by Julian Sher
There is no official record of what went on for the duration of the ninety-minute interrogation. The two police officers were the only witnesses. Graham took only a single sheet of notes. Today, Steven Truscott remembers the first hours of his slow, steady slide into the abyss of incarceration: “They would take turns questioning me and calling me a liar,” he says of Graham and Trumbley. “One would come in and question you. He would leave the room. The other one would come in and he would say: ‘You lied. You did this, you did that.’ They keep questioning you and calling you a liar, and you just can’t believe what’s going on. In your mind, you can’t understand what’s happening. And all through the whole thing I stuck to what I had said.”
If the OPP inspector was hoping the boy would crack, he was sadly disappointed. “He steadfastly maintained that his statement was true in every detail,” Graham later reported.
Throughout his ordeal that night—and indeed, throughout all his forthcoming days in court—Steve never cried, at least not in public. Much like his mother, the fourteen-year-old held his emotions in close check. “I just wasn’t brought up that way—it’s kind of not the air force way,” he says today in reflection. “I knew I hadn’t done anything. I had nothing to be afraid of.”
That did not mean the boy was not scared out of his wits as he sat in a police interrogation room. Why hadn’t the police contacted his parents?
Doris Truscott was in a panic. It was 9:30 p.m. and there was still no sign of her son.
“Where is he?” she wondered. “He should have been home—it’s very seldom he’s late.”
Bob Lawson was baling his final load of hay for the day in his barn when a pair of headlights lit up the driveway to his farmhouse. As he walked over to the car, he saw Doris Truscott roll down her window. The farm was the only place she could think her boy might be this late at night.
“Have you seen Steve?” she asked. “It’s getting dark and it’s not like Steve to stay out late.”
“I saw Steve earlier, but not for a couple of hours,” the farmer informed her.
Doris was filled with a sense of dread. One schoolchild had already gone missing and turned up dead in the bush. Where in heaven’s name was her boy?
At the OPP station in Goderich, Graham had decided to take Steven to the RCAF guardhouse in Clinton. He ordered one of his men to find Steve’s father, Warrant Officer Dan Truscott. The police got Steven to the guardhouse on the base around 9:25 p.m. Ten minutes later, his father arrived “in a hostile attitude,” according to Graham. The inspector had kept Steven in custody—getting him to sign a statement and then questioning him about a murder—for two and a half hours without even informing his parents. But the OPP man could not grasp why a parent would be upset at the officers who had swept away his son without notifying anyone.
“The father asked me in a belligerent manner how and where Steven had been picked up,” Graham said. Dr. Brooks painted a slightly more sympathetic picture, reporting that Steve’s father “naturally was the anxious parent who wanted to know what had happened to his son and why he was there.”
For his part, the frightened boy felt relieved at least one of his parents was on hand. “My dad was there, so I figured, you know, he’s not going to let anything happen,” Steve says.
Dan Truscott immediately wanted to know if his son had been taken into police custody with his own consent.
“I asked him to get into the car to accompany me to read the statement and he got in willingly,” Trumbley reported.
Dan turned to his son: “Is that right, Steven?”
“Yes,” the boy answered.
Graham attempted to allay the father’s fears. “I told them that Steven had been brought in on my instructions and as a result of our investigation thus far certain suspicions had been directed toward Steven.” The OPP inspector explained he wanted doctors to examine the boy.
Steve’s father asked to speak with the boy alone and took him into an adjoining room. “I told him they were accusing me and calling me a liar,” Steve recounts. “It was quite clear they were trying to pin this on me.” Dan emerged from the chat with his son a few moments later.
“I refuse to allow Steven to be examined by a doctor,” he said. “Steven says you accused him of murdering Lynne and called him a liar.”
“I didn’t accuse him of murdering Lynne at all,” Graham replied. “I pointed out certain features from his statement that indicated he was lying. My only duty is to try to determine the truth.”
“Steven never goes out with girls,” his father reportedly said.
“We have information that he had a date with a girl that night,” Graham replied, referring to Jocelyne’s story of her rendezvous with Steven in the bush. “Will you consent to a medical examination of Steven?”
It was a pivotal moment. Ever the military man eager to do the right thing, Warrant Officer Dan Truscott was not one to question rules and regulations. He turned to his friend, Sgt. Charles Anderson of the OPP. “What do you think about it, Charlie?”
“I think you should consent to the examination,” Anderson suggested. “It looks bad if you don’t consent to the doctor examining Steve.” (Truscott could not know that Anderson was hardly a neutral advisor. Under Graham’s orders, he had already taken steps to secure a search warrant for the Truscott home, even before Steven was picked up. Lawyers would later convince a judge that Anderson’s comments were an unfair police inducement.)
In any event, it is doubtful that Dan Truscott could have wrested his son away from the police, even if he wanted to. “It was apparent to me it was unlikely he would get the boy home,” Dr. Brooks reported. In the end, Steve’s father bowed to authority; he turned to the OPP officers surrounding his son and agreed to the medical exam. Nobody asked Steve what he thought.
Initially, there was some question about whether Brooks should conduct the exam, but after consulting with the commanding officer, it was determined it would be better if an outside, civilian doctor performed the task.
The police asked Dan Truscott for the name of his family doctor. He mentioned that in the past, they had consulted a Clinton general practitioner, Dr. John Addison. Addison had briefly seen Steven twice in October 1957 for a urinary infection, and had treated Steven’s brother Bill for a threatened appendix.
Dr. Addison arrived at the guardhouse around 10:35 p.m. A graduate of the University of Western Ontario, he had been practising medicine in Clinton since 1943. A stern-looking man with dark hair, a trim moustache and black glasses, Addison was well liked by the local citizenry. Presumably, the family doctor was supposed to be more dispassionate than Dr. Brooks, the military doctor working closely with the police. But Addison’s first move was to consult with the air force medical man. “I met Dr. Brooks first, who outlined a bit of the story that had transpired before as to why they wanted me to examine the prisoner,” Addison said later. “I had known … that this boy was the possible suspect of the rape.” Hardly a good start for a neutral observer.
“He accompanied me into the adjoining office,” Brooks said. “An examination of Steven then took place.”
A short while earlier, Steve’s mother had shown up at the guardhouse. “I was dumbfounded, I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “I felt I should have been told that they were taking him and questioning him, and I should have been there. Did they not think parents would worry when their son is not home?” She glanced at her fourteen-year-old boy, alone and frightened. “I can remember him sitting in the chair. He just looked [as if he was saying,] ‘What’s going on?’ He couldn’t believe it.”
All her adult life, Doris had been a law-abiding, conservative-minded military wife, respectful of authority. That was about to change. “I always respected the police,” she says. “But I sure as hell learned to lose respect.”
Three officers, Corporal Sayeau, Sergeant Anderson and Cpl. Helmar Snell, followed Doris back to the house. She let them in through the side door and they advised her they had a sea
rch warrant.
“You don’t need a search warrant—if it proves anything, go ahead, look!” Doris told the officers.
From Steven’s bed upstairs, Sayeau took one pillow slip, two white cotton sheets, a wool blanket and a pair of red flannel pyjama bottoms. From his dresser came two pairs of washed underwear; from the hamper, some dirty underwear and a red shirt; from the top of the stairs near the back door, a pair of brown shoes. From outside the house, the police took Steve’s bike. In the basement, hanging on a clothesline, the police found a pair of red trousers.
“Those are Steven’s trousers,” Doris told the police, according to their notes. “He was wearing them on Tuesday evening. I washed them Wednesday morning. I did all the washing Wednesday morning.”
Sergeant Anderson asked Doris if she noticed anything unusual with Steve’s clothes when he came home Tuesday.
“No, just boy dirt.”
“Mrs. Truscott had a guilty feeling about her son by washing his trousers the next morning,” Sergeant Anderson later concluded. The police would always insist the red jeans were the only piece of clothing on the line; Doris would claim there were more clothes at the far end.
Outside the Truscott home, the flashing lights of the police cruisers created quite a stir in the normally serene and pitch-dark rural community. Bob Lawson, finally finished with his farm work by 11:00 p.m., had been troubled ever since a frantic Doris Truscott had dropped by earlier. Lawson decided to drive around the neighbourhood to search for Steven. When he saw police vehicles around Steve’s house and Steve’s bike—but no sign of the boy—he feared the worst. “We were all a bit jumpy. I mean, a child had just been murdered; now here’s another kid missing,” Lawson says.
“Did you find Steve?” Lawson asked Corporal Snell.
“Oh yeah, don’t worry, we know where he is” was the cryptic answer from the officer.
Lawson was not the only neighbour to drop by the Truscott home. Lil Woodson, whose two teenage boys played with Steve and his brother Ken, had never been that close to Doris. “I knew of her, but we played bridge in different groups,” she explains. She had heard that Doris had been looking for Steve and came over to see if there was any news.
“Have you found Steve?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Doris said without flinching. “He’s in the guardhouse.”
Woodson became a regular visitor from that moment on. “We became pretty close friends,” Woodson explains. “What brought us together was that my boys were just about the same age as hers. There but for the grace of God, it could have been one of mine.”
By now, Steven had been in police custody for nearly five hours, almost half of that time without a parent present. Still, he remained calm and relaxed when, in the presence of his father, the two doctors began their examination.
Dr. Addison chatted with Steve to put him more at ease. “I didn’t want to go in and strip the boy off and examine him I tried to talk to him and asked him what it was all about,” he later said. “Steven was very co-operative.” The other doctor concurred. “He was quiet and got up and took his clothes off, as he was told, and was completely co-operative,” according to Dr. Brooks. “He was examined from head to foot.”
The doctors found the usual war wounds collected by an active teenager in the battlefields of a playground. On Steve’s left arm, there were “four little scratches,” the longest about 1¾ inches. On his right elbow, three linear scratches. On his knees, “two small scratches” about an inch long. On the back of his right thigh, a circular scratch about 2½ inches long. The police later suggested this mark matched a rip in his jeans and could have been made by the barbed wire surrounding Lawson’s bush.
None of the marks were recent enough to show any blood. Addison concluded: “I thought they were trivial, little things.”
But as he continued to examine the boy in front of him, Addison made a disturbing discovery: “We found a very sore penis.” The doctor found “little red spots where the capillaries had been destroyed” in an area about the size of the ball of his thumb or a quarter on each side of the shaft. He described it as “like a brush burn, with serum oozing from each of those large sores on the side.”
Up until that moment, according to Dr. Addison, Dan Truscott had been “just a bystander.” Now the father was concerned. “Both his father and I were rather alarmed at the lesion there, and we both impressed upon Steven that … things looked rather dark,” Addison said.
“How did you get such a sore penis?” the doctor says he asked the boy.
“I don’t know. It has been sore about four or five weeks.”
“He has never said anything to us because it hasn’t bothered him,” his father said.
Addison says he pushed Steven for an explanation of the sores: “Have you been masturbating?” he asked.
No, Steven answered.
Did Steven get his penis “caught in a knothole,” the doctor asked.
No, the boy replied.
Had he perhaps had intercourse with “some other girl who he was trying to protect?”
No, insisted the boy.
Addison again asked Steve if he had been masturbating. “Finally, he said he had a week ago—in his bathroom.”
The two doctors left the room to tell the police about the troubling results of their examination. In a sex slaying, a sore penis on a suspect was a big break. “Here, in the officers’ opinion, was incriminating evidence, circumstantial, yes, but still, in our view, very important,” Graham commented later.
The police decided to take a blood sample, and Steve’s father readily agreed. Dan Truscott even collected a lock of hair from his son’s head at the police’s request.
It was 1:00 a.m., well past Steve’s bedtime. Dr. Brooks recalled that Steve’s father insisted “that Steven was very tired and that Steven should be allowed to go home.” But the police were far from finished with the teenager.
At one point, the police and doctors glanced at Steve sitting listlessly at a desk. “The boy was dallying on the typewriter and they thought he was tapping out some plausible theory or confession,” Addison recounted. “We waited for a long time and he was still tapping away and nothing happened.”
With no confession or explanation at hand, Addison turned to Inspector Graham and made a startling suggestion. “Well, he won’t tell me anything about it, he won’t tell his father anything,” Addison said. “Do you mind if I go and question him some more?”
Graham readily agreed. After more than six hours of confinement, Steven still showed no signs of cracking. The OPP homicide investigator was only too glad to have the genial country doctor try his hand at interrogating the exhausted boy.
Dr. John Addison had completed the assignment he had been called that night to perform: a medical examination of one of his patients. Why did the doctor now decide, at 1:00 in the morning, to pursue a role more appropriate to a detective? “I didn’t receive what I thought was a satisfactory explanation for his sore penis, and I wanted to see if I could get him to tell me some more of the truth,” he later explained. “His stories, I didn’t feel, were jibing too well and I thought I could convince him to tell me some better reason for his sore penis.”
Steve had told the doctor that he’d had the sores for about four or five weeks. If Addison acted as a personal physician should, his concern should have been for his patient’s health, not his criminal status. He could have taken a swab of the oozing serum, sent it to a laboratory for examination and treated Steven accordingly. If the results proved the sores came from an illness or skin condition, Addison could have laid the entire matter to rest.
Instead, Addison proceeded to question the boy for about one hour. There were no witnesses. Steven does not recall anything about the meeting. Addison’s version of the events, the only existing record, came from notes he scribbled during his talk with Steven and from a lengthier account he wrote later that morning.
The doctor tried to urge his patient to come clean. “I told
him that if he told the truth he would likely get off a lot easier than if it was dragged out of him in a long court procedure.” Addison tried to befriend the boy in the hopes that he would open up more willingly. “Steven, there seems to me some discrepancy in our story as to how this all happened,” he said. “I hear one thing from the police and one thing from you, and you haven’t told us about this sore penis and things. Now let us see exactly what happened and we can put the story together.”
Steve described the car he saw on Tuesday night and insisted—as he had from the start—that the yellow marker he saw on the rear fender was not necessarily a licence plate: “I think it was yellow. I am not positive whether it was a licence plate or not.”
“What did you talk about when Lynne was riding with you?” Addison asked.
“She asked about our fishing places,” the boy answered. “I said there was one down by the river and across the highway there was a little trout stream.”
Fatigued and alone, Steve nonetheless was sticking to the story he had told police from the start. But then his tale, according to Addison, took a strange twist.
“I don’t know whether I was down [by] the river or not,” Steve allegedly said. “I can remember her saying something about getting a thistle. I am not sure where it was. It might have been [while we were] going down by the river. There were lots of thistles in the field.”
Which field, Addison asked.
“The one just back of the bush.”
“Did she get a thistle while walking through the field?”
“I think so.”
“Do you think there is a possibility you may have taken her in the bush?” asked the doctor.
“I don’t recall it. I remember walking in the field, but not with her.”
“Are you positive you were walking through the field?”
“I am not positive but I think I was,” Steve is reported to have said. “I remember letting her off at the highway.… remember going down through the field, I think. I remember something about someone yelling out that they stepped on a prickle. And then I remember coming out and getting on my bike. I remember coming back to the station.”