by Julian Sher
A few moments later, Steve added some more details: “I went over the fence just about two telephone poles from the middle of the field. I remember something about a big rock, sort of smooth, I think. I hit my foot on that rock. I think that was when I was going out to get my bike.”
In the doctor’s mind—and to the police waiting outside—it all sounded if not like a confession then at the very least a description of events before and after the murder. “I cannot help but feel that this boy did not act to me like a normal boy while I was talking to him,” Addison wrote to Graham a few days later. “Even the suggestion that he may have harmed Lynne brought no angry denial or an outbreak of tears.… He did not protest strongly enough when I suggested he had molested Lynne. He agreed it could have happened.”
To Steve’s defenders, the boy’s words—even assuming the doctor accurately recorded them—were no more than the confused ramblings of an exhausted teenager drained almost beyond the point of consciousness. Steve’s bizarre tale of thistles, prickles and smooth rocks sounded almost dreamlike. And vague phrases such as “could have” and “might have” and “I don’t know” were hardly self-condemning admissions of guilt.
Addison gave no warnings to his patient that he was, in effect, questioning him at the behest of the police. The police had not even formally advised Steve that he was their chief suspect. They were not legally required to tell him that any statements he made could be used against him. Still, a judge would later blast the police in no uncertain terms for trying to use a doctor to question a teenage boy.
But as far as Inspector Harold Graham was concerned, he now had a solid case. He had testimony from Jocelyne about a date, an oral report from the laboratory about a time of death before 7:45 p.m., a boy with penis sores and a freshly washed pair of red jeans.
Graham made no apologies for the gruelling marathon session he put the boy through to get what he wanted. “Some of the critics point to the length of time Steven was in our custody before the charge was laid,” he said. “Major crimes are not always solved in time limits.”
Graham consulted by phone with the Crown prosecutor. Dr. John Addison drove home and wrote up his notes.
At 2:30 a.m., Graham walked into the guardhouse and saw Steven with his head on his father’s shoulder. “I told his father we were taking him to Goderich,” Graham said. In other words, to jail.
At three o’clock on Saturday morning, June 13—more than eight hours after Graham had first taken Steve into police custody—the boy’s arrest became official. Mabel Gray, justice of the peace, signed the arrest warrant charging Steven with murder: “Steven Murray Truscott (fourteen years of age), on or about the 9th day of June, 1959, … unlawfully did murder Lynne Harper, contrary to section 201 of the Criminal Code of Canada and, being under the age of sixteen years, is therefore a juvenile delinquent within the meaning of the Juvenile Delinquents Act.”
Juvenile or not, within hours the Crown prosecutor would be in court attempting to get the boy tried—and, if convicted, hanged—as an adult offender.
9
“LIGHTNING SPEED”
“Police Spin Speedy Web to Nab Suspect” ran the headline in the Toronto Telegram, reflecting the media’s amazement at how quickly the OPP had cracked the sensational case. “Inspector Graham worked almost without sleep for two nights and a day in investigating the case which has shocked the air force community and surrounding towns,” the paper reported. Another newspaper noted with equal surprise that the arrest came with “lightning speed.”
By any standards, it was a remarkably swift operation. Harold Graham had arrived in Clinton at 7:30 Thursday evening. By Friday evening at 6:50, he had sent out a squad car to pick up Steven. In less than twenty-four hours, he had solved the headline-grabbing murder that had prompted the province to issue an unprecedented “dead or alive” reward.
“It was three o’clock [on Saturday morning] when we landed with Steven Truscott at the county jail,” Graham later recounted. “Now this was only a good start on the case because there were so many witnesses to interview.” It seemed oddly backwards, reflecting how rushed the entire operation had been: one would expect the police to make a “good start” in a case by interviewing the “many witnesses” before an arrest, not afterwards.
There were signs that almost from the start, Graham was convinced Steve was the killer. Graham and some of his key officers would occasionally return to the Mount Forest home of Cpl. John Erskine, the identification officer, at the end of the day to relax and discuss the case. “The officers would come back to our house,” recalls Erskine’s widow, Dee Harris. “I’d hear them talking about the pros and cons.”
Dee remembers one of the first visits in particular, at the very beginning of the investigation. Graham came in first, up the three stairs from the side door landing toward her kitchen. “He’s guilty!” the inspector declared as he turned to his men behind him. Dee did not catch the rest of the argument, but she remembers thinking to herself: “If it’s so cut and dried, why bother investigating any more?” When Graham left, she discovered her husband shared her concerns. “I just can’t believe Graham would say he’s guilty when the case has just started,” John Erskine told his wife. As Erskine continued to gather evidence on the case over the summer months, his doubts—and his conflict with Graham—would grow.
It was understandable that, as the last person known to have seen the girl alive, Steve would become a prime suspect in the eyes of the police. If Steve was innocent, there were troubling coincidences, and all good cops, for good reason, are suspicious of coincidences. His friend Butch George had been spreading rumours about seeing Steve take the girl to the area where her body later turned up. Doctors found sores on his penis days after a girl had been raped. The police thought it extremely unlikely that Lynne’s assailant would return so close to her home to commit the crime or to dump the body. “Picking the person right up at Number 8 Highway and bringing her back and murdering her in the bush. My God! How realistic is that?” asks Hank Sayeau.
The police were also bothered by the fact that two children who claimed to be looking for Steve that evening, Jocelyne and Butch, could not find him between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., and several others failed to spot him on the county road during that time. They were intrigued by his sometimes angry response to his friends’ taunts about being with Lynne. They doubted he ever could have spotted the car he claimed to have seen. And eventually, they were convinced that a footprint near Lynne’s body could have been made by one of Steve’s shoes.
These pieces of evidence—or speculation—all pointed the police in one direction. But there were outside pressures at work as well. Dennis Alsop, who was one of the officers involved at the end of the Truscott investigation, and who knew Graham well, offers this explanation for Steve’s rapid arrest: “Everything pointed to him. You’re not going to let him walk. Emotions were pretty high [at the air force base]. Finding one of their own, raped and dead. There was a suspect—I don’t think they could sit on it very long. That was the way when I was on the job—you moved, you didn’t sit around and wait.”
Emotions were indeed high, and not just at the base; the tension also existed between the air force personnel and the people in the surrounding towns and villages. The citizens of Huron County had a conflicted relationship with the several thousand military on the base. On the one hand, Clinton depended heavily on the support jobs and consumer dollars generated by the sprawling air force station. On the other hand, many civilian residents resented the isolationist attitude of the air force people. The base was, after all, legally and socially a kingdom unto itself.
All these tensions came to the fore when the grim discovery of Lynne’s body would inform the air force and civilian communities that a murderous sexual predator was on the loose; each was convinced the monster could only have come from the other side.
As the farmer living right next door to the base, Bob Lawson straddled the divide between the military and the civil
ian worlds. He recalls that the airmen were convinced the culprit was a local civilian, and the residents of Clinton were fearful it was true. “There were some air force officers who were very outspoken about it. ‘We’re going to catch this person and we’re going to deal with him ourselves in the most severe manner,’ they said. And that kind of upset people. I mean, who do they think they are to take the law in their own hands? But when they pinned it on a young boy from the air force base, I suppose the people outside the base heaved a sigh of relief.”
The rest of the province also heaved a sigh of relief. The forces of law and order had solved a gruesome sex slaying. The good people of Ontario could go back to their ordinary lives secure in the knowledge that, once again, the justice system would triumph. Steve was the perfect candidate for Lynne’s murderer. He was not a civilian from town. He was not a man in uniform, which could result in a public relations disaster for the air force. He was just a teenager who could be dispensed with quickly and quietly.
Sitting on his small metal cot in the Goderich jail, Steven could not fathom what had brought him there. Looking back at his arrest much later as an adult, he concludes he was just at the “wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I think it was the easiest route possible for them and they jumped on it,” he says.
The trick to good detective work is not in finding a suspect, but in proving guilt methodically and scientifically while eliminating all other possibilities. The OPP had good reason to question the fourteen-year-old who last saw Lynne. But inquisitive reasoning appeared quickly to give way to blinding tunnel vision once they had the boy behind bars.
“We checked all kinds of guys around the camp and around the community,” Hank Sayeau insists. “There were all kinds of names being put forward. If information came in about so-and-so being a possible suspect, we ran it down, trying to find out if there was any substance to it or if he had an alibi. Trumbley and I worked all summer trying to run down people that people had something to say about.”
Sayeau and the other OPP officers did work hard all summer. And while they doubtless followed many leads, there is no indication from the official record that the police ever seriously investigated anyone as a suspect in Lynne’s murder besides the fourteen-year-old boy they already had in custody.
Indeed, in the mountain of police files, the word “suspicion” is only used once to describe any other individual besides Steven. Vaughn Marshall, airman #56527, had been posted in Clinton for only ten days. He was eighteen years old and lived in the barracks with the other single men. Marshall was the only person the police questioned as a potential suspect before they arrested Steve. Only four decades later, when the long-buried police files became available, did details about Marshall’s story emerge.
According to the entries in Cpl. Hank Sayeau’s notebook, he spoke to the young air force recruit at 9:55 p.m. on Thursday, June 11, right after Sayeau left the autopsy. Marshall told police that at the muster parade on the base to organize the search parties, the commanding officer informed his men that Lynne—still a missing girl—might have taken a ride in a Chevrolet Bel Air. “I remember [a] two-door, ′59 white hardtop, whitish grey,” Marshall’s statement reads. “Passed it on outskirts of Clinton about 7:05 or 7:10. Fellow and girl in it. Car going 45–50 miles per hour.” Marshall said the car had “PQ plates”—in other words, yellow licence plates from the province of Quebec.
It is possible that after the muster parade Marshall told someone about spotting the car and word got back to the police. That would explain why the police might have wanted to speak to him so soon after the body was found. But far from being a casual car spotter, Marshall began telling the police some odd stories. He told Sayeau he was “introduced to Lynne about three or four weeks ago on a Friday or Saturday night” at a party, and claimed Lynne stayed at the party until midnight. He added that on the Tuesday night Lynne disappeared, he caught sight of the girl in downtown Clinton. “Saw Lynne Tuesday night on street corner in front of Tip Top Tailors—6:30 or 6:40,” the police notes read. “Lynne had on (blue) shorts—just noticed from waist down. Looking down street toward Goderich.”
Marshall got the description of Lynne’s shorts right—police and military bulletins alternately described them as blue or turquoise. But there was no way Lynne had time after her supper to leave the base and travel to Clinton at 6:30 p.m.; she was busy helping the Brownies in the schoolyard at the time. And it was hardly likely she would have been at a party until midnight with eighteen-year-old airmen.
Retired OPP officer Hank Sayeau today has only vague recollections of questioning Marshall, but theorizes that Marshall was making up stories to get involved in a high-profile case. “Why waste your time with an individual like that?” Sayeau concludes.
Harold Graham, however, would later cite Marshall as an example of how the OPP did pursue other suspects seriously and did not go after Steven Truscott with a single-minded obsession. “My inquiry … during the evening of June 11th … included investigating the activities of an airman,” he wrote in a 1966 OPP memorandum. (In an earlier draft of the memo, Graham used stronger language, writing that he questioned “an airman suspected of the murder.”) He reported that Marshall “was cleared of suspicion when a … girl confirmed his whereabouts on the evening that Lynne Harper disappeared.”
Marshall said on Tuesday evening he picked up his girlfriend, Lois Dale, and took her to Stratford, where he paid a woman twenty-two dollars because he had bumped into her fender earlier. He and Lois then went to Goderich until around 10:00 p.m.
There are no records in the available OPP files of what Lois Dale did or did not tell the police. There is no reason to believe she was anything less than truthful. Even assuming she fully corroborated her boyfriend’s story, however, there seemed to be a double standard in operation; the word of a girlfriend alone was enough to exonerate an eighteen-year-old man, but the word of two boys who put Steven in the clear when they saw him at the river with Lynne were seen as suspect precisely because they were his friends—“chums of the accused,” in Graham’s dismissive phrase.
The case of Vaughn Marshall raised one other intriguing question. If the police believed his story about travelling with his girlfriend to Stratford and Goderich as proof that he did not abduct Lynne, they had every reason to believe his story about seeing a “whitish grey” 1959 Chevrolet with yellow plates on the highway outside of Clinton.
In other words, even if the police correctly ruled out Marshall as a suspect, he could have been a potential witness, one who said he saw the same type of car Steve claimed to have seen at around the same time and in the same area.
Marshall was not the only one who spotted a potentially suspicious car. On the night Lynne disappeared, two people saw two different cars parked near the bush late at night. By the time Steve was arrested on Friday, the authorities also knew of three other sightings, specifically of 1959 Chevrolets, in the area. Military and police officials largely ignored all but one of these five vehicle reports.
Officials at the base guardhouse initially paid Bob Lawson little heed when he told them of a car he spotted near his bush late Tuesday evening. He had finally finished a hard day’s work on his farm and decided to take a late-night dip in the river. He drove down the county road toward the bridge with a friend. About halfway down, right next to the tractor trail that led into his bush—and about three hundred feet from where Lynne’s body was found—he spotted something he had never seen there before: a parked car.
“There are places on that road where people park at night, mainly down between the railroad and the river. But I don’t ever recall seeing anybody park there at night right beside the bush,” Lawson says. It was an older maroon or red convertible, possibly a ′51, ′52 or ′53, with a man in the front seat. “We slowed up behind it and shone the lights on it,” Lawson recalls. “I thought there was a girl sitting in the car, too; you couldn’t tell for sure, but I think I could see her head. She was sitting dow
n much lower than he was. As we drove by he gave us a bit of lip.”
A few minutes later, when Lawson was swimming in the river, the car whizzed by over the bridge and the driver hollered at him again. The farmer dismissed him as a local man upset because his romantic date in his fancy convertible was spoiled. Lawson did not give the matter a second thought until three days later, when Lynne’s body was discovered in the bush right next to where the car was parked.
Two weeks later, the police did track down an airman who owned a dark convertible. The airman admitted he had parked on the county road at least five times when he was “with a girl” but said his late-night car romances took place nearer to the river than to the bush where Lawson had spotted the car. He said he sold his car two weeks after the murder; the police made no further investigation.
At least in that instance police had made an initial inquiry. Other car sightings made that Tuesday never even got to that stage.
A young airman had stayed behind to clean up the mess hall on the Tuesday evening, putting away beer bottles and clearing the tables. Donald Hall, who fixed radar equipment at the base, earned a little extra cash by performing some housekeeping duties. Hall lived off-base, and sometime after 11:00 p.m., he got into his car to drive home along the county road. “As I came around the bend, just after the school, I glimpsed in the distance the bumper of a car. I said to myself, ‘What idiot would be parked on the side of this road? I put on my high beams so that I wouldn’t hit whoever it was.’”
It was a large late-model vehicle “with heavy chrome,” but Hall does not recall the make or colour. As he approached the car parked near Lawson’s bush, he caught sight of the lone occupant, a young man in what appeared to be a light-coloured shirt. “He had very dark, wavy hair. A shock of wavy hair,” Hall remembers. “He wasn’t military for sure. Not with that hair. He was a civilian, just sitting there.” He says he reported it to both the military police and the OPP. Neither force seemed terribly interested. “I talked about it in detail to the OPP. The officer took down the particulars, but when I was finished the interview I thought it was not very thorough,” Hall remembers. “I was never called back about it. Never.”