Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  Another member of the air force had a disturbing encounter with a car earlier that evening. A nightly trip to the Custard Cup was a regular part of the routine for Cpl. Arlene Strauman and her girlfriends. “We used to go over there every night—it was almost without fail,” she remembers fondly. “It was always crowded.”

  There was not much else for young single women to do at the Clinton air force base after hours. Arlene, a flight control operator, was one of three hundred women stationed there for four months of radar training. After classes ended around 4:00 p.m., she and fellow female officers would make a short trip to the mess hall, then back to the barracks for a quick shower and a change into civilian clothes. Around 7:00 p.m., they would stroll down to the Custard Cup. On Tuesday, June 9, the ritual was no different from any other night, except for one detail.

  As Arlene and her friend, Beverly Bolton, left the ice cream parlour to return to the base, three men pulled up in a car.

  “Would you girls like a ride?” one of them asked as he rolled down the window.

  “No, thanks,” the officers said demurely but firmly.

  “Oh come on,” the men teased, undeterred.

  “I can still see the young man in the back seat who did most of the talking as vivid as anything,” Arlene says today. “He was very good-looking. I remember he had really nice teeth and lots of black curly hair.”

  Arlene also remembers the car as a “light green or a greenish grey” Chevrolet. Just as Steven says he easily recognized the ′59 Chev at the highway around 7:30 p.m. that evening, Arlene had no problem identifying a similar vehicle thirty minutes earlier at the Custard Cup. “Everybody knew what a ′59 Chev looked like because they were so different,” she explains. “They had those big tail fins and triangular-shaped tail lights, too.”

  The fancy car, though, was not enough to entice Arlene and her friend. The Chev rolled along the road beside the two air force women for about fifty feet. Then, the defeated Romeos sped away.

  At the time, Arlene Strauman thought nothing of the incident: “We just walked back to the base and laughed about it.” But she recalled the encounter with unease when later in the week, news about Lynne’s murder was making the rounds at the base.

  “Everybody was talking about it in the barracks. We heard that they’d caught a young guy and he had said that she had gotten into a ′59 Chev. So right away Beverly and I looked at each other and said: ‘Hey, we saw a ′59 Chev. They tried to give us a ride.’ So we went down to the guardhouse to tell.”

  But the military police at the guardhouse were not interested. “They didn’t want to listen to us at all,” Strauman recalls.

  “You don’t know your cars. What do you know?” Strauman remembers the dubious MP asking her.

  “Well, I know it was a Chev!” she replied.

  “I got the impression they didn’t want to hear from us,” Strauman remembers, the bitterness still in her voice. “We knew what a ′59 Chev looked like, we definitely did. We saw it. Nobody called us. Like nobody wanted to know anything more about our information.” The next week, both women finished their duties at Clinton and transferred out.

  “Looking back on it now, they didn’t want to know that somebody else besides Steven Truscott had seen a ′59 Chev,” Strauman concludes. “They already had their case and they had their suspect, and they didn’t want someone to come in and mess it all up.”

  Strauman’s account can only be confirmed indirectly, since the daily logbooks from the military police at RCAF Station Clinton are no longer available. “I know that people went to the guardhouse with information, and it was passed on to us, and we investigated cars and we investigated people,” says Hank Sayeau of the OPP. The air force did issue a general call for anyone on the base with any information about Lynne’s activities on Tuesday night to come forward. “As a result, numerous personnel did report to the guardhouse with various information concerning incidents occurring Tuesday night,” said one official military summary of events that week. Just how many of these numerous reports the military passed on to the OPP or what the police did with them is not clear.

  By the end of the week, the OPP had two more reports of 1959 Chevrolets in the area, both of them with Quebec plates. When Sayeau questioned Vaughn Marshall on Thursday, June 11, the young airman said he had spotted a man and a woman in a two-door “whitish grey” 1959 Chev with yellow plates on Highway 8 just outside of Clinton. That same evening, around 10:00 p.m., the police in Goderich stopped a man for a speeding violation. He was driving a 1959 Chevrolet with yellow Quebec plates. The officer noted the car was green but “could be mistaken for grey.” The police did some checking the next morning and found that the driver had been spotted reading a paper in a local hotel, but was not registered there. He said he was on his way to Sarnia. The police had his name and licence number, but made no further follow-up. By then, they were well on their way to arresting Steven Truscott.

  Ignoring potential leads was one thing. Not following rudimentary police procedures was quite another. In any sex-related murder, it was standard practice for the police back in the 1950s—and still is today—to check out the “usual suspects”: the known sexual predators or recently released offenders with a history of sexual assaults. That is precisely what the OPP did three years before Lynne’s murder when a five-year-old girl, Susan Cadieux, was sexually assaulted and murdered in London, Ontario, in January 1956. A police official told the newspapers they had quickly rounded up fifty known “sexual perverts,” in the indelicate terminology of the times. (Cadieux’s killer was never found.)

  But when Lynne’s body turned up nearly naked in the bush near Clinton, there is no evidence the police made any serious attempt to check out the whereabouts or activities of known sexual deviants in the region. That failure was all the more surprising because the proximity of the crime scene to the air force base gave the police both a large pool of suspects and, in theory at least, easier access to their personnel files. Several thousand young, single men moved in and out of the Clinton station on a continual basis. They were transients, often strangers to the region and to each other. Alcohol abuse was not an uncommon problem in the ranks. They constituted a much more likely group of potential suspects than teenage students.

  That is certainly what some townspeople thought. Henry Lamb ran a service station in Goderich and coached a hockey team for the children. “At that base there would be a thousand men to question, but instead Steven just got railroaded,” he says.

  Graham did make one request of the air force brass, asking that the commanding officer hold a muster parade “for the purpose of examining the genitalia of all airmen at the school.” Perhaps the prospect of his men lining up around the flagpole and displaying their private parts for all to see in the summer sun was too much for the commander to consider. He declined. “I did not pursue the matter,” said Graham diplomatically.

  Possibly if Graham had made a more restricted request to examine only the military records of the airmen with known criminal or sexual offences, instead of the penises of all the enlisted men, the air force might have been more compliant. That will never be known; there is no indication Graham made any more requests of the air force to investigate the sexual practices of its own men.

  It was a shame. Because if he had bothered to ask, it is likely that Graham would have uncovered the case of the pedophile who had tried to pick up little girls less than three weeks before Lynne went missing.

  On May 21, ten-year-old Nancy Davidson was walking back from school with two of her friends along a quiet country road outside of St. Thomas, about an hour’s drive from Clinton. “We noticed a car pull up and stop when the first girl went off to her house,” Nancy recalls. “He came around the corner and stopped in between two houses when the other girl went up into her driveway.”

  That left Nancy alone. As she neared her home, the strange man in the car pulled up beside her and first asked her if there was a creek near by, then if there was good
fishing. “But then he asked me if I would get in the car. He wanted me to pick out the prettiest present. And I said no. And then he picked out these panties that he had. And he totally scared me,” she remembers. “His eyes were bulgy and he had that glassy look and there were dark circles. And I knew he was drinking and I just wanted to get away.”

  As luck would have it, Nancy’s father, Glen, approached in his car and Nancy dashed to safety. “I couldn’t get in his car quick enough. And I told him what the man had done and said.” Her parents called the police, who located the man not far away and brought him back to the Davidsons’. “He denied it and I called him a liar. And I said, ‘Please look under the front seat,’ and they did.”

  The police found alcohol and a bag full of panties. They arrested the man on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

  The man’s name was Alexander Kalichuk. At thirty-five, he was a sergeant in the air force, stationed at RCAF Station Aylmer after seven years at the Clinton base. What the OPP and the Davidsons did not know was that the troubled airman had a long history of sexual and alcohol problems. As far back as 1950, Kalichuk was charged with an unspecified “indecent act” in Trenton. He paid a ten-dollar fine and thirty-nine dollars in costs. There was a conviction for drunkenness in 1952. But military records indicate his sexual escapades continued throughout the decade. One report makes reference to a “similar incident of exposure in Seaforth.” The documents also mention a case in family court that was dismissed, but not before the authorities recommended treatment “before the airman finds himself in severe difficulties.”

  Raised on a farm in Manitoba, Kalichuk finished grade Nine and worked briefly as a farm labourer and bulldozer operator. He never found much success in anything except military work. He was in the air force from 1941 to 1946, then again from 1950 to 1955. He briefly left the military to take a civil service examination, but failed and re-enlisted in the air force by the end of 1955. In uniform, Kalichuk never rose higher than a posting as a modest supply clerk. From 1950 until August of 1957, Kalichuk worked at Clinton; his last summer there, he quite possibly crossed paths with Lynne Harper’s father, Leslie, who ran the supply department.

  Even when he was transferred to Aylmer, an hour away, Kalichuk never strayed far from Clinton. He lived on a farm about twelve miles from the base, owned by his wife, Helena. Neighbours remember her as “a great cook, a wonderful woman and a hard worker,” but her husband had a darker reputation as a “silent drinker.” She had two older children by a previous marriage; both of them loathed their stepfather. “He leached my mother’s farm for money,” says the son. “She became an alcoholic because of Alec.” His sister, nineteen in 1959, was equally bitter: “I found him sleazy; he gave me the creeps. It doesn’t surprise me that he tried to lure girls into the car.”

  Together, Alec and Helena also had a young son named Mark. Ron Christensen, Mark’s best friend, remembers the strange warning his pal would give him “every time without fail” before entering the Kalichuk household: “Just look at Dad and say ‘Hi’ but don’t wait for him to say ‘Hi’ back,” Mark would tell his friend.

  “I walked into that house to be greeted by the eerie, quiet, stone-faced Alec sitting in the dark kitchen at the table with a drink in his right hand,” Ron recalls. “Alec always had a bright red, glowing face with a pasted-on sort of lost stare.”

  One week after Kalichuk attempted to abduct Nancy Davidson, he appeared in a St. Thomas courtroom. The sergeant had spun various tales to justify his rather bizarre behaviour. “He claimed that he was on the way to the Lake Erie shore and that he was going to use the female underwear as prizes for fishermen,” according to one account. “The Lake Erie shore is nowhere near where the airman was found.” Kalichuk also claimed he had “decided to give some children in the neighbourhood a party” and had purchased five pairs of underwear and some boxes of candy as prizes for them.

  The magistrate dismissed the charges for lack of conclusive evidence but warned the air force of his suspicions. Kalichuk paid a fine for illegal possession of liquor. Nancy’s father remembers what one of the OPP officers said to him as the man who tried to abduct his daughter escaped prosecution.

  “He might have got away with it here,” the policeman said, “but he’ll be looked after by the air force.” It was wishful thinking.

  It was eleven days after Alexander Kalichuk walked out of court in St. Thomas a free man that Lynne Harper disappeared.

  There is no evidence Kalichuk murdered Lynne Harper. There is also no evidence that he did not. His whereabouts on the evening of June 9 are unknown. But his bizarre actions before June 9 and his rapid mental collapse afterwards suggest he was at least as likely a suspect as the boy police had scooped up and incarcerated in the Goderich jail with “lightning speed.”

  For starters, it was quite possible Kalichuk was in the Clinton area at the time. Though he was stationed in Aylmer, his stepdaughter remembers he came home “pretty much every night.” Home was not more than a fifteen-minute drive from the intersection where Steve says he left Lynne. Kalichuk’s daytime attempt to pick up Nancy Davidson also suggests it was not unusual for the wandering sergeant to be cruising the county back roads even when he was supposed to be on duty. “He was often on the road,” says his stepson.

  What’s more, Kalichuk had a criminal record and a predisposition to luring young girls. “I could see him raping or molesting,” says his stepdaughter, “but not murdering.” He was a coward, she says, and if he murdered Lynne, “he probably did it while he was drunk.”

  Kalichuk did not own a 1959 Chevrolet. Still, even if Steven’s description of the vehicle was accurate, there was no proof Lynne’s murderer was in that car. It is possible Lynne got a ride in one car but met her assailant somewhere else on the road. According to his stepchildren’s best memories, until 1959 Kalichuk drove a light yellow Ford. In early 1959 Sergeant Kalichuk bought a new 1959 light yellow Pontiac Stratochief, whose wide fins made it look somewhat like the flashy Chevrolets of the same year. Curiously, Kalichuk took advantage of a short trip out west in early July to sell his car. Just weeks after Lynne’s murder, Kalichuk got rid of the brand-new vehicle he had owned for only a few months.

  It is also possible Kalichuk had access to another car around the time of Lynne’s disappearance. His stepdaughter was married in May, and family guests came from Manitoba, one of the provinces that issued yellow licence plates. The car Kalichuk used to try to pick up Nancy Davidson on May 21 was probably not his yellow Pontiac. Glen Davidson, Nancy’s father, remembers “it wasn’t a bright colour”—yellow or white or red. He vaguely recalls “a gunmetal grey or a light brown” vehicle. “It was big at the front end, wide,” Nancy recalls. “I remember seeing wings—they were shaped up at the back.”

  What is certain, at any rate, is that the medical and military records portray a deeply troubled man spiralling out of control precisely around the time of Lynne’s murder. On the very same morning Lynne vanished, two senior medical officers met at the St. Thomas probation office to discuss Kalichuk’s deteriorating mental state. Also that day, a doctor at the air force infirmary began what would be a series of disturbing medical reports: “Lately he has been drinking to excess with increased frequency,” the physician noted on Tuesday, June 9.

  Eighteen days after Lynne’s body was discovered, Kalichuk left Ontario on annual leave. By July 2, Kalichuk was back at the RCAF Station Aylmer infirmary with a grim prognosis. “He was … evasive at times and there was a definite paranoid tinge to his thinking,” Dr. A. M. Beach reported. The sergeant suffered from “overwhelming anxiety, tension, depression and guilt.” The psychiatrist’s analysis was blunt: “sexual deviation” and anxiety reaction. “We are dealing with acute emotional disturbances so often seen in people with character disorders when they get caught,” Beach concluded. It appeared to be a disproportionate overreaction if Kalichuk was bothered only by the panty incident—a charge, after all, that he had so easily
beaten.

  On Dr. Beach’s recommendation, the air force dispatched Kalichuk to the psychiatric clinic of London’s Westminster Hospital on July 22. “On admission, he was tense and nervous, and anxiety and depression were obvious,” the medical staff reported. When questioned about the attempted pick-up of young girls in May, Kalichuk was “extremely vague and evasive.” He also gave an “inadequate explanation” for his indecency charge in 1950. But by July 31, doctors decided the sergeant was “no longer depressed” and discharged him. The clean bill of health would prove to be premature.

  What is remarkable in the Kalichuk case is not what the doctors did but what the police did not do. When the officers in the OPP’s St. Thomas detachment received the general police bulletin on June 11 about the murder of a twelve-year-old girl just outside an air force base, why did no one think of Kalichuk—the air force sergeant they had picked up just three weeks prior for trying to lure a ten-year-old girl into his car? Why did no one in the military raise a red flag when they heard about the Kalichuk file at the same time an officer’s daughter had been raped and murdered? It is not as if Kalichuk’s condition was a dark secret. Medical officers were reviewing his case on the morning Lynne vanished. On Monday, June 15, two days after Steven Truscott first appeared in court, an air force social welfare officer named J. J. Young wrote a confidential, two-page memorandum providing a detailed history of Kalichuk’s sexual proclivities.

  Kalichuk’s name, however, would never appear on any police or military files concerning the Harper case. Steve’s defence lawyer and the jurors would never hear about the man using panties to pick up young girls in the Clinton area in the days before Lynne’s murder.