by Julian Sher
But Kalichuk’s name would resurface in the 1960s; the military and the OPP could not easily escape his shadow.
Kalichuk was not the only known sexual predator in the Clinton area. Clayton Dennis, thirty-seven at the time, lived in Seaforth and had a contract to do regular electrical repairs on the air force base. “I got to know Harper because he was the head guy signing cheques,” Dennis says today. “I went to his house one time. It was to repair his dryer.”
Dennis admits he was involved “in a little rape case” in 1948 and served time in Collins Bay Penitentiary. He says he left Seaforth in the fall of 1959, but that his departure had nothing to do with Lynne’s murder or Steve’s trial. “My work was depleting and the bank was pushing me for money and I got a chance to go to the States,” he says. “Nobody chased me out.”
Gwen McKeller remembers it a bit differently. The former wife of Dennis’s best friend, she and her daughters often saw Dennis at their home. “He talked about sexual things in a way that disturbed the girls,” she says. “Disturbed me, too.”
McKeller describes Dennis’s departure in 1959 as “strange and sudden.” She recalls talking with Dennis shortly after Lynne’s death. “He made one statement that I didn’t like. He said, ‘She had it coming to her’ or ‘She was asking for it.’” To this day, McKeller wonders why the police did not check on Dennis. “He was right on the base where that girl lived and he was working there,” she says. “Why wouldn’t they interview everybody … especially ones with a record for rape?”
Clayton Dennis now lives in Florida. He dismisses such talk as “small-town gossip.” “I had nothing to do with it,” he says. “[The] police never came to talk with me about an alibi or about their case. Nobody ever questioned me.”
Matthew Meron was a nineteen-year-old airman at RCAF Station Clinton who also worked as a lifeguard at the swimming pool, and therefore presumably knew Lynne, an avid swimmer. Shortly after Lynne’s murder, he transferred out of Clinton to Goose Bay and later to Trenton. Meron married and had two daughters, but was an excessive drinker and was kicked out of the air force. He began beating his wife and sexually abusing both daughters. On one occasion, “he took [one] daughter to a secluded wooded area, and when she resisted sexual intercourse, he tried to strangle her,” according to a family member. “Hunters came by and she got away.”
“When his wife learned of the sexual abuse … she confronted her husband,” the family member recounts. “He denied it at first, then with no sign of remorse, he told his wife rape was better than murdering them.”
Meron never talked about the Harper murder, except to tell his wife “he knew Steven Truscott was innocent.” Family members grew more suspicious when Meron seemed ill at ease anytime they were near the Clinton area. At one point, after an evening of drinking, he turned to his father-in-law and asked: “Do you think my hands could kill?”
In 1959, while stationed at Clinton, Meron had access to his mother’s car, a late-model Chevrolet licensed in Montreal—in other words, with yellow Quebec plates. Meron died in 1985 without ever having been questioned by police about his activities on the night of June 9, 1959.
An air force base and a small town harbour many such ugly secrets. The fact that sexuality was more taboo in the 1950s than today did not mean that sexual problems were any less common than they are now—only that they were more suppressed. When murder strikes, it is the job of the police to turn over rocks and unearth the dark, nasty undergrowth of a community.
OPP Inspector Harold Graham, in talking about the Lynne Harper case, once said investigators had to ask themselves some tough questions. “Has the investigation been thorough and complete? Has anything been overlooked?” he asked. “Has every aspect of the case, whether favourable or unfavourable to the accused, been checked and presented to the Crown attorney?”
Excellent questions that still deserve an answer.
10
“THE ROSE BEYOND THE WALL”
A Buddy Holly song blared over the radio. It was early Saturday morning, June 13, and twelve-year-old Catherine O’Dell was already on vacation in Alberta. A friend to both the Harpers and the Truscotts, she and her family had left Clinton for a summer holiday just a few days before Lynne’s disappearance.
Suddenly, the crackle of a news bulletin shattered her vacation bliss. The police had arrested and charged a classmate with the murder of Lynne Harper. Later she found out it was Steven.
“For me it’s like, ‘Where were you when John Kennedy was shot?’” recalls Catherine. “I went and woke my parents up. It was really a shock. But what was even more shocking was that Steven had been accused of it.”
Back in Clinton, Bob Lawson was stunned when he learned the boy who loved to ride his tractor was now sitting in jail on a murder charge. “We could hardly believe it. But in those days I guess we didn’t question authority as much as we do now. We assumed somebody in their position, doctors and police and so on, were more or less above reproach.”
If friends of Steven, such as Lawson, were willing to give the police the benefit of the doubt, there were plenty of others on the base who hardly needed convincing that the boy was guilty. “I don’t remember anybody being surprised or insisting that it wasn’t him,” recalls Mike Fisher, Lynne’s former babysitting charge. “Too many fingers were pointing in his direction.”
Karen Allen, Steve’s girlfriend of sorts, remembers the confusion a young child faced. “It was frightening to think that something like that could happen to Lynne, and then all of sudden Steve was in jail and people kept saying that he did it,” she says. “It was hard to be a kid and keep saying ‘but he didn’t’ when everybody said ‘but he did.’”
Schoolteacher Maitland Edgar says most of Steve’s classmates were in shock. “They didn’t know what to believe,” he recalls. “There was a bitter feeling that anyone could do that to Lynne.” Edgar personally did not think his star athlete was guilty. “I never believed he was capable of doing something like that,” the vice-principal says. “If he had had a snap temper he would have had occasion to let it explode during hockey or football games, and I never saw it.”
There was less sympathy for the accused murderer in the population at large. News of the arrest flashed across the front pages of the newspapers, briefly overshadowing the upcoming visit of the young Queen Elizabeth. “CHARGE BOY, 14, GIRL’S SLAYER,” the London Free Press announced.
“Nothing has occurred in this district for scores of years to so arouse public feeling,” an editorial in the local Goderich paper said. “It was a bitter contradiction of a complacent feeling that such a thing just ‘can’t happen here.’”
The grief and sadness at Lynne’s widely covered funeral that Saturday afternoon only heightened public fury against her accused slayer. Flowers blanketed the front of the base’s Protestant chapel as the mourners filed in. Shirley Harper sobbed uncontrollably. Her husband, Leslie, and Lynne’s two brothers also wept. So did the many air force officers, neighbours and dozens of children in attendance.
Squadron Leader Charles MacLaren, station padre, read a poem called “The Rose beyond the Wall”:
Shall claim of death cause us to grieve,
And make our courage faint and fall?
Nay! Let us faith and hope receive—
The rose still grows beyond the wall.
The padre tried to offer a “word of hope and assurance” to what he aptly described as “a shocked and sad community.” Lynne’s rose still did grow beyond the wall, he assured the mourners, “because God has designed it so through immortality.”
As the funeral procession left the chapel, thirty members of Lynne’s Girl Guide troop, neatly dressed in uniform, formed a guard of honour on either side of the coffin. Sixteen RCAF officers served as pallbearers. Her family buried Lynne, the newspapers reported, “dressed in the Girl Guide uniform she loved.”
Two families lost their children on Saturday, June 13. One, forever, to a graveyard; the other to a jail. Th
e Harper family’s loss was infinitely more tragic and final; the Truscott family’s loss was nonetheless wrenching because they felt a grievous error had been committed and had no way of knowing how long their boy would stay behind bars.
“It will be over soon and he’ll be out. That’s the only thought I had,” remembers Doris Truscott. “It would be fixed up in no time.” Never in her wildest nightmares could she imagine that by the time her Steven emerged from prison, he would be a grown man.
Just two hours before Lynne’s funeral began, the boy many blamed for her slaying made his first court appearance.
“His Folks Sob, but Suspect Emotionless,” ran the headline in the London Free Press. “A pale, skinny fourteen-year-old boy, charged in connection with the murder of a twelve-year-old schoolmate, showed no emotion today as he faced a juvenile court judge,” the paper reported. Dressed in a black-and-grey-striped shirt and dark sports trousers, “the boy was allowed to talk to his sobbing parents for a few minutes.”
“He was scared, definitely scared,” Doris Truscott remembers. To be suddenly thrown into the bowels of the justice system unnerved her as well. “It was all so different from everything that was in our lives. You’re dumbfounded,” she recalls.
The issue before Magistrate Dudley Holmes was a simple one: where should Steven be tried? As a general rule, a fourteen-year-old would be tried as a minor, with all the extra protection the law affords. In a juvenile court, Steve’s trial would take place in camera and before a judge alone, presumably somewhat more dispassionate than a jury picked from a local population inflamed over Lynne’s murder. If convicted, he would receive a sentence far short of the maximum death penalty, and his record would be sealed.
But the Crown prosecutor was determined to see Steven bumped up to adult court—and hanged as a murderer. Certain provisions of the Juvenile Delinquents Act allowed for moving the case to adult court. Two of the conditions were straightforward in Steven’s case: the offence had to be indictable under the Criminal Code, and the accused had to be at least fourteen years old. The two remaining conditions were left to the discretion of the judge: trying a child in adult court had to be in the best interests of both the community and of the accused. It would take three more hearings over the next two weeks before the judge would make up his mind.
After only five minutes before the magistrate, Steven was remanded into custody until the following Thursday for another court appearance. There would be no bail for an accused murderer, even if he was a juvenile. Steve had spent the first hours of his incarceration in the early hours of Saturday morning in a detention centre. After he had appeared in court, the police now took him to his new home, the Huron County Jail. “I hope he won’t be here very long,” a jailer told a newspaper reporter, fully aware of the desolate and dingy conditions in the century-old cells.
The old grey bricks of the jail had not changed much since the fortress-like edifice on the outskirts of Goderich had housed its first criminals in 1841. Steve passed through the ten-foot-high wooden doors at the entrance, then down a thirty-yard corridor as dark as a tunnel, the sound of his footsteps and those of his police guards echoing off the walls. The boy undressed and stood, humiliated, as the guards frisked him and ordered him to shower. They gave him a shirt, a pair of pants and shoes—without laces. Four rows of cells radiated from the metal spiral staircase in the centre. The guards pulled a bolt to open a two-inch-thick door, then passed through two sets of metal gates to a narrow hallway lit by three light bulbs. Along one side ran a row of tiny cells with steel bars, with a common toilet at the end of the corridor.
“It really was kind of terrifying,” Steven remembers. “You’re doing what you want, you’re free, and all of a sudden you’re thrown in a four-by-eight-foot room, no friends, no family,” Steve says. “It’s really hard to describe the terror that you feel—especially at that age.”
The boy suffered a further humiliation that afternoon when Cpl. Hank Sayeau arrived to seize his underwear. It was a puzzling move; the police had already seized underwear and other clothes from Steve’s dresser and hamper at home. What did they hope to find on a pair of undershorts that the boy had worn overnight in jail? Steve, to his horror, would find out the answer in a public courtroom three months later.
“Oh, what a horrible place for him to be in,” Doris Truscott says, shuddering at the memory of her first visit that Saturday. “It was just so cold. Even the people there were as a cold as the jail was. They didn’t consider him being a kid.” His mother and father huddled with their son, trying to assure him his ordeal would soon end. “I just thought it would all be over in a few weeks, so I wasn’t worried,” Doris says.
It was a curious scene: mother and son, steeled in the Truscott tradition of shielding their emotions, both unwilling to show their true anxieties and trepidations. “You could sense he was scared,” his mother recalled. “I think he was putting up a front.”
Of course he was putting up a front, Steve admits. He had learned from a master. “My family basically does the same thing, to show you that everything is going to be okay, and so you do the same thing. You feel it inside but you don’t let it show.”
Inside, though, the boy’s nerves were jagged, his fears were racing. He did not sleep that first night. “I don’t think your mind even grasps what’s going on. It takes a long time to sink in,” Steve recalls. “And all the time that it’s going on you’re thinking, ‘They’re going to realize that they made a mistake, and you know, they’re going to let me go.’ But it just never happened that way.”
When Doris Truscott gave birth to her second son on January 18, 1945, in Vancouver, British Columbia, she could hardly expect to be visiting him in a jail before his fifteenth birthday. Just three years earlier, Doris had met a jovial young wireless operator on an air–sea rescue boat where her father was an engineer. Dan Truscott, like Doris’s father, was air force; he started dropping by the house as a casual friend, but it did not take long for the wartime romance to blossom into marriage. Four children soon followed over the next decade: Ken in 1943, Steve in 1945, Bill in 1950 and Barbara in 1953. Like most military families, they played hopscotch across the country, living in bases near Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Quebec City and River, Manitoba. “You roughed it—didn’t always get what you wanted,” Doris says. In the dreary cold of Manitoba, the Truscotts made do in “a little shack” with an outdoor toilet; they were grateful to be one of the families to enjoy running water.
Steve and his brothers earned extra dollars by cutting neighbours’ lawns and shovelling driveways. In Edmonton, Steve and Ken delivered newspapers across the expansive base; in the dead of winter, their hands and feet were so cold that once home their father rubbed them with hot towels until the blood flowed again. But Steve would never complain; even as a child he kept his emotions in check. His mother remembers when, at the age of four, Steven fell down the stairs and a two-inch sliver of wood from a door jabbed into his back. The painful shard was extracted and some iodine was applied—and not a single tear from the boy. “I was more upset than him,” his mother says.
Steve loved the adventure of new woods to explore, new rivers to skate on, with every move the family made. But military life was not without its costs. Steve was wary of striking deep friendships. “You were friends with everybody but close with nobody. Either they were moving or you were,” he remembers. Steve had to repeat his third grade when one transfer meant he could not keep up with the new standards in his latest school. But school work was never Steve’s forte in any case. “He was good but he would just daydream,” his mother recalls his teachers saying.
Steve preferred to get his education from the forests and streams near his many successive homes across the country. He brought bugs and snakes into the house as pets, a habit he did not abandon when he arrived in Clinton. Maitland Edgar recalls Steven enthralling his classmates with a baby screech owl and a muskrat.
As a boy, Steve dreamed of being a pilot. With his br
others, he built airplanes out of balsa wood, attaching a small gas motor and two wire lines to move the flaps. Their dreams took flight in the fields next to the real airplanes of the air force. At night, in his bedroom, Steve stared at the plastic models of Spitfires, Hurricanes and Mustangs that hung from his ceiling and cluttered his dresser.
Sports were his passion. In winter, he donned goalie pads on the skating rinks; in spring, a third-baseman’s glove helped him shine on the baseball diamond. In summer, he often spent a month in Vancouver visiting with his maternal grandfather, who owned a small fishing boat in Burrard Inlet. Steve helped “Pop” put down crab traps, and sometimes, with luck, they had a lunch of fresh seafood on the boat. A faded black-and-white family photo shows a beaming Steve, no more than seven years old, holding a small flounder and smiling with as much pride as if he had just harpooned Moby Dick himself.
The Truscotts moved to Clinton in the summer of 1956, a year before the Harpers arrived. Steve found new friends, new woods and rivers to explore—and new pranks to play. At night, with few streetlights to attract attention, Steve and his friends would hide in the pitch dark between the houses, knock on side doors and scamper off.
They did not always make a clean getaway. In April of 1959, neighbours called police when they heard a rowdy bunch of teenagers causing some property damage at the vacant farmhouse near the Clinton base. The police investigated but pressed no charges. Steve’s father, Dan, organized a troop of boys to clean up the damage. “Steve said he didn’t do the things they were accused of, but he was with the kids, so he had to pitch in and go back and clean it up,” Doris recalled. “They knew right from wrong.”
“You had a guideline—if you crossed over that, you were in trouble,” Steve agrees. “If you did something, you got heck. You knew you were going to get heck.”