by Julian Sher
Steve’s reputation was such that even those who could hardly be accused of being in his fan club—the police—had to admit he was, by all accounts, a decent kid. “Steven was a pretty regular guy, he was well thought of,” remembers OPP Cpl. Hank Sayeau. “The only thing I ever heard critical of him was that he had to win. All the kids were Steven’s buddies—girls and boys. The kids liked him.”
In the Goderich jail, his parents said their goodbyes and left Steven alone, on a metal cot in his cold cell. The boy who gave youngsters in Clinton rides on his toboggan, the boy who won the senior championship at the school field day, would never be a boy again.
On June 13, 1959, the Harpers buried their daughter. That same day, Steven Truscott buried his boyhood.
SUMMER: THE SCRAMBLE TO MAKE A CASE
11
TROUBLE WITH WITNESSES
Harold Graham was convinced he had Lynne’s killer safely behind bars. Now all the senior OPP investigator had to do was prove it. And he had to prove it to the satisfaction of the new player who had entered the Truscott game: Crown prosecutor Glenn Hays.
The Goderich prosecutor had a reputation among police officers for being a painstaking taskmaster. “He had to satisfy himself that there were reasonable and probable grounds to put the guy on trial,” Hank Sayeau remembers. “He just wanted more before he moved. You had to have things organized.”
Glenn Hays, like Harold Graham, realized this case was going to be one of the most important of his career. Throughout the summer, the prosecutor and the chief investigator worked closely. Graham frequently held meetings with the Crown counsel in his Goderich offices. When the trial began, the OPP inspector sat right beside Hays, giving him advice and insight into the witnesses.
“It is the duty of the investigator to carefully weigh the facts in his mind,” the inspector later remarked in a speech about the Truscott case in 1967. “Make an assessment of the facts, pursue certain theories, taking into account any new developments that might tend to support or detract from them.” As it turned out, Graham and his men would stumble across many “new developments” that did detract from their original theory about Steven, facts that should have warned Hays and the police they were possibly on the wrong track. Instead, Hays ignored the inconsistencies and contradictions—and more importantly, kept them from the defence.
With Lynne buried and Steve in jail, the police began a weekend blitz of belated fact-finding: on Saturday and Sunday alone, they interviewed seventeen children and two adults. Over the next couple of weeks they would interview dozens more. For many of the children of RCAF Station Clinton, what should have been a summer of laughter and laziness became an ordeal of police queries and probes.
The police had already spoken casually to some of the children in the days after Lynne’s disappearance. But now, with a murder trial looming, interviews were much more serious. They set up headquarters at the school gym and grilled the children one by one as they filed in. The police then typed up the youngsters’ statements and, in most cases, got them to sign them in the days that followed. Graham was front and centre during the questioning; his signature appears as a witness at the bottom of almost all of the statements gathered that first weekend.
The children’s words, their fleeting memories, the snatches of what they saw or heard, now became permanently etched in police documents. It was all standard police procedure, but for many youngsters, it was frightening. “It was pretty stressful. It was frankly terrifying,” Bryan Glover, one of Steve’s teenage pals, recalls. “They were always asking over and over: ‘Well, are you sure, are you sure about that?’ It felt like an interrogation.”
Casual remarks suddenly took on a grim significance far beyond what a child could fathom. Karen Allen at first had no apprehensions when she sat down and looked up at the three police officers standing over her.
“I was not a particularly timid girl. They were asking me questions and I was answering,” she says. “Then it took a turn and all of a sudden it was scary.”
The turn came when Karen offered what she thought was a harmless romantic detail. “When I admitted that Steven had kissed me once at a dance party, they asked me if he had ever tried anything or if he had ever frightened me,” she remembers. “I told them no, it was just a little kiss and that Steven wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
But Corporal Sayeau and Constable Trumbley seized on the revelation, according to Karen’s memory of the event.
Had Steven ever tried bolder sexual advances, they wanted to know.
“No,” Karen replied. “What are you asking me that for?”
“Did he ever frighten you?” they asked.
“No,” Karen insisted.
“Then they started asking detailed questions about specific sexual acts and that’s when I started to cry,” Karen remembers. “Nowadays, with television, young people would probably know what they were talking about, but I really didn’t. I was a kid who was green as grass. They didn’t ask anything really crude but it was strange and upsetting.”
Perhaps realizing they had pushed the girl too far, but determined to dig further, the police went to see Karen’s mother. Mrs. Allen told the officers there was nothing sordid to investigate. Her daughter and Steven saw each other only occasionally; one time, Steve’s father even drove Karen home after a dance.
“Well, why would she cry?” the police asked.
“Well, why wouldn’t she cry if you’re asking her questions like that?” Mrs. Allen retorted.
“So that was it. They never questioned me again,” Karen says, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “No one would allow the police to treat kids the way they did back then. If you weren’t telling the police what they wanted to hear, they pretty much told you [that] you were lying. They didn’t want to hear what you wanted to say.”
Other children were more compliant. When strong-arm tactics did not work, the police were apparently not above exercising a little friendly persuasion to jog a child’s memory. Ten-year-old Darrell Gilks told Graham and Trumbley he saw Steven on the evening Lynne disappeared, but he got some of the details wrong. “Steve had a red shirt,” he said, incorrectly (Steve’s shirt was white), “and red pants, and I don’t know what shoes he had.”
That last phrase was crossed out and, in a police officer’s handwriting, replaced by the words “brown canvas shoes”—the footwear Steve wore that night.
No witnesses would need more massaging and coaxing from the police than the two children who would become star witnesses for the prosecution—Jocelyne Gaudet and Butch George. Jocelyne had already given two somewhat confusing statements to the police, telling Graham she was at the bush looking for Lynne and telling Trumbley she went there to meet Steve, but at that time saying nothing about a secret date.
On Saturday, Jocelyne sat down with Inspector Graham and Constable Trumbley to tell them a third, more elaborate story. Graham and the prosecution seemed to have a faith in Jocelyne that her fellow classmates and teachers lacked. “She was a bragger. She was always telling people that she did this or that or what she knew—she would brag about boyfriends but no one believed she had any,” recalls Meryann Glover, who was close with both Lynne and Jocelyne. “I didn’t believe anything she had to say.” Jocelyne’s teacher, Maitland Edgar, shared that distrust. “We had some difficulties with her—school discipline, untruthfulness. She was just not reliable.”
But the police needed Jocelyne to be reliable. If they were going to build an effective case against Steven Truscott, Jocelyne had to provide them with verifiable facts and times, to prove the boy was a sexual predator.
Jocelyne told the OPP officers that on the Sunday before Lynne disappeared, she dropped by Lawson’s barn with a few other girls to see a newborn calf. The next day in school, during recess or social studies class, she chatted with Steve. “Some way or other we got to talking about if there might be any more calves, and Steven said he thought there would be two in the bush and asked if I wanted to go and see the
m.”
Could she make it that night, Monday evening?
“I couldn’t, I said, because I had Guides.”
What about Tuesday?
“I said that I might but it wasn’t set.”
Jocelyne seemed confused about how often she and Steve talked about the alleged date. She told police that the next day at school they talked again, between 9:30 and 10:15 in the morning, during social studies period. At trial, Jocelyne would embellish her story, saying that there were not just two school meetings but “about four.”
She was vague on the time for the date. She never claimed Steve fixed a time, only that, “I told him I might be at the bush if I could make it around six.” Their rendezvous spot, according to Jocelyne, was to be “on the right-hand side of the [county] road, where the bush began. “And then I asked him to wear something I could see from a distance,” Jocelyne added.
It is curious that the police did not immediately see this anecdote as somewhat fanciful. According to their star witness, the secret rendezvous was to take place in plain sight of everyone: not deep in the bush or even in the partially hidden laneway farther along the bush, but right on the road, not far from O’Brien’s farm and the school. The county road at that time in the evening was a busy thoroughfare, crowded with parents and children of all ages. In fact, according to the police’s own investigation, between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m., five different people—a woman named Beatrice Geiger, her son Kenneth, his friend Robb Harrington and two other teenage boys—all spotted Steven on the road. Why would Jocelyne think that special clothing was needed to spot him?
Jocelyne also added the following detail on the purported reason for the hush-hush nature of her meeting with Steve: “I didn’t tell anyone about this plan to meet, because Steven told me not to tell anyone and not to bring anyone with me because Bob didn’t like a whole lot of kids on his property.” Presumably, the police considered this excuse by Steven to be a clever lie to lure his prey into the bush. But a simple inquiry would have revealed that if Steven did use that pretence, it was a feeble one that Jocelyne should have rejected immediately. Every child on the base knew that Bob Lawson had a well-deserved reputation for openness and friendliness. “I don’t think I gave the children the feeling they had to be secretive,” the farmer recalls. Indeed, he explicitly told police at the time—just hours after they talked to Jocelyne—that “it was quite customary for the children of the air force station to be on my farm and in the bush.”
According to Jocelyne, on Tuesday evening around 5:50 p.m., Steve came knocking on her door. “My brother, André, answered and called me to the door,” she said. “I stood just inside the doorway and Steven stood outside.”
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Steve answered, then asking her if they had any homework, a strange query, considering Steve had not missed school that day and was hardly known as a studious pupil.
“I said we did and he said ‘thank you,’” she recounted.
Just as he was leaving, Jocelyne added a comment: “I wasn’t sure I would be able to make it to the bush at six o’clock.”
“All right,” he said.
The only person who could directly confirm that it was Steve who came calling was Jocelyne’s seven-year-old brother. Oddly, there is no evidence in the police files that the OPP ever talked to the boy, who had presumably recognized Steve once and could do it again. The police did speak to Jocelyne’s father, who said that “my son answered the door and called to my daughter that Steve was there, and she went to the door and talked to him for about a minute.” In his first appearance in a courtroom, he would give a different version of how he came to know it was Steve at the door.
Evidently, the OPP were not bothered by the logical inconsistencies with Jocelyne’s story. If her date with Steven was so secretive, why would Steven brazenly come calling at her house, thereby alerting her family just prior to luring their daughter into the bush for some hanky-panky? If Steve told her to “not to tell anybody” because of Bob Lawson’s dislike of children, why did Jocelyne run to the barn to ask the farmer if he had seen Steve?
The OPP also never fully resolved a much more fundamental problem with Jocelyne’s tale: just who was she looking for along the road and near the bush? The entire police case against Steven as a sexual schemer angling to get a girl, any girl, into the bush, was predicated on Jocelyne being on the road Tuesday evening hunting for Steve to meet for their secret date. While Bob Lawson confirmed to the police that she asked for Steve when she came to his barn, Jocelyne herself had first told police she was looking for Lynne. The only two children she spoke to on the county road that evening, Butch George and Philip Burns, both insisted she had asked them about Lynne. (Philip said she asked about Lynne and Steve; Butch said she was interested in Lynne alone.)
The OPP had to get around this dilemma. So ten days after her Saturday declaration to police, Jocelyne made an addendum to her story—in effect, her fourth police statement. The “further statement,” as the OPP called it, was written in the third person: “She asked Philip Burns if he had seen Steven but never mentioned Lynne’s name,” it read. “Says she asked Butch George the same again, not enquiring about Lynne.”
The OPP had no trouble getting Jocelyne to adapt her story. To get genuine corroboration, however, police needed Philip and Butch to change their stories to match Jocelyne’s. But at the preliminary hearing and at trial, both boys would continue to insist Jocelyne had indeed enquired about Lynne.
If Jocelyne’s story about the arrangements for her date had some gaps in logic, her recounting of her attempts to meet Steve on Tuesday evening was flawed by much more serious gaps in time.
Jocelyne was very definite about her times in her formal statement to the police and she stuck by those times in all of her court appearances. She said she left home around 6:30 p.m. and headed straight for Lawson’s farm “to ask … if Steven had been around.” She then biked down the county road, where she bumped into Philip and Butch. She continued on toward the bridge, where she claimed she tried to talk to Bryan Glover. “I asked him about the fishing but he didn’t answer.”
Jocelyne went out of her way to insist on her time at the river: “When I was down at the bridge, it couldn’t have been after seven,” she told the OPP. She then decided to return to the farm. “I stayed at Lawson’s barn rather a long time and was home sometime between 8:30 and 9:00.” Jocelyne would later specify that that “long time” was about ninety minutes.
For his key witness, Graham thus had a timeline that looked something like this:
About 6:30: Leave home, arrives shortly at Lawson’s farm and stays only minutes
About 6:45: Meets Philip and Butch near the bush
Before 7:00: Down at the bridge
7:00 to 8:30: Leaves bridge to spend ninety minutes with Lawson
Not a single one of the girl’s times coincided with reality, a startling fact that the OPP could not have failed to notice.
Three boys confirmed that Jocelyne was near the bush. Philip, Butch and Bryan all saw her there. But they saw her around 7:15 or 7:20, not around 6:30. The police spoke to all three boys and could not have missed the fact that their key witness was seriously off in her timing.
As for her alleged visit to the bridge, it could also not have escaped the police’s attention that—with the exception of Butch—not a single child or adult at the river recalled seeing Jocelyne there that evening. The police took statements from close to a dozen people at the bridge that weekend and would interview a dozen more in the days to come. No one talked about seeing Jocelyne—not even Bryan Glover, the boy with whom she allegedly tried to have a chat at the river.
Soon after Jocelyne spoke to the police on Saturday, June 13, OPP Cpl. Hank Sayeau visited Bob Lawson’s farm to get a formal statement from him. Yet astonishingly, the OPP apparently did not ask the farmer to verify any of Jocelyne’s times. Lawson told police Steve “appeared quite intelligent and was of good character,” but J
ocelyne’s name did not once appear in his statement.
Only twelve days later, on June 25, did the police return to get another account from the farmer. “Jocelyne Gaudet came to my farm at 7:25 p.m.,” he told police, putting her initial arrival at the barn almost one hour later than Jocelyne had. He was certain because Jocelyne asked for the time and he looked at his watch. Even more disturbingly, Lawson told the police: “Prior to leaving she said she had been down at the bush looking for Steve and went down toward the bush again to look for him.”
In other words, contrary to what Jocelyne had told police, she went to the bush first, before going to Lawson’s farm.
Lawson’s revelation that Jocelyne had told him a different story than she told the police should not have surprised the OPP if they had done their basic homework. They knew Jocelyne had to be near the bush between 7:15 and 7:20 when the three boys—Butch, Philip and Bryan—saw her there; and they knew she was not at the farm until around 7:25. Therefore, unless she was capable of time travel, her story had to be false: she had to have gone to the bush first and then to Lawson’s barn. It was a contradiction the police either chose to ignore or dismissed as irrelevant. (If Jocelyne was at the farm around 7:25 and Steven did leave the school around that time with Lynne, it would also explain why Jocelyne never saw either of them.)
The OPP also never bothered to ask Lawson about the duration of Jocelyne’s return visit, the one she claimed lasted about an hour and half from 7:00 to 8:30. The farmer would later say her stay lasted a few minutes, not ninety minutes. “It wasn’t very long,” he says. “I was hustling around because I wanted to get a lot of chores done on the farm.”
Jocelyne seemed hard-pressed to fill up the entire two hours she was away from home—from 6:30 p.m. until around 8:30 p.m.—with her hunt for Steven. But the evidence shows that she could account for only about thirty minutes of her time that evening. There is an unexplained gap of about forty-five minutes from the time she left home at 6:30 until three boys saw her near the bush around 7:15. There is another gap of about one hour from 7:25 when Lawson said she left the barn until around 8:30 when she returned home, interrupted only by the few minutes Lawson saw her at his barn for the second time.