by Julian Sher
Whatever Jocelyne was doing that evening, it may have been something she didn’t want the police or possibly her parents to know about, perhaps so embarrassing or personal that she was consistently inaccurate about her times not just with the police, but repeatedly in court. She was desperate enough that she would eventually ask an adult to help her to cover the time she could not account for.
It remains a mystery to this day what, if anything, Jocelyne was trying to hide. It also remains a mystery why the police so fervently believed a girl few of her classmates or teachers trusted.
As Graham and his officers began speaking to some of the other boys, including Steven’s friends, they got their first inkling that Butch George did not have an abiding affection for the truth. Butch had told the police on the Thursday before Lynne was found and on Friday, after her body turned up, that—like Dougie Oates and Gord Logan—he had seen Steve and Lynne cross the bridge. That should have put Butch in the camp of potential defence witnesses. But on Saturday and Sunday, the police heard that he was spreading quite a different story to the boys at the base.
Allan Durnin told police that around 7:50 on Tuesday night, Butch told him that “he saw Steve Truscott go into the woods with Lynne Harper.” A little more than an hour later, Butch was telling the same tale at the Custard Cup, according to George Archibald. “Butch said he saw Steve go into the woods with Lynne but I don’t think we believed him or paid much attention,” George told Graham. Bryan Glover, Tom Gillette and Paul Desjardine gave the police similar accounts.
These revelations must have excited the OPP investigators. A pal of Steven’s who had previously given him an alibi was now changing his tune. Better still, here at last was a potentially pivotal eyewitness, someone who boldly claimed that he saw Steve Truscott take Lynne Harper into the woods where her body was later found. This was as close to the proverbial smoking gun as the police were ever going to get.
The police discovered that, as a result of Butch’s tales, there was a lot of teasing of Steve in the days after Lynne’s disappearance. Tom Gillette informed Graham that at school on Wednesday, Steve told him he went into the bush because “he heard a calf in the woods.” That evening, Steve told a similar calf story to the boys gathered down at the bridge and “sounded as if he was threatening” Butch, Tom said. Allan Durnin told the police that on Thursday, Steve came close to fighting with him when he challenged Steve’s story about giving Lynne a lift to the highway. For the police, a picture was beginning to emerge of a guilty boy, cornered by his friends and lashing out at his accusers.
The OPP formally interviewed Butch on Monday, June 15, but it was not until June 25, ten days later, that Butch signed his statement. For most children and adults, there was only a short interval of a few days, while the police typed out their handwritten notes, before they were called back in for the formal signing. Why the long delay in Butch’s case? Did the police threaten Butch with the possibility that he could be charged along with Steven for trying to cover up for him? Or were the police working with him to get rid of some of the contradictions in his statement?
Clearly, the OPP were in a quandary with Butch George. If it was true he had seen Steve take Lynne into the bush, then they had a golden eyewitness. If that was not true, then one of their chief accusers against Steven was a liar. It was a seemingly stark and irreconcilable contradiction: either Butch did see Steve in the bush or he did not. Both could not be true. But remarkably, the police—and later the prosecution—decided they would have it both ways: they would use Butch’s unverified tale of seeing Steve go into the bush to show Steve’s anger when teased by his friends, while at the same time use Butch’s quite contradictory insistence that he failed to spot his best friend at all on the county road that evening as proof that Steve must have been hiding in the bush. It was a stunning feat of legal gymnastics—and incredibly, they pulled it off.
In Butch’s formal police statement, the OPP thus faithfully transcribed without question his account of what he told friends on Tuesday evening. “I told Allan Durnin that Steve was at the bush with Lynne,” Butch told Graham and Const. Donald Trumbley. At the Custard Cup, he told several more boys a slightly different tale: “I had seen Steve going into the bush with Lynne.”
Picture the scene: the OPP’s top homicide investigator watches and listens as a good friend of the boy he has just jailed for the murder of Lynne Harper signs a statement declaring he saw Steve go into the bush. What more did the police need? Graham had found the eyewitness testimony he needed to put his suspect at the scene of the crime. A logical next step would have been to ask Butch a simple question. “This is very important evidence, Butch. Can you show us where and when you saw Steven take Lynne into the bush?” If police ever asked that question, there was no recorded answer to it in any of Butch’s testimony to the police or the courts over the next three months. Either the police and the prosecution did not trust their chief witness enough to ask it, or, if they did ask, they were not satisfied with the truthfulness of Butch’s reply.
There was good reason for misgivings. As they put together the chronology of Butch’s statements, the police must have scratched their heads in bemusement, if not frustration. On Tuesday night, Butch was telling anyone who would listen he had seen Steve take Lynne into the bush. On Wednesday night when Butch, Steve and their friends gathered at the bridge, he denied that he was spreading that tale in front of the very boys to whom he had told it the night before. By Thursday morning, Butch was telling the police he saw Steve and Lynne, but not in the bush. This time, “he saw Lynne and Steven on the cycle going toward the highway” after they crossed the river. By Monday, he dramatically altered his story and swore to the police he had in fact not seen Steve or Lynne at all that evening, either at the bush or at the bridge, until he dropped by Steve’s home around 9:00 p.m. Little wonder that the prosecution would make sure Butch was well prepped before testifying in court. Even then, his testimony ended up as a confusing jumble.
The OPP also seemed singularly uninterested in pursuing any other enquiries with Butch, except regarding his comments about Steve. The same day Graham sat down with Butch, the police files reveal the OPP learned that Butch’s relative Mike George was claiming as early as Wednesday—the day after Lynne’s disappearance—that Lynne had been raped. Not simply missing—as everyone thought at the time—but raped. Graham could have asked Butch if Mike knew more about what went on in the bush than Butch did. He could have asked Butch if he was covering for Mike or someone else. But there is no indication in the police files that the OPP asked any of these questions of Butch, Mike or anyone else.
Graham must also have noticed that Butch’s statement seriously contradicted that of his other star child witness, Jocelyne. Butch gave quite a different spin to the encounter he had with Jocelyne at the laneway leading to the bush.
“I asked her if she had seen Steve,” he recounted. She replied that she had not. Butch insisted that she then asked “if I had seen Lynne.” Not Steve, as Jocelyne had claimed, but Lynne.
Butch said that Jocelyne then continued her quest for Lynne, not Steve, when he—but no one else—saw her down at the river. “She asked me if I had seen Lynne yet and I said no.”
If the OPP had difficulty getting the changing stories of Butch and Jocelyne straight, they had the reverse problem with the two boys who claimed they saw Steve cross the bridge with Lynne on their way to the highway. In a statement witnessed by Graham and Trumbley on June 13, Gord Logan repeated the story that must have caused the police officers no end of grief, both for its consistency—the twelve-year-old never wavered in a single detail in any declaration he made to the police or in court—and in its potentially devastating impact on their case.
“I think it must have been nearly 7:30 when I saw her and Steve,” he told the officers as he described what he witnessed while he was fishing and swimming in the river. “She and Steve were riding double on Steve’s bike and they were going toward Number 8 Highway.… I a
m sure it was her. She was wearing shorts, I think.” Gord said that about five minutes later, he saw Steve come back, this time alone, and stop at the bridge. “He hasn’t talked to me about this,” Gord added, perhaps in response to query from the police who were trying to determine if there had been some collusion.
Gord’s statement was the single most powerful support Steve had for his innocence, because it confirmed his version of the time he left the school, and also confirmed his claim that he drove Lynne to the highway and returned without her. The police and prosecution would have to destroy Gord’s credibility, by suggesting either that he lied or was mistaken about what he claimed to have seen from more than six hundred feet away.
Dougie Oates, the turtle enthusiast, posed a bigger dilemma for the police. Unlike Gord’s, his story could not be dismissed because of distance. He had told Graham on Friday he had seen Lynne on the crossbar of Steve’s bike as they rode right past him across the bridge, just inches away. On Saturday, he stuck to his guns. “I saw Steve and Lynne ride by. They were riding double on Steve’s bike, going toward the highway,” he said.
According to the police transcription of Dougie’s statement, he was somewhat vague on the exact time he spotted the two older children. “I don’t know the time, but I think it was a half hour either way from seven o’clock,” his statement read. Dougie would later hotly contest saying those words, but they gave the police and the prosecution an opening. If Dougie’s sighting was closer to 6:30, they reasoned that the boy was confused: he had seen Steven alone, just as several other people had seen Steven around that time along the county road. If, on the other hand, Dougie saw Steve after 7:00 p.m., then he had to be telling the truth about seeing both Steve and Lynne crossing the bridge—and Steven was innocent. Timing, as always, was crucial.
When Constable Trumbley returned a few days after young Dougie gave his weekend statement to the police, he ran into the boy’s obstinacy once again. “I took him over to a corner and we sat down in chairs and I explained to him this was the statement that was received from him on Saturday,” the OPP officer recounted. “I asked him to read it over carefully. He took it in his hands.”
“Is it correct? Want to make any changes?” the police officer asked the boy.
“No, it is correct,” Dougie answered politely.
“Will you sign it?”
“No,” the eleven-year-old said firmly, “my mother told me not to sign anything.”
So the police had an unsigned statement, but one that was potentially damaging to their case just the same. Here was a classic example of what Graham called “new developments that might detract” from the police theory. Graham believed “every aspect of the case, whether favourable or unfavourable to the accused” had to be checked.
Dougie’s story was clearly unfavourable to the police case, but the police seemed determined to help the prosecution prove the boy left the bridge before 7:00 p.m.—before Dougie could have seen Steven and Lynne. That meant they had to dismiss his insistence that he left for home around 7:30, after he saw Steve and Lynne. “I didn’t look at the clock when I got home, but I am supposed to be home around eight o’clock,” he said. The police had to ignore his mother, Genevieve Oates, who told them her son got home “around 7:20 or 7:30,” although it was possible she was confused about the date.
Graham’s own notes seem to support Dougie’s story. According to his brief handwritten report of Dougie’s first police interview on Friday, June 12, the boy said he saw “Arnold at bridge.” Since by all accounts Arnold “Butch” George only got to the bridge around 7:30, Dougie must have been there at least that late on Tuesday evening to have spotted him. Most importantly, the police had to suppress important corroboration of Dougie’s story that came from a witness at the bridge, a witness who was devastating to their case—a hidden witness the judge and jurors never got to see or hear.
While Graham and Trumbley spent the weekend questioning schoolchildren, other officers were trying to gather other evidence. At 6:45 p.m. on Saturday, June 13, OPP Identification Officer John Erskine went out for the fourth time in forty-eight hours to the crime scene. This time his assignment was to take pictures of bicycle tracks found in the laneway leading into the bush.
Erskine took pictures of three sets of tracks, encrusted in the fractured earth, not far from where Lynne’s body was found. The earth along the trail was so parched there were large cracks breaking through the brown soil. It had barely rained since May, and it did not take an expert like Erskine to realize the bike tracks had to have been made when the ground was damp—in other words, at least a week before the murder took place.
Erskine was supposed to be gathering evidence against Steven Truscott. Instead, what the corporal was accumulating were gnawing doubts about the boy’s guilt.
12
“LOOK WHAT I FOUND, MOMMY”
“Our time in this investigation is being devoted to the taking of statements from various boys and girls,” Inspector Harold Graham informed his superiors about the progress of his case. “The time factor being so important, I will report on this phase when the statements have been completed.”
Graham was burdened by contradictory accounts about what time Steve and Lynne left the school, starting at 7:00 and going all the way to 7:30. He also had various estimates of Steve’s return to the school, ranging from 7:45 to 8:15. To make their case against Steve stick, the authorities had to prove he had the time necessary to commit the crime. Steve said he had left the school around 7:25 and returned before 8:00. The police had to prove that Steven was away from the school for much longer than half an hour. It would take Steve almost five minutes to get to the laneway leading to the bush, another few minutes to walk down to the trail and enter the bush, and about ten more minutes to return, leaving him about ten minutes to hide his bike, subdue Lynne, undress her, rape and murder her, and clean himself up. A thirty-minute window made the murder technically possible but barely credible.
Two mothers with the Brownies at the school told police they thought Steve and Lynne left sometime between 7:00 and 7:10. But when Graham spoke to the first person Steve and Lynne met soon after they left the school and headed down the county road, the news was not good. Richard Gellatly told the police he was bicycling home when he crossed Steve and Lynne somewhere between the south end of the bush and the school. A few minutes later, at “about twenty-five minutes after seven,” he got home, grabbed his swimming trunks and left. Graham and Trumbley added in their notes: “Richard’s father verifies that he left about that time, as he remembers him coming home for his trunks.” Richard’s testimony meant that Steve and Lynne had started their bike ride much later than the prosecution needed to make a solid case. It would have taken Steve and Lynne only a few minutes—not fifteen to twenty-five minutes—to travel the short distance from the school to where they met Richard. Either he and his father were wrong or the two mothers at the school were wrong about Steve’s departure time.
Once Steve and Lynne left the school, how long was Steve gone? The young boys playing baseball were the first to see him return, but they were not particularly helpful to the prosecution. Stuart Westie told Graham that Steve was gone for “about half an hour.” Warren Heatherall agreed Steven returned “fifteen or twenty minutes or half an hour later.” Billy MacKay put it at twenty minutes.
Three girls saw Steve pull up to the swings where the teenagers were congregating after he talked to the ball players. Lyn Johnston estimated Steve arrived around 8:15 p.m. Lorraine Wood put his return at about 8:10 or 8:15. Nina Archibald agreed.
On the other hand, two other youngsters—indirectly supported by their parents—gave earlier times. John Carew informed police he thought Steve came by the school close to 8:00 p.m. His mother and father would later reinforce his story by confirming what time John arrived home. Sandra Pleasance, meanwhile, was putting her younger sister to bed when she glanced out the window of her home near the school and saw Steve. “I am not too sure of t
he time, but after talking to my father about it, he thinks it would be between a quarter to eight and eight, but I think it would be closer to eight,” she told police. A handwritten note by an officer at the bottom of her statement describes her as “unreliable.” There is no indication the OPP ever checked with her father.
Graham did not fully realize it at the time, but he stumbled upon a key witness for the prosecution when he talked to a shy little ten-year-old named Philip Burns on Saturday, June 13. Philip left the bridge sometime around 7:00 and ambled home slowly, arriving at the PMQs at 7:30. Alongside the bush, he met Jocelyne and Butch George. “I walked on home and never met anyone else,” he told police.
Here was a boy on the county road for a good part of the crucial half hour between 7:00 and 7:30 and he had failed to see Steven. And there was more. Philip said just as he was leaving the bridge, he spoke to a friend who was in a car driven by one of the mothers from the base, Donna Dunkin.
On Monday, June 15, when the police first talked to Donna Dunkin, she was unhelpful. She reported that on the day Lynne disappeared, she went to the river and saw “three big boys fishing on the bridge.” But OPP officers Sayeau and Trumbley returned to see Dunkin a week later and, whether through police prodding or her own volition, her memory seemed to have improved. Dunkin told them she drove some children to the river in her car, parking between the bridge and the nearby railway tracks. “Just as we were slowing down to pull off to park, I met Richard Gellatly and the Burns boy,” she said, referring to Philip. Her story seemed to get some support from Beatrice Geiger, who also reported seeing Philip and Richard along the riverbank at about the same time.