by Julian Sher
The police knew that Richard, travelling on his bike, met Steve and Lynne on the county road near the school. Philip, walking on foot and therefore much farther behind Richard, said he had not seen them. Now that Dunkin had told them both boys left the bridge at the same time, a simple scenario began to emerge that any juror could grasp in an instant: if Philip, travelling several hundred feet behind Richard, did not see Steve and Lynne, they must have left the road and gone into the bush.
It would become the centrepiece of the prosecution’s “eyewitness” case and more than any other non-expert testimony helped convince a jury of Steven’s guilt.
While the police were trying to put together a viable timeline from an array of witnesses, they also realized they faced another challenge—they had scant physical evidence tying the boy to the crime scene. Graham quickly put his men to work to find what they could.
On Monday, June 15, Cpl. Hank Sayeau brought Identification Officer Erskine the two tires he had seized from Steve’s bike. Erskine began tests to see if the tires matched up in any way with the cracked marks found on the tractor trail. Sayeau also delivered the soiled pair of underwear he took from Steven in jail to a biologist at the attorney general’s laboratory for further examination.
Later that evening, Erskine returned to the bridge to check out Steve’s story about seeing a car at the highway. In trying to recreate the scene, the police parked a 1959 Chevrolet with various coloured licence plates at the intersection of the county road and Highway 8, while Erskine, standing at the bridge thirteen hundred feet away, snapped pictures. They concluded a yellow licence plate or marker could not be spotted on a car’s rear bumper. It was the first of several visual tests the police would do, and not the last one to be seriously flawed.
The problem with photographs is that while the human eye automatically makes adjustments for focal length, a photographer must zoom in or zoom out a camera lens depending on what is being highlighted in a picture. How the OPP set the camera lens determined what the photographs looked like: a licence plate might appear much clearer than Steve could ever have seen it or much fuzzier. Only seven years later would there be a more accurate recreation, with human test subjects looking at various coloured markers—a test which produced strikingly different results than the first one.
The police also tried for fingerprints. The same day one officer showed up at Steve’s jail to take his prints, another OPP officer picked up Lynne’s shoes from the Toronto laboratory—presumably to check for similar prints. The police files show no records of any matches.
Finally, on Friday, June 19, a week after they jailed Steven, the police got their first piece of physical evidence, but it turned out to be an unwelcome gift.
Corporal Hank Sayeau prided himself on being a meticulous, careful investigator. Since Thursday, June 11, his men had gathered all kinds of evidence from the crime scene, from as far away as hundreds of feet from the body. Discarded Kleenex, Coke bottles, a black comb, bits of plastic. But the one thing they could not find was the heart-shaped locket on a gold chain Lynne was wearing when she left the house. Witnesses remembered seeing her fingering the locket at the schoolyard that evening, but it was not around her neck when her body was discovered. On Tuesday, June 16, one week after Lynne’s disappearance, Sayeau and several other men returned to the area to search again for the piece of jewellery, without results.
Two days later, Sayeau was back once more, along the county road. This time, he was not looking for the locket; he took a soil sample “approximately 300 feet south” of the north edge of the bush. He was standing just “four feet from the fence.” He saw no trace of Lynne’s locket.
The next day, however, ten-year-old Sandra Archibald had better luck. She always enjoyed picking berries along the county road, but on Friday, June 19, she spotted something shiny catching the sunlight. “I was picking strawberries and my little sister wanted to pick more, so [we] went on ahead,” she later remembered. “That is when I found the locket.”
On the edge of Lawson’s bush, a gold locket with an RCAF crest was hanging over the lowest string of barbed wire. Part of the chain was inside the fence; the locket fell on the roadside. “I didn’t know whose it was and I thought I could keep it,” Sandra said. She took her prize home to her mother, Aida.
“Look what I found, Mommy!” she cried. A neighbour had told Mrs. Archibald that Lynne had a locket just like it. Aida Archibald wrapped the locket in a tissue and called the police. By 5:15 p.m., Corporal Sayeau was on the scene. Sandra later showed the officer where she made her discovery, about 280 feet south of the bush’s northern tip—roughly the same spot Sayeau had stopped for soil samples and far from the tractor trail where, the police alleged, Steve had entered the bush with Lynne.
On Monday, June 22, Sayeau went back to the scene and checked the fence on the west side of the bush, where the locket had been found. From 3:25 p.m. until 4:24 p.m., he gathered evidence. He removed hair particles from the two lower strands of the barbed wire fence. He also snapped three sections of the wire. The hair samples would turn out to be animal hair. The experts at the attorney general’s laboratory found nothing on the wire, though the police instructions inexplicably told the scientists, “Don’t check for blood.”
The next day, Sayeau showed the locket to Leslie and Shirley Harper “and they both identified it as being the one worn by their daughter on the night she went missing,” according to his notes. When it came to trial, Leslie Harper would try to fudge that assessment.
And for good reason. The locket was a bothersome discovery for the police and prosecution. It could not have fallen off Lynne’s neck while Steven dragged her into the bush because the police maintained they did not enter the bush directly from the county road, where the locket was found, as they would have been easily spotted. The police insisted that Steve turned down the laneway and went into the bush from the side, a distance equal to two football fields away from where Sandra stumbled upon the locket.
If Steve was innocent, on the other hand, the locket’s location made sense. If a different person returned to the county road with Lynne (dead or alive) under the cover of darkness later that evening or sometime the next night, and crossed into the bush where the locket was found, it was possible the locket then fell off or was ripped off Lynne’s neck. It was also possible the killer, while fleeing the scene of the crime when the murder occurred—or perhaps even days later—threw the locket into the bush, where it caught on the barbed wire fence.
Reflecting on it today, Sayeau tries to put the best possible spin on the locket’s discovery, suggesting Steve may have tossed it away as he was leaving the bush. “I would like to think that maybe he did take it from the scene and he thought, ‘Better not take that home.’ The defence can’t say that he didn’t throw it there. But I can’t rule out the other theory either. We certainly know he didn’t throw it there from the time he was put in custody.”
And that was the rub. Steve was in police custody as of Friday evening, June 12. If Steve put the locket there, he could only have done it sometime between Tuesday and Friday. That would mean the locket had to remain dangling from the fence unnoticed while police combed the area surrounding the crime scene, first when they discovered the body on Thursday, and then repeatedly in the days afterwards. It was possible everyone missed the tiny piece of jewellery for ten days after Lynne disappeared; it was possible Sayeau missed it when he was examining the same area; it was also possible someone innocently picked it up in one place and discarded it where Sandra found it. Or was it possible that the locket was not there until shortly before Sandra Archibald went picking for berries? If that was the case, Lynne Harper’s locket appeared while the boy charged with her murder was locked up behind bars.
And if Steve did not put the locket there, who did?
13
FOR THE GOOD OF THE CHILD
The frantic police investigation was beginning to take its toll on the Clinton air force community, especially its yo
unger members. First, the students in Maitland Edgar’s class had to get used to staring at Lynne’s empty desk. By the second week, there was a second vacant chair, as Steven Truscott sat in a jail in Goderich, charged with the murder of their classmate.
Doris Truscott was doing her best to cope with Steven in jail and three other children to care for at home.
“It’s a bad thing for him, but it’s very, very hard on the rest of the family too,” she told Lil Woodson, her friend and neighbour. “You can’t just let the family go.”
Doris knew the tongues of some of her less charitable neighbours were wagging. “It’s funny what people will think: I was a very cold person because I never cried a lot,” Doris says. “It was an odd thing for people to make that remark because everybody is different. Maybe I never cried out in public, but you do at home. There was no shame in people breaking down at all, but it just wasn’t my nature in public. The children took after me in that way.”
Community gossip was one thing. Doris had no idea jurors would later interpret her fourteen-year-old’s lack of public tears as a sure sign of guilt.
Soon after Steven was jailed, Dan Truscott walked in the house with news that would make defending their son all the more difficult.
“He came home and said, ‘We were asked to move off the station.’ The air force wanted us off the base; it was a strong suggestion,” Doris remembers. “We thought, ‘Now what are we going to do?’”
It was not necessarily a direct order; the brass presented it as something that would be best for everybody. Dan’s son was about to go on trial for murder—a hanging offence—but the air force deemed it advisable to transfer Dan to a base near Ottawa, about 350 miles away. The Harper family would also soon depart, for England, but for them it would mean an escape from the tragic memories, the press hounds and curious onlookers.
It was hard for Doris not to think that her family was a victim of “injustice by the higher-ups,” as she put it, because her boy was not an officer’s son. OPP Inspector Harold Graham himself later acknowledged the problem of rank. Without providing details, he wrote to his superiors about the “difficulties” affecting his case: “There was the ‘officer–men’ relationship between the associates of the father of the deceased and the associates of the father of the accused.”
Indeed, it did not take long for the air force to close ranks. An officer’s daughter had been raped and murdered, the police had jailed the son of a non-commissioned officer, and that was it. Time to impose military discipline and show the proper respect for rank and for the chain of command.
A “confidential report” by air force police Sgt. John Wheelhouse to the training command headquarters was striking in its exuberant endorsement of the OPP case against Steven Truscott. “Steven appeared to have seen and remembered too much detail for a fourteen-year-old who was a below average student in school,” the report noted somewhat caustically. “His eyesight was tested and was normal without being outstanding.”
The air force official seemed more eager than the police to prove Steven guilty. “Time of death has been established as being between 19:15 hours and 19:45 hours, more likely between 19:15 hours and 19:30 hours,” stating a narrow fifteen-minute window that even the police were not brash enough to suggest.
Despite the lack of help from the air force, the Truscotts were not going to abandon their fight for their son. Doris and the children would live in the family’s trailer in a park not far from the Goderich jail Steve now called home. Ken, Steve’s older brother, got a job at a local Pepsi bottling plant. To catch a glimpse of his brother, Ken scaled a tree near the prison wall. “I was just high enough over the wall to see him through the window of the cell block,” Ken recalls. “Somebody saw me and reported it.” Steve’s jailers promptly moved the prisoner to a cell with no view through the window.
In the space of a few weeks, Doris Truscott’s life had been shattered. In early June, she was a military mom, preparing the kids for summer vacation and socializing in the Sergeants’ Mess. Now she was living in a trailer park, her son sitting in a century-old jail cell. She called on her military grit to survive. “I think being a serviceperson, you learn to accept things more and make do with what you have,” she recalls. “Your world has turned completely around, but you push it to the back of your mind and you look ahead. Nothing more could happen that could be worse, so it’s got to get better.”
But it was indeed about to get worse.
Doris and Dan Truscott had neither the money nor the connections to hire a lawyer for their son. Friends in the air force recommended they contact Frank Donnelly, a prominent attorney who was known as one of the best defence lawyers in Huron County—a reputation that earned him grudging respect from the police. “We didn’t particularly like him, but if we were in trouble we probably would have hired him,” joked Hank Sayeau, who, as an OPP corporal, did battle with Donnelly several times. “He was very thorough and pretty strenuous. He gave you a hell of a cross-examination.”
Born and raised in the Huron County area, Donnelly went to Toronto to study and practise law in the 1920s, but returned to Goderich in 1930 and never left. His father was a well-known senator, and Donnelly himself was on the fast track to success. Donnelly was so eager to take the Truscott case that he postponed a major step up the legal ladder—he was about to be appointed as a judge to the Superior Court of Ontario.
From the start, Donnelly assured the worried parents they had nothing to fear. “He really felt a kid of that age was not going to be found guilty on circumstantial evidence,” Doris recalls. “It made me feel more confident. We were really green to the police and lawyers and their way of doing things.”
Dan Truscott, however, was not going to leave his son’s fate entirely in the hands of a lawyer. Stationed about six hours’ drive away, near Ottawa, Dan could only make it back to Clinton on weekends. But he used what little time he had there to gather whatever evidence he could to prove his son’s innocence. He found out that a classmate of Steve’s named Allan Oates had reported seeing him alone on the bridge around 7:45 p.m. on the evening Lynne disappeared. If true, Allan’s account provided corroboration of Steve’s story that after he dropped Lynne at the highway, he had returned to the bridge for a few minutes. Dan Truscott put Allan in touch with Donnelly, and Allan became one of three central child witnesses for the defence.
Dan Truscott also happened to be friends with George Edens, the corporal who had first found Lynne’s body. “He used to call me in a number of times and get me to draw what I had seen with a pencil and paper,” Edens remembers. “He made me draw the same scene over and over again, hoping I would bring out something new or different, or correct something.”
Nothing turned up. Sensing his friend’s helplessness, Edens turned to him one day and said, “Dan, I’m very sorry about your son being arrested.”
“George, I’m going to tell you something,” Dan replied, looking his colleague right in the eye. “If I thought that boy of mine was guilty, I would be the first one to drag him off to jail, and pay to have him convicted. But I walked up to him in that guardhouse [the night he was arrested] and I put my finger right in his face and I said, ‘Did you kill that little girl?’ And he said: ‘No, Dad, I didn’t.’”
Edens remembers Dan’s grim determination as he completed his story. “My children can lie, probably about some little things, but nothing like this,” Steve’s father said. “George, I know he didn’t do it and I’m going to help him. Every way I can.”
Before the Crown could put Steven on trial for murder, they had to ensure he was mentally fit. “I believe the possibility that this boy is mentally ill should be considered,” suggested Dr. John Addison, the family doctor who examined Steven on the night of his arrest, in a letter to Inspector Harold Graham.
Two psychiatrists examined Steve in the final days of June. Dr. G. E. Jenkins of the Mental Health Clinic in London found the boy to be “quite polite and quiet but apathetic.” Beginning a refrai
n that would become the mantra of the psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers who would question Steve over the next months and years, Jenkins noted that Steve “did not reveal as much anxiety as would normally be found in a person facing so serious a charge.”
The teenager told the doctor he “feels badly that the police do not believe his story” but was confident he would soon be released. “[He] plans to work on a farm this summer, so that he can earn money to buy an old car,” Jenkins reported, concluding that Steven showed no signs of “gross mental illness.”
On June 29, Steve was back in juvenile court as the lawyers battled to determine his legal fate. Frank Donnelly’s first promise to the Truscotts was to try to keep Steven’s case out of adult court. It did not take long for Doris and Dan to realize that their lawyer’s assurances were one thing, the vagaries of the justice system quite another.
Magistrate Dudley Holmes of the juvenile court remarked on the “peculiar position” of judges in such hearings. “I have no evidence. I have no knowledge of the crime alleged,” he explained. “I have the charge before me, I have the child before me.… The accused is over the age fourteen and there remains only the question regarding the good of the child and the interests of the community.”
Crown prosecutor Glenn Hays argued that a trial in adult court would best serve the interests of the community and the accused. Donnelly acknowledged that, in principle, it might be wiser to try Steven in adult court because in some juvenile courts, the judge had little or no legal training. But not in this case. “I am convinced,” he said, “if this boy is tried before Your Honour his trial will be fair [in a] court that is designed for the … welfare of people of his age.”
His Honour was not that convinced. “The interests of the community demand that the accused be proceeded against by indictment in an ordinary court,” Holmes said. “And it is my opinion that the good of the child also demands that this case be proceeded with in an ordinary court and I so order.”