Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  The third doctor to complete the medical triangle of evidence against Steven was Dr. John Addison, the family doctor from Clinton who also examined the boy the night of his arrest.

  Addison concurred with Brooks’s description of Steve’s penis. “Personally, I have never seen as sore a penis in twenty-two years of practice. It certainly wasn’t a three- or four-week-old job, which Steven said it had been.”

  Addison testified that he did not believe Steve’s reluctant admission he had masturbated a week before. “Masturbation is supposed to give every female or male offender some feeling of enjoyment,” he explained, “and I don’t see how it could possibly give him any enjoyment when it was as sore as the night I saw it.”

  But under questioning from Donnelly, Addison did not entirely rule out the possibility the wound could be self-inflicted.

  “You did suggest to him that [masturbation] might be the cause of it, did you?”

  “Yes sir,” Addison conceded. “I suggested it as a possible reason that might cause [it].”

  “How many ways do you think this could have happened, doctor?”

  “In my opinion, the penis would, first of all, have to have an erection on, and it would have to be inserted between two surfaces that rub on the side,” Addison explained. “Rubbing is one way. A knothole that was a little narrow from the side to side might do it.… An oval hole might do it, where it caught on either side.”

  Addison had, in effect, left the door slightly ajar to a possible explanation other than rape for Steve’s penis sores. It was a door he would try to slam shut in September.

  Glenn Hays knew he could not rely only on the easily coaxed testimony of police and medical experts. To convict the boy in the dock, the Crown prosecutor would have to use what one court observer aptly described as the “mixed-up recollections of children.” The preliminary hearing gave Hays a taste of just how hard it was going to be to get his young charges in line.

  Hays ran into his first obstacles when he tried to widen the time Steve had to carry out the crime. Warren Heatherall and Stuart Westie, playing baseball at the school, said Steve left “somewhere around 7:00,” but they were not certain. Stuart said he had a watch but never looked at it: “When I am playing, I don’t take much care on what time it is.”

  Hays hardly fared any better with the two mothers taking care of the Brownies at the school that evening. Anne Nickerson and Dorothy Bohonus.

  “What time did she disappear with Steven Truscott?” Hays asked Nickerson directly.

  “I didn’t have a watch and, as I say, I am just going by approximate times—perhaps between five after, ten after seven,” Nickerson said.

  Her fellow Brownie leader was not much more specific. Dorothy Bohonus did have a watch, but the last time she glanced at it was 6:50, when she first saw Lynne. “It must have been about ten minutes after I was there that the boy came along, so it was 7:00 or shortly after when she joined him, and I didn’t see them leave.”

  Four people, two women preoccupied with a group of Brownie girls and two boys more interested in baseball than bike-watching. Two witnesses wore watches; only one looked at her watch and that was well before Steve and Lynne left.

  All in all, not a very solid array of witnesses. Hays would have to do much better at trial.

  The indefatigable Crown prosecutor also had great difficulty in getting a straight story about what Steve and his friends talked about at the bridge on the Wednesday evening after Lynne’s disappearance. Hays wanted to prove two things: that Steve talked about looking for calves in the bush, and that he threatened Butch about spreading the story that he had seen Steve take Lynne into the woods.

  Paul Desjardine told the preliminary hearing he initiated the conversation about the bush that evening: “I asked Butch if Lynne Harper went into the woods with Steven and Butch didn’t say anything, and then I asked Steven the same and I said that Butch said you had, and then Steven asked Butch if Butch said that, and Butch said he didn’t.”

  “Was there another conversation a few minutes later?” Hays prodded, ever hopeful he could get at the story about Steve’s strong words to Butch.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Dismayed, Hays pushed again. “Was there any further conversation?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”

  “Any talk of a cow or a calf?” Hays was desperate here. It would hardly do for the only boy on the bridge who questioned Steve about Lynne not to remember the calf story.

  But Hays was clearly leading the witness and the judge would have none of it. “No. You may be able to do something about it later, but I smell things that aren’t according to Hoyle here,” he said sharply.

  Bryan Glover, another boy on the bridge that evening, confirmed that he heard Paul ask Steven why he was in the woods with Lynne Harper. “He said he heard a calf in there and took her in there to show it to her.”

  “What was said after that?” asked Hays.

  “That is all I remember.”

  So much for the threats exchanged between Steve and Butch. A reporter covering the hearing aptly summed up the prosecutor’s dilemma: “Crown attorney Glenn Hays had a frantic and not altogether successful afternoon trying to elicit from the young witnesses the same stories they had given police earlier.”

  Only Tom Gillette delivered a snippet of what Hays needed. Contrary to the other boys, Tom insisted Butch told Steve he saw him take Lynne into the bush.

  “I didn’t go into the bush with Lynne,” Steve allegedly answered, and then Tom added this editorial comment: “He sounded like he was threatening him—threatening Butch.”

  If Hays hoped all this confusion could be solved by the boy in the middle of the muddle—Arnold “Butch” George—he would be sorely disappointed.

  The prosecution’s star child witness got off to a bad start even before he began. “What do you know about swearing in court to tell the truth?” Magistrate Holmes asked as Butch George sat down in the witness box.

  “You aren’t supposed to tell a lie, and supposed to tell the truth,” the boy answered.

  “That is right, as far as it goes. Do you know what the procedure is—I am trying to get a simple word to make sure that you will tell the truth in court,” the judge continued, not spelling out what word he was looking for, but clearly a bit dubious about Butch’s truthfulness.

  “No sir.”

  “Don’t you?” The judge was frustrated. “I think possibly your evidence can be received but I doubt very much if you can be sworn.” Holmes never hesitated to swear in many of Butch’s classmates, including children younger than he was. For whatever reason, Magistrate Holmes—unlike the police—appeared to sense that Butch George was hardly a reliable witness.

  “Don’t add anything to it—don’t put any fancy touches of your own on it, or anything that you dreamed up,” the judge warned the boy in stiffer language than he used for other children.

  From the beginning, Butch got things wrong.

  “I did meet Jocelyne Gaudet at the end of the bush,” Butch confirmed.

  “Did she have a bicycle?”

  “No,” he answered. (According to Jocelyne, she was indeed on her bicycle that evening.)

  Butch then said he went swimming until 8:30 p.m.

  “And during all that period did you see Steven Truscott?” “No,” came the clear reply.

  “So you saw him at no time after you left the station at about seven o’clock until you returned home about 8:30?”

  “That is right.”

  Defence counsel Donnelly pushed the issue even further. “You didn’t see him at all?”

  “No,” Butch said.

  And then the key question: “Did you see him go into the woods with Lynne Harper?”

  “No.”

  In other words, Butch was admitting he lied to all his friends when he told them he saw Steven go into the bush with Lynne. He kept changing other parts of his story as well. This is how he described his chat with St
eve around 8:45 on Tuesday night:

  “Where did you go?” Butch asked.

  “I gave Lynne Harper a ride down to Number 8 Highway and then she was picked up in a 1959 Chev heading toward Seaforth,” Steve told his friend.

  “Why did you give Lynne a ride?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Skip the subject,” Butch replied, “and let’s play catch.”

  It sounded like a normal chat. Gone were the juicy elements Butch had recounted to the police: his question about what Steve was “doing in the bush with Lynne” and Steve’s reply that he was looking for a cow and a calf. But Butch enlivened his account of his next alleged encounter with his friend on Wednesday evening. That was when Steve supposedly told him he had made an error by telling police he had waved to Butch at the river on Tuesday evening. Butch made their conversation sound more conspiratorial by adding some exciting details to his story.

  “They are coming down. It is going to look bad for me,” Butch now had Steve saying.

  “I might as well tell them that I saw you,” Butch offered.

  Butch told the court he went through with that lie. “I told the police that I had seen Steven.”

  “What you told the police that time was not the truth?” Magistrate Holmes asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “To help Steven.”

  In his cross-examination, Frank Donnelly largely steered clear of Butch’s shifting accounts of his talks with Steve. But he did probe Butch about his conversation with Jocelyne when he met her near the bush on Tuesday evening.

  “I think she said she was looking for Lynne,” Butch confirmed, repeating what he had told police.

  “She asked you if you had seen Lynne Harper?” Donnelly stressed, to make sure there was no misunderstanding.

  “Yes,” Butch replied.

  From Hays’ perspective, given Jocelyne Gaudet’s predilection for changing her story, her testimony about a secret date with Steve was mercifully brief. Even then, she managed to let slip some odd statements.

  Hays asked her about the location for their clandestine get-together.

  “On the county road, on the right-hand side, outside the fence by the woods,” she said. “You can see it from the classroom window.”

  From the classroom window? That would mean their meeting point was within sight of the school. It hardly seemed the place to pick for a secret encounter. It also did not explain why Jocelyne asked Steven, according to her police statement, “to wear something I could see from a distance.”

  Jocelyne’s father, Flight Sgt. Charles Gaudet, followed his daughter on the stand. Hays wanted him to confirm the story he had told the police: that his young son, André, had answered the door just before 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday and told Jocelyne that Steve had come calling. But in his testimony before the magistrate, the story changed. Gaudet indicated his son did open the door but did not announce the visitor. “When she came back into the dining room … I think my wife asked Jocelyne who was at the door.” That story is not what his wife told police. (At trial, Gaudet dropped any mention of his wife, saying that only his son opened the door to someone that evening.)

  “That is that,” Magistrate Dudley Holmes said when the last witness left the stand. It was 5:15 p.m. on the second day of the hearing.

  Holmes did not have to set the bar too high to send the case to trial. The testimony did not have to be consistent or entirely credible. He did not have even to determine the truthfulness of the testimony. All he had to decide was whether there was enough evidence for a jury to decide the truth.

  He turned to the fourteen-year-old boy in the dock. “Stand up,” the judge ordered, and Steven obediently rose.

  “Having heard the evidence, do you wish to say anything in answer to the charge? You are not bound to say anything, but whatever you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence against you at your trial,” Holmes said. It was the first time anyone had read Steven his rights. By the laws of the day, Canadian police were not obliged to spell out a suspect’s rights when they were questioning or even when arresting him.

  Steve looked at his lawyer. “Your Worship,” Donnelly said solemnly, “the accused does not wish to make a statement.”

  Donnelly then proceeded to outline a defence, if it could be called that. He brought forth only Herbert and Charlotte Mellish, neighbours of the Truscotts. They testified that they had spent the evening with Steve’s parents at the Sergeants’ Mess the night Lynne disappeared. It was a baffling move by the defence; the Mellishes’ testimony seemed entirely irrelevant to the proceedings and did nothing to establish Steve’s innocence or guilt.

  Donnelly called no other witnesses; his intervention was over in ten minutes. Perhaps it was indicative of Donnelly’s confidence that the Crown case was so weak it needed little rebuttal. But as Inspector Harold Graham put it succinctly in a memo to his superiors after the hearing: “The evidence called by the defence was in complete agreement with the information known by the prosecution and was of little value.”

  At 5:30 p.m. on July 14, after hearing thirty-one witnesses and examining twenty-one pieces of evidence in two days, the judge was ready with his decision. “Well, in my opinion,” Magistrate Holmes declared, “the evidence is sufficient to put the accused on trial.”

  “Bewildered, unhappy but most uncomprehending” was how newspaper accounts at the time described Steven’s reaction. The Toronto Telegram reporter apparently shared Truscott’s bewilderment, wondering how “out of the welter of believable and unbelievable evidence” Holmes determined there was enough evidence to proceed to trial. “The magistrate was obviously baffled by the age-old question: how do you sift out the truth from the fantasy in the mixed-up recollections of children?” the newspaper asked. “In fact, the whole area where the body was found seems to have been teeming with youngsters … but not one of them was able to say he or she had seen the two go into the woods.”

  It was a valid analysis of the weakness in the prosecution’s case. The presence of reporters had allowed independent observers to explain and comment on the proceedings to the public. That probing role of the media would be entirely absent when the formal trial got underway in September.

  In Clinton that evening, life went on as usual. The drive-in had a new hit on the big screen: Love Me Tender with Elvis Presley. The newspapers the next day would report that, south of the border, a dashing young senator named John F. Kennedy would launch what he called his “new frontier” and accept the Democratic nomination for president.

  For Steven Truscott, the frontiers were limited to the walls of his cell. “You’re locked up in a cell and you’re on your own,” he remembers. He passed the time reading magazines and walking in the small exercise yard. He felt like a bystander watching the legal storm raging all around him. Frank Donnelly visited him only twice between the preliminary and the trial. “It was more or less, ‘This is a legal thing; you are a kid, you don’t know anything, this is what we are doing,’ and I didn’t have any say in it,” Steve recalls.

  Donnelly and others assured him he had little to worry about. “So you believe all this,” Steven says. “You don’t find out until the trial that all these people haven’t been telling you the right thing.”

  Maitland Edgar, the school vice-principal, remembers talking to Const. Donald Trumbley one day that summer while sitting in the officer’s cruiser. Trumbley, who interviewed most of the children and filed the arrest papers against Steven, was frustrated that after all the hours of interrogation and weeks in a jail cell, the boy had not cracked and confessed. The policeman slapped his hands against the steering wheel in frustration. “By God, but that boy is guilty!” he exclaimed.

  Edgar says he tried to explain that, to his mind, if Steven was guilty, the boy had gone through a “complete change of nature because that wasn’t the kid that I knew.” But he felt Trumbley was not open to doubts. “There was one train of thought
for the police. You have something you grab on to and you refuse to let go.”

  With only a month to go before trial, the OPP was running out of time. They decided to pursue an investigation into the school’s clocks. Steve had always insisted he left the school ten to fifteen minutes later than the police thought—not around 7:10 but closer to 7:25. He supported that claim by stating that as he walked across the playground with Lynne, he glanced at a clock on the wall in the kindergarten.

  But in July the police discovered that an electrician had disconnected the master clock earlier in the year. Carl Lippert told them some of the clocks around the school were out five and six hours. Only on June 27—almost three weeks after Steve’s bike ride with Lynne—did Lippert return to the school to synchronize all the clocks. “I had to change all the clocks,” he said. “None of the readings were the same.” Maitland Edgar confirmed the “clocks controlled by the master clock were not in operation.”

  At last, it looked as if the police had caught Steven in a direct lie—and, better still, a lie that could be exposed by incontrovertible physical evidence. A lie that exposed his attempt to narrow his window of opportunity to commit the crime.

  But the truth stymied the OPP officers once again. Michael Shrepnik, the school caretaker, agreed that the school clocks hadn’t run since Easter. But then he added, “Miss Irvin, who teaches kindergarten at the school, inquired if I could find her a clock. I got an electric clock and had put it up on the wall on the northwest corner of the room.”

  If Steven was lying, by a lucky coincidence he picked the one good clock in the school to lie about. The OPP quietly dropped the clock quest and it was never raised in court.

  If officers such as Donald Trumbley had no doubts about their case, at least one of his colleagues was less sanguine. Corporal John Erskine, the identification officer who spent more time in the bush than any other policeman gathering evidence and taking pictures, had qualms from the start. “The more he looked into it, the more he was absolutely convinced the boy was not guilty,” his widow, Dee Harris, recalls.