Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  It was a dismal birthday present. Two days before, on January 18, Steven turned fifteen. Was it going to be the first of many birthdays behind bars or perhaps the last birthday he would ever celebrate in his life? Steve did not know for sure. He was still scheduled for execution in less than a month—February 16.

  Despite his tender years, Steven’s odds for a reprieve were not necessarily favourable. Between 1920 and 1960, Canada executed twenty-one people under the age of twenty, according to one study cited by historian Carolyn Strange. In what she aptly termed a “lottery of death,” Ottawa commuted the death sentences of only one in three young people.

  At 10:30 on Thursday morning, January 21, the federal cabinet gathered around a table in Room 340S of the House of Commons. On the agenda was the pending execution of two convicted murderers: an adult named Marvin McKee and a teenager named Steven Truscott. Diefenbaker and his colleagues decided not to stop the hanging of the man but to save the boy. Clearly what weighed in the balance for Steven was not any consideration of the unfairness of his rushed arrest or a dubious prosecution—only his age mattered. “It was inconceivable to allow this boy … to hang,” the cabinet had noted earlier. In other words, had he been eighteen, or perhaps even sixteen, he might well have hanged—innocent or guilty.

  The following day, on January 22 at 12:23 p.m., a telegram from the deputy minister of justice arrived at the Goderich jail. The nineteen words brought both salvation and doom: “Governor general in council has commuted death sentence of Steven Murray Truscott to life imprisonment in the Kingston Penitentiary.”

  Steve would not die. But unless he got parole, the boy would spend the rest of his natural life behind bars.

  O’Driscoll immediately announced he would make an appeal to the Supreme Court, filing his action on February 22. Two days later, the Supreme Court turned Steven down. As was typical in such cases, they gave no reason for their decision.

  The Truscotts had exhausted all of their legal avenues. Eight months after he was arrested on the hot summer evening of June 12, Steven finally did leave the Huron County Jail in Goderich, but not in a way he or his family ever envisaged.

  Steven walked down the same long, dark corridor of the jail he first entered in June as a naive boy. Now he walked out a condemned convict, wearing manacles and chains.

  The boy had escaped death, but a life sentence behind bars was impossible for the fifteen-year-old to comprehend. “It’s beyond your imagination to even think about,” Steve says. “I was going to jail and I was going to be there for a long time.”

  30

  LESSONS OF REFORM SCHOOL

  Deciding not to hang Steven Truscott did not end the government’s predicament of where Canada was going to jail a convicted murderer who had just turned fifteen. A penitentiary, filled with adult criminals, seemed harsh and potentially dangerous. So the authorities came up with a novel solution. The Penitentiary Act allowed authorities to transfer a convict under the age of sixteen and “susceptible of reformation” to a reformatory prison in the province where he was sentenced. For one night, police would take Steve Truscott to a penitentiary in Kingston—thus technically satisfying the requirement to imprison him in a federal penal institution. They would then transfer him to the Ontario Training School for Boys, near Guelph.

  The police in Goderich were not going to make it easy on the boy. Sheriff Nelson Hill and another officer escorted Steven in their cruiser, with leg irons clamped around his ankles and handcuffs on his wrists. Not once along the six-hour journey to Kingston did the police remove the restraints, even when they stopped for a bite to eat.

  The patrons inside the small restaurant froze as the chains rattled on the floor. They looked up to see a thin boy boxed in by two burly, armed policemen. “I’ll never forget the sound my chains made as they scraped along the floor of the restaurant,” Steven recalls today with uncharacteristic bitterness.

  The unlikely trio sat down to order their food, but the officers would not take off Steve’s handcuffs when the meal came. Helpless, Steven stared at the meat on his plate, unable to use both a fork and knife with his wrists locked tightly together. A waitress, taking pity on the boy, came over to cut his meat.

  “Thank you,” Steven said as he manoeuvred the fork in his manacled hands.

  Fear replaced humiliation as they approached the imposing grey walls of the Kingston prison complex. Don Patterson, a supervisor there, remembers his first glimpse of the teenager who had become Canada’s most famous inmate. “His knees were shaking,” he says. “You hear the darn bars shut behind you—clash, bang—that’s enough to scare anyone.”

  Patterson looked askance at the shackles and handcuffs on the boy. “I thought it was kind of heavy,” he says. “That was frightening for the young chap.” Frightened or not, penitentiary officials were unsure what to do with a fifteen-year-old in one of Canada’s toughest penitentiaries, even if his stay was only overnight. They finally decided to let Steven sleep in the prison hospital, away from the general inmate population. “He was very quiet and co-operative,” Patterson says.

  As he led Steven to his bed for his night behind the penitentiary walls, Patterson tried to calm the scared boy. “Don’t worry about it, you’ll be well looked after,” he said.

  The soothing words did not help. Steven slept fitfully. “I was so terrorized and pumped,” he remembers. “You’re in a state of shock … still expecting someone to come to your rescue.”

  The next morning—once again chained in leg irons and handcuffs—he began the two-hundred-mile drive from Kingston to what was to become his home for the remainder of his youth: the Ontario Training School in Guelph.

  “I thought at first he was going to be a troublemaker.”

  Ray Nankivell was nervous. One of the guards at the school, Ray was a hefty, well-built man from Cornwall, England. He was mulling over the strict orders from his superintendent, John Bain. Earlier that day, the head of the boys’ reform school had gathered his staff together to issue a stern warning. “We have a federal prisoner coming in. His name is Steven Truscott,” Bain said. “If twelve boys escape, let the rest go, but get Steven because he’s not our prisoner; he’s a federal prisoner and he was sentenced to die. We have to keep an eye on this guy.”

  The Ontario Training School was, in effect, a maximum-security prison for young offenders, or “juvenile delinquents” as they were called in the 1960s. “We had anything that other jails could not handle,” Nankivell explains. Still, they tried to make the boys feel as relaxed as possible. Surrounded by farmers’ fields and a small river to the north, the red-brick, two-storey building looked not unlike a small high school—except for the bars on the windows and the barbed wire fence. The guards wore grey slacks, green jackets, ties and a white shirt. They were unarmed. The boys wore black boots, khaki pants and T-shirts.

  When Sheriff Nelson Hill dropped off his shackled prisoner, his over-the-top tactics disturbed the prison officials in Guelph as much as they had in Kingston.

  “We were shocked to watch this little boy with leg irons and handcuffs,” recalls Les Horne, the school’s librarian, who happened to be in the front office when Steve arrived. “The first thing we did was make the sheriffs take their guns off. They were a little reluctant.”

  Horne immediately took pity on the newest arrival. “He was a very bewildered, confused kid; it’s a wonder he stayed sane.” Steven had made his first friend.

  Once the armed escorts had removed their weapons—and Steve’s chains—the boy entered the prison facility through a blue steel door with a small bulletproof window. As one door shut behind him, the guards buzzed open another one until he was inside a long, barren corridor. Steve turned right and made his way to the check-in room, where he showered and prepared to be strip-searched and photographed.

  The guard doing the honours was Dave Mills, a likeable fellow from Belfast who had lost little of his Irish brogue. Steve was soon to discover that most of the staff was from Ireland, Scotla
nd or England, giving the school an air of old-world civility combined with an almost colonial paternalism.

  “I had in the back of my mind that I couldn’t treat him like the other guys,” Mills remembered. “We were told he was ‘high security.’” But he found the shy and polite boy charming. Following standard procedure for new arrivals, Mills put Steve in segregation in “C” block. He quickly tried to put the boy at ease by calling him “Steve” instead of the curt “Truscott” the boy was used to hearing from his jailers in Goderich.

  “That’s the first time [in jail] anyone had called me by my first name,” Steve said. Within minutes, he had made a second friend.

  Superintendent John Bain promptly wrote to the deputy minister in charge of reform institutions to inform him that Steven was adjusting well. The boy wrote two “quite cheerful letters”—prison officials monitored all correspondence—to his family and to the governor of the Goderich jail—to tell them he was okay. “He has been very quiet, making no requests or inquiries of any kind,” Bain reported. He added that Canada’s youngest federal inmate was still in segregation, but they planned to slowly integrate him into their organized activities.

  Integration meant moving into one of the four cellblocks that housed the fifty or so juveniles at the school. Steve moved into “A” block on the first floor. There were twelve cells in each block; Steve’s home was the third cell down from the showers. His quarters had a bed, toilet, basin and a small cupboard. His keeper was Ray Nankivell.

  He recalls with genuine affection the boys under his charge. “It felt like twelve sons,” he says. “We would treat them that way.” But it was a strict family, with swift retribution. “If you give me a rough time—fighting or even for giving lip—I’ll lock you up and put you on charge,” Nankivell warned his Dirty Dozen. A charge meant a note on a boy’s record—something Steven managed to avoid for his entire stay at the Guelph institution.

  “He never did a thing wrong, never got charged,” says Nankivell, who despite his superintendent’s warnings took an immediate liking to Steve. “He was a gentleman, very respectful of authority. Always gave us a smile: ‘How are you today, sir?’ He got on well with the boys as well as the staff.”

  Nankivell woke up the boys around 7:00 a.m. They went down to the cafeteria to pick up breakfast, where Steve quickly befriended Alice Hebden, the cook with a plump figure and the hearty cuisine to justify it. “We have lots to eat; I’ve gained twelve pounds in the last two months and weigh 160,” Steve told a visitor in March.

  Hebden, remarkably alert and lively today at ninety-six, unabashedly admits she quickly began to love the good-natured new boy like a son. “He was very quiet. He would do anything for anybody,” she says. “He never caused any trouble.” Steve’s mother, Doris, was grateful for the cook’s maternal kindness. “She more or less took him under her wing,” Doris says.

  After the obligatory reciting of grace, the boys ate their meals and then headed off for work in the basement machine and carpentry shops. It was a long day—from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., interrupted only by a forty-five-minute lunch break.

  But Steven loved the shop work, soaking up the skills with an enthusiasm that would serve him well in his adult years. Steve always enjoyed working with his hands, and anything that kept him busy meant his mind did not have time to ponder the prospect of growing old behind bars.

  In woodworking classes, Steve and his friends built a cornice decorated with carved doves for a local church, a two-storey spiral oak staircase for a Guelph resident and mahogany cabinets so grand that one guard proudly took them home. Steve’s special talent, though, was with anything mechanical. “When I get out, I’d like to work in a machine shop,” he told a visitor. The fifteen-year-old could not have imagined he would come very close to fulfilling that wish as an adult, just a few miles from where he was labouring as a juvenile inmate.

  Despite his young age, Steve’s height, strength and easygoing but firm character quickly made him a natural leader among the other boys. Once a week, the boys in the cellblocks at each end of the corridor would compete to see who could do the best cleanup. Steve was a team leader, and he imposed air force crispness. “They won every week. That place was spotless,” says guard Dave Mills. “You got to watch TV, and you also got cookies and milk,” Steve remembers today, still proud of his teenage victories.

  There were less salutary rewards as well. The housecleaning champions, despite their age, also sometimes received rolling tobacco—this was, after all, long before public health campaigns against smoking. From a single pouch of the brown leaves, Steve could make fifty cigarettes, enough to last a week or more. Less than a month after entering the training school—and barely past his fifteenth birthday—Steve became a heavy smoker, a habit he has been unable to shake to this day.

  Two nights a week, Steve took grade Nine classes in English, French and mathematics. Steve also picked up other lessons that were not exactly on the official curriculum. From his fellow inmates, he learned the tricks of making do behind bars. If the boys wanted to smoke and they had no matches or lighter, they would wrap toilet paper around a razor blade, unscrew a light bulb and gingerly jab the device into the socket. The resulting sparks and burning tissue did the trick.

  Other fires were burning outside the reform school walls. Steve could carve wooden cabinets and wash the floors with the rest of the boys, but no matter how hard he tried to blend in with the other detainees, he could not change the fact that he was different. His case was a cause célèbre that continued to make ripples—small ones at first, but eventually a crashing wave that swept across the country.

  One of the first cracks in the official wall of silence came in March of 1960, when George Wardrope, the Ontario minister for reform institutions, decided to pay a visit to the training school in Guelph. The minister chatted with the adolescent prisoner for forty-five minutes. “I just told him I didn’t do it, that’s all,” Steven told a reporter at the time.

  Holding out the prospect of parole, the minister indicated that a life sentence did not necessarily mean life. “Mr. Wardrope said it all depended on my behaviour so I am prepared,” Steve said. “I’ll do my best to obey the rules.”

  In the eyes of some authorities, it was bad enough a cabinet minister met with a convicted murderer. But a furor erupted when Wardrope publicly declared that he had “a great deal of doubt” about Steve’s guilt. “I was able to size him up and I couldn’t see he was hiding anything,” the minister said. “He seems like just a normal teenager.”

  It did not take long for the wrath of the establishment to come down on the errant minister. Kelso Roberts, the attorney general who had posted the $10,000 “dead or alive” reward for Lynne’s killer, promptly denounced his cabinet colleague’s words as “entirely incomprehensible.” The Toronto Daily Star warned his remarks were “bound to cause needless misgivings about our courts in the public mind.”

  Wardrope quickly fell into line. “I should not have commented on the matter of his guilt or innocence at all,” he said, apologizing for any denigration “upon the administration of justice.”

  The issue died quickly, but not for Steve’s father. He penned a poignant letter to the cabinet minister on March 29. “You have given us a great deal of hope,” Dan Truscott wrote. “It means a great deal to us to know that someone is thinking along the same lines as we have always thought.”

  Dan ended his letter with a plea for help that, like the letter, was ignored. “I have used all my savings and am in debt trying to help Steven and to establish a new home for my family,” he explained. “I do not know who to turn to for help now.”

  The Truscotts did not know it yet, but help for their cause was about to come from someone who deeply believed in their son’s innocence. An inquisitive writer named Isabel LeBourdais had read about Steve’s case and it piqued her curiosity. “I started off because I had a son the same age,” she later explained. She originally felt such a young offender should have been
tried in juvenile court and if guilty, needed treatment, not punishment. But as she investigated, she became convinced something had gone horribly wrong in that Goderich courtroom in 1959.

  LeBourdais, whose work had appeared in national magazines such as Chatelaine and Saturday Night, came from a comfortable Toronto family with a long tradition of social activism. Her mother was a suffragette; her sister Gwethalyn Graham won Governor General’s Literary Awards for two of her books, including one that skewered the “polite” anti-Semitism in so-called high society.

  “To take on the establishment was not a thing that bothered her, but it was a time when far fewer women were doing it,” says her son Julien, who remembers a mother active in the fight for mental patients’ rights, ban-the-bomb protests and the early black civil rights movement. She was the only white member of the Toronto Negro Community Centre, so busy there her husband, Don—himself also an accomplished writer—once joked: “If I ever want a divorce I’ll name the Negro Centre as co-respondent.”

  Now LeBourdais applied that same energy to a pursuit of the truth in Steve’s case. She began by travelling to Clinton and met with families who knew the Truscotts—the Logans, the Gilkses and the Carews. Frank Donnelly, Steve’s former lawyer, would not talk to her, but she did obtain the court transcripts—an important breakthrough since no outside observer had ever combed through the official record for inaccuracies or contradictions.

  On April 22, 1960, Isabel LeBourdais wrote to Doris and Dan Truscott, introducing herself and announcing plans for an article in the near future about their son in Chatelaine. Steve’s parents readily agreed to a meeting, telling her, “We always believed that Steven is innocent and feel that there has been a miscarriage of justice, but it is another thing to prove it.”

  That challenge made the quest all the more appealing to LeBourdais. Never one to shy away from an unpopular crusade, she was eager to take on what in 1960 was still sacrosanct: the infallibility of the police and the courts. “The criticism that Mother made of the legal system was shocking at the time,” Julien LeBourdais explains. “And that it was [coming from] a woman, too, was a bit more of a shock. It was a bit unseemly. That didn’t bother her; in fact she relished that.”