by Julian Sher
While Isabel LeBourdais began sniffing around Clinton for proof of Steven’s innocence, prison psychiatrists began probing the boy’s mind for proof of his guilt. It was the onset of a decade-long battle that Steven would wage—largely alone and isolated—against the psychiatric and prison establishment. They would throw everything at him—interviews, tests, needles, drugs, truth serum and even LSD. All the boy had was his iron determination not to give in to the doctors’ persistence that he confess to a crime he insisted he did not commit.
From the start of his incarceration at the Guelph reform school, half a dozen different psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers began filing regular reports to Ottawa.
J. P. Cathcart, the psychiatrist who had first examined Steven in Goderich, returned to probe the young prisoner in Guelph on February 19, 1960. The strongest indication of guilt he could find was a “remarkable change in tone of voice—including tremulousness” when he asked the boy about the crime.
Perhaps hoping for better evidence, the authorities brought in psychologist H. J. Breen for more examinations. After a brief conversation and a short test, Breen seemed to have cracked the mystery. “This would appear to be the case of a rather schizoid boy who is precociously developed for his age and hence lacks sufficiently strong ego resources to cope with his expanding physical (sexual and aggressive) drives. It seems entirely probable that he could commit an impulsive crime such as that of which he has been accused.”
It was the kind of analysis that would unfortunately mark most of Steven’s encounters with those out to delve into his mind. “It’s hard to realize how much power they have,” says Steven. “You have to be in that position [as an inmate] to see the power that they have. It was just so frustrating.”
The man who would dominate Steve’s psychological probing throughout his stay in Guelph was Dr. James Hartford, a consulting psychiatrist from Kitchener who saw Steven at least six times from 1960 to 1962. “On the surface he was likeable and generally co-operative,” Hartford said in his first report. “And to an untrained person he would appear reasonably normal.” Fortunately, the doctor pointed out, he was not so easily fooled: “I felt the boy was ill,” he quickly concluded.
From the start, Hartford found the boy’s memories of his life on different air bases “rather unusually superficial.” When Steve complained that psychiatrists and psychologists had already grilled him, Hartford saw dark overtones to the teenager’s mistrust. “He is defensive, guarded,” the psychiatrist wrote.
Steve’s unwavering insistence on his innocence seemed to trouble the doctor as well. “He completely denies any involvement in this of any kind,” he said. “He feels that at the trial a good many people told stories that were not true and he was particularly angry with the police for some of their accounts of his evidence.”
“It is difficult to give a diagnostic expression of my findings, to date, in connection with this boy,” Hartford said, but then—as was customary in his profession—the psychiatrist had no difficulty finding the appropriate labels to affix to Steven. “There are some things that suggest a mild suspiciousness, some petulance and some psychopathic flavouring.… I would classify this boy as a mixed neurotic picture of almost borderline degree with mild paranoid and moderate psychopathic tendencies.”
Social workers seemed to concur. Clare McGowan, assistant local director of the Children’s Aid Society, wrote a two-page report that appeared to be based largely on gossip picked up from “confidential references” around the Clinton base. “Steve was interested in sexy ‘comics’ and was known to possess some obscene copies,” she wrote. She added that Steve was a “pathological liar” and “the product of his home,” a substandard home, in her opinion, since “the Truscotts did not attend church … and [Steven] apparently had no encouragement from his parents re: spiritual growth.”
Another social worker, E. J. Brown, recounted bizarre statements from Steven that never appeared in any other reports before or since—declarations that Steven today fervently denies ever making. Steve allegedly told Brown he had an eighteen-year-old girlfriend and had sexual intercourse for the first time when he was thirteen—a remarkable thing to keep secret on a military base.
Indeed, if the social worker was to be believed, thirteen appeared to have been a busy age for the budding criminal. The boy, according to Brown, ran with a gang when he was in Vancouver—presumably while visiting his grandparents for a few weeks during the summer. “He learned how to make gunpowder from the gang he ran around with—they used it for blowing locks.” These teenage hooligans “were up to everything—stealing, breaking and entering, robbery, etc.… The proceeds of their crimes were always split evenly between them all.”
Brown’s diagnosis was bleak. “This student has told lies so readily in the past—and got away with them—that he now lives those lies, and finds the truth hard to tell. He shows absolutely no sense of shame, appreciation of moral values or remorse for his past mode of conduct,” he concluded. “Underneath this exterior of calm acceptance, I believe there is an effervescent, boisterous and quicktempered boy with a contemptuousness for rules in general and authority in particular who considers himself clever enough to ‘beat the rap.’”
There appeared to be two Stevens, a sort of teenage Jekyll and Hyde: the dark, devious and repressed troublemaker who emerged every time a social worker or psychiatrist closed the door in the interview room, and the happy-go-lucky, responsible and well-behaved boy that the guards, cooks, teachers, inmates and virtually everyone else at the facility saw every day in the reform school corridors.
Certainly the new superintendent of the school, Don Williams, had a radically different appreciation of Steven than the mind probers. In his first report, dated June 6, Williams noted Steve exhibited a “steady behaviour pattern” and was “well accepted” by all the boys. “One rather amazing feature of this boy’s performance is his apparent emotional indifference to all situations. He has not received a single misconduct report, which is unusual,” Williams wrote.
Two months later, the superintendent was still scratching his head. “Steven is still a difficult boy to fathom,” he recorded on July 27. “He is a polite, quiet spoken and generally well-behaved boy.… There is very little criticism that one can offer.” Perhaps sensing this was not what his superiors were expecting to hear about Canada’s renowned convicted teen killer, Williams assured correctional authorities that his staff were on guard. “Sooner or later, one feels that this boy must find some medium of expression, be it mild or volatile. Of necessity he must be watched closely,” he wrote. “The early prognosis has been favourable, but we should not relax our vigil.”
But after another three months had passed, the vigil seemed only to confirm there was nothing to be vigilant about. In October, Williams reported it was hard to believe Steven had completed the first eight months of his sentence “without a misconduct report or having displayed some form of defiance or insolence. And yet this is exactly what Steven has done. We accept the situation and give him full marks for maintaining such a high standard of behaviour.” The superintendent concluded, “It would appear that Steve has resigned himself to this situation, and that he intends to make the best of it.”
The guards who worked and lived closely with Steven every day had a simpler explanation. “I never thought that Steve was guilty,” says Dave Mills. “In all the time I worked here, they had more social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists that went to interview him. I used to go home wondering, ‘They’ve been out to see this guy for six or seven months off and on—surely he’s going to break down somewhere.’ But not once. Not once. I never did think that he had committed murder.”
Alice Hebden, the cook, agreed. “We all thought he was innocent. Everybody.” As librarian Les Horne put it, “Most of the staff would have said, ‘He’s not the kid who could have done that.’”
Ray Nankivell, the supervisor who spent a great deal of time with Steven was equally adamant. “We all
thought he had a bum rap.” Nankivell remembers how sullen Steven looked every time he emerged from a grilling by the psychiatrists or psychologists. “He would just stare into nothing.”
“You kind of develop an attitude that, ‘I don’t care what other people think,’” Steve explains. “You try to put up a barrier and you say, ‘All that matters to me is what I think.’ I knew I was innocent. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I had absolutely nothing to do with this murder.”
But for the mind readers, Steve’s protestations of innocence were just more indication of his obvious guilt.
“Mom and Dad are coming,” Steven told one of the guards, Ken Russell.
“I wonder what the heck they’re going to bring this time,” Russell replied eagerly. A tough, no-nonsense guard who would go on to become an OPP detective, Russell liked Steve, even if he felt the boy was reserved. “We used to have toe wrestles,” Russell remembers, hooking their big toes together and pressing back to see who gave in first. “I would always beat him.”
Russell and the other staff looked forward to visits from Steve’s parents almost as much as the boy did. “They always had piles of stuff for the school—candies, cakes, a big bushel of apples,” Russell says.
“We tried to carry on as if nothing happened,” Dan Truscott wrote to a friend, reflecting his family’s determination to keep a tenuous hold on normality despite the jailing of their son. Dan and Doris had settled in Richmond, a small town south of Ottawa, close enough to the air force base and quiet enough to give the family some anonymity.
“It was hard on the kids,” Doris admits, as the Truscott name had achieved national prominence—and for some, notoriety. “Different little things came out, like ‘Oh, you’re a Truscott,’ said in a little slur.”
“It was a strain,” says Steve’s older brother, Ken. “You’re always wondering what people are thinking.” But if Ken and his younger brother and sister ever winced under the burden of being Steven Truscott’s sibling, they never let their parents know. “They felt we already had a lot of pressure,” Doris says. “They didn’t want to bring that home because it would upset us more.”
Doris and Dan took their other children to see Steve at the training school, even if it was awkward to explain to ten-year-old Bill and seven-year-old Barbara what their older brother was doing behind bars. Making the three-hundred-mile trip was a financial strain for a couple still trying to cope with raising three children at home and paying down a mortgage. Dan got a part-time job four nights a week at a local racetrack; Doris worked weekends and sometimes once or twice a week at the Richmond bakery.
“It was a hard struggle to get through,” Doris says. “I never begrudged it and I never moaned and cried about it, because it got us up to see Steve. I was just glad we could get there.”
Getting there meant seeing their boy adapt to growing up behind barbed wire fences. “All in all he is bearing up wonderfully well and seems to get along well with the guards, and they always speak well of him,” his parents wrote of Steve in May of 1960. They watched Steve and his fellow detainees play baseball against a team from Toronto. Steve, as he had under the freer skies of Clinton, always shone as a sharp third baseman with a wicked throw to first.
“He is quite happy now that he’s able to be outside and play ball,” his father noted. Dan perhaps did not suspect that for his jailed boy, sports had become more than a game. “People vent their frustration differently—I would do it in sports,” Steve remembers. “You kind of throw yourself at it. Just about anything I went into I ended up winning.” Steve’s enthusiasm for sports as an outlet for his frustration left him with the usual battle scars. His medical record shows that, in addition to providing a prescription for glasses, doctors treated him for fractures to his left hand and a sprain to his right ankle.
In October, Steve’s parents reported that their son was learning to play the trumpet—a gift from guard Dave Mills—and as section leader his cellblock came first in the clean up competition three months in a row. But as Steve created a new life for himself behind bars, his old life from Clinton seemed to be slipping away. One of his visitors at the training school was Gord Logan, one of the boys who insisted he saw Steven and Lynne cross the bridge on that Tuesday evening in June of 1959. The reunion was awkward for the two former school buddies, and Gord’s father, Tom, had to do most of the talking. “I couldn’t think of anything to say,” Gord later told a reporter.
The chasm between Steven and his former childhood friends was to be expected. Steve was changing, forced to make friends with a much tougher crowd—boys like Mike McGuin, a troubled youngster who from the age of six until twenty-five would spend seventeen years in various institutions. Mike came to the Guelph reform school in the summer of 1960, and remembers Steve as a likeable kid who stuck to the code juvenile delinquents adopted behind bars: “You’re in here and I’m in here, let’s make the best of a bad situation and get on with our lives,” McGuin explains.
At the end of the year, Steve spent his second Christmas behind bars. For Steve and his family, Christmas was always the saddest time of the year. His mother sent him fruit cake and shortbread. “It was hard to get it through your mind he was really serving a life sentence,” Doris remembers. “You couldn’t imagine he was there for that long a time for something he didn’t do.”
Doris had a few friends to turn to, but most of the time when she needed support, she turned inward: “I’d sit and talk to myself, and I was not ashamed to admit it. I felt I had to keep going because of the kids,” she says.
Meanwhile, Steve’s father, to take his mind off his son’s imprisonment, plunged himself into one of his favourite activities—hockey. Dan took his son Bill to practices and games, and even refereed. Bill’s team once lost a tight 1–0 decision because his father ruled a goal scored by his son’s team went under the net. “I must say Bill doesn’t think too much of his dad as referee,” Dan wrote.
Looking back on a childhood dominated by his older brother’s imprisonment, Bill Truscott marvels at his father’s ability to devote time to all of his offspring. “Dad was always busy with hockey. I never felt I missed anything.”
But Bill also remembers a father obsessed with clearing his son’s name. “Every table in the house was covered with anything that he could find anywhere,” he remembers. “It was just normal after a while. Dad would spend five or six hours a day clipping newspapers, writing, talking on the telephone to people to see what could be done.”
“It always seemed like, ‘Next month things will be taken care of’ or ‘six months from now,’ or someone would say, ‘By the spring something should be done,’” Bill remembers. But help for Steven always proved out of reach.
“A lot of times Dad wouldn’t come out of the house for a weekend, upset over the whole thing,” says Bill. “It would get to him, just wondering if he’d done everything, what else he could do.”
For several months now, the Truscotts had left their trailer outside of the Guelph home of Alice Hebden. It made the long drive from Ottawa easier, and they could drop by the cook’s house for cold drinks and warm company when visiting Steven. There was no toilet in the Spartan trailer, just a small stove and table that folded into a bed. With an air mattress and a sleeping bag, three people could fit into the cramped quarters.
Hebden had to go to work at six o’clock in the morning, but one night she remembers Dan stricken with grief over his son’s plight. “I sat with him until 5:45 a.m. He cried all night long,” she recalls. “His son was going through all this and he couldn’t do a thing.”
Meanwhile, Isabel LeBourdais was finding her challenge to get to the truth about Steven’s case was also full of grief and aggravation. The publishing world would prove less than eager to publicize a controversial case that seemed to throw into question the underpinnings of Canadians’ faith in the fairness of their justice system. By August, she told friends Chatelaine had decided not to print an article on the case. She then pinned her hope
s on publication in the Star Weekly, but that, too, seemed elusive.
“If only someone will print your story, I feel certain that it will bring something out into the open,” Doris Truscott wrote to LeBourdais.
By early 1961, LeBourdais set her sights on a bigger publishing splash—a full-length book. “McClelland & Stewart are definitely committed to publishing my book on the case as soon as I can get it written,” she told the Truscotts. “This is the first time that we really have what looks like some solid, definite guarantee that efforts will bear fruit. I’ll never give this up until we all have what we want—Steven free and completely cleared.”
Speculating about a new trial, LeBourdais suggested the only person up to the task was Arthur Martin, one of Canada’s most prominent defence attorneys. “I would do everything I possibly could to help make sure that he takes the case, when the time comes,” she stated.
LeBourdais recruited various friends and acquaintances of the Truscotts at the Clinton base to do some of her footwork—measuring distances at the bridge, breaking off branches in the woods, testing how far sound travelled from the crime scene, and poking around the air base for information.
Tom Logan summoned the courage to give LeBourdais a copy of his son Gord’s statement to the police. Gord’s declaration would be one of the few pieces of paper from among the many dozens of witness statements that would see the light of day—until boxes of police and Crown files became available some forty years later.
LeBourdais also talked to Dr. David Hall Brooks, the chief medical officer at the base, in what he later described as a “stormy interview.” According to LeBourdais’ notes, he said he knew a boy had done the crime because Lynne “was too undeveloped to appeal to an older man.” Brooks claimed the couple started “exploring each other” in the field by the woods and only later went into the bush.