Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  The air force authorities were not going to make it easy for LeBourdais to pursue her investigation. Fear began to grip the military families who had welcomed the author into their homes on the Clinton base.

  It had been two years since Steve’s arrest, but by the summer of 1961 members of the military brass were unnerved to see a journalist sniffing around the base for clues and witnesses. On June 23, they issued a regulation in the daily routine orders that effectively banned base personnel from talking to LeBourdais. The directive used general terms about military staff not speaking to outsiders about personal matters, but the target was clear.

  The air force made it explicit to the Logan family. Frances Logan wrote to LeBourdais to tell her an air force police officer said LeBourdais could remain at the Logans’ “as a personal friend, but we’re not to discuss the Truscott case.” John Carew, one of Steve’s classmates, remembers the atmosphere of intimidation he and his parents felt. “News travels around a base pretty fast,” he says. “The administrative staff got wind that [LeBourdais] was staying there. They didn’t like her purposes and they were worried about what she was going to say. They didn’t want her on the base.”

  The strong-arm tactics of the air force worked. Grace Carew wrote to LeBourdais saying that if news got out her husband, Grant, was talking to her “they might just terminate his career and he would go out on a dishonourable discharge.… It’s too bad it has to be like this, but I think you can understand why.”

  LeBourdais was livid. “It was ridiculous, incredible, idiotic,” she bellowed, “and what in thunder did they all think they were doing anyway, trying to stop me from visiting friends?”

  Steve’s second summer behind reform school bars was proving to be as enjoyable as it could be in an institution that was a prison in all but name. “Steve is doing fine, he is allowed outside the fence now and takes care of the flowers, lawns and garden, so he is quite pleased,” Doris wrote when she and the children visited him in early July of 1961. She also brought along a bushel of apples and four watermelons. By August, his parents were proudly reporting that Steve’s wooden scale model of a school was going on display at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.

  Family visits were a mixed blessing. Steve missed his family terribly, but seeing them occasionally only reminded him of what he had lost. “It was the only time he was sad,” guard Dave Mills recalls. “They were fairly close-knit. That family was really broken up by the whole thing.”

  “He used to get in his quiet moods—kept to himself,” supervisor Ray Nankivell remembers. “Never saw him cry. That’s the one thing we thought—there’s something wrong—because he didn’t show any emotion.”

  There were rare moments when the teenager expressed his bitterness. One of the other boys at the school was also serving time for a murder, but because the adolescent was tried in juvenile court, he obtained an early release.

  “He got out in two years. What’s wrong, Mr. Mills?” Steve complained.

  He chafed at other restrictions. As a federal prisoner, Steve, as one guard put it, was “the only one who never saw daylight (outside the prison grounds) from the day he arrived to the day he left.” Steve’s cellmates—even the other boy charged with murder—made regular trips to a swimming pool at the local university and to a downtown hockey rink. But not Steve. Superintendent Williams even tried to lobby government officials to change their strict policy toward Steve, but he did not succeed.

  “It’s tough, Mr. Mills,” Steve grumbled as he saw the others leave the confines of the institution for sports trips.

  “Sure,” the guard empathized.

  “Well, I guess I’m different,” Steve said.

  “Well, I don’t think that way about you, Steve,” Mills said, trying to console his favourite detainee.

  Escape attempts were not uncommon among the juveniles. The chain-link fence with a few strands of barbed wire on top was not an insurmountable barrier to an athletic and determined teenager. “Three big leaps up the fence and you’re out,” Steve recalls. Inevitably, the police and guards caught any runaway boys—with only open farm fields in the immediate vicinity there were not a lot of places to run. Steve, though, says he didn’t entertain the possibility of making a break for it because he was convinced the justice system would eventually realize an innocent boy had been jailed. “I never thought of escaping because, in my mind, somebody was always going to come up and say, ‘Sorry, we made a mistake,’” Steve says. It would take a while before Steve would have the courage to rid himself of the naive hope that the cavalry was right around the corner, just waiting to rescue him from a miscarriage of justice.

  Steve’s more immediate concern was surviving in a prison-like atmosphere. For all its trappings of grace before meals and unarmed guards, the Ontario Training School still housed some fairly disturbed boys charged with violent crimes, sexual assaults and other serious offences. “It was a pressure pot,” says Les Horne. “Steve was physically able to hold his own without any bullying.… The way he carried himself, he developed a security in himself pretty early on. He got respect from the staff and other kids.”

  Ken Russell remembers there was only one time he ever saw Steve in a scuffle. He opened a door to see Steve, halfway down a back staircase, pinning a boy against the wall as if responding to a provocation. Steve and Russell made eye contact, and without a word, the boy knew what he had to do. “He just backed right off,” Russell says. “Most of the time he just stayed out of trouble.”

  Indeed, more often than not, the staff called on Steven to diffuse any trouble.

  “If you had a problem, you’d call on Steve,” says Alice Hebden. She remembers the guards once called Steve down to the kitchen because the cook was having trouble with an unruly boy. “He knew how to quiet them down. He would just talk to them quietly.”

  “If he was in the [military] service, he would have been a leader of men,” Ray Nankivell says with almost fatherly pride. “They all respected him. They looked up to him. If I ever had any trouble with any of the boys, I would say, ‘Steve, have a word with so-and-so.’”

  “Steve had leadership qualities that were unbelievable,” says Dave Mills. “He didn’t do things half-heartedly. If I had to have a boy, I would like to have a son like Steve.”

  Indeed, Mills saw Steve as part of his family. It was not unusual for the guards to bring their relatives to the school for holidays and to see shows put on by the boys. Mills’ wife and his two young daughters got to know Steven well. “I was always struck by Steve’s good manners,” Mills remembers, adding he never once felt nervous having a convicted murderer play with his girls.

  Steve’s ease at winning over the hearts of guards and fellow cellmates was profoundly disturbing to the psychiatrists, who were still convinced they had a dangerous sex offender on their hands just waiting to explode.

  “He has maintained, up until now, his facade of innocence, bravado and sureness of himself by playing the role of the lone wolf,” psychiatrist James Hartford reported. “This has helped him maintain the kind of iron curtain of denial around him. But this kind of isolation is something that must be maintained at its full strength at all times, twenty-four hours a day. He cannot let down for a moment because if he does he might make a slip.”

  Hartford came up with a strategy to ensnare this patient who so adamantly maintained his innocence. For more than a year the psychiatrist had taken Steve’s “lack of affect” as proof of guilt. But now he reversed positions and told the boy not to become too friendly and emotionally involved with others. “I told him that it was perhaps not a good idea for him to let down his guardedness,” Hartford said. “In this manner I have him on a spot. If he withdraws from these involvements he will be doing so because I suggested it, and therefore will see me as being on his side. If he doesn’t withdraw and they do produce a degree of disorganization in him, he will also see me as having foretold it.”

  On paper, it looked like an ingenious way to force w
hat Hartford called “an impending breakdown of [Steve’s] defences.” But six months later, the doctor had to admit the patient seemed to have foiled his plot.

  In a memorandum to the superintendent, the psychiatrist accepted grudgingly “the high esteem” the other boys had for Steve. “He has assumed the role of the benevolent leader and enlists strong loyalties and sincere respect. The boys apparently help to maintain his denial by feeling that he is a victim of injustice,” Hartford complained. “This creates a dangerous situation because it becomes a generalized sort of delusion in which everyone participates, but it is nevertheless unreal and will eventually force Truscott into a more and more godlike role.”

  Hartford apparently never stopped to consider that if everyone else thought Steven was innocent, perhaps the delusion was the psychiatrist’s.

  Superintendent Don Williams, for one, did not see Steven as “godlike” but he certainly seemed to describe him as practically angelic—at least from a disciplinary point of view. “An aura of mystery still surrounds this boy,” Williams wrote in an assessment report in 1961. “He has been in this school over a year and has yet to be charged for misconduct. There have been occasions when his inner controls have been sorely tested by the daily strain of the situation—seeing the other boys come and go and the uncertainty of his own future.… We anticipate that one of these days Steve will have to give expression to these pent-up emotions, if for no other reason than to release the pressure.”

  That anticipated explosion never came. By the middle of the year, Williams was recording that Steven was participating in “all activities with plenty of interest and desire” and showed “sound leadership.” By year’s end, there was no change. “Steve continues to behave like a model student. His participation in all phases of our program is good and he has yet to be placed on charge for any form of misbehaviour. There are times when he could be likened to a robot.”

  Six months later—by June of 1962—Steve still had an unblemished record after almost three years behind bars. “Steve continues to exercise remarkable control of his emotions and general actions,” the superintendent reported. “As yet Steve has not been on charge … and always manages to give a good account of himself.”

  The objective reality was too hard even for psychiatrist James Hartford to ignore. “[Steve] has been here two years and has adjusted himself so successfully that he is quite unique,” he admitted in his final report on the boy he seemed determined to crack. “The following remarks embody my own speculations, which hopefully are based upon more than appearances,” he wrote, perhaps sensing how thin his speculation was. “When Steven came here I was struck by his lack of affect,” Hartford wrote. “He has changed. I fear that the changes we see are all on the surface.… His offence is dealt with a firmly defended denial and this primitive defence covers a good many of his conflicts. I would consider there to be considerable danger to other people when this denial is broken down.”

  The psychiatrist ended his report with a stern warning. “I still consider Steven to be egocentric, narcissistic, uninvolved with other people as with things.… I also consider him, as of today, potentially dangerous to other people.”

  Hartford would get one more chance to assess Steven in four years’ time. But then it would be on a prominent national and very public stage—the Supreme Court of Canada.

  For several months Steve’s parents had been trying desperately to find out what Ottawa had in store for their son. In the spring of 1962, Dan Truscott learned that when his son turned eighteen at the start of the following year, prison authorities would transfer him permanently to a federal penitentiary in Kingston. The chairman of the parole board, George Street, told the Truscotts that as a matter of course they would be reviewing Steven’s case since he was so young, but Street would not give Dan any commitments. “So I guess we’ll have to wait and see and hope,” Dan wrote.

  Easter weekend that year gave Steven and his friends a chance to let off some steam after another winter of incarceration—and an excuse to show off some of their talents to families and invited guests from the community of Guelph. The boys put on skits and musical numbers. The program listed Steven in the choir’s performance of “Milk and Honey” and “Open Your Heart.” He also played guitar and sang an enthusiastic, if not altogether melodic, rendition of the Everly Brothers hit “Dream.”

  One of the couples in attendance was enjoying the show so much they telephoned their babysitter to ask her if she minded working a little later.

  Not at all, said Marlene, the seventeen-year-old the well-to-do couple had hired. The daughter of a labour organizer from the working-class part of town, Marlene was only too glad to make some extra cash. When the couple returned home, they talked excitedly about the show they had seen at the institution.

  “What is that place?” Marlene asked.

  “It’s a training school for boys,” they told her. “There was even a boy out there who was in for a murder of a classmate.”

  Marlene went home and put the story out of her mind. “I never thought any more about it,” she said. But in four years, she would get caught up in a very public battle over the boy who played guitar at the Guelph reform school talent show.

  Steve’s stay at the training school was coming to an end. Christmas Day in 1963—as in previous years—was a low-key affair, with no parties or presents, which could spark jealousy among boys in detention. Instead, there were only a few cards from family and friends, some mild revelry in the cellblocks and then lights out. “Christmas just reminds you of everything you don’t have, everyone you are not with,” Steve recalls.

  Five days before Christmas, there was a more somber atmosphere at another jail in Ontario. For several years, it had been the practice of the government to commute all death sentences to life imprisonment when the jury had recommended clemency. But in two recent cases, the juries made no plea for mercy. Ronald Turpin was found guilty of murdering a policeman and Arthur Lucas guilty of stabbing to death another man. Ottawa made no move to stop their death sentences. In Toronto’s Don Jail, they were executed, one after the other, in the early hours of December 20.

  Turpin and Lucas were the last people to be hanged in Canada. Already there were limits on the use of capital punishment. “Bowing to public pressure” generated in part by Steven’s case, says historian Carolyn Strange, “the Diefenbaker government introduced legislation in 1961 that provided a statutory prohibition against the execution of juveniles under the age of eighteen.” In 1966, when Steven’s case would again become the centre of public controversy, the death penalty debate resurfaced—and Canada took its first steps toward the complete abolition of capital punishment.

  Steven had escaped the hangman’s noose but for the jailed teenager another deadline loomed. He was only a month away from his eighteenth birthday, which meant he could no longer stay in the relatively benign confines of the Ontario Training School. For months, staff and administrators at the Guelph institution had tried to figure out a way to keep the boy with them, but their lobbying efforts failed. Prison authorities were determined to send him to Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston.

  In early January Dan Truscott spoke on the phone to federal justice minister Donald Fleming. “He told me he was sorry,” Dan reported, but there was nothing the minister could do. At the government’s suggestion, Steve’s parents took a tour of the federal prison with the warden. They were pleased to see the prison had a good training department, but the visit did little to assuage their panic. “Once he is sent to Collins Bay he is fingerprinted, photographed and given a number which will follow him the rest of his life,” Dan wrote to Isabel LeBourdais.

  “Don’t worry,” the writer tried to reassure Steve’s parents, typing the next words in upper case to reinforce their resolve: “WE ARE GOING TO GET HIM CLEARED AND THE RECORDS WILL NO LONGER EXIST!”

  On January 18, 1963, Steven celebrated his eighteenth birthday—a symbolic passage to manhood for most boys. But for Steven Mur
ray Truscott, turning eighteen meant a one-way ticket to a high-security prison.

  Jailed at fourteen and then sent to a reform school until he was eighteen, Steven never went to high school. No football championships, dates with cheerleaders or prom nights. Steve instead had spent his formative teenage years behind bars. He came into the Guelph reform school a frightened fifteen-year-old; he left as a chain-smoking, confident yet shy young man who had added both weight and sadness to his now muscular frame.

  “I remember the sadness that befell us all when we finally had to surrender him to Collins Bay,” says Les Horne, the librarian who was the first to see Steven when he had arrived in Guelph three years earlier. Indeed, Steven’s case so moved Horne that a few years later, when he left the prison system to become the provincial child advocate in Ontario, he opposed every attempt to move a child defendant to the adult criminal system.

  Alice Hebden wept unabashedly as she hugged Steven. “It was just the same as if I had a son,” she says.

  “The kitchen staff was crying, the female staff were crying, the teachers were crying,” recalls Ray Nankivell, Steve’s supervisor for much of his stay in Guelph. The male guards tried to keep their composure as they shook hands with their favourite young charge, but Nankivell confesses a little water came to his eyes as well.

  “I was very sorry to see him go,” Nankivell says, not just because he would miss Steve, but also because the veteran guard at the reform school knew the dangers that lay ahead for the boy: “He was going to prison.”

  31

  NUMBER 6730

  “How would you like to go for a ride?”

  Fred Smith, the warden at Collins Bay prison was asking one of the supervisors, Don Patterson, a question that was really an order.