by Julian Sher
“Sure, where to?” Patterson complied, always eager for an assignment that took him outside the drab walls of the penitentiary.
“Guelph,” his boss explained. “Go up to Guelph, pick up Steven Truscott and bring him back.”
As he stood in the warden’s office, Patterson’s mind flashed back to the day three years before, when he first saw the frightened boy who had come to sleep overnight in the Kingston penitentiary complex. Now his job was to bring that boy back for a much longer stay—in theory, for the rest of his life.
Patterson had to transfer not only the prisoner, but also his file. Once in Guelph, he met for two hours with the training school supervisors to get their assessment of his newest charge.
“He was an ideal inmate; we’d wish he’d stay here,” they told him. “For a young chap, he was really well-motivated. He wasn’t going to sit in a cell and mope all day.”
Patterson then took a nervous Steven into a side room and introduced himself.
“You know where you’re going?” he asked.
“Yeah,” replied Steven.
“You’re going right back where you were temporary before. Back to prison—only this time not in hospital,” Patterson said. “There’s two ways you can go back there: in handcuffs, or sit down beside me driving all the way back and enjoy the ride.”
“Mr. Patterson,” Steve said immediately, “you’ll never have one bit of trouble with me.”
And he didn’t. “I never took the handcuffs out of my pocket,” Patterson recalls. For Steven, it was a welcome contrast to the humiliating shackles the Goderich sheriff had put on him for his first prison transfer. This time, when Patterson stopped at a restaurant to treat Steve to a juicy steak dinner, there were no embarrassing chains or cumbersome handcuffs.
“That sort of broke the ice,” Patterson said. As the teenager and his new friend made their way through the snow-covered southern Ontario countryside, Patterson tried to prepare his passenger for the hardships that lay ahead. He warned him about “muscle groups” that go after the youngest inmates. “They’ll get him in there and he’s their kid,” Patterson explained—everything from sexual favours to more menial tasks.
“When you get there, any trouble at all, you come to me,” Patterson tried to assure Steve.
The supervisor changed topics. “There’s a machine shop there, are you interested?”
“Yup,” the young man answered.
“Well, you’ll meet a super guy who runs a small shop there with only about six other inmates,” Patterson promised.
As the car sped along the highway on that cold winter day in January of 1963, Steven considered his uncertain future. Then, as Patterson pulled into the parking lot on Bath Street in Kingston, the aging stone walls of Collins Bay loomed in front of him. The red copper towers that sat atop the castle-like entrance earned the prison complex the name “Disneyland” among the locals. But the six hundred-or-so permanent tourists inside its thirty-foot walls would give it the more appropriate label of “Gladiator School.”
Though technically a medium-security institution, the fortress structure and tough population of Collins Bay made it what the authorities called a “high-medium” prison. When the gate of heavy iron bars closed behind Steven, he forgot all the reassuring words from Don Patterson: “It scares you half to death,” Steve remembers. He later told his family it was like being put on a plane blindfolded and landing in another country where you don’t speak the language.
Steven walked along a long hallway with a low ceiling and bland green and yellow walls. The corridor was called Gaza Strip, because inmates walked down one side, guards down the other. Steve’s “drum” (living quarters) was on cellblock “C,” third door on the right, Number 5. The two-inch-thick wooden door was only about twenty-two inches wide, with two solid fifteen-inch hinges and a tiny black metal slot to allow guards to peer in. The cell came furnished with a tiny sink in the right-hand corner, two metal shelves, a cot and a small window in the back.
Gazing at his new living quarters—one of two dozen cells on a range that housed murderers, thieves and hard-time convicts—Steve did not yet realize how lucky he was. “C” block was a choice location, sort of the upper-class neighbourhood of the prison, because the cell’s solid doors—instead of open bars—afforded inmates a measure of privacy and quiet. His prison fatigues were appropriately drab black boots, grey pants and a white T-shirt. Only one thing distinguished his outfit from the hundreds of other incarcerated men: a label bearing the number 6730.
At the age of eighteen, Steven Murray Truscott’s identity had been reduced to four digits.
“It was a grim place to go in,” Doris Truscott says today, remembering her visit to see Steven in a penitentiary. “You hear those doors shut behind you and you think, ‘Oh God, imagine this every day, every day—you’re lucky to be sane when you come out of those places!’ That was my thought.”
Prison rules stipulated his parents could visit him only once a month for an hour, or twice a month for thirty minutes. Doris and Dan decided they would alternate visits by themselves with visits accompanied by the other children. “I believe that once Steve becomes acclimatized to this new system, he will get along fine,” Doris wrote with her typical grin-and-bear-it resolve. “He seems very happy, was put right to work in shop and says they have wonderful equipment and instruction is very good.”
That instruction came from a man who would become Steve’s surrogate father figure, replacing the Guelph guards who had watched over him in the training school. Joe Fowler, a grizzled former World War II navy seaman, would put in thirty-eight years in the Collins Bay machine shop before he eventually retired in 1985. “You don’t have to be crazy,” he says, reflecting on his career as a prison instructor, “but it helped me.”
He remembers the call he got one morning from Warden Fred Smith.
“Joe, I’m sending you a con that’s coming down from Guelph,” the warden said. “Keep an eye on him, he’s a young lad.” Fowler said he’d look after him.
“He looked like a scared boy, a very, very scared boy,” Fowler remembered. “He seemed lost; he didn’t know which way to turn. He was very quiet, kind of withdrawn, very bashful.”
Fowler realized he had to connect with the boy right away. He knew Steve’s father was in the air force, so the veteran seaman chatted away about the armed forces, and Steve lightened up at once. “He came right out of his shell,” Fowler says. Not one to rush to judgment, Fowler says he waited two years before making up his mind about the convicted killer standing before him.
For the next few years, the grinding motors and flying sparks in Fowler’s shop became the centre of Steve’s life. Fowler taught the eager student arc welding, acetylene work, brazing and propane torch manoeuvres. Together, they fixed prison farm machinery, took care of kitchen equipment, replaced cellblock locks and did maintenance in the boiler room. Anything that broke inside the walls of Collins Bay, they fixed. Guards would even bring in their home appliances for quick repair work. For community groups, Steve built wheelchair lifts for vehicles. “That boy got an education in there that nobody else could have got—he’s done it all,” Fowler said. “He listened. That’s why he was as smart as he was—he listened.”
Fowler carefully watched over his new trainee—he was, after all, a convict charged with raping a child, not usually the most popular type of inmate in the prison culture. Don Patterson also regularly dropped by the machine shop to keep an eye on the teenager.
“Has anyone bothered you? How are things going?” he would ask Steven.
The new arrival never reported any problems. In fact, he quickly made friends with some of the other inmates. After the first month passed without incident, Patterson relaxed. “Once he got over that hurdle, he was okay.”
Steve’s fellow prisoners felt the same same way. One of the inmates at Collins Bay was Mike McGuin, who knew Steve briefly from the Guelph reform school. Mike had left the reformatory before Steve, but ha
d been arrested on new charges and now found himself in a penitentiary. He was struck by how quickly Steve picked up the survival skills of prison life. “There’s a code that you go by and I never remember anyone bothering Steve. Everybody liked him.”
Mike’s older brother Ted was also in the same prison. Both brothers were such regular offenders one prison official quipped they were doing life on the instalment plan. Hardened convicts like Ted were impressed that Steven, accused of raping a child, survived unscathed in a prison environment where sex crimes were rarely tolerated. “At that time there was some honour in the joint,” Ted says. “It’s like nobody touched him because … we all believed in his innocence.” In McGuin’s eyes, Steven had passed an important test. “He went to a tougher court than any court in this country, and he was found innocent in our court.”
In Steve’s mind, he had passed an internal mental test as well. For years, since his arrest in June of 1959, Steve had convinced himself that it was all a nightmare—the arrest, the jailing, the preliminary, the trial, the verdict, the death sentence, the reform school—that somehow, somewhere, someone would realize it was all a mistake and free him. It never happened, but Steve always clung to the hope that someone would rescue him.
Now, as the bitter winter winds swirled around the prison yard in Kingston, Steven finally accepted it would not happen. He was alone. “I knew I wasn’t getting out. It sort of hits home that no one is coming to get you out,” he says. “You sort of harden yourself up because you don’t know what to expect.”
While Steve was trying to find his way in the confines of a gloomy penitentiary, Isabel LeBourdais was trying to break down the no less daunting walls of a publishing industry that seemed determined to condemn her investigation to a silent death.
LeBourdais had signed a contract with McClelland & Stewart in late 1961. By the end of 1962, she was telling the Truscotts the publisher had returned her 350-page draft with “scathing criticisms … so I started all over again.” As Steven was settling into Collins Bay, LeBourdais told his parents she had a September publication date. “There is still a lot of detail to be worked over but daylight is finally in sight,” she informed the Truscotts, but quickly added a cautionary note: “During the past year I have had a series of disagreements with Jack McClelland.”
In fact, McClelland was getting cold feet. Even a trip to Clinton with LeBourdais did not allay the fears of one of the most powerful publishers in Canada. Fearing lawsuits and a political maelstrom from a book that so brazenly took on the legal establishment, McClelland implored LeBourdais to tone down her book.
For the next two years LeBourdais battled to get Steven’s story out while continuing to unearth new findings about the case. In 1963, she wrote to the chief coroner of Ontario, Dr. Frank Cotnam, to request a copy of Dr. John Penistan’s official autopsy report. Much to her surprise—and Cotnam’s—there was no official report on file. Cotnam wrote to Penistan asking for one; two weeks later he informed LeBourdais he still had no news, which he found odd, he told her, because it should have been as simple as putting a copy in the mail.
Finally, the typed, undated report arrived, and LeBourdais sat on a sofa in Cotnam’s office to read it (he would not let her make a copy). She discovered that nowhere in the report she saw did Penistan specify the 7:15 to 7:45 time of death. “I was, in fact, astounded that the report gave NO time of death other than forty-five hours before the identification [of Lynne’s body],” she wrote.
Someone else was also carrying out new investigations into the four-year-old case of Steven Truscott. Harold Graham of the OPP had quickly moved up the ranks after his headline-grabbing resolution of the Lynne Harper murder. By 1961, Graham had become the OPP’s chief inspector. In 1963, with more than a hundred murder investigations under his belt, he was promoted to assistant commissioner, taking charge of the anti-gambling and anti-rackets squad in addition to the CIB. He furthered his reputation by heading investigations into allegations that gangland figures had bribed senior OPP officers.
Graham learned that Ken Russell, the guard who used to toe-wrestle with Steven at the Guelph training school, had become an OPP officer. In the middle of 1963, Russell got an unsettling message, asking him to come to Toronto headquarters to meet with Assistant Commissioner Graham.
“What have I done wrong?” worried the new recruit.
Russell duly reported to Graham’s secretary. He waited for about fifteen minutes until Graham arrived, wearing a large overcoat. “Come in the office,” his superior ordered. Once inside, Graham got straight to the point:
“You were at the Guelph training school?”
“Yes.”
“You were a supervisor there?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know Truscott?”
“Yes.”
“I’m just going to ask you one question. During the time you were there, did he ever talk about it to you?” Graham said, referring to Lynne’s murder.
“No, he never mentioned a word. As far as I know, nobody mentioned it to him and he didn’t mention it to anyone else,” Russell replied.
“Okay fine, thank you very much,” Graham said, and the meeting was over.
Graham never asked Russell point-blank if he thought Steven was guilty or innocent. “It was hard to say—I wasn’t too sure myself,” Russell says. “To me Steve had a little bit of a curtain. There was a little bit behind that you didn’t know about.”
He did not find it curious that, four years after a court had supposedly settled Steven’s guilt once and for all, Graham was still poking around the case. “He worked so many angles,” said Russell.
Back at Collins Bay, Steve once again was facing some intensive grilling of his own, with a battery of psychologists and psychiatrists trying to break the young man’s stubborn insistence on his innocence. Only now, the mind games would be much more extreme than at the Guelph school—going all the way to truth serum and hard drugs. And this time, the stakes were much higher. At Collins Bay, the psychiatrists were trying not only to unlock the supposed secrets buried inside Steven’s brain; the doctors also held the key to his release. Without a psychiatric endorsement of Steve’s rehabilitated mental health, the eighteen-year-old would never get parole.
For the next five years, Steve’s nemesis would be Dr. George D. Scott, a small, unassuming man who seemed particularly keen on cracking the mystery of Lynne Harper’s murder. “I have been interested in the psychological aspects of his case and feel he will require considerable psychiatric attention before any understanding of his offence can be postulated,” he wrote to the National Parole Board in June of 1964. “In the next period of time he will be seen at some length from both the psychological and psychiatric point of view … to try and uncover the fundamental motives for his offence.”
At their first meeting, Steve found the doctor friendly and outgoing. “But he had the same attitude as the others: ‘I’m a prison psychiatrist. If you’re not guilty you wouldn’t be here,’” Steve says. “He had one mission when it came to me—to get a confession, and I always got the feeling that it was a big disappointment that he couldn’t get an admission of guilt.”
“He was like a scared rabbit,” Scott says today. “He had a secret.… The secret was repressed by him—whatever it was.” Scott speculated that perhaps Steven had attempted to kiss Lynne, and when she fought back he tried to stop her from screaming, accidentally strangling her. “At fourteen years old, it’s a world of instant reaction,” he says. “I didn’t think he knew he murdered the girl. I didn’t think he knew that he had done an evil deed.”
One of the first full-time psychiatrists in the Kingston-area prisons, Scott says he was a “path breaker” in the use of electroshock treatment and what was called “narcotherapy”—softening up patients with drugs. “My life was spent doing things that were damn near innovative,” he says. “I was the big honcho then.”
In 1964, at forty-nine years old, Scott was perhaps also hoping the Truscott case
would give his career a much-needed boost. His reputation had suffered a serious blow when an inmate named Léopold Dion, serving a life sentence for sex crimes, was paroled. “George came out unequivocally—this man does not represent any risk to the community,” one prison official recalled. Within a year of his release, Dion murdered four boys in Quebec in 1963.
The psychiatrist would take no chances with the famous child murderer now under his care in Collins Bay. Scott determined that the best way to “uncover the motives” for Steven’s crime would be to loosen the boy up with the help of some drugs. Within a month of filing his first report on Steven, the Truscotts got wind of the doctor’s proposals. “Steve told me that [Scott] wished to administer some drug that would make him relax, and he refused to take it,” Doris wrote in a letter to Isabel LeBourdais.
His parents went to talk it over with the warden and then wrote to Scott himself. “We certainly do not want Steve to refuse any treatment if it means jeopardizing his chances of parole, but we did tell him we did not feel this was the time for any truth serum,” they said. “If he must, he must, but first we would like to talk to you.”
On August 15 the Truscotts met with the psychiatrist, who convinced them of the wisdom of drug therapy, suggesting that the mind sometimes “blanks out” the memory of a criminal deed. They then reported to the doctor that they had “a very good talk with Steven.”
“We were first quite concerned how to approach Steve and the subject of taking these injections, as we did not want to leave him with the impression that we did not think he was telling the truth,” they said. “So we explained to him what Warden Smith had said regarding how the parole board [based] so much of its decision on the psychiatric reports.… We told him that the only way he could expect to be released was by co-operating.”
Steven, according to his parents’ account, pleaded for support. “Dad, what more do they want to know?” he begged. “I’ve already told him all I can.”