by Julian Sher
Desperate to get their son out of prison, his parents authorized the drug tests. “Dr. Scott, we are more concerned than ever to get to the bottom of things,” they wrote. “We hereby authorize you to carry out any test with Steve that you deem necessary to aid him in obtaining his parole.”
The next entry in the psychiatric file is a handwritten note by Scott saying that Steven “at his own request … wishes to proceed with psychiatric treatment.” The drug tests were scheduled to begin October 1.
It is not clear from the files if Scott spelled out to the Truscotts exactly what kinds of drugs he was planning to use, or their possible side effects. Typically, psychiatrists used some kind of relaxant, commonly known as “truth serum,” which lowered an individual’s usual psychological defences and theoretically made the subject more prone to talking and opening up. But Scott and many of his colleagues were also experimenting with a more powerful mind-altering drug called lysergic acid diethylamide—LSD.
Just 150 miles east of Kingston, at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, one of Canada’s leading psychiatrists, Dr. Ewen Cameron, was making widespread use of LSD in a series of terrifying experiments on unsuspecting patients. His work, financed in part by the American CIA, sparked an uproar years later when details came to light.
Dr. Scott was running a smaller-scale laboratory using prisoners as human test subjects. His extensive use of LSD on female inmates in Kingston during the 1960s prompted a federal government inquiry three decades later. “LSD with some people can glorify their problems—make them clear to them,” Scott says by way of explanation. With luck, he hoped it would crack Steven’s shell.
As early as 1961, descriptions of the toxicity and adverse effects of LSD had been reported in several medical publications. Sandoz, the company that manufactured the psychedelic drug, had warned psychiatrists of “possible abuse” in 1962. Still, drug therapy was a fairly common, if legally murky, practice in the prison system of the 1960s. Technically, all that was needed was informed consent. Scott persuaded Steve’s parents to get Steve to consent; it is debatable that any of them made their decision in an “informed” way.
In any case, the supposed justification for the drug therapy—improving the chances for parole—was a nonstarter. Steve and his parents rightly surmised that without the blessing of a psychiatrist, he would never get parole. What they did not know was that Steve could not get parole for some time. Under federal law, no inmate serving a life term after a commuted death sentence was even eligible for parole until spending ten years behind bars. Nevertheless, there was nothing to stop an inmate from applying for parole at any time. As early as January 1963—as Steve was being transferred from Guelph to Collins Bay—the parole board reported they “did not deem it advisable to grant parole.” They ruled his case would come under review again in January of 1965 and so, in August of 1964, Steven filed an application.
“I know five years is not very long for a sentence like mine, but I was very young, and all I ask is just one chance to prove that I’m worthy of being allowed to mix with society,” he wrote. “I have done my best to keep a clean record while I am serving my sentence. I have reached the stage where being locked up will be of no more good to me.”
Then came the one sentence that would cause Steven much trouble in the years to come: “I have paid five years of my life but this has taught me that crime does not pay, so all I ask is please grant me one chance to make a success of my life and prove that one dreadful mistake does not mean that I will ever make another one.”
Those who believed Steven was guilty would later seize on those words as being tantamount to a confession, though Steven would give quite a different interpretation—that he was talking in general about the lessons of incarceration, not admitting to any specific crime.
In fact, there was evidence in his parole file to back up his claim. Two weeks after he wrote those words, Steve met with a parole classification assistant named W. J. Haggerty. The prison official, having read the dossier and interviewed Steven, came to a simple conclusion: “Truscott still claims innocence of the present offence but accepts his sentence with the feeling that nothing can be done now.” One month later, another parole officer, J. Sullivan, met with Steven and reported the inmate’s statement: “I do not think I am guilty.”
Steve’s parole file also included uncommonly strong words of praise from his guards. One official, identified only as Squad Commander Smith, wrote, “Without a doubt the most polite and co-operative inmate I have ever dealt with.… Although he is serving a life sentence, I cannot picture him as a criminal.” Joe Fowler, the machine shop trainer, said, “This has been the most outstanding inmate I have ever had work for me. His work is excellent—and he produces with a minimum of supervision. You can depend on him to do his best at all times.”
But Fowler and the rest of the prison staff were too gullible, as far as the psychiatrists and psychologists were concerned. In early September of 1964, Dr. A. Celovsky, a consultant psychologist, remarked that on the surface Steven showed “good outward control” and “a demeanour beyond reproach.” But his testing purported to uncover something much darker. “On further scrutiny the test data point to an aloof, self-centred, peculiarly detached individual,” Dr. Celovsky reported. “Keeping very much to himself, he manages to cover with a good cloak of control what would otherwise set him in an unfavourable light.”
On December 1, chief prison psychiatrist George Scott reported that though he had seen the patient several times since June in “superficial” meetings, he had just completed the “prime psychiatric interview.”
“I found this man polite and perfunctory,” Scott said, noting the young inmate struck him as “somewhat sad.” Scott laid out four possibilities for Steven: that he committed the crime and did not want to admit it; that he had “subconsciously forgotten the whole affair because it was so sordid;” that he was innocent but covering for someone who did the crime; and finally, that he did not commit the offence.
The doctor implied he did not think the last alternative was likely. “I wanted him to know that he could consciously be forgetting the whole situation because it was so traumatic,” he said, holding out a carrot to Steven: “[I] further exhorted him that if he could remember it, the problems related to his case would be simplified.”
Scott had originally planned to start using truth serum injections on December 15, 1964. Instead, the doctor delayed the drugs and questioned Steven about what he called adolescent experimentation with sex. Scott reported that Steven did not answer questions about Lynne Harper directly, except to say, “She wasn’t that good-looking.” Asked if he had sex with other girls, Steve said he could have if he wanted to, according to the doctor.
With or without drugs, Scott seemed confident he could wrest a confession out of the reluctant convict. “I would suspect that if we continue in this type of interview some astounding revelations will occur as time goes on,” he boasted. The doctor felt 1965 was going to be a make-or-break year in the battle to unlock the secrets of Steven’s mind.
By the time Steve marked his twentieth birthday in January 1965, he had been inside Collins Bay for two years. He barely noticed that outside the prison’s walls, the sea change that came to be known simply as “the sixties” was beginning to dramatically alter the country he had left behind.
John Diefenbaker, the Conservative leader who had commuted Steven’s death sentence, had gone down to defeat at the polls in 1963. Lester B. Pearson’s Liberals ushered in a new period of reform, bringing in the new Maple Leaf flag, a national medicare program—and a young intellectual from Quebec named Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who, as justice minister, in a few years would get his chance to wrestle with a new Truscott controversy.
A telling sign of the times came via the small screen. Back in 1959, Steve and his friends had thrilled to simple-minded TV cop shows like Dragnet. By 1965, a hit new series was now in its second season. It featured David Jansen as The Fugitive, a wrongfully convicted man runnin
g from the police. Popular culture was not only suggesting the justice system sometimes made mistakes—it was making a hero out of someone railroaded by the police and the courts.
Inside the confines of the psychiatrist’s office in Collins Bay prison, however, there was little room for such doubt. Dr. George Scott began the year questioning Steven if, in his imagination, “he ever decided how Lynne had died.” Steve simply replied he never imagined what happened to her after he left her at the highway.
Did Steve not think she would scream, Scott asked.
Steve said he thought she would.
Was it possible he had forgotten the crime because the murder was so out of character for him?
“There was more anxiety” from Steven over this question, Scott reported, but “he does not think about the murder at all over the last few years and has put it out of his mind.”
To get at the truth about the murder trapped in Steve’s mind, Scott was now ready to use chemical inducements. Steven saw it as a necessary pact with the devil, a gamble he felt he was sure to win. “I wanted out and the only way I was going to get out was by him putting in a favourable report, and the only way he was going to [do that] was if I did all these tests,” Steve explains. “I finally said to Scott, ‘I’ll do the tests providing when you’re done, if you find nothing to prove that I’m guilty, you go along with my way of thinking about it.’”
A note in Scott’s files confirms that the doctor assured Steven that through drug treatment he might be able to recall something related to the offence that could help “with his eventual release from [this] institution.”
Never for a moment, Steve says, did he fear that the drugs would bring to the surface a secret so deep perhaps he did not even know he had buried it. “I knew I wasn’t guilty, so I said okay. I had no hesitation. Whatever tests you want to do, I’ll go along with them. And I did.”
The first recorded use of drugs on Steven was on February 16, 1965, starting with sodium pentothal, a popular relaxant widely used after World War II as a sort of truth serum. The drug slowed the patient’s heart rate and relieved tension and anxiety. Often, nitrous oxide—commonly known as “laughing gas”—was added as an anaesthetic.
Scott—who says he administered over five hundred such treatments in his career—had to use “a great deal of caution” with the drug—too fast, and his patient would slip into unconsciousness, too slow, and Steve would just be enveloped by giddiness.
“[It was] just to take the edge out of the brittleness of emotion,” Scott explains. But it didn’t work. If the serum helped Scott uncover any secrets in Steven’s brain, he wasn’t telling anyone. No findings appear in the available files for the next two months.
On April 9 and 10, over a period of “five hours of treatment,” Scott gave Steven four hundred grams of LSD. More doses soon followed, and Scott noted he planned to use the drugs again “in about five to six months.” Once again, the psychiatrist was disappointed.
“His reaction during the five hours of treatment was remarkably over-controlled,” Scott reported. “He lay on the bed with eyes in an upturned position. He had a gentle smile on his face but he felt very little.… From time to time his back would straighten and arch tightly, raising his body on his toes and his head.”
The medical staff kept a close watch on their drugged patient in the next twenty-four hours. The logs record Steve saw “many beautiful and desired memories together with gritty childhood recollections”—but no confessions to murder. Today, Steve remembers only a vague feeling of disorientation and a vision of bright, flashing lights.
Scott seemed unwilling to shake his belief the young prisoner was hiding something, despite turning up nothing on his drug-assisted expedition into the far reaches of Steve’s unconscious mind. “At times I feel there is nothing to investigate in this case.… He [is] so controlled, so pleasant and so objective that certainly there must be in his subconscious a tremendous control for commanding details,” Scott wrote in May of 1965. “The rapport between Truscott and myself is good, but I will have to continue to see him for some time yet before even the slightest break in the case occurs.”
The good rapport appears to have been largely in Scott’s mind; for his part, Steve was now increasingly alarmed about the psychiatrist’s designs. “Was Dad able to reach him?” he asked his parents in early May, desperate for them to help him. “If so, what did he have to say about this next test he’s going to do? He told me that he wasn’t going to do anything until I said I was guilty, or if I could convince them that I didn’t do this. I said that I’d go along with him … but only if at the end of the tests nothing comes up he would go along with me—and he didn’t say anything. He’s got his mind set that I’m guilty and there’s no chance of me changing his mind.”
Doris Truscott remembers her frustration. “The tests they gave him did not prove that Steve was guilty, but Scott said it did not change their opinion. Well, I thought, ‘They’ve got their minds made up. Nothing’s going to change their mind.’”
Still, on Sunday, May 23, Steve’s parents spent an hour with their son, trying to convince him to keep cooperating with Dr. Scott. “I have always instilled in Steven the importance of staying in line,” his military father assured an official in the Office of the Commissioner of Penitentiaries in Ottawa.
In his own calm way, though, Steve was holding firm against Scott. “Dad, no matter what I say to him I have the feeling that he thinks I am not telling the truth,” he wrote. “Dr. Scott on one of his first visits told me that if I did not admit to the charge or that if I did not truly convince him that I did not commit the crime, he would not put in a favourable report to the parole board.”
Increasingly convinced that the doctor he had authorized to use drug treatments on his son had a hidden agenda, Dan Truscott made a bold demand to prison officials in late May of 1965. “I request that Dr. Scott be taken off the case,” Dan wrote, asking authorities to let an independent doctor chosen by the family examine their son.
The Truscotts wanted to bring in Dr. John Rich, a visiting lecturer in child psychiatry at Queen’s University in Kingston, who specialized in adolescent problems. In principle, federal prison authorities did not raise any objections to the idea, but they seemed in no hurry to give an outside doctor access to Dr. Scott’s patient. Months dragged on before the Truscotts got a straight answer.
Meanwhile, in June of 1965, Dr. Scott and Steven confronted each other in the small office on the second-floor hospital ward of the prison.
“It was pointed out to him that unfortunately he is looked upon as a guilty party,” the psychiatrist reported. “As such he therefore committed an offence which he will not recognize.” Scott told Steven that psychiatric treatment was directed toward getting him to face his guilt “squarely rather than keeping it away from his mind.” Or, if he was erroneously convicted, “eventually some information will come up which will completely free him.”
Scott recorded there was anger in Steve’s voice as the inmate pointed out “what a difficult position he was in.” Doctors were suspicious because he was so controlled, Steve explained, but getting mad and expressing himself would only make himself get into a worse position than he was presently in.”
The young man’s complaint about his Catch-22 situation seemed to have some effect on the doctor. “The psychiatric side of the case was not directed at trying to prove that he was guilty, but was trying to assist him in facing the facts so that eventually he could be released,” Scott wrote.
The problem, of course, was that Steve disputed the very fact of his guilt that the psychiatrists wanted him to face. Over the summer, Scott and other experts he enlisted continued to probe Steven’s psyche. A psychologist instructed Steven to draw pictures of men and women in what was called—in all seriousness—the “drawing a person test.” Somehow the test conclusively showed that Steven exhibited signs of “egocentrism and narcissism,” as well as “aggression toward the female figure and a strong id
entification with the masculine image.”
At times, Scott contradicted himself: “He has not actually laughed in one interview that I have had with him over a period of years, although on many occasions I have found myself enjoying some of the conversation and laughing with him.”
But to the Truscotts, the stranglehold the prison psychiatrist had on their son’s future was no laughing matter. In September, a worried Dan Truscott wrote directly to Prime Minister Lester Pearson, asking what would happen to Steve’s chances of parole “if Dr. Scott … does not receive the answers he wants.” He again pleaded for help in arranging Dr. Rich’s visit to Collins Bay to examine Steven.
The prime minister’s office forwarded Dan’s letter to the justice minister. An executive assistant to the minister finally informed the cash-strapped family they could send in their own doctor “at your expense.” Rich would finally meet Steven in February of 1966, nine months after the Truscotts had made the request.
As Steven’s struggle with the prison psychiatric establishment continued, he took solace and strength from new friends and activities inside Collins Bay.
“You just live it day by day,” he remembers. “You don’t look ahead and you don’t look back. What comes up today—that’s what happens. There’s no way you can plan ahead. You don’t know whether you’re getting out in five years, ten years or twenty years.”
As he did in the Guelph training school, Steven displayed the ability to win over the hearts of usually hardbitten prison guards and officials. “Boy, he was great!” says supervisor Don Patterson. “Never got into a fight. He was cool, calm, collected. He had marvellous self-control for a young chap coming into prison. I thought, ‘Well, maybe he had all these pent-up emotions and if he ever broke down, what would happen?’ But that wasn’t the case at all—he was in control of himself all the while.”
As the months turned into years, Patterson’s admiration turned into something deeper: an abiding belief in the young inmate’s innocence. “You kind of study these people over the years; you get a pretty good handle on them,” he says. “You see this person and you speak to him. You realize that you don’t think he ever did it.”