by Julian Sher
As a prison guard, of course, Patterson was used to convicts’ tales of woe. “Inmates will tell you tales that long,” he laughs, stretching his arms far apart. But Steve was different, he insists. “A lot of people had the same feelings about that young lad, yes indeed.”
Joe Fowler, Steve’s instructor at the machine shop, was coming to the same conclusion. “The warden had told me, ‘He’s just a kid, just another kid,’ but he turned out to be a good kid,” Fowler says. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody. He wouldn’t hurt a mouse. You’d trust him anyplace.”
That trust took concrete form when Fowler worked with Steve for several months on a special project. Both teacher and student were tired of lugging their heavy toolboxes around the prison grounds. So they took a clutch from a stone crusher, a small motor from a lawn mower, metal and trimmings from discarded appliances—and fashioned an odd-looking cross between a dune buggy and a go-kart. Once completed, it had two seats, a small hood and—most important for the two busy repairmen—a trunk in the back to store their tools. Fowler and Steve drove everywhere in their contraption to make their repair calls, sparking waves and laughs from inmates and staff alike. “He looked like King Farouk,” Fowler says, remembering Steve’s proud smile.
Remarkably, Fowler even got permission to take Steve outside the prison walls in their vehicle. Just beyond the confines of Collins Bay lay a vast prison farm annex, where minimum-risk inmates raised animals and harvested some food for the penitentiaries in the area. Since Steve and Fowler frequently had to repair machinery on the dairy farm, their little car was the easiest way to make the journey. But it meant one of Canada’s most celebrated convicted murderers was roaming around open fields with nothing standing between him and freedom except a small farm fence.
Fellow inmate Ted McGuin remembers watching Steve with envy. “He’d drive out that gate every day and go over to the annex. I’m sorry, you’d only have to give me one chance and I wouldn’t have been back.”
But Joe Fowler wasn’t worried about Steve.
“I told him, ‘Don’t you try to run away!’” Fowler says.
“Oh, no, Mr. Fowler, I wouldn’t do that.”
And he never did. “I just knew in my heart he wouldn’t escape,” Fowler insists. “It wouldn’t be hard for him to knock me off and run to freedom. But he wasn’t going to run. I knew. I just knew—it’s not very often you can say that. He was as true as he could be. Never lied to me.”
As Fowler’s respect for the boy grew, so did his doubts about Steve’s conviction. One day, the machine shop instructor even made a trip out to Clinton to see for himself how far the bridge was from the highway. “How in the hell could the police say he couldn’t see the car!” he says. “They tried to make a liar out of him—that’s the way I kind of looked at it.”
“I could not see the boy doing what they said he did,” Fowler continues. “He didn’t have the character for that. Not a mean hair on his hand. I guess that’s what convinced me he didn’t do that crime. I know in my heart he didn’t kill anybody. I was too close to him, for too long.”
When Steve wasn’t working with Fowler in the machine shop, his favourite hangout was the radio room. From a small cubicle jammed with old records and even older equipment, Steve could broadcast news and music throughout the prison (every prisoner had a radio in his cell with the choice of two in-house stations). Every morning, Steve would get up thirty minutes before the other prisoners, fire up the system and put on some rousing music. Over the public address system, he told the inmates to get ready for the guards’ count of the prisoners. Then he selected two local radio stations—country music was always a favourite—and plugged them in for the day. In the evening, Steven would read news bulletins from the administration, play records by request and announce upcoming sports activities.
His radio job gave Steven something to do in the evenings—the loneliest part of the day. “The ones that get in trouble are the ones that sit around and do nothing. And then what do you think about—the outside?” Steve says. His disc jockey career also provided the setting for Steven’s only run-in with the administration in all of his years at Collins Bay. One night, a kitchen staff member made coffee for some inmates and had no milk; Steve gave him a can of milk they kept in the radio room. The next day, the kitchen helper returned the milk to Steve, who put it in his coat pocket and forgot about it. That night, during a frisking, guards found the milk and accused him of stealing it from the kitchen.
The following day, the deputy warden called the machine shop and told Fowler he was docking Steve thirty days of good time for the theft. “Tell him he can have all my good-time days,” Steve joked to Fowler. Both of them knew that an inmate serving life did not get any time off for good behaviour.
Among the other inmates, Steve’s closest friends were two other lifers, John and Chuck. Both men, in their early thirties, were serving time on murder charges. It was ironic that after drifting from one military base to another as a child without long-term friends, then spending three years at the Guelph reform school watching other juveniles come and go, Steven finally found a sense of permanency with convicted murderers.
But prison life had its own set of rules. “You didn’t hang around short-timers because it hurt too much,” Steve explains. “You meet a short-timer, he’s in and out, so why become friends with him? You kind of form your friendships with someone who’s in for the same time as you so that you know you’ve got a friend here for a long time.”
Still, for all his success in building some semblance of stability inside prison, the one inescapable fact was that a normal life with his family and friends was passing him by. Steve tried hard to keep a grasp on familial ties. In his letters home, he asked about his brother Bill’s hockey tournaments, his sister Barb’s skiing classes and his older brother Ken’s school work. But a few words scrawled on prison stationery were hardly a satisfying substitute for family life. Ken would move out of his parents’ house and get married; Bill and Barb grew from the siblings Steve had to babysit into young adults. Except for brief chats in a barren prison visiting room, Steve would miss all of that.
John Carew, one of Steve’s childhood friends, came by the prison while he was attending the nearby Royal Military College in Kingston. Any hopes for a warm reunion evaporated in the chasm that now separated the former baseball buddies. “The visit was embarrassing for both of us,” Carew recounts. “I just felt so helpless that here was a kid that I played sports with and was a schoolmate. But it was just so awkward. Maybe if we’d been in touch before that it might have been easier, but everything was so different for each of us.”
The twelve men who put Steven in prison appeared to show no regrets as the years passed. The jurors of Huron County who had sentenced Steven Truscott in 1959 organized a picnic several years later to keep in touch. “It was only a social gathering, it had nothing to do with the trial,” explained the wife of jury foreman Clarence McDonald when the media got wind of the bizarre affair. “The men all became good friends at the trial and thought it would be a good idea to get together for picnics and things.”
Former juror Wilmer Dalrymple defended the socializing, saying, “We got to know each other pretty well in the two weeks we were locked up together at the trial, and we thought our wives and kids should get together too.” His wife said they received Christmas cards from several other jurors.
Pausing for a moment to think about the boy her husband had found guilty, Mrs. Dalrymple told a newspaper she thought Steven should be released from prison. “After all, he’s not the only one to blame if he did it,” she said. “It’s his parents [who] were at fault in raising him the way they did.”
But the jurors’ satisfaction over their decision would be short-lived. Isabel LeBourdais’ controversial book on the trial was about to be published.
As James King tells it in Jack, his biography of Jack McClelland, by late 1964 LeBourdais had grown disillusioned and bitter with Jack McClelland, espe
cially after her mother died. “She died without ever knowing that the book was published, or that I had succeeded in doing anything to save the boy she had grown to care about so much,” she wrote. The next year, McClelland told her, “We would like to publish the book, but only if you will stick to the facts and not tilt at windmills.”
LeBourdais instead recruited a trusted friend and lawyer, Ted Joliffe, to help her break her contract with the reluctant publisher. She also arranged for Joliffe to visit Steven in prison. She explained to the Truscotts that Joliffe, a left-wing activist with strong ties to the CCF party, had vetted her manuscript and was now intimately familiar with the case. “He intends to stay on the job with us until Steven’s conviction has been reversed and the truth has been proved.”
LeBourdais then went to London, England, and had little problem convincing Victor Gollancz—a respected publisher with progressive sympathies—to publish her book uncensored and undiluted. He promised he would export copies to Canada, even if that meant he lost money. It was only at that point that McClelland & Stewart leapt at the chance to publish a Canadian edition. It was a sad and embarrassing moment—a story about a pivotal Canadian trial first had to find foreign support before Canada’s own publishing industry took it seriously.
“I shall always probably feel somewhat acid about Jack McClelland because of his refusal to take a courageous stand on my book until after Gollancz had done so,” LeBourdais noted to a friend.
But at least Steve’s story would get out. “Progress!” LeBourdais announced triumphantly to the Truscotts. The book would be published in England on January 13, 1966, and soon after that in Canada. “This time, there will be no glitches and no cowardice on the part of the publisher or his lawyer,” LeBourdais wrote. “With any luck, 1966 should see us making news.”
In her wildest dreams, she could never have foreseen how right she would be.
PART THREE
THE PUBLIC BATTLE: 1966–1967
“I soon came to the conclusion that it wasn’t
a sick boy who was guilty, but a perfectly
normal boy who was innocent.”
—Isabel LeBourdais
“A bad trial remains a bad trial.
The only remedy for a bad trial is a new trial.”
—Supreme Court Justice Emmett Hall
32
A NATIONAL DEBATE
It did not take long for Steve’s story to start making headlines.
The Trial of Steven Truscott was scheduled for release in Canada only in March, but the publisher sent advance copies of LeBourdais’ book to newspaper editors and members of Parliament. “Book Disputes Evidence on Which Boy Convicted of Murder,” the Globe and Mail reported in late January, a hint of the furor to come. “If there seems to be any merit in it, I’ll look into it at once,” Arthur Wishart, Ontario’s attorney general responded in a declaration he would soon regret.
For Steven, who had just turned twenty-one behind bars, the publicity was heartening. “I read several articles in different papers about the book and they were pretty good,” he wrote his parents in February. “So I’m praying that things work out okay, as I sure want out of here.”
It was quite unlike anything the Canadian public—not to mention politicians and police—had ever seen. An investigative book was still a rarity in the 1960s. A book challenging the judicial system was unheard of; that the book was written by a female made it all the more unusual. In the quaint language of the times, many headlines referred to LeBourdais as a “woman writer” or even as a “widow.”
A Toronto Daily Star columnist, Ron Haggart, captured the uniqueness of LeBourdais’ work: “The new kind of journalism for Canada: the review of the judicial process by an intelligent, rational and inquisitive layman who sets out to re-investigate and re-try a case without the preconceived notions of the police and without the artificial and frequently stupid restrictions of the courtroom.” Even if LeBourdais was wrong about Steve’s innocence, he wrote, “the book is a terrible revelation of the bumptious elegance, the pretense and the ritualistic nonsense which afflicts the Canadian courtroom.”
LeBourdais had gone back and carefully read the hundreds of pages of court transcripts—something no reporter covering the trial in 1959 ever thought of doing. She interviewed many of the child witnesses and talked to families on the air base. Basic journalistic methods—but in the uncritical mindset of the times, few observers saw the police and the courts as fair targets of scrutiny. LeBourdais changed the rules.
Her book exposed for the first time some of the glaring problems with Steve’s conviction: the constantly changing stories of Butch George, the improbabilities in Jocelyne’s tales, the contradictions in the medical testimony, the dubious police tactics and the bias of the presiding judge. One of her most frightening revelations was the prejudice some of the jurors felt toward Steve from almost the opening of the trial.
“I knew the boy was guilty right from the start,” one juror admitted to Isabel LeBourdais when she interviewed him a year after the trial. “I had no doubt from the beginning, but I did not form any conclusions until the end,” said another. Perhaps the mood of the twelve men from Huron County was best summed up by the angry words of the juror who admitted, “I knew by the third day no one was going to prove that young monster innocent. If we’d had to stay there all winter to convict that fiend, I’d have stayed.”
A passionate appeal for justice by a passionate crusader, the book had an openly partisan approach that rankled even sympathetic reviewers. Arthur Maloney, a former MP and head of the Canadian Society for the Abolition of the Death Penalty called LeBourdais’ book an “eloquent plea” in his critique for the Globe and Mail, but noted “she is guilty of the biased emotional approach” she decried among the jurors. Kildare Dobbs in Saturday Night magazine felt the book was “marred by bias.” Still, its power impressed him. “We see clearly that the Truscott trial was a solemn farce,” he wrote. “At best the Truscott trial was shockingly careless.”
Unaccustomed to such bold challenges to their traditionally sacred profession, the defenders of the legal system—even those with no direct stake in the Truscott case—fought back with surprising venom. Joseph Sedgwick, one of Canada’s leading criminal lawyers, denounced the book as “an unwarranted attack on the processes of justice” in a front-page article in the Toronto Daily Star. At a panel discussion on the book in Toronto, Clay Powell, a prosecutor with the attorney general’s department, warned the book “could lead to the eventual destruction of Canada’s judicial system.”
Not unexpectedly, The Trial of Steven Truscott struck a particularly sensitive nerve in Goderich and Clinton. The Goderich Signal-Star accused LeBourdais of carrying out a “vicious vendetta” against the county. According to one headline, jurors denounced her as a “City Author Chasing a Buck.” Referring to the biased justice in the racially torn southern United States, one city official complained, “The worst thing is that people are liable to think this is some kind of Dallas—you know, Goderich, the Dallas of Canada.”
“Residents freely admit that many … felt a hostility toward the young suspect and his parents at the time,” the Globe and Mail reported. “But they say also that none of those feelings influenced the jury into deciding the fourteen-year-old boy was guilty.”
What seemed to frighten many people was the unsettling prospect that if their community had erred about Steven in 1959, it exposed a much wider crack in their belief system than they were willing to contemplate. “If we can’t have confidence in our courts, what kind of country have we got?” asked John Livermore, the clerk treasurer of the town of Clinton. “As far as I am concerned, it’s closed.” Others, however, were willing to consider the unthinkable. An unnamed lawyer told a newspaper he felt a “sense of hurt” over the case: “A hurt for what has happened to Steven, of course, but more than that I think, a hurt because that system of justice in which we all believe showed its fallible human side and let us down by erring.”
> A reporter came across former juror Sidney Pullman, engaged in a debate with his business partner, Lorne Dale. The two men confessed they argued all the time about the merits of the case. “As long as I live, I’ll never believe he did it,” Dale said. “I think the boy’s trial was unfair. There’s a lot of things that were never brought out at the trial, things that should have helped that boy.”
Pullman, on the other hand, defended his colleagues on the jury as “a fine group,” although he was not above admitting there was a fair amount of bias against Steven. “Even if they might have felt the boy was guilty when they went into court,” he said, “I think they were fine enough to judge the case on the evidence.”
“I still think he was guilty and my conscience is clear,” said his fellow juror, Anson Coleman. “I am getting sick and tired of it,” added juror John Dietz. “You’d think we were the guilty ones.”
In a front-page editorial, Wilma Dinnin, the editor of the Clinton News-Record called for “personal soul-searching.” Describing LeBourdais’ work as “well-documented, well-researched, well-written,” she was all too aware that many of her fellow citizens were not keen on reopening old wounds.
“There will be those in this area … who will say: ‘Why do they have to go into all that again?’” she wrote. But Dinnin had a ready answer. A young man has just turned twenty-one after spending six years in prison, she pointed out, “and to him, we believe ‘all that’ is important.”
Certainly, some of the young people in town agreed with her. Over 190 students from Clinton’s Central Huron Secondary School signed a petition calling on the federal solicitor general to take action. One of the petitioners was Gord Logan, the boy whose testimony about seeing Steve and Lynne cross the bridge the jurors refused to believe.