by Julian Sher
This was the 1960s, after all, and the dawn of a new anti-establishment activism among young people unheard of during the conservative times when Steven was arrested. Other students in Ontario quickly rallied to the cause. In Toronto, fifty-five students from Victoria Park Secondary School signed a petition protesting that “a boy of our generation” may have been wronged. At a conference of the Ontario Older Boys Parliament meeting in Lansing, Ontario, a grade Twelve student spoke out on Steven’s behalf, and his classmates agreed to write to the prime minister. Five student leaders received wide press coverage when they arrived in Ottawa in late March to present one of many petitions to the House of Commons. The prime minister’s parliamentary secretary told them Pearson had a “personal interest” in the case—and gave them a letter for their principal asking that they be excused for missing school.
Within a few weeks, LeBourdais’ book had sold almost sixty thousand copies and its influence began to spread beyond the borders of Canada. The New York Times highlighted the story in early April. In England, the Sunday Telegraph called the book “brilliant,” and concluded “the elaborate system of criminal justice has plainly broken down.” The Sunday Express told readers the book was “most disturbingly convincing.”
Controversy and publicity were well and good, but what Steven needed was action. The pressure mounted as ordinary citizens debated the trial in local riding associations, community centres and churches. “We like to think that our courts are always just, if not infallible,” said the United Church Observer. “We expect that publication of this book will start things happening.”
It did. The Ontario legislature entered the fray when a Toronto newspaper interviewed Dr. John Addison, the family doctor who questioned Steve the night of his arrest. Addison said he told the boy “to confess, to tell the truth, that it would be a lot easier for him if he did.” That bothered one Liberal MPP, who wondered if it was normal practice for a doctor to interrogate a patient for the police. It was not, replied Arthur Wishart, the Ontario attorney general, who—despite his pledge in January to look into the case if it had merit—now insisted that the controversial dossier was entirely a federal matter. “I have no authority,” he said, even though it was an Ontario police and court system that jailed, tried and sentenced Steven.
It did not take long for the whirlwind to hit Parliament Hill. On March 7, James Byrne, a Liberal MP, called on the solicitor general to hold a royal commission into the Truscott trial, insisting the “cards were stacked” against the boy. “I personally am so convinced of this boy’s innocence that I am prepared if necessary to stake my seat in the House of Commons on the outcome of an inquiry or a royal commission,” he vowed. Ralph Cowan, a fellow Liberal, denounced Byrne’s declaration, condemning him for bringing the entire House into disrepute.
For the next month, there was a relentless barrage against the government from all three opposition parties. Tory opposition leader John Diefenbaker joined the call for some kind of inquiry. NDP House leader Stanley Knowles became Steve’s most outspoken defender, visiting him in prison and proclaiming on national television his faith in the young man’s innocence. “Sensing the kind of lad that he is and hearing him answer all my questions quite freely and quite straightforwardly … convinced me that he didn’t commit the crime, indeed convinced me that he couldn’t possibly have committed it,” he said.
James Byrne joined Knowles and Isabel LeBourdais on Betty Kennedy’s popular radio show in Toronto for a ninety-minute special. “I lost faith in the Canadian courts,” Byrne proclaimed. “I have lost faith in the legal profession.”
LeBourdais gained even greater celebrity status when she appeared on This Hour Has Seven Days, the most talked-about TV show of its time. The irreverent current affairs program on the CBC, hosted by Patrick Watson and Laurier LaPierre, was so controversial the network’s top brass eventually yanked it off the air. The program featured a lengthy interview with the book author they billed as “the defender of a boy murderer.”
“He had some scratches on his body?” the interviewer asked delicately, going through the evidence that helped convict Steve.
“He had injuries on his penis, if you want to call it by its right name,” LeBourdais said boldly, becoming perhaps the first person to use the word on national television. She then explained the conflicts and inadequacies of the medical testimony.
By confidently making such a bold accusation of a miscarriage of justice, was she not asking readers to believe that her judgment was better than that of the judges, jury and appeal court, the TV interviewer asked.
She had had more time than they did to investigate the intricacies of the case, LeBourdais responded. “I soon came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a sick boy who was guilty, but a perfectly normal boy who was innocent,” she said.
Viewers then saw a brief, touching interview with Steve’s mother. Her hair up in a beehive style, Doris Truscott patted the armrest of her sofa nervously as she talked about her only moments of intimacy with her son in a crowded visiting room at the prison.
The camera then cut to a visibly shaken Laurier LaPierre—this was still in the days when most network television was live, not taped. “Steven Truscott was sentenced to hang by the neck until dead,” the host said, as he moved his hands up to wipe away the tears forming in his eyes. “Doubts about his innocence, ladies and gentlemen, give urgency to the movement to abolish capital punishment,” he continued, his voice cracking. “Next week in the House of Commons the abolition bill will get first reading.”
That display of journalistic non-objectivity earned LaPierre a severe reprimand from his bosses and gave the corporation’s executives one more nail for the coffin of the show they were desperate to kill.
LaPierre’s words reflected how the debate over Steve’s fate became inextricably linked with another issue gripping the country—the abolition of capital punishment. “Truscott Furor Boosts Anti-hanging Hopes,” said the headline in the Toronto Daily Star, over a story that noted Steve’s case assumed a “new national significance” as Parliament prepared to debate the death penalty.
The timing was accidental, yet it was only natural the two debates merged. Reviewers of LeBourdais’ book had emphasized how close Canada came to hanging a fourteen-year-old that many people now believed was innocent. “If a case of such importance can be so badly bungled, even more alarming travesties of justice must be commonplace,” Saturday Night noted. “That we should retain the death penalty in a country where no one in a courtroom can be relied on to do his job conscientiously is incredible.” When the Globe and Mail canvassed public opinion in Clinton, an unnamed church minister told the paper: “Perhaps there is a lesson here for those about to consider the question of capital punishment in Canada. Human nature is susceptible to error. Think of the horror of discovering that error when it is too late to do anything about it.”
“I pray that never again in Canada shall a fourteen-year-old hear those dreadful words ‘to be hanged by the neck until you are dead,’” said one letter writer to the Toronto Daily Star.
Oddly enough, while the death penalty debate split the country, it was probably the only issue upon which Steve Truscott and the father of the girl he was accused of murdering agreed. “There shouldn’t be any,” Steve told a newspaper interviewer when asked about the death penalty. “Not just because of myself but because spending years in jail is a lot worse. You suffer in jail.”
Leslie Harper, considering the depth of his grievous loss, showed surprising compassion. He told the press he personally opposed the death penalty, calling it barbaric. He said a murderer should be forced to contemplate his deed every day from the confines of a jail cell. “[Lynne’s] death affected him tremendously,” recalls Leslie’s cousin James Harper. “After he retired from the military he went on to work with young offenders. I think it was because he wanted the connection with young people.”
Capital punishment was so contentious there was even a debate about the debate in
Parliament, as politicians wrangled over how to proceed. It was not the first time Parliament had wrestled with the issue. Between 1954 and 1963, individual MPs had introduced private abolition bills in each parliamentary session, each time ending in failure. This time there were six private members’ proposals, but the government also indicated some support. When Prime Minister Pearson decided to allow for a free vote on hanging, cheers erupted in the chambers.
The Commons, like the country, was evenly divided. One poll showed that fifty-eight MPs favoured outright abolition and another forty-three were for abolition with exceptions (for the murder of prison guards and police officers). Only eighty-four were firm retentionists or leaning that way. Ralph Cowan, the outspoken Liberal backbencher who opposed any review of the Truscott case, wanted to abolish hanging but replace it with the gas chamber. The remaining sixty-one MPs were undecided or undeclared.
On the weekend before the debate, Stanley Knowles visited Steve in prison and made no secret of the fact he saw the dispute over hanging and over the Truscott trial as one and the same. “This was one of the reasons I developed a particular interest in the case, and decided to go down and see him,” he said. “The discussions behind the curtains and in the lobbies [of Parliament] yesterday indicated there was a widespread feeling of ‘Thank God we didn’t hang this guy.’ I heard one Tory say that there were ‘lots more like him.’”
Prison officials were infuriated when Knowles published an account of his visit with Steve in a Toronto newspaper. The distinguished parliamentarian asked the convicted murderer if he harboured any bitterness. “No, not now,” Steven told him, “but there were times when it was more than a human being could take.”
Steve had only one question for his visitor. “What do you think of the chances of a public inquiry into my case?”
Knowles replied he thought they were good, but he would not predict the outcome of such an inquiry.
“I am not worried about that,” the young man said confidently. “I know if there is an inquiry, it will prove that I am innocent.”
Knowles was not the only politician suddenly making a trip to see the young man at the centre of a new political controversy. In the week prior to the capital punishment debate, James Byrne visited Collins Bay, and so did the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary, John Matheson.
It was all too much for the authorities. On March 23, Ottawa announced it would bar any more MPs from visiting Steven, even though it was a traditional practice to allow politicians access to prisoners. Penitentiary officials insisted they made the decision in Truscott’s best interest. “We just cannot have a succession of people going in to see him,” the warden said.
Back in Parliament, after a stormy and emotional debate over the death penalty, a compromise position won out. The Pearson government introduced and passed Bill C-168, limiting capital murder to the killing of on-duty police officers and prison guards. It would be another decade before Parliament tried again to completely abolish the death penalty—this time, under the leadership of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Behind the grey walls of Collins Bay, Steve only caught glimpses of the public furor over his trial and capital punishment. Except for the occasional newspaper article or radio report, he was sheltered from the controversy. Prison officials would not even let him have a copy of the LeBourdais book. “The warden explained to me that other inmates would steal it and might get fighting, taking sides over whether Steve was guilty or not,” Doris Truscott told the press. “When I told Steve, he said, ‘Yes, I see that.’”
“Don’t let these people get on your nerves,” Steve later wrote to his parents, telling them he was glad the book was selling so well, “so the more people that read it can see just how crooked the law can be when people put a little pressure on the police.”
The pressure was about to mount against Steve as well. The next year would see him rise to the pinnacle of public acclaim and crash to the depths of private despair. He was lucky that just at this time he made a new friend in prison who would help guide him through the turbulent days ahead.
Malcolm Stienburg was a rarity in a penitentiary—a prison chaplain with heart and brains. After graduating from Mount Allison University with a major in English and psychology, Stienburg went to Queen’s University for his master’s of divinity. Once ordained as a United Church minister, Stienburg served in small towns in Saskatchewan and southern Ontario. But he quickly tired of what he called the “pink tea circuit,” and at thirty-two years of age he jumped at the chance for a more exciting challenge inside prison walls. He did so with no liberal illusions about reforming lost souls. “If you lean a little bit toward the inmates you’re a con lover, if you lean too far toward the administration you’re a joint man,” he says. “So you can’t win. It’s a very tough line to walk. You burn out very quickly.”
Collins Bay had never had a full-time chaplain, and in early 1966, Stienburg was determined to make his post more than a house call from God. “I need about half a dozen inmates who I can trust to tell what kind of programs they need,” he told the administration. One of the inmates suggested Steve join the group. Stienburg took an immediate interest in the boyish-looking inmate with the constant smile.
“Steve was a very quiet kid, polite, with a bit of that wry sense of humour,” Stienburg remembers. “He was always at Sunday service. It wasn’t terribly important for him in terms of his own personal faith or beliefs, but it got him out of the ‘drum’ Sunday morning.” Steve became a regular visitor to the Protestant chapel at the far end of the prison courtyard, playing endless games of cribbage and four-hand euchre, talking the hours away with the padre.
In one of his first encounters with Steve, Stienburg asked his new card partner a simple question. “I said, ‘How could you possibly make the adjustment from a fourteen-year-old boy riding your bike around the community to a convict facing life in prison?’ And his answer was, ‘You either adjust or you die.’ And he adjusted.”
Adjusting to prison life was one thing; adjusting to being one of Canada’s best known inmates was quite another. As the winter’s snow began to melt from the prison yards, Warden Fred Smith wrote to Steve’s parents, advising them their son was “pale and strained.” He told the Globe and Mail the publicity around the case was unnerving the prisoner: “I was worried about the effect that all this pressure might have on the boy,” Smith said.
In fact, the more serious pressures on Steven had to do with psychiatry, not publicity. His long-running private battle with the prison psychiatrists was coming to a head. On March 22, NDP member of Parliament Andrew Brewin showed reporters a copy of the letter J. R. Geoffrion, executive assistant to the justice minister, sent to Steve’s parents in the previous fall. “The penitentiary authorities are hopeful that Steven may be encouraged to abandon his so-called defence strategy when discussing his offence and be absolutely frank with the psychiatrist, who is only acting with a view to help and assist the patient,” the cabinet aide wrote, in effect saying Steve should ’fess up and come clean.
To avert any scandal, A. J. MacLeod, federal commissioner of penitentiaries, assured the media that prison psychiatrist George Scott never tried to force Steven into admitting guilt. “I know Dr. Scott well, and pressure would not be an appropriate word.” Warden Fred Smith also denied there was any problem. “This is ridiculous. There has been absolutely no pressure.”
But Scott’s private records from the time reveal a more complicated story. Scott had been trying to convince Steven to consider going to Penetang, an institute for the criminally insane, for a period of five to six months. “They will never get me to go to any bughouse except in a box,” Steve told his parents.
“Scott sometimes had a cavalier attitude that he was one hundred per cent sure [about an inmate],” Malcolm Stienburg remembers. “He would say to the inmate, ‘I think your problem is this, this and this. I want you to go away to think about that for a while.’ Amazingly, the inmate comes back next month with a g
reat penetrating insight—‘Yes sir, Dr. Scott, you’re right on the nose.’ Scott would then write down that the inmate has developed insight into his problems.”
But Scott’s easy formula was not working with Steven, and his dismay was evident in his log entry for February 22, 1966:
The problem of his innocence or guilt plays a role in my particular attitude toward [him]. He states that he is not guilty of the offence and this must be accepted as his statement. The fact that he was found guilty in the traditional courts of Canada is a factor of extreme importance. If he’s guilty and is not admitting it then this implies that there is a complete repression of the problems involved.
This case presents an extreme dilemma from the psychiatric point of view because no matter what is done by psychiatry in this case, it is going to be suspected of forcing this man into the admission of guilt whether he’s guilty or not.
Increasingly frustrated with the obstinate young prisoner, Scott wrote the head of medical services in the Office of the Commissioner of Penitentiaries. Scott had tried to treat Steven with all the available techniques, but now he wanted to call together a psychiatric panel of leading experts to figure out what steps to take next. It was partly a therapeutic exercise and partly an attempt to cover his political backside.
By late March, Scott had pulled together an impressive panel of experts: Dr. Ronald Briggs, the director of the child and adolescent psychiatric clinic at the Kingston General Hospital; Dr. Robin Hunter, the head of the department of psychiatry at Queen’s University; and Dr. John Pratten, the superintendent of the Ontario Hospital. Another penitentiary psychiatrist, Dr. Robert McCaldon, would chair the panel. Each man was to interview Steven separately and then meet with his colleagues for an evaluation.
Scott asked the board to determine if they would “recommend further probing to enable Truscott to come to grips with his problem.” Among the possible avenues of treatment, Scott suggested more truth serum and nitrous oxide, a transfer to the Penetang institution, and group therapy with another convicted young murderer who admitted his offence. In one particularly revealing question, Scott asked his fellow doctors, “Do you agree that the LSD treatments and the pentothal [truth serum] should not be recorded on his prison file, as they are distinctly privileged relationships?” It is certainly possible that the only distinct privilege Scott wanted to preserve was his right to administer drug treatments without controversy.