Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  An October 1 telegram from the OPP in Barrie, Ontario, revealed that another ex-inmate told the police he “never overheard Truscott ever talk about the crime.” On October 2 came a report from the Burlington OPP that six other former prisoners said the same thing. The prison barber who cut Steve’s hair said the boy was “the quiet type [who] never said anything about the case.” A friend of Steve’s who worked with him in the radio room for two years told the OPP “he had discussed the case with him many times. Truscott always maintained he was innocent.”

  In the end, Graham had to accept his quest for someone to back up Glover’s tale of a jailhouse confession was hopeless. An inspector informed him that the police had no luck with the twenty names supplied by Glover. “All that could be located were interviewed but none will corroborate [his] statement.”

  Graham quietly dropped the matter. In the meantime, the OPP hoped they could come up with something new from a series of tests they were conducting in Clinton.

  The police went back to the evidence of the bicycle tire marks found in the dry, cracked earth near the crime scene in 1959. In 1966, the OPP identification unit contacted two professors at the University of Guelph who specialized in soil analysis. Both men, unfortunately, said the photographs indicated the tire tracks were made after a heavy rainfall of at least a quarter of an inch. The last recorded rainfall of that amount occurred May 31, more than a week before Lynne disappeared.

  New footprint evidence looked more promising for the police. In May of 1966, Dennis Alsop—the same identification officer Graham recruited at the last minute before the 1959 trial, hoping to get a match from the scuff marks found near Lynne’s body—began another series of tests. He made enlargements from the negatives and found the vertical ridges on the outside edge of the sole of Steve’s right shoe were “consistent” with the marks near the body.

  “It is my opinion that the characteristics found in the impression at the scene could have been made by the shoes that I received … on September 11, 1959,” Alsop, now a detective sergeant, wrote. A second identification expert, Cpl. M. I. T. Peer, determined the marks “appear similar to the lines … imprinted into the earth.” He concluded they were made by Steven’s shoe or—in an important qualification—“by shoes of a similar type of manufacture.” It was far from conclusive, but it was the best the OPP was going to get.

  The police also carried out research for the two key visual debates at the trial. First, could Gord Logan, standing 642 feet away at the swimming hole, see Steven at the bridge? Second, could Steven see the colour of a licence plate on a car thirteen hundred feet away at the highway?

  On June 16, provincial constable A. Twaddle, standing where Gord Logan said he spotted Steve and Lynne, was able to identify nine different vehicles crossing the bridge, what colour they were, and at times even the number of occupants in the cars. When two young girls came to the bridge on their bicycles (much like Steve and Lynne did) Twaddle could see one girl wore pink slacks and a brown coat, while the other wore black slacks and a white sweater. “The girls at this time would possibly have been recognizable to us if they were previously known, mainly due to clothing,” he said.

  Perhaps dismayed by this apparently strong endorsement of Gord’s claims, the police dispatched another team to redo the same test on July 14. They reported that this time all four officers present “agreed that it was impossible to identify anyone on the road or bridge.”

  That same day, the police also ran tests from the bridge. They found two civilians, gave them notepads and told them to mark down what they saw as an OPP officer drove by the spot where Steve said he saw Lynne get in the car. The officer drove a light grey 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne, on which he affixed different-coloured licence plates in six separate tests. “The tests proved to all observers that it is impossible to see the colour of any licence plate,” Inspector R. A. Ferguson reported.

  The statement was not quite accurate. The first observer noted glare on the rear bumper three times. Steve’s lawyer had suggested the yellow markings Steve claimed to have seen could have been reflection from the sun. The second test subject saw the glare twice. He also easily spotted the driver (Steve had said he could make out at least one person in the car) and once he thought he saw an orange plate (it was yellow). When a police corporal tried the test, he did even better, choosing colours that were close or matching three times out of five. All the observers could easily make out the year and model of the vehicle.

  The Crown never entered any of these police tests into evidence before the Supreme Court. It had not been a rewarding summer for the OPP investigators.

  For all his fervour in pursuing the Lynne Harper case against Steven Truscott, Assistant Commissioner Harold Graham did not pick up the trail of one of the most suspicious men around the base at the time of the murder: Sgt. Alexander Kalichuk, the alcoholic airman who had been arrested shortly before Lynne’s disappearance for attempting to pick up a young girl in his car.

  Since his release from a psychiatric hospital in the summer of 1959, Kalichuk’s thirst for liquor had shown no signs of diminishing—and there were signs that his appetite for little children remained as well. Kalichuk’s farm was only twenty minutes from the Clinton air base, but his attempt in the fall of 1959 to get a posting there had been rebuffed by the Clinton brass, who did not want the known predator on their base in the midst of all the publicity around the Truscott trial. Kalichuk settled for the nearby Centralia station, and it did not take long for problems to re-emerge.

  “Police Warn Parents: Young Girls Molested,” ran the front-page headline in the local paper, the Exeter Times-Advocate. The Goderich OPP issued a bulletin on “a male person attempting to entice young girls into his car on township and county roads.” Sergeant H. T. Barker said the police were investigating two recent incidents: a thirteen-year-old who ran away from a man to avoid abduction, and a seven-year-old who was “forced into [the man’s] car, but released after she screamed and yelled at length.”

  “Molesting Continues,” the newspaper reported one month later, noting that “police remain concerned about continuing attempts … to pick up young girls.” There had been four incidents involving girls ranging in age from six to fourteen. The police were never able to identify a suspect, but the air force certainly had its suspicions. J. J. Young, the social worker who had handled the Kalichuk case in 1959, made reference to the community’s concerns when he updated the airman’s file in the 1960s. “The number of reported incidents were frequent enough that the local papers were reporting them,” he wrote in a report on Kalichuk. “At that time, I let the then commanding officer at Centralia know.” Apparently, nobody on the air force staff bothered telling the police they thought they knew the identity of the molester.

  Kalichuk eventually got his transfer to RCAF Clinton in early 1965. And it was there that Willard “Bud” Longley stumbled across his file. Longley was a flight lieutenant and the personnel administration officer at the base. “I discovered a misfiled psychiatric report on an airman … which filled me with foreboding,” he says. Longley was curious why Alexander Kalichuk had been traumatized by guilt and hospitalized so soon after Lynne’s murder. “I briefed my commanding officer on what I had found, and he authorized and encouraged me to investigate the individual to whatever depth it might take to determine whether this airman might be the real murderer.”

  Brigadier General K. W. Greenway, now retired, confirms he gave his assistant the go-ahead to launch an investigation. “Longley was very good at documenting things,” he says. Longley says he spent fifty hours a week tracking down Kalichuk’s records, his whereabouts before and after Lynne’s disappearance, the sale of his car shortly after the girl’s murder, and his hospitalization. “I became totally obsessed with this case,” he remembers. “My investigation was peculiar. I couldn’t come right out and ask questions. I had to keep it a secret so no one would know I was asking about him.”

  After three months, Longley felt he had
amassed “a mountain of material … that pointed a very accusing finger at the airman.” Longley claims Harold Graham then came to the Clinton base for a long meeting to discuss his findings. “I explained all the facts and concerns we had and, in fact, I opened the whole book to him,” Longley recalls. “I gave Inspector Graham the best … briefing that he could ever have been given.”

  But according to Longley, the OPP officer was not impressed. “Graham indicated the information was all really redundant and would make little difference to Steven’s situation because, as he put it, ‘Truscott had had his day in court,’” the air force investigator says. The meeting ended badly. “I lost my patience.… He was telling me to keep our noses out, and I was suggesting he should pull up his socks and do his job better. We didn’t shake hands. I was disgusted.”

  Harold Graham, for his part, denies he ever met with Longley at the Clinton station or anywhere else. “I would pick up on any sex offenders that came to my attention that might be of some interest,” he told the fifth estate, “and I don’t remember Kalichuk, the name, nor the meeting that somebody says I had with him.”

  Edith Baker, who worked as a secretary for Longley and Greenway, says, on the contrary, she distinctly remembers Graham coming to the base and walking past her desk to their offices for a meeting. Greenway, for his part, did not attend any meetings on Kalichuk but says of his officer, “Knowing Longley he would have kept the OPP involved.” The OPP says it no longer has Graham’s datebook for that period. The air force says it no longer has logbooks to show who visited the Clinton base at that time and it has no trace of any report being filed at military headquarters. So no official record is available to prove if a meeting between Graham and Longley ever took place.

  There is one intriguing piece of official correspondence from that time, however. On April 4, 1966, Kalichuk’s social welfare officer, J. J. Young, took the unusual step of writing a confidential memo to the commanding officer of RCAF Station Centralia about Kalichuk’s “aberrations when he had been at Clinton.” Military censors have whited out most of the document. Still, it was curious the air force brass would be discussing Kalichuk during the very weeks the Harper affair was once again hitting the front pages with news that the government was about to re-open the case.

  No further action was taken by the air force, and the Kalichuk file slipped into obscurity, where it would remain for another three decades.

  For Steve and his family, meanwhile, the summer and fall of 1966 was an upbeat, if anxious time. Isabel LeBourdais cheered them with news she was launching the Steven Truscott Defence Fund “because we know that Steve’s case must be handled without any thought of the cost.” The tireless campaigner assured the family, “This time Steven will get the strongest, fullest, and the most competent representation that it is possible to provide.” Usually a political cynic, LeBourdais allowed herself a brief burst of optimism. “Several years ago, I gave [Doris Truscott] my word that I would not stop until Steven’s name was cleared and he was home with her,” she wrote. “I think we are within sight of achieving this objective.”

  Not without a cost, however. Steve’s father suffered two minor heart attacks in the spring. “The doctor told him if he didn’t slow down, the next one would be fatal,” Doris wrote to LeBourdais. “But he’ll never change in any way.” Dan and Doris took a short break from their battles to celebrate a happy family event in July: the marriage of Steve’s older brother, Ken.

  If Steve was saddened as he watched his siblings grow up without him, he was not showing it. “The change in the past month is clear—he is far more self-confident and less immature,” Isabel LeBourdais reported after a brief visit in September. “The support of the lawyers and everyone else has pulled him out of his imprisoned teens.”

  Steve was upbeat in a letter he penned to his parents that month:

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I hope that you and the family are all fine and in good health. I read some stories in the paper the other day and was glad to see that things are starting to get underway. At last I guess I’ll be going to take the stand.… I sure hope the truth will come out this time.

  I hope to see you all soon, so long for now.

  Love,

  Steve

  When his parents came to visit, Steve informed them he had resumed playing trumpet and he had promised the other inmates he would blast it loudly on the day of his release. “The guys certainly are behind me on this thing,” Steve said. “They all wish me the best of luck. Even the guards have said they’re keeping their fingers crossed for me.”

  Malcolm Stienburg, the prison chaplain, could sense the groundswell of support for Steven. “An overwhelming percentage of inmates were really cheering for him, hoping that he would get released, and [so did] many, many of the guards as well,” the minister remembers. Stienburg tried to caution the young inmate as he sat across the table, playing cards in the prison chapel. “I said, ‘Look Steve—this is a court, and while I don’t think the courts would ever do anything deliberately dishonest, I think that they are very reluctant to change, too. Just don’t get your hopes built too high.’”

  But Steven could not help but have hope. “I want to testify and clear my name once and for all,” Steven told his mother. “He told me he’d come back and spend a few days cooking … when he got out,” Doris told reporters. “I warned him not to build his hopes up because he wasn’t out yet. You just don’t know—some funny things can happen.”

  Despite Doris’s worries, the papers reported that she, Dan and Ken came out of the prison happy, smiling, and confident that this would be one of their last visits to Steven in jail.

  * Penistan’s daughter Julia came forward in 2004 to say that she felt her late father had been pressured to support the police theory that Truscott was guilty. “I know, just from my dad’s body language and his quietness, that he took an awful lot of heat for what he found,” she said. “I’m sure he suffered internally for it.”

  34

  HIS DAY IN COURT

  The country sat transfixed as one of the most controversial legal dramas in the nation’s history played itself out on the national stage. A CBC documentary took viewers into the home of the Truscotts, where Dan and Doris proudly showed off the needlepoint, leatherwork and woodwork—including a dresser with a mirror and two desks—their son had crafted for them behind bars.

  “He has certainly missed the best years of his youth,” Dan said, describing the past period as “years of blankness.”

  “He missed going to a show with a girl, dancing, playing with other children,” Doris added. “I don’t know any ways society could pay back to Steve the years he has put behind bars.”

  The program ended with Steve’s parents making their way up the wide steps outside the Supreme Court of Canada. “I do feel that now that we have the highest court in the land dealing with the case, he will get a fair break at last,” Dan said optimistically. Doris, ever the cautious realist, added: “All we can do is hope and pray.”

  Ottawa’s decision to put the fate of Steven Truscott into the hands of the nine most senior judges in the country had as much to do with politics as the law. The preamble to the federal cabinet’s reference to the Supreme Court made no secret of the fact that the public outcry sparked by LeBourdais’ book had forced the government’s hand: “There exists widespread concern as to whether there was a miscarriage of justice in the conviction of Steven Murray Truscott, and it is in the public interest that the matter be inquired into.”

  At least one of the Supreme Court justices saw the influence of the public in the matter as a “dangerous precedent.” In a confidential memo, Justice John Cartwright expressed unease at the political time bomb that had landed on the court’s front doorstep. “We know the reference has been made to satisfy an aroused public opinion to the effect that Truscott’s trial was unsatisfactory and that he may well be innocent,” Cartwright said. “Unless every latitude is given to the defence, public opinion will b
e left unsatisfied. I cannot escape a feeling of regret that the government, having yielded to Mrs. LeBourdais’ cry for an inquiry, did not also accept her view that this court is not the proper tribunal to conduct it.”

  Justice Cartwright’s memo was a sign that—even before proceedings began—some of the Supreme Court justices might have been worried about the consequences of overturning Steven’s conviction. Four of the sitting judges had been on the court in 1960 when it refused Steven’s first appeal. If the court now ruled that Steven deserved a new trial, the justices in effect would be criticizing not only the original trial judge, but also their own decision in 1960.

  The stakes were high—not just for Steven, but for the credibility of the entire justice system. On October 4, the evening before the first day of public hearings into the Truscott case, Steve’s parents went to the Ottawa airport to meet the woman who, in the words of one newspaper, “aroused the nation and the government” to give their son a second chance. “It’s good to see you,” Doris said with a smile, as she embraced and kissed LeBourdais while the flashbulbs of the news photographers popped and reporters jostled for a quote. “This time, I’m sure the truth will come out,” Doris said, confidently telling the press that her son would be “home for Christmas.”

  Publicly, Isabel LeBourdais stayed positive and assured the Truscotts she was confident of victory. But the longtime warrior against the status quo had her private doubts. “Unfortunately, there is a grave danger that the desire not to upset the establishment apple cart … may be much stronger than the desire to do justice to one boy,” she wrote to a friend.

  “What do you think this is—a circus?”

  The Supreme Court clerk was outraged at all the spectators who had invaded the august chambers of high justice. He ordered the pushy onlookers to leave the overcrowded public benches in the courtroom or the hearing would not resume. One newspaper reported thirty-seven people, most of them women, rushed through the doors and grabbed all the available public seats. Steven “caused a stir among the crowd, particularly among the young women.”