by Julian Sher
Doris returned to her neat, three-bedroom bungalow, where Bill and Barb greeted the mother who had been a pillar of strength through all the years of legal defeats. “We won’t leave this house until Steve comes home,” she said.
Steve, as always, seemed to accept his fate. He wrote Isabel LeBourdais to ask her to send a message to his lawyers. “I never got a chance to thank them for a wonderful job they did,” he said. “I don’t think anyone could have done as well as what they did.”
The woman who more than anyone had stirred the public’s passions over the Truscott case was defiant to the end. “We didn’t lose, we were defeated, and there’s a difference,” LeBourdais told reporters. “The judgment of the land’s highest court cannot change my own personal view. I’d be hypocritical and inhuman if I change my opinion about Steven’s innocence now. I won’t give up trying to prove he’s innocent.
“I want him to be cleared more than I want him free,” LeBourdais continued. “What good is it for him to come out with a record like that? Who would give him a job? Who would welcome him into their homes? Who would let him date their daughters?”
Others involved in the case had a different view. For Leslie Harper, the father who had suffered the irreplaceable loss of his daughter, the Supreme Court’s decision was “purely anti-climactic.” He told the press, “I’ve believed for almost eight years the original verdict was right and just.” Lynne’s mother held her grief in private. “Mother doesn’t want to make any comment,” Lynne’s brother Barry, now twenty-five, said at the doorstep of his parents’ home. “She’s quite upset by it all.”
The key legal players from the 1959 trial were equally mum. “I’m through with it now,” said Justice Robert Ferguson. “It’s somebody else’s responsibility.” The once opposing lawyers—Frank Donnelly and Glenn Hays—had both since been promoted to the bench. “I’m not free to discuss it,” said Donnelly, a judge on the Ontario Superior Court. When reporters caught up with Glenn Hays, a magistrate in Goderich, he paused for a moment and then said simply, “I have no comment.”
Harold Graham, the police officer responsible more than anyone else for Steve’s arrest, was slightly more forthcoming. He told the press he took “no joy over it either way” but could not resist a small self-congratulatory note. “The case was carefully investigated by all concerned and we felt all along there was sufficient evidence to support the verdict reached,” the OPP assistant commissioner said.
For the jurors in Huron County who reached that verdict, there was relief in the confirmation of a job well done. “The best news I’ve heard in a long time,” said Walter Brown.
“We expected that. I couldn’t see how they could do anything else,” commented Harry Vodden.
Many people in Clinton, fed up with the bad name the entire affair gave their town, were also pleased. “Clinton Sighs with Relief,” the Toronto Daily Star proclaimed. John Livermore, the town clerk treasurer, echoed the views of those who saw the Supreme Court decision as a much-needed assurance the justice system was working properly. “If we can’t trust these things, what can we do?” he asked. “Now we can only hope that case is finally closed.”
The Truscott case was far from closed, precisely because if the Supreme Court decision restored some people’s faith in the law, it shattered the trust of many other citizens. The Truscott affair cut to the core of Canadians’ attitudes toward the judicial process, and for that reason the political storm it unleashed could not be contained. Many people—for and against Steven—felt it was not Steven Truscott but the justice system that was on trial.
In that sense, the Supreme Court ruling was as much a political verdict as a legal one. Ralph Cowan, the federal MP who so fervently opposed his government’s decision to refer the case to the Supreme Court in the first place, understood the significance of the verdict. It was the only decision the high court could make, he said. “Otherwise, it would have condemned the system of justice we have in Ontario and the dominion of Canada.” The London Free Press underscored what was at stake: “It would be regrettable indeed if public emotionalism or hysteria were permitted to denigrate or subvert our judicial processes.”
“Public emotionalism” was getting out of hand. Network TV showed pictures of dozens of young people protesting in Ottawa, carrying signs calling for “Justice for Steven Truscott Now.” “We felt the trial still left a reasonable doubt,” a college student said. “We feel the cabinet should take it upon itself to free the boy now.”
On Parliament Hill, the demand for the government to do something about Steven was intense, cutting across party lines. “He certainly is not going to benefit by further incarceration, and I feel there should be no delay in granting to him a release on parole,” Conservative opposition leader John Diefenbaker said. The NDP’s Stanley Knowles—probably the politician who had lobbied the hardest for Steve’s release—was crushed by the adverse ruling: “The boy will be out before long on good behaviour. This is not good enough. I’m still convinced he’s innocent.” Liberal James Byrne, who vowed to stake his seat on Steve’s innocence back in March of 1966, called the Supreme Court decision a terrible disappointment. “I don’t plan to give up my seat,” he said. “It may be contempt, but I remain convinced that he should have been exonerated.”
Monday, May 8, was the first day Parliament was back in session since the court ruling, and Steven Truscott’s fate was front and centre of the debate. Diefenbaker opened Question Period by asking Pearson if he was considering including Steven in the expected commutation of many prison sentences for Canada’s centennial year. Pearson said he would discuss it with the solicitor general and his newly named justice minister, Pierre Trudeau.
The NDP’s Andrew Brewin wanted the House legal affairs committee to study the questions the Supreme Court ignored, such as the unequal resources available to the defence and the Crown in 1959 and the community bias against Steven. Pearson refused.
Pearson, Trudeau and the rest of the cabinet had several choices—they could grant Steven an immediate pardon, speed up his parole, order a new trial or do nothing. The easiest thing for the politicians to do was to hide behind the rules. Parole regulations stated that a commuted death sentence required a prisoner to serve at least ten years. That meant Steven would only be eligible for parole in June 1969.
The NDP countered that cabinet made rules and could change them. “Government thinking on the matter is that would create a dangerous precedent if the cabinet were to change its own regulations in the face of this campaign,” the Toronto Daily Star reported, revealing that—as always—the Truscott case was as much about politics as it was about law.
The precedent for the government granting clemency in a high-profile case was not good. The only other recent parallel with the Truscott case was the trial of Wilbert Coffin. A Quebec court found Wilbert Coffin, a trapper, guilty of the 1953 slaying of three Pennsylvania hunters in a controversial trial. “L’affaire Coffin,” as it became known, stirred the passions of the province. Much like the Truscott trial, Coffin’s condemnation was seen as quick and shabby justice, a rushed verdict designed to placate the interests of the American tourism industry. Under intense pressure, the federal cabinet in 1955 asked the Supreme Court to rule on the original decision of the Coffin case. Unlike Steven’s review a decade later, the Court could not hear new witnesses or testimony.
In January of 1956, the Supreme Court agreed with the guilty verdict in a seven to two decision. (One of the dissenters, ironically, was Justice John Cartwright, who was still a member of the court when Steven’s case came up ten years later. Two other justices who decided Coffin’s fate—Abbott and Fauteux—also would sit in judgment over Steven.) The cabinet decided there would not be a new trial and declined to alter Coffin’s death sentence. He was hanged on February 10, 1959.
Years later, the controversy of the execution of Coffin still simmered. Jacques Hébert, a future senator, wrote a passionate bestseller with the provocative title J’accuse les as
sassins de Coffin. In 1965, the solicitor general in Quebec laid contempt charges against Hébert. The journalist was defended in court by his good friend, a young law professor named Pierre Trudeau.
Two years later, Trudeau was justice minister. Perhaps he thought of Hébert’s campaign as he pondered what to do about Steven Truscott. If he did, it did not seem to influence his opinion of the Truscott case.
Trudeau, Solicitor General Lawrence Pennell and Pearson would not grant Steve clemency or an early release. The prime minister announced his cabinet’s decision to the nation: “It is not our intention to take any action at the present time.”
Steven Truscott would stay in jail, a convicted murderer, until at least 1969, when he would get his first real chance at parole. Isabel LeBourdais visited Steven in prison shortly after the decision. “It may be a long haul still, but Steve … can stick it out,” she wrote to a friend. “He has a tremendous strength of character.”
He would need it. He would over the next years grapple with the breakup of one family and the birth of another. His battles were far from over.
* The Supreme Court of Canada was far more divided over the case than it let on and was also fearful that the chief justice, who was suffering from alcoholism and bad health, could be a public embarrassment during the Truscott hearings, according to a new book by political scientist Frederick Vaughan. In Aggressive in Pursuit, The Life of Justice Emmett Hall, Vaughan wrote that at least two of Hall’s colleagues told him they would support his dissent but then backed out at the last minute. The book also revealed that Chief Justice Robert Taschereau walked around his home in a dirty bathrobe and torn slippers, surrounded by discarded liquor bottles, dirty dishes and leftover meals. He resigned two months after the Truscott hearings concluded.
PART FOUR
THE PRIVATE BATTLE: 1967–1997
“I never once doubted him. Never once.
He stood his ground for what he believed in
and that was the truth.… And he always instilled
that in us—that if you wait and you’re a
good person, it’ll all come back to you someday.”
—Ryan Truscott
38
RELEASE
If Steve thought his life had hit rock bottom with his defeat at the Supreme Court in May of 1967, he was wrong. Just as he began to settle back into his routine at the machine shop at Collins Bay, his world crumbled. A few weeks after prison chaplain Malcolm Stienburg had told Steven about his legal setback, he had to deliver more bad news—but this time, the news struck much closer to home.
Stienburg got the call on a Saturday night. It was from Steve’s aunt in Windsor. “Look, I got something I think you should know and perhaps you want to do something about it. If not, he’s going to hear from other sources and it’s going to be destructive for him,” she told Stienburg. Steve’s parents, Dan and Doris, had separated, their marriage irrevocably shattered. “Will you tell Steve tomorrow?” the aunt asked.
“I had the night to think about it, because I had chapel services the next morning,” Stienburg says. The chaplain felt that Steve probably had an inkling all was not well on the home front; his parents had already begun visiting him separately in the last few weeks. Still, Stienburg feared the breakup would deeply affect the young man who depended so much on his family as a lifeline to the outside world. “I knew the strength of those ties and how much they meant for him,” he says.
The dilemma weighed on Stienburg’s mind as he delivered his Sunday sermon—he usually kept them short, he says, because “some of those inmates had the attention span of a louse”—while Steven sat in the stiff chapel chair, blissfully unaware. Stienburg walked up to him after services and quietly broke the news to him.
“It was like being hit over the head with a bat,” Stienburg recounts. “He had a wounded, hurt look. It was the toughest thing I have had to do.” Stienburg could see a thin film of water forming in the young man’s eyes.
Stienburg also saw that Steve was more concerned for his parents than for himself. “I don’t think there was much self-pity. It wasn’t ‘Poor me’—it was ‘Poor Mom, poor Dad.’ And there was an element of ‘if it wasn’t for me, they’d be together.’”
“It probably hit me harder than everything except the original trial,” Steven admits today. “I only saw my parents once a month. The only thing that means anything to you in the whole world is your family.”
After the Supreme Court defeat, Steve could retreat inside himself, comforted by the fact that he knew he was innocent and it did not matter what others thought. But he had no such refuge for this crisis. His parents’ looming divorce filled him with sadness and the nagging guilt that he was somehow responsible.
“No way,” his mother insists. “I think he felt he was maybe to blame, but it just wasn’t so.” Doris concedes the long battle to free her son was a great emotional and financial strain on the family, but her marriage simply fell apart when she and Dan stopped loving each other. “I don’t think it [Steven’s case] had anything to do with it all. We just didn’t get along,” she says.
Doris had endured her son’s ordeal with stoic resolve. But Dan’s emotions were much closer to the surface, and his passion to help Steve—while remaining a devoted father to his other children—exacted a heavy price. In the early 1960s, he had a mental collapse and spent a few weeks recovering at a psychiatric hospital in Quebec. It was not the first time; according to his air force medical record he had had a nervous breakdown in 1955.
Then, shortly after his breakup with Doris, Dan again sought psychiatric help. By late July, he wrote to Isabel LeBourdais that doctors had discharged him from the hospital “with a clean bill of health and one month’s supply of pills” (although he would seek more treatment within a couple of years).
The rest of the family did their best to pull together. Steve’s younger brother, Bill, who remained closest with Dan after the split, says the pressure of the unrelenting battle to free Steve “probably had quite a bit to do” with the strain in his parents’ relationship, since it dominated so much of their lives. “That became pretty much their whole life; it was pretty much all they talked about,” he remembers. “It just felt like you were in a hole and couldn’t get out.”
By this time seventeen, Bill drove down to the prison whenever he could to see his brother. “He always looked the same—upbeat about everything,” Bill said. “He never complained about anything.”
Steve’s older brother, Ken, meanwhile, went into a management training program at Woolco and landed a job as a department manager at one of the company’s Kingston stores, serendipitously located just across the street from the Collins Bay prison. “It felt a little funny but it was handy for me to go visit,” Ken says. Ken tried not to feel he was drifting away from Steve, but it was hard to have a conversation about everyday life with a brother who had grown up behind bars. “You’re not on the same track,” he remembers. “You don’t have as much in common when you’re having a conversation. You’ve outgrown building airplanes out of balsa wood.”
Meanwhile, Dan Truscott, once released from hospital, quickly plunged back into his efforts on Steve’s behalf. Dan kept in touch with sympathetic MPs on Parliament Hill; he also collected letters and petitions protesting the Supreme Court decision from across the country. “But all the petitions will not help,” he told LeBourdais. “What is needed is new, concrete evidence.”
In the wake of defeat at the Supreme Court, Steven’s supporters tried to dig up more evidence. The Steven Truscott Defence Committee placed full-page ads in the Huron Expositor newspaper appealing to eyewitnesses to come forward. “If anyone saw Lynne Harper that evening Steven Truscott can still be proved innocent!” the ad said, inspired by unconfirmed reports that Lynne had been spotted in Seaforth on the evening of June 9, 1959. “Do you know the names of those who said they saw her? Do you have any information?”
No one came forward with new information. LeBourdais became convinc
ed the only way to free Steve was to launch a new investigation to track down the real killer. But she could not convince any media outlets to invest the enormous time and money needed. Both Canadian Magazine and the Star Weekly, two major national publications, turned down her requests.
“I’m going to have to chicken out,” Peter Gzowski, then editor of the Star Weekly wrote to her, expressing “enormous admiration” for what LeBourdais had accomplished so far. “What you are onto is possibly the greatest magazine story of all time. But it’s also the most expensive.… I don’t think [we] … can afford to take the kind of calculated risk you require.”
LeBourdais even approached private investigators, only to discover the cost would be prohibitive. “They are quite frankly not at all encouraging,” she informed the Truscotts.
Doris did not want to abandon the fight to clear her son’s name, but she felt helpless. “What could you do? It really wasn’t an option,” she says. “We didn’t have the money, that’s for darn sure. How are you going to do it? You just can’t.”
One person who did not want to give up the battle was Marlene, the young woman from Guelph who five years earlier, in 1962, babysat for the Guelph couple when they went to see Steven and the other young offenders perform at the reform school’s Easter show. Marlene grew up just a few miles from the reform school, in a working-class neighbourhood in the north end of Guelph. Her father, Leslie, was a union organizer for the United Steelworkers. “I can remember him coming home and getting books and magazines from us to take to the men that were on strike,” she says. “I lived in a house where supporting the underdog was always prevalent.”