by Julian Sher
Though a quick student with a photographic memory, Marlene did not care much for studying and left school in grade Eleven. She easily found work as a receptionist and bookkeeper in small firms around town. “I knew that I could quit, start saving, get a car, meet someone and get married,” she says. Marlene would indeed get married and start raising a family within seven years of leaving school—but reality would prove less tranquil than she had imagined.
Born just four days later than Steven, Marlene had an interest in his case that was casual at first. As a fourteen-year-old, she remembers the summer of 1959 more for the fact that she bought her first sailor blouse at Reitman’s for $3.98 than for the trial of a boy her age in a small town a hundred miles away.
But that all changed in the spring of 1966. Marlene’s mother showed her daughter the front cover of the Star Weekly, featuring a picture of Steven. “You should read it,” her mother said. “You should read about what happened to this boy.”
At twenty-one, busy with work and a hectic social life, Marlene initially paid scant attention. But a couple of days later, she came into the living room, picked up the magazine article and read it all. “I was horrified,” she remembers. She dashed out to buy LeBourdais’ book, but both bookstores downtown were out of stock. She eventually laid her hands on a copy on a day she was getting her hair done. “I couldn’t wait to get under the dryer so I could start reading it,” she says.
Marlene was possessed. A few weeks later, she borrowed her father’s car and drove two hours to Clinton to see for herself what a boy could see from the bridge. She started clipping every newspaper article she could find on the case. She began writing letters to Isabel LeBourdais. On the eve of Steve’s appearance before the Supreme Court, Marlene penned a poem, put it in a simple frame and sent it to his parents. It read, in part:
Stand up to the public—both brave and bold
Tell them your story, which has never been told.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Although you have missed the best years of your life
Do not let the remaining years be years of strife.
Dan Truscott sent Marlene a short thank-you note, which she treasured. Marlene’s steelworker father, more used to political battles with the establishment than was his newly activist daughter, tried to temper her enthusiasm. “They won’t let him win,” he told her. “They don’t like to admit they’re wrong.”
At work as a receptionist in a real estate company the day the Supreme Court decision was announced, Marlene was so shocked by the eight to one verdict she called a local radio station to get confirmation of the news. “My father was right,” she thought to herself. “I was sad, but I was angry more than anything.”
The defeat only made Marlene more determined. She drew up a petition asking Ottawa to call for a new trial, and quickly gathered over three thousand signatures. “I can remember taking it everywhere with me, everywhere,” she says. “This thing took over my life. I could tell that my dad was proud. He thought it was great that I was standing up for someone other than myself.”
But by the end of the summer of 1967—when it was clear the government was not going to do anything but let Steven serve out his term until parole—Marlene had no choice but to end her crusade—at least for the moment. She had written a personal letter to Steven, but she got it back unopened. The prison authorities told her she was not on his official list of correspondents.
On August 22 and 27, the ABC network aired the concluding two-part episode of The Fugitive, at the time one of the most highly rated TV finales. Sitting in Collins Bay, Steven could find little solace in the fact that it had taken Dr. Richard Kimble four years and 120 episodes to prove he had been wrongfully convicted.
So far, Steve had spent twice as many years behind bars as the fictional character had been on the run—and he had no idea how many more years he had left. Steve turned to music, blasting away the blues on his trumpet or joining a jam session playing guitar with a few of the other inmates in a small music room near the prison gym. “You can’t just say, here’s ten years of my life, it didn’t exist,” he says. “It existed and you make the best of it. You were in a situation where if you were going to make the worst of it, you would have never come out of there.”
Like other inmates, Steve learned to savour the small victories. For New Year’s celebrations, the convicts would make home-brewed alcohol from potatoes and sugared water. The guards would find a few of the makeshift stills, but never all of them. “They’d stumble across an obvious place, but there would be others,” Steve says with a grin.
“Steve fell in with a good bunch of inmates,” Malcolm Stienburg explains. “One was in for safecracking and two for murder. I know it sounds strange, but they were a good bunch of inmates. The fact is that none of them came back to prison once they were released.”
Ross, a veteran safecracker and an older convict who watched over Steve, was released in late 1967. But Steve still had fellow lifers Chuck and John for company. And in the spring of 1968, he and John got their big break—a transfer out to the farm annex, where Steve used to cut grass with Joe Fowler. Spreading from behind the walls of Collins Bay about a mile south almost to the shores of Lake Ontario, the farm provided food for the prisons in the area and served as a sort of transition zone for better behaved inmates. “The more you get them to trust you, the more freedom they give you,” Steve explains.
Steve and the other farm helpers slept in rooms, not cells. It was a completely open-door policy—Steve and John headed out to the fields in the morning and returned only for meals. If they were baling hay, they might go back out after supper and work until dark. The only thing stopping them from running away was a four-foot-high fence.
For Steve, these were the glory days in prison. If he drove his tractor out to the far southeast corner of the fields, he could watch the drive-in movie playing across the road. “It was fascinating just to be sitting there,” he remembers. “You’d sit and watch until the boss of the farm would come out and tell us it was time to go.”
In a small creek that runs through the farm, Steve and John would sneak in a little fishing, using flies made by other inmates. In the barter system behind bars, Steve’s handcrafted leatherwork was a valuable commodity that he could swap for fishing gear or other goods.
Standing under the sun, Steven—now a well-built twenty-four-year-old—could easily close his eyes and imagine he was back on Lawson’s farm. The police had snatched him on a hot summer day as he made his way home from the farm. A decade later, he was working on a farm again—but ten years of his life had been ploughed under. Steven preferred not to think of the time and memories lost.
“You move on, one day at a time, and you kind of close that chapter,” he says. “If you remember everything in the past, it hurts too much.”
As a well-behaved prisoner with an excellent record, Steve also earned the privilege in 1968 to leave the penitentiary grounds to attend classes at Queen’s University. “That was a complete shock,” Steve says, recalling the campus scene at the height of the turbulence of the late 1960s. “I was used to people in authority with uniforms, a shirt or tie—the whole bit. Here, the professors walking around were dressed worse than the students.”
Steve signed up for English and political science classes; no one knew who he was except the professors. He enjoyed the freedom, but felt out of place in the academic world, where principles seemed more important than reality. “I used to get into arguments all the time with the political science professor,” he remembers. “Everyone knows how it should be,” the convict would challenge him. “Let’s go on to how it is.”
“You have to give him a great deal of credit,” says one of his instructors, Barry Thorne. “It’s not easy if you’re relatively uneducated to start up a university course. It’s a daunting and tough prospect and he managed to do it. That impressed me.”
A shy person at the best of times, Steve avoided his fellow students, who were you
nger, more carefree and preoccupied with finding either a good book, a good beer or both. “You didn’t really mingle with them because you knew where you were going to be that night,” Steve says, “and you knew they weren’t going to be there.”
That night, as every other night, Steve was back in prison. But at least he no longer had to worry about the psychiatrist.
Dr. George Scott, perhaps burned by the scathing testimony at the Supreme Court, largely ignored Steven for two years. When he began filing reports again in May of 1968, it seemed—almost magically—that the troubled, tortured inmate Scott talked about in years past had disappeared. “There was not rancour or hostility from any supposed problems which arose in his case in the past,” Scott wrote, not specifying if by “supposed problems” he was referring to his own diagnosis of Steve’s mental health or the public furor that erupted over his handling of the case. The doctor noted Steven was “without the obvious defensive air which he had some years ago.”
By June, Scott reported Steven seemed to be “doing quite well.” By October, he was “gaining much more confidence in his abilities to communicate.” In November, a Rorschach test revealed “a sensitive, intelligent young man having good ties with reality.” On December 24, 1968, Scott filed a Christmas present of sorts, telling the warden Steven was “doing quite well.… I do not think we’re going to have any major problem.”
It was the last significant analysis Dr. George Scott filed on his star patient—except for his parole papers. After almost a decade of reports from him and more than a dozen other psychiatrists, the serious mental disorders they said had afflicted Steven had somehow disappeared. “That kind of makes you angry,” Steve says today. “These are official documents, [and they say] ‘schizophrenia,’ ‘paranoid’—you name it, if it was in the psychiatric book, I was it. Now what did all these people do to cure me of all these sicknesses?”
Around the same time Scott was giving Steven a clean slate for his mental health, another doctor closely connected to the case, pathologist John Penistan, was doing a bit of housecleaning himself. In January of 1969, the president of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science wrote to William Bowman, still Ontario’s director of public prosecutions. He wanted to publish the doctor’s article about the Lynne Harper autopsy, in order to “provide Dr. Penistan with a discreet forum in which to present his finding.”
Bowman did not object, but he warned, “the press may pick up the matter again. If this did occur, it would undoubtedly open up the old wounds.” He need not have worried. By the time Penistan’s article appeared in print in September 1969, the pathologist had removed all of his major reversals in the draft he had sent to Harold Graham in May of 1966. Still, Penistan did manage to squeeze in a few cautionary notes he had neglected to stress in court. Ten years after he helped condemn a boy to hang on the basis of a precise time of death for a “violent, brutal” rape, Penistan now talked only of a “superficial abrasion” in the vagina with no specified cause, and concluded that, based on stomach contents, “death had probably taken place within about two hours of the girl’s last meal.”
The 1960s were coming to an end, as was the decade Steven had spent behind bars. And now, finally, he had a tangible ray of hope for his freedom. Steven was eligible for parole in June of 1969—subject, of course, to recommendation by the parole board and final approval by the cabinet.
In the months following Steve’s defeat at the Supreme Court, his supporters had tried, unsuccessfully, to jump-start the process. In the fall of 1967, NDP MP Stanley Knowles introduced a private member’s bill to parole Steven. Terry Nugent, a Progressive Conservative backbencher from Edmonton, blasted his fellow MPs for supporting Knowles’ proposal as “unwarranted attacks on the administration of justice.” Solicitor General Lawrence Pennell silenced the debate by affirming the cabinet would not consider parole for Steven until he had served the minimum ten years required by law.
Steven bided his time and in September of 1968 filed his formal application for parole, beginning the arduous process about nine months before his eligibility date. His mother visited him on the Labour Day weekend and told reporters she was optimistic. “He couldn’t have a better record,” Doris said.
“He doesn’t want to build up his hopes this time,” Dan Truscott cautioned, “and we certainly don’t.” The newspapers noted Steve’s father was unemployed and surviving on an air force pension, having been “in and out of hospital for a year with bad nerves.”
Steven had a special ally in his fight this time—his parole officer was Malcolm Stienburg. In July of 1967, the prison chaplain, while still remaining a United Church minister, changed jobs and became a parole supervisor. Stienburg was eager, as he put it, “to get away from the frustration of the walls” that came from working with inmates in isolation. He wanted a chance to work outside the prison with parolees and their families.
Stienburg began pushing the mountains of paperwork through the system. He wrote fair but overwhelmingly positive evaluations, confident he could help get Steve out. “Truscott maintains that he is not guilty of the offence,” Stienburg wrote in one of his reports to the National Parole Board. He noted that Steve’s guards and prison instructors gave him top marks. “Truscott’s institutional record is unblemished,” Stienburg stressed.
Even Dr. Scott was on board for Steven. “He has not reflected any signs [of] any known psychiatric disability whatsoever,” the doctor now proclaimed. “His conviction was based upon an alleged offence which he has consistently denied.”
Stienburg had earlier told the press that, once released, Steve would live under his real name. “Anything else Steve would consider dishonest,” he said. Now Stienburg regretted those words, because the parole board decided Steve had no choice in the matter. “We came to the decision that he would come out with an assumed name because we were concerned with what the media would do to him. It was a clamour at that point, and we just figured that was the best way to handle it.”
Steve objected, Stienburg recalls, but not too strongly. “If he had his preference, he’d have come out as a Truscott,” he says. Sitting at a picnic table on the farm annex, just outside the prison walls, Stienburg and Steve began thinking of possible names. Johnson was a simple one that came to mind. They also considered Steve’s mother’s maiden name, which he could easily remember and respond to. No firm decision was taken right away.
There remained one intractable problem, however—where would Steven live? His parents were divorced. His father had been seeking medical care. His mother had begun a new relationship with another man (whom she would eventually marry). Stienburg and the parole officials were also worried that if Steven moved in with either parent, the media could easily track him down. “The press would know where he was and the publicity hounds were going to be riding herd on him,” Stienburg feared.
It was not a decision that sat well with Doris. “Steve and I weren’t given a choice,” she says. “I think he would have been better to come home.”
The June 1969 deadline for Steve’s eligibility for parole came and went, as the paperwork and decision-making dragged on. At a parole board meeting in Ottawa, frayed nerves led to testy exchanges. Someone suggested sending the all-too-famous inmate to live in the student residence at a university.
“You have to be out of your skulls,” Stienburg interjected. “Taking him out of one institution and putting him in another!”
Out of frustration, one of the committee members asked why Stienburg did not take Steven home to live with his own family.
“I may do just that,” the minister blurted without thinking.
There was a pause when no one said anything, too stunned to react.
“Are you serious?” one of the parole board officers finally asked Stienburg.
“Well, look,” Stienburg said more slowly this time, “I better check with my wife first.” He left the room to call home. His wife, Mary, had met Steve a few times when Stienburg had brought her and their two you
ng sons to visit his favourite inmate at the farm annex.
“If that’s what you decide, that’s fine with me,” Mary said without hesitation.
“I hung up and that was the end of it,” Stienburg says.
Parole officers might take their work home with them—but not the ex-inmates themselves. But over the years, Stienburg had developed a much deeper bond with Steven than he ever had with any other inmate: “Personally, I had a great deal of trouble believing that he was guilty. He’s a very gentle person. And I don’t see that type of emotion in him that would lead him to commit that type of offence.”
Gentle enough to win the hearts of Stienburg’s two young boys. To prepare his family for their new houseguest, Stienburg had Andy, aged three, and Trevor, aged seven, visit Steven at the farm about a half dozen times over the summer and fall. They tossed a ball back and forth and played on the swings. “It was his first introduction to real life with kids,” Stienburg recalls. His children quickly took to the tall man they called “Uncle Steve.”
By early September of 1969, the National Parole Board finally sent in a favourable recommendation for Steven to the federal cabinet. “Once the board recommends parole, the cabinet rarely turns it down,” Stienburg assured Steven. “But the Lord alone knows when it will make the decision.” Steve would just have to wait.
On Tuesday, October 21, Steve was working on the farm when he got a message to go to the warden’s office. Still in prison garb, Steve made his way to the administration building. “I didn’t have a clue what they wanted,” he remembers.
The minute he opened the door and saw Malcolm Stienburg and the warden with a sheaf of papers on the desk, he knew he was one step closer to freedom.
“Well, if you just sign these papers, we can be on our way,” Stienburg told Steve.
“I’ll sign them,” Steve said immediately.
Standing in the office was Don Patterson, the prison supervisor who had first greeted the frightened fifteen-year-old who came for an overnight stay at the Kingston prison complex in 1960. And Patterson had also driven eighteen-year-old Steven from the Guelph training school to Collins Bay in 1963. Now, as he stared at the twenty-four-year-old man in front of him, he saw only traces of that fearful child.