by Julian Sher
“He was taller,” Patterson recalls. “He’d filled out a bit. But that face you’d recognize right away.” And that face, Patterson remembers, instead of being etched with fear or apprehension, now displayed a beaming smile.
“He walked out of there more of a gentleman than probably any con that came out of prison—with his head high,” says Joe Fowler, his machine shop instructor. The man who taught Steven welding modestly insists that he had nothing to do with welding the boy’s character as well. “Maybe I did a little by showing him trust and faith,” Fowler says. “He grew up in there. He could have become like another con,” Fowler says. “But the system never took hold of him. He just held a line and never changed from that line; he was going to do things right and he did things right. He turned out to be a pretty decent boy.”
Steve’s departure was so rushed, he did not have time to say goodbye to Fowler or to his two friends, John and Chuck. Even his mother was not told about his release. Prison officials knew that the news would leak out, so they arranged for Stienburg to ferry Steve out the back gates in his steel-grey 1964 Volkswagen Beetle.
“I looked out front and there were reporters all over the place,” Don Patterson remembers.
Patterson escorted Steve and Stienburg across the prison courtyard to the southwest exit and waved as the car sped away.
“It’s a success, he’s gone,” Patterson told the warden. Then he walked outside the prison gates to the hordes of newspapermen.
“What are you chaps waiting for?” he asked.
“Truscott!” they exclaimed.
“You’re a little bit late, he’s already gone,” Patterson told the disappointed scribes.
And to himself the prison guard who had seen a young lad grow up behind bars whispered a silent prayer:
“Good luck there, boy!”
39
STARTING OVER
Steve was utterly stunned, almost paralyzed by a curious mixture of joy and fear. “One minute you’re in jail, then suddenly you’re outside. It’s such a shock to the system,” he says. “You’re off in another world, you can’t believe it.”
He and Stienburg drove along a small road that cut between the western wall of the prison and the farmland. They reached the main city road and turned left. A light snow had started to fall.
When Steven first walked into a jail in June of 1959, the Russians had put the Sputnik satellite in orbit, Elvis ruled the airwaves and Diefenbaker’s Conservatives ruled the country. By the time he had emerged in late 1969, the world was unrecognizable. Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, the Beatles had come and were almost gone, two Kennedy brothers had been assassinated and Pierre Elliott Trudeau was starting his transformation of Canada.
Steven had missed all of that and more. His kid brother and sister were now adults. His older brother was married. His parents were divorced. Steve left prison without a stitch of clothing except the prison uniform he was wearing. In a red wooden toolbox, he carried his trumpet, a lighter, some photographs and personal letters.
The original plan was simple. Malcolm Stienburg had wanted to keep Steven under wraps in an isolated cottage on Bob’s Lake, about forty miles north of Kingston, until the initial press fury died down. But that was a summer scheme, hatched when Stienburg assumed Steven would be out of prison in June. Now it was the onset of winter, and the two men arrived at a creaky cabin that had little heat and less insulation.
“Mac”—as Steve began calling Stienburg—piled charcoal into an old wood stove to generate some heat. Stuffing themselves with bacon and eggs, the two men sat down to watch the fuzzy images of a black-and-white TV set. “We’re listening to the news and they’re reporting that Steve has been taken to an unidentified city in western Canada,” Stienburg remembers. “We’re sitting back there killing ourselves laughing.”
Two hundred miles away, in her living room in Guelph, Marlene, the young woman who had worked so hard to get Steven released after his Supreme Court defeat, was watching a hockey game. The news flashed that Steven Truscott had been freed from prison. “Oh, isn’t that great!” she exclaimed. She wrote Steven a Christmas card, sent to Isabel LeBourdais’ attention, wishing him the best in his new life.
Back in the cold cabin, an exhausted Steve had gone to bed. “Truscott’s in there sleeping like a baby and I’m up all night stoking the old wood stove,” Stienburg laughs. He woke up his young companion the next morning with an urgent proposal: “We’ve got to get out of here or we’ll freeze to death.” The snow had made the steep hill leading away from the cabin treacherous, so the minister told Steven to get in the front seat of the Volkswagen, while Stienburg started spreading sand.
“Suddenly, the engine was bucking and the tires were spinning,” Stienburg recounts. “I forgot—he’d never driven a car!”
With Mac at the wheel, the two refugees of winter managed to make their way to the nearby village of Moscow, Ontario, where Stienburg’s mother-in-law had a home. They expected her to be there, but upon finding the house empty, Mac and Steve had no choice but to enter by strongly pushing in an unlocked basement door.
“Truscott, we’ve been out one damn day and already you’ve got me involved in a B and E,” the minister said only half jokingly. “Steve was standing back killing himself laughing,” Stienburg remembers. “He thought it was a hoot.”
The two men rested at the house until Friday, when Mac decided to treat Steven to a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens. They caught an early train out of Kingston to Toronto at 7:00 a.m., because Mac figured the chances were slim of meeting anyone he knew at that hour. But he ended up running into a friend of his anyway.
“Good morning,” Mac said nervously. Pointing to his somewhat awkward-looking young companion with the crewcut—he muttered, “This is a friend of mine, Steve, uh, Rogers,” using the first name that popped into his head—the name of a used-car lot where he had recently purchased his Volkswagen.
“Geez, I see Truscott got out,” Mac’s friend commented, as he scanned the headlines in the morning paper he was carrying.
“Yeah,” Mac answered nonchalantly, hoping the conversation would die.
“Did you know him?” the man pursued.
“Oh, yeah.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Oh, I knew him pretty well,” Mac answered, elbowing Steve as the two of them tried to stifle their laughter. The man had his newspaper in front of his face so he could not see the huge grins on his fellow travellers’ faces.
After a weekend in Toronto, Stienburg felt media interest had faded sufficiently to make it safe to bring Steve to Westbrook, a small bedroom community just outside of Kingston, where Mac lived with his family. The minister had prepared the terrain a few weeks earlier by canvassing his neighbours, asking them what that they thought about Steven Truscott getting parole. No one raised objections.
“Well, that’s fine for you—you figure he’s going to be a thousand miles away,” Mac pushed. “What if he came to your neighbourhood?”
“It wouldn’t make a difference,” his neighbours told him, including one who was an OPP officer. “A lot of people knew Steve was there,” Mac remembers, “and not one said a word.”
Steve settled quickly into the Stienburg household. “Oh, hi, Uncle Steve,” Andy and Trevor said when they saw him at the kitchen table. Andy, the younger boy, took a special liking to the new houseguest. “His smile is like a clown, because it’s ear to ear,” he told his parents.
A Super 8 home movie shows a smiling Steve on the verge of tears, as the two boys, Mac, and his wife, Mary, surround him in mid-January for his twenty-fifth birthday—his first outside of prison since 1959. Steve told Mac he always wanted to celebrate with champagne, so the minister took him down to the liquor store to buy a fourteen-dollar bottle of Mumm’s. “He wanted to uncork it—damn thing blew off, left a mark in the ceiling, foam all over the carpet,” Mac recounts. “Poor Steve, he was so embarrassed.”
“They treated me jus
t like a son, the boys treated me like an older brother,” Steve remembers. “It was really important because it was a family atmosphere, and it made me feel at ease.” Steve made brief visits to see his father and his mother, but it was clear his new home—at least for a while—was with the Stienburgs. “I only wish I could get the family back together,” Steve wrote to Isabel LeBourdais about his separated parents. “But I guess it’s best the way things are, as everyone seems quite happy now.”
As an ex-con, Steve began to make the difficult adjustment to life on the outside. “All of a sudden you’re thrust out—every decision you make is your own,” Steve explains. “I had never been in a restaurant for years, never dialled a phone.”
“Little things bothered him,” Mac remembers. He noticed Steve, like other recently released inmates, preferred to pay for a coffee with a five-dollar bill even if he had coins, because he was too nervous to count out the exact change.
“He always felt bad about not having good manners, never knowing just what to do,” Mac says. During one visit with neighbours, Mac remembers the ex-inmate trying to manoeuvre a teacup, saucer and cookies in his clumsy hands. “It was just like watching a bear cub—awkward as the devil,” he says.
There were more practical concerns as well. Mary took Steven to buy him a pair of jeans and a wallet. Mac went to a government office in Kingston and arranged for Steven to get a social insurance number under his assumed name. In Steve’s file, his real name was also listed, so when it came time to retire he could claim his pension. The manager at the government bureau was so eager to help he took it upon himself to drive to Ottawa to make sure the paperwork got done efficiently and discreetly.
Stienburg also had to run interference for Steve at work. One day, an irate citizen phoned the parole officer to complain. “Well, I sure would hate to hire a babysitter and know that it was Truscott looking after my kids!” she said. Stienburg smiled to himself, knowing at that moment Steven was home taking care of his two young boys while Mary was in hospital.
Another time, one of Stienburg’s bosses at the National Parole Board called in a panic.
“Where’s Truscott?” he wanted to know.
“He’s at my house,” Stienburg answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, he was this morning. Why?”
“He’s been positively identified in Winnipeg by the police there.”
“Well, if you want to hold the line, I’ll verify,” Mac said, and switched lines.
“Truscott—where are you?” he asked Steve.
“What?” Steve said, bewildered.
“You’re not in Winnipeg then?”
“No.”
“All right, I’ll explain it to you tonight,” Stienburg said. He returned to the nervous parole supervisor to assure him Canada’s best-known parolee was not on the run.
In case of future trouble, Stienburg suggested Steve keep a diary of where he was every day. “For a long time, if there’s another type of offence like this, you’re going to be questioned,” Mac warned.
Steve had escaped the hangman’s noose. But he was beginning to realize that being branded a convicted child slayer would follow him around for the rest of his life. The judge’s words “until you are dead” took on another layer of meaning.
As Steven was feeling his way in the uncertain world outside prison walls, he was about to meet face-to-face with one of his most ardent supporters—and a woman who would change his life. Isabel LeBourdais had given Steve the Christmas card Marlene, the Guelph campaigner, had written to him. “I will write to the girl who has put so much effort into helping,” Steve told LeBourdais in a letter, “as I appreciate the thought and work that everybody has done.”
In late January, LeBourdais called Marlene and asked if it was okay to drop by soon for a visit. “I’ve got someone here I’d like to bring down,” she said. “Actually, it’s Steve, and I want to put him on the phone.”
After a nervous hello, Steve could not seem to muster much beyond a few words. “I know people in Guelph,” he said.
“I’m thinking, ‘What should I say?’” Marlene remembers. “This guy doesn’t know what to say to me.”
“It was the first girl I had talked to in years,” Steve recalls. “It was all new territory for me.”
Marlene, still living with her parents at Kristen Road, ran out to pick up some fried chicken for the visitors. A couple of hours later, the doorbell rang, and Marlene got her first look at the young man she had read so much about. Steve wore a long navy blue raincoat, a black turtleneck and slacks. Despite his short hair, he had a sort of James Dean rakish look about him. “I can remember feeling bad,” Marlene says. “Here’s this person that I know so much about—so much private stuff. You don’t usually meet a man when you know things about his body parts and his whole life.”
Marlene’s father was the first to speak to the visitor at the door. “He probably recognized fear,” Steve jokes today. Marlene’s parents, LeBourdais and the two twenty-five-year-olds finished up the chicken and dessert in the living room while engaging in some awkward chit-chat. Then Marlene offered to take Steve to a local car club—she’d heard he was a mechanical whiz.
They got into Marlene’s 1962 white Chevrolet Impala and drove through the streets she had roamed as a teenager, the same town that had been Steve’s home a decade earlier—except he had been an adolescent prisoner behind a reform school fence. Realizing she was going to have to introduce her companion to her friends, Marlene turned to Steve.
“What name are you using?” she asked.
“Steve, uh, Johnson,” he muttered, using one of the aliases Mac had come up with.
Marlene remembers feeling odd as she stared at the man who had been the centre of her political attention for the previous three years. “All of a sudden he’s a real person.”
At the end of the evening, when it came time for the uncomfortable goodbyes, Marlene was not quite ready to let go of the shy young man.
“You’ll have to write and tell me how you’re making out with your life,” she suggested. “You have my address?”
“Yeah,” Steve said in his usual monosyllabic parlance.
Marlene babbled on about her summer plans. “I’m going with a friend out west.”
“Where you going?” Steve dared to ask.
“Vancouver.”
“Well, I’ll be out there too,” Steve said. Stienburg and Steve had decided that by the spring, Steve would be ready to leave the safe confines of the parole officer’s home. He would move out west to live with his grandparents near Vancouver.
Steve gave Marlene his grandparents’ phone number and they said goodnight. Marlene quickly dashed off a letter to Isabel LeBourdais.
“Here was a boy who I knew so much about and always thought of as a young fourteen-year-old, and all of a sudden he appeared at my home as a man of twenty-five (and a handsome one at that),” she confessed in her letter. “I am just fascinated by him—he is just a wonderful person in every respect—he is soft-spoken, well-mannered and humorous—three good characteristics.”
“Steve is just great! His parents must be so proud of him,” she concluded. “It is just too bad he is going away, though.”
Going away for Steve meant saying goodbye in early April to Mac and the Stienburg family, who had nurtured and sheltered him in the first few trying months of freedom. Steven hugged Mary and the kids and boarded a train to British Columbia.
When Stienburg went upstairs to Steve’s room, he discovered the red toolbox Steve had carried out of prison. “The box was there, with his lighter, shoes, prison release clothes and his trumpet. He left everything that reminded him of the prison,” Stienburg says. “He never explained it and I never asked.”
It was the last house on a small street on a cliff in Burnaby, perched over the Second Narrows Bridge. Just across, the Georgia Strait waters flowed steadily toward the Pacific, and the snow-capped mountains reached for the blue skies of a West Coa
st spring. After the grey vistas of his prison years, the view from his grandparents’ home was nothing short of liberating for Steven Truscott.
Marlene had driven out to Vancouver with some friends and kept trying to call Steve, never getting an answer. “I almost gave up, and then one time his grandmother answered and I asked for him,” she says.
“Do you remember me?” she asked nervously.
“Oh, yeah,” Steve answered, using as few words as possible.
“Do you want to come over sometime?”
“Okay.”
Steve did not have a car—he didn’t even have a licence. But he began dropping by Marlene’s apartment in downtown Vancouver to play cards or Parcheesi with her and her girlfriends. Marlene usually drove him home.
“It was more of a friendship thing,” Marlene says. “He was a desperately lonely person.”
One evening, overcoming his shyness, Steve asked her if she wanted to go out for dinner. “Have you ever been to the Ship of Seven Seas?” he asked, referring to a floating eatery on the other side of the Second Narrows Bridge. Marlene hated seafood but readily agreed to go.
They stared out at the Vancouver skyline across the inlet and to the west, up river, they could see the towering trees of Stanley Park. They talked about school, about growing up in Ontario, about family.
“I felt, ‘This is a lost person.’” Marlene says. “He was quite in tune with what was going on in the world, but he just needed somebody emotionally and physically.”
As the weeks progressed, she saw Steven slowly gain confidence. Her father came for a visit for several weeks in July and spent long days walking through the city with Steve while Marlene worked as a bookkeeper. One evening, as the summer was winding down, Marlene and Steve walked around Stanley Park and Marlene stopped to sit on a swing.