Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  “I just remember him standing, looking at the water, and I’m looking at him. And everything changed,” she says. “Before he had been a name, then a cause, then a friend. But then I realized I had a different feeling—I saw him without the case behind him, someone I wanted to be a companion to.”

  Steve, for his part, says there was “no moment when a light bulb went on. I just felt really confident with her.” That confidence blossomed into an unshakeable love.

  By fall, the two had married in a private ceremony. No family, no guests, no pictures. They were afraid that somehow word would leak out and the press hordes would descend. For Marlene, who had always dreamed of a big wedding, it was a crushing compromise—the first of many she would have to make over the next years.

  “It was the happiest and the saddest day of my life,” she says.

  Marlene and Steve also decided to move back east, to Guelph. Steve, who had been born in Vancouver, loved the sea and mountains. But his aging grandfather was more than a decade older than the “Pop” who took the young boy fishing on his boat. “I had grown up so much that the things you remember when you were a kid were just not the same,” Steve says.

  He was also having trouble finding steady work. Marlene was homesick and was convinced Steve needed to be closer to his family in Ontario. They arrived in Guelph on a Friday, and by the following Monday Steve had found a job as a millwright—a general mechanical repairman—at a local plant called Linreed. He would stay there for nearly two decades.

  For a while, the new couple lived with Marlene’s parents, and Marlene helped Steve make the transition to daily life. At restaurants, Steve always waited for Marlene to order first and then asked for the same thing, still not used to having a wide choice of meals. He shied away from crowds, and would not go to a movie if there was a long lineup at the theatre. He hated talking on the phone.

  “There was still so much that I hadn’t done. It was really tough,” Steve says. “Marlene really helped me adjust. I don’t know how I could have survived.”

  Marlene had to do some adjusting of her own. For starters, she had to deal with a somewhat shell-shocked mother-in-law. Doris Truscott had seen her young boy snatched away from her, but Steve did not end up living with her after a decade in prison. And then—less than a year after leaving jail—he married a girl in what must have seemed like impetuous haste. “We didn’t know what she was like or anything,” Doris says. “It was a little upsetting.”

  The two women—equally iron-willed and unbending—slowly got to know and respect each other. “She said to me, ‘I don’t know how you could go through what you did,’” Doris remembers. “I told her, ‘You have to adjust yourself—there are other kids.’”

  “She was the one who kept the family going,” Marlene says of Doris with admiration. “She kept the other children back from it—one child had been hurt, she wasn’t going to have the rest all hurt.”

  Marlene understood that choice, but she still yearned to launch a public fight to clear her husband’s name. “Why did it stop? Why did it just disappear after the Supreme Court?” she asks. “It just died. It shouldn’t have. I’m like my dad—a fighter.” She had come to the Truscott case as a fiery, tireless campaigner. Now married to the man she had fought to free, she suddenly found she had to restrain her combativeness.

  To make matters worse, while Steve was thrilled to be out of the penitentiary, Marlene found Steve’s parole restrictions suffocating. He could not leave town without notifying the authorities, so a last-minute decision to go see his family on the weekend meant scrambling to reach a parole officer.

  “I was a free spirit, used to doing what I wanted—I was going crazy,” Marlene says.

  Being a free spirit—and the daughter of a labour organizer in an NDP household—didn’t stop Marlene from being very traditional in many ways. She had worked since she was sixteen, but her life’s ambitions were simple. “I didn’t want a career—I always wanted a family,” she says.

  “That’s all I ever wanted—a white picket fence around my house, and kids.”

  The kids would come, but Marlene would find that raising a family was a lot more challenging than she ever dreamed when you are the wife of Steven Truscott.

  40

  WHAT TO TELL THE CHILDREN

  He stood there quietly, cradling this strange treasure in his arms. The rough hands that had chiselled wood and welded metal in prison now felt the softness of a newborn’s skin. For all his awkwardness in the outside world beyond the prison walls, Steven seemed to take to fatherhood as if it was his natural calling.

  It was the late spring of 1971 and Marlene had just given birth to a healthy eight-pound girl named Lesley. “I am still to this day overwhelmed—it was like he had had ten other kids,” she remembers. There were complications after the delivery and Marlene spent six weeks recovering.

  Steve was up every night bottle-feeding Lesley, then out to work at the crack of dawn and back by the early afternoon for more baby care. Over the next few months, Steve took his daughter on walks in the summer, sleigh rides in the winter and for the inevitable first pictures with Santa Claus. “Lesley would just go wild when she saw Steve,” Marlene says. “He was just everything to her.”

  Lesley was named after Marlene’s father, who had died of a heart attack just a month before. Steve’s father, Dan, made regular trips from Ottawa to see his new grandchild. Divorced, and still heartbroken he could not do more to clear his son’s name, Dan fawned over the baby girl. “Lesley was his world,” Marlene says.

  A first child is something special for every father, but for Steve, Lesley was much more—a testament that he had survived, that after losing his freedom, his name, his childhood, here at last was something he could hang on to.

  “I just can’t believe I have her—it’s something that can never be taken from me,” he told Marlene as he held their young child in the hospital room.

  “I can remember thinking at the time: ‘I wonder if your mother thought that when you were born,’” Marlene says. “Mind you, they took him from her.”

  When Steve and Marlene drove out to the Kingston area to show off Lesley to Malcolm Stienburg and his family, Steve’s parole officer suggested Steve come watch Mac and some of his friends at a ParticipACTION baseball game.

  What Steve did not know was that Mac played on a police team, and the game was at a diamond right outside the walls of the Collins Bay Penitentiary. When they arrived, the ballplayers—who had no idea of Steve’s real identity—suggested the new father join them on the benches, where he would be more comfortable holding his daughter. At one point in the game, Mac found himself as a runner on second base, and from his perspective he could see Steve surrounded by off-duty police officers—with the prison walls as backdrop.

  “I just burst out laughing,” he remembers. “I couldn’t help it.”

  Steve could get away with it because, while his name was notorious, his face—at least as an adult—was virtually unknown. His story was back in the news in the fall of 1971 with the launch of a new book called The Steven Truscott Story, written by Bill Trent, a Montreal journalist who was a staff writer with Weekend Magazine. A three-part series of excerpts from the book ran in the popular magazine distributed free across the country as an insert in many daily newspapers. “Behind these walls a fourteen-year-old sat waiting to be hanged,” the cover story said, accompanied by a gloomy picture of the Goderich jail. “Steven Truscott tells his story of growing up in jail.”

  Trent had spent several weeks talking and even living with Steve shortly after his release and wrote the book as a first-person narrative. It had little of the shock value of LeBourdais’ revelations and some of the passages purporting to be Steven’s exact words seem too flowery or literate to have been uttered by the usually reserved Steve. Still, the book gave Canadians personal insight into what Steve and his family had gone through during his arrest and long years behind bars.

  Trent’s book was controve
rsial enough for the trustees in Huron County to strike it off the recommended reading list for the secondary schools in the area where Steve had been tried and convicted. “The book was not an unbiased overview of the incident,” the director of education explained. “[The trustees] did not feel that its use would add anything to the education program.” At least two of the school officials would have had good reason to be upset by the book. One was jury foreman Clarence McDonald; the other was Dr. John Addison, the family doctor who had testified against Steven.

  In 1975 a shadowy figure in the Truscott affair passed away. Air force sergeant Alexander Kalichuk had continued his downward slide into an alcoholic haze of mental collapse throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s. One of his colleagues, Sgt. John Lawson, was serving as a custodian in a psychiatric institution in Goderich after retiring from the air force. Lawson had known Kalichuk as the base drunk, but was still shocked when he saw the dishevelled and sunken man muttering to himself and walking aimlessly in the corridors. “I guess his brain is all pickled with alcohol,” a nurse commented.

  Few people mourned when Kalichuk was buried in a small plot near Seaforth. Today, weeping willows droop over his abandoned farmhouse just twenty minutes away from Clinton. The shingles are falling off, rags are stuffed into holes in the wall, and weeds push up through a rusted old car in the field. Whatever secrets Kalichuk might have had about where he was on the night of June 9, 1959, he took with him to his grave.

  The year 1975 also saw the release of a fictional movie inspired by Steven’s story called Recommendation for Mercy. The poster showed a forlorn boy on a cot behind bars, and two jagged newspaper headlines screaming “BOY 14 SENTENCED TO HANG!” and “GIRL 13 SLAIN.” The names and many of the facts were changed, but the movie served to generate even more sympathy for Steven’s experience. “I’ve always felt the boy was innocent,” producer and director Murray Markowitz said.

  The film also sparked Steven’s first foray onto the public stage since his brief appearance at the Supreme Court. Following the buzz around the movie, Steven did a forty-five-minute interview with reporter Brian Thomas of CHUM radio in Toronto, and excerpts were widely rebroad-cast on television and quoted in the newspapers. “I definitely am not and I will never say that I was guilty,” he said.

  Steve described to the radio audience the LSD and truth serum treatments he endured. “I was tested for two years by at least a dozen psychiatrists—with pretty much every test they could think of—trying to get a confession out of me, which they never got.”

  Steven stated that it would be his first and his last interview. “And so now, as quickly as he reappeared, Truscott has gone back into anonymity,” one television report on Steven’s brief public sortie concluded.

  But not quite. Steve could seek anonymity, but echoes of his appointment with the hangman were not far from many people’s minds when Canadians grappled with the debate over the abolition of the death penalty. A decade earlier, at the height of the controversy over Steve’s conviction, Parliament had restricted hanging—for a five-year trial period—to slayers of on-duty police officers and prison guards; the trial period was renewed for another five years in 1972.

  In April 1975, Justice Emmett Hall, now retired from the Supreme Court of Canada, led a delegation to Parliament Hill urging that the death penalty be completely abolished. Hall explained that his delegation—assembled by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and including religious leaders, broadcasters and authors—was a “response to the growing demand for the restoration of capital punishment.”

  Indeed, Solicitor General Warren Allmand, a strong abolitionist, was under intense pressure to bring back the noose. One convicted killer was scheduled to be hanged the following month for the slaying of a Toronto policeman during an armed robbery. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario, representing 535 towns and cities in the province, called on Ottawa to reinstate the death penalty for murder committed during robbery and any premeditated killings.

  Canada’s official hangman, deprived of business by the commutation of death sentences since 1962, called for Allmand’s resignation. “I am definitely against him holding that position,” the anonymous state executioner said in a radio interview, insisting his criticism was not motivated by monetary concerns, since he was paid an annual retainer by the federal government whether or not he slipped the rope around anyone’s neck.

  By the time Allmand and the Liberal government were ready for a formal parliamentary debate on capital punishment in May of 1976, there were eleven men in Canada sentenced to die. The bill proposed to abolish hanging and substitute it with a life sentence to be served for a minimum of twenty-five years before parole. Allmand read a letter from Pauline Maitland, the widow of the slain Toronto policeman. She urged the government to do everything it could “to prevent this terrible second crime”—the execution of her husband’s murderer. “The killing of this man would be completely foreign to all the moral standards of my late husband and myself,” she said.

  Before it was over, 119 MPs spoke their minds, taking up forty-six hours of Commons time. Erik Nielsen, a powerful Tory, was a strong retentionist, as were many others in his party. Andrew Brewin, so active in the campaign to free Steven a decade earlier, assured Parliament the sixteen members of the New Democratic Party would vote to abolish capital punishment.

  Prime Minister Trudeau insisted his opposition to the death penalty was based not on principle, but on practicality—it was not an effective deterrent. Still, he spoke with his usual rhetorical flourish: “To kill a man for punishment alone is an act of revenge—nothing else. Some would prefer to call it retribution because that word has a nicer sound. But the meaning is the same,” he said. “Are we, as a society, so lacking in respect for ourselves, so lacking in hope for human betterment, that we are ready to accept state vengeance as our penal philosophy?”

  In the end the vote was extremely close. In what the newspapers described as a packed, sweltering and divided House of Commons, politicians voted to abolish the death penalty by the slimmest of margins. The bill passed the all-important second reading on June 22 by 133 to 125.

  Trudeau called it “one step further from violence and barbarism.” NDP deputy leader Stanley Knowles, the parliamentarian who perhaps more than any other had fought for Steven’s freedom, called it “a great day in the history of civilization.”

  Ironically, John Diefenbaker, who had commuted Steven’s death sentence and fought hard for his early parole, was angry. All his life he was against the death penalty. But he turned against the bill to abolish it because it also did away with hanging for treason, rebellion and the murder of the monarch. “Thugs from all over the world will know that it’s come one, come all—it’s open season for all of you,” the venerable politician blustered. “Now they will assassinate whomever they please, when they please.”

  After more wrangling in committee, Parliament gave the abolition bill final approval on July 15 with an even closer tally—only six votes separating the two sides. Allmand announced that all eleven convicts sentenced to die would have their sentences commuted immediately.

  By abolishing the death penalty, Canada became the eleventh Western nation to do away with capital punishment. The British Parliament had rejected a move to restore the death penalty in December 1975. Other Western countries without a death penalty at the time included Denmark, Finland, Sweden and West Germany.

  Interestingly, just as Canada formally put a stop to state executions, the United States was moving in the opposite direction. In 1976, the American Supreme Court ruled the death penalty—which had not been used for some years—was constitutional, provided the states implemented certain safeguards. Thirty-six of fifty American states would eventually bring back the death penalty, killing 944 people between 1977 and 2005.

  In Canada, the issue refused to die quietly. Two years later, in 1978, Diefenbaker led a rump group inside the Tories to force new Conservative leader Joe Clark to accept a
national referendum on the issue. Some polls showed eighty-eight per cent of voters wanted a referendum and sixty-eight per cent would favour a return to hanging.

  The prime minister would have none of it. “The 1976 vote settled the issue,” Trudeau said with characteristic defiance. “We don’t plan to reopen it.”

  Back in Guelph, Steve and Marlene were more preoccupied with domestic concerns than national debates. They now had two children—Lesley, who was turning into a bright, inquisitive schoolgirl, and Ryan, born in 1974.

  Steve continued to be a devoted father. “The minute Steve came through the door, my day was over with those kids,” Marlene says. “He fed them, he changed him, he bathed them, he put them to bed. He just loved them.”

  After spending his childhood moving constantly from one air force base to another, then his teenage and young adult years in prison, where cellmates and friends would come and go, Steven yearned for stability. “All my life, everyone came in and out of your life,” Steve says. “It was important for me to put down roots somewhere.”

  Once he and Marlene settled in Guelph, they never left. Steve would work in the same factory for seventeen years, leaving only when the plant shut down. He quickly found another job, where he works to this day.

  “Every day at 3:30 after work his car pulled in—you could count on him,” says Olga Samson, a neighbour and friend of the Truscotts. “He is without a doubt the best father that I have ever seen in my life,” her husband, Gary, adds. “He has such great rapport with his children. He never raises his voice, ever.”

  But the joy of raising a family also posed a dilemma to Canada’s best-known, but most private, convicted child murderer: what to tell the children about his past—and when. Steve and Marlene had not made any conscious decisions about what to do and they were caught between two countervailing pressures.

  On the one hand, Steve did not want go out of his way to conceal himself. Steve never legally changed his name. He and Marlene married under the name Truscott.