Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  “There’s a big misconception—we’ve never hidden,” Steve says. “If somebody asked, ‘Are you Steve Truscott?’ I told them.”

  On the other hand, Steve’s foremost concern was protecting his new family. “If the children had to have the name Truscott, from the word go they wouldn’t have had the chance to have a normal life. It had nothing to do with them,” he says. “For me, my family is my life. So everything else is secondary—even my own life.” That’s why Steve’s passport, his social insurance number, his bank accounts and driver’s licence—everything to do with his public identity, including the surnames of his children—were all under his assumed name.

  Not that Marlene accepted their enforced anonymity meekly. She still detested Steve’s parole restrictions, everything from his need to report in regularly to the requirement to get permission for any travel outside of town. When five years outside of prison passed without incident, Steve was placed under reduced parole supervision. After his parole officer came by the house with the official papers, Steve promptly went upstairs to sleep.

  “But I was up all night in the kitchen, jumping and excited and dancing a jig,” Marlene says. “Yes, I’m free of those people!” she shouted.

  Marlene wanted to scream to all who would listen what the real name of her husband was, and why he was innocent—but not while her children were small. “I was waiting for those kids to grow up,” Marlene says. “But I knew it was going to happen, come hell or high water, something’s going to give here.”

  Steve and Marlene—along with their co-workers, neighbours and friends—walked a fine line between privacy and pride. One of Steve’s best friends at work, Ray Hatton, knew his real identity, as did many other employees. “The guys would never say anything out of respect,” says Ray’s widow, Maureen, who became a close confidante to Marlene. “The guys were very protective of Steve. They figured he’s been through enough. If he wants to talk about it, he will.”

  Maureen found out about Steve’s identity at a card game, when some of the men pointed him out to her.

  “Do you know who he is?” one of them said, revealing Steve’s real name.

  “Are you serious?” Maureen gasped.

  “Yeah—but he wasn’t guilty,” the man assured her.

  An energetic woman with eight children, Maureen soon moved next door to Marlene, and the two women quickly formed an unofficial “breakfast club,” grabbing a coffee at a local diner after they dropped their kids off at school.

  “[Steve’s situation] was never a subject until she wanted to bring it up,” Maureen says. “I didn’t think it was any of my business.”

  Other neighbours felt the same way. Butch and Joan Brock met the Truscotts at a Labour Day picnic, and warmed to their folksiness and good humour. Butch took Steve hunting; the Brocks’ teenage boys babysat for the Truscott children. “We knew who he was, but whenever we got together we never talked about it,” says Butch.

  Neighbours with smaller children were equally nonplussed. Pat Corbit lived near to the Truscotts in the 1970s, and Steve often took care of her baby daughter along with Lesley. When Pat later discovered who he really was, she wasn’t upset. “I didn’t say, ‘Oh my God, my daughter has been in his house.’ It didn’t bother me at all,” she says. “I knew Steve and I knew the kind of man he was.”

  Oddly enough, the one neighbour who did panic over Steve’s notoriety only did so because she didn’t know who Steve really was. Christa Severa had been the teenager from Germany who in 1959 was horrified her parents were immigrating to Canada, where they sentenced young boys to hang. Twenty years later, in the spring of 1979, she was a mother of two moving into a new home in Guelph.

  “You know the guy next door has been convicted of rape,” a relative told her, without ever mentioning the name Truscott.

  “That’s really great, that’s what you want to hear when you move into a new house,” Christa recalls. “It really disturbed me. I had a daughter and it was a scary situation.”

  The driveways and backyards of the two families were separated only by a small fence, and Christa’s daughter Tracey quickly became friends with Lesley, much to her mother’s disquiet. Lesley’s father—whom Krista knew only by his assumed name—did not seem dangerous. “I thought it was strange that he wasn’t mean,” she recalls. “I was never afraid when the children were outside, but when my daughter was out of my sight, the hair at the back of my neck stood up.”

  Finally, her fear overwhelmed her, and Christa suggested Tracey find a new friend. She stopped her daughter from going to Lesley’s birthday party. Marlene’s heart sank. She figured Christa had discovered her husband was the notorious Steven Truscott, convicted murderer and rapist, and was convinced of his guilt. It was Marlene’s worst nightmare—that her children should have to pay for the alleged sins of their father.

  And they did pay. In July of 1979, Steve’s father went into the hospital with stomach cancer, and within two weeks Dan Truscott was dead. Lesley had been the apple of her grandfather’s eye, and she adored the playful, kind man who would cover himself with acorns to make her laugh. But the family decided the eight-year-old girl should stay away from the funeral.

  “I was not allowed to go, and I felt I should have. I felt I was old enough,” Lesley says today. “They wouldn’t let me go for fear of reporters. They didn’t want pictures taken of us. And I can remember just crying and crying, wanting to go to my grandfather’s funeral. And I couldn’t.”

  Perhaps the decision was wise. Outside the funeral home, photographers tried to grab a shot of the elusive Steven Truscott. Inside, family mourners caught reporters taking notes. Steve—normally calm and even-tempered—was outraged. “I didn’t want the press to have anything to do with this. This was my family—stay the hell away!” he remembers. One of his brothers escorted the newsmen out.

  More publicity was stirred up in October 1979, when journalist Bill Trent came out with an updated version of his 1971 book. This time it was entitled Who Killed Lynne Harper? The book consisted largely of his original first-person account of Steve’s life, with Justice Emmett Hall’s dissenting Supreme Court opinion as an addendum.

  But Trent also added about fifty new pages as an introduction, speculating on various possible suspects. The leads were tantalizing but nebulous—anonymous sightings of Lynne in Seaforth after she left Clinton; an unnamed nurse who phoned an open-line radio show claiming she knew “it was an adult on the base who killed her;” a plumber from Kitchener who insisted he had the real story.

  Trent also included the story of the “Three Painters” who were working on gas station signs in the Clinton area at the time of Lynne’s murder. One of the men had died, but the other two, brothers named Ronny and Russ, had served time in Kingston Penitentiary for armed robbery. In a transcript of a taped interview from the 1960s with an unnamed interrogator—almost certainly Dr. George Scott or another psychiatrist at the prison—Ronny says his brother may have killed a girl named “Linda Harper.” But later, when asked to sign a statement, Ronny said he “could have been making things up.”

  The Toronto Star later tracked down the two brothers out on parole. Russ said they were indeed painting signs in the area at the time “but we had nothing to do with it. If we had, the police would have questioned us.” He said his brother Ronny had been mentally unbalanced ever since being shot in the head in an aborted bank robbery.

  What neither the Star nor Trent knew was that as far back as November of 1967, the authorities had been aware of the story of Russ and Ronny. A letter from William Bowman, who represented the Crown at Steven’s Supreme Court hearing, revealed that he and other officials met with psychiatrist George Scott just weeks before Steven’s new hearing. They discussed Scott’s “frequent examinations” of Ronny, with and without drugs. Bowman reported that Ronny claimed his brother “showed him the body of a young girl whom he said he had assaulted.… [Ronny] further indicated that he thought that the body was that of Lynne Harper.” Bowman
said both brothers “may be described as pedophiles.” For some reason, though, Bowman concluded that “there was no connection between [these] statements and the Truscott case.” Any investigation of the “Three Painters” quickly died.

  Trent’s book created enough renewed interest in the Harper affair that the press again began hovering around the Truscott home. That Steve was living under an assumed name in the community was one of Guelph’s best-known “secrets.”

  To make matters worse, the book came out just days before Halloween, and Marlene was in a panic the night Lesley and Ryan were supposed to go trick-or-treating. “We were scared to answer the door,” Marlene remembers. “What were we going to do? I just didn’t want the reporters to come to the door and say something in front of the kids.” She decided to shut off all the lights in her home, bundle the children into a car and drive them to a friend’s house at the other end of the city.

  Lesley recalls being puzzled as she and her brother Ryan were not allowed to go trick-or-treating in their own neighbourhood. “I knew that something was wrong; I just couldn’t figure it out,” she says.

  “They were disturbed because they couldn’t understand why they were whisked away without any real explanation,” Marlene admits. But she was tortured. How could she explain to her five- and eight-year-old children that their father had been convicted of raping and murdering a girl, that he did not do it, but the newspapers still wanted his picture.

  To satisfy the public’s thirst for more news on the Truscott story, Marlene agreed to do a series of radio interviews in Toronto with Bill Trent—a convenient way to speak out publicly while maintaining a fair degree of privacy. Marlene also appeared on Canada AM with her back to the camera.

  Marlene knew she was pushing the limits of the code of silence by which Steve, his mother and siblings had chosen to live. “Steve said it was fine for me to go, but you don’t want to drive a wedge into the family,” Marlene recalls.

  “I felt that if I did anything that caused any problems, then I’d really be in trouble,” Marlene admits. “Yet I felt that I couldn’t sit still on this. It was very hard on me. I felt alone—I was for a long time.”

  Her brief media exposure had two unexpected effects. In Toronto, Marlene met a young radio reporter named Trish Wood. “She was very pushy, and I liked her because of that,” Marlene says. The two women exchanged phone numbers, and over the years Wood kept in touch with the Truscotts. That encounter in 1979 would eventually have immeasurably profound consequences for the entire Truscott family twenty years later.

  Marlene’s concealed appearance on TV also caught the attention of her neighbour, Christa Severa. She recognized Marlene’s voice instantly and realized the “rapist” living next door was none other than Steven Truscott—the boy whose case she had followed even while in Germany, and in whose innocence she had always believed.

  When Marlene returned home, there was a knock on the door and Christa stood at the entrance.

  “Marlene, I saw you on TV,” she said.

  “Oh, really,” Marlene muttered.

  “I recognized your voice,” Christa explained. “So Steve is Steven Truscott.”

  “I thought ‘Oh my God, here we go again,’” Marlene recalls. “I was so afraid she wasn’t going to talk to me, that she was going to ask me to move.”

  Instead, Christa explained her story—how she always sympathized with Steven Truscott—and apologized profusely for keeping her daughter away from Lesley. “What can I do to help?” she asked. As Christa got to know Marlene better, she discovered that underneath the normal bustle of a stay-at-home mother was a seething anger and frustration.

  “We can’t do what normal people do,” Marlene once confided to Christa, who had just returned from a Florida vacation. Steve’s reduced parole restrictions still barred him from entering the United States without declaring at the border that he was a convicted murderer. “Nobody knows what we had to go through, how our life has been affected by all this over the years.”

  “She was never going to give up,” Christa recalls. “Marlene said, ‘If it’s the last thing I’ll do, I’m going to fight for Steve.’”

  Marlene’s best friend, Maureen Hatton, elaborates: “You’ve got to realize where she is coming from. She is totally devoted to her husband. She’s like a mother bear with cubs. Steve never answers the phone—she is so protective of him. ‘You don’t touch my husband and you don’t touch my kids.’”

  “It’s a matter of your name, your pride, of holding your head up high,” Maureen remembers Marlene telling her one day. “There have been a lot of tears; there are days when she has been down. I think she dug in her heels years ago and promised she was going to clear her husband’s name. If she does nothing else she will do that—that’s her whole mission.”

  In 1980, Marlene and Steve had their third and final child, Devon, a rambunctious boy who quickly grew into such a playful rascal his parents were sometimes tempted to replace the last two letters of his name with an i and an l.

  “With Devon you never knew what to expect when you walked into that house,” Marlene says. “The place could look like a bomb—believe me, Devon could do it, and Steve would just walk in and pick him up and hug him as if nothing had happened.”

  Steve today is philosophical about it all: “Things didn’t bother me, after what I had gone through.”

  Marlene remembers one incident in particular, when Devon, as a toddler, smashed a carton of eggs on the kitchen floor.

  “Look at the mess he made!” Marlene complained when Steve arrived from work.

  “Oh, it’s only eggs, it’s no big deal,” Steve said calmly.

  But with Devon’s older sister and brother, Lesley and Ryan, fast approaching their teenage years, Marlene and Steve had more pressing worries than broken eggs—they had to figure out soon when and what to tell the children about Steve’s past.

  “When is the right time?” Steve asks himself today. “You kind of have an age in mind, but have you waited too long or are you going to tell them before they even understand?”

  “It is one of those things where you say to yourself: we’ll know for each one of them,” Marlene says. “I sort of got it in my mind that it would be fourteen—because if their dad could go through with what he did then, they could listen to it—they could go through it too.”

  The children were already curious about why their name was different than so many of their cousins, aunts and uncles on Steve’s side of the family.

  “How come they are all Truscotts?” they asked.

  “Well, your grandmother married twice,” Marlene replied. While not a lie—Doris had remarried—it was hardly an explanation. Marlene realized it would only satisfy the children for a while. “I knew they had to know soon because they were getting too old not to know.”

  As it happened, it was in school that Lesley first discovered the truth. Browsing through the library one day, she stumbled across Bill Trent’s book, The Steven Truscott Story. “I recognized the last name from my aunts and uncles,” Lesley remembers. “I took it out, read the back, leafed through it. I started looking at the pictures, and I recognized my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh! This is my dad!’” Lesley was twelve at the time.

  Lesley kept her discovery to herself until two years later, when her mother called her into the living room one day. “She had all the books out on the table, and she said, ‘I have to talk to you about something,’” Lesley says.

  “Mom, I already know,” Lesley said, surprising her mother. “I don’t believe it—I don’t understand it, how could they have done this?” Lesley asked about the jailing and sentencing of her father.

  Three years later, when Ryan turned fourteen, Marlene broached the subject with him as well, only to discover that he too had seen the book. But for Steve’s oldest son there was a special poignancy about being fourteen and discovering his father’s story. “I thought of all the things I got to do when I was fo
urteen that he missed. I thought of having my family taken away, having my friends taken away, the place that I lived, all my belongings, all my clothing, everything taken away from me,” Ryan says. “And to be able to live through it to tell about it.”

  Devon, the youngest child, did not find out until he was an adolescent in the mid-1990s, when a more cynical generation had grown up surrounded by legal scandals in real life and many tales of wrongful convictions on movie and TV screens. The teenager had only one question for his mother about his father’s dramatic life at fourteen:

  “Tell me he didn’t wear red pants,” Devon quipped.

  Marlene had made a conscious decision to talk to the children about their father’s past without Steve present. “I just felt I was the better one to tell them, because there were things I could say about him that he couldn’t say about himself,” she explains. “There’s just no way I would have married him if I thought [the accusation of murder] was true, and I sure as hell would have found out over the years.”

  Steve was relieved his children, once they were old enough to understand, had learned the truth. “I didn’t want to burden them with what happened to me years ago,” Steve says, “but I think they accepted me for who I am.”

  Indeed, if anything, the discovery of what their father went through seemed to raise Steve’s stature in the eyes of his children. “I think I myself would be very angry. And he’s not. Not at all,” Lesley says. “He’s an absolutely incredible father. I can’t believe they would even think of blaming something like that on him.”

  “I never once doubted him. Never once,” says Ryan. “He stood his ground for what he believed in and that was the truth. I’m sure that he had opportunities where he could have gotten a lesser sentence by admitting to something that he didn’t do, and he didn’t. He stood his ground. And he’s always instilled that in us—that if you wait and you’re a good person, it’ll all come back to you someday.”