by Julian Sher
The making of the documentary was a pursuit of many such false leads, dead ends, recalcitrant or confused witnesses, mixed in with just plain luck—good and bad. Several key witnesses had died just months or sometimes even weeks before the fifth estate managed to locate them or their families. After many months, Theresa Burke finally tracked down Butch George, and contacted him through a family member, but he refused to be interviewed. None of the surviving police officers wanted to talk at the time, and the two doctors still alive—Dr. Addison and Dr. Brooks—declined to be interviewed on camera.
Burke spent long weeks tracking down other people; in one case, more than two thousand people across Canada with a common surname were contacted in what turned out to be a wasted attempt to locate a possible witness (the name provided by a former base resident had been wrong). The Internet proved invaluable in finding children who had lived on the Clinton air force base in 1959, but then had scattered across the country, married, and sometimes changed names. Through chat groups and reunion pages on the Web for Canadian “military brats,” the fifth estate appealed for help, information and even home videos. Local museums came up with photographs and other memorabilia from the era.
Some filming took place in the early fall, even while the research was ongoing. The Clinton area had changed little over time: the road Steve bicycled down, Lawson’s bush, the bridge and the river were all much as they had been in 1959. Student volunteers from the local high school—many of whom had studied the Truscott case in class—helped with the re-enactments. They wore fifties-style clothes, rode creaky old bicycles and played with ancient-looking baseball gloves and skipping ropes. The program producers decided to film these black-and-white sequences with old film stock, rather than modern videotape, to give the scenes a grainy, textured look.
A highlight of the filming came when Steven consented to return to Clinton with Linden MacIntyre, to amble across the schoolyard where he played as a child, travel down the county road he biked on so often as a boy, and walk to the bush where Lynne’s body was found. A grey-haired grandfather, he stood on the same bridge where he often came as a teenager, and told the TV cameras about the last time he saw Lynne Harper on June 9, 1959.
Meanwhile, the fifth estate crew was turning up new leads. By late 1999, a young journalist with a law degree, Dallas Brodie, joined the research team. She contacted surviving jurors and medical experts, and helped co-producer Theresa Burke dig into an intriguing mystery—the file of Sgt. Alexander Kalichuk. Willard Longley, the retired air force officer who had stumbled across the file in the 1960s, had been in contact with the fifth estate since the fall. He talked about his chilling discovery of a “sexual deviant” in the Clinton area, but declined to give up the name of the suspect and was reluctant to get involved any further; he then left for an extended motor home vacation in Mexico.
The researchers at the fifth estate hoped that documents related to Longley’s investigations might be located in the records of the Department of Defence, even without a name of the suspect. So they filed an Access to Information request; the military came back empty-handed, insisting they had no records of any correspondence between Longley and headquarters about the Truscott case. What’s more, the military had transferred all their old files over to the National Archives in Ottawa, where archivists said they would be unable to look through tens of thousands of boxes of personnel records without a name.
Dallas Brodie then phoned and faxed every trailer park in Mexico until she located the wayward Willard Longley, who finally called back and gave up the name of the suspect. The archivists then went through the boxes from the Clinton air force base. But to everyone’s surprise, nothing was found. What no one knew at the time was that Longley had misspelled Kalichuk’s name—and furthermore, Kalichuk’s file was with another air force station.
By February 2000, Gary Akenhead, a talented film and videotape editor, began the daunting task of cutting hours of pictures and interviews down into a television story—even as final research continued. Typically, a fifth estate documentary will go through about a half dozen “cuts” or versions before the final cut is approved. The Truscott program went through more than ten revisions over a period of two months before senior producer Susan Teskey gave her thumbs-up. With so much good material that couldn’t be used, the show decided to build a Web site, featuring everything from Philip Burns’s new story to Glen Sage’s sighting of the footprints and Harold Graham’s confidential memos.
Up until the last minute, there were dramatic additions to the documentary. Steve and Marlene had nervously agreed to let the cameras film a family get-together, but they were adamant that they did not want their children interviewed. The producers believed viewers would want to hear what it was like growing up in the Truscott household. Finally the Truscotts relented and Linden MacIntyre travelled to Guelph to interview Lesley and Ryan. Their story was among the most riveting material in the documentary.
Also in the final days before deadline came the big break in the Kalichuk file. Andrew Whorl, an intrepid researcher at the National Archives, decided to check through the boxes from the Aylmer base, which was located not far from Clinton. It did not take him long to find the Kalichuk records—and a file that had been hidden for forty years was about to make news across the country.
In their small living room on March 29, 2000, Steve and Marlene Truscott gathered around the television set with their children. Most of their friends assumed they had already seen the program, but CBC policy forbids participants in a documentary from getting an advance screening or having any say in content.
Steve, forever mistrustful of the powers-that-be, continued to doubt the show would make it to air. “I figured right up until the night that it aired that something was going to happen and they weren’t going to put it on,” he says. Even the advertisements in TV Guide did not convince him. “I was more shocked that it came on, than what was in it,” Steve says.
When the program was finally broadcast that Wednesday evening, over 1.4 million Canadians tuned in to watch Steven emerge from the shadows. “His Word Against History: The Steven Truscott Story” was one of the highest-rated documentaries on the network that year. It touched a deep chord with Canadians who had grown up with the story, and reached out to younger citizens who had never heard the name Steven Truscott.
“In a Goderich, Ontario, jail cell, he awaited the hangman,” MacIntyre’s voiceover began over sombre black-and-white pictures of the brick prison walls and the bleak, dark cell. “He was fourteen.”
Pierre Berton read excerpts from his moving poem about a boy “too old to cringe and too old to cry, but never too young to die.” Then, in a dramatic moment, black-and-white footage of a little boy bicycling down a road in the 1950s dissolved into colour footage of running shoes on bike pedals. As the camera slowly revealed the feet and body of the cyclist, Canadians caught their first glimpse of Steven Truscott in three decades.
He spoke his first words about breaking the silence: “It’s important to me. I know that they got the wrong person,” he said. “My kids are all grown up. We’ve discussed it as a family and we figured it was time to come out.”
The documentary then proceeded to lay out the evidence that there had been a miscarriage of justice: the contradictory tales of Butch and Jocelyne, the eyewitness testimony of Dougie Oates, the dubious medical conclusions. Dr. John Butt, the former chief medical examiner for the province of Nova Scotia and one of the pathologists the fifth estate consulted, explained that modern science has completely discounted stomach contents as a reliable indicator of time of death. “The definition by time in this case is wrong,” he stated categorically.
Then Steven should never have been found guilty, MacIntyre asked.
“If that was the linchpin, the answer is, he should not have been,” Butt replied. “If that was what was used to wrap the parcel, it should have fallen apart.”
A highlight for many viewers came when Lesley and Ryan talked about their f
ather. Did they ever have any doubts about his innocence, MacIntyre asked. “Never,” Lesley responded with a smile. “My dad is the most laid-back, relaxed person I’ve ever met in my life. I’m sure everything that he went through with all the time in jail has really moulded the wonderful person that he’s become.”
“I guess I just couldn’t imagine having all of my rights taken away from me,” Ryan added. “People talk about heroes all the time. And who do you admire, and who’s your hero in your life. And we don’t even have to go anywhere but our house.”
The documentary revealed that all the evidence with potential DNA had been destroyed, so Steve had little chance of proving his innocence conclusively. “No one will ever know beyond a reasonable doubt who killed Lynne Harper,” MacIntyre said as his narrative drew to a close.
Why, MacIntyre asked Steve and his wife in the documentary’s final scene, was it so important for them to pursue their battle since Steve was long out of jail?
“He is not scot-free,” Marlene said. “He goes to bed every night as a convicted murderer, and he wakes up every morning as a convicted murderer. Why should he be?”
The camera cut to Steven. “I want to see justice done. Justice hasn’t been done,” he said. “Not to the Harper family and not to my family. So I mean for both families. It’s all I want. After forty years I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
With a freeze-frame on a tight close-up of Steve’s face, the documentary ended. And so did an entire chapter of Steve’s life.
42
A NEW HOPE
The boy was nervous and more than a little scared.
He walked down the small street in Guelph, turned up the walk tot he second house on the right, and knocked hesitantly on the side door of Steven Truscott’s house.
Eleven-year-old Skylar Hurst had the hip haircut, loose-fitting jeans and flashy sneakers that are the uniform of the MuchMusic generation; a far cry from the military crew cut, red pants and simple canvas runners that a teenage Steven wore in the 1950s.
Yet the boy in the year 2000 seemed to reach across time to connect with the boy from 1959 as Skylar sat down to watch the fifth estate documentary on the Truscott story with his mother. “I was just really sad and mad that he got charged like that, so I thought it would be cool if the other kids in my class could hear how unfair that was,” Skylar said. He decided to prepare a speech for his grade Six English class and wanted to interview Steven. He knew the famous ex-prisoner lived in his city, but he didn’t know where, so he simply wrote on the envelope, “Steven Truscott, Guelph.”
The letter got to its recipient. The fifth estate show had made Steven a minor celebrity. Hundreds of letters poured in from across the country, many of them with only a name. Canada Post gave Steven the special treatment usually reserved for the likes of Santa Claus, and delivered every envelope straight to his door.
Of all the letters, Skylar’s intrigued Truscott the most. “I’m really sad that you had to go through all that,” Skylar wrote. “Don’t worry, I’ll understand if you don’t want talk about it, but if you phone and I am not home, keep trying. I am probably out playing sports so keep calling.”
Skylar was often outside on the streets, fooling around on his mountain bike. Four decades before, another schoolboy had been inseparable from his new green racing bike. Perhaps Steven Truscott saw a little of himself in the kid from across town. As luck would have it, when the phone call came Skylar was indeed outside on his bike, but the Truscotts made arrangements with his mother and invited the Hurst family for a visit and an interview.
“Innocent or guilty? You decide,” Skylar told his classmates as he began his presentation. At fifteen minutes, his speech was much longer than it was supposed to be, but the usually restless students of Guelph’s Central Public School listened intently and peppered him with questions. In the first year of a new century, grade Six children were enthralled by a murder case that made headlines when most of their parents were schoolchildren. The Truscott story has always fascinated Canadians. Now it had gripped a new generation.
Skylar received a mark of 99.5 out of 100 for his speech.
Over five hundred people sent e-mails and letters to the CBC, an exceptional response to a single program. The messages, almost all of them sympathetic, came from strangers, from children who grew up at the Clinton air force base, even from former inmates.
In Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, tears came to eyes of Ted McGuin when he saw Steve’s children talk about their father as a hero. McGuin, like his brother Mike, was a tough veteran of reform school and Collins Bay, and had admired Steve’s stamina and principles behind bars. Thirty years later, he found himself watching Steve’s story on TV with his wife and nine of their foster children.
“He’s not a bad man?” one of the children asked.
“No, he was not,” McGuin replied, explaining that Steve did not belong in prison.
Then came the question McGuin knew was coming but he dreaded just the same. “Did you belong there, Dad?” his children asked.
“Yes, Daddy belonged in prison back then,” McGuin told his family. “But that man was innocent.”
After the show, McGuin sat down in front of his computer to send a message to Steve, identifying himself by name and by number—ex-inmate number 1486.
“You need to know, Steve, that I, like my brother, will go to our graves believing in your innocence,” he wrote. “I know that might not be much comfort to you, coming from guys like us—guys that were in there because we belonged there. But I always believed you to be innocent. I still do.… I knew you. I looked into your eyes. I saw the innocence they failed to see.
“Steve, you’re a lucky man to have kids that are that proud of their father,” he concluded. “Hold your head up, man.”
Even some police officers—active and retired—were upset by the show’s findings. “I personally take pride in my own police work,” wrote one thirty-two-year veteran of the Ottawa-Carleton police force, “and would not jeopardize any investigation ‘to get a conviction at any cost.’”
In addition to the e-mails to the fifth estate, the Truscotts also received about four hundred letters and cards in the weeks following the show (and another one hundred Christmas cards at the end of the year). “We accused him and threw him away, hoping that we would never have to hear about his case again,” said one letter writer. “What an injustice we have done to you and your family.”
“Like it or not, Steven Truscott, you have become a Canadian icon,” wrote an Ottawa schoolteacher. “For young people, you do not have to clear your name.”
A number of people seemed eager to do something to make amends for what they saw as Canada’s mistreatment of Steven. Mary Yanchus, a teacher from Guelph who grew up in Clinton, volunteered to stuff envelopes, make calls or circulate petitions to help Steven get a new hearing. “Know that, like millions of others, I care about you, pray for you in my way and earnestly wish you success.”
Traci Bell of Alberta was inspired to build a Web site with an online petition, calling on the federal justice minister to take action. “This is my opportunity to help see justice done,” she explains. “Sometimes you have to stand up for something you believe in.”
At Steve’s workplace, only about a quarter of the roughly four hundred employees had known his real identity. Steve took a few days off before and after the fifth estate broadcast, but the day after it aired he and Ryan stopped by the plant to pick up his paycheque. Ron Charbonneau, Steve’s supervisor, says it took the new TV celebrity an hour to make it from one end of the factory to the other, as his workmates cheered him, clapped him on the back and saluted his courage. For Steve, it was a moment of supreme pride and relief to be accepted for who he was. “The guy’s a gentle man,” Charbonneau says when asked how Steve’s work buddies see him. “Talk to me until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never convince me that he’s guilty.”
More and more people were coming up to Steve in public. Sometimes t
hey gawked or pointed fingers at him; one woman nearly fell into the frozen food bin as she stared so intently at the man whose image had appeared on TV and in the newspaper. Often people came up to him to shake the hand of a man they admired.
It was a novelty for Steven to experience directly the passions his case engendered. “I missed all the publicity in the past,” he says. “I never saw all the letters, the media interest. This is a first for me. And I’m sort of overwhelmed by it.”
Slowly, imperceptibly at first but then unmistakably, the fifth estate broadcast and its aftermath began to have a profound effect on Steve. “I noticed a change in myself,” Steve admits. “I wasn’t outgoing [before]. The house, our close friends, that was basically it. All of a sudden things started opening up. People who we never knew or met came to the door. I can now stand there and talk to a complete stranger and it doesn’t bother me. It was very positive what it’s done to me.”
The children and Marlene saw a more relaxed, more open Steve, as if pressure and tension building up over decades had finally been released.
“It has taken the heat off me. Because now he’ll answer a telephone and talk to anybody,” Marlene says. “I was the one who had to talk to everybody first. He’s more confident now.”
Across the country, the story reignited passions around the case that refused to die a quiet death.
“Truscott Issues Plea for Justice—show makes strong case for his innocence,” ran the headline in the Globe and Mail. “Truscott Wants Vindication—CBC documentary raises new doubts,” said the Gazette in Montreal. “Stunning new proof in Steven Truscott’s 1959 sex-slaying case,” the Ottawa Sun said on its front page. “Was there a cover-up?” The documentary would go on to earn the Canadian Association of Journalists’ top prize for Best Investigative Report of 2000, and was part of a package of fifth estate exposés on the justice system that won the prestigious Michener Award for “meritorious public service journalism.”