by Lorna Poplak
As for the defence — well, there was none. When the time came for Maher to leap to his feet, produce his promised hundred witnesses, and definitively clear Coffin’s name, he spoke just five words: “My Lord, the defence rests.” He would not even allow Coffin to take the witness stand to tell his own story.
The jury was expecting a spirited defence. When that didn’t materialize, what was left was a one-sided version of the events. At the end of the nineteen-day trial, it took the jury only thirty-four minutes to find Coffin guilty, and he was sentenced to hang at the Bordeaux jail in Montreal.
In the years since his conviction, much has been said and written about Coffin’s defence, or lack thereof. Reckless and negligent in the extreme — that’s how renowned Canadian defence lawyer Edward Greenspan, who studied the case, described Maher’s performance. But, according to prominent Toronto criminal lawyer Arthur Maloney, Queen’s Counsel (QC), the prosecution also played a role in denying Coffin a fair trial: “The defence was in many respects taken by surprise. Many witnesses were called, the nature or effect of whose testimony was unknown to the defence. This was improper and unfair.”
But was Coffin guilty?
Of theft, certainly. He confessed as much, saying he had arranged with the hunters to go back to their truck a couple of days after his last contact with them. Finding the truck empty, he helped himself to some booze and got hammered in the process. His senses dulled by drink, he then helped himself to some of the hunters’ belongings and decamped. It was just a tiny step, the Crown would have you believe, from this kind of petty pilfering to the worst kind of murder.
Coffin swore that he had no gun in his truck, as that witness for the prosecution had asserted. And the money, including U.S. dollars, that he was accused of spending? He drew up a list of people (including Lindsey) who had paid him, both before and after the period when the murder occurred, for staking mining claims and doing carpentry and other services for them.
With a death penalty looming, Coffin desperately needed legal help, which he obtained through the efforts of his own A-team: Quebec lawyer François de B. Gravel and Arthur Maloney QC. The affair stuttered on until February 1956. Coffin was reprieved seven times. Appeal followed appeal; rejection followed rejection; and telegrams and letters piled up. From this tangle of appeals and refusals, new strands of evidence emerged.
Early on, Coffin told police — a claim he held to steadfastly until his death — that when he last saw the victims, they were in the company of two other Americans. He described their vehicle as a jeep with yellow plywood sides. After the trial, several witnesses stepped forward to corroborate this story, among them a young Toronto doctor and his wife who had travelled across the St. Lawrence River by ferry on June 5, 1953. They had noticed a jeep with a plywood cover that matched the description Coffin had given the QPP. There were two men in the vehicle, both wearing U.S. army–style jackets. Other witnesses also stated that a jeep with two occupants and U.S. licence plates was in the area around the time the murders were probably committed.
Another point: John Edward Belliveau, a journalist for the Toronto Daily Star , wrote a book about the case that was published after Coffin’s death. According to Belliveau, something that did not come out at Coffin’s trial was that Eugene Lindsey was reputed to be a hard-nosed moneylender, not above getting his enforcers to beat up his debtors, or doing the job with his own fists. Could Lindsey’s enemies have followed him to the Gaspé and murdered him?
This jumble of contradictory information added up to just one word — doubt. As the Ottawa Citizen put it in October 1955: “Altogether the doubts raised in the public mind by Coffin’s defence can hardly be allayed unless Ottawa orders a new trial, clear of wrangling about the conduct of the first trial and open to the introduction of any new evidence. This would seem the best way to determine Coffin’s guilt or innocence, for where a man’s life is at stake, the fullest resources of judicial procedure should be exhausted before inflicting the penalty.”
Hopes were raised at the eleventh hour when the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Coffin’s appeal by a vote of five to two. That may seem negative, but in the past, a divided vote had always resulted in commutation of the death sentence. This time, when relations between the provincial government of Quebec and the federal government in Ottawa were particularly strained, it did not. Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis was furious at the actions of the federally appointed Supreme Court; he complained that the feds were stomping on Quebec’s autonomy. An appeal by Coffin’s team to the Cabinet in Ottawa was doubly unsuccessful: the Cabinet decided against a new trial and refused to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy. And Duplessis rejected Coffin’s plea to be allowed to marry his long-time partner, Marion Petrie.
On February 9, 1956, Coffin’s lawyer François Gravel and his spiritual advisor, Reverend Sam Pollard, visited him in his cell to give him the grim news. The Gazette reported Gravel as saying, “I told him that he must hang, that commutation of his death sentence had been denied. He took the bad news like a man. He turned to Mr. Pollard and asked: ‘Do you think I can still marry Marion?’ Mr. Pollard told him that, too, had been refused.”
“I am convinced,” added Gravel, “that Coffin is innocent.”
The following morning, the hanging proceeded.
Was this a case of cynical political opportunism warping the path of justice? Firebrand author, publisher, and future senator Jacques Hébert certainly thought so. He believed that the case was the biggest legal miscarriage in the history of Quebec, and he published two books to say just that. In the second one, J’accuse les assassins de Coffin (I accuse Coffin’s assassins), published in 1963, he fingered the Duplessis government for making Coffin the fall guy in the hunters’ murder in order to protect the province’s lucrative tourist industry. This sparked a royal commission in 1964 to investigate the affair. The commission concluded that Coffin had received a fair trial.
When the bell tolled seven times and the black flag was raised at Montreal’s Bordeaux jail on Friday, February 10, 1956, signalling the death of Wilbert Coffin, it did not mark the end of the story. The long-simmering debate on how to deal with the possibility of miscarriage of justice in Canada was heating up. The boiling point would be reached through a case that began in Clinton, Ontario, on a sunny June afternoon in 1959, with the thermometer hovering at the thirty-one-degree -Celsius mark. It was a case that would take nearly fifty years to shuffle along to its imperfect end.
Chapter 12
Steven Murray Truscott: A Kid on Death Row
T uesday evening, June 9, 1959. Steven Truscott, a popular, athletic fourteen-year-old schoolboy is riding his bike with his buddies on a bridge just outside the town of Clinton, Ontario.
Early Saturday morning, June 13, 1959. Steven Truscott is in prison, accused of the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old classmate.
What happened?
After an early dinner on that hot and steamy Tuesday, Lynne Harper left her house on the Royal Canadian Air Force base around 5:00 p.m. She was headed for the school to help organize a Brownie meeting. When she hadn’t returned home by 11:20 p.m., her worried father reported her missing to the air force police. The following morning, with his daughter still nowhere to be found, Leslie Harper knocked on his neighbours’ doors to ask if anyone had seen her the night before.
Yes, said Steven Truscott. At around 7:30 p.m., Lynne had asked him to give her a ride on his bike to Highway 8. She told him that she was mad at her parents because they wouldn’t take her swimming, and she was planning to hitch a ride to see some ponies. With Lynne sitting on the crossbar of his bike, Steven pedalled along County Road, which led north from the school and over a bridge to the highway. After dropping her off, Steven headed back toward town to join his friends. At the bridge, he turned and looked back. He saw Lynne climb into a grey Chevy with yellow stickers or licence plates. That was the last time he saw her.
Had she run away? No. Two days later, her half-nude body
was found covered with branches near Lawson’s Bush, a wooded area situated to the east of County Road just before the bridge. Her clothes were neatly folded beside her — other than her blouse, which had been used to strangle her.
By that time, the police had already questioned Steven a few times, on occasion pulling him out of class to do so. They had also decided that they had their man, or rather, their boy. And in the very early morning of June 13, the boy was formally charged with the murder of Cheryl Lynne Harper and taken into custody.
Two police officers accompany Steven Truscott to the Huron County courthouse after his arrest for murdering a schoolmate in 1959. He was fourteen years old at the time.
Steven was only fourteen years old, but a juvenile court magistrate decided that he should be tried as an adult before a judge and jury. This meant that in spite of his age, he could be sentenced to death if found guilty of murder. Steven pleaded not guilty at his trial in Goderich, Ontario.
Crown prosecutor Glenn Hays’s case against Steven leaned heavily on the medical evidence, which was damning. District pathologist Dr. John L. Penistan had performed the autopsy on Lynne’s body. Basing his opinion on an examination of the contents of Lynne’s stomach, he testified that the time of death was between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m. on June 9. Doctors John Addison and David Brooks added their expert testimony to Penistan’s. Two sores found on Steven’s penis during a physical exam shortly after Lynne’s death were believed to have been caused by the sexual assault on the girl; in Brooks’s words: “A very inexpert attempt at penetration.”
Eyewitnesses testified that Steven was with Lynne during that period, which Steven himself had admitted. No one else was seen with her that evening. Testimony from two of Steven’s classmates helped to incriminate him further. Jocelyne Gaudet claimed that Steven had invited her to look for calves that evening near Lawson’s Bush, where Lynne’s body was found (implication: for sex), but their plans fell through. Another classmate, Butch George, said that Steven had told him that he and Lynne had been near the bush on the night of the murder. Hays skilfully explained away the fact that both these kids had changed their stories since their first statements to the police.
There was no clear evidence, said Hays, that Steven and Lynne had actually crossed the bridge and gone as far as Highway 8. They must have turned off into the woods before reaching the bridge. And that’s where Steven killed Lynne.
As for defence attorney Frank Donnelly — well, years later, Truscott told journalist Bill Trent that he distrusted the man from the very beginning. But it is fair to say that Donnelly was hamstrung by a lack of resources and limited access to police and prosecution files.
Donnelly called witness Dr. Berkely Brown, an expert on both the digestive system and rape cases. Brown argued that using the contents of the stomach to establish the time of death was unreliable, as food can remain undigested in the stomach for longer than four hours after a meal. The lesions on Steven’s penis, he said, were most likely not caused by sexual intercourse. Steven had told doctors Addison and Brooks that he had had the lesions for a few weeks, but this was not admitted as evidence. It was later shown that they were caused by a dermatological condition.
Donnelly tried to demonstrate that Steven had met Lynne in the schoolyard well after 7:00 p.m. Steven would not have had time to murder Lynne and rush back to the bridge within the narrow thirty-minute time-of-death window suggested by Penistan.
As an antidote to Gaudet and George, classmates Dougie Oates and Gordon Logan testified on Steven’s behalf. They claimed that they saw Steven dropping Lynne off at Highway 8 and returning alone across the bridge to join his pals. According to them, Steven was nowhere near Lawson’s Bush around 7:45 that evening. Also, people who met and spoke with Steven that evening described his behaviour as completely normal.
In his summing-up, Justice Robert Ferguson said that no one saw Steven kill Lynne, which meant that all the evidence was circumstantial. The jury, then, should be sure that the circumstances were all consistent with Steven’s guilt, and inconsistent with any other reasonable explanation.
The judge was not impressed with Steven’s friends Oates and Logan, or their versions of the events clearly supporting Steven’s story that he had left Lynne at Highway 8. Their evidence was shaky, said the judge, and there was no direct proof that Steven and Lynne had crossed the bridge.
The jury of twelve was all male. (Defence lawyer Donnelly told Steven’s mother, Doris, that although women jurors were permissible by 1959, they were a bad option for this case as they would have been too emotional.) It took them less than four hours to deliver their verdict: guilty, with a plea for mercy.
On Wednesday evening, September 30, 1959, Judge Ferguson ignored the jury’s request and Steven received the automatic sentence — death by hanging. His execution was set for December 8, 1959.
Steven was taken back to his small cell at the Huron County Gaol in Goderich, which had now become the death row cell of a convicted murderer. The rules had changed. He was no longer permitted to exercise in the prison yard or join other prisoners for meals. His only outing was to take a shower once a week.
Initially, he wept. “At night time you lie there and cry,” he told Julian Sher, author of Until You Are Dead . “But it doesn’t really accomplish that much. So after a while you even stop doing that. You kind of harden yourself up for what’s to come.”
But the dread remained. “I woke up one day and somebody was building something outside the wall. You could hear the hammering. I figured they were building scaffolding [for the gallows]. It’s just kind of living in terror because nobody tells you any different and it’s getting closer and closer to the date that they set.”
You would have to go back to 1875 to find a boy as young as Steven languishing for months on death row in Canada. A fourteen-year-old First Nations youth, Quanamcan, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder of a mother and her son in Nanaimo, British Columbia. After a recommendation for mercy from the jury, his sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. The last teenager actually executed was Archie McLean, sixteen, youngest member of the Kamloops Outlaws that terrorized the Fort Kamloops area of British Columbia in the late 1870s. He and his fellow gang members were hanged in January 1881.
Would Steven Truscott, seventy-eight years later, also face the gallows?
Steven’s lawyers appealed his conviction, first to the Ontario Court of Appeal. This was dismissed. An application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was denied. There was no way, however, that Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was going to sanction the hanging of a fourteen-year-old . By that time, changes to the Criminal Code were being considered, especially with regard to juvenile offenders; in 1956, for example, a special joint committee of the House and Senate had recommended removing the death penalty for children younger than eighteen. In January 1960, the Cabinet stepped in and commuted Steven’s death sentence to life imprisonment.
Steven Truscott: bounced from death row at the Huron County Gaol in Goderich to the Ontario Training School for Boys in Guelph, and, when he turned eighteen, to the Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston. What was a boy to do? What this boy did was train in the machine and carpentry shops and participate in sports programs. In 1969, after ten years in prison, he was eligible for parole. A perfect record meant that he had no problem gaining his release at the age of twenty-four. He changed his name and moved to Guelph, where he married, had three children, and worked as a millwright.
But while Steven Truscott got on with his own quiet, dignified life in the shadows, the case itself obstinately refused to fade into the sepia footnotes of history. Lawyers, writers, and a gutsy new breed of investigative journalists began to make a difference.
A moving poem in the Toronto Star by Canadian historian, author, and journalist Pierre Berton, called “Requiem for a Fourteen-Year-Old ,” started the ball rolling six days after Truscott was sentenced to death. Berton lambasted the way the crimina
l justice system had treated the “small, scared boy” in Goderich, a boy who would probably be reprieved (“We always do”), then put in prison to rot. Berton received a deluge of hate mail for his pains. How dare he defend a convicted killer, his critics exclaimed. His own daughter should be raped by a sex fiend, too, they said.
One person who did not hate Berton and his poem was Toronto writer and social activist Isabel LeBourdais, whose own son, coincidentally, was fourteen years old at the time. LeBourdais started digging and then wrote a book called The Trial of Steven Truscott . The book dropped like a stick of dynamite onto the desks of Canadian publishers. Not one of them would touch it and risk a costly court battle. It was eventually published in Britain in 1966, and only then picked up by Canadian company McClelland & Stewart.
“Who killed Lynne Harper?” LeBourdais asks in her final chapter. “Some man with a very sick mind raped and strangled the young girl that night…. They said Steven had done it…. Every witness, every clue, every fact that did not support a case against him was overlooked or ignored from the hour the body of Lynne was found. Why? ”
The media continued to keep awareness of the Truscott case in the public eye — but an on-camera tear from the eye of Laurier LaPierre after an interview with Doris Truscott for the CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days led to both his firing (as it indicated possible bias in his reporting) and the canning of the show in 1966.
In the 1970s, author Bill Trent published two books about Truscott. Then, in the late 1990s, the CBC brought its sizable resources into the fray. The result was a Fifth Estate documentary called “Steven Truscott: His Word Against History,” produced by Julian Sher and hosted by Linden MacIntyre, which aired in March 2000.