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MACINTYRE: In
a Goderich, Ontario jail cell, he awaited the hangman.
He was fourteen.
TRUSCOTT: I
woke up one day and somebody was building something
outside the wall. You could hear the hammering,
and I thought they were building a scaffold. And
it's just kind of living in terror, and everyday
you expect it to be your last.
MACINTYRE:
It was 1959 and his name was Steven Truscott. Once
his jailers saw his brother climbing a tree to catch
a glimpse of him, so they moved the prisoner to
a cell without a window.
PIERRE BERTON:
(reading): "The cell is lonely, the cell is
cold; October is young but the boy is old. Too old
to cringe and too old to cry. Though young - but
never too young to die. At last we've something
to boast about: we've a national law in the name
of the Queen to hang a child who is just fourteen."
MACINTYRE:
Columnist Pierre Berton broke journalistic conventions
and wrote a bitter poem about the death sentence,
a rare display of outrage amid all the sensational
news stories. But it was 1959, when Canada still
had mainly rural and small-town roots, a time of
prosperity and order. People still presumed the
infallibility of institutions like the justice system.
In the summer of that year, just outside
the air force base at Clinton, Ontario, a single
tragic incident would shatter many assumptions about
the innocence of youth, and about the safety of
children. For days there had been a heat wave. It
was near the end of the school year. The children
were restless. Two of them set out on a bike ride
that would carry them into Canadian legal history.
The girl was Lynn Harper, aged 12. The boy was one
of her classmates, Steven Truscott, aged 14. Two
days later searchers found her body in a wooded
grove.
For more than 40 years there would
be controversy about what really happened on that
evening. Partly because of it Canadians abolished
the death penalty. In that time one voice was absent
from the debate … that of Steven Truscott.
TRUSCOTT:
It's important to me. I know that they got the wrong
person. My kids are all grown up, we've discussed
it as a family and we figured it was time to come
out.
MACINTYRE:
His life was frozen in the '50s. After years in
prison he took a new name, married, had children,
watched them grow, eventually told them his grim
story: how he became the central figure in one of
Canada's best known murder cases.
His daughter Leslie remembers when
the Truscott case came up in school as a class project.
LESLIE:
After class I went to my teacher and I said, Please
tell me that we're not going to do any more on this
subject. And he says, Why, does it bother you? And
I said, Yes it does. And he said, Well it bothers
me too to see an innocent man sit in jail for ten
years for something he didn't do. And I said, Well,
it bothers me for a different reason. And he said,
Oh, really? And I said, Yes, I said, He's my father.
MACINTYRE:
For years he avoided the place where his life changed
so dramatically when he was 14.
June 9 1959: a small bridge over a
slow river - it was all you needed when you were
14 and life was coming into focus. Steven was popular
and athletic, usually at the river with the other
boys, or on the playing fields at the school. That's
where he was, on his bike, at seven in the evening,
June 9. Lynn Harper was also there. She was the
daughter of an officer on the Clinton base.
TRUSCOTT:
Lynn Harper came over on the bike and more or less
asked me what I was doing and I said, Well, I'm
going down to the river to see if any of the kids
are down there. And she asked me if she could have
a ride down to the highway. And I thought, well,
I'm going down there anyhow.
MACINTYRE:
A tiny little moment.
TRUSCOTT: Yeah.
A tiny little moment that kind of changed everybody's
life.
MACINTYRE:
He says that Lynn told him that she'd squabbled
with her parents at supper time. She wanted to go
to the main highway and from there she was going
to a place where there were ponies. Along the way
they passed a wheat field and a grove of trees known
as Farmer Lawson's Bush. A couple of minutes further
on they crossed the bridge spanning the little river.
He says he dropped her at Highway No. 8. Then he
rode back to the bridge where he stopped to watch
the other kids playing in the water. He glanced
toward the highway once and saw a car pull up.
TRUSCOTT:
It was a '59 Chev, gray. And as it swung in and
it started to pull back out, there was something
orange on the back of it. I couldn't tell whether
it was a license plate or a sticker or whatever.
That was the first year that Chev changed the style
of their car and they had large fins going out like
wings, and the tail lights looked like cat's eyes.
And there was no other car around like that.
MACINTYRE: The
police came here during the investigation, they
did tests and they later testified that you just
couldn't see a car from that distance, let alone
an orange or yellow sticker on the back of it.
TRUSCOTT: That
was what I saw and I maintain that today.
MACINTYRE:
By his reckoning it would have been just after 7:30
when she drove off in the strange car. The police
at first thought she'd run away. By Thursday, the
military organized a large search party to sweep
the area, starting at the school, heading north
toward Farmer Lawson's Bush. That afternoon they
found her body, sexually assaulted and strangled.
George Edens was a young airman then.
EDENS:
First thing I saw was her clothes. And her clothes
were laying there, rather neatly I thought, and
I thought, why would a little girl be out here without
any clothes on. And then I looked at her and I thought
Oh my heavens, no. I knew then that she was dead.
MACINTYRE: Among
the Ontario Provincial Police officers at the scene,
a senior investigator from headquarters in Toronto,
Insp. Harold Graham would head the investigation,
and it wouldn't take him long to crack the case
wide open. In an area with thousands of transient
young men in the military and civilian populations,
there might have been many suspects, but Insp. Graham
quickly found his prime suspect in the elementary
school. They found her body Thursday afternoon.
Friday evening they picked up Steven Truscott.
TRUSCOTT:
The police officer got out and he says, Get in the
car. I mean, back then when you're 14 years old
and you kind of looked up to the police, when they
told you to get in the car, you got in the car.
MACINTYRE:
Later they brought him to the base guardhouse, then
they told his parents. Their Friday night interrogation
would go on for more than seven hours. Frightened
and exhausted and without a lawyer present, he was
under constant pressure to confess. He refused.
TRUSCOTT:
They would take turns coming in and questioning
me, and then the next one would come in and call
me liar, and you did this, you did that.
MACINTYRE: Eventually
he became confused, made mistakes. He stuck to his
story about seeing five boys swimming while he watched
from the bridge, got two of them wrong. Told the
family doctor he could have molested Lynn, but couldn't
remember. On Saturday morning, after less than two
days of investigation, they charged the boy with
murder.
TRUSCOTT:
One cop says, after being there just overnight.
This is our suspect. We're charging this person.
I mean what ever happened to the word investigation?
MACINTYRE:
Have you got it boiled down to any kind of a reason
why this happened to you?
TRUSCOTT:
It was the easiest route out for them, and a 14-year-old
kid was the easiest possible way.
MACINTYRE: The
first reaction to the arrest was one of relief that
the killer had been captured. And there was a bonus:
he was a kid, a nobody. He wasn't a serviceman,
so the military were spared embarrassment. He wasn't
a civilian, so there was no danger of a backlash
from the base. The bad news was that the police
really didn't have much of a case against him other
than having been seen with the victim while she
was still alive. And much of the evidence came from
a lot of contradictory stories out of the mouths
of children. The stories were about who saw what
and when on this road, from the school to the river,
past Farmer Lawson's Bush, which is on the right
about halfway up. If Steven and Lynn left the school
and drove past the bush, over the river, to No.
8 Highway, as he insisted they did, he was innocent.
The police believed he lured the girl
into the bush and killed her even though there were
eyewitnesses who corroborated Truscott's story.
An 11 year old who had been at the
river catching turtles said he was climbing the
embankment to go home when he saw Steven and Lynne
ride by.
His name was Dougie Oates and 40 years later he's
still positive that he saw them.
OATES: I recall saying
hi and waving at them and Lynn smiling back. I don't
recall any real reaction from Steven, because he
was peddling down the road headin' towards Highway
No. 8.
MACINTYRE:
No doubt in your mind about it.
OATES:
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind I saw both
of them. Well, couldn't see one of them without
the other, but they were both … they were
riding double on Steve's bike across the river.
MACINTYRE: You
see, if your memory is sharp, then Steven Truscott
is innocent.
OATES: I
don't know how anyone could've come to any other
conclusion. I could see that maybe being dismissed
if I was the only one that had seen them cross the
bridge, but in fact, I know I'm not the only that
saw them cross the bridge.
MACINTYRE:
Gordon Logan, who was 12, was fishing in the river.
He told police he looked up and saw Steven and Lynn
drive by. Shortly afterwards, he saw Steven coming
back alone, presumably after dropping Lynn at the
highway. His story is significant because he reported
it to the police on Thursday morning, before they
found Lynn's body. Later, when it became crucial
to Steven's alibi, the police said he made it up
to protect his friend, that the bridge was too far
away to see anybody on it clearly.
But we've discovered police records
indicating the opposite. In a real test later on,
a policeman standing where Gord Logan stood precisely
identified clothing and colour and concluded that
someone on the bridge would have been recognizable.
But at the trial, the prosecution was able to persuade
the jury that the boys who had seen Truscott and
Harper cross the bridge were just part of a conspiracy
of pals out to protect him.
OATES: When
you think about it logically, I mean, at the ripe
age of 11 years old, we would've had to have been
extremely sophisticated to be able to put together
stories like that.
MACINTYRE:
So you can sit in front of me today and in front
of the whole country and say what you said with
such ferocity back then: that you were not a liar.
OATES: No,
no I saw Steve Truscott and Lynn Harper cross the
bridge heading north towards Highway No. 8 on that
evening. And there's absolutely no doubt in my mind.
MACINTYRE: There
were many children and adults who saw Steven on
his bicycle that evening. Nobody, including Truscott,
disagreed that he picked her up at the schoolyard
and gave her a ride just before she disappeared.
But that wasn't enough --- the police needed objective
evidence to pinpoint the exact time of Lynne's death.
Lynn Harper left home at about 6:15.
She met up with Steven just after 7. People saw
Steven around the base at 8 ... and shortly after
that he was home babysitting for the rest of the
evening. To prove that he killed Lynn Harper, the
prosecution would have to prove she died between
7:15 and a quarter to eight
The local coroner was Dr. John Penistan.
Relying mainly on the analysis of Lynn's stomach
contents he placed the time of death precisely in
that half-hour window --- an astonishing precision
even with the forensic tools available today
It was such a crucial piece of evidence
that we asked for some expert opinions on the validity
of Dr. Penistan's conclusions. Dr. John Butt is
former chief medical examiner for Nova Scotia. Years
working mostly as a prosecution expert have taught
him to be very careful drawing conclusions from
stomach contents.
BUTT:
I think one thing that we can learn is perhaps what
the person ate at the last meal. I don't think it
tells you anything precise about the time of death.
MACINTYRE:
Sure told... the police and the pathologist at the
time a lot. Told them that she died sometime between
7:15 and 7:30 on the night of June the 9.
BUTT: Well
the big question here is whether or not that information
said to have been developed from the stomach contents
quote unquote scientifically was meeting some predetermined
parameter.
MACINTYRE:
A polite way of saying that Dr. Penistan might have
been tailoring his conclusions to substantiate the
suspicions of policemen ... It was difficult to
challenge Dr. Penistan's conclusions since the prosecution
never entered his official autopsy report into evidence.
But they called the pathologist to
testify and he declared that Lynne died that evening
some time shortly before eight o clock.
BUTT:
The definition by time in this case is wrong.
MACINTYRE:
Steven Truscott then should never have been found
guilty.
BUTT:
If that was the if that was the lynch pin the answer
is he should not have been. If that was what was
used to wrap the parcel, it should've fallen apart.
MACINTYRE:
Evidence at the crime scene indicated that the little
girl had fought against her attacker.
This note by Inspector Graham in
the early hours of the investigation advised his
officers to look especially for someone with "scratches
on face, neck, hands and arms".
The prosecution would later claim
that Steven Truscott lured Lynn down the lane, somehow
knocked her unconscious, dragged her through a barbed
wire fence, then carried her, limp and bleeding,
into the bush where he raped and strangled her.
But Steven arrived at the school minutes
after the supposed time of death and according to
every single eyewitness who saw him there, was behaving
normally ... unscratched, unbloodied and unbothered.
That should have eliminated him as a suspect. It
didn't.
TRUSCOTT: There
was a gravel road here, there was a barbed wire
fence all along the front. They said I went back
in the bush and killed and raped her
MACINTYRE:
No marks on you.
TRUSCOTT: No.
MACINTYRE:
No dirt.
TRUSCOTT:
No marks, no dirt, no blood, nothing. She had a
big cut down her leg, marks on her back. To do all
that out here without anybody seeing you because
the road is just back to the side here ... it was
impossible to have happened.
MACINTYRE:
The wheels of justice were turning quickly in June
of 1959. Ninety days after he was arrested he went
on trial as an adult in the Huron County court house
in Goderich.
His parents never doubted him ...
but shortly after his arrest, the military transferred
his father, Dan Truscott, to Ottawa, 800 kilometers
away. They rented a trailer in Goderich near the
jail ...and not far from the courtroom where the
trial would take place.
The trial was over only 15 days after it started.
The all male jury recoiled at evidence
of rape and murder in their idyllic community and
found the schoolboy … guilty.
The judge pronounced the sentence:
that on the 8th of December he would be hanged by
the neck until he was dead.
TRUSCOTT:
All the time that it's going on you're thinking,
they're going to realize that they made a mistake
and you know, they're going to let me go. But it
just never happened that way.
MACINTYRE:
Doug Oates, who was 11 and who had endured a withering
cross examination as he insisted on Truscott's innocence,
was stunned.
OATES: I
was flabbergasted, I just couldn't believe that
you can convict somebody or find somebody guilty
with really no evidence other than circumstantial
evidence. I think that's just abhorrent.
MACINTYRE: The
death sentence was postponed to the new year ...
then, early in 1960, the federal government commuted
it to life imprisonment.
TRUSCOTT:
It's really, really kind of terrifying. Night time
you lay there and cry 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 -
what's to come.
MACINTYRE: This
was what he had ahead of him ... after a few years
in a youth facility, Collins Bay Penitentiary near
Kingston ... a tough prison that's known among convicts
as "gladiator school".
He never wavered in his claim of innocence.
He voluntarily submitted to psychiatric probing
--- with truth serums and LSD --- for secret signs
of guilt.
TRUSCOTT: This
is what the psychiatrists all were hinting at -
where you don't remember. So I said hey. I know
I'm not guilty. Whatever tests you wanna do, I'll
go along with them. ....And nothing came up to indicate
that there was any guilt.
MACINTYRE:
Was there any moment in the testing or in the prior
to the testing that you felt, maybe I did it, you
know, maybe they are gonna find something in here?
TRUSCOTT: No.
None at all.
MACINTYRE:
As the children of Truscott's generation came of
age in the mid-sixties, his case found new life
... Many protesters saw Truscott as a victim of
corrupt authority
A more aggressive media began to challenge institutions
like the courts and police ...
PATRICK WATSON:
I'm Patrick Watson
MACINTYRE:
The CBC's This Hour Has Seven Days showcased a new
book on the Truscott case ... it was a blunt critique
of Truscott's trial, written by Isabel Lebourdais.
LEBOURDAIS :
I got hold of a transcript of the trial and decided
it wasn't a sick boy who was guilty, it was a perfectly
normal boy who was innocent
MACINTYRE:
After a lot of public pressure, the Supreme Court
of Canada decided to review his case ... to determine
whether or not he deserved a new trial. They decided
eight to one that he didn't. He never testified
at his original trial ... and when he appeared before
the Supreme Court, they said they found his testimony
vague and confused.
Today he says he never really had
a chance.
TRUSCOTT:
You're in jail. I think after so many years of nobody
believing you. I mean for so many years, they are
not interested. They couldn't care less. You don't
matter.
MACINTYRE:
It was his last shot at vindication for a long time.
MACINTYRE:
October, 1969 … Steven Truscott left Collins
Bay penitentiary on parole. He was 24.
He would never return to prison … but he'd
never really be free either, as long as he was branded
… a murderer.
He moved into the home of Mac Steinberg …
a member of the National Parole Board.
Steinburg was known in the world of
corrections as an old-fashioned hard-liner ...but
he'd developed a deep respect for Truscott and,
on his release, took him into his own family.
MACINTYRE: Did
you ever have any cause to regret that?
STEINBURG: Not
one minute. Personally I have a great deal of trouble
believing that he was guilty because he's a very
gentle person and I don't see that type of emotion
in him that that would - that would lead him to
commit that type of offense.
MACINTYRE:
Truscott eventually settled down in Guelph, Ontario
where he earned a living as a millwright. He never
had another problem with the law. As time passed,
even the justice system seemed to forget about him.
But anonymity became a kind of prison, for him and
for his children. When his father died he had to
tell his kids they couldn't go to his funeral. His
daughter Leslie never forgot it
LESLIE : For fear of
reporters. They didn't want pictures taken of us.
And I can remember sitting at my aunt and uncle's,
just crying and crying, wanting to go to my grandfather's
funeral. And I couldn't.
MACINTYRE:
Steven Truscott only told his children who he really
was when they became teenagers. Devon is his youngest
son.
MACINTYRE: Leslie and
her brother Ryan say the truth only deepened their
admiration for their father.
MACINTYRE: Did
you ever think maybe, my gosh, there's another side
to him that I don't know about.
LESLIE:
No. No.
MACINTYRE:
Never crossed your mind?
LESLIE:
Never. 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 and that
has really molded the wonderful person that he's
become.
RYAN: I
guess I just couldn't imagine going through having
all of my rights taken away from me. Having my family
taken away ... everything taken away from me. And
to be able to live through to tell about it. 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.
MACINTYRE:
As the years passed his most tenacious supporter
was his wife … Marlene, who has acquired an
encyclopedic knowledge of his case, and unshakeable
faith in his innocence.
MARLENE: I've
taken things day by day, I've taken them witness
by witness. I've gone over it and over it and over
it. And it all amounts to one thing, they were on
a quest. It's him they have in mind. So while they
are getting all this information to have him convicted,
the murderer runs free.
MACINTYRE:
In the 1950's Clinton was a military base …
home and workplace for thousands of airmen …among
them, at least one troubled individual whose medical
files should have flagged him as a suspect.
Two years ago the fifth estate, assisted by the
National Archives in Ottawa, retrieved a 900 page
dossier on an acquaintance of the Harper family,
once stationed at Clinton … a sexual predator
with an unhealthy interest in young girls.
His name was Alexander Kalichuk.
Sgt. Kalichuk was a troubled man, a heavy drinker
with a history of sexual offenses. He lived in this
farmhouse with his wife and three children ... less
than a 20 minute drive from the Clinton base. He
worked as a supply technician there until 1957...
He transferred to another base, in Aylmer, about
a one hour drive away ... but made frequent trips
back to Clinton ... where Lynn Harper's father was
the senior supply officer.
Kalichuk's record of sex offenses went back at least
a decade. In 1950 he had two convictions for indecent
exposure in Trenton, where he was stationed.
About three weeks before Lynne Harper's
murder he stalked three young girls on a country
road outside St. Thomas. When two of them had gone
home, he tried to lure the third into his car. Nancy
Knowles … now Nancy Davidson …was 10
years old.
Today she remembers how the car followed at a distance
until she was alone.
DAVIDSON: He
asked me if I would come around and get in the car
because he wanted me to pick out the prettiest present
and I said, No. And then he pulled out - he had
this brown paper bag and he pulled out this underwear.
MACINTYRE:
Little kid's underwear.
DAVIDSON: Yeah,
yeah.
MACINTYRE: And
what did he want?
DAVIDSON:
He wanted me to pick out the prettiest pair of underwear.
He had a bottle between his legs. His eyes were
bulgy and he had that glassy look and there were
dark circles and I knew he was drinking and I just
wanted to get away.
MACINTYRE:
Kalichuk was caught and charged and appeared in
Elgin County court a week later.
In spite of his prior convictions, the judge released
him with a warning.
Three weeks after Lynne Harper's murder, Kalichuk
entered a psychiatric hospital. According to records
he was suffering from anxiety, depression and guilt.
Kalichuk was released but apparently
far from cured. A heavily censored confidential
military memo about "Sgt Kalichuk's aberrations"
warned cryptically that when he was later posted
at a base near Clinton, ongoing incidents were serious
enough to get into the local paper.
In fact, police were warning about
the activities of an unidentified molester who was
preying on young girls from a car ... through all
of which, Sgt. Kalichuk managed to avoid particular
attention as a suspect ....in those incidents ...
and, most significantly of all, in the murder of
12-year old Lynn Harper.
Kalichuk spent the rest of his life
in and out of psychiatric hospitals and died in
1975 from alcoholism.
JULIAN SHER:
Alexander Kalichuk is really just the worst
example of a long list of potential suspects ignored
that showed that the military and the police really
were not interested in a serious investigation into
who killed Lynn Harper.
The producer of the fifth estate documentary
on Truscott two years ago continued to investigate
the case independently … and has now written
a book: Until You are Dead. Julian Sher.
SHER:
In any rape case it would be normal for the police
to investigate likely suspects in the area, people
with a history of, of rape convictions, sexual deviants.
In this case police didn't do that. Within 24 hours
they focused on Steven. We uncovered names of people
the police could have looked at. There was a man
doing electrical repair work on the base who knew
the Harper's who, according to one member of his
family, said after Lynn Harper's murder, She had
it coming to her. He had a rape conviction several
years prior to the murder. He was never looked at.
There was a lifeguard on the base and Lynn Harper
was a very active swimmer who, according to members
of his family, continued to engage in forms of sexual
abuse and assault throughout the '60s and always
was very nervous about the Harper case. He was never
investigated by police. There were other men around
the area who had known convictions and the police
clearly didn't do their basic homework.
MACINTYRE: The lead
investigator in the Harper murder case was a senior
Ontario Provincial Police officer from Toronto …
Inspector Harold Graham.
His quick disposition of the case and the conviction
of Steven Truscott made Graham a legend among Ontario
policemen and, before he retired, he'd become the
OPP commissioner.
Graham died recently … adamantly rejecting
our requests to discuss his biggest bust.
But at least one of his colleagues harboured serious
misgivings. He was Corporal John Erskine …one
of the three lead officers in the Harper murder
investigation.
HARRIS: Well,
he was a perfectionist in everything he did. Like
it had to be done right or it wouldn't be done at
all.
MACINTYRE: Dee
Harris is Corporal Erskine's widow and she remembers
how he became increasingly distressed by the case.
HARRIS:
Oh not right at the start. It was later on in the
investigation. He said at that time after he had
looked at different fact that he said, I'm sure
he's not guilty.
MACINTYRE:
But the boss … Inspector Graham … had
his mind made up, so the corporal kept his opinion
to himself … His widow is still troubled by
it.
HARRIS:
All the police officers would come back to our house.
I know Graham definitely felt he was guilty. He
was convinced right at the start. The first day
pretty well. You can't decide an investigation in
the first day whether they're guilty or not guilty.
You don't have enough facts to go on.
MACINTYRE:
But after the first day of the Harper murder investigation
Inspector Graham clearly believed he had his murderer
… even though he originally thought the murder
probably happened at 9 o'clock … when Truscott
was home watching television.
MACINTYRE:
That crucial detail quickly changed. As the police
and prosecution prepared their case against their
prime suspect in the fall of 1959.
Documents recently uncovered suggest that they suppressed
crucial evidence supporting Truscott's claim of
innocence.
There was a statement by a nine year-old girl, in
clear and accurate detail, that Steven and Lynne
crossed the bridge on his bike just as he and two
other boys said he did. Neither the defense nor
the jury ever saw that statement.
Mrs. Harper testified that is was unlikely that
Lynn would ever hitch-hike. But according to three
police reports, that's exactly what she and her
husband first suspected when Lynn went missing.
Neither defense nor jury ever saw those reports.
If there was one piece of evidence
that sealed Steven Truscott's fate it was the report
by the pathologist, Dr. Penistan, that she died
shortly before eight o'clock in the evening of June
ninth, 1959. But Dr. Penistan changed his mind about
that seven years later … after what he called
"an agonizing reappraisal".
He told Harold Graham … by then the assistant
OPP commissioner … that Lynne Harper's death
could have been at any time in a 48 hour period.
Significantly, this was in May of 1966 … just
as the Supreme Court of Canada was about to review
the Truscott case … It might have been a bombshell
… if the justices had known about it. But
somebody struck Penistan's name from the list of
prospective witnesses before the hearing started.
PHIL CAMPBELL:
There is in our view not a single part of
the case mounted by the Crown that isn't called
seriously into question, if not utterly devastated
by the evidence that we've retrieved.
MACINTYRE:
November 29th, 2001 … Truscott, flanked by
lawyers and advocates from the association in defence
of the wrongly convicted filed a formal request
for a review of his case by the federal justice
minister, Anne McLellan.
TRUSCOTT: I trust and
hope that she will earnestly read it and after 42
years finally do the right thing.
MACINTYRE:
The justice minister accepted the submission …
but made only one promise.
MCLELLAN: That
this matter will be dealt with as expeditiously
as possible. We understand that Mr. Truscott has
waited a long time to have this matter reviewed.
MACINTYRE:
Ever since Truscott went public two years ago, support
for his appeal has grown in his home town, Guelph.
LAIDLAW: …
forgiving, compassionate person never could be and
never has been a cold blooded murderer.
MACINTYRE:
That was a common opinion in Guelph and it was given
substance in the local paper by Maggie Laidlaw.
LAIDLAW: I first heard
of Steven Truscott way back in the '60s when I was
a high school student.
MACINTYRE:
She's also a city councillor and sponsored a motion
supporting his appeal. Something about the case
affected her almost personally.
LAIDLAW:
First of all the closeness of our age at the time.
I was 15 or 16 at the time. Steven Truscott was
14. The entire circumstantial evidence, nothing
really to pinpoint him, just all circumstantial.
The fact that Canada had almost hung a 14 year old
boy. Those facts really brought it home to me.
MACINTYRE:
Mary Janchus, a local teacher, saw the original
fifth estate documentary on the Truscott case and
has organized a mail-in campaign to support Truscott's
application for a ministerial review. She's generated
nearly 16,000 responses so far.
YANCHUS: I'm
here with more of the cards. I understand they're
going fairly well.
YANCHUS: The
highest standards have not been met in this case
and I think that we have the right to expect of
our justice system, the highest standards. And I
feel that it's not just up to Mr. and Mrs. Truscott
to right this wrong but that we all play a role
in making sure that our justice system meets the
highest standard. In June of 1959 a terrible tragedy
occurred to Lynn Harper but in the days to follow
a tragedy occurred to Steven Truscott and Steven's
is the one that we can fix.
Steven Truscott put the twin tragedies
behind him many years ago. He paid a horrendous
penalty for a crime he insists he never committed.
Now a grandfather, he has decided to sacrifice his
privacy, to bring a painful chapter of his life
back into the public spotlight. He's still asked
why.
MACINTYRE:
Whether he did or not, he is free, he did his time,
he owes nothing to society.
MARLENE:
He is not scot free. He goes to bed every night
as a convicted murderer, and he wakes up every morning
as a convicted murderer. Why should he be?
TRUSCOTT:
I want to see justice done. Justice hasn't been
done. Not to the Harper family and not to my family.
So I mean for both families. It's all I want.
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