<<back 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. 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 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 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. 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 MACINTYRE: Steven Truscott
only told his children who he really was when they became teenagers. Devon
is his youngest son. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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". 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. 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. 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.
the fifth estate: The Steven Truscott Story
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