June 19
CANADA:
Life on hold----Steven Truscott became the poster boy against capital
punishment in Canada after he was sentenced to hang for murder in 1959 at
age 14.
The little hollow in the woods where the search party found Lynne Harper's
battered body on that hot June day in 1959 is overgrown by mature trees
and thick brush. The school at the former Clinton air force base, now
called Vanastra, where Harper and Steven Truscott were classmates, has
been converted into a church.
The airmen are gone, and what's left of the once-pristine base has decayed
into dilapidation or converted into low-income housing.
But along the quiet country road heading north, where Truscott made his
infamous bicycle ride with Harper on the handlebars on June 9, 1959, the
question lingers.
A question the now-59-year-old Guelph millwright and his growing legion of
supporters want answered.
Who killed Lynne Harper?
45 years ago this month, the skinny, mild-mannered Truscott, a Grade 8
pupil, was arrested, charged and locked up in the Goderich Jail after
Harper, 12, was found dead, wearing only a blood-stained undershirt with
her blouse ripped off and knotted around her neck. She had been strangled
to death and raped.
By fall, the popular, athletic son of a warrant officer, then just 14, was
convicted by a jury of 12 Huron County men.
Justice Ronald Ferguson ordered him to "be hanged by the neck until you
are dead," making Truscott the youngest person ever in Canada to face that
sentence.
The case made front page headlines across the country, shocking the nation
and splitting public opinion. It has been revisited many times over the
past 4 decades by a public clamouring to find out more about the teenager
ordered to die.
The Truscott conviction remains a seminal case in the argument against
capital punishment years after death sentences were abolished.
LOST INNOCENCE IN HURON COUNTY
Left in the wake of the trial was a loss of innocence for the idyllic
Huron County community.
And a nagging sense among some that something went terribly wrong in the
Goderich courtroom, even after a failed Supreme Court of Canada appeal,
after Truscott's sentence was commuted to life, and after his parole in
1969.
Conservative Clinton's roots are deeply planted in rural Ontario life. Its
population was about 2,600 at the time of Harper's death and it was an
alcohol-free town.
The violent death of a child sent a chill through the community,
especially because it involved the RCAF Station. It was the largest radar
and telecommunications centre in the country, training thousands of
airmen. At its height in the heady days of the Cold War, 3,000 people
lived and worked there.
THE CROWN'S CASE AGAINST TRUSCOTT
The crown contended that on June 9, 1959, a lustful Truscott took the
younger Harper into the woods, raped her and then, perhaps in a panic,
murdered her, silencing the only witness to his crime.
Among the linchpins in the prosecution's case:
- Truscott was the last person seen with Harper. The time at which they
were seen together fits what was accepted to have been the approximate
time of death.
- There was testimony Truscott tried to arrange a secret date with another
girl in the same bush.
- There were sores on Truscott's penis, which the prosecution described as
"brush burns." Blood and semen were found on his underwear.
All those points have since been challenged, as have tactics police used
in their dealings with the young Truscott.
To this day, Truscott maintains Harper asked him to take her for a ride on
his bike. He did, he maintains, and dropped her off on a county road,
where he saw her get into a car. End of story.
While opinions still vary regarding the trial held up the road in
Goderich, where Truscott was sentenced to hang, there has been a shift in
Truscott's favour. Many who have been swept up by the story have taken up
his cause.
- A petition with about 16,000 names has been sent to federal Justice
Minister Irwin Cotler, led by Jeff and Mary Yanchus, two Guelph teachers
with distant connections to Truscott. The petition demands Cutler order a
new trial.
Jeff Yanchus teaches high school and his father worked with Truscott. Mary
Yanchus grew up in Clinton.
"I think it's obviously a case where we think the justice has failed,"
Jeff Yanchus says. "It would be a personal, concrete, specific affirmation
that Canada is something like we imagine it to be. We imagine it is
possible to right this wrong."
- Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) lawyer James
Lockyer says "this case has captured the imagination of people since its
inception. A lot of people automatically had problems with the idea a
14-year-old would do this."
Lockyer says he doubts the action Truscott longs for is imminent just
because a federal election is under way, but adds his office was
successful with another application 2 days after the writ was dropped.
"I'm utterly confident in Mr. Truscott's innocence," he says. "And I'm
reasonably confident the minister will do the right thing."
For Lockyer and the Truscott family, that would be ordering a new trial in
the same Goderich courtroom.
"We would be asking he Ontario attorney-general to acknowledge in open
court they convicted an innocent man in the courtroom where he was
sentenced to death," Lockyer says.
That moment "would be an enormous relief for (Truscott), that's it's over,
his name cleared."
The minister could also flatly reject the application, refer the case back
to the Ontario Court of Appeal or offer a pardon.
A pardon is out of the question, Lockyer says, because it would be
forgiving the crime.
- Retired journalist Bob Massecar, who was a cub reporter for The Free
Press when he was assigned to cover Truscott's Supreme Court appeal in
Ottawa in October 1966, says he now has doubts about Truscott's guilt,
based on new evidence, such as the potential other suspects who were never
interviewed.
Massecar remembers a young Truscott "swaggering and chewing gum" in the
courtroom without a hint of nerves. "He was a real cold fish. He never
showed any emotion at all," he says. "I think I would have been scared
skinny.
"My feeling from the evidence I heard, and his demeanour, I thought he was
guilty."
In retrospect, Massecar says, the years of prison might have caused
Truscott "to put up a front" that he misinterpreted.
'HE WAS FRAMED,' SAYS OWNER OF BUSH
- Bob Lawson still lives on the family farm where Harper's body was found,
in a wooded area called Lawson's Bush. In 1959, when he was 23, the air
force kids would drop by his place. Truscott drove his tractor, he
recalls, and would "blaze away on the welder."
"There is no possible way he could have done it. He was framed. He had to
have been framed," Lawson says.
Lawson has never believed the quiet boy from the base killed Harper.
"But you get that you don't say much because you get cut down every time
you say anything. So you try to avoid the subject if you can. It was like
that for years. "
Lawson says a 14-year-old committing as grisly a crime "would have left a
trail a mile wide.
"The fact he came out (in 1997) when he asked for DNA testing, that pretty
well proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he was innocent," Lawson says.
(Truscott's request was for naught -- the trial exhibits had been
destroyed).
A FORMER CLASSMATE 'JUST WANTED TO SOB'
- "Steve did it like I did it," says Cathy Beaman, who lived next door to
the Truscotts for a short time and was in his class at school. She now
lives in Montana.
"I think most of our parents knew in their heart. I mean, Steve was
totally incapable of doing this."
Beaman says she often thought about the boy she sat with at the back of
the class. "He was very kind and nice to everybody. I don't think I ever
saw him angry."
Four years ago, they met again after she dropped him a note. Truscott told
her he had "a wonderful wife, a wonderful family, wonderful children, a
good job and lots of friends. He said 'what more could you ask for in
life?'"
"I just wanted to sob," Beaman says.
- Malcolm Stienburg the former chaplain at the Collin's Bay institution
who took Truscott in to live with his family after his release --
Truscott's parents had split up during his incarceration -- also remains
on Truscott's side.
Even in the face of prison and a family breakup, Truscott was incredibly
resilient, he says.
"He had a very positive impact on people, even inmates. I never heard an
inmate ever express the opinion Steve was guilty.
"I just find it impossible to believe that Steve Truscott is guilty of the
offence. I've always felt like that and I continue to feel that way."
HE WAITS, AND HOPES
Now settled in a quiet Guelph neighbourhood surrounded by a loyal and
protective community, and valued by his employer as a steady and talented
millwright, Truscott has dedicated his life to his family.
His wife, Marlene, a tenacious researcher of the case, and his children,
Lesley, 33, Ryan, 29, and Devon, 23, are his biggest supporters. Friends
know him as a doting father and grandfather. All he wants, he says, is the
answer he craves. And the man who has waited decades to clear his name
remains upbeat.
"That's about all you have is hope," he says.
(source: The London Free Press)
