Supporter of wrongfully convicted Steven Truscott dies at 84

LONDON — He watched in horror as one of his bright young pupils was found murdered and another was charged with raping and killing her.

He had to take the rest of his Grade 7 and 8 class to the funeral. He saw the boy go to jail, sentenced to hang to death.

For the rest of a long and accomplished life, teacher Maitland Edgar would tell anyone who asked that, frankly, he didn’t believe the boy did it.

Decades later, that boy, Steven Truscott, was finally cleared of the killing of Lynne Harper.

On Friday, Maitland Edgar died at 84, at peace and to the end known for doing the right thing.

“We were all proud of him,” said his son, Brian Edgar. “Steven thought of him almost as another father.”

Edgar began teaching at a oneroom schoolhouse when he was 17, and was hired at the air base school in Clinton, Ont.

In 1959, he was teaching a Grade 7 and 8 class. In the front of the class sat Lynne, 12, who he once described as a “live-wire and a very intelligent type of student.”

In the back corner sat Steven Truscott, a quiet, athletic kid, “a good kid.”

When Harper went missing in June that year, Edgar watched out his window as 200 airmen searched for her. Edgar told

in an interview 13 years ago he clearly remembered the current events discussion in class the day after Lynne’s body was found.

Edgar was told at first to lie to his pupils and tell them only Lynne was found, not that she had been killed, his son recalled.

Through the years that followed, in a community reeling from the killing and bitterly divided about Truscott’s conviction, Edgar continued to mourn the girl’s death but stand by his other pupil.

“He firmly believed Steven couldn’t have done it,” Brian Edgar recalled.

Truscott spent four months waiting to be hanged, until his death sentence was commuted to life in prison. In 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously overturned his conviction.

Over the years, Edgar Truscott became friends.

Truscott visited the Edgar family this week and spoke about his former teacher and longtime friend.

“Steven told me: ‘ One of the things your dad told me a long time ago, after it happened, is you’ve got to look on the bright side of life because looking the other way doesn’t get you anywhere,’” Brian Edgar said. “That is Steven’s outlook on life, too.”

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