Even fellow inmates knew Truscott innocent
Teen’s wrongful conviction for girl’s rape and murder neglected other suspects
Twelve-year-old Lynne Harper had a minor tiff with her parents on the last day of her life.
It wasn’t over anything huge. She had wanted to go swimming and they said no.
Harper left her home on the Air Force base near Clinton in southwestern Ontario in a huff and vanished shortly afterwards.
Two days later, on June 11, 1959, her partly clothed body was found in a shallow grave in Lawson’s Bush, a wooded area not far from her home. She had been strangled with her white sleeveless blouse.
No weapon was found near the body.
Just a day after that, the Ontario Provincial Police announced that they had solved the crime and that 14-year-old Steven Truscott was in custody.
Truscott, the son of a warrant officer on the Air Force base, was the last person known to be seen with her. He had given her a brief ride on the crossbars of his bicycle before joining up with friends.
After a speedy trial, marred by tunnel vision and a lack of direct evidence, Truscott was found guilty of Harper’s rape and murder.
He was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead, making him the youngest Canadian to ever face a death sentence.
On Jan. 21, 1960, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and his federal cabinet commuted Truscott’s sentence to life imprisonment.
It would take 47 more years for his name to be finally cleared by the Ontario Court of Appeal. The court ruled unanimously in 2007 that Truscott was the victim of a “miscarriage of justice” and that “the interests of justice dictate that an acquittal be entered.”
Former provincial Attorney General Chris Bentley announced in 2008 that the province would pay Truscott and his wife Marlene a total of $6.6 million in compensation.
For Truscott’s case to reach this point, his fate engaged crusading authors like Isabel LeBourdais and Julian Sher and lawyer James Lockyer and members of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted, now known as Innocence Canada.
Through it all, the question remains:
Who killed Lynne Harper? LeBourdais suggests in her 1966 book, “The Trial of Steven Truscott,” that the killer was more than six feet tall, as he appeared to twist branches off a maple tree, one of which was seven feet above the ground. In an odd memorial of sorts, three branches were left on her body. Truscott was five-foot-seven at the time.
She wrote the killer was able to quickly render Harper unconscious without a weapon, suggesting he may have had military training.
She also suggests the rape was done somewhere other than where Harper’s body was found.
“All the evidence indicated that she was attacked after dark, by moonlight, in an unknown spot, by an older man who had a psychotic personality and plenty of time — not in broad daylight, in Lawson’s
Bush, by a 14-year-old boy who was quite normal and had very little time indeed,” LeBourdais writes.
“It is probable that Lynne was brought back to Lawson’s Bush by the driver of a second car who offered to take her home,” LeBourdais writes. “He may well have been someone she knew.”
She also notes the killer was an exceptionally precise man.
“The outstanding feature of the scene in Lawson’s Bush was its orderliness,” she writes. “This was not a man who tossed his victim into a ditch by the road, or even hid her body in some swamp or thicket, miles away, where it might not be found for weeks or months. Everything had to be tidy.”
Dr. George D. Scott was a prison psychiatrist while Truscott was an inmate at Collins Bay penitentiary near Kingston.
Extensive efforts were made to get Truscott to confess to the crimes while in prison, with no success. He was injected with so-called truth serum and the hallucinogenic drug LSD, but never told authorities he committed the crimes.
Scott claims in his 1982 book “Inmate” that he played detective himself, trying to learn the true identity of Harper’s killer.
He notes that Truscott didn’t strike him as the murdering type.
“There were no dangerous elements in his personality,” Scott writes.
Scott wrote that he had suspicions that a bank robber who did time in Kingston Penitentiary might have been the real killer, or perhaps it was the robber’s brother.
Scott writes that he and a colleague played detective themselves, with no success.
“I had hoped to win unconditional freedom for Steven with my detective efforts but I failed,” Scott writes.
Investigative journalist Julian Sher notes in his definitive 2002 book, “Until You Are Dead,” that there were car skid marks near Harper’s body and that she was known to hitchhike around the Clinton area.
Sher also notes there were three separate reports by the OPP and military police stating that the Harpers originally suspected Lynne had hitchhiked to run away.
Truscott said he took Harper to the intersection of a county road and Highway 8. He says he looked back and saw her getting into a 1959 Chevrolet
Sher lists a 19-year-old airman is a possible suspect. That man transferred out of the Clinton area and was later convicted of beating his wife and sexually abusing his two daughters.
He died in 1985 without ever being questioned in the Harper murder.
There was another potential suspect in the area who was a sergeant. He had a history of indecent acts stretching back to 1950, and had attempted to molest a girl less than three weeks before Harper was slain.
He died in 1975 after drifting deeply into alcoholism.
Sher also mentions the brothers who were suspected by Scott and notes that a Crown lawyer wrote “they may be described as pedophiles.”
Ironically, Truscott appeared to have received a fairer hearing at Collins Bay penitentiary from inmates than he was afforded by the justice system. Convicted sex attackers who targeted children usually receive a particularly rough time behind bars, but Truscott was spared.
“At that time there was some honour in the joint,” a former inmate who served time with Truscott told Sher. “It’s like nobody touched him because … we all believed in his innocence.”
In a fight to stay alive, Harper had apparently scratched her killer but there wasn’t DNA technology available at the time to test matter found under her fingernails. When her body was exhumed years later, there weren’t usable traces to determine the identity of her killer.
The murder remains unsolved.
After a speedy trial, marred by tunnel vision and a lack of direct evidence, Steven Truscott was found guilty of Lynne Harper’s rape and murder