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Jaime
Wheeler
| Denver
Crawford
| Wilf
Hathway | Martensville Prosecutors
still defending their malice | RCMP
agents committed crimes with immunity from prosecution
Still more Big Boss Scenario
Stings: Wade Skffington
| Atif Rafay and Sebastian
Burns (in this one, RCMP colluded illegally with U.S. Police
in Washington State | Patrick
Fischer |
Section 465 of Criminal Code
regarding criminal conspiracy found here
Steven
Truscott 2005 | 2006: Waiting for Ontario |
Steven Truscott:
2006
- Series: Truscott: A
Murder Mystery
- The quest for exoneration
National Post, Kelly Patrick,
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
In June, 1959, 12-year-old Lynne Harper was found raped and strangled
to death in a wooded grove near a Clinton, Ont. air force base.
Steven Truscott, the 14-year-old classmate who last saw her alive,
was sentenced to hang for her murder. Now, 47 years later, the
Ontario Court of Appeal will begin reviewing Mr. Truscott's conviction
next week. This is the fourth in a five-part series.
- - -
Steven Truscott's fight to
clear his name began immediately after a Huron County jury pronounced
him guilty of the murder of Lynne Harper at 10:55 p.m. on Sept.
30, 1959.
His battle did not begin well.
On Jan. 20, 1960, the Ontario
Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed Steven's appeal.
Two months later the Supreme
Court of Canada followed suit, denying him leave to appeal to
the country's highest court on Feb. 24, 1960.
As is still the practice with
the Supreme Court today, it gave no reason for refusing to hear
the case.
Steven had just turned 15 and
had already exhausted every conventional route to freedom.
The one bright spot in the
teenager's early legal battles came on Jan. 21, 1960, when Prime
Minister John Diefenbaker's Cabinet commuted Steven's death sentence,
erasing his appointment with the hangman.
Now instead of the gallows,
Steven faced life behind bars.
With no legal options left,
he needed a champion. He found one in the unlikeliest person:
Isabel LeBourdais.
She was a Toronto mother of
four who worked as a freelance writer in the early 1960s, a time
when few women worked outside the home and even fewer dared undermine
the establishment.
Mrs. LeBourdais was an exception.
Possessing an activist bent
and a crisp style of prose, she had already written articles
for Chatelaine, Maclean's and other publications when she began
researching a story about Steven's death sentence.
At the time Mrs. LeBourdais
had no reason to question Steven's guilt, says her son Julien,
now 62.
"She was just appalled
by the fact that a 14-year-old boy was sentenced to hang,"
he says, even though the sentence had been commuted.
Mrs. LeBourdais obtained the
transcripts of the Truscott trial, an extremely rare move for
a lay person in that period. She also spoke to Steven's parents,
Dan and Doris Truscott, and began interviewing as many of the
players in the case as she could.
Before long, says her son,
she concluded Steven was the victim of a terrible miscarriage
of justice.
Mrs. LeBourdais's research
eventually grew into a book, The Trial of Steven Truscott.
When it hit store shelves on
March 24, 1966, the 240-page volume touched off a maelstrom of
controversy among those incensed at how the justice system treated
Steven.
An equally angry group thought
Mrs. LeBourdais had meddled where she didn't belong.
Her son says now that many
of the police, judges, jurors and southwestern Ontario townspeople
who were positive they had locked up the real culprit considered
the book "an attack."
The book's ripple spread, winning
over many Canadians. As the clamour for a full inquiry into Steven's
case rose, Ottawa reached for a radical remedy.
Using a little-known section
of the Supreme Court Act, the Liberal Cabinet of then-prime minister
Lester Pearson ordered the Supreme Court to review the Truscott
case on a reference.
The reference process allows
the government to ask the court a specific question.
In the Truscott reference,
the federal government asked the Supreme Court how it would have
ruled had an appeal been allowed in Steven's case when he first
requested one in 1960.
A change to the Criminal Code
in 1961 had widened the grounds on which appeals could be made
to the Supreme Court. Had the change been in place in 1960, the
Supreme Court may have considered hearing Steven's case.
The reference instructions
also gave the Supreme Court's nine justices wide latitude, allowing
them to plumb the existing record, accept new evidence and --
for the first time in the Supreme Court's history -- hear live
testimony from witnesses, including Steven.
But the review presented a
dilemma.
Seven of the nine judges sitting
on the Supreme Court in 1966 were also on the court in 1960,
when the court denied Steven's conventional leave to appeal.
"The court had really
been asked to judge its prior wisdom," says Frederick Vaughan,
biographer of Justice Emmett Hall, the only Supreme Court justice
to rule in Steven's favour at the reference.
But Syd Usprich, a law professor
at the University of Western Ontario in London, says he does
not believe the dilemma had a significant impact on the review's
outcome.
"The original rejection
would have been done on much narrower grounds," he says.
To further complicate matters,
then-chief justice Robert Taschereau was sliding further into
alcoholism when the review began, according to Mr. Vaughan's
book.
Judge Taschereau retired four
months after the Supreme Court released its decision in the Truscott
case.
"In this case, where the
court needed a full court press as they say in basketball, it
just wasn't forthcoming from the chief justice. He was too far
gone," Mr. Vaughan says now.
Against this backdrop, the
Supreme Court prepared to tackle one of the most controversial
cases in legal history.
Meanwhile, then-21-year-old
Steven was six years into a jail term that had taken him first
to the Ontario Training School for Boys in Guelph, Ont., and
then to Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston, Ont.
As prison experiences go, Steven's
was gentler than most.
"I think the inmate population
really didn't believe that Steven Truscott was guilty,"
says Malcolm Stienburg, now 72, the former prison chaplain at
Collins Bay.
Mr. Stienburg and Steven became
friends during Steven's prison term.
"Here's a young man who's
in there serving time -- and it was well-known at this time as
a result of LeBourdais's book -- for a pretty horrendous crime,
a sexual offence," he says.
"Normally that type of
offender doesn't have an easy time of it in the institution.
But he was respected in his own way by the security officers
and the long-term offenders."
Although Steven meshed comfortably
with his fellow prisoners and liked his work at the Collins Bay
machine shop, he had no desire to waste more of his youth behind
bars. Prison psychologists armed with "truth serum"
and LSD had already tried to pry confessions out of him.
The Supreme Court began hearing
a parade of 26 witnesses on Oct. 5, 1966, many of whom spoke
to physical evidence.
Steven took the stand on Oct.
6. In a voice barely audible at moments, he delivered a forgetful
performance that undermined his case.
Mr. Stienburg, the prison chaplain,
now says Steven told him afterward he "couldn't think"
on the stand and that the pressure of testifying had driven even
the simplest recollections from his mind.
"I don't think either
the court, the Crown or even his own lawyer knew the tensions
that that experience set up in that kid," Mr. Stienburg
says.
Steven's lawyer Arthur Martin
was considered the best defence lawyer in Canada at the time.
He and Crown lawyer William Bowman presented their arguments
in January, 1967.
Three months later, on May
4, Steven received the news. By an 8-to-1 margin, the Supreme
Court ruled that had an appeal been allowed in 1960, it would
have been dismissed.
The majority's decision methodically
destroyed almost every point the defence presented in Steven's
favour. The justices weren't shy about what they thought of Steven's
testimony: "There were many incredibilities inherent in
the evidence given by Truscott before us and we do not believe
his testimony."
Judge Hall, the lone voice
of dissent, slammed Steven's original trial as bad and insisted
a new one be ordered.
"I take the view that
the trial was not conducted according to law," he wrote.
"Even the guiltiest criminal must be tried according to
law."
Steven, meanwhile, had learned
to expect disappointment from the justice system. "There
was no whining and thumping his chest and feeling sorry for himself,"
Mr. Stienburg says. Steven just said: "The Supreme Court
made a mistake."
A little over two years after
the Supreme Court's decision, Steven was granted parole.
The 24-year-old went to live
with Mr. Stienburg, who by then had become a parole officer,
and with Stienburg's family near Kingston.
A year later, on Halloween
day, 1970, Steven married a 25-year-old woman named Marlene.
She had followed Steven's case
and joined the 1966 campaign to exonerate him. Mr. Stienburg
conducted the marriage.
Steven and Marlene had three
children and for nearly 30 years lived quietly in Guelph, Ont.,
under an assumed last name.
In 1997, Steven's name crept
into the news again.
He had retained lawyers to
search for physical evidence that could be used for DNA testing.
Nothing useful survived.
Around the same time, Steven
and his family began co-operating with the fifth estate, a CBC-TV
investigative program. The documentary aired in March, 2000.
In November, 2001, Steven and
lawyers from the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted
-- which helped secure exonerations for Guy Paul Morin and David
Milgaard -- stood before a group of jostling reporters to announce
that they were asking then-federal justice minister Anne McLellan
to re-visit Steven's case under a seldom-used section of the
Criminal Code that remedies miscarriages of justice.
The association's 700-page
submission argued a combination of police tunnel vision, undisclosed
evidence and shoddy medical evidence helped convict Steven of
a crime he had not committed.
"I want my name back,
I want closure," said Steven, by then a mild-mannered grandfather.
"I guess in a roundabout
way, [I want] vindication for what they've done to my family's
name," he said at the time. "I want to set the record
straight."
The Justice department appointed
Justice Fred Kaufman, the judge who led a public inquiry into
Guy Paul Morin's wrongful conviction, to investigate Steven's
case.
In April, 2004, Judge Kaufman
submitted his sealed final report to then-federal justice minister
Irwin Cotler. In October, 2004, Mr. Cotler followed Judge's Kaufman's
advice.
On a reference, he sent the
Truscott case to the Ontario Court of Appeal for a review on
the basis of "fresh evidence"
"There is a reasonable
basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred,"
Mr. Cotler said in 2004.
Mr. Cotler's decision was a
disappointment to the Truscotts and their supporters.
They had hoped Mr. Cotler would
immediately order a new trial in the Goderich, Ont., courtroom
where Steven was convicted 47 years ago.
Had that happened, the Crown
almost certainly would have been forced to rise and declare there
was not enough evidence to proceed.
"Everyone is going to
be older, quite a lot older unfortunately, before we finally
have that day of joy and happiness when Steven Truscott's reputation
is returned to him," Steven's lawyer, James Lockyer, said
at the time.
kpatrick@nationalpost.com
THURSDAY
Our series continues with a
look at Clinton and other fallout
Truscott in court in
Toronto to hear review of his 1959 murder conviction
Keith Leslie And Mike Oliveira, Canadian Press,
June 20, 2006
TORONTO (CP) - Steven Truscott,
the youngest person ever sentenced to die in Canada, allowed
himself a rare expression of hope Monday as lawyers seized their
last, best chance to clear his name by attacking the science
that helped to brand him a murderer nearly half a century ago.
Truscott, a man whose name
is, for many Canadians, a synonym for miscarriage of justice,
appeared relaxed as he arrived at the Ontario Court of Appeal,
his family in tow, for the first day of a three-week review of
his case.
After a morning of listening
to an expert witness poke holes in the 1959 autopsy report that
helped convict him of the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne
Harper, Truscott allowed himself an expression of cautious optimism.
"We're hoping they exonerate
us," he said. "Information came out that was never
out before, so it was good."
The doctor who originally examined
Harper's body 47 years ago didn't have the scientific know-how
to support his conclusion that she died within a 30-minute window
on the night of June 9, 1959 - a conclusion that made Truscott
a prime suspect, said Dr. Michael Pollanen, Ontario's chief forensic
pathologist.
Even today, pinpointing a time
of death remains one of the most difficult questions in pathology
to answer, Pollanen told the Appeal Court's five-judge panel.
"There is no universally
accepted and infallible method to determine time of death,"
he said.
The original autopsy concluded
that Harper likely died sometime between 7:15 p.m. and 7:45 p.m.
on the night of June 9, 1959, two days before her body was found
in Lawson's Bush near the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton,
north of London.
But the basis of the coroner's
report focused too much on the contents of her stomach and not
enough on other factors, like the lack of body decomposition,
Pollanen said.
It had been hot and humid,
and Harper's body should have undergone a significant degree
of decomposition had it been in the sun for two days, Pollanen
said.
"There were nil external
signs of decomposition, and only minimal internal signs of decomposition,"
he said.
The lack of autolysis in Harper's
body - a process in which the body automatically breaks down
and digests itself - opens the door to a completely different
timeline than the one used to convict Trustcott, he added.
Truscott, then 14, was convicted
of rape and murder on Sept. 30, 1959, and became the youngest
person in Canada ever sentenced to death.
His death sentence was commuted
to life in prison in 1960, the same year his first appeal was
denied, and he served nine years in jail before being released
on parole.
While Pollanen insisted his
testimony did not exonerate Truscott or pinpoint a different
time of death, the evidence is crucial to the defence, said Julian
Sher, an expert on the case and author of a book entitled Until
You Are Dead - words the judge used in passing sentence.
"When Steven Truscott
was sentenced to hang, the prosecutor stood up in the court and
said the testimony of the coroner at the time narrows like a
vice on Steven Truscott like no one else," Sher said outside
court.
"Now today we heard the
chief pathologist was willing to consider June 10 as a time of
death. Everybody agrees Steven Truscott was . . . at school all
that day."
The Ontario Court of Appeal
can decide to acquit Truscott, order a new trial, stay the proceedings
or dismiss the appeal. The review is expected to last three weeks.
Former justice minister Irwin
Cotler defined the terms of reference for the appeal to be based
on so-called fresh evidence, saying there was a "moral obligation"
to assess whether new evidence would have affected the original
verdict.
Lawyers for both sides are
seeking direction from the court as to whether witnesses should
appear and be examined in open court, a precedent set when the
case went before the Supreme Court of Canada in 1966 and a move
the defence favours.
The court could allow the witnesses
to testify in open court or appoint a special commissioner to
question them and report back to the court.
The Crown believes the examination
of "fresh evidence" witnesses is not warranted in open
court "in light of the nature and amount of the fresh evidence
to be cross-examined" and would tax the court's resources,
Crown documents say. © The Canadian Press 2006
Autopsy drafts that would
have cleared Truscott never given to defence
Kelly Patrick, CanWest News
Service; National Post, June 20, 2006
TORONTO - For Steven Truscott,
the road to the Ontario Court of Appeal's review of his 47-year-old
murder conviction has been extraordinarily long and plodding.
So it must have seemed especially
swift to him Monday when the first bombshell of the modern case
was dropped so soon after the history-making hearing opened.
A lawyer for Truscott entered
into evidence a pair of autopsy drafts that suggested the pathologist
who examined the body of 12-year-old Lynne Harper in 1959 initially
concluded she died several hours too late to have been murdered
by Truscott.
''We contend these were never
disclosed to the defence,'' said James Lockyer, one of Truscott's
four lawyers, as he handed the reports to the five-judge panel
presiding at the review.
Truscott was 14 when he was
sentenced to hang in 1959 for the sensational rape and murder
of Harper. Her body was discovered in a wooded grove near the
air force base in the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton where
she and Truscott lived.
Truscott's death sentence was
eventually commuted to life in prison. He was paroled in 1969.
The time of death was one of
the key pieces of evidence that helped convict Truscott. The
Crown lawyer at the original trial in Goderich, Ont., called
it the ''vice'' that clamped down on Truscott as the only person
with the opportunity to kill Harper.
Dr. John Penistan, the pathologist
who performed the autopsy, testified at the original trial that
Harper died between 7:00 and 7:45 p.m. on June 9, 1959, the night
the Grade 7 student and dedicated Girl Guide disappeared.
Truscott admitted he was with
her for part of that time.
However, witnesses confirmed
Truscott was back at a schoolyard on the base by 8 p.m., meaning
that if Harper died after that time he could not be her killer.
No autopsy report was entered
at Truscott's original trial.
In 1963 four years after Truscott
was found guilty a copy of an autopsy report by Penistan was
produced at the request of a Toronto author working on a book
about the Truscott case.
The document further narrowed
Harper's time of death to between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m.
Lockyer entered the 1963 report
into evidence Monday, but argued it was typed well after two
earlier reports he also presented to the court.
The first report, a handwritten,
undated document unearthed just last year from Stratford General
Hospital, shows Penistan estimated Harper's time of death as
40 hours before her body was brought in for examination, or 12:45
a.m. June 10, 1959.
The second report, a partially
typed, partially scrawled draft, pushes Harper's time of death
even later, to between 4:45 and 10:45 a.m. June 10, 1959.
Both times of death would rule
out Truscott as her murderer.
However, the question of when
Harper died is far more complex than digging up long-hidden autopsy
drafts. Time of death is expected to occupy a significant chunk
of the three-week hearing.
Michael Pollanen, Ontario's
chief forensic pathologist and the doctor who supervised the
exhumation of Harper's body in April, testified on the subject
all morning Monday.
After reviewing the three autopsy
drafts, photos of Harper's body and some 47-year-old slides of
Harper's liver and kidney tissue, Pollanen cast doubt on the
45-minute time-of-death window Penistan testified to in 1959.
Pollanen said Harper's relatively
full stomach pointed to a time of death on June 9, but that all
the other evidence ''would tend to push an inference toward June
10.''
''The time interval must be
broadly inclusive,'' he said.
But under cross-examination
by Crown lawyer Alex Alvaro, Pollanen admitted his findings were
still compatible with death before 8 p.m. on June 9.
Truscott, now 61, has maintained
his innocence since Ontario Provincial Police first plucked him
from his ordinary life as a shy, athletic teenager and charged
him with raping and strangling Harper.
He walked into court Monday
dressed in a maroon shirt and grey jacket, his wife of 35 years,
Marlene, and his two grown sons by his side.
The family sat quietly on a
reserved bench beneath a glittering copper chandelier in the
majestic courtroom's public gallery throughout Monday's proceedings.
A handful of Truscott's friends
and supporters filled the few spots on benches not packed with
reporters.
Among Truscott's supporters
in court Monday were two men waging their own battles for exoneration:
William Mullins-Johnson and Romeo Phillion.
The Justice Department is currently
reviewing their murder convictions.
Phillion, a 67-year-old released
on bail in 2003 after serving three decades behind bars for a
murder he insists he did not commit, said he came to the court
partly to return a kindness Truscott showed him three years ago.
''When I came out (of prison)
in 2003 he called me at home to congratulate me,'' Phillion said.
''The guy's been through a
lot,'' he said of Truscott. ''Set him free. Set him free.''
Technically, Truscott has been
free since 1969, when he was paroled after 10 years in prison
but he is also still a convicted killer.
In 2001,Truscott moved to have
that stain cleared from his name.
He applied to the federal minister
of justice for a review of his conviction under a seldom-used
section of the Criminal Code intended to remedy miscarriages
of justice.
The application and a federal
report by retired Justice Fred Kaufman eventually led then-justice
minister Irwin Cotler to conclude a miscarriage of justice had
likely occurred in Truscott's case.
Cotler ordered the Ontario
Court of Appeal review.
Testimony by witnesses is expected
to run until July 7. Oral arguments in the case are expected
to be presented in January.
After that, the Ontario Court
of Appeal will have four options: to dismiss Truscott's appeal
or to quash his conviction and order a stay of proceedings, a
new trial or an acquittal.
kpatrick@nationalpost.com,
National Post © CanWest News Service 2006
`Wrong' evidence
used in Truscott case Conviction based on `entirely, absolutely'
incorrect science Uncertainties include time frame of murder,
cause of penis lesions
TRACEY TYLER, LEGAL AFFAIRS
REPORTER, Toronto Star, Jun. 21, 2006
For nearly 40 years, the Canadian
government had notes and memos buried in its files indicating
the case against Steven Truscott was founded on evidence that
was "entirely and absolutely wrong" and scientific
conclusions that were "not possible," the Ontario Court
of Appeal heard yesterday.
The federal government obtained
expert medical opinions in 1966 that appeared to undermine the
Crown's case against Truscott, who, at 14, was convicted and
sentenced to hang for the murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper
in 1959. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
The experts, including one
of the federal government's own pathologists, said there was
"no justification" for Dr. John Penistan's conclusion
that Lynne died within two hours of eating dinner on June 9,
1959 - a time frame that implicates Truscott. Penistan's opinion,
based on an analysis of the food in Lynne's stomach, was the
centrepiece of the Crown's case.
"Both (experts) inform
me that an estimate of the type made by Dr. Penistan, on the
basis of which it is made, is not possible," D.H. Christie,
the director of the federal justice department's criminal law
section, said in an April 4, 1966, memo to T.H. MacDonald, the
deputy minister.
In fact, the experts said Lynne
could well have been killed hours later, when Truscott was known
to be at home babysitting his siblings.
Weeks after obtaining the damaging
evidence, the government referred the case to the Supreme Court
of Canada for a rehearing. The court ruled 8-1 to uphold Truscott's
conviction.
Ottawa approached the medical
experts in the midst of a political firestorm
At no time during the hearings
did federal justice department officials disclose their new expert
opinions to Truscott's lawyers or to the court, James Lockyer,
a member of Truscott's current legal team, told a five-judge
appeal panel yesterday.
The documents, he said, were
released to Truscott's lawyers in early 2005, several months
after the federal government sent the case to the Ontario Court
of Appeal for a review. It may well be history's final word on
the 47-year-old case.
Earlier this week, the court
began hearing testimony from witnesses. One of them is Toronto
lawyer Morris Manning, who was an articling student with the
Ontario Attorney General's ministry in 1965 and 1966.
Part of his job was helping
William Bowman, then director of public prosecutions, prepare
for the hearing before the Supreme Court. Under cross-examination,
Manning told Lockyer he never saw the justice department's notes
and memos on the case.
He would have questioned them
"immediately" and definitely would have remembered
them because they involved the very subject matter he was researching.
The federal government approached
the medical experts in the midst of a political firestorm that
had erupted following publication of The Trial of Steven Truscott
in the spring of 1966, a book about the case by Toronto author
Isabel LeBourdais. The book argued strongly that the case was
a miscarriage of justice.
The notes and memos filed with
the court yesterday make clear that federal officials viewed
the book as an attack on the administration of justice and were
weighing various options for controlling the damage and deflecting
public attention from the case. At that point, they were leaning
heavily towards an out-of-sight, out-of mind approach and considering
holding a closed-door inquiry.
Federal justice department
officials did not disclose their new expert opinions
Meanwhile, Christie took the
book and the medical evidence in the case to one of the federal
government's own pathologists, J.R. Jackson, head of the laboratory
at the department of veterans' affairs, and to D.H. Starkey,
a pathologist at the Queen Mary Hospital in Montreal.
Besides pointing out the impossibility
of accurately determining Lynne's time of death based on an analysis
of her stomach contents, (noting that the digestive process is
highly variable), the pathologists were asked for their opinions
on another key aspect of the prosecution's case: the presence
of lesions on Truscott's penis.
The Crown argued the lesions
were caused by rape and found support for that theory from Penistan
and Dr. David Brooks, the chief medical officer at the Clinton
Air Force Station, where Truscott and Lynne resided.
Penistan said the injuries
could have been caused by a "blind furious thrust of the
male organ." Brooks, who examined Truscott on June 12, the
day after Lynne's body was discovered, suggested an "inexpert
attempt at penetration" was the cause.
Truscott said the lesions had
been present for weeks but he'd been too embarrassed to tell
anyone. But Brooks contradicted this, estimating the lesions
were two to five days old - within the time frame of Lynne's
murder. There was no scabbing, which would have started developing
within a week, he said.
Starkey informed the federal
government that Brooks was "entirely and absolutely wrong,"
according to notes Christie made of their conversation. Superficial
wounds in moist places like the genital area don't scab normally,
but heal upwards from deeper layers, a slower process.
Truscott told police he'd never
had sexual intercourse and Starkey also provided the government
with information that appeared to support him. The doctor consulted
a children's dermatologist and a urologist, who both said that,
based on the lesions, there was "no reason at all to doubt
the boy."
The hearing continues.
Truscott investigator
discounted witnesses Officer insists statements weren't credible
SCOTT ROBERTS, With a report
from Canadian Press
Witness statements contradicting
the Crown's case against Steven Truscott were dismissed as "imaginative"
and "not credible" by the lead investigator in the
47-year-old slaying of Lynne Harper, a court heard yesterday.
Retired Ontario Provincial
Police investigator Harry Sayeau said he discounted the evidence
of three young witnesses because he didn't believe them.
But defence lawyers suggest
the witnesses were discredited because their timeline of events
didn't gel with the Crown's estimation that Mr. Truscott killed
the 12-year-old girl between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m. on June 9, 1959.
Lynne's body was found in Lawson's Bush near the Southwestern
Ontario town of Clinton, north of London.
"I made an impression,
an opinion on the individuals," said Mr. Sayeau, now 84.
"I conveyed the probability of those thoughts. But it wasn't
to fit into my scheme of things."
According to documents, Daryl
Wadsworth, a school-aged boy at the time of the rape and murder,
told police he remembered seeing Steven Truscott leave the local
schoolyard at about 7:25 p.m.; the Crown had Mr. Truscott leaving
at 7.
In Mr. Sayeau's written notes
at the time of the investigation, he characterized Daryl's evidence
as "imaginative. Wouldn't consider his story at all."
Mr. Sayeau and other investigators
discredited the statements of two other witnesses, one of whom
was Karen Daum, 9. She saw Mr. Truscott and Lynne biking together
on Highway 8, down by the river, at a time the Crown also rejected.
In his notes, Mr. Sayeau wrote,
"She's a cute little girl but she had to be wrong. . . .
She's not credible as far as the Crown was concerned."
Asked in court to elaborate
on why he dismissed her statement, Mr. Sayeau said there was
too much evidence to the contrary.
Neither of the children was
called as witnesses in Mr. Truscott's murder trial because the
Crown did not disclose their statements to defence lawyers.
Asked by defence lawyer Marlys
Edwardh yesterday if he knew whether other investigating officers
had made calls to nearby OPP detachments or Air Force bases about
possible suspects or recent sex offenders, Mr. Sayeau said he
didn't think police ever consulted.
"I'm human. I'm not privy
to every phone call that was made," he said, raising his
voice.
Carnival workers who came into
town days before Lynne's disappearance were also never investigated.
"There was no follow-up
as far as I was concerned," said Mr. Sayeau, who was a corporal
in the Goderich detachment in 1959.
In his 2001 book Until You
Are Dead, author Julian Sher suggests the failure to contact
other detachments and air bases contributed to the conviction
of Mr. Truscott. The book provides details suggesting that Alex
Kalichuk, an Air Force man with a history of sex crimes, may
have been the killer.
Mr. Truscott was convicted
for Lynne's rape and murder and was sentenced to death. The sentence
was commuted to life in prison and he was released on parole
after serving nine years. He has always professed his innocence
and won a review of his conviction.
Outside the courtroom, Mr.
Truscott said he doesn't blame Mr. Sayeau for his conviction,
calling him a "pawn to the higher-ups."
Mr. Truscott, just 14 when
he was convicted, said he was satisfied with the day's proceedings
but was anticipating much more information being brought to light
in the weeks to come.
"It's very enlightening
for everybody to finally hear some of this information that has
been there for a lot of years and nobody's ever brought it out,"
he said.
- OPP did not ask about
criminals in area: officer: Steven Truscott Appeal. Police failed
to learn of pedophile in nearby town, lawyers tell court
Kelly Patrick, National
Post, June 23, 2006
TORONTO - It has been nearly
half a century, but retired OPP chief superintendent Harry Sayeau
can't put the first capital murder case he ever worked behind
him.
In 1959, as a corporal in the
provincial police force's 14-man Goderich detachment, he helped
convict 14-year-old Steven Truscott of the grisly rape and murder
of 12-year-old Lynne Harper.
Yesterday, Mr. Sayeau, now
84, took the stand at the Ontario Court of Appeal while the boy
he helped arrest 47 years ago sat in the gallery as a grey-haired
adult, his grown daughter, Lesley, by his side.
Afterwards, Mr. Truscott said
he felt no ill will toward Mr. Sayeau, one of the last surviving
officers responsible for his 10-year prison stay. "He was
kind of a pawn to the higher-ups, so I don't blame him for any
of the stuff that went on," he said.
"A lot of information
came out, mainly about disclosure. [These are] things that should
have come out years ago."
The picture Mr. Sayeau's testimony
painted was of a bygone era, one in which officers made copies
of their notebooks by hand, the police and Crown weren't required
to disclose evidence to the defence and cops could finger a seventh
grader for murder before taking any witness statements or considering
any other suspects. Mr. Sayeau testified he and his police colleagues
did not directly contact neighbouring OPP detachments, Crown
offices or the Royal Canadian Air Force to inquire about sexual
predators living in the area before or after arresting Mr. Truscott.
Mr. Truscott and Lynne lived
with their families on an RCAF radar training base outside Clinton.
If the OPP had contacted the RCAF authorities, argued Marlys
Edwardh, one of Mr. Truscott's lawyers, they would likely have
learned about Alexander Kalichuk. He was an air force sergeant,
heavy drinker and known pedophile who lived inSeaforth, a town
just east of Clinton.
"If you made those inquiries
you may have learned about Kalichuk or learned about others ...
it seems a self-evident proposition to me," Ms. Edwardh
said.
"It's possible, yes,"
Mr. Sayeau said.
Ms. Edwardh also questioned
Mr. Sayeau about a June 11 reference in his notebook to a woman
from the Clinton fair board who offered to provide police a list
of out-of-town carnival staff working in the area when Lynne
vanished on June 9, 1959. "There was no follow-up as far
as I was concerned," he said.
Mr. Sayeau was deeply involved
in the investigation into Lynne's death, especially in its early
stages. Working out of a small, single-storey detachment with
little more than a typewriter, secretary and a few police radios
for equipment, Mr. Sayeau led 250 airmen in the search that turned
up Lynne's body at 1:50 p.m. on June 11, 1959.
As well, he collected evidence
from the wooded grove where she was discovered, attended her
post-mortem and drove jars of physical evidence gathered at the
autopsy to the attorney-general's laboratory in Toronto. One
of the points of contention at yesterday's hearing was exactly
what Mr. Sayeau learned about Lynne's stomach contents when he
brought them to the Toronto lab on June 12, 1959, and whether
he later "molded" that information to fit the Crown's
theory.
Mr. Truscott's current legal
team presented two versions of Mr. Sayeau's June, 1959, police
notebook to the five-judge panel yesterday.
The first contained contemporaneous
scribbles. The second was a copy Mr. Sayeau wrote out by hand
for Crown attorney Glenn Hays shortly before Mr. Truscott's trial.
(In the days before photocopiers, Mr. Sayeau had no other way
to produce a copy for Mr. Hays.)
When Mr. Sayeau arrived at
the attorney-general's lab, he presented a clear, sealed jar
of Lynne's stomach contents to two biologists, Elgin Brown and
John Funk, then took notes of the biologists' opinions. In the
first notebook, Mr. Sayeau wrote that Mr. Funk said: "Stomach
contents appear to be meat (possibly ham)." In the second
notebook, he changed the note to read: "Preliminary examination
indicates stomach contents meat (either turkey or ham)."
Ms. Edwardh argued the change
was an example of Mr. Sayeau "molding" his notes to
conform to the Crown's case, which rested in part on Lynne's
dying within two hours of finishing her last meal at 5:45 p.m.
on June 9, 1959. Digestion largely stops upon death, so the more
"readily identifiable" or less digested the food in
Lynne's stomach was, the likelier it was she died within the
Crown's necessary time frame.
Ms. Edwardh also introduced
original police statements from two boy witnesses whose stories
tended to support the defence theory that Mr. Truscott biked
with Lynne up County Road to Highway 8, dropped her off, and
watched as she thumbed a ride in a 1959 Chevrolet heading east.
Mr. Sayeau took both statements.
As was common practice in 1959, neither was disclosed to the
defence.
Mr. Truscott has always maintained
that he and Lynne began their ride from the base school grounds
at around 7:30 p.m. and that he was back at the school, without
Lynne, by 8 p.m. That timeline was too short to fit the Crown's
theory, which relied on three witnesses who testified Mr. Truscott
and Lynne set out closer to 7 p.m.
In separate statements dated
June 24, the young witnesses, David Faubert and Daryl Wadsworth,
told Mr. Sayeau they saw Mr. Truscott and Lynne leave the schoolyard
closer to 7:30 p.m.
On Daryl's statement, Mr. Sayeau
wrote: "Very imaginative, I think. Wouldn't consider it
at all."
Ms. Edwardh asked Mr. Sayeau
why he dismissed as "imaginative" the story of a boy
who backed Mr. Truscott's version of events. He admitted it was
because it did not mesh with the case police had woven.
Mr. Sayeau also testified about
a third child witness named Karen Daum, a nine-year-old who told
police again and again that she saw Mr. Truscott and Lynne cycle
over a bridge crucial to the case.
Although he did not interview
her, Mr. Sayeau testified the investigator's consensus was that
she was a "cute girl, but had to be wrong."
Ms. Daum's statement was not
disclosed to the defence until 1966, when the Supreme Court held
a landmark review of Mr. Truscott's conviction. She is expected
to testify at the current review, sometime in the next two weeks.
Truscott witness testimony
impeached
FROM CANADIAN PRESS, Jun. 28,
2006
A woman who gave damning evidence
at Steven Truscott's 1959 murder trial told a fellow student
years later that police had the "wrong guy" behind
bars.
That testimony today from the
judicial hearing into Truscott's conviction for the rape and
murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper.
Sandra Stolzmann told court
she went to nursing school with witness Jocelyn Gaudet in 1966,
the same year Truscott's appeal went before the Supreme Court
of Canada.
Stolzmann says Gaudet told
her one night, "they've got the wrong guy, they've got the
wrong guy."
Gaudet told Stolzmann that
police should have been going after a man in a yellow car who
had been seen in the area.
Stolzman says Gaudet refused
to come forward because she was afraid to admit she lied at the
original 1959 trial.
Child Witness from 1959
trial testifies at hearing
LONDON FREE PRESS, June
28, 2006.
TORONTO (CP) - A child witness who gave
damning testimony at Steven Truscott's 1959 murder trial revealed
years later to colleagues that she lied to investigators and
that the "wrong guy" was behind bars, court heard Wednesday.
Jocelyn Gaudet's claim that Truscott
set a date to meet her in the woods the same evening 12-year-old
Lynne Harper was raped and strangled was powerful ammunition
for the prosecution, which successfully argued that the 14-year-old
boy had sex on his mind and set his sights on Harper after failing
to meet Gaudet. In 1966, just days before the Supreme Court embarked
on a review of Truscott's case, Gaudet confessed her secret to
a group of fellow resident nurses at a Montreal psychiatric hospital,
court heard.
Sandra Stolzmann described Wednesday
how Gaudet admitted she lied under oath when she testified at
Truscott's trial 47 years ago, and even suggested to her friends
that a man who had been spotted driving a yellow car in the area
should have been considered a prime suspect.
" 'They've got the wrong guy,
they've got the wrong guy. They've got to be looking for the
guy in the yellow car,' " Gaudet told the women as
she became visibly upset, Stolzmann testified.
Truscott steadfastly professed his innocence
at trial and told prosecutors he saw Harper get into a passing
car after he took his schoolmate for a bike ride in rural Clinton,
Ont., on the evening of June 9.
When Gaudet was asked why she lied to
police, she replied, "I was the old girlfriend and I didn't
want them to know I was following them," Stolzmann said.
Stolzmann's version of events was seconded by fellow nursing
co-worker Elizabeth Hulbert, who also told court she was in the
room and heard Gaudet say, "I was a witness and I lied."
When pressed by her colleagues to tell
the truth before the Supreme Court, Gaudet said she would fake
a psychiatric illness and be committed to an institution before
admitting that she lied, Hulbert testified.
Both women said Wednesday it was their
belief that Gaudet did just that, although neither had first-hand
knowledge of Gaudet ever being institutionalized. When it became
clear Gaudet wasn't going to testify before the Supreme Court,
Stolzmann said she went to the RCMP. The Supreme Court ultimately
ruled 8-1 against granting Truscott a new trial.
In preparing the report that concluded
there was likely a miscarriage of justice in the Truscott case,
Justice Fred Kaufman interviewed Gaudet, but the woman has not
testified at the judicial review of Truscott's conviction.
The ubiquity of hitchhikers in post-war,
rural Ontario was also explored Wednesday in the plain-spoken
testimony of a childhood friend of Harper's - evidence that drew
laughs from the spectators' gallery and even smiles from the
Appeal Court justices hearing the case.
"We usually just stuck our thumbs
out and we usually got a drive to town," Catherine Beamer
said before adding she and Harper did just that "at least
15 to 20 times" as young teens.
Truscott's insistence that Harper thumbed
a ride after they parted fell on deaf ears in 1959, since the
girl's parents insisted their daughter would never hitchhike.
"I don't think anybody ever gave it a second thought,"
Beamer said of hitchhiking. "It was just a way of life."
The woman testified that she was friends
with both Truscott and Harper, and outside the court expressed
her hope that justice will finally be done in the case. "Steve
needs justice as does Lynne, because it's as much about justice
for her as it is for him," said Beamer, who fondly recalled
Harper as a close companion and "a little bit pushy."
"She was my friend, and I miss her."
Truscott was convicted on Sept. 30, 1959,
for Harper's rape and murder, becoming the youngest person in
Canada ever sentenced to death.
His death sentence was commuted to life
in prison in 1960, the same year his first appeal was denied.
He served nine years in jail before being released on parole
in 1969. Truscott has steadfastly professed his innocence.
The review of the murder conviction is
expected to stretch into next week.
Unlikely body was in
bush soon after bike ride: expert
SCOTT TRACEY, CANADIAN PRESS,
Jun 30, 2006
Editor's note: This story
contains graphic details that may not be suitable for some readers.
Earlier this month, Sherah
VanLaerhoven placed three dead pigs in the spot where Lynne Harper's
body had been found 47 years and six days earlier.
By studying how flies laid
eggs on the pigs, the University of Windsor forensic entomologist
concluded it was highly unlikely the 12-year-old girl was killed
within two hours after she was last seen with Steven Truscott,
a panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal heard yesterday. "I
would say it's a high probability (Harper's) body was not there"
before sunset on June 9, 1959, the night the girl disappeared,
VanLaerhoven testified during the landmark appeal of Truscott's
decades-old conviction.
The entomologist, who was called
by Truscott's current legal team, said she conducted the pig
experiment in an effort to understand which species of flies
might have been attracted to Harper's corpse, and how quickly
they would have deposited eggs or live larvae on it.
Much of the evidence this week
has been about maggots seized by pathologist Dr. John Penistan
after Harper's body was found in Lawson's Bush June 11, 1959.
The maggots were sent to the attorney general's lab in Toronto,
where scientist Elgin Brown allowed them to grow and identified
them as blow flies and flesh flies, court has heard.
VanLaerhoven told the court
she went to Lawson's Bush near the former Clinton air force base
on June 17. She placed the pigs at the edge of the bush and placed
cow manure around them in an attempt to recreate conditions of
1959 when farmer Bob Lawson used to keep his cows in an adjacent
field.
She testified blow flies landed
on each of the pig carcasses within the first 30 minutes and
she observed "visible large masses of eggs" within
the first hour. VanLaerhoven said this caused her to conclude
Harper's body, lying in the same location in similar weather
conditions, would almost certainly have been rapidly colonized
by blow flies. She said this was not consistent with the blow
fly maggots collected by Penistan, which measured less than two
millimetres long and which entomologists agreed were very early
in their development.
VanLaerhoven told the court
there was a "95 per cent probability" the blow fly
maggots found on Harper's body were deposited there sometime
during the day on June 10 -- the day after the girl was seen
cycling with Truscott.
She added even if she was correct
about this belief, it would not necessarily mean Harper's body
was not in the bush before sunset the night before.
"As I scientist I can't
exclude that as a possibility," VanLaerhoven acknowledged,
though she said based on her pig experiment she considered this
"a low probability."
The entomologist said she caused
"trauma" to the pigs' vaginas in an attempt to make
flies colonize that area, but the blow flies she observed laid
eggs exclusively around the pigs' faces.
This might be important, as
one issue of contention this week is whether maggots seized from
Harper's vulva were from blow flies or flesh flies. Court has
heard Penistan seized six-millimetre-long maggots from the girl's
body and sent them to the Toronto lab. Both sides agree this
included maggots from a lesion on Harper's buttock, but disagree
about whether maggots seized from the vulva were among those
six millimetres in length.
Brown, the attorney general
lab scientist who grew the flies, testified this week all the
six-millimetre maggots he grew were flesh flies and said he believed
they all were collected from the buttock and vulva.
The Crown contends, however,
there were some blow fly maggots among the larger ones collected.
If it's true blow fly maggots had reached that size by the time
Harper's body was found, it would suggest Harper was killed closer
to the time she was with Truscott.
Truscott's lawyers believe
the six-millimetre maggots were all flesh flies in early stages
of development, and will likely argue they could have been laid
anytime during the day on June 10 and still have been that large
by the time Penistan found them a day later.
Court has heard it is not clear
from the notes of Penistan and Harry (Hank) Sayeau, the former
OPP officer who delivered the maggots to the Toronto lab, whether
the jar of larger maggots contained samples from the buttock
and vulva. The hearing, at Osgoode Hall in Toronto, continued
this morning.
- Truscott investigators
shrugged off farmer Saw strange car near where girl found
- Officials not interested
in his sighting
-
- TRACEY TYLER, LEGAL AFFAIRS
REPORTER, Jul. 1, 2006
The farmer who owns the property
where 12-year-old Lynne Harper's body was found in 1959 says
he saw a strange car parked near his fence line the night she
disappeared.
Bob Lawson said he went to
the guardhouse at the Royal Canadian Air Force Base at Clinton,
Ont., to report the incident, but the officer on duty wasn't
interested. Lawson's farm was next door to the base.
"He said they already
picked someone up and charged them," Lawson told a five-judge
panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal yesterday.
He would soon learn the person
charged was 14-year-old Steven Truscott, a warrant officer's
son, who lived on the base and liked to spend time at Lawson's
farm.
Lawson was confident Truscott
would be acquitted and believed he was not the type of teenager
who would commit murder.
Instead, Truscott was convicted
and became the youngest person sentenced to hang in Canada. The
sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. The appeal
court panel, headed by Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry, is
in the midst of an extraordinary review to determine if the conviction
should be set aside in light of fresh evidence.
Lawson also told the court
yesterday that during the 1959 trial, a key Crown witness named
Jocelyne Gaudet, then 13, came to his farm and tried to persuade
him to change his testimony, to accord with what she told jurors
about her failed attempts to find Truscott the night of June
9.
Gaudet was an important witness
because she could help the prosecution explain a motive for the
crime.
Gaudet told the '59 jury she
had plans to meet Truscott for a secret date at Lawson's bush
around 6 p.m. on June 9, but she didn't arrive until 6:30 p.m.
She said she looked for Truscott
at the farm and along an adjacent county road until about 8 p.m.
but couldn't find him.
The prosecution's theory was
that when Jocelyne didn't show up for the date, Truscott substituted
Lynne, luring her into the bush and killing her sometime between
7 and 7:45 p.m.
Truscott has maintained his
innocence for 47 years. He told police that Lynne, who also lived
on the base, asked him for a ride to the highway after dinner
on June 9. They set off on his bicycle around 7:30 p.m., riding
north along the county road, he said. Truscott said he dropped
her off at Highway 8, where she hitched a ride in what appeared
to be a '59 Chevy.
The night was hot. At the time,
Lawson was a 23-year-old farmer. Today, he turns 70.
He remembers milking his cows
that night and getting ready to bring in the hay crop the next
morning. At dusk, his neighbour Ross Crich dropped by and they
decided to go for a swim in the Bayfield River.
As they headed north along
the county road, they noticed a car parked near the bush on the
west side of Lawson's property, he told the court yesterday.
The car was about 23 metres south of a tractor trail that ran
along the north side of the bush.
Lynne's remains would be found
in the bush two days later, about 25 metres south of the tractor
trail, 86 metres from the road. The car was a convertible and
appeared to be a '52 Ford, he testified. He and Crich pulled
up behind it and shone their lights. A man was driving and there
appeared to be a shorter girl beside him in the middle of the
seat, he said. But Lawson and his friend didn't recognize them
and continued on to the swimming hole.
Later, the same car sped past
them and the driver may have yelled some obscenities out the
window, Lawson said.
The hearing resumes July 5.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell