Steven Truscott - His Word Against History - the fifth estate

welcome to the fifth estate marshal Milgard Morin these names now represent painful reminders of the fal ability of the police and lawyers judges and juries but before them all there was Stephen Truscott in 1959 when a 12 year old girl disappeared on a hot June evening an investigation lasting less than two days and a trial of less than two weeks sent a fourteen-year-old school boy on his way to the gallows Stephen Prescott's murder trial was the most famous and infamous child criminal case in Canadian history his death sentence was commuted but he spent 10 years in prison since his release Truscott has lived a secret life under an assumed name shunning all publicity until now tonight he breaks that 40-year silence the Fifth Estate has reviewed the documentation in this case interviewed dozens of witnesses and followed leads ignored by the police at the time and we've uncovered some astonishing new evidence a long hidden file whose contents raised disturbing questions about the integrity of the murder investigation and the fairness of his trial Stephen trust God's guilt is a historical fact but is it true was the verdict just he still maintains his innocence but after four decades it is now his word against history and now posterity must judge in tonight's program key scenes are recreated based on verbatim accounts of witnesses and from military police and archival documents [Music] in a Goderich Ontario jail cell he awaited the hangman he was 14 I woke up one day and somebody was building something outside the wall he'd hear the hammering and I thought they were building this raffle and it's just kind of living in terror [Music] and everyday you expected it to be your last it was 1959 and his name was Steven Truscott once his jailer saw his brother climbing a tree to catch a glimpse of him so they moved the prisoner to a cell without a window 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 have something to boast about with a national law in the name of the Queen to hang a child who is just 14 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 have been a heatwave 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 age 12 [Music] the boy was one of her classmates Stephen Truscott aged 14 [Music] two days later searchers found her body in a wooded grove in the more than forty years since there has been much controversy but what really happened on that evening partly because of it Canadians abolished the death penalty in that time one voice has been absent from the debate that of Stephen Truscott he has chosen to live in a closed privacy until now it's important to me I know what 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 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 after class I went to my teacher and I said please tell me that we're not gonna do any more on this subject and he says why does it bother you and I said yes it does and he says 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 he said oh really and I said yes I said he is my father he rarely revisits the place where his life changed so dramatically when he was 14 June 9th 1959 a small bridge over a slow river it was all you needed when you were 14 and life was coming into focus Stephen 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 7:00 in the evening June 9th Lin Harper was also there she was the daughter of an officer on the Clinton base Lynn Harper came over to the fight and more and less asked me what I was doing and I said well I'm worn down to the river to see if they knew the kids are down there and she asked me if she could have a ride down to the highway that's while I'm going down that way anyhow a tiny little moment yeah a tiny little moment that kind of changed everybody's life he says that Lin told him that she'd squabbled with her parents at suppertime 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 number eight then he rode back to the bridge but he stopped to watch the other kids playing in the water he glanced toward the highway once and saw a car pull up was a 59 chef gray and as it swung in and 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 chef changed the style of the car and they had large bins going out like wings and the tail lights look like cat's eyes and there was no other car around like that 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 that's what that was what I saw and I maintained that today 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 [Music] by Thursday the military organized a large search party to sweep the area starting at the school heading north toward farmer Lawson's bush [Music] that afternoon they found her body sexually assaulted and strangled George Eden's was a young air man then first thing I saw is 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 what you know that she was dead among the Ontario Provincial Police officers at the scene a senior investigator from headquarters in Toronto inspector 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 inspector Graham quickly found his prime suspect in the elementary school they found her body Thursday afternoon Friday evening they picked up Stephen 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 place when they told you to get in the car you got in the car later they brought him to the base guard house then they told his parents there 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 they would take turns coming in and question me and then the next one would come in and call me a liar and you did this you did that eventually he became confused made mistakes stuck to a 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 him on Saturday morning after less than two days of investigation they charged the boy with murder one cop says after being there just overnight this is our suspect we're charging this person I mean what happened to the word investigation have you got it boiled down to any kind of a reason why this happened to you was easiest road out for them and the 14 year old kid was the easiest possible way 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 and nobody he wasn't a serviceman so the military were spared embarrassment he wasn't a civilian so there was no danger of 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 Stephen and Lin left the school and drove past the bush over the river to number eight highway as he insisted they did he was innocent the police were convinced he was lying that they really turned off the road and into the bush their challenge was to prove it there had to be a motive for stopping by the bush and one of the kids from the school handed them the oldest one in the book sex a girl named Jocelyn cadet claimed that on the day before the murder Truscott had made a secret date to meet her in the bush suggesting that his teenage hormones were on the boil the alleged date would become crucial evidence against him that never where did she get that notion I couldn't even begin to tell you it never took place Jocelin would later testify that just before 6:00 on the evening of the murder he stopped by her house to remind her of their date however we've discovered notes that cast doubt on that testimony there from an early interview with the police one of several and there's no reference at all to that visit she would testify that she went to the bush looking for Stephen that evening [Music] but these police notes by inspector Harold grahame record that Jocelyn first said she'd be looking not for Stephen Truscott but for Lynne Harper and an incident during Truscott trial never previously revealed raises questions about her credibility she testified that she was also looking for Stephen at Lawson's firm not far from the bush she got her time wrong by an hour so during the trial she went to see farmer Bob Lawson to ask for a favor it was one evening there again I was getting the cows in to do the milking and she wanted me to change the time that she was over to coincide with the time that she had told them that she had been older she wanted you to change your story that's right did you give her a response no I said I can't do that [Music] the police picked up a more damaging story from another boy butch George a good friend of Stephens was spreading it among the other guys the night Lyn disappeared one of the guys was Alan Durnan who was 11 at the time but she George stopped and he said to me trust cots in the bush with Harper what it meant was that he he was in with a bush with Harper trying to do whatever fourteen-year-old boys do that should have been conclusive and eyewitness who placed the suspect at the scene of the crime but it would become one of the great mysteries of the Truscott case that the police never asked butch George where and when he made this incriminating observation and while the prosecution got other kids to testify in my new detail about what they saw and didn't see that night he never asked butch George to repeat under oath the extraordinary claim that he saw Lynne and Steven in the bush maybe it was because butch had a credibility problem the night Lynne Harper disappeared jocelyn cadet said she bumped into butch on the road too just beside the bush and she asked if he'd seen Steven butch said no later that evening Bush dropped by Stephens house and they tossed a ball around for a while he later told the police they didn't talk about Lin and that they did that he saw Stephen down by the bridge earlier that evening they that he didn't and he only said so because Stephen asked him to Alan Durnan was one of the kids who thought Stephen was guilty but butch Georgia's contradictions almost made Truscott look innocent every time but she was called up to the stand to give some kind of evidence or to answer a question or whatever he changed his story every trip so I think that the prosecution must have just got to the point where what do we believe you know is it can this guy tell the truth or can he get his story straight or is there something wrong with him of the dozens of children and adults on the county road that hot June evening nobody could reliably place Stephen in or near the bush where Lynn's body was later found then the police introduced some interesting reverse logic proof that Stephen and Lynn had gone into the bush they only had to prove that at some point they weren't on the road [Music] enter little Phillip Byrnes he was 10 and he was supposed to be home early he started walking just after 7 a boy on a bike passed him the kid on the bike said he met Lynn and Stephen on Stephens bike up here to school but Phillip said he didn't meet them the prosecution would persuade a jury that if he didn't meet them on the road it could only mean that they've gone into the bush but a close reading of Philips police statement suggests that there were a number of people he didn't see on the road that night people who said they'd seen him which shouldn't be particularly surprising for a ten-year-old on an evening that was still unremarkable nothing spectacular was going on people are swimming people are riding up and down the road nobody really has any reason to pay to pay particular attention maybe Stephen and Lynn did take a little trip up by the edge of the woods explains everything people coming and going and not seeing it no it never happened it didn't happen tend to happen I picked her up at the school right down to the highway no detours no detours but yet butch George who was one of your close friends says that you and Lynn were in the woods and and Butch is insinuating that he saw you in the woods it was more or less a joke it started off to be a joke I think more or less young kids saying oh I saw you with the girl or what started off to be a joke all of sudden when the police got hold of it was no longer a joke but two other witnesses would strike a serious blow at the prosecution theory remember the geography if Stephen and Lynn crossed the bridge he could not have killed her in the bush and two witnesses insisted that they saw them cross the bridge riding double on his bike one of them was an 11 year old who was at the river catching turtles as he climbed the embankment to the bridge to go home he said that Stephen and Lynn rode by his name was dougie Oaks and more than 40 years later he's still positive that he saw them I recall saying hi and waving at them and Lynn's smiling back I don't recall any real reaction from from Stephen as he was pedaling down the road hidden heading towards highway number eight no doubt in your mind about it 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 you see if your memory is sharp then Stephen Truscott is innocent I don't know how anybody could have 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 one that saw them cross the bridge Gordon Logan who was 12 was fishing in the river he told police he looked up and saw Stephen and Lin drive by shortly afterwards he saw Stephen coming back alone presumably after dropping Lin at the highway his story is significant because he reported it to the police on Thursday morning before they found Lin's body later when it became crucial to Stephens alibi the police said he made it up to protect his friend but 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 Gordon Logan stood precisely identified clothing and colors 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 seemed Truscott and Harper across the bridge were just part of a conspiracy of pals out to protect him Doug Oates when you think about it logically I mean at the ripe age of 11 years old yo we would have had been extremely sophisticated to be able to put together stories like that so you can sit in front of me today in front of the whole country and say what you said with such ferocity back then that you were not a liar no no I I saw Steve Truscott and Lyn Harper cross the bridge heading north towards highway number eight on that evening there's absolutely no doubt in my mind when we come back how flawed medical evidence nearly sent Stephen Truscott to the gallows I don't think there is any medical or forensic evidence which clearly links Stephen Truscott with Lin Harper's death the prosecution's case against Stephen Truscott wasn't going to get very far on the shaky testimony of children they needed objective evidence and what could be more objective than science and what the prosecution's child witnesses might have lacked in certainty several doctors involved in the Truscott case more than made up for testifying with inspired confidence that Lin Harper had died in exactly that half hour that she'd been with Stephen Truscott Lin Harper left home at about 6:15 she met up with Stephen just after 7:00 people saw Stephen around the base at 8:00 and shortly after that he was home babysitting for the rest of the evening to prove that he killed Lin Harper the prosecution would have to prove she died between 7:15 and a quarter to 8 the local coroner was dr. John Penniston relying mainly on the analysis of Lin's stomach contents and 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. peniston's conclusions dr. John but 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 I mean I think the one thing that you 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 it sure told the police and the and the pathologists at the time a lot they told them that she died since then between 7:15 and 7:30 on the night of June the night well the big question here is whether or not that information that was said to have been developed from the stomach contents quote-unquote scientifically was meeting some predetermined parameter a polite way of saying that dr. Penniston might have been tailoring his conclusions to substantiate the suspicions of policemen it was difficult to challenge dr. peniston's conclusions since the prosecution never entered his official autopsy report into evidence I don't think there is any medical or forensic evidence which clearly links Stephen Truscott with Lynne Harper's death dr. Rex Farris is a veteran pathologist from Vancouver we also asked him to review the medical testimony he found dr. peniston's claims to be extraordinary given the quality of information available to him from a decomposing body how impressed are you with the basis on which they nailed down fairly you know fairly precise time of death well I I'm not impressed at all I think the bottom line is that they there really was no valid method used to determine time of death under the best of circumstances determination of time of death of a dead body may be very difficult if not impossible surprisingly dr. Penniston himself came to the same conclusion years later reviewing his own conclusions about the time of death based on stomach contents he said that he might have been accurate but that they were not incompatible with death at a later time up to 12 hours or even longer the definition by time in this case is wrong Stephen Truscott then should never have been found guilty 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 have fallen apart the case against Truscott didn't fall apart in fact he was damned by even more dubious medical evidence to doctors who examined the boy three days after the murder said they found two large lesions on his penis each the size of a quarter Truscott at 14 was mortified trying to explain injuries which he still insists were grossly exaggerated to shock prudish members of the jury to hear these two doctors describe it in court I was probably the best built 14 year old kid in the world at that time according to them know these two doctors exaggerated soul they blew it all out of proportion and they got away with it the Fifth Estate uncovered evidence that backs him up the day after that examination there was another a third doctor examined him in the Gutteridge jail and according to the Jailhouse report which never surfaced at his trial he had not observed any injury on the penis in fact forensic experts like dr. Russell Davis of London England who has worked with the police on hundreds of rape investigations argue that a rape rarely produces sores like those described on Truscott my overall impression reading these papers is that the medical evidence was far too precise in situations where you can't afford to be precise because the margins of error are very big it's almost as if they were fitting the evidence to the guilt of the crime [Music] if the police profile of the murderer was correct Lin Harper's killer would have had injuries that were far more conspicuous 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 [Music] the prosecution would later claim that Stephen Truscott lured Lin down the lane somehow dr. unconscious dragged her through a barbed-wire fence carried her limp and bleeding into the bush where he raped and strangled her but Stephen arrived at the school just 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 yeah it was almost like a gravel rolled down this way and there was a barbed-wire fence all along the front they said I went back in the bush and killed and raped her and no marks on you No No Deal 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 the wheels of justice were turning quickly in June of 1959 90 days after he was arrested he went on trial as an adult in the Huron County Courthouse 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 courthouse where the trial would take place the trial was over only 15 days after it started an all-male jury recoiled at evidence about rape and penis lesions and found him guilty some jurors later called him an animal and a sexual stud the judge pronounced the sentence that on the 8th of December he would be hanged by the neck until he was dead all the time that that's going on you're thinking they're gonna realize that they made a mistake and you know they're gonna let me let me go but it just never happened that way Doug Oates who was 11 and who had endured a withering cross-examination as he insisted on trust God's innocence was stunned I was flabbergasted I just couldn't believe you know the the fact that you can convict somebody or find somebody guilty and with really no evidence other than circumstantial evidence I think that's just abhorrent Pierre Burton's poem in the Toronto Star never questioned the verdict just the death sentence but it provoked a violent backlash it was Savage that one man Florence that I I hope your daughter ISM is raped by a sex fiend another woman who wrote has said the hanging is too good for him you ought to be whipped before he is hanged the death sentence was postponed to the new year then early in 1960 the federal government commuted to life imprisonment it's really really kind of terrifying nighttime you'd lay there and cry but doesn't really accomplish that much soul after while you even stop doing that you kind of harden yourself up for what's what's to come this was what he had ahead of him after a few years in the youth facility Collins Bay Penitentiary near Kingston a tough prison that's known among convicts as gladiator school max Steinberg was a no-nonsense chaplain at Collins Bay and he wondered about trust God's chances for survival I asked him to that I said how could you possibly make the adjustment from a from a fourteen-year-old boy riding your bike around the community and so and so forth to facing life and his answer was something the effect you either you either adjust or you die and he adjusted he adjusted but remained rigid in his claim of innocence even as prison psychologists probed his subconscious with truth serum and LSD for secret signs of his guilt and this is what the psychiatrist's all were hinting at or you don't remember so I said hey I know I'm not guilty whatever tests you want to do I'll go along with them and nothing came up to indicate that there was any guilt was there any moment in the testing or in the prior to the testing that you felt maybe I did it you know maybe maybe maybe they are gonna find something in here no none at all as the children of Truscott generation came of age in the mid-60s his case found new life many protestors saw Truscott as a victim of corrupt Authority a more aggressive media began to challenge institutions like the courts and the police I'm Patrick Watson and this is our report on the last seven days the CBC's this hour has seven days showcased a new book on the Truscott case it was a blunt critique of Truscott trial written by Isabelle Laborde I got hold of the transcript of the trial and began to read it and soon came to the conclusion that it wasn't it wasn't a sick boy who was guilty but a perfectly normal boy who was innocent 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 he admits he went to the highest court in the land scared and unprepared at the Supreme Court hearing when they started asking you questions a lot of them you don't remember clearly you saying you went in this room could cold you didn't do your homework how are you supposed to do your homework you're off to the side this doesn't involve you it's a legal issue Stephen why didn't you just say gimme it gets your life you have it you're in jail [Music] I think after so many years of nobody believing you I mean for so many years they're not interested they couldn't care less you don't matter it was his last shot an indication for a long time when we come back new hope in a long hidden file the military abandoned the Clinton Air Force Base in 1971 it survives only as a footnote in one of Canada's most troubling criminal cases but before it closed a senior Air Force officer made a discovery that decades later raises grave questions about the integrity of the investigation of Lynn Harper's murder he found a misplaced psychiatric file from 1959 and reading it he felt a chill the subject of the file was a sexual predator who also sounded like a killer the file subsequently disappeared for nearly 40 years [Music] recently an investigation by the Fifth Estate assisted by the National Archives in Ottawa retrieved that file part of a 900-page dossier on sergeant Alexander Khalid Chuck sergeant callo chuck was a troubled man a heavy drinker with a history of sexual offences he lived in this farmhouse with his wife and three children best in a 20 minute drive from the Clinton days he worked as a supply technician there until 1957 he transferred to another base inhale mer about an hour's drive away but he made frequent trips back to Clinton where Lin Harper's father was the senior supply officer Calla Chuck's record of sex offenses went back at least a decade in 1950 he had two convictions for indecent exposure in Trenton where he was stationed just about three weeks before Lynn Harper's murder he stopped three young farm girls on a country road outside st. Thomas Ontario [Music] he tried to lure one of them a ten-year-old into his car offering a gift of new underwear he left when he saw the girl's father approaching but was later arrested by the OPP and charged a week later a judge dismissed the charge for lack of evidence before he let him go the judge gave kallenchuk a stern lecture making it clear that he knew what he'd been up to it seems quite unlikely that the police wouldn't have felt the same and kept an open file on him even though he'd walked away scot-free this time it was on May 28th that callow Jeff walked out of that courthouse a free man 12 days later near the Clinton airbase where he'd recently been stationed and continued to visit twelve-year-old Lynne Harper was murdered remarkably we've been unable to uncover any evidence that sergeant callo chuck was ever considered a possible suspect and it is clear that once suspicion fell on Stephen Truscott there was no discernable interest in anybody else either by the police or by the military brass and yet at the very moment that Lynne Harper was supposedly hitchhiking toward the town of Seaforth Kalla truck may well have been in the area his military records revealed that earlier on that same day Air Force medical officers were discussing his weakness for alcohol and little girls they met with a probation officer who was reporting another incident of indecent exposure involving Calot chuck this time in Seaforth a few miles from the Clinton base and back at the aylmer base where he worked most of the time a medical doctor opened a file on Sergeant Alexander Kalachakra on July 2nd three weeks after Lynne Harper was murdered kallu chuck is said to be suffering from overwhelming anxiety tension depression and guilt the senior medical officer was blunt in his diagnosis his problem was sexual deviation and anxiety reaction Calla truck entered hospital July 22nd still described as tense nervous and suffering from anxiety and depression a strong overreaction if he was simply worried about a minor charge that had been dismissed almost two months earlier Cal HF was released but apparently far from cured a heavily censored confidential military memo about Sergeant callo chucks 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 sergeant callo Chuck managed to avoid particular attention as a suspect in those incidents and most significantly evolved in the murder of 12 year old Lynne Harper that would change when an Air Force flight lieutenant named Bullard Budlong be later stumbled across calyx psychiatric file at the Clinton Base Longley got permission to conduct an investigation which lasted for three months in the mid-60s and it reinforced his darkest suspicions he uncovered calla tucks history of sexual crimes he discovered that kallenchuk had sold his car shortly after the harbor murder he tried to track kallenchuk movements tonight at the crime [Music] wrongly says he eventually met the man who arrested Truscott Harold Graham of the OPP at the Clinton base to discuss his findings he says Graham wasn't interested Harold Graham famous as the man who cracked the Truscott case had risen by then to the office of assistant commissioner and would eventually go on to head the OPP hello mr. Graham mr. Graham now retired declined an on-camera interview but spoke to us on the telephone Sanj and Caltech had a record as a sexual offender and had been arrested in by the OPP on the 21st of May just before the first cut now it's just a couple of weeks before the murder is any of this sound familiar to you Mr Graham no it doesn't strike a note at all the airforce investigator tells us that he actually briefed you on the Kalachakra file I would pick up on any sex offender that came to my attention that might be of some interest yeah and I don't remember colors just the name or the meeting or he says somebody said a head will today the OPP refuses to say if they have ever investigated Sergent Alexandra kallenchuk Lumley had nowhere else to turn with his calla tuck inquiries and handed his findings over to the air force today military activists say they have no record of what happened in his reports kallenchuk continued a downward spiral through the 60s and 70s there were drunk driving charges and as late as 1969 a military doctor noted that there were still official concerns but his peculiar behavior towards young girls that same year 1969 in October Stephen Truscott left Collins Bay penitentiary on parole he was 24 he would never again return to prison but he'd never really be free either as long as he was branded a murderer he moved into the home of max Steinberg who was by then a member of the National Parole Board Steinberg was known in the world of Corrections as an old-fashioned hardliner but he developed a deep respect for Truscott and on his release took him into his own family did you ever have any cause to regret that not one minute personally I have a great deal of trouble believing that he was guilty because he's a as I say he's a very gentle person and I don't see that type of of emotion in him that that would that would that would lead him to commit that type of an offense crossguard eventually married and settled down under a different name in Guelph Ontario where he's worked steadily as a millwright after 30 years his record as a citizen is unblemished as time passed even the justice system seemed to forget about him but anonymity also became a kind of prison for him and for his children when his father died he had to tell his kids they couldn't attend the funeral Leslie never forgot it for fear of reporters they didn't want pictures taken of us and I can remember sitting at my aunt and uncle's just crying and crying wanting to go to my grandfather's funeral and I couldn't his youngest son Devon is 17 Stephen Truscott decided early on only to tell his children who he really was when they became teenagers Leslie and her brother Ryan say the truth only deepened their admiration for their father did you ever have any doubt that my gosh there's a dark side to my father that I didn't know about no no never personally never my dad is the most laid-back relaxed person I've ever met in my life it's just I'm sure everything that he went through with all the time in jail and that has really molded the wonderful person that is that he's becoming 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 about our house I've got the other box that came in the murder of Lynn Harper and his conviction have become not surprisingly an obsession for Stephen Truscott and his wife Marlene was absorbed an encyclopedic knowledge of his case same time and but Phillip burns us just to have left the bridge and walked home and according to the the police files it took them 30 minutes right from there I've taken things day by day I've taken them witnessed by witness I've gone over and over and over it and it all amounts to one thing they were on a quest it's him they have in mind so when so while they're getting all this information to have him convicted the murderer runs free in 1997 Truscott was briefly hopeful that breakthroughs in DNA testing would finally vindicate him but after months of searching authorities could only turn up this list showing that most of the key evidence where the killer's genetic material might be found had been destroyed genetic testing might have solved the mystery once and for all but no one will ever know beyond a reasonable doubt who killed Lynne Harper Sergeant Alexander calicut lies in a grave in Seaforth at rest after a tortured life he spent his final years in and out of psychiatric institutions and when he was out was usually lost in a haze of alcoholism which eventually killed him in 1975 is he the man who in the eyes of the law is the murderer is now enjoying a serene middle aged at peace with himself and his family and after 30 years preparing to resume his real identity and his name Stephen Truscott determined to continue the effort to prove his innocence even though he knows it's now his word against history why it's so important for you guys as a couple as a family to keep pursuing this whether he did it or not he'd he's scot-free he did his time he owes nothing to society he is not scot-free he goes to bed every night as a convicted murderer and he wakes up every morning as convicted murderer and why should he be 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 I forty years I don't think that's too much to ask

Channel: CBC News

Views: 438,789

Keywords: Steven Truscott (Person), The Fifth Estate (Award-Winning Work), CBC News, CBC Television (TV Network), News (TV Genre), Wrongfully Accused (Film), Linden MacIntyre

Id: yp8WH2x1JLA

Length: 49min 7sec (2947 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 15 2015