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This website states that in 2002, the federal government appointed retired Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Fred Kaufman to review Truscott’s Section 690 application. It was recommended that the Ontario Court of Appeal reopen the Truscott case to permit a full appeal. The federal minister of justice agreed. A special five-judge panel of the Court of Appeal began hearing the fresh evidence in mid-2006. A year later, it acquitted Truscott outright, in part because it said a fair retrial would be impossible so many years after the fact.

This webiste also discusses the media interviews Steven was invlved in, he said that he had been drugged with LSD and truth serum during his incarceration by authorities in the hope that it would induce him to confess.

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At the age of 14, ​Steven Truscott was wrongly convicted of killing his 12-year-old schoolmate Lynne Harper. Five decades later he was exonerated.

Steven Murray Truscott was a popular, athletic teenager who lived with his parents in the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton. In 1959, at the age of 14, he was wrongly convicted of killing his 12-year-old schoolmate Lynne Harper. Not until five decades later was he finally exonerated.

Lynne Harper Murder

On the evening of 9 June 1959 several witnesses saw Steven Truscott cycling with Lynne Harper through the countryside - Truscott carrying her on the handlebars of his bicycle. Two days later, the girl's remains were found just off a tractor trail in a lightly wooded area known as Lawson's Bush, on the outskirts of Clinton.

Truscott became an immediate suspect. Questioned by police, he maintained that he had given the girl a lift to a highway intersection approximately a kilometre west of town, where some believe Lynne intended to hitch a ride to her grandmother's home in a nearby community. Police found details of his account deceptive and promptly arrested Truscott for murder.

With a population of just 3,500, Clinton - located near Lake Huron about 200 km west of Toronto - was divided evenly between long-time local residents and military families who worked at Canadian Forces Base Clinton, a nearby radar-training base. Both the Truscott and Harper families belonged to the military community.

Steven Truscott, born in Vancouver on 18 January 1945, was the son of a non-commissioned air force officer, Dan, and his wife Doris. They had arrived in Clinton in 1956, a year before the Harper family was transferred there.

The abduction and murder traumatized the community to a point where Truscott was denied bail. The Crown also succeeded in having his upcoming trial transferred to adult court, ensuring that Truscott could be potentially sentenced to either life imprisonment or execution.

Trial and Conviction

Truscott's jury trial consumed 15 days. The prosecution case was based on an assertion that Harper was a cautious girl who did not hitchhike. It alleged that Truscott sexually assaulted Harper, strangled her with her blouse and then arranged a few tree branches to partially cover her remains.

The prosecution highlighted a series of seemingly inconsistent statements Truscott had made in his statements to police, as well as the existence of a mysterious abrasion on his penis. It also questioned why Truscott did not reveal until at least a day after Harper disappeared that he had seen her get into a Chevrolet at the spot where her left her on Highway 8. Finally, it cited evidence that fresh bicycle tire tracks were found leading along the tractor path to the body site.

Mr. Truscott's defence lawyer, Frank Donnelly, maintained that the victim dismounted from Mr. Truscott's handlebars hundreds of metres past the entrance to the tractor trail where her body had been found, making it most unlikely that he had taken her all the way back to the tractor trail site in order to kill her.

Truscott repeated his assertion to police that he had seen Lynne picked up by a 1959 Chevrolet with an out-of-province licence plate.

Timing was critical to the case. Pathologist John Penistan, who conducted an autopsy of the victim, testified that her half-digested stomach contents revealed that Lynne had died between 7:15 p.m. -7:45 p.m. This narrow window of opportunity proved to be damning evidence against Truscott, since it was certain that he had been with her during that time. The brief window also lessened the possibility of a stranger having picked Lynne up on the highway and driven her back across the bridge toward the tractor path where she died.

The trial featured a good deal of testimony from children who had been playing under the bridge that evening and saw Truscott with Harper. Both the Crown and defence used the children's accounts to bolster their own contentions about the timing of events.

Truscott was found guilty on 30 September 1959. His conviction and the imposition of a death sentence caused a significant public clamour. A year later, the federal government commuted his sentence to life imprisonment with a 10-year parole eligibility period. Truscott's subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was rejected.

Truscott Paroled

In 1966, a book by Isabel LeBourdais stirred up controversy anew. The Trial of Steven Truscott made a detailed case for the young man having been railroaded by careless police officers and a vindictive prosecution. LeBourdais was particularly critical of Dr. Penistan's conclusions, and of apparent discrepancies with the evidence gathered by Ontario Provincial Police investigators. She was also critical of the manner in which statements from underage witnesses were obtained and used by the Crown.

A special reference to the Supreme Court of Canada led to the case being re-examined in 1966; however, the Supreme Court ruled that his case had been justly decided.

Truscott was paroled in 1969 and disappeared into anonymity. For almost 30 years, he lived under the media radar in Guelph, Ontario. His identity was known only to some members of the community and to his co-workers at a company where Truscott was employed as a millwright. To the outside world, he was known only by his assumed name, Steven Bowers.

AIDWYC Investigates

Under Section 690 of the Criminal Code, Truscott could apply to have his conviction reviewed and potentially referred for a retrial. First, however, the Department of Justice had to be satisfied that fresh evidence in the case could affect the outcome of his trial.

Lawyers from the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) dug into the background of the case, eventually obtaining 3,000 pages of material not before disclosed to the defence. The group drafted a 700-page brief that raised multiple instances of evidence that, according to AIDWYC, hadn't been adequately investigated or had been improperly suppressed.

At the same time, AIDWYC lawyers worked with the CBC program The Fifth Estate to stoke public interest about the long-ago case. A producer at the program, Julian Sher, also produced a book, Until You Are Dead, arguing for Truscott's innocence.

The thrust of the fresh evidence was that the Crown had suppressed information from children that could have been used by the defence to confirm Truscott's claim that he rode across the bridge and left Harper at Highway 8.

The defence had also obtained a previously undisclosed police report showing that the bicycle tire tracks on the tractor trail were likely to have been left there at least a week before Harper was killed, rendering them meaningless as evidence.

Pathologist's Letter

Perhaps the most significant new evidence was the discovery of a letter Dr. Penistan had written in 1966 to the lead police investigator in the case, Harold Graham. Sent on the eve of the 1966 Supreme Court of Canada appeal, Penistan admitted in the letter that he had made an "agonizing reappraisal" of his testimony at the Truscott trial and concluded that he should not have supplied such a narrow window-of-time opportunity.

The letter had never been disclosed to the defence.

A final item of undisclosed evidence involved an elderly couple who had told investigators soon after the murder that they had spotted a young girl hitchhiking, around the spot Truscott claimed to have left Harper that night, at roughly the time she disappeared.

Truscott's lawyers put forward an alternative suspect in the murder - a one-time air force sergeant named Alexander Kalichuk, who had been transferred away from Clinton two years before the Harper murder but had maintained links with the community. Kalichuk had been arrested in St. Thomas, Ontario, three weeks prior to the Harper murder, for attempting to lure a young girl into his car.

The failure to disclose evidence that was potentially favourable to Truscott was not illegal under rules and conventions existing at the time. However, much had changed in the years since then. The Supreme Court of Canada, in a landmark 1991 case known as R v Stinchcombe, had ruled that there was a constitutional obligation on the part of the state to disclose potentially relevant evidence to a defendant.

Appeal and Acquittal

In 2002, the federal government appointed retired Québec Court of Appeal Justice Fred Kaufman to review Truscott's Section 690 application. Kaufman, who had earlier presided over an inquiry into the wrongful conviction of Guy Paul Morin, recommended that the Ontario Court of Appeal reopen the Truscott case to permit a full appeal. The federal minister of justice agreed.

A special five-judge panel of the Court of Appeal began hearing the fresh evidence in mid-2006. A year later, it acquitted Truscott outright, in part because it said a fair retrial would be impossible so many years after the fact.

In media interviews, Truscott recalled waking up every morning of his initial period behind bars wondering if he would be executed before the day was out. He also said that he had been drugged with LSD and truth serum during his incarceration by authorities in the hope that it would induce him to confess.

"I'm not bitter," Truscott told journalists. "You can't live day after day being bitter . . . I've moved on with my life. My wife and I raised a family. I was always taught to look at things positively."

Meanwhile, Lynne Harper's father maintained that he and other close family members were skeptical of Truscott's innocence.

Truscott continues to live in Guelph with his wife, Marlene. He was awarded $6.5 million in compensation by the Ontario government in 2008, part of which Truscott used to launch the Truscott Initiative in Justice Studies at the University of Guelph, funding two scholarships for students in the field.

See also: Truscott's Quest for Vindication Continues.

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At the age of 14, ​Steven Truscott was wrongly convicted of killing his 12-year-old schoolmate Lynne Harper. Five decades later he was exonerated. Steven Murray Truscott was a popular, athletic teenager who lived with his parents in the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton.

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3. Steven Truscott - Innocence Canada #1

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3. Steven Truscott - Innocence Canada #1

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This website describe the events prior to Lynne's murder, on the evening of June 9, 1959, Steven was seen giving Lynne a ride on his bicycle. They parted ways. Later that evening, her father reported her missing. Two days later, Lynne’s body was found in a nearby wooded area. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Despite Steven's young age, he was ordered to stand trial as an adult. The Crown’s theory was that rather than dropping Lynne off as he claimed to have done, Steven turned off into the bush and killed Lynne at some point between 7:00 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. that evening.

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We've helped exonerate 21 innocent people since 1993.

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4. Steven Truscott - The search for justice #2

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4. Steven Truscott - The search for justice #2

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Posted July 7th, 2008. An in depth CBC News article describes how a students murder led to Steven becoming the youngest death-row inmate. His case, was one of the most famous and controversial in Canadian judicial history, and helped spur Canada to abolish the death penalty. This article also states that many people claim officials were too hasty and ignored some witnesses and possible suspects.

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Police charged 14-year-old Steven Truscott three days after finding his schoolmate's body.

In 1959, he was sentenced to be hanged at age 14 for a schoolmate's murder, becoming Canada's youngest death-row inmate. His case, one of the most famous and controversial in Canadian judicial history, helped spur Canada to abolish the death penalty. After the original conviction, Steven Truscott spent four months in the shadow of the gallows until his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Paroled in 1969, Truscott disappeared into an anonymous existence in a southern Ontario city.

On Aug. 28, 2007 - 48 years later - the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously overturned that conviction, declaring the case "a miscarriage of justice" that "must be quashed" and acquitted Truscott. The judges went on to say, however, that "the court is not satisfied that the appellant has been able to demonstrate his factual innocence."

Shortly after the decision was released, then Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant told reporters the Crown has no plans to appeal and offered an apology to Truscott.

In July 2008, the Ontario government announced it would pay Truscott $6.5 million in compensation for his ordeal. "We are doing what we can to bring to the conclusion this remarkable aspect of Mr. Truscott's life's journey," Chris Bentley, Ontario's attorney general at the time, said.

Case for acquittal

Steven Truscott, appearing on CBCï¿½s The National in 2001, has always said he is innocent.

After a public campaign calling for his exoneration ï¿½ buoyed by a book scrutinizing the conduct of his trial and a 2000 CBC's The Fifth Estate documentary where Truscott publicly proclaims innocence ï¿½ the Ontario Court of Appeal conducted a judicial review of his case. Witnesses took the stand between June 19, 2006, and July 7, 2006.

The review hinged on fresh evidence using forensic entomology ï¿½ pinpointing the time of 12-year-old Lynne Harper's death by the larval development of insects. In Truscott's 1959 murder trial, the time of death was pegged between 7 and 7:45 p.m., which pointed to Truscott as the murderer.

During the three week review, some of the forensic and pathology experts cast doubt on coroner John Penistan's key forensic evidence used to convict Truscott. Witness accounts not included in the original police case ï¿½ a strange car seen near the woodlot where Harper was found, the night she was murdered ï¿½ came to light. Old testimony by key witnesses in the Crown's original case were refuted.

But even before new testimony was presented to the Ontario Court of Appeal, a growing number of people had been persuaded that Truscott had been wrongfully convicted after a police investigation that critics say was too hasty and ignored some witnesses and possible suspects.

In Jan.-Feb. 2007 a panel of judges from the Ontario Court of Appeal again heard testimony as Truscott asked that he be cleared of the charges once and for all. The hearings were televised online by CBC.

Quick police probe, two-week trial

It was a hot, muggy evening on June 9, 1959, when Truscott gave his classmate, 12-year-old Lynne Harper, a short lift on his bicycle near an air force base outside Clinton, Ont.

Lynne Harper, 12, had been raped and strangled.

Two days later, searchers found the girl's body in a wooded grove near the town, about 180 km west of Toronto. She had been raped and strangled.

Truscott was the last known person to have seen her alive.

Within two days, police charged the teenager with her murder. After a trial that lasted only 15 days, he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.

Three decades later, Truscott remembered those days in a jail cell in Goderich, Ont., when he feared he would feel the noose before his 15th birthday.

"I woke up one day and somebody was building something outside the wall," he told The Fifth Estate.

"You could hear the hammering, and I thought they were building a scaffold. And it's just kind of living in terror, and every day you expect it to be your last."

Truscott's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he spent the next 10 years behind bars.

The case immediately provoked controversy, not only because of Truscott's tender years but also because some doubted his guilt.

Uproar leads to Supreme Court review

In the spring of 1966, a book written by Isabel LeBourdais – The Trial of Steven Truscott – attacked the rapid police investigation and trial, calling into question a justice system that many people then considered infallible.

Her argument that the court had erred and sentenced an innocent teen to death made front-page headlines and sparked public demonstrations. The resulting uproar in Parliament led Lester Pearson's Liberal government to order a Supreme Court review.

Canada's top court examined the Truscott case in 1966, not to determine his guilt or innocence but to decide whether he should have a new trial. The judges ruled 8-1 to uphold the verdict.

While Truscott remained in prison for three more years, many experts believe the controversy over his case led to Canada abolishing the death penalty in 1976.

Meanwhile, Truscott adopted a new name and settled in Guelph, Ont., where he worked as a millwright, married and raised three children.

2000 documentary raises more doubts

Steven Truscott talks with Linden MacIntyre, from the CBCï¿½s the fifth estate.

Although the Truscott name was well known in Canada, he remained anonymous until March of 2000, when the CBC's The Fifth Estate broadcast a documentary about his case.

The program presented new evidence that, when added to that uncovered by LeBourdais and others since the original trial, built a case that police may have laid charges too quickly, while playing down some witnesses and ignoring other potential suspects.

Truscott said he dropped Harper off at a highway, then saw her hop into a strange car as he pedalled away. He said Harper, the daughter of an officer on the Clinton base, told him she had squabbled with her parents and planned to hitch a ride somewhere.

The police maintained that Truscott killed her before reaching the highway and left her nearly naked corpse in the woods.

Their case, built on purely circumstantial evidence, hinged on the testimony of a pathologist who testified that Harper died between 7:00 and 7:45 p.m. ï¿½ an extremely precise determination even by today's forensic standards.

In 1966, Penistan had second thoughts and published a review of his autopsy that opened the time frame to a 12-hour window.

The Fifth Estate found that police also dismissed testimony from witnesses, including some who insisted they saw Harper and Truscott reach the highway.

Other suspects ignored?

The police and military never seriously considered other suspects that should have been flagged, The Fifth Estate said.

Air Force Sgt. Alexander Kalichuk

For example, the journalists uncovered old military files on Alexander Kalichuk, a heavy drinker with a history of sexual offences who lived within a 20-minute drive of the base. The air force sergeant had come to police attention after trying to lure a 10-year-old girl into his car about three weeks before Harper disappeared.

Another man, an electrician with a conviction for rape, worked regularly at the base and knew the Harpers.

The program suggested the Ontario Provincial Police may have rushed to judgment with Truscott, in an echo of police actions that led to the wrongful convictions of David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin.

While DNA testing helped overturn those convictions, no DNA evidence that can be analyzed exists in Truscott's case.

Campaign to exonerate Truscott

Truscott has always maintained his innocence, voluntarily submitting in prison to psychiatric probes that included truth serum and LSD.

When he went public in 2000, he said he wanted to clear his name for the sake of his children and grandchildren.

His case was taken up by the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, a group that includes lawyers who helped establish the innocence of Morin, Milgaard and Donald Marshall.

Truscott and the association's lawyers filed a formal appeal with the federal justice minister in November of 2001, asking for a formal review of the case. In a 700-page legal brief, they argued that the police used tunnel vision to zero in on Truscott, ignoring important witnesses and other suspects.

Two months later, the federal justice minister appointed a former Quebec judge, Fred Kaufman, to assess the claim under Section 690 of the Criminal Code.

Kaufman, who headed an inquiry into the wrongful murder conviction of Morin, can recommend that the case be retried or reviewed by an appellate court. He can also recommend a pardon.

Kaufman's report went to the justice minister in the spring of 2004. On Oct. 28, 2004, the federal Minister of Justice, Irwin Cotler, referred the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal for review.

"I have determined that there is a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice occurred in this case," Cotler said.

Ontario Court of Appeal review

Testimony in the three-week review supported some of the criticisms of the 1959 murder trial made in The Fifth Estate documentary, but not all of it pointed to Truscott's exoneration.

Retired OPP superintendent Harry Seyeau, who helped convict Truscott in 1959, testified that he and his police colleagues did not inquire about existing sexual predators with nearby OPP detachments, Crown offices, or the Royal Canadian Air Force. The farmer who owns the property where Harper's body was found, Bob Lawson, said he saw a strange car parked near his fence the night the 12-year-old disappeared. Lawson told the court he went to the guardhouse at the Royal Canadian Air Force, but the officer on duty wasn't interested. He also testified that Jocelyn Gaudet - a key child witness who said Truscott set a date to meet her in the woods on the night of June 9 - came to his farm and asked him to change his testimony to match hers.

Lawson wasn't the only witness who cast doubt on Gaudet's testimony, which gave ammunition to the prosecution. Sandra Stolzmann testified that Gaudet admitted to lying under oath in Truscott's trial to her and a group of fellow resident nurses in Montreal. Stolzmann also told the court that Gaudet suggested a man who was spotted driving a yellow car in the area should have been considered a prime suspect. Testimony from another nursing co-worker, Elizabeth Hulbert, echoed Stolzmann's account.

However, Karen Jutsi, who was nine years old when she testified in Truscott's trial, said her original statement was incorrect. At the murder trial, Jutsi, whose maiden name is Daum, said she was on a bridge when she saw Truscott on a bicycle giving a ride to Harper on a country road sometime after 7 p.m. on June 9, 1959. She told the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2006 that she was not on a bridge when she saw Truscott, but near Lawson's bush where Harper's body was later found. Jutsi said she was shocked when she read her statement years later, because it was wrong.

But the bulk of the witnesses focused on determining Harper's time of death, a detail that could either implicate or rule out Truscott as Harper's killer.

Both the prosecution and the defence presented pathology and entomology experts. Some backed up Penistan's original findings, some refuted them and the methods used. But all cast doubt on the narrow time frame of 7:00 to 7:45 p.m. on June 9 for Harper's death.

Renowned U.K. pathologist Bernard Knight - who wrote one of the standard textbooks for pathologists - criticized Penistan's use of stomach contents to determine when Harper died. "It's so inaccurate it is hardly worth doing," he said. "There are so many errors in it that it's impossible to give an accurate time of death." Ontario's chief pathologist Michael Pollanen testified that there wasn't enough evidence to pinpoint Harper's death, and that she could have died a day later than the original finding. Michigan pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz, with more than 50 years experience in the field, told the court Penistan wasn't equipped to evaluate the time of death. Spitz praised Penistan's methods for being advanced for the time, but said, "Maybe he was wrong."

Other expert witnesses used maggots collected from Harper's body in 1959 and today's expertise to establish when she died (larvae are deposited on the body shortly after death.)

Elgin Brown, a biologist working at the Ontario attorney general's crime lab at the time of the murder, told the court that maggots found on Harper's body probably hatched at 2:30 p.m. on June 10, 1959. He estimated that because the bugs were in the first stage of development, they were laid earlier that morning. Forensic entomologist Sherah VanLaerhoven estimated that insects started laying eggs or larvae on Harper's body between 11 a.m. June 10 and 8 a.m. the following morning. This time frame would rule out Truscott as her killer, but VanLaerhoven couldn't rule out the possibility that Harper died before sunset June 9.

Dr. Neal Haskell, a forensic entomology professor from Purdue University in Indiana, testified that larvae must have been deposited on the 12-year-old's body between 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. He said Harper could have died anywhere within a few minutes or two hours before this - giving weight to the time interval Penistan originally determined.

However, Haskell later re-evaluated his statements. Haskell said that a certain family of flies, flesh flies, do not land on a body less than 24 hours after a person died - a key part of his estimate of Harper's death. But Truscott's lawyers presented one of Haskell's reports on a 1992 murder where he concluded that flesh flies landed on a woman's body within the first 12 hours. Haskell was also questioned about a voicemail he left with Ontario Provincial Police in 2005, saying he would cast doubt on Truscott's innocence if he was put on the stand. Haskell did not deny leaving the message, but said he was only interested in pinpointing the time of Harper's death.

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Police charged 14-year-old Steven Truscott three days after finding his schoolmate's body. In 1959, he was sentenced to be hanged at age 14 for a schoolmate's murder, becoming Canada's youngest death-row inmate. His case, one of the most famous and controversial in Canadian judicial history, helped spur Canada to abolish the death penalty.

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Published in 1975, this is an image of the book Steven Truscott wrote based on his case. He describes major events that took place during the trial, and how this wrongful conviction has impacted him.

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This is a photo of Steven Truscott during the process of his trial.

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This is a photo of Lynne Harper, the girl who was found raped and killed at the age of 12.

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'Viable suspect' explored in murder that saw Steven Truscott wrongfully convicted

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A retired OPP officer believes there is a credible suspect in the 1959 murder of Lynne Harper, a crime Steven Truscott was convicted for, and later acquitted of.

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This video explains how new evidence was collected, and a new suspect was found who was a registered sex offender. If this new evidence was found earlier, it could have changed the outcome of the case. A few years later, Steven Trustcott was free.

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After being labeled a killer for 45 years, Steven Truscott got the chance to clear his name. He was 14 years old when he was charged, his death sentence got commuted to life in prison. The goal was to take the case to trial again, with a jury of his peers. This video also discuses compensation, and how it is available to Steven Truscott.

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Steven Truscott's $6.5 Million Award for Wrongful Conviction

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On June 11 1959, 12-year-old Lynne Harper was found raped and strangled to death. Steven Truscott, a classmate who last saw her alive, was sentenced to death for her murder. The Ontario Court of Appeal was set to review Mr. Truscott's conviction. His story continues to fascinate many people.

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tunnel vision, where police investigators do not proceed with an open mind;

mistaken eyewitness testimony;

false confessions;

in-custody informers who are not reliable;

flawed forensic and expert testimony; and

public and media pressure to convict.

(Bajer, et al., 2008)

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By: Roya Sarwar