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This video is an example on how a conviction, wrongfully or not, can affect a family.
With knowledge gained from our Wrongfully Convicted course, we believe that Truscott and his family should have been offered conferencing circles to address the outcome of the case.

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Worst Cases Of People Being Wrongly Accused

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A Canadian court acquitted Steven Truscott today and called his murder conviction "A Miscarriage Of Justice". http://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/think-and-grow-rich/198261

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Steven Truscotts battle with, not just the court system... but cancer?

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Steven Truscotts battle with, not just the court system... but cancer?

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GUELPH, ONT.-As a teenager, he faced the hangman's noose, condemned as a child killer and a rapist. For more than 50 years, he fought to clear his name of a crime that he insisted he did not commit.

But now Steven Truscott, one of Canada's most famous victims of a wrongful conviction, is fighting one final, daunting battle - against cancer.

Truscott, a 67-year-old grandfather, had his entire prostate removed last year in an attempt to destroy a potentially deadly tumour. He has since undergone 33 radiation treatments and doctors continue to test him for any warning signs that the cancerous cells may have returned.

"Worrying about it isn't going to make it go away," Truscott told the Toronto Star in an exclusive interview at his home. "I figured if the government couldn't get rid of me, this wasn't going to get rid of me either."

At age 14, Truscott faced execution for the murder and rape of a classmate, Lynne Harper, in 1959 near the air force base where they lived in Clinton, Ont. His sentence was commuted to life in prison just weeks before the scheduled hanging.

That early brush with death seems to have informed Truscott's resolve to fight his cancer. "You're put on this earth and what's thrown at you - you either handle it or you don't," he said.

Inspired by the very public battle waged by the late NDP leader Jack Layton, Truscott agreed to discuss his medical condition to send a message to Canadian men to regularly take a simple test for prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a possible early indicator of cancer.

"I'd always been healthy. I figured you don't need the test if I feel fine," he said. "It takes two minutes to take the PSA test. If you know someone who has died from prostate cancer, it is not a pretty picture."

Truscott spent 10 years behind bars and then a lifetime on parole as a convicted murderer. In 2007, after a decade-long legal battle to reopen his case, the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously overturned his conviction as "a miscarriage of justice" that "must be quashed."

The following year, the Ontario government awarded Truscott $6.5 million in compensation. He moved into an expansive home on the outskirts of Guelph with his wife Marlene and looked forward to a comfortable life with their three children and four grandchildren.

Then, the devastating news. Truscott, who says he never spent a day in his life in the hospital, had not visited his family doctor in two years. When he finally booked a visit, a routine checkup and blood test found dangerously high levels of PSA.

A subsequent biopsy confirmed he had prostate cancer.

"I can remember thinking: 'Why does this have to happen to him?'" said Marlene, Truscott's wife of 42 years and the driving force in her husband's battle to prove his innocence. "I was just sick, absolutely, completely sick from worry."

Truscott, who had learned to control his emotions after years in prison and frustrated legal appeals, was more reserved - at least outwardly.

"He handled it almost stoically; none of this 'poor me' stuff, just about the way you would expect Steve to react," said Mac Stienburg, who was Truscott's prison chaplain in the 1960s and, later, his parole officer. He has remained a close family friend.

"This (cancer) would sound like peanuts in comparison with a death sentence to hang," said Stienburg. "This paled in comparison."

Still, when Stienburg got a late night call from Truscott, he sensed the man he had known since he was a teenage inmate was more concerned than he would admit.

"What's God doing to me?" Stienburg remembers Truscott asking, only half-jokingly.

"I don't know, but I'll ask him and put in a good word," said the former chaplain.

Last summer, Truscott underwent surgery for a prostatectomy, the complete removal of his infected gland.

It went well but Dr. Timothy Wesley-James, the urologist who performed the operation, found the cancer had infected 40 per cent of Truscott's prostate and "microscopic" traces had spread locally.

"You have concerns," Wesley-James told the Star.

Then late last year, a blood test detected PSA again - bad news because with the prostate removed the only explanation for PSA readings was that some of the cancerous cells indeed were still present. So over the winter, Truscott began intensive radiation treatments, five days a week for almost two months.

In April he walked into the office of Dr. Joda Kuk, his radiation oncologist at the Grand River Regional Cancer Centre in Kitchener, to get the latest test results.

Kuk had drawn a smiley face and the scrawled the word "YAY!" on Truscott's medical folder: The PSA levels were undetectable.

"It was evidence that I had hit the target of cancer cells," Kuk said.

About 40 per cent of men like Truscott who had high-risk features in their prostate cancer might see a recurrence of the disease, Kuk explained, but effective radiation treatment can cut that danger in half.

"The outlook is good but you monitor these patients for 15 years because it could still come back," said Wesley-James.

The surgery, radiation and stress over the past year have taken an obvious toll on Truscott. Once a strong, fit man with the ramrod-straight bearing of a boy who grew up on an air force base, Truscott has put on weight, walks more slowly and lacks the energy he once had.

"I tire out faster," he admits.

Marlene has also spotted a "big personality change," noting her usually easygoing husband at times is "far more distant, more irritable."

The Truscotts have largely stepped out of the public limelight since Steven's acquittal in 2007 after a gruelling decade of appeals, hearings and campaigns against wrongful convictions.

The family has quietly launched the Truscott Initiative in Justice Studies at the University of Guelph, funding two scholarships for students in the field and working toward setting up a chair devoted to justice and social issues.

They still get letters and emails regularly from supporters and schoolchildren working on projects about the famous legal case.

Truscott said there is only one thing that would bring him back into the public eye: "If they ever try to bring back the death penalty," he said, referring to occasional murmurs from some Tory politicians.

"How many wrongful convictions have there been in Canada, and how many of those people would be dead (under capital punishment)?" he asks. "I would come back for that."

But for now, Truscott wants to think about life, not death.

He and his wife dream of spending more time with their grandchildren and taking a road trip to explore Canada.

"I was given two chances," Truscott says, escaping a hanging death after a criminal conviction and - for now at least - a lingering death from cancer. "My cat has nine lives, so I have seven more to catch up."

He breathes heavily as he rolls his 270-kilogram Kawasaki motorcycle out of his garage. So far this spring he has found the energy to take the bike out for a spin three times, an exhilarating jolt of freedom for the grandfather who still chafes at the memory of spending his teenage years behind bars.

"You just get out there and feel free," Truscott says, a hint of that boyish twinkle in his eyes. "Nothing holds you back."
Julian Sher can be reached at 514-944-6943, at sher.julian@gmail.com and on Twitter @juliansher.

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Steven Truscott fights another battle for his life | The Star

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GUELPH, ONT.-As a teenager, he faced the hangman's noose, condemned as a child killer and a rapist. For more than 50 years, he fought to clear his name of a crime that he insisted he did not commit. But now Steven Truscott, one of Canada's most famous victims of a wrongful conviction, is fighting one final, daunting battle - against cancer.

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Truscott did not receive, due process. This was the failure of the court system that lead to Truscott's conviction

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Truscott maintained his innocence despite being sentanced with evidence that proved otherwise.

After collaborating, we came to the conclusion that, the "Young Offenders Act" would have enabled Truscott to reintegrate into society prior to his case coming to an end, allowing Truscott to seek freedom and a follow-up trial after he becomes legal age instead of serving 45 years.

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Steven Truscott applied for parole, he was paroled in 1969 to live in Ontario under probation.

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It is either the longest miscarriage of justice in Canadian history or an injustice to the memory of a murdered 12-year-old girl.

As the hearings into the case of Steven Truscott begin again, a court will revisit a crime that dates back to 1959 in hopes of finally figuring out if the right man paid the price for a vicious killing.

Here's a timeline of the events:

1959

June 9: When 12-year-old Lynne Harper goes for a walk and then disappears from the air force base near Clinton, Ontario, her parents and officials become concerned. An all-out search is launched for the pre-teen, with fears she may have been lost in the bush filled countryside. But no one knows what happened to her.

June 11: After two days of searching, the worst fears of everyone involved are realized. Harper's body is discovered on a nearby farm. Evidence shows she's been raped and strangled. Fourteen year-old Steven Murray Truscott, a classmate, was the last person seen with the victim. He had apparently offered her a bike ride before she disappeared.

June 12: Truscott is questioned by authorities. He admits he was with the girl, but claims they split up and he saw her getting into a car as he was riding away. Despite his story, as community outrage grows with demands for action, the young boy is placed under arrest and is officially charged with her murder the next day. He maintains his innocence from the start.

December 8: After months of preparation and a trial, a jury finds Truscott guilty of the murder. Despite his age, they sentence him to death by hanging. The court case lasts just 15 days.

1960

January 22: Amid much controversy about the serious sentence, the Conservative government under then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker commutes the penalty to life in prison. Truscott has been on death row for four months.

1966

The story falls out of the headlines and becomes yesterday's news until a journalist named Isabel LeBourdais publishes a book called "The Trial of Steven Truscott", the first document to raise serious questions about the case and its outcome. It prompts the Supreme Court to take a second look at the issue. But after deliberating and reviewing the case, the justices vote 8-1 against giving the young man a new trial.

1969

After ten years behind bars, and despite his life sentence, Truscott is released from jail. He disappears, taking on a new identity and settling into obscurity in Guelph. But despite his second chance at life, the convicted killer, now in his mid-20s, remains haunted by bearing the scar of a guilty conviction for a murder he insists he didn't commit.

He marries and has three children, but his secret stays safe for the next 20 years.

1997

September: Truscott agrees to the same type of DNA testing that exonerated Guy Paul Morin and David Milgaard of murder. But crucial evidence that may have helped clear him had been destroyed.

Prominent attorney James Lockyer agrees to take on his case. He's the same advocate who helped overturn the wrongful conviction of Morin for the death of Christine Jessop in Queensville, Ont. in 1984.

2000

March: Truscott comes out of hiding and reveals himself for the first time in almost 40 years, with an interview on the CBC. He vows to do everything in his power to clear his name.

2001

November 28: Lawyers for the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted file an appeal to have Truscott's case reopened, as the public outcry against the original decision grows.

2002

January 24: Retired Quebec Justice Fred Kaufman is appointed by the federal government to review the case.

2004

After two years, Kaufman's report goes to the Justice Minister. But its conclusions aren't made public.

October 28: Justice Minister Irwin Cotler sends the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal to consider if new evidence would have changed the outcome of the trial back in 1959.

2005

November 29: The public finally gets to see the Kaufman Report. It suggests there was a miscarriage of justice but there's simply not enough evidence to get Truscott of the hook.

2006:

April 6: After more than four decades and a lifetime of scientific advances, the body of Lynne Harper is exhumed. But Truscott is doomed to more disappointment - after so much time, no useable DNA is found on her remains. She is reburied four days later.

June 19: Truscott finally gets his day in court, as the Ontario Court of Appeal starts hearings in his case. They last until July, and as the court hears witness after witness talk of irregularities and problems with the evidence, lawyers for both sides are ordered to make oral arguments in January 2007.

2007

January 10: Attorney General Michael Bryant announces cameras will show cases from the Ontario Court of Appeals. The first one to be televised: the Steven Truscott case.

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Steven Truscott Case Timeline - CityNews Toronto

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It is either the longest miscarriage of justice in Canadian history or an injustice to the memory of a murdered 12-year-old girl. As the hearings into the case of Steven Truscott begin again, a court will revisit a crime that dates back to 1959 in hopes of finally figuring out if the right man paid the price for a vicious killing.

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Steven Truscott's long fight for justice ended in victory Tuesday when the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted him of the 1959 murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper and pronounced his conviction "a miscarriage of justice."

The court rejected the option of ordering a new trial for the 62-year-old Guelph millwright, who was sentenced to hang for the murder at age 14.

A new trial after so many years would be a "practical impossibility" and would amount to an injustice given that Truscott and his family have lived with the burden of a wrongful conviction for nearly half a century, the court said in its 300-page decision.

"The appellant in this case served ten years in the penitentiary and has lived his entire adult life in the shadow of a conviction that we have concluded must be quashed as a miscarriage of justice," said the five judge panel, speaking in one voice simply as "the court."

"I never in my wildest dreams expected in my lifetime for this to come true," Truscott told a packed news conference Tuesday afternoon at the offices of his lawyers and the group that helped to secure the acquittal, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

"It's a dream come true."

Moments after the judgment was publicly released, Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant held a news conference outside Osgoode Hall, where he apologized to Truscott, who spent 80 per cent of his life living as a convicted murderer.

"For that miscarriage of justice, on behalf of the government, I am truly sorry," Bryant said.

He told reporters he has asked Sydney Robins, a retired judge of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to provide "advice" to the attorney-general's ministry on the issue of compensation for Truscott.

Bryant added that he didn't know how any compensation payment might be affected by the court's failure to declare Truscott factually innocent.

Lynne Harper's father, Lesley, a former RCAF flying officer, and one of her two brothers will have input into those compensation discussions. Bryant said he spoke this morning with her brother, who asked if the family could make submissions to Robins.

Bryant said he agreed.

Truscott had harsh words for the Crown, saying it fought his lawyers "every step of the way" for years despite having the fresh evidence which helped overturn his conviction. "The Crown chooses not to think about justice," Truscott said at Tuesday afternoon's news conference.

"I know (Bryant) apologized on behalf of the government, but I don't really feel that the apology was sincere. For the past four and a half years they had the same evidence as what the judges have had, and they chose to fight us every step of the way. I don't feel the apology was sincere."

During oral arguments before the court earlier this year, Truscott's legal team urged the court to go even further - not just acquitting him, but declaring him innocent.

But the court said it was in no position to do so, pointing to the difficulty in making a case for absolute innocence given the absence of DNA.

"The appellant has not demonstrated his factual innocence," said Justice David Doherty, Karen Weiler, Marc Rosenberg, Michael Moldaver and former Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry.

"To do so would be a most daunting task absent definitive forensic evidence such as DNA. Despite the appellant's best efforts, that kind of evidence is not available."

"The task of demonstrating innocence is particularly difficult in this case where in addition to the passage of almost a half-century since the crime, certain immutable facts cast some suspicion on the appellant," the court added. For example, Truscott was the last person known to see Lynne alive.

But while a conviction would still be possible, the more likely result at any hypothetical new trial would be that Truscott would be acquitted, the court said.

The court quashed Truscott's conviction on the basis of fresh evidence from medical experts and previously undisclosed reports authored by Dr. John Penistan, who conducted the autopsy on Lynne's body, which "destroys" the "damning" testimony that helped convict Truscott in 1959.

Penistan claimed that by examining the state of Lynne's stomach contents he could fix her time of death to between 7 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. on June 9, 1959, a narrow time frame that gave Truscott exclusive opportunity to commit the murder.

The use of stomach contents to ascertain when a person died is a tool that "cannot withstand scientific scrutiny" and expert evidence now confirms she could have died much later, the court said.

The court's judgment ends one of the longest and most fiercely contested legal battles in Canadian history. Five decades after the crime took place, with the possibility of wrongful convictions widely acknowledged, Ontario's attorney general fought assiduously to prevent the case from being reopened.

The story began on hot summer night, June 9, 1959, at the school grounds on the Royal Canadian Air Force base near Clinton, Ont., when Lynne climbed onto the crossbar of Truscott's bicycle. Both lived on the base with their families.

Truscott told the Ontario Provincial Police that Lynne had asked for a ride to Highway 8 and hoped to visit some ponies at a nearby farm. He said they headed north, along what was known as the "County Road."

After he dropped her off at the highway, Truscott said, he turned around and saw her getting into a grey 1959 Chevy that had either a yellow licence plate or bumper sticker.

Lynne's body was found by an RCAF search party two days later, just off the County Road, in a grove of maple and ash trees known as "Lawson's Bush."

Had she lived, Friday (Aug. 31) would have been her 61st birthday.

Today's ruling comes ten years to the day Truscott's lawyers notified the attorney general's ministry their client wanted his case reopened and had consented to having exhibits from the 1959 trial subjected to DNA testing.

All evidence that might have been suitable for testing, however, had been destroyed. Truscott instead applied to the federal justice minister to have his case reviewed under sec. 690 of the Criminal Code (now sec. 696.1).

In a Nov. 2001 brief to the government, his lawyers argued the Crown and police withheld crucial evidence from the defence at Truscott's 1959 trial and that the trial itself was inherently unfair.

The federal government retained retired Quebec appeal court judge Fred Kaufman to review the case. Kaufman concluded there was reason to believe a miscarriage of justice likely occurred, but said some of the evidence before him may not be admissible in a court of law.

His recommendation that the case be sent to the Ontario Court of Appeal was accepted by Justice Minister Irwin Cotler in 2004. In June 2006, a five-judge panel began reviewing the case, including a mountain of fresh evidence, as if it were an appeal of Truscott's 1959 conviction.

The Crown's circumstantial case against Truscott essentially consisted of two parts. The first was the so-called "County Road" evidence, which consisted of eyewitness accounts from people, many of them children, about Steven and Lynne's whereabouts along the County Road the night she disappeared.

The second was so-called scientific and medical evidence purporting to establish Lynne's time of death.

During an autopsy at a Clinton funeral home, Dr. John Penistan, the regional pathologist, made what was perhaps the most crucial finding in the case. He claimed that by examining Lynne's stomach contents - placing them in a jar and holding them up to a light bulb - he could tell that she died within two hours of eating dinner, pinpointing her time of death at between 7 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. on June 9, 1959.

The evidence was devastating for Truscott, who acknowledged being with her at that time. At the 1959 trial, the Crown attorney told jurors the evidence tightened like a vise around Truscott's neck.

But other experts expressed doubts at the time about the ability to use stomach contents to determine a person's time of death and the methodology has now been discredited.

In fact, during hearings in the case last year, the Ontario Court of Appeal was told that for nearly 40 years, the federal government had notes and memos buried in its files indicating that much of Penistan's evidence was founded on "entirely and absolutely wrong" medical and scientific conclusions.

The federal justice department sought out expert medical opinions about Penistan's findings in 1966, just weeks before the government referred Truscott's case to the Supreme Court of Canada for review.

The experts, among them a pathologist employed by the federal government, warned there was "no justification" for Penistan's claims.

But at no time did justice department officials ever disclose the information to Truscott's lawyers or the Supreme Court judges, who ultimately ruled 8-1 to uphold the conviction, the Ontario Court of Appeal was told.

The documents were released to Truscott's lawyers in 2005.

Meanwhile, the County Road witnesses included two boys, Gord Logan and Dougie Oates, who told police that while they were swimming and catching turtles in the Bayfield River on the night of June 9, they saw Steven and Lynne ride over a bridge towards the highway. Steven later rode back alone, they said.

At the 1959 trial, the Crown painted the boys as liars, alleging they were part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Truscott. The prosecution's theory was that Steven and Lynne never made it to the highway.

The Crown alleged that Truscott veered off the County Road well south of the bridge and headed into Lawson's bush, where he raped and murdered Lynne.

A 9-year-old girl named Karen Daum, however, corroborated much of Truscott's statement. She told police in June of 1959 that she saw Lynne and Steven riding north of the bush, towards the highway. Daum was never called to testify at the 1959 trial.

Testifying before the appeal court in 2006, Daum, now Karen Jutzi, recanted her 1959 police statement.

Another prominent witness at the 1959 trial was a 13-year-old girl named Jocelyne Gaudet, who testified that she'd made a "date" with Truscott to meet at Lawson's Bush around 6:30 p.m. on June 9, 1959 to look for calves.

The Crown's maintained that when Gaudet didn't show up, Lynne became a substitute for Truscott, who was portrayed as a lust-crazed teenager intent on luring her into the bush.

That theory showed serious signs of splintering six years ago, however, when two women who went to nursing school with Gaudet in Montreal in the 1960s came forward.

At a get-together in a student residence in 1966, just before the Supreme Court hearing began, Gaudet announced that she had lied at Truscott's trial, the women told the Ontario Court of Appeal last year.

Soon after her shocking outburst, Gaudet checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.

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Steven Truscott's long fight for justice ended in victory today when the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted him of the 1959 murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper and pronounced his conviction "a miscarriage of justice." Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant said he is considering compensation for Truscott.

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Truscott's sentence was later reduced to life in prison.

This took a detrimental affect on Truscott's life. After the death penalty was abolished it gave Truscott a chance to appeal his case and ultimately lead to him becoming a free man, 45 years later.

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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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Steven was convicted of murder and rape of Lynn Harper at the age of 14. The verdict was made 15 days into the court hearings and sentenced Truscott to death by hanging.

We believe that the court system was wrong in concluding the court case with lack of evidence that directly appoints Truscott's as the primary offender.

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Worst Cases Of People Being Wrongly Accused

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Steven Truscott's $6.5 Million Award for Wrongful Conviction