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In this first picture you can see Steven Truscott as the 14 year old boy that he was before his life changed forever.

This is important as it shows the view that Truscott was really an young 14 year old boy when this all started.

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This is a video that will tell you all about the case leading up to what happened on that day his life changed forever.

This video is important as it tells you the situation Steven was in and how his life changed by giving a friend a ride to the highway.

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Steven Truscott - His Word Against History - the fifth estate

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It was a hot, muggy evening in 1959 when 14-year-old Steven Truscott gave his schoolmate Lynn Harper a ride on his bicycle near an air force base outside Clinton, Ontario. Two days later, the girl's body was found in a wooded grove near the town. She had been raped and strangled.

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In this article we learn that one of the reason Truscott conviction was not over turn. Was because in 1980s DNA evidence became a thing and released a lot of people. However, in Truscott's Case there was no DNA evidence to rule Truscott as the killer.

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Carolyn Strange Australian National University
On Oct. 1, 1959, Canadians awoke to stunning news: A fourteen-year-old boy had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a schoolmate. The two-week trial that ended with the judge's statement - that Steven Truscott be "hanged by the neck until dead" - was closed to the media. But that was about to change.

Truscott was "wrongfully convicted" of the murder of Lynne Harper, his 12-year-old schoolmate in southwestern Ontario. Although his name is now synonymous with the term wrongful conviction in Canada, it wasn't a phrase widely used until the 1980s, when DNA evidence was first employed to save convicts from death row in the United States and to release Canadian prisoners serving life sentences for murder.

Why did it take so long for Truscott's conviction to turn into a wrongful conviction?

The short answer is that no viable DNA remained to rule out Truscott as Lynne Harper's killer, nor to identify the person responsible for the crime. But a deeper explanation lies within the politics of the death penalty in Cold War Canada.

Sex murder in the Cold War era

Diefenbaker came to office proud of his reputation as a criminal defence lawyer. None of the homicide suspects he represented was accused of committing a sexual murder. However, he did defend one man, executed for murder, whom he believed was innocent.In 1959, it was unusual for a teenager to be sentenced to death, but the execution of men convicted for sex murders wasn't uncommon. In 1957, for example, two men - Gerald Eaton and Joseph-Pierre Richard - were hanged for the murders of girls in British Columbia and New Brunswick, respectively. Both executions took place after John Diefenbaker's Conservatives put an end to the Liberals' 22-year hold on government.

This may have contributed to his inclination to spare Truscott the death penalty, because when news broke that the teenager faced execution, Diefenbaker did not approach the case as a miscarriage of justice.

Instead, he proceeded on the assumption that the boy's death sentence could be commuted.

Mindful of public opinion

Since 1869, federal statutes in Canada set the terms by which cabinet members could advise the governor general - the British monarch's representative in Canada - to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy.

That means that since Canada became a nation, elected politicians who served in the federal cabinet effectively determined the fate of people condemned to death. The 1950s was the first decade in which ministers exercised discretion over the death penalty with public opinion in mind.

Polling on Canadians' attitudes toward capital punishment showed that in 1953, seven of 10 Canadians supported the death penalty. But by 1958 and 1960, polls showed that only half of Canadians believed the death penalty was the appropriate punishment for murder.

(Court handout/Creative Commons)

The Conservative cabinet likely felt confident that the majority of Canadians would approve of their decision, made on Jan. 21, 1960, to spare Steven Truscott the death penalty.

The announcement occurred on the same day the Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the Truscott defence lawyer's claim that the trial had been conducted in a manner that favoured the prosecution. The commutation came with the usual commuted sentence: Life imprisonment.

For most Canadians, the proceedings probably confirmed that their criminal justice system worked. The investigation of a murder had produced a suspect who was properly indicted and tried before a jury. He was granted the benefit of legal representation.

The verdict confirmed his guilt. And the commutation of his sentence showed that Canadian justice was tempered with mercy.

Why did Canadian attitudes about capital punishment change?

In the late 1950s, the abuse of individual rights in the Soviet Union and its satellites was big news and had captured the attention of Canadians, especially miscarriages of justice.

Totalitarian states conducted show trials in which the verdict was a foregone conclusion. In contrast, Canada's Criminal Code allowed appeals on the basis that a "substantial wrong or miscarriage of justice" had occurred if a criminal verdict appeared inconsistent with the evidence.

The Canadian Bill of Rights, which came into effect eight months after the commutation of Truscott's sentence, exemplified the distinction between the free world and the Communist regime, which valued the collective over the individual.

The bill included the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. But it also declared that "institutions remain free only when freedom is founded upon respect for moral and spiritual values and the rule of law."

To question the outcome of the Truscott trial and the court's dismissal of the appeal was, in 1960, equivalent to challenging the rule of law and the heritage of British justice, which was the foundation of Canada's justice system.

(Amazon)

Another principle enshrined in the 1960 Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press, led to a shift in public opinion. Truscott may have faded from public consciousness if journalist Isabel Le Bourdais had not published her book on his case in 1966. Innocuously titled The Trial of Steven Truscott, it convinced most readers that Truscott's conviction was unfair.

The numerous books, articles and documentaries that followed Le Bourdais' exposé, together with further appeals argued before the Supreme Court of Canada and the Ontario Court of Appeal, resulted in the official affirmation from the federal government in 2004 that "a miscarriage of justice had likely occurred" in the investigation into Lynne Harper's murder and the prosecution of Steven Truscott.

In 2008, Truscott received substantial compensation a year after the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted him of the charge of murder. Yet it did not declare him innocent.

Why?

In 1966, after Parliament debated the abolition of capital punishment, Diefenbaker, no longer in office, revealed that his cabinet would likely have authorized Truscott's execution if he had been older. Le Bourdais' book convinced him that the government must offer Truscott a new trial, "the facts ascertained, and justice be in fact done."

As the 60th anniversary of Steven Truscott's conviction approaches next year, a distinct pronouncement of his innocence would be justice delayed - but finally done.

Carolyn Strange, Professor of History, School of History, ANU, Australian National University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Anniversary of Steven Truscott's death sentence: Guilt to innocence

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Carolyn Strange Australian National University On Oct. 1, 1959, Canadians awoke to stunning news: A fourteen-year-old boy had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a schoolmate. The two-week trial that ended with the judge's statement - that Steven Truscott be "hanged by the neck until dead" - was closed to the media.

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In this picture you can see the victim Lynn Harper and how she was a young 12 year old girl.

This reminds us that a little innocent girl lost her life that day and we will never know who her real killer was.

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In this video we hear from a Police Officer that believes that he knows who killed Lynn Harper and it was not Truscott. We also hear that he was trying to get his other offices to look into the person. But the other Officers were focus on Truscott.

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CTV London: New theory in Steven Truscott case

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A retired OPP officer has released a book about Steven Truscott, and it reveals who he thinks killed Lynne Harper in 1959.

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In this article we learn about what happen during the murder trial and how this case had changed the way we looked at our legal system.

This is a interesting article as it share some background information about Lynn Harper and Steven Truscott. It allows us to look at the facts and think that every decision that we make can have a big impact on our lives.

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Lynne Harper was a middle child: she had one older brother and one younger. She was small for her age. She was born in New Brunswick, but because her father was in the Air Force, she moved around the country a lot. In 1959, when she was twelve, Harper lived on an Air Force base in Clinton, Ontario, a small town near London. She made lots of friends there-she was an energetic kid, a quality that led some people, looking back later, to describe her as a live wire. Others called her bossy. She was a Girl Guide, and she liked playing baseball. She had crushes on boys in her class and was occasionally self-conscious about a scar on her face from a childhood accident. Sometimes she argued with her parents.

In June of 1959, two months before her thirteenth birthday, Harper was found dead in the woodlot of a farm in her neighbourhood. She had been raped. Her body was covered in cuts and bruises, and the cause of death was strangulation. Four days later, Harper's schoolmate Steven Truscott, a soft-spoken and well-liked fourteen-year-old, was arrested for her murder and sentenced to death by hanging. His sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison, and he was later released on parole before his conviction was overturned in 2007. Harper's murder remains unsolved.

Murder trials boil down to observable facts-concrete certainties that have been witnessed and recorded to the satisfaction of a judge and jury. The kind of minutia that otherwise gets lost in the course of an average day-the exact time you left your house (down to the minute!) or the exact colour of car you think you saw your friend walk up to-is elevated to the realm of vital importance. The words we use to describe a conviction or an alibi are words of substance and solidity: strong, bulletproof, iron-clad. The way we talk about a murder charge is at odds with realm of fiction, which is often about ambiguity, emotional states that can't be easily defined. But when Beverley Cooper wrote Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott, ambiguity was her chief concern. She believes Truscott was innocent, but the play isn't really a story about that. It's about how the community changed after a child was killed and another child was charged with her murder.

Cooper says her friend Ann-Marie MacDonald's Giller-nominated novel The Way the Crow Flies, also loosely based on Harper and Truscott, served as an inspiration for her when Eric Coates at the Blyth Festival asked her to write a play about the case. She also says she enjoyed the Netflix show Manhunt: Unabomber, a fictionalized take on the FBI's search for Oklahoma City bomber Ted Kaczynski. "I'm kind of fascinated and yet cautious of that genre," Cooper says.

Fiction about a real-world tragedy risks sensationalizing the events that remain painful for a lot of people. But they also provide the opportunity to explore human behaviour, to directly address the impacts of violence and trauma. "I think what interests me is not necessarily the crime-I'm not really interested in gruesome crime-but what I am interested in is the social implications," Cooper says. What fascinated her about this case, she explains, is the effect it had on the community: a small town rocked by unexpected violence, trying to cope with grief and tragedy, divided by what many people saw as competing loyalties to two families suddenly at odds with one another.

The charges against Truscott were laid in large part because everyone agreed he was one of the last people to see Harper alive. He had given her a ride on the handlebars of his bike on the warm June night she disappeared; an immaculate illustration of childhood innocence for two people who didn't know their childhoods were about to end. (In a rare televised interview from 2015, producers on The Fifth Estate got Truscott to ride by the same area as that fateful bike journey decades earlier. The image was haunting in its mundanity: there's nothing shocking about a middle-aged man riding a bike until you think about who is no longer there.)

Much of the testimony in Truscott's murder trial came from children, a detail that seems directly lifted from Lillian Hellman's 1934 play The Children's Hour. Many of them gave conflicting accounts, either because they were vindictive or just plain mistaken. The prosecution's "star witnesses" were Jocelyne Gaudet and Arnold "Butch" George, schoolmates of Harper and Truscott. Both were preteens and both changed their stories to police several times, but neither of those facts stopped prosecutors from putting them on the stand. Neither one has spoken to the press as an adult. But several nurses who trained at St. Mary's Hospital in Montreal in the 1960s say they knew a woman who called herself Kim, but who everyone knew was actually Gaudet. One nurse said in a signed affidavit that Gaudet had lied on the stand and knew Truscott to be innocent.

The fact that so many kids were involved in the trial was another element that was deeply interesting to Cooper. Her son was fourteen when she started writing the play, and she says she remembers looking at him and thinking: How could it happen? "If you think back on a summer night when you were thirteen or fourteen, could you remember exactly where you were or what you did the night before?" she asks. "Something like sixty-one kids were interviewed that night. ' Where were you, and what did you see? ' The impact of that on the kids, that one of their classmates could be found raped and murdered, and then the guy that they looked up to as the popular jock is charged with her murder-that kind of fascinated me."

The other big driver of Truscott's conviction, besides child testimonials, came from science that has since been debunked. Dr. John Penistan, the pathologist who examined Harper's body, said he could isolate the time of her murder to between 7:15 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., which a doctor named John Butt told The Fifth Estate is an impossible deduction. (Stomach contents tell doctors "nothing precise," about the time of death, Butt said.) But at the time of the trial, it was enough.

One of the most significant people in the Truscott saga, and one who figures prominently in Innocence Lost, is the late journalist Isabel LeBourdais. She had travelled from Toronto to Clinton in the early '60s to write a story about the case for Chatelaine, but became so wrapped up it that the article became a book. The Trial of Steven Truscott, published in 1966, was the first major work arguing that Truscott had been wrongfully convicted.

That book is one of many that Cooper read in preparation to write the play. Innocence Lost is meticulously researched, and the majority of the lines that are attributed to real people-like Doris Truscott, Steven's mother-are either direct quotes Cooper found in the historical record or sentiments she knows the real person expressed. LeBourdais is an exception: her character in the play interacts with characters Cooper made up, so some of her dialogue is imagined. All of Detective Inspector Graham's lines, Cooper says, come from speeches or interviews he actually gave.

At the time of Truscott's conviction, some people-even the ones who didn't doubt that a fourteen-year-old was physically capable of murder by strangulation, like LeBourdais did-rejected the idea that a minor should be hanged. Others, including Harper's family, believed Truscott did commit the crime and saw doubt in the conviction as an insult to her memory. "Boy seems so calm and normal, but is he savage murderer?" a Toronto Telegram headline asked. When Toronto Star columnist Pierre Berton wrote a poem decrying the decision to put a fourteen-year-old child to death, he received death threats of his own. "A hanging is too good for him," Berton reports being told by one letter-writer in the Fifth Estate episode about the case. Another person phoned him to say: "I hope your daughter is raped."

Wanting someone to blame after such a horrific event is an instinct Cooper investigates in the play, rather than outright condemns. Harper's death was so shocking, and she was killed in a way that was so gruesome, that it was natural for Clinton residents to find comfort in identifying the supposed perpetrator. "I can totally understand that rush to judgment," Cooper says. "You so want them to catch the killer right away so that you can breathe again. And if you have children who are the same age, you're terrified." She recognizes that instinct in her own reaction to alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, who police have charged with eight murders in the area of Toronto's Gay Village. "I believe that guy's guilty," Cooper says. "He hasn't had a trial yet, but I'm pretty certain he's guilty. And we want to believe he's guilty, because we want whoever it is who's doing these horrible things to have been caught."

More than just the killing itself, Cooper sees Truscott's story as a loss in faith in institutions that, in the '50s, many Canadians still saw as faultless. In The Trial of Steven Truscott, LeBourdais wrote that "most of us give very little thought to the manner in which justice is administered. We leave it to the police, the magistrates, the judges, and others involves in judicial processes." But when it's a crime news story, and someone gets arrested, people are usually only slightly interested. "We usually take it for granted that the accused is guilty or the police would not have arrested him. We thoughtlessly line ourselves up with the police as judge, jury and even executioner."

The continued and contemporary need to be vigilant about our justice system is something that came up often in the play's rehearsal hall with director Jackie Maxwell, Cooper says. We are still learning about institutional problems that disproportionately punish certain groups while criminalizing others, she says, pointing to the recent acquittal of Gerald Stanley, the farmer who fatally shot twenty-two-year-old Indigenous man Colten Boushie in Saskatchewan. (Boushie's family has recently asked the UN to investigate systemic bias in the way law is enforced in Canada.) "Our justice system is enforced by humans, and humans are by nature fallible," Cooper adds.

Cooper met Truscott briefly when he came to see the play during the last show of its run at Blyth. Just before the play started, a girl who looked about twelve went up to Truscott and asked for his autograph. His legacy, though, remains mixed: Cooper says a previous artistic director at Blyth received death threats when he suggested a play about the case. For her part, Cooper was impressed by Truscott. "He was so gracious, and so polite, and kind of shy," Cooper remembers. "I found it so incredible that he could go through all this and not be bitter." He rarely gives interviews, and has since changed his name. He has a wife and grown children, and is now a grandfather.

Over the years, many other people have been considered as possible suspects in Harper's murder. In Until You Are Dead: Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History, author Julian Sher lists suspects, including an Air Force sergeant named Alexander Kalichuk, who had been caught trying to lure a ten-year-old girl into his car the month before Lynne was killed. Police never considered him a suspect. Clayton Dennis, an electrician on the Air Force base who was a convicted rapist, was never questioned by police. Matthew Meron, a lifeguard who was nineteen at the time of Harper's death, later sexually abused his young daughters and tried to strangle one of them. And several years ago, retired Ontario Provincial Police officer Barry Ruhl published a book called A Viable Suspect about a different man, whose real name he doesn't use, a suspect in an unsolved early '70s murder of a teenage girl. "We've got all sorts of cold cases in Ontario," Ruhl told a Guelph Mercury reporter in 2014.

For Cooper, a major priority was making sure Harper isn't forgotten from the play. It was important to her that a young girl play Harper for the few scenes she has in the play, rather than an adult actress. "When you see that innocence in that child, it hopefully has some resonance," Cooper says. She wants Harper's casting to be "a reminder to us that this did happen to somebody so young, and that it was a very tragic thing. I think we can get lost in details of legal stuff and crime stories.

"It always seems so cold when they tell it-the newspapers, and then lawyers and then the books. Like her death was just a pile of details to be examined," says one of the characters in the play. "She was a living, breathing twelve-year-old child. She was a good girl."

Maija is the co-founder and former co-editor of Intermission. She'd like you to know that her name is pronounced just like "Maya."

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Intermission | Telling the Story of the Murder Trial that Changed the Country

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Lynne Harper was a middle child: she had one older brother and one younger. She was small for her age. She was born in New Brunswick, but because her father was in the Air Force, she moved around the country a lot.

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This Video is about how a person had actually made a theater play about Steven Truscott Life. Through his 15 day court trial, to his prison sentence.

This Video is very important as you can see the point of views from everyone involved. As people had to give testimonies and they were not necessarily 100% sure what happen. Yet they had the ramifications from their testimonies to sentence Truscott his life sentence.

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Playwright Beverley Cooper joins The Agenda to talk about "Innocence Lost," her production based on the life of Steven Truscott.

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This picture shows how long the fight and how long the battle as been to get justest for Truscott him self.  As he is no longer a little boy but a older man.

This is important as it shows that Steven did not give up his Innocence and wanted to make sure he had his name cleared.

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In this third article about Truscott, we look at what kind of compensation Steven got from being in prison for 10 years and going until 2007 to be an innocent man.

In this Article it also asks how the brother of Lynn Harper feels that Truscott should not receive any compensation.

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Lynne Harper's brother said the $6.5 million being paid to Steven Truscott, the man wrongfully convicted of killing his 12-year-old sister, is "a real travesty," according to a media report.

Barry Harper told the Globe and Mail in an interview published Tuesday that the idea of the compensation is so hard to take that he does not plan on breaking the news to his father, Leslie, who is in his 90s and lives in a nursing home.

Barry Harper said he's talking to lawyers, but thinks he has little chance of getting the compensation blocked.

"I don't think there's many options open," Harper told the Globe from Ohio, where he lives.

Lynne Harper was last seen alive on June 9, 1959, when she was spotted riding on the handlebars of her friend Truscott's bicycle near the air force base where they both lived in the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton. Her body was found in a wooded area two days later, showing visible signs of strangulation and rape.

Truscott, 14 at the time, was convicted of her murder in a 15-day trial and sentenced to hang, becoming the youngest Canadian inmate on death row. His sentence was commuted to life in prison four months later, and he spent the next 10 years in jail before being released on parole at the age of 24.

He lived the next three decades under an assumed name, marrying his wife, Marlene, in a secret ceremony to avoid publicity. The couple raised three children in anonymity in Guelph, Ont., before Truscott went public in 1997 in a fight to clear his name.

Truscotts said compensation is bittersweet

On Aug. 28, 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted Truscott, and the Ontario attorney general apologized for the "miscarriage of justice" and the 48 years Truscott lived with the stigma of being labelled a rapist and murderer.

On Monday, the province announced it was paying Truscott $6.5 million to compensate him for all he endured.

Truscott and his wife called the compensation a "final and long-awaited step in recognizing Steve's innocence," although they said the money was bittersweet.

"Although we are grateful for the freedom and stability this award will provide, we are also painfully aware that no amount of money could ever truly compensate Steven for the terror of being sentenced to hang at the age of 14, the loss of his youth or the stigma of living for almost 50 years as a convicted murderer," the Truscotts said in a written statement Monday.

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Victim's family stunned by Truscott compensation | CBC News

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Lynne Harper's brother said the $6.5 million being paid to Steven Truscott, the man wrongfully convicted of killing his 12-year-old sister, is "a real travesty," according to a media report.