From his farmhouse in Clinton, Ont., Bob Lawson can still see the bush on his land where Lynne Harper's body was found 45 years ago.
Even today he scratches his head in disbelief that the boy he liked the most among the local children would be fingered as her killer.
"I thought this was utterly ridiculous: how could he have done it?" said Mr. Lawson, whose farm was a favourite hangout for many of the children on the sprawling RCAF base in Clinton. He had a special fondness for the soft-spoken, lanky Truscott boy who was always eager to lend a hand with chores.
But in 1959, television was still in black and white and so were public attitudes about the justice system. Few people questioned the actions of police, prosecutors or judges.
"In those days if someone is arrested, it was pretty well assumed they must be guilty. People took it for granted that justice will be done," Mr. Lawson said.
The lives of many of the children of Clinton were changed on June 12, 1959, when police arrested Steven Truscott, barely 24 hours after the body of Lynne Harper was found. A popular student and athletic star, 14-year-old Steven was the last person reported seen with the 12-year-old girl before her disappearance three days earlier.
Steven gave Lynne a ride on his bike down a busy county road on the evening of June 9. He insists he dropped her off at an intersection with a major highway, where she hitchhiked away. To get to the highway, he said he crossed a bridge over a small river that served as a local swimming hole, and then returned over the bridge alone after dropping Lynne off. At least two child eye witnesses near the river confirmed his story.
But police and the prosecutor maintained that Steven never got to the highway, that he had instead turned off the busy county road hundreds of metres before reaching the bridge, carried his bike and Lynne into a nearby bush, raped and strangled her, and then returned to the schoolyard at the base -- unseen by anyone and without a scratch or trace of blood on his body.
Douglas Oates was a curious 11-year-old, hunting for turtles that fateful day near the river. At Steven's trial, he testified he was inches away as Steven and Lynne crossed the bridge toward the highway, directly contradicting the prosecution's scenario of Steven never making it that far. Despite a withering cross-examination by a prosecutor who branded him a liar, the Oates boy stood his ground then, and to this day.
"I've honestly told them what I saw," said Mr. Oates from Edmonton, where he recently retired as an electronic technologist with Nav Canada. "What it's done to my life is that I don't trust the justice system."
The prosecution withheld key evidence from the defence, including the sworn statement of another child witness who could have corroborated much of the Oates boy's story.
The Crown also relied on dubious medical testimony that pinpointed the time of Lynne's death to within 30 minutes of the time she was seen with Steven, based largely on the contents of her stomach -- a practice disputed even then, and thoroughly discredited in scientific circles today.
But the pathologist's testimony on time of death swayed the jury. So did evidence that Steven had sores on his penis. And the Crown also produced two other child witnesses who said they had been looking for Steven that evening on the county road and did not see him.
The jurors voted unanimously for a guilty verdict "with a plea for mercy." But the judge immediately imposed the death penalty, telling the pale 14-year-old in the prisoner's box that he would "be taken to the place of execution and that you there [will]be hanged by the neck until you are dead."
Even some of the jurors were shocked by the death sentence. "It brought tears to our eyes," one said.
Steven spent the next four months on death row in a small cell in an aging jailhouse in Goderich, Ont. -- so frightened he once mistook the clanging on a construction site outside his window for the building of his gallows.
When the cold snows of December arrived, Steven spent the first of what would be many holidays alone.
"You know your whole family is having Christmas, but you're not there and you know it's not going to be the same for them," he once recalled.
"It's just too much for your mind to comprehend."
The cabinet of then prime minister John Diefenbaker eventually commuted the sentence to life imprisonment -- not because they doubted the fairness of the trial but, according to cabinet notes, because the hanging of a teenage boy "would undoubtedly reflect badly on Canada."
The case was especially traumatic for the children of the Clinton air force base, who suddenly had lost one friend to homicide and saw another jailed for her death.
"It was shocking and it snowballed and it just kept getting worse," said Karen Allen, a girlfriend of Steven's at the time, who still lives in the Clinton area. "You couldn't believe what was happening."
"After the trial, nobody wanted to talk about it any more and you tried to put it away," she said. "But it wouldn't go away."
Certainly the ordeal never went away for Steven Truscott.
He began serving his life sentence behind bars at a reform school for boys in Guelph, and was transferred to Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston when he turned 18. Though technically a medium-security institution, its 10-metre-high walls and tough population made it what the authorities called a "high-medium" prison. Some of its occupants called it "Gladiator School."
Mr. Truscott was subject to a barrage of LSD injections and truth-serum tests by prison staff psychiatrists in an effort to get him to confess, a not-uncommon practice at the time.
"They tried to play detective," said Malcolm Stienburg, the prison chaplain who later became Mr. Truscott's parole officer and eventually a good friend. "I never had any question of guilt in his case. Most people would be flying off the edge, in prison like that. He was always calm and laid back, but you knew that inside there was turmoil."
Mr. Truscott won the confidence of the warden, who gave him permission to work unsupervised at a farm outside the prison walls, as well as most of the guards and even the hardened convicts.
Ted McGuin remembers Mr. Truscott as a star third baseman on the prison softball team. Now 62, Mr. McGuin lives in Prince Albert, Sask., and is a foster parent with a clean record since 1970. Back in the 1960s, he was serving time in Collins Bay for armed robbery.
"You would be in harm's way if you were known as a rapist," Mr. McGuin said, noting that convicts often judged their fellow inmates more harshly than did the outside world.
"Truscott went to 'our court' -- the prison yard court -- and we found him not guilty. Nobody ever believed he had done it."
Many Canadians shared those doubts about Mr. Truscott's guilt after a bestselling book by pioneering journalist Isabel LeBourdais forced Ottawa to ask the Supreme Court of Canada to review the case in 1966.
But after hearing 26 witnesses, including Mr. Truscott, the judges ruled 8-1 to uphold the original guilty verdict.
However, newly discovered archive material indicates that, again, police and prosecutors withheld vital information from the court, including a letter from the pathologist who made what he called an "agonizing reappraisal" of his definitive estimate of the time of death that had nearly put a noose around Steven Truscott's neck. The pathologist had widened his estimate to anywhere from 12 hours to two days.
Mr. Truscott walked out of prison in 1969 on parole, still a convicted murderer.
Within a year, he met and married Marlene, a young woman who had been a tireless campaigner for his freedom in the battle leading up to the Supreme Court hearing. For the next 30 years, they lived in anonymity in Guelph, raising three children and using his mother's maiden surname, Bowers, as their family name.
Mr. Truscott works steadily as a millwright at a local factory. He became a regular fixture on ski trips and other after-school activities with his children, apparently wanting to experience the teenage life he never had.
"His family always came first, very much so," Mr. Stienburg said. "He has been as devoted as any human being can be. When he stepped through the door, those kids were precious to him."
It was only after all three of their children were adults that the Truscotts decided to go public. They contacted CBC-TV's investigative program, the fifth estate. A documentary in March of 2000 and a subsequent book raised disturbing new questions about the original police investigation and trial.
"Justice hasn't been done," Mr. Truscott said at that time. "Not to the Harper family and not to my family. It's all I want. After 40 years I don't think that's too much to ask."
His wife Marlene amassed an encyclopedic grasp of the smallest details and pushed journalists and lawyers to dig deeper. The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted took up the challenge, filing a 700-page brief calling on Ottawa to reopen the case.
The subsequent publicity transformed the once shy Mr. Truscott into a nationally recognized symbol of justice gone wrong. The Guelph City Council, two trade unions, numerous schools and several MPs all rallied to his side.
For years, Mr. Truscott raised his children under an assumed name to protect them from public attention. But his oldest son, Ryan, officially changed his surname three years ago to Truscott.
And yesterday, in front of the TV cameras outside the family home in Guelph, Ryan was defiant: "I am a Truscott. I am proud of who I am and of what I am," he said. "We will have our day in court."
. Julian Sher is the author of Until You Are Dead -- Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History.
Snapshot of events
June 9, 1959, at 6:15 p.m.:
12-year-old Lynne Harper left her home on the air force base in Clinton, Ont., for an after-dinner walk.
Just after 7 p.m.:
Lynne saw schoolmate Steven Truscott, 14, on the grounds of their school, and asked him to give her a ride on his bicycle.
Between 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.:
Witnesses said they saw Steven, with Lynne riding on the bike's handlebars, crossing a bridge over the Bayfield River heading toward the nearby
intersection with Highway 8.
Steven said he dropped Lynne off at the highway and then headed back to the bridge. Witnesses said they saw him riding alone back toward the bridge.
5. Just after 7:30 p.m.:
Steven said he stopped and looked back at the highway and saw Lynne getting into a strange car, which drove off.
8 p.m.:
Steven was seen back at the base.
Before 9 p .m.:
Steven was at home babysitting.
8. June 11:
Lynne's body was found in the bush off an old tractor road on the farm of Bob Lawson. She had been raped and strangled.