![]() LeBourdais was particularly critical of Dr. The Trial of Steven Truscott made a detailed case for the young man having been railroaded by careless police officers and a vindictive prosecution. In 1966, a book by Isabel LeBourdais stirred up controversy anew. Truscott’s subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was rejected. ![]() A year later, the federal government commuted his sentence to life imprisonment with a 10-year parole eligibility period. His conviction and the imposition of a death sentence caused a significant public clamour. Truscott was found guilty on 30 September 1959. Both the Crown and defence used the children's accounts to bolster their own contentions about the timing of events. The trial featured a good deal of testimony from children who had been playing under the bridge that evening and saw Truscott with Harper. 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. 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. 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. Truscott repeated his assertion to police that he had seen Lynne picked up by a 1959 Chevrolet with an out-of-province licence plate. 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’s defence lawyer, Frank Donnelly, maintained that the victim dismounted from Mr. Finally, it cited evidence that fresh bicycle tire tracks were found leading along the tractor path to the body site. 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. 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 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 case was based on an assertion that Harper was a cautious girl who did not hitchhike. 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. The abduction and murder traumatized the community to a point where Truscott was denied bail. They had arrived in Clinton in 1956, a year before the Harper family was transferred there. Steven Truscott, born in Vancouver on 18 January 1945, was the son of a non-commissioned air force officer, Dan, and his wife Doris. Both the Truscott and Harper families belonged to the military community. 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. Police found details of his account deceptive and promptly arrested Truscott for murder. 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. 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. 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. Not until five decades later was he finally exonerated. ![]() In 1959, at the age of 14, he was wrongly convicted of killing his 12-year-old schoolmate Lynne Harper. Steven Murray Truscott was a popular, athletic teenager who lived with his parents in the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton. For nearly five decades, Steven Truscott lived under the shadow of a wrongful murder conviction.
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