"Until You Are Dead": The Wrongful Conviction of Steven Truscott - Softcover

Sher, Julian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676973817 ISBN 13: 9780676973815

Verlag: Knopf Canada, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The award-winning investigation into one of the most notorious murder cases in Canadian history—and that helped the wrongfully convicted Truscott clear his name after decades in prison.

In 1959, a popular schoolboy, just 14 years old, was convicted and sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of his 12-year-old classmate. That summer, Canada lost its innocence and the shocking story of Steven Truscott became imprinted on the nation’s memory. First published in 2001, “Until You Are Dead” revealed new witnesses, leads and evidence never presented to the courts. Now this national bestseller is fully revised and updated, and takes readers from that fateful night in 1959 up to the new appeal granted to Truscott in 2006. Julian Sher’s award-winning and insightful chronicle details Steven Truscott’s dramatic final battle – with the help of his family, investigative journalists and lawyers – to clear his name once and for all.

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JULIAN SHER is an award-winning journalist and the author of many widely-acclaimed books, including White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan, “Until You Are Dead”: Steven Truscott's Long Ride Into History and The North Star: Canada and the Civil War Plots Against Lincoln. As an investigative reporter, he worked for the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. He was the Senior Producer of CBC's the fifth estate, Canada's premier investigative TV program, for five years. He has directed and written major documentaries, covering wars and intrigue across the globe. His documentary Nuclear Jihad, produced for the New York Times and CBC, won the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest film, Ghosts of Afghanistan, won three top Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Documentary. He is also active in protecting media freedoms, working with the Centre for Free Expression and Journalists for Human Rights. More information at www.juliansher.com

Von der hinteren Coverseite

With an update on Ottawa's re-opening of the case.
In 1959, a popular schoolboy, just fourteen years old, was convicted and sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of his twelve-year-old classmate. That summer Canada lost its innocence and the shocking story of Steven Truscott became stamped in the nation's memory. Having always maintained his innocence, this is the true account of what happened, how Steven grew to adulthood in prison and lived anonymously ever since--until now.
In the fall of 2001, Truscott's lawyers presented a 700-page brief to the federal justice minister. Early in 2002, Ottawa decided to re-open the case, naming a retired judge to investigate. The updated paperback recounts this historic triumph.

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Chapter 8

Trapped

By Friday evening, a tumultuous week was coming to an end in Clinton. As much as they could, the children and adults in the PMQs around the air force station tried to follow life’s normal pursuits. Steve was looking forward to some fun and adventure over the weekend. Some fishing, some baseball, maybe another trip into the woods to work on the tree house. As the sun dipped in the horizon, Steve headed over to one of his favourite places around the base, Lawson’s farm — unaware that he was about to spend his last hour of liberty for the next ten years.

***

It looked like rain, Bob Lawson thought as he rushed to finish the evening chores — a godsend after the crop-scorching heat all week. Lawson was eager to get a little haying done. “If you start the lawn mower, I can cut the grass,” suggested his mother, Alice Lawson.

Bob was in the barn with the cows when he heard a loud, clanging racket. A fifteen-foot metal chain attached to the farm dog had somehow got tangled up in the mower and was slowly dragging the terrified mutt toward the sharp, spinning rotors. Lawson knew he was too far away to get to the mower in time. He caught sight of Steve rushing up the driveway to the farm. Fortunately, the mower stalled, and the chain stopped only a few feet before the dog would have had an unappetizing encounter with the rotors.

Laughing, the boy began to untangle the chain from the lawn mower. Still, the Lawsons felt that Steve was more reserved than usual. “Steve seems a little quiet this evening,” Alice Lawson told her son. Perhaps Lynne’s death had shaken the boy, Bob thought. The day before, Steve had dropped by the barn and appeared to be bewildered by events: “I heard they found Lynne in the bush,” Lawson remembers Steve telling him. “How did she get there?”

With the Lawsons’ dog safe from the marauding mower, Steve hopped on Lawson’s new Ferguson 35 tractor. “He loved being on that tractor,” Lawson recalls. “I would often let him ride on it. Steve was good with machines.” The lanky boy stood on the tractor’s floorboard, leaning against the fender, while the farmer rode across his land. When they got to the edge of the crops, Steve jumped off and perched himself on a large rock. For safety reasons, Lawson never let Steve stay on the tractor when he hooked it up to the harvester. As Lawson began haying, Steve rested on the rock, gazing out at the paths and trails where the children played hide-and-seek and picked berries. He saw the thick expanse of Lawson’s bush where only a few weeks earlier he and his friend Leslie had built a tree house.

“He was sitting on that stone, but next time, when I turned the tractor around and came back, he was gone,” Lawson recalls. “I guessed he had walked back to the barn.”

Bored, or perhaps anxious to get home for a bite to eat, Steve headed back down to the county road.

He never made it home.

***

At the Goderich OPP station, Inspector Harold Graham had made up his mind. Jocelyne’s story about a date and the phone call with the results from the laboratory analysis of Lynne’s stomach contents pointed the finger at the Truscott boy. “At ten minutes to seven, I had him picked up,” Graham said. He sent out Const. Donald Trumbley to bring in the boy — preferably without his parents’ knowledge. “I asked the constable to try and get him away from home.” The OPP cruiser pulled up to the gateway at the Lawson farm.

“Would you get into the car and come with me? We want you to read over your statement,” Trumbley explained, referring to Steve’s interview with Graham that morning.

“Yes,” said the teenager, without a moment’s hesitation. Looking back forty years later at that fateful moment, Steven explains that in 1959 young people had an abiding respect and trust in authority. “Back then when you’re fourteen years old, you looked up to the police. When they told you to get in the car, you got in the car,” he says. Steve never thought to question where Trumbley was taking him, much less to ask about his legal rights.

Trumbley pulled into the Goderich police post with his teenage passenger and took the boy into a small room at the back of the station. Steve had no reason to believe he was doing anything but signing a witness statement. The police did not tell him he was no longer simply a witness, that he had instead become their chief suspect. They did not tell him this trip to the station was, to all intents and purposes, an arrest. Certainly, they wanted his signature–but not just on a statement. What the OPP wanted from Steven was a confession and they were going to do everything they could to get one, even if that meant bending a few rules to the breaking point.

When Steven walked into that police station Friday, he was walking into what, in hindsight, can only be described as a trap, carefully planned and well executed by Harold Graham. Twenty minutes before dispatching Trumbley to pick up Steve, Graham had another officer, Sgt. Charles Anderson, obtain a search warrant for the Truscott home. Anderson then contacted Dr. David Hall Brooks, the chief medical officer on the base “and advised him of what we had planned to do.”

Graham had a very specific objective in mind — get Steven alone, without any interference from his parents. Years later, at a police convention, he boasted about his well-planned strategy: “I was well aware of the judge’s guidelines that it is preferable to have a parent or social worker present when you are questioning a juvenile,” he explained to his appreciative audience. “I was also well aware that it would be an exercise in futility, so I chose to disregard those guides.”

Graham’s was a bold admission of how far the police were willing to go to get their man, even if their man happened to be a fourteen-year-old boy. “Judges can always set their own guides for prisoners, they are not laws,” Graham said defiantly. And he was right. The Juvenile Delinquents Act in 1959 did not require the police to ensure a youth’s parent or guardian was present; today it is the law. Still, while Graham had not strictly violated any laws, he seemed to forget that the police had not told Steven he was a “prisoner” or even officially a suspect. At the boy’s murder trial three months later, the judge was unsparing in his criticism of the police’s tactics that night: “The ordinary safeguard should have been taken and he should have been warned. He was undoubtedly under arrest. It was clear he would never have been allowed to go.”

“Will you read this aloud,” the inspector told the boy as he handed him a typed statement based on Steve’s interview earlier that day. Steve read the text out loud and, according to Graham’s account, asked for only one minor change. He said his return to the school was not at 8:00 p.m., but closer to 7:50 or 7:55 p.m. “That was crossed out . . . and changed, and he said then it was correct, and I asked him to sign it and he did,” Graham said. Steven signed the statement at eight o’clock, ten minutes after their meeting began.

The inspector from the Criminal Investigations Bureau, a veteran of a decade’s worth of homicide cases, now had the boy exactly where he wanted him: alone in a room in a police station. Every police officer hopes they can crack a murder case with a confession, thereby saving the courts time and trouble. For the next hour and a half, Graham, assisted by Constable Trumbley, probed and prodded...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0676973817
• ISBN 13: 9780676973815
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 624
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar