Clinton, Ontario — On June 11, 1959, the body of 12-year old Lynne Harper was discovered in a woodlot northeast of Clinton, Ontario. Although insect evidence was photographed and collected at the scene and autopsy, this evidence was not used in the 1959 trial. Instead, time of death was pinpointed to a 45 minutes window of 7:00-7:45pm on June 9 based on stomach content analysis.
Based on circumstantial evidence and this time frame that he was the last suspect to see her alive, 14-year old Steven Truscott was convicted of her murder. He was scheduled to be hanged, but a temporary reprieve postponed his execution. In 1960, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Truscott was the youngest person to be sentenced to death in Canada, and his case provided the major impetus toward abolition of the death penalty in Canada. Truscott always maintained his innocence.
In 2001, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted filed an appeal to have the case reopened. In 2006, the authors of this paper were contacted by Attorneys James Lockyer and Phil Campbell of the LCP Law Firm in Toronto to investigate this case. Fresh evidence was presented at the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2006-2007 including testimony of 3 forensic entomologists. This resulted in controversy regarding identification of the insects and assumptions of insect behaviour that affected the postmortem interval estimate.
Lack of scientific evidence for the controversial theories proposed by one testifying entomologist resulted in disregarding his testimony. Instead, testimony by VanLaerhoven and Merritt was accepted. Based on their analysis and a re-creation experiment of the insect evidence, initial fly colonization occurred during daylight hours of June 10, 1959.
The collected larvae were not likely to have been deposited on the body before dark (9:40pm) on June 9, 1959 as this would have resulted in significantly larger and more advanced larval instar than were collected at the scene or autopsy. This analysis, together with a pathology reanalysis of stomach content analysis, demonstrated that the original estimate of time of death was unreliable.
Truscott was with numerous witnesses prior to 7pm and after 8pm on June 9, 1959, thus the estimate of time of death was the most critical evidence in the original 1959 trial and the 2006-2007 appeal. On August 28, 2007, his conviction was overturned, declared a wrongful conviction and miscarriage of justice. Steven Truscott was acquitted of the murder charges.
