Not only was the 14-year-old found guilty — he was also sentenced to death by hanging. But Steven Truscott always maintained his innocence and tried to appeal his conviction in 1960. Two appeals courts rejected his request, according to Innocence Canada, but the Governor-General changed Truscott’s death sentence to a life sentence.
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While Truscott was in prison, a Toronto journalist, Isabel LeBourdais, published a book called “The Trial of Steven Truscott,” detailing the case. Her book brought the case back into the public consciousness, and the governor-general asked Canada’s Supreme Court whether an appeal would have led to the sentence being overturned — but the court maintained that no appeal was warranted. Yet after 10 years in prison, he was eligible for parole, and was granted supervised release in October 1969. He began living under a new name, married in 1970, and had three children.
But Truscott wasn’t in the clear yet. It wasn’t until decades later that Truscott’s conviction was overturned. With a new analysis of the contents of Lynne Harper’s stomach and insect activity on the corpse, the timeline for her murder “demonstrated that the original estimate of time of death was unreliable,” according to Pub Med. On August 28, 2007, Steven Truscott’s conviction was finally overturned and declared a miscarriage of justice.
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