![]() The court also said it was not possible to retry the case in a lower court because so many of the witnesses are now dead. The best it could do is to toss out the conviction. They wanted the court to go one step further and declare Truscott innocent.īut the court said it had no way under Canadian law to declare someone innocent. Lockyer and his fellow attorneys argued that simply reversing the conviction wasn't enough. Since the time of death weighed so heavily on the minds of jurors nearly half a century ago, the appellate court ruled that the conviction had to be set aside. They found that the maggots were not nearly as large as they would have been if they had been present on the body since the early evening of June 9.īoth testified that Lynn was most likely killed the next morning, not during the narrow window the night before when it was possible that Truscott could have been the killer. They did that by measuring the size of the larvae, or maggots, in the early photographs. "We were able to determine how long it had been since colonization had taken place," Merritt said. That would give them a fairly good fix on the time of death. The life cycle of the blow fly is well known, so it was possible for the scientists to work backwards from the time that the body was discovered to the time when the flies first colonized the body. Chief among them were blow flies that laid hundreds of eggs, beginning soon after they found the body. The two scientists were fortunate in that the court record contained several photographs and precise measurements of insects that "colonized" the body moments after death. Merritt and Sherah VanLaerhoven, a forensic entomologist for the province of Ontario, were able to show to the court's satisfaction that their evidence indicated the death occurred much later, probably the following day, at a time when Truscott was known to be somewhere else. So Lockyer turned to the relatively new science of forensic entomology. DNA evidence could have ruled Truscott out as a suspect, but no DNA evidence remained from the death scene. Tragically, the issue might have been resolved quickly in a court today. That memo, which only surfaced recently, was written seven years after the conviction, while Truscott was still in prison serving a life sentence. Sadly, in a handwritten memorandum that Penistan himself called an "agonizing reappraisal," he admitted that he spoke with too much confidence during Truscott's trial, and his own evidence did not rule out the possibility that the murder could have occurred several hours later, when Truscott was at home. During the appellate court appeal, several experts testified that stomach contents are subject to many variables, including temperature and the nature of the food and many others, and thus could not be a reliable way of determining the precise time of death. John Penistan based that conclusion primarily on the examination of the food contents in her stomach, which he testified had been in Harper's body less than two hours at the time of her death. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy put the time of death at precisely between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m. ![]() So if Truscott did it, the murder had to occur during that narrow window between 7 p.m. Numerous witnesses testified that they saw the two youngsters riding on the bike at around 7 p.m., and Truscott was seen alone at about 8 p.m. "The time of her death has been the subject of intense controversy from the outset," the court observed in rendering last month's verdict. #Later case trialTiming became key in the trial and subsequent appeals of the case. Lynn had been raped and strangled with her own blouse. Her body was found two days later near the place where the two had been seen. She was a passenger on his bike on the outskirts of their Canadian village. Truscott was the last person seen with Harper, late in the afternoon of June 9, 1958. "I could never imagine how this kid who went to school with this girl and was a friend of hers could have done this." "It was a horrific crime," he said in an interview. "I was brain dead at the end," said Merritt, who has become somewhat passionate in his defense of Truscott. ![]() The proof, Merritt argued during a rigorous seven hours testifying, was provided by the flies that would have landed on the young girl's body within minutes of her death. ![]() The ruling wasn't a surprise to entomologist Richard Merritt of Michigan State University - one of a dozen certified forensic entomologists in the United States - whose testimony in the trial was "critical," according to Lockyer. ![]()
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