Mother of Steven Truscott never lost hope
Thursday, December 20
- Organization: Globe & Mail
Doris Truscott Brennan, the powerful, feisty, determined mother who never wavered in her support for her son, Stephen Truscott, has died. She was in her early 80s, and she lived to see her boy finally acquitted last August of a grisly murder 48 years ago near a military base in Clinton, Ont. - a murder he said from the start that he didn't commit.
At the trial in 1959, she was there behind Stephen, then just 14, whispering words of encouragement. She displayed grace under fire when the judge pronounced that her son was to hang by the neck until he was dead - a sentence that was later commuted to life in prison, of which Stephen served 10 years before being paroled. And she got down to the business of working both to clear his name and at three jobs to help keep the family afloat and pay for gas for the car trips to and from the Collins Bay penitentiary, near Kingston.
As the years went by, she knew she could never give up or give in to the temptation of dwelling on what might have been because she had to move forward and fight for what was right. Every day was difficult, she once said, but Christmas was the hardest. "I don't think any parent can imagine what it's like -- and I hope they never have to," she told an Ottawa newspaper last August after the Ontario Court of Appeal cleared his name. "Having to sit in the court when your son was 14 and sentenced to hang is something you'll never forget." A full obituary is forthcoming.
