On June 9, 1959, 12-year-old Lynne Harper left her home in Ontario, Canada, to enjoy an after-dinner walk.  She ran into a classmate, fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott, and climbed onto the crossbar of his bike.  Another child saw them around seven o'clock that evening near a place called Lawson's Bush, while a boy riding on the same road only a few minutes later claimed that it was empty at the time.  This appeared to have been the last place where anyone spotted Lynne Harper alive.

When she failed to come home that night, a search was organized, and two days later her body was found in the woods.  She had been strangled with her own blouse, and it appeared that she had been sexually molested by someone wearing crepe-soled shoes.  Rape was later confirmed by the pathologist during an autopsy.  Analyzing the contents and state of digestion of the meal she had eaten just before leaving home, he estimated that she had died around 7:30 p.m. that same evening.  He had no way of knowing that this estimate would become the center of an international controversy.

The search was on for Steven Truscott.  It turned out that on the evening of the murder he had arrived home at 8:30.  While he admitted being with Lynne, he claimed that he had dropped her off at a spot where she got into a Chevrolet.  However, he was examined by a physician and found to have marks on his penis consistent with rape.  He claimed that these marks were from a rash.  Since he was known to have a pair of crepe-souled shoes, a search was made, but the shoes had disappeared.

The strong circumstantial evidence ensured a conviction, and Truscott---only 14---was actually sentenced to hang.   However, due to public outrage, the sentence was commuted to life.  Eventually an appeal was filed to Canada's Supreme Court.  This, and a book that claimed an unfair ruling in the case, got the attention of two competitive pathologists in Britain.  Professor Keith Simpson believed that the book was in error, while Professor Francis Camps believed that the fault lay with the courts.  In 1966 they both came to Canada to provide expert testimony during the appeal, one for the prosecution and one for the defense.  Experts from the United States also came in to align themselves with one or the other, and the focus was on the estimated time of Lynne Harper's death.

Since the single method used to come up with the estimate was the process of digestion, the experts debated over the likelihood of inaccuracy.  In Lynne's case, only part of the food in her stomach had been digested by the time she had died.  She had eaten at 5:30, so it had seemed impossible to the pathologist that more than two hours had passed.  Yet if she had in fact died an hour or more later than the pathologist had indicated, then Truscott could not have been her killer. Because there is variation in digestion, depending on the type of food eaten and the speed of the person's metabolism, some of the experts argued that the assessment could easily have been wrong.  In addition, certain strong emotional states such as terror or anger can also slow the process, and she was certainly afraid.

Camps insisted that the time of death estimate was wildly inaccurate.  He shocked the court by claiming that Lynn could have died as long as ten hours after her last meal.  Countering this, Simpson pointed out that the death scene supported the initial analysis.  No gray Chevrolet had been found and there were no clues pinpointing other suspects.  The time of death estimate was more likely to be correct than to be as inaccurate as Camps was claiming.

In the end, the judge decided that Camps and his allies had provided no support for a new trial, so the sentence was reaffirmed.  Yet Truscott was released in 1969, only ten years after the murder, as if sufficient doubt was raised to just let him go.

So far we've seen cases where insect infestation and stomach digestion are used as markers for establishing time of death.  Let's look at the whole list.