The reputation of Canada's Nobel Prize-winning author has taken a battering since it emerged that she stood by Gerald Fremlin, the man who abused her own daughter from the age of nine
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Jane Morrey says family friend Gerald Fremlin exploited her just a few years before he sexually assaulted his stepdaughter Andrea.
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During her brief separation from Fremlin in 1992, Munro also shared with Skinner her own suspicion regarding one of the most high-profile cases in Canadian history.
For reasons that remain unclear, she suspected that her husband might have raped and murdered Lynne Harper. In June 1959, the 12-year-old girl’s body was discovered in a woodlot northeast of Clinton, Ont., the town where Fremlin’s parents lived and where he and Munro eventually settled.
Steven Truscott, a classmate of Harper’s, was wrongfully convicted and Harper’s murder case remains unsolved.
Munro’s reasons for suspecting his involvement aren’t known to Skinner, but she believes they might relate to her mother’s insight into his character.
Skinner conducted her own investigation into the possibility. She contacted Truscott’s legal team and tried to determine Fremlin’s location in 1959. At the time, Fremlin’s parents lived in the Clinton residence that he and Munro would later inhabit. He was 34 at the time. Despite her efforts, Skinner’s inquiries reached an impasse, and when she later asked her mother about it again, Munro said she no longer believed it.
Munro said that Fremlin, was, in fact, in Alaska when Harper was killed, and that, as proof, she had seen letters he had written to his parents.
Nevertheless, the fact that her mother stuck by a man who sexually abused her — while also suspecting, even for a passing moment, that he might be capable of rape and murder — remains a source of pain and bewilderment for Skinner.
She wrote in a text message: “I thought she would have stayed with him no matter what he had done to me and others.”