A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  Copyright © 2011 by Timothy Appleby

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and simultaneously as a hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-88873-0

  Cover design by James Iacobelli

  Cover photographs: © Glenn Davy/All Canada Photos/Corbis (house);

  © Walter B. McKenzie/Getty Images (soldier)

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Maps

  Introduction

  1. A village under siege

  2. A-Town

  3. A new life

  4. Drill Sergeant

  5. A pilot soars

  6. Over the threshold

  7. Wing commander

  Photo Section

  8. Up the ladder

  9. A soldier stalked

  10. A soldier slain

  11. Business as usual

  12. Roadblock

  13. The house on Highway 37

  14. “Call me Russ, please”

  15. Betrayal in uniform

  16. “Canada’s bright, shining lie”

  17. A new kind of monster

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  SOUTHEASTEN ONTARIO

  Crime sites in Orleans neighborhood, Ottawa.

  Crime sites in Tweed.

  INTRODUCTION

  He looked like a haunted man, marched into court every day in handcuffs and ankle shackles, a burly police officer on each arm. Clean-shaven and neatly groomed, still a colonel in the Canadian air force, Russell Williams wore a dark jacket and slightly mismatched pants, brown shoes and a pale, open-necked shirt, no tie allowed. The dozen other cops always stared at him hard as he was led to the glass-walled prisoner’s box a few minutes before the proceedings began, and so did everyone else in the packed courtroom. But he never glared back. He would stand for a moment to have the cuffs removed, his eyes averted, and then meekly sit down.

  At age forty-seven, Williams remained a muscular figure, six foot two, 180 pounds. He’d kept fit inside his cramped cell at Quinte Detention Centre over the past eight months with a rigorous push-ups regimen. And during his four-day guilty plea and sentencing in Belleville, two hours east of Toronto, there was always concern among court officials that he might suddenly try to bolt or lunge for a weapon of some kind. What did he have to lose? He would never walk the streets again, and he’d already made an imaginative attempt to kill himself while in custody. But he never did step out of line—he always behaved.

  He resembled a husk of a human being, a forlorn portrait in misery and disgrace, the first colonel in the history of the Canadian Armed Forces—and there have been more than 16,000 of them—to be charged with murder. Many killers have dead, lizard-like eyes, indicative of a lifelong indifference to the suffering they have wrought. But Williams’s eyes were alive, bright with torment. A couple of times during the proceedings he wept, and from three yards away his grief seemed genuine, though he was surely sniffling as much for himself as for anyone else. Mostly he just gazed at the courtroom floor, as though deeply ashamed of who he was.

  And he was ashamed. The most closely guarded secret of the Russ Williams story is the fact that along with the tsunami of evidence of unspeakable crimes that police found on his home computer, there was also child pornography. And that was the one offense to which he refused to plead guilty. Murder, rape and bizarre sexual assaults, scores of terrifying, fetish-driven home invasions—he was ready to admit to all of that, in a series of confessions that were mostly truthful, although sprinkled with self-serving evasions. But he was not willing to acknowledge downloading child pornography from the Internet, and during the pretrial negotiations he’d been adamant: child porn charges would be a deal-breaker. If they were laid, there would be no guilty pleas on the murder and sexual assault charges. Instead, everything would go to trial—an outcome that neither the prosecution nor the defense was eager to force.

  As he sat in the prisoner’s box, flanked by two officers of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Williams would occasionally take a sideways peek at the courtroom, or glance up at the two flat TV screens at the front of the room where the photo exhibits provided a glimpse into his secret world of horror.

  Here he was: the formerly proud commander of the country’s most important air base, the popular career soldier with top-level military-security clearance, the crackerjack pilot who’d once flown a Polaris Airbus to London to bring Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to Canada for a royal visit. Here he was, via the damning photographic evidence: in the bedroom of a teenage girl whose home he had invaded in the dead of night while everyone was away. His lean, naked frame was stretched out on her neatly made bed as he leered confidently into the expensive Sony camera he’d carefully set up. One arm was draped around a large white stuffed animal; his other hand gripped his erect penis as he masturbated into the girl’s underwear.

  Dozens of similar pictures were shown, excruciating close-ups of the killer’s genitalia and his face as he posed in his stolen trophies, gaze unflinching. Many were unnerving to look at—spectators in the courtroom often averted their eyes—and his computer hard drives had held thousands of such images, adroitly concealed within folders and subfolders. And this was not the worst of it. Not by far. These were just the pictures of himself and his lingerie keepsakes, and the least offensive of them were released to the public as court exhibits, chiefly pictures showing Williams modeling some of the 1,400-plus items he admitted stealing. Not screened in court, because they were deemed too disturbing, were the long, grotesquely choreographed videos of the bondage, rape and deaths of the two women he had killed, spectacles of numbing violence and cruelty in which he was scriptwriter, director and star. He had taken scores of still pictures as well.

  Now he was nearing the end of the line. Early each October morning outside the ornate Belleville courthouse, police dogs barked in the darkness as squads of cops waited, preparing to hustle Williams inside, behind a black canvas screen that shielded him from the television cameras. Reporters began lining up at five in the morning for a spot in the 153-seat courtroom, and an overflow room with a videolink one floor down held many more spectators. Curiosity in Belleville and the environs was intense as the last scenes in this horrifying saga of murder and sexual obsession were played out.

  But there was nobody there in court for Williams as the curtain came down: no family, no members of the military, not a single ally save his well-paid Ottawa lawyers. Russ Williams had become a toxic commodity because he had betrayed everything and everyone: his country, the armed forces, his wife, his parents, his few friends, the many people who had admired him and loyally worked under him during his sterling 23-year career. A few days after his conviction on all eighty-eight charges, he was formally stripped of his rank and medals; later his uniform was burned in an incinerator at the air base he had once commanded, and the two medals were shredded. Williams will serve his life sentence in an isolated prison cell the size of a small bathroom, under 24-hour camera surveillance. His chances of parole are around zero, and he will almost certainly die in that claustrophobic cell in Kingston Penitentiary, or in one very much like it.

 
And for what?

  In large part the answer was up there on the big TV screens, as Hastings County Crown attorney Lee Burgess and colleagues read in the lengthy agreed statement of facts that accompanied Williams’s guilty pleas to two counts of first-degree murder, two of sexual assault, two of unlawful confinement, and eighty-two home break-ins. It was all about sex—sexual fantasy, sexual obsession and sexual control, taken to a homicidal level that most people in the courtroom could barely comprehend. The other motivations were strong but secondary: the power he wielded over his victims, and the thrill of taking ever more risks in the belief that he was smart enough to stay ahead of any pursuit.

  The detectives who took his detailed confessions had had to look no further than his two homes to find most of the physical evidence they sought. Williams had not only stored and carefully itemized the spoils of his obsessive break-ins, a collection of stolen women’s underwear so extensive that twice he had had to take some of it to fields outside Ottawa and burn it. Along with the videos and thousands of still photos of himself, he had also documented everything in copious typed notes, describing each one of the crimes to which he was now willing to plead guilty.

  Other serial killers have kept diaries too, and it was plain that for practical purposes he was a serial killer. The strict definition of the term as used by the FBI and the RCMP is that he or she has claimed at least three lives, and Williams killed two people. Yet there is no doubt whatever among justice officials close to the investigation that he would have murdered again had he not been caught, and would have continued to kill. And he all but said so himself.

  As well, it was evident that he had long been a sexual deviant, and now here he was: a stalker and cunning sex killer who had been commanding 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, Canada’s most important air base, the air force’s operational hub.

  How was that even conceivable?

  In thirty years of writing about crime in Canada and conflict abroad, I thought I’d seen every kind of killer. But Russell Williams did not resemble any of them, and in one way he seemed the scariest of all, because so many different people who’d dealt with him had respected him and liked him so much. Throughout his long military career he’d been almost universally seen as a smart, decent guy, a stickler for organization and a bit awkward socially, but also generous and very often kind. What had changed him into the monster now before the court? Or had everybody just been fooled all along? It was suggested, and the analogy was not entirely fanciful, that he resembled a Jekyll-and-Hyde character: by day, an exemplary, upstanding citizen; by night, transformed into a loathsome, terrifying predator.

  Eight months had now elapsed since Williams had been charged with murder, and it was becoming increasingly evident that no additional cases were likely to be laid at his door, suggesting he had unleashed his instincts unusually late in life. And if so, then why? What was the trigger? That was what everyone was asking, and none more so than the people who had known him—or had thought they did. And nobody, it seemed, had an answer.

  1

  A VILLAGE UNDER SIEGE

  Neatly dressed in casual clothes, the tall, lean man didn’t have a lot to say as he patiently waited his turn in the barber’s chair that Saturday morning. Saturdays are often a busy time for Tweed barber Reg Coté, a fixture on the village main street for thirty years, and in that regard October 3, 2009, was no different. Longtime customers, mostly middle-aged, stop in for a sixteen-dollar haircut and a chat with whomever is there, including the agreeable Coté, a good talker and listener whose Quebec accent remains strong. There’s no red-and-white striped barber’s pole outside his shop, but there’s a makeshift one inside, and his salon resembles the traditional model: an informal, walkin business with a single barber’s chair and an L-shaped seating arrangement, where men who know each other can catch up on local developments, good and bad.

  But this was no ordinary Saturday morning in Tweed. The usually tranquil village was struggling to make sense of an unusual piece of local news. Two days earlier, under the headline “Public Safety Concern,” provincial police at nearby Madoc had issued an unsettling press release:

  The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Central Hastings detachment are investigating two break-ins that occurred, in which a male suspect entered the home while the residents were sleeping. On September 17 and again on September 30, 2009, both in the early hours of the morning, an unknown male entered Tweed residences. During both separate incidents, the suspect struck the female victim, tied her to a chair and took photos of her. The suspect then fled the scene. The OPP want to remind everyone to ensure all doors and windows are secured and to practice personal safety. Please report any suspicious activity to the police immediately by calling 911. OPP officers are following up leads to identify the suspect. If anyone has information about these incidents, they are asked to call the Central Hastings OPP.

  Some particulars were missing from the release. Nothing conveyed the fact that the attacks had been sexual in nature, and that after being blindfolded and tied to chairs, both women had had their clothes cut off before nude photo sessions began. Nor that the home invasions had lasted hours, and that they had occurred within a few hundred yards of each other, on adjoining roads on the rural outskirts of town.

  A half hour’s drive north of Belleville, Tweed lies roughly midway between Toronto and Ottawa. Once a bustling way station on the Toronto–Montreal rail line, these days Tweed is a laid-back community of about 1,600, with three times that number in the greater area. Yet it is also a fairly worldly place, home to many retirees, and most households have access to the usual modern telecommunications devices. So word of the twin assaults spread quickly.

  Already, out-of-town undercover officers had been spotted—faces not familiar in Tweed—in unmarked cars and in at least one instance peering out the windows of someone’s borrowed house. In undercover surveillance, a good rule of thumb is that the smaller the venue, the harder it is to remain unseen. And it hadn’t taken long for some of Coté’s more astute customers to notice that something unusual was afoot in the Cosy Cove Lane area, a few minutes’ drive from Victoria Street, the main thoroughfare.

  So on this Saturday morning, the barbershop conversation consisted of little else but the mystery intruder and what he might do next. “Suddenly there’s people coming into the shop and talking about all this,” Coté recalls. And as he clipped and snipped, Coté was not the only person in the shop paying close attention to the discussion. So too was the tall man with the brush cut waiting to get a quick trim.

  The chatter was laced with rebukes for the police. Why hadn’t they put out the full story? And why hadn’t they issued an alert after the first home invasion, on September 17? Why did they wait for the guy to strike again?

  It was an issue that would become a sore point in Tweed, although there was a certain logic to the information gaps. Police investigating serious crimes routinely withhold details that can only be known by the perpetrator, such as the caliber of a gun or the quantity of cash stolen in a robbery. In this instance, moreover, investigators were navigating a fine line between warning the public and trying not to trigger panic—and an instant media blizzard—which is what might well have happened if all the bizarre details had become known. As well, an undercover operation was supposed to be under way. What’s more, there had initially been a credibility issue with one of the two women who’d been attacked.

  But that’s not how many people in Tweed saw things, at least not at the time, as the talk buzzed in Coté’s barbershop that morning. And as it did, most of his customers very likely had little idea who the tall, well-dressed man might be as he sat there quietly listening. But Coté knew, because he was one of his regulars; he’d been cutting his hair for several months. He was Colonel Russell Williams, forty-six, wing commander of the sprawling 8 Wing/CFB Trenton air base, a 45-minute drive southwest of Tweed, and for several years a resident of the short, winding road named Cosy Cove Lane.

  Rich in history and fo
lklore, perched on the edge of Stoco Lake, Tweed feels different from many small Ontario towns, perhaps a bit more sophisticated. A dwindling handful of dairy and cattle farmers still make a living in the hills outside town, and nineteenth-century brick buildings line Victoria Street. Along with its numerous retirees are many others who have exchanged big-city stresses for a smaller paycheck and a more low-key lifestyle. Tweed is the former home of Patrick LeSage, the retired judge who presided over the sensational Paul Bernardo murder trial in 1995. Provincial Liberal cabinet minister Leona Dombrowsky is a lifelong Tweedite too. It’s a place where plenty of people still go to church, patriotism and small-c conservatism run deep, and some of the newer arrivals in town will tell you it can take years before you are accepted by the old guard. Yet Park Place Motel owner and Indian expatriate Neil Patel says that during his four-plus years in mostly white Tweed he has yet to encounter a racial slur. Nor has he once had to call police to deal with unruly guests at his well-run hostelry, tucked on the shoreline beach of Stoco Lake at the entrance to town.

  Now, almost overnight, the comforting sense of security had evaporated. No one had the least idea of the identity of the Tweed Creeper, as he became known. But it didn’t look as if he lived very far away. Tweed residents began locking their doors and many started keeping a loaded gun at hand.

  “My mom didn’t really want me walking anywhere, and when I walked to the bus stop in the morning, it was dark in the morning back then, so I was always looking over my shoulder, and I was really scared at night,” says Ruth, a Tweed teenager who would learn months later, to her great horror, that her home had been broken into and robbed of underwear by the same intruder who had attacked the two women. “It was hard to sleep. I was thinking that someone was going to come in my house. I always woke up in the middle of the night, at like two in the morning, because that’s when all this stuff happens.”