Amid the speculation and rumor, the police were working with full reports of the two bizarre attacks, which had occurred on adjacent roads connected by a wooded footpath. The first victim, known as Jane Doe, was a young mother in her early twenties who had been asleep in her recently rented lakeside cottage with her weeks-old baby; her spouse, a truck driver, was away, working up north for Ontario Hydro. In an account that police initially seemed to doubt because it sounded so improbable, she told them the intruder came inside, probably through an unlocked door, and woke her. He then struck her—hard—before blindfolding her, tying her to a chair and taking out his camera for a lengthy nude photo session. When he was finished, he fled into the night. There was no sexual penetration or sexual assault in any usual sense. She never saw the attacker’s face. Her baby was left unharmed, and did not waken.
A report form was filled out, but there was little follow-up at first. The investigating Madoc OPP officers wondered briefly whether the attack—if it had even taken place—might have been the work of the woman’s spouse, but they swiftly discounted that possibility. And the cops’ problem was not merely that their rural and small-town experience had left them unprepared for a strange case like this, which seemed to belong in the pages of a big-city tabloid. It was also that the intruder, whoever he might be, had left behind nothing that could be traced—no items of clothing, no fingerprints and no samples of DNA.
Moreover, fairly or not, the young woman had a reputation for being erratic, and perhaps in this case she was possessed of an overactive imagination. Among the few Tweed residents who heard of the incident, there was the quiet suggestion that she might be suffering from postpartum depression.
Then, thirteen days later, the second attack took place.
A former accountant and telemarketer, and mother of three, 46-year-old Laurie Massicotte lived alone in her lakeside cottage on nearby Cosy Cove Lane. She recounted in an interview what happened.
As she often did, she had fallen asleep under a blanket on her living room couch, watching late night television. And the TV was still on when she woke, finding herself under assault from a man she could not see. The blanket was over her head and he was repeatedly punching her in the head and face. For many long minutes he kept his hands tightly on her throat—she feared she was going to be throttled—and as he did so, he warned her not to resist or to try to look at him.
The intruder had entered her home through an unlocked window at the back of the house, out of sight from the road. He told her that a robbery was under way, that he had accomplices who were in the house and that his job was to control her. With Massicotte’s head still under the blanket, the man reached underneath and blindfolded her with a strip of pillowcase material he had sliced up. A second strip was used to bind her hands behind her back.
What followed was more than three hours of terror. “After he got my blindfold on me, he stood up, obviously, and he barked at me, ‘Are you looking at me?’ And I said, ‘Oh no, God no.’ ” It was the wise thing to say. “You don’t want to see me,” was his reply. The robbery story was a ruse, and though she didn’t realize it until later, there were no accomplices. Instead, the invader made her sit on the couch and, with the blindfold still on, he tied her up with a kind of harness he had fashioned from another pillowcase. He then stripped her naked by cutting off her clothes, wielding the blade with great precision. “It didn’t leave a scratch on me,” she said. Then the photo session began. The assailant took dozens of photographs, directing Massicotte as he obtained shots from numerous angles. She could hear the camera clicking.
But before any photos were taken, something curious took place. She told her attacker that her head was throbbing from the blows and that she needed some aspirin. Still in her blindfold, she was led to the bathroom and given two before being returned to the couch. “He was patting my head after he brought me back to the couch. As we were walking, he was rubbing my head softly, and he was apologizing, saying, ‘Sorry for that,’ ” she recounts. “He was sorry for punching me in the head.”
The intruder made many other conciliatory gestures, constantly reassuring Massicotte that if she cooperated he would not kill her. In a tone she is sure he deliberately kept low so as to disguise his voice, he called her “Laurie” many times, made small talk and said she seemed like “a nice person.” Only fleetingly did he touch her sexually, and when she protested he stopped.
Her worst moment came near the end, after he had ordered her, still naked and in her harness, to strike a particularly obscene pose. He said he was leaving to make sure “the others” had got away but that he would be back in ten minutes to collect his camera gear. She heard the sound of a zipper. “And I thought that’s where the gun was coming from, and he told me no, it was just his camera bag. I thought for sure he had a gun, I started fussing real bad. He told me, ‘No, Laurie, I don’t have a gun,’ and he let me feel the camera strap on my face, to let me know it was only a camera.”
He finally departed at around four-thirty. He had to leave by then, he told her a couple of times, and by coincidence or not, a couple of doors down from Laurie Massicotte’s house lived a man who left home for work each morning at 4:45. Half an hour later she managed to struggle free, calm down somewhat and call 911. Within ten minutes two uniformed officers from the Madoc OPP detachment were at her door, soon followed by plainclothes detectives, a big forensics truck, a canine unit and a phalanx of other police who fanned out and began scouring the woodland that surrounds Cosy Cove Lane.
One thing that particularly puzzled the police who investigated this incident—different police officers were handling the first one—was that her assailant had been so oddly considerate of her, even as he tormented her, as if he was doing something he somehow had to do but wished he didn’t.
A year later, Massicotte remained thoroughly traumatized by what she was put through. “I was terrorized to death. I’m still in shock. I’m lucky that I have my inside protectors and my inside strength,” she says. “I still live it, minute by minute, but I get through it. He let me live, but it went on for three hours.”
Massicotte’s distress that day did not end when the police showed up at her door. Her teenage twin daughters were not living with her, and even as she was being questioned by detectives, they were learning of their mother’s ordeal via a string of lightning-fast text messages being relayed around their Belleville high school, messages that depicted the assault as being even worse than it was. “My daughters found out through texting on the playground, in grade twelve. It trickled down and my daughter is trying to figure out where the heck this all came from. And by the time it got to my daughter, it was saying I had been raped and brutalized, tied up and raped. She was so angry and upset, and she didn’t know if any of it was true.”
Nor was anyone else in Tweed sure what to make of it all. Within days, news of the two home invasions was all over the village, and the victims’ identities and addresses became widely known as well. And as the details seeped out, the fear level began to soar.
“With the second attack, things just blew up in town,” Coté the barber remembers. “Usually doors were unlocked and now they were all locked. In this small community I would say probably 70 percent of the people have guns, if not more, and I know a lot of guys taught their wives and girlfriends how to shoot because of this, and I know a lot of people who were keeping guns under their beds.”
Some Tweed residents, including reeve Jo-Anne Albert, had heard only a few sketchy details about the first attack. The home invasion targeting Massicotte, however, dispatched a shock wave. “That changed everything. That changed how the people in Tweed live, and we will never go back to how we were—at least I hope we don’t,” says Albert, an affable schoolteacher-turned-politician who has lived in Tweed for close to forty years and probably knows it as well as anyone. “It took away the innocence of a small town, I really believe that.”
Yet even as alarm bells began ringing, a parallel crime wave was under
way in Tweed, and this one was largely unseen. Over the previous two years, dozens of peculiar house burglaries had been taking place, almost all in the same Cosy Cove Lane neighborhood where the two women were assaulted. These were not run-of-the-mill break-ins, which usually target cash and valuables that quickly get sold for a fraction of their value. Rather, they were the work of a single-minded sex fetishist whose sole quarry was women’s underwear of all types: panties, bras, girdles, thongs, swimsuits. In a couple of instances, bathrobes and shoes were taken too. Entry to the homes had been gained in a variety of ways, often involving no more than walking through an unlocked door. And where there was forced entry, the most common means of access was a picked lock rather than a smashed window or jimmied-open door. In almost every instance, no one was home at the time, indicating that the intruder had done considerable reconnaissance before breaking in.
But almost no one in Tweed knew anything about this. In all, there were forty-five such burglaries in the area over a two-year period, many of them repeat trips to earlier targets (one residence was hit nine times). But almost all went unnoticed, or else they were not reported, possibly in some cases out of embarrassment. Police had been apprised of just one, and there was no mention of stolen underwear. Of course, no one in Tweed could have imagined that a similar wave of break-ins was simultaneously taking place in the Ottawa suburb of Orleans, 125 miles away.
To say that Russ Williams kept a low profile in Tweed, his adopted home for several years, would be an understatement. To call him near invisible would be more accurate, and this was in keeping with virtually every other facet of his nonmilitary life. He was occasionally seen at a convenience store or gas station, but for most of Tweed, Williams simply didn’t exist. He was never spotted in the liquor store or at taverns. He didn’t buy groceries in the big IGA Food Market. He never stopped off to grab a quick sandwich or coffee in the Gateway restaurant or the By the Way Internet café, two hubs of local activity on Victoria Street.
Perhaps most striking of all, he was unknown at the Tim Hortons outlet at the Sulphide Road cutoff on the outskirts of town, which led up to his nearby home on Cosy Cove Lane. Williams was not much of a coffee drinker, usually preferring tea. Nonetheless, his avoidance of Timmy’s seems odd, to say the least. Ubiquitous across the nation, the famed Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain holds a semi-iconic status in the military; it even has a presence at the Canadian Forces base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, which Williams had several times visited. As well, the Tim Hortons coffee shop at Sulphide Road served as a meet-and-greet point in Tweed for local residents and busloads of Canadian troops heading to Afghanistan from the big army base in Petawawa, north of Ottawa—the site of their last cup of home-brewed coffee before going off to war. The ritual got started in 2008, the year before Williams assumed command of 8 Wing. Students from St. Carthagh Catholic School gathered to salute the soldiers at Timmy’s, where each was handed a gift card. Then the troops made a second stop at the Legion Hall on the high street, where they were hailed by students from the S.H. Connor and Tweed-Hungerford senior schools.
Given the role the coffee shop played in the community and its links with the military, it might have been expected that the 8 Wing base commander living just up the road would be a regular visitor. But as far as is known, he never stopped by there. “When this all came down, it was a real shocker, because we had no idea he lived up on Cosy Cove,” says a longtime employee. “No idea at all. We’d never heard of the guy until this. When we did, we freaked.”
So if Williams was anxious to avoid the people of Tweed, why would he get his hair cut in the relatively exposed environment of Reg Coté’s small barbershop? There seem to have been two compelling reasons, one being intelligence gathering.
“He would come in here, and he’s far from being a stupid man, so he would get information here,” Coté said later. “It’s easy to get information in a barbershop—ask a question, listen to what everybody has to say. He would always be listening more than talking. So after the second girl [was attacked], of course he’s in here, sitting here waiting for a haircut, hearing all the talk, so he knew right away there was undercover cops.”
Coté recalls Williams as a taciturn customer, always courteous. “I talked to the guy a lot. He didn’t say much at first, but eventually he started talking more. The first time he came in here I figured he’d never come back—he didn’t say much, wouldn’t talk to me. But he always listened. What you hear in a barber’s shop is not always true, but the way I figure it, he thought he was never going to get caught. And so maybe he started doing things more out in the open than before.”
Williams never made any mention of the two home invasions, as far as Coté can recall. “He was way too smart for that.”
In one otherwise casual barbershop conversation that would take on some significance later, Williams did make inquiries about one of his next-door neighbors on Cosy Cove Lane, Larry Jones. “I remember Russell asking me if I knew Larry Jones, and the way he asked me was as if he didn’t know, although by then he’d been coming in here for a long time,” Coté says. “He asked me what’s he like and I said, ‘Well, yeah,’ and we were talking about it. I’ve heard so many things about Larry since I’ve been in Tweed …” So, too, had many other people in the village, and not all the gossip about Jones was friendly.
All the talk about police surveillance that October Saturday morning may have given Williams a scare, because three weeks would elapse before there was another of the lingerie raids he had been stealthily committing in Tweed for two years—a relatively long gap in the pattern. But if he had been rattled, his caution didn’t last. His next target, on October 24, was a house on Sulphide Road, just down the road from his Cosy Cove Lane cottage, close to the Tim Hortons. That was to be the last break-in in Williams’s immediate neighborhood; two more Tweed homes would be burgled in the first week of November, but both were off his usual beaten path.
And there was a second explanation for Williams’s regular visits to Coté’s shop for a quick trim. The obvious alternative to having his hair cut in Tweed would have been to do what other 8 Wing personnel did: stop in at the Trenton air base’s own barbershop, on the south side of the property, a thirty-second walk from Williams’s office at command headquarters. But doing so would have exposed him to the one thing he was anxious to evade, in Tweed, in Trenton and everywhere else: conversation and scrutiny. No less than its civilian counterpart, a military barbershop and its relatively informal atmosphere is an excellent place to catch up with news and rumors, and perhaps ask a polite question or two of the customer in the chair, even if he is the base commander. The barbershop on the base has closed its doors since Williams was there, but when it was open there would usually be three or four people getting a haircut at the same time.
One of the defining characteristics of Williams’s extremely busy seven-month spell as the leader of 8 Wing was his concerted effort to spend as little of his free time as possible on the base, or in the company of other senior officers. He didn’t live there, he was rarely seen in the officers’ mess, and he became more and more reliant for communication on his BlackBerry, which he used to receive and dispatch a steady stream of messages. At the same time, a big part of a wing commander’s duties consists of being in the public eye, especially at busy 8 Wing, where the pace was often hectic. Williams attended plenty of official functions, to have his photo snapped and to speak a few words to a reporter from Contact, the base’s excellent weekly newspaper. But there were many others that he skipped, sending a junior officer to stand in for him instead.
Only after he was arrested did questions begin to surface as to why he had been so aloof, although some people did think it odd at the time. One of those people was retired army lieutenantgeneral Jack Vance—General Jack as he is known, a greatly respected figure in Tweed, and a former vice chief of staff of the Canadian Armed Forces. Now seventy-seven, Vance remains sharp of mind, and he knows a thing or two about watching for bad appl
es within the military: before he became vice chief, he oversaw personnel operations for the entire armed forces for five years. No screening system could have detected Williams’s latent criminal instincts, he believes—not within the armed forces and not in any of the other major public-oriented professions, such as the judiciary, the medical world or the Church. Yet Vance has come to believe that Williams’s day-to-day behavior could have drawn more scrutiny that it did.
“The thing I notice about him is this: Base commander basically means being there all the time. Why on earth would he not live there? There was a house for him. He would finish a very good day’s work in Trenton and jump in his car, or go to this particular bar in Belleville, instead of going to the officers’ mess. It was as if he was shunning his own officers, because he wanted to get away from them. More to the point, psychologically he wasn’t there—he wasn’t committed. And it was kind of a shame his wife wasn’t there too, because there’s a really important job for the wife of a base commander … I would have thought that somebody of a more senior rank might have noticed all that.”
In Tweed, by contrast, there was very little for anyone to notice.
Williams lived a highly compartmentalized existence, and off-duty in the civilian world he barely registered as a member of the community, a consistent pattern during his entire 23-year career with the military. He had very few close friends, he belonged to no social clubs or volunteer organizations, he never attended church as far as is known, and he had no children. He was a computer whiz, easily able to keep pace with the advances of the information age, but his expertise was largely confined to his professional life—and to his macabre, sex-drenched secret life. No blogs or chat rooms or social media websites show any sign of him.
In Tweed, moreover, which has long had close ties to the Trenton base, something else cloaked him. Among the handful of Tweedites who were aware of Williams, such as next-door neighbors who would wave or occasionally exchange greetings, his prestigious position as commander of the 8 Wing base lent him a natural aura of mysterious authority—perfect cover for his clandestine night life. This, after all, was someone who had been entrusted with top-secret information, had flown prime ministers and royalty around the world, and dealt regularly with people at the top levels of government. A couple who lived next door to Williams and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, on Cosy Cove Lane, Monique and Ron Murdoch, knew them a little better than most, occasionally socializing with them and playing cards, and at least once Ron Murdoch went out ice fishing on Stoco Lake with Williams.
A New Kind of Monster Page 2
