A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  Was Williams trying to frame Jones? A second mysterious incident suggests that perhaps he was. On the same night that Lloyd was kidnapped, January 28–29, 2010, Jones says someone broke into his garage, across Cosy Cove Lane from his house, where he keeps his boats and snowmobiles. Curiously, however, only three items appeared to be missing: a blue cigarette lighter, a pair of work gloves and an old coat that his dog, Wes, a West Highland terrier, was fond of sleeping upon. What happened to those items remains a mystery. Jones wonders if Williams could have taken the items with the idea of using them to frame him for a crime, but he concedes he may never know.

  As for what he went through with the OPP, Jones takes a charitable view. “Half of those guys are friends of ours, we’ve played hockey together—my niece and my nephew are both OPP officers. So all this wasn’t their fault. They just weren’t trained for an investigation of this magnitude.”

  Tweed settled down a bit in the next few weeks, but the tension lingered. Residents pitched in to knit a giant scarf in support of Canada’s athletes at the Vancouver Olympics, as the We Believe campaign sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce took hold. “Tweed was at its best, prouder and stronger, because people felt as though they were finally involved in something that brought them together,” remembers Lisa Ford, who with her husband operates the By the Way coffee shop on Victoria Street.

  Then two things happened. Midway through November in the rural outskirts of Belleville about midway up Highway 37 as you head towards Tweed, there was a break-in at the house of an artist and music teacher whose husband was away. The intruder took some sex toys and underwear. And, terrifyingly, he left a taunting message on the woman’s home computer, suggesting he had been in the house at the same time she was on the previous evening, hiding in an upstairs linen closet.

  Few people in Tweed heard about the burglary, and the Belleville police who investigated it seemed to know nothing about the two earlier sex attacks around Cosy Cove Lane.

  About a week later, there came word of what sounded like a domestic-related homicide in Brighton, just west of Trenton along Highway 401, an hour’s drive from Tweed. A flight attendant attached to CFB Trenton had been found murdered in her home, where she lived alone. Provincial police from Northumberland County took charge of the case and urged local residents to stay calm. “There are no present issues with regard to public safety,” an OPP officer said on November 30, five days after Corporal Marie-France Comeau’s asphyxiated, bloodied body was discovered in her bedroom, wrapped in a duvet.

  To the residents of Tweed, there was no special reason to make any connection between the events in their community and either of these incidents, particularly the Comeau homicide. Brighton seemed very far away. And for the handful who did hear about what had occurred, the least likely person to be in any way involved would probably have been the pleasant, seldom-seen military figure who had arrived in Canada from England more than four decades earlier.

  2

  A-TOWN

  David Russell Williams was born into a world of middle-class privilege, filled with high achievers. Later in life he would tell friends he didn’t remember much about his early childhood, and whether that’s true or not, he rarely spoke about it, even when pressed. After his arrest, when it became clear that his extraordinary cruelty and violence had been directed exclusively at women, observers looked to his roots for possible clues as to what might have fostered his rage, and some were there to be found.

  Deep River has long been one of the jewels of the upper Ottawa Valley, the lush, green Laurentian Mountains on the northern Quebec shore of the Ottawa River providing a spectacular backdrop. Tucked into the river’s south shoreline, all but invisible from the nearby Trans-Canada Highway that links it to the Chalk River Research Laboratories ten miles down the road, the small town was the first place in Canada that Williams called home. He was a few weeks shy of five when he, his British-born parents and his younger brother, Harvey, arrived there more than forty years ago, riding a wave of incoming scientists, technicians and their families attracted by high-paying jobs and what in many ways was an idyllic existence.

  Affluent and remote, a white-collar oasis of Ph.D.-toting intellectuals plunked down in a rugged northern landscape, Deep River was by any yardstick unusual. Naturally, much has changed since then. The trees that dot Deep River’s neat, curvy residential streets are thicker and taller. The many sailboats that used to be moored off the Deep River Yacht and Tennis Club—the town’s social hub during the two years that Williams lived there—have largely been replaced by houseboats.

  The small downtown core looks different too, reconfigured after a big fire tore through it in 1998, destroying the landmark Giant Tiger store and half a dozen other businesses. No longer an all-white enclave, there is a growing immigrant population, mostly from Asia. And the town’s relationship with Atomic Energy Canada Limited, the Crown corporation tasked with managing the country’s nuclear program, has also evolved. Deep River has always been called A-Town—A for atomic—and is still joined at the hip to Chalk River, with AECL remaining by far the area’s principal employer. But no longer does the corporation own the big, comfortable houses in which the scientists and their families lived.

  “They used to own everything. It was a company town. You pretty much had to work at Atomic Energy to keep a house,” says realtor Jim Hickey, who has lived in Deep River since 1945. Hickey and his family spent their first few years in rented accommodation. “And my father would warn me to keep the grass cut, because there was a shortage of housing, the implication being that we’d better keep it cut or we might lose it. I was twelve when he died, and I remember one of the [AECL] employment officers coming to the house with his wife and telling my mother, ‘When this guy’s old enough to work, send him in to see me.’ ”

  But Deep River’s current population of around 4,400—7,600 in the greater Deep River area—hasn’t changed much, nor have the town’s attractions. Waves lap at the golden beaches, a magnet for family picnics, just a few minutes’ walk from the downtown. Sunrises over the river are legendary, and a short drive away is the eastern edge of Algonquin Park. Stroll around Deep River and you will be hard put to see a piece of litter. Serious crime barely exists. In 2009, the ten-officer police force recorded 199 occurrences, two-thirds involving theft or other property crime. Residential neighborhoods don’t have sidewalks, because everybody knows to drive slowly and safely.

  “People who come here for the first time call this God’s Country,” enthuses Karen Bigras, deli manager at Fleury’s Super-Valu, the anchor retail outlet in the small downtown. Bigras moved to Deep River in 1969, when she was four, a year after the Williams family arrived, and she recalls a very happy childhood. “I absolutely loved it. We didn’t have to worry about anything, we were allowed to ride our bicycles and walk on the road, we didn’t have any fears. All the kids went to playgrounds, and there was always things to do outside: camp days, arts and crafts. The word bored didn’t exist when we were children. I don’t know anybody who didn’t have a wonderful childhood here. A lot of the people I went to school with have moved back here to raise their children.”

  But it was not the town’s agreeable environment and lifestyle that brought the Williams family to Deep River. Rather, it was Chalk River’s cutting-edge lab facilities, whose jobs lured scientists from around the world, principally from Britain. The Chalk River Laboratories were the sole raison d’être for Deep River, as they are today. Chalk River remains the source of more than one-third of the world’s—and almost all of North America’s—supply of medical diagnostic isotopes, a safe radioactive material used chiefly to diagnose illness.

  The atomic theme is ubiquitous in the town. Numerous schools and streets are named after pioneers of Canada’s nuclear development, a stylized atom logo adorns city stationery, and A-power has long had a place within the local culture. A 1950s rock band called themselves Phil Rowe and the Atomic Five, and there was a men’s basketball team named the N
eutrons.

  This was the milieu to which the Williams family transplanted themselves, six years after Canada’s first nuclear power plant, the CANDU prototype, went online near the Chalk River Labs. And for a four-year-old boy uprooted from the English Midlands, moving there must have been a grand adventure.

  Williams was born on March 7, 1963, in the small town of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, southwest of Birmingham, where both his parents attended university after marrying in Wales the year before. Russell’s father, Cedric David Williams—Dave was the forename he used all his life—had emerged from his studies as a skilled metallurgist. In an era when most Britons could readily immigrate to Canada if they chose, opportunity beckoned in the shape of a job offer from AECL. So, in early 1968, the Williams family—Dave, Christine, Russell and Harvey—packed their bags and launched their rather strange new life.

  Constructed amid great secrecy and built in part by German prisoners of war, the Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratories were created in 1944 by the federal government as part of the nuclear Manhattan Project, which created the A-bomb. The basic idea, enthusiastically promoted by Winston Churchill, was that U.S. and British know-how would fuse with Canadian uranium, all in a suitably isolated location. Deep River was the company town built to house the scientists and their families who poured in.

  To this day the myth persists that Chalk River was the source of the plutonium in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In fact, the war had ended by the time the first Chalk River nuclear activity began. Nonetheless, it remained for many years a highly enigmatic enterprise. Both Deep River and Chalk River were patrolled by armed guards, with access to either place controlled by military checkpoints. Deliberately placed upwind and upriver from Chalk River to avoid possible fallout from its reactors, Deep River sits between the Trans-Canada Highway and the Ottawa River, about 125 miles northwest of Ottawa and a 45-minute drive from the big Petawawa army base.

  Everything in Deep River was meticulously planned—so much so that years before the Williams family arrived, its critics mocked it as sterile, artificial and oppressive. In a jaundiced and now-famous article in Maclean’s magazine in 1958, author Peter Newman painted a picture of a community that could sometimes be stifling, likening Deep River to “a utopian attempt to create a happy environment where all is ordered for the best.” The writer quoted a poem penned by a resident that mocked Deep River’s entrenched sense of good order:

  Although the town is trim and neat,

  With cozy houses on every street,

  Though saying so is indiscreet,

  I hate it.

  But the poet was assuredly in the minority among the mostly urban-educated professionals who lived in and around Deep River. Writing in 1970 as Deep River marked its twenty-fifth anniversary, visiting Globe and Mail reporter Rudy Platiel marveled at what he called “a town with few parallels.” He noted the energetic volunteerism, the busy library, the enthusiasm at the weekly newspaper, and the scores of clubs and social groups—everything from yachting and drama to track and field, curling, bridge and a symphony orchestra whose conductor doubled as a neutron physicist. “This town is clubbed to death, always has been,” according to Hickey the realtor. “Access to the big city didn’t used to be what it is today, and people made do with what they had.”

  In short, Dave Williams and his family had arrived in a small town with a sophisticated urban feel to it, full of skilled professionals with high expectations. The work was steady, the money was good, and home was a big three-bedroom duplex on Le Caron Street that the Williamses bought in March 1968, the same month Russell turned five.

  An elderly English-born widow who lived in the other half of the duplex at the time and is still in Deep River today remembers his parents as standoffish and aloof. Russell, however, was a lively, friendly little boy who would chat across the fence, sometimes in very English-oriented slang. One time he solemnly informed her that his younger brother, Harvey, had just “spent a penny” in the garden flowers, a euphemism for relieving oneself that was dated even then. Like everyone else who learned of his arrest four decades later, the former neighbor was horrified by the news. “He was a smart kid, very smart. I don’t know where he went wrong, but something went wrong. I hope they throw the book at him.”

  No less stunned was retired teacher Erma Wesanko, who taught Williams in the kindergarten class at Deep River’s T.W. Morison Public School. A snowbird, she was vacationing in Florida when she got word. “It was a tremendous shock, quite a surprise. His name rang bells when I heard it, and when I saw his picture I absolutely remembered him as this little blond boy I had known. I could just picture him. He was a quiet little boy. I can’t remember him being tremendously outgoing. He was just a normal little boy, very attractive, gorgeous really. It’s just a very sad story. It hurts me terribly to think about how this could happen to someone.”

  Wesanko remembers her teaching days in the community with great fondness. “Deep River was such a great place for children, a safe town with all kinds of activities and all kinds of things to do.”

  But beneath the smooth veneer of familial stability was an undercurrent of turbulence, barely concealed then and today widely acknowledged: a permissive 1960s sexual ethos was flourishing in the community. “It was like Peyton Place [the New England town in the classic novel about the sordid secrets that lie beneath a placid exterior], quite a little den of iniquity. People were trading partners and sleeping with one another’s wives,” says retired schoolteacher Dianne Murphy, who also taught at Morison when Williams attended.

  Many marriages ruptured, “and a lot of people stayed with their new partners,” Murphy remembers. “They had what they called the Key Club, and quite a few people participated. A lot of the professionals would have been involved, more than the techies. The population was heavily loaded with British immigrants, and there was a certain kind of class system that was incorporated into this town. Some neighborhoods were designed exclusively for the professionals, others were for the tech people.”

  Karen Bigras, too, recalls the Key Club, a conduit for wife swapping. A participant would go to a party at the club with his or her spouse and then leave with someone else’s partner. Bigras first heard about these goings-on when she was seven. “You put your keys in a hat. My parents were shocked and horrified when they found out about it. They had been asked to join.”

  Retired family therapist Peter Addison, who spent six years as chief counselor at the Deep River high school, knew both of Williams’s parents and tried unsuccessfully to help them when their marriage faltered. “It was an exciting time, it was all happening, this nuclear thing was going to be their salvation,” he says of the Deep River residents. But Addison also recalls a social milieu that was “neurotic as hell,” in which sexual experimentation seemed to blend with an adherence to conventional middle-class values. “It was a strange society. None of that free-spirited stuff was as free-spirited as it appeared to outsiders. The parents were pretty traditional. Some of them didn’t understand why kids would have a choice about what they wanted to do. I remember arguing with parents when kids would want to drop Latin or something. It would be, ‘No, they can’t do that.’ ”

  Some who lived in Deep River at the time remember Williams’s father, David, as a loud, authoritarian figure who would insult his wife in front of others and insisted on having his way. Neither parent was overtly affectionate, several people said; both seemed preoccupied with their busy lives. “Russell’s mother would come down to the [Yacht and Tennis] Club and leave him on his own to play on the waterfront,” remembers a former resident who was a few years older than Russell and knew the family. “Frankly, the teenagers at the club really did not like the father at all. He became the subject of many pranks. He had a quick, sharp temper and was easily provoked.”

  How much impact any of this had on Williams’s psyche and how much it shaped his future life is subject for speculation. What is certain is that his home
life was soon going to change radically.

  Living on Birch Street a couple of blocks from the Williams house was another family drawn to Deep River by the Chalk River project: Jerry and Marilynn Sovka and their three young children. An Alberta-born nuclear physicist, the son of Czech immigrants, Jerry Sovka was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he too had attended the University of Birmingham, on a scholarship, which is where he may have first met Christine Williams. “Jerry Sovka was very much involved with the Yacht and Tennis Club—and many other things,” says retired AECL electrical engineer Bill Bishop, who has lived in Deep River since 1967. “He was a very social person, maybe too much so. He was a ladies’ man, he liked women, he had an air about him. He was a real hustler.”

  The Williamses and Sovkas were close, and nowhere more so than at the Deep River Yacht and Tennis Club, the epicentre of social life where live rock bands often played on Saturday nights. The club also had a reputation as a “meet market.” (Some people had a less genteel term: the Deep River Twat and Penis Club.) “The Brits brought—I won’t say peculiarities—but they brought a freer kind of attitude,” opines another long-ago Deep River resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If you went to a dance, you didn’t just dance with your wife, you danced with three or four other partners … It was socially accepted in Britain, probably an offshoot from the postwar years. It was pre-Woodstock, but the acceptable threshold was steadily winding its way down. It was just a very fluid marital scene in some circles. I don’t know what was going on behind closed doors, but at the yacht club dances, for example, they were definitely pushing the envelope.”