A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  Along with its success stories, UCC has had its share of scandal. In 2007 it dispatched a mass letter to all UCC graduates, staff and former staff, apologizing for a series of notorious, headline-grabbing incidents involving sexual and physical abuse that had rocked the school for years, first surfacing in the late 1990s. Five UCC staff members were charged with sex offenses, including possession of child pornography, and three were convicted. Later came a big lawsuit on behalf of eighteen former students. The school said in its letter that the crimes were the most difficult issue it had ever had to deal with, and some took place while the Williams brothers were there. There seems to be no evidence, however, that they were in any way affected, or that they even knew of the abuse.

  As he matured at UCC, Russ Sovka became more confident, which some interpreted as being stuck-up. “He didn’t have a lot of friends, zero social interaction. He pretty much played the trumpet and stuck to himself,” a former school roommate recounts. “He completely lacked any social skills whatsoever. I just can’t recall him having a single person he spent a lot of time with. In typical conversations, if there were subjects he had knowledge of, it was like he was above discussing them with you. He was creepy.” A hint of that arrogance can be gleaned from his graduation message in the 1982 UCC yearbook, in which he reprised the famous remark of trumpet legend Louis Armstrong: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”

  A much less harsh assessment comes from Innes van Nostrand, who also attended UCC in the years 1980–82 and went on to become its vice-principal, a post he holds today. “Russ was a fairly quiet, very responsible guy who didn’t really stand out per se, not a big extrovert. I think he was well enough liked. I would call him responsible and diligent. What teenagers are after in life is fitting in. The vast majority of them are driven by the desire to fit in, and he’d found an outlet through his music. The music program was booming at that stage, they’d brought in a couple of very dynamic music teachers, and a lot of people started getting really involved, and it was an area he did very well at.”

  Van Nostrand didn’t immediately recognize Williams’s name when the arrest took place; he always knew him as Russ Sovka. When he did make the connection, he was like just about everyone else who had ever had dealings with Williams: he was speechless, simply disbelieving that the pleasant young man he remembered stood accused not only of murder and sexual assault but of unleashing his terrifying violence on a soldier under his command. “I don’t think there’s anyone from [UCC] who could ever have imagined that if someone had done these kinds of crimes it would have been this guy. Some things are just stunning. I’d say this shows you can never be definitive about anyone.”

  Williams graduated from UCC in 1982, and the two brothers’ paths then diverged. Harvey was to head for Montreal’s McGill University and the beginnings of a career in medicine, while Russell enrolled at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. Russ’s two years at UCC had passed quickly and pleasantly. “He remembered it very fondly,” Jeff Farquhar says. “He said he had a lot of fun and he was very proud of his UCC ring, which he wore all through university. He seemed to have made some great relationships with teachers.”

  As far as is known, however, Williams didn’t maintain contact with a single person he had known at UCC, nor with any of the friends he had made at Birchmount. There is an online database for UCC alumni. At the time of his arrest, it listed Russell Sovka as “lost.”

  One person he did stay in touch with was his stepfather, Jerry Sovka, and the contact remained occasional but steady through most of his life, with Christmas greetings exchanged only a few weeks before he was arrested. At the time, Sovka was living in Aix-en-Provence, France, and was still working in the nuclear field.

  Williams’s adult relationship with his mother, Nonie, was much more distant. When he was arrested in February 2010, they had largely been out of touch for several years. Neither parent was willing to be interviewed for this book. In emails, both parents asked for privacy at what Nonie Sovka called “this terrible time.” Harvey Williams, now a medical doctor in Bowmanville, Ontario, issued a short statement to the many inquisitive news organizations struggling to piece together a profile of the killer colonel. In it, he attested that “a deep rift” had resulted from the 2001 separation of Jerry and Nonie Sovka. “We rarely had any contact until two years ago, when my mother and I tried to find a way to repair the family rift. We have had only minimal contact with him in the past two years.”

  Nonie Sovka did nonetheless attend what must have been an immensely proud occasion: the elaborate swearing-in that saw Williams take command of the 8 Wing/CFB Trenton air base in July 2009, the peak of her son’s 22-year military career. Also there, sitting separately on the other side of the podium in the bright sunshine, was her long-ago husband, David Williams.

  4

  DRILL SERGEANT

  In the fall of 1982, at the age of nineteen, Williams began a four-year arts course in politics and economics, from which he would graduate with a medium-level honors degree. As at UCC, his marks and classroom performance showed a good, competent student rather than a brilliant one. But he seems to have changed and matured at university. Conceivably his time at UCC had allowed him to loosen certain ties to his mother and stepfather, who would move from South Korea to Hawaii, where Jerry Sovka was hired as chief engineer overseeing the Canada–France–Hawaii telescope. What’s clear is that for the first time in his life Williams was living independently, free from the constraints of home and boarding school.

  Together with five other students, he moved into a brown-brick Scarborough College subsidized townhouse, unit C8. Former U of T roommates and staff portray a bolder, more gregarious Russ Williams, as he began calling himself (reclaiming his biological father’s name), than the quiet, serious UCC student. Certainly he looked different, with a longish shag haircut and a full beard that made him resemble Swedish tennis megastar Bjorn Borg, one of his idols.

  Politically, he seemed to gravitate from left to right during his four years at U of T, according to a former U of T staff member who taught Williams several classes and marked his papers. He began as a liberal and a big fan of Pierre Trudeau—who was in his final years as prime minister, long after Trudeaumania—but steadily became drawn toward the muscular conservatism of the Reagan administration, and its adventures in Grenada, Central America and the Middle East. Jeff Farquhar says he witnessed the same shift. (Later Williams became a staunch admirer of George W. Bush. A year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he wrote a curiously myopic thesis in defense of the mission, even as it sank into bloody chaos.)

  The six housemates varied widely in their academic pursuits, but as a group they quickly bonded. In their second year, five of the six moved together into another unit, and several remained friends after that. In both years, Williams lived on the top floors of the two townhouses, at his insistence. And from the outset he was the self-appointed organizer-in-chief, a neatness fanatic. The floors and furniture were kept so squeaky-clean that visitors would remark upon it; slippers had to be worn by the roommates, shoes left by the door; chores were allocated with a rigorous in-house schedule that earned its protagonist the nickname Drill Sergeant. The first clear signs of the obsessive-compulsiveness that would define such a large part of his character were becoming evident.

  He kept up links with his parents. The brothers spent Christmas of 1982 with their father, Dave, in Schenectady, N.Y., and the next year were reunited for the holidays with Jerry and Nonie Sovka in Scarborough. Twice Russell and Harvey also flew to Hawaii for Christmas visits and once Jerry Sovka’s own three children joined them there; the five youngsters spent at least one summer vacation together too.

  Yet Russell rarely spoke of his family and retained a strong air of loneliness, former university friends say. At the end of his first year at U of T he went on a solo cycling trip to England and Wales with a prized ten-speed bike and his camera. He took a bad fall, hurting his hand, but before te
nding to the wound he photographed it, later laughing it off.

  And indeed, a lighter side of his personality began to emerge. He never became a party animal, eschewing both drugs and booze except for the occasional beer, and usually heading off to bed before the other residents of C8. But he rapidly became known as an orchestrator of elaborate, often invasive practical jokes. Frequently the pranks were childish: hiding in a housemate’s closet, waiting for him to come home and settle down, and then springing out with a loud yell; saran-wrapping the top of a toilet bowl and daubing pretend cracks on a mirror; apple-pie beds, the top sheet refolded into a shallow crease so the victim’s feet rammed into it as he climbed in. Others were more creative, such as gluing pennies into a door frame so the knob wouldn’t turn. And in one memorable case—illustrative of a remarkable mechanical expertise that in later years made him an amateur authority on Swiss watches—Williams disassembled a front-door lock, adjusted the internal tumblers and then put it back together so it needed a different key.

  He delighted in seeing a hapless victim walk into one of his traps, and was famous for unleashing his loud, braying laugh when they did. But the others in C8 pulled similar stunts, and as they recall, it was all in fun. Another time Williams organized an ad hoc group of raucous musicians wielding garbage can lids and drumsticks. His trumpet blasting, he led them on a parade through the campus to the tune of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.”

  “He was very friendly and cheerful and he had a great sense of humor,” one of his former friends remembers. “At no time was there ever any suggestion that he was leading a double life, or that he had strange proclivities or tendencies, or was interested in violent porn—or porn, period.”

  Williams’s parents may have been well off, but there was not a lot of cash around and he was frugal, always keeping close track of expenditures. After even a modest evening out, he would return home and itemize the cost down to the last cent. But he didn’t mind spending money if he had to, and if he thought it was worth it. As the information age began accelerating in the early 1980s, Williams was one of the first among his peers to grasp the enormous potential of the personal computer. He bought one of the early ones, which served as word processors rather than Internet portals, along with a printer, and he mastered the technology with ease. He was quick to purchase a CD player too, when they arrived—a Sony; nothing but the best, scraping up the cash even if he couldn’t really afford it.

  Ever constant was his near-fanatical preoccupation with fitness—jogging, baseball, and punishing games of squash and tennis, of which he had an encyclopedic knowledge. Jeff Farquhar recounts watching Williams perform at a marathon tennis tournament in September 1982. “He played tennis that whole day, and it was a hot day, I remember, it was Indian summer. He kept winning match after match. And when he was done, he stopped like an engine without oil. Three of us guys in residence picked him up and carried him all the way up the hill to residence, and we dumped him in the bathtub and poured the water on him and shut the door.

  “And he was in there groaning and screaming, with leg cramps all the way up his leg. I’d never seen anybody like that—I laughed so hard. He was a big, lanky guy [Williams stood six foot two, with a lean, muscular build of about 180 pounds that hardly changed throughout his adult life]. Oh my God, he couldn’t move. I’ve never seen that kind of muscle fatigue in anybody.”

  There may have been a touch of recklessness, too. Another roommate walked into the kitchen to find Williams and a friend shooting off a BB gun, firing at objects floating in the sink, pellets ricocheting around the room. But there was no hint of malice or viciousness in anything Williams did, Farquhar insists. “He had a conscience, he always had a conscience. That’s what really leaves me stunned about this whole thing [the arrest and criminal charges]. Russ always had this strong sense of right and wrong.”

  For all his discipline, he was also quite capable of evincing emotion. Farquhar recounts the day in January 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger blew up and disintegrated off the coast of Florida, killing all seven crew members—this, at a time when Williams was nearing graduation and giving serious thought to becoming a pilot. “I remember that like it was yesterday. I was the guy with the TV. I had a little fourteen-inch color screen and I brought it out to the living room for everyone to share. Russ was so horrified. I remember he came running into the house. ‘Oh my God, did you hear, did you hear?’ And I was saying, ‘Yeah, that’s really sad, really horrible.’ But I’m looking at him like, wow, this reaction was almost over the top. He was really, really, really upset, just so in awe and in shock.”

  At around the same time, Williams experienced another, more personal upset. He had met Misa, a Japanese exchange student, toward the end of his first year at U of T and had fallen for her hard. They began seeing each other and for more than two years the tall Williams and his diminutive girlfriend were an item. By every estimate, he was devoted to her. But if the feelings were mutual, it didn’t show; years later, none of Williams’s former friends could recall seeing them hug or kiss.

  It was not his first fling. Shortly before starting at university he had dated a woman who now lives in British Columbia. He abruptly severed the relationship, leaving her heartbroken. But with Misa it was the other way around. She told him they were through, and he took the news very badly. One former friend said it was the only time he ever saw him cry.

  The rupture’s long-term impact on Williams is guesswork. Certainly it became of great interest to Ontario Provincial Police detectives after he was arrested and it had become evident that every one of his dozens of horrifying crimes was directed at women.

  Tracked down in Japan by Globe and Mail reporter Greg McArthur almost a quarter century later, Misa knew that her long-ago companion had been arrested and charged with murder and sexual assault, but she declined comment, saying she had nothing to add. “All I can say is, whatever my experience was, I don’t think it will be of any use [to you],” she told McArthur. It’s nonetheless clear that this was Williams’s first serious romance, and probably his last until he met his future wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, whom he would marry in 1991.

  Along with other residents of unit C8, Jeff Farquhar didn’t much care for Misa, who he says seemed to have an oddly intimidating effect on the normally controlling, assertive Williams. “She ran him like a whipped horse,” he says. “It was always her way or the highway, and he was always trying to acquiesce—what she wanted to do or not want to do. She always wanted to hit the books harder and didn’t have a lot of time left over for Russ, so there was always an argument about finding time to do things together.”

  Another ex-roommate describes an incident when he needed to speak to Williams and stopped by the home of Misa, also in residence. “I knocked on the door and I was told by the other women that Russ and [Misa] were up in her room. So jokingly I said, ‘Russ, put your clothes on and come down.’ Well, he didn’t come down and then I found out a few days later that he and his girlfriend were very upset that I had made a comment like that, which quite surprised me. I made a point of apologizing to him and to her.”

  The breakup with Misa sent Williams into a depression, according to Farquhar, and he struggled to achieve a reconciliation. He sent her a dozen long-stemmed roses, and would hover around places on campus where he knew she would be. But she sent the roses back, and even entreated Farquhar—by no means a friend of hers—to persuade Williams to back off. “She was getting really pissed,” Farquhar says.

  When it became evident to Williams that the separation was permanent, he was inconsolable. “I don’t know of him dating anybody after Misa, not at all,” says Farquhar. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t well liked—God, I mean a lot of women liked him because he was a great guy. The only time I ever pushed him was if there was an event or an upcoming dinner at the university and you were expected to have a date. And Russ would say, ‘No, not going.’ ”

  Williams was not the only student on the Scarborough cam
pus with some serious issues involving women. One year behind him, also pursuing an economics-related course, was a blond, fresh-faced student destined to become the most notorious sex killer of his generation. His name was Paul Bernardo, and he was convicted in 1995 on two counts of first-degree murder and multiple other charges, including two of aggravated sexual assault, in which he used a knife. So heinous were his crimes, and so numerous, that he was designated a dangerous offender, a classification that reduces parole possibilities to almost nothing.

  Bernardo committed at least eleven extremely violent rapes—probably many more—and most of them occurred in the large Toronto suburb of Scarborough, generating widespread local terror and earning him his pre-arrest nickname, the Scarborough Rapist. Trial testimony from his wife and accomplice Karla Homolka (convicted of manslaughter and released after serving out a full twelve-year prison term) strongly suggests Bernardo was responsible for a long-term pattern of sex attacks that were never solved. The first two attacks for which he was convicted took place in Scarborough on May 4 and 14, 1987, a few weeks before he graduated from U of T with a degree in commerce and economics. After Williams was arrested in February 2010, an imaginative newspaper story that garnered widespread attention amid the saturation coverage speculated on the basis of comments from an invisible police source that the two killers may have been “pals” who had partied together or had even “competed against each other.”

  There’s not a shred of evidence to support this thesis. Williams and Bernardo graduated in different years (not both in 1987, as the story stated) and there is nothing to indicate they ever met. Toronto police swiftly examined the ostensible connection and drew a blank. So too does Farquhar, who says today that if Williams had known Bernardo, he would have been aware of Bernardo too, and he was not. The author of the newspaper article even consulted Bernardo, via his father, to see if he could recall a Russell Williams from his Scarborough university days. Bernardo (always glad of a diversion as he serves out a sentence of life imprisonment in solitary confinement) told his father he did not.