A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  It would be Williams’s first and only spell both in the Middle East and in a war zone, and he appears to have thrived at Camp Mirage. He already had a “Secret” security clearance (as opposed to “Top Secret”), which was deemed sufficient for his new duties. He underwent no additional background screening for the posting.

  He was taking charge of an air base as busy as some major European airports, a conduit for flights that streamed in day and night. In all, well over 200,000 passengers have passed through Mirage since it was created in 2002, and when Williams was there most of them arrived and left aboard the aging CC-130 Hercules transport planes that were the backbone of the Canadian war mission, whose hub was Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan. A former air force officer under his command at Mirage described the new CO’s performance as “fantastic,” saying he appeared comfortable under pressure and was adept at juggling several balls at the same time, always with good humor. And the pace was nonstop, frequently requiring Williams to put in an eighty-hour week.

  Camp Mirage’s primary function was as a transit point for troops starting or ending six- or nine-month tours of duty. But many Canadian VIPs came and went too, as did soldiers and dignitaries from allied countries. There were also the occasional ramp ceremonies for soldiers who died in Afghanistan—one when their bodies arrived at Mirage and a second when they were sent on to Trenton and then Toronto, for a final autopsy.

  There was no combat role for the Camp Mirage personnel (hence no possibility that the genesis of Williams’s crimes was some type of post-traumatic stress disorder) and from a distance a stint there might have looked like easy street. In fact, it was highly demanding. Air maintenance was the chief task of the rotating 300 to 400 officers deployed to Mirage for six months at a time, drawn from air bases in Winnipeg, Greenwood, Trenton, Cold Lake, Comox and Bagotville. Also on hand were communications experts, an intelligence unit, military police and civilian support staff. Troops had access to a well-run mess hall, shared with other coalition troops, phone cards, an Internet area, a recreation room, a music room and even a scuba club.

  Among those who served at Camp Mirage, three years before Williams arrived, was Corporal Marie-France Comeau, whom he would later rape and murder in her Brighton home. She was part of Operation Apollo, the first group of Canadian soldiers to land in Afghanistan, and was deployed as a traffic technician, driving a forklift truck to load and unload cargo and drawing widespread admiration for her hard work and unflagging good spirits.

  Up the road for the handful of senior officers able to pay regular visits was safe, West-friendly Dubai. But the working conditions at Mirage were often brutal, encompassing long work weeks and blistering temperatures that could reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit. In the hottest months, the Persian Gulf humidity was so extreme that much of the work had to be done at night.

  As base commander, Williams oversaw everything, from day-to-day duties such as the fire detail, medical detail, kitchen duties and the computer system to the constantly shifting arrivals and departures schedules. Everything was to run like clockwork, he insisted, and for the most part it did. In addition, he had to travel regularly within the region—to the Kandahar base, which he visited at least once a month, to Abu Dhabi, the U.A.E. capital, and sometimes to Qatar, for consultations with senior U.S. military officials based there. It was all very much like being a mini wing commander—a continuous, highly visible job.

  Nonetheless, after the murder and sex-assault charges were laid against Williams, voices in the blogosphere speculated that perhaps in his off-hours at Mirage—a tour that wrapped up in June 2006, fifteen months before his first acknowledged break-in—he found time to commit crimes in the Dubai region, possibly other murders. One conspiracy theory that briefly gained attention suggested that a military policeman’s unexpected suicide at Camp Mirage while Williams was there might have occurred because the officer had discovered something suspicious about his boss—liaisons with prostitutes in Dubai, for example, who for a high price were definitely available.

  There’s no evidence whatever to support this thesis, and two factors weigh against it. First, Williams’s existence at Mirage was highly regulated, and he was rarely out of view. Every six weeks, the Camp Mirage commander had a 48-hour rest and recreation break off the base, but because of the importance of his job, he would never have been alone. And during those short spells, Garrett Lawless says, “everybody would always need to know how to contact you.”

  Second, the trajectory of Williams’s admitted crimes began with dozens of break-ins committed when the homeowners were almost invariably absent, a pattern that continued for two full years (September 2007 to September 2009) before spiking up sharply and accelerating into sexual assault and finally murder. It is conceivable and in fact very likely that long before Williams carried out the first burglary with which he was charged, targeting a family who lived near his cottage in Tweed, his obsession with women’s underwear had manifested itself—perhaps as voyeurism, or sneaking into a bedroom during a house party. And he may well have committed earlier burglaries too. But it seems improbable he did anything illegal in Dubai. One of the hallmarks of his later crimes was that they all took place within what could be called a comfort zone—close to his home, involving people whose movements he had carefully tracked. He had no opportunity to do that kind of research in Dubai, even if had wanted to. Rather, Williams told police—and for the most part they believed him—that it was during his next posting, back in Ottawa, that he first started breaking the law.

  Williams’s six-month spell at Camp Mirage, with regular side trips to Afghanistan, earned him the circular-shaped South-West Asia Service Medal (Canada). He wore it alongside his Canadian Forces Decoration, an award given to all members of the military who have completed twelve years of good service. Following his criminal convictions in October 2010, he would be stripped of both, together with his rank, and the medals were shredded.

  Back in Canada, still a lieutenant-colonel, he commenced a desk job that was physically much less taxing than his eighty-hour weeks in the desert but no less critical to the air force. In July 2006 he was appointed to the dull-sounding Directorate of Air Requirements, the agency that oversees the acquisition of new airplanes and other major assets. As within any other technically oriented organization, the work flow is constant, as new planes displace older ones and decisions are made about what will be needed in the future, what can be dispensed with and what can be afforded. The job requires both nuts-and-bolts expertise with respect to the planes and other equipment and an acute business acumen, since much of the work involves negotiating with airplane builders and other manufacturers, both domestic and foreign. Many up-and-coming air force officers spend time at DAR.

  Williams’s particular mandate was to oversee and advise regarding the acquisition of two types of new heavy-lift aircraft: four Boeing CC-177 Globemaster transports (a Conservative election pledge) and a much bigger fleet of C-130J Hercules planes. New search-and-rescue planes were also in the pipeline.

  There was another key way in which Williams’s new posting in Ottawa differed from his job at Camp Mirage. When he left at the end of the day, and headed either to his Orleans home on Wilkie Drive or to the cottage in Tweed that he used on weekends, nobody was watching him.

  6

  OVER THE THRESHOLD

  Williams spent two and a half years with the Directorate of Air Requirements in Ottawa, working under Lieutenant-General Angus Watt, who would later recommend his promotion to full colonel.

  Williams was “unusually calm, very logical and rational and able to produce good-quality staff work in a fairly short time, which is a valued commodity in Ottawa,” Watt later told the CBC’s Fifth Estate program. “You have to be good with people and you really have to be a good leader. You have to be good with the administration, you have to be good with the media, and good with the public. It all has to come together in a package that gives us confidence that you will do well as wing commander,
and Russ had all of that package … Is there something that we did or didn’t do that would have given us a clue [as to his dark side]? Everybody’s had the same reaction—there was no clue.”

  At the DAR operation in Ottawa, he left very much the same impression. “Russ was ahead of the curve. He didn’t just see the day-by-day stuff landing on his desk—he was anticipating what’s going to be coming next, in terms of possible problems,” says another air force officer who worked with Williams at the same time. “The Globemasters were pretty much a done deal when he got to DAR—it would have been a big surprise if they hadn’t gone through—but the amount of technical know-how that went with them was vast. These are complicated airplanes, and he was totally on top of it. I’m sure he didn’t enjoy doing a desk job as much as he liked flying, but you never heard him complain, he was cheerful. I guess he knew that if you wanted to keep going up and make [the rank of] full colonel, DAR was a place where you had to pay some dues.”

  But one of his neighbors in Orleans, George White, recalls Williams’s demeanor changing perceptibly at around this time, which White put down to the new job. “He became more secretive when he had the job downtown with the Directorate of Air Requirements. That was the environment in which I spent eighteen years, on the civilian side, and so I knew a bit of what was going on. At his level he would be reviewing the specs and making sure they would be presented the right way to the minister. But it also involved knowing the business side, making sure that in the contract all the T’s were crossed and the I’s dotted, to convince the minister that we’ve got to get these airplanes. He was a member of that team, but we never discussed it. I would say, ‘Hard day at work?’ and he would say, ‘Oh yeah.’ He never brought his work home, it was just idle chitchat.”

  The aircraft projects Williams was overseeing went through almost entirely as planned. In February 2007, the federal government signed a contract with the Chicago-based Boeing Company for four CC-177 Globemasters, and delivery began six months later. The C-17, as it is abbreviated, is a hulking military transport plane designed to haul both people and cargo, and is also used by the armed forces of the United States, Great Britain and Australia. By April 2008, all four Globemasters had arrived at 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, where Williams took command nine months later. Nor did any major problems arise over the deal with Lockheed Martin for the big new Hercules airlifters. In January 2008, Ottawa signed a $1.4-billion contract with the Bethesda, Maryland, manufacturer for seventeen new CC-130Js, to replace the existing CC-130E and H models. The first CC-130J arrived at CFB Trenton in June 2010, four months after Williams’s arrest.

  In sum, there appear to have been no significant work-related pressures that might have had any bearing on the colonel’s seemingly momentous decision to commit his first acknowledged break-in, fourteen months after he arrived at DAR.

  On the second weekend of September 2007, Williams drove the 125 miles from Ottawa to his rural retreat on Cosy Cove Lane. Living close by was a family—father, mother, son and daughter—who probably knew Williams and his wife better than most people in Tweed. Few local residents were even aware of the low-profile 8 Wing commander, but this family certainly liked him. The two couples had bought their cottages at around the same time, and Williams and Harriman had visited the family’s home on several occasions for dinner. In the summer months they had sat together outside overlooking the lake, playing cards.

  After Williams was arrested, many former neighbors would say that the colonel’s relationship with Harriman had seemed stiff and formal, a marriage of convenience perhaps. But possibly this particular husband and wife put Williams and Harriman at ease, because the wife later spoke of a couple who seemed genuinely devoted to each other, and sometimes could be seen strolling, holding hands. And if the parents liked Williams, so did their teenage son and younger daughter. Williams sometimes took the children tubing, pulling them around Stoco Lake in his outboard-powered boat. The boy had an interest in guitar, which Williams encouraged, and in the summer of 2009 the daughter would be given a key to Williams and Harriman’s cottage so she could look after the couple’s new cat, Rosebud.

  Now, in September 2007, at the age of twelve, the girl became the first target of the family’s trusted friend.

  Williams broke into the family’s home twice, and possibly three times, that month, always while they were away. And like virtually everyone else in Tweed whose homes he invaded over the next two years, they never noticed anything missing and had no idea they had been robbed. Not until several weeks after Williams was arrested in February 2010 did they learn to their horror what their neighbor had been doing.

  That first break-in took place in the late hours of September 8 and early hours of September 9, a Saturday/Sunday. Twenty-five time-stamped photographs Williams took and stored on his computer hard drive in Ottawa show that after entering the family’s house through an unlocked door, he was there for more than two and a half hours, all of that time spent in the girl’s bedroom. While he was there, he established a pattern that he would often replicate during his scores of subsequent break-ins in Tweed and Ottawa: he rooted through the girl’s underwear drawer, stripped naked and posed for his carefully positioned camera, draping her clothing around his erect penis and ejaculating on it. On leaving this, his first victim’s house, he took with him six pieces of underwear.

  He came back three weeks later, either once or twice, again arriving late at night. The first twenty photos—all similar to the ones he took the first time—were made before and after midnight on September 28. Then, shortly after eight o’clock the next morning, he took twenty-two more, suggesting he either returned or had spent the night in the girl’s bedroom. Many more pictures were taken that day, both inside the girl’s bedroom and outside in some nearby woodland, where Williams photographed himself naked wearing her underwear.

  The template was set, and in several ways these first two (or three) break-ins are illustrative. They took place on weekends under cover of darkness while the homeowners were away, a modus operandi over the next two years that goes some way toward explaining how he was able to lead his double life. In all, Williams ultimately pleaded guilty to 82 burglaries, encompassing many return trips to the same houses, plus two sexual assaults and two murders, these last four also starting as break-ins. (Two counts of forcible confinement raised the total number of charges to 88.) Of those 86 intrusions in Tweed, Ottawa, Belleville and Brighton, more than half took place on a Saturday or a Friday—28 and 18 respectively—and a further 18 occurred on a Thursday. Seven were on a Tuesday, 7 others on a Wednesday, 5 on a Sunday and just 3 on a Monday.

  Eight months later, in May 2008, Williams returned and broke into those same neighbors’ house yet again.

  Williams entered the dozens of homes he robbed by the path of least resistance. Often he walked through unlocked doors, especially in Tweed, where serious crime was almost unknown. Sometimes he forced a window sash or a screen, usually at the back of the house. If he had to, he could usually—not always—pick the lock, a skill that dated back to his university days. And he did his homework ahead of time, too, often scouting out targets while he was jogging. In and around Cosy Cove Lane, which is a long walk from the center of the village, with no bus service, an empty driveway was a giveaway.

  And this first clutch of burglaries also sheds light on Williams’s obsessive sexual interests, which drove his law-breaking from beginning to end, and which in large part focused on victims who were young. He told police that the preferred age of the women he targeted after doing his reconnaissance was late teens to early thirties. But of the 48 different homes he invaded, in 13 instances females aged under eighteen were either his sole or the joint target. And child pornography would be found on his computer.

  Although he many times posed for himself cross-dressing in women’s stolen underwear, he seems to have displayed no sexual interest whatever in boys or young men. The wearing of the underwear, often while he masturbated, looks to be an extension
of his need to invade his victims’ privacy in the most intimate way. His huge collection of photos included not only the pornographic ones, by far the majority, but also a much smaller number of shots—usually photos of photos hanging on bedroom walls—showing the victim in ordinary, everyday poses, as if the intruder wanted to have a trophy of that too, perhaps to enhance his pleasure when he got home.

  In the case of this first break-in, he photographed a news clipping showing the twelve-year-old at a Tweed Legion function, together with two classmates, holding what appears to be a certificate or plaque. Capturing innocent images of his unsuspecting victims, especially if they were young, was a hallmark of Williams’s perversity. After he later began expanding his raids to target houses near his home in Ottawa, he photographed himself masturbating in the bedroom of a girl aged about eleven, for instance, with her underwear spread out on her bed. But he also snapped four framed photos that he found in the house, showing three different young girls, none of whom appeared to be over the age of twelve. In another break-in, he photographed a young woman’s university degree hanging on her bedroom wall.

  The fact that Williams returned at least twice to that first house on Cosy Cove Lane also underscores the repetitive nature of his obsession. He hit numerous houses two or three times, and one, also near Cosy Cove Lane, he burgled on nine different occasions. There too, the homeowners knew nothing about it until he was arrested.

  His total haul almost defies belief. In all, he admitted to stealing and cataloging around 1,400 pieces of clothing, nearly all of it women’s lingerie, and in one raid alone he took 186 items. Some of his loot he destroyed, when the collection became too large to manage, but hundreds more pieces—barely hidden—were found at his Ottawa townhouse and Tweed cottage when they were searched by police. And along with the underwear were many of the thousands of photos he took, artfully concealed inside folders and subfolders within his computer system, together with a near-complete log of all his admitted crimes, recording the dates, the places, the nature of the offense and other details.