A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  After his first repeat trip to his neighbors’ home on Cosy Cove Lane, Williams waited a few weeks before striking again. Once more it was on a weekend in Tweed, close to his home, and once more he broke into the same residence twice, stealing thirteen undergarments and a bathing suit. But this pair of early burglaries stands out from the others.

  The burglary at the second house is the only known time that Williams came close to being caught in the act, inside someone’s house. The home belonged to a couple with twin eleven-year-old daughters, and nobody was home at the time, as the family was attending an evening after-dark barbecue at a neighbor’s house. But when the parents briefly returned to pick up a couple of items, they noticed a tall intruder inside, wearing a hoodie, shorts and running shoes. He ran into the woods and they chased him, without result. They noticed nothing missing, and only reported the burglary ten days later when they heard of another break-in, which proved to be unrelated.

  That house belonged to the adult daughter of Williams’s Cosy Cove Lane neighbor Larry Jones. Two years later, as we have seen, Jones would become a suspect in the two sex assaults Williams went on to commit. This abortive break-in, however, which Williams would later describe to police as “a close call,” appears to have had no bearing on Jones’s future troubles, and looks to have been no more than coincidence, one in a rash of burglaries Williams carried out in the immediate area.

  As with the multiple break-ins he would later commit in Ottawa, the proximity to his own home provided Williams with an excellent fallback card in the event he was spotted on or near someone’s property. He would simply have been able to say: “I was passing by and saw something suspicious, so I thought I should check.” And who would have doubted him? He was, after all, the colonel in charge of the most important air base in Canada. As Jones put it, with regard to the break-in at his daughter’s house: “If I would have seen Russ Williams walking on the trail back there [near the house], I’d have said, ‘Russ, did you see a kid running through here?’ ”

  Perhaps the close call gave Williams a fright, because after committing one more break-in on November 1, he abruptly ceased for more than four months before resuming on March 15, 2008, the longest gap in his two and a half years of home invasions. When he did start again, the pattern was the same. All ten of the first Tweed burglaries occurred within a short walk of Williams’s cottage, and all showed the same grotesque behavior: intrusions into homes while the owners were out, protracted masturbation sessions where he cavorted and posed for the camera with his underwear trophies, and then the theft of those items, often a dozen or more stuffed into bags he had brought with him, before he slunk off into the night. Almost all the first Tweed burglaries took place around the weekend; during the week, while he continued to work at DAR, he lived at his home on Wilkie Drive in the Orleans area of Ottawa.

  Then, in May 2008, eight months after the first break-in in Tweed, his focus abruptly widened. The predator grew bolder, and began targeting houses in Orleans. As with almost all the Tweed burglaries, they were close to his own home, and once again he used his regular jogging routine for reconnaissance missions.

  But the Orleans neighborhood of Fallingbrook where Wilkie Drive is located is an urban subdivision of neat, curving streets, in contrast to the houses on and around rural Cosy Cove Lane in Tweed, which typically could be approached from several sides. Most of the 34 thefts and attempted thefts in Orleans, involving 25 different homes, required Williams to make his approach from the front of the house, walking up the side driveway and then usually gaining entry from the back; in only a couple of instances was he able to approach from the rear, through parkland. He was no less stealthy, because he was never caught in the act, although at least once he had to flee when he was spotted trying to force a window at a house on Apollo Way, close to his own home.

  Another difference between the two locales where the break-ins were carried out is that the Orleans homeowners were much more rigorous about keeping their houses locked up, meaning that in a number of instances Williams had to force his way inside. As well, his quest for trophies was gathering pace and he started stealing more items, in one case raiding a house that was home to a mother and two daughters and grabbing every piece of underwear they owned. As a result of such wanton theft, almost two-thirds of the Orleans break-ins did get reported to Ottawa police. Of the 25 homes Williams raided in Orleans over the next fourteen months, about 15 of the owners filed a report, although often not right away. In many instances, however, the owners were unable to say whether anything had been stolen.

  While the Ottawa police had no idea who might be responsible, it was plain that a prowler was on the loose, and in October 2008 an investigation was launched, deploying undercover cops who watched the street from unmarked cars and posed as residents out for a late night stroll.

  Among the homes broken into in Orleans was that of retired couple Patty and Milt Mitchelmore, who live on Caminiti Crescent, a couple of blocks from Williams’s home on Wilkie Drive. It was in August 2008, and they had just returned from their cottage when they noticed that a screen was missing from one of the dining room windows, and that there was dirt from the garden on the hardwood floor below the window. As well, a side door was unlocked, marking the burglar’s departure.

  The Mitchelmores looked through the house and found nothing missing (Williams had left empty-handed) but reported the incident to police anyway. “The police constable did a tour of the house inside, and then he found the screen hidden in some shrubs in the backyard,” Patty Mitchelmore says. “We have patio furniture on the deck in the backyard, and apparently one of the patio chairs had been put in the garden so the intruder could use it to get in, because the constable could see the markings of the four feet of the chair, though the chair had been returned to its place.”

  Two years later, she could joke about the incident. “Maybe he didn’t find anything he wanted.” She was, nonetheless, extremely unnerved when, a few weeks after Williams was arrested on charges of murder and sexual assault, she was told he had been in her home. “If we’d noticed anything missing, if I’d seen my underwear spread out on the bed, that would have had much more of an impact than seeing some dirt on a hardwood floor. So we were grateful, thinking that maybe we’d arrived home at just the right time.”

  On the last day of October 2008, Ottawa police issued a warning urging the public to be vigilant, after two break-ins that month that they described as unusual. “It should be noted that the only items taken in the two Break & Enters were women’s undergarments,” the statement read. “Due to the peculiar nature of these incidents, the Ottawa Police wishes to remind the public to be vigilant and ensure that they secure their home at all times.”

  As part of their investigation, Ottawa police also revisited some older, possibly related cases, including a January 2005 double break-in at a high-rise building on the west side of Ottawa, where dozens of women’s undergarments were stolen by someone described as a tall, clean-cut man in his thirties. No connection to Williams was ever established with that or any other break-ins beyond his tightly circumscribed comfort zone of Fallingbrook.

  Meanwhile, some additional expertise was called in, in the shape of Detective Sergeant Jim Van Allen, a seasoned criminal profiler attached to the OPP’s Orillia-based Behavioural Sciences and Analyses Services unit who has taken a role in hundreds of murder and sex-assault investigations. Van Allen’s task was to assess the disparate information about the break-ins and make a highly educated guess as to the type of person responsible. He didn’t like what he saw at all.

  The intruder was becoming more aggressive, even as he stealthily evaded detection. In one Orleans home, he left a message on the home computer taunting the occupants by telling them he had been there. In another, he left a trail of leaves leading into the house. In a third, he placed on the floor a photograph of the woman whose underwear he had stolen and he masturbated on it.

  “He was messaging the victims and the victims�
� family by disturbing their living space, and he was getting a kick out of it,” says Van Allen, who has since retired after thirty-one years with the OPP and is now a criminal profiling consultant in the private sector. “I look at all behavior on a continuum, and one of the things I’m seeing here is this: He could have just stolen the underwear off of a clothesline or something like that, but he’s getting into the homes. He’s in the beds, he’s trying the underwear on, and I see that as a psychological movement toward the victims’ bodies.”

  In hindsight, Van Allen is unsurprised that Williams went on to rape and kill, although he says the speed at which Williams raced up the sexual deviance ladder is startling. “The guy we were looking for was right in that neighborhood, and the frequency of the break-ins and the repetitiveness showed he had this arrogance. And I thought: ‘This is a guy who could escalate.’ You can’t forecast whether it will be days, weeks, months or ever, but it certainly suggested he was going to continue in that manner. I concluded that he seemed to be very careful about avoiding contact with people, but that anytime that changed, the danger of a hands-on sexual assault would go right up.”

  The geography of the burglaries, all clustered in the Fallingbrook subdivision, underlined the likelihood of there being a single predator who lived in the neighborhood. But who he might be, the Ottawa police and Van Allen had no idea until Williams was arrested. And there was no predictable time pattern. More than once a cluster of burglaries was followed by a long pause before the next one took place.

  For a while, suspicion in Ottawa centered on a local man who had been charged with possessing child pornography. When police spoke to him, he reacted very cagily, and shortly afterward a pile of burned lingerie was found in a nearby field, marking one of two occasions when Williams disposed of some of his loot. “It was very coincidental, and it didn’t do much to help eliminate this guy,” remarks Van Allen. But when a further break-in occurred while the suspect was under police surveillance, it became clear he was not responsible.

  If Williams was worried about the October 31 police alert, it didn’t show, although he had by now begun monitoring the Ottawa police website as it tracked and publicized the mounting number of occurrences. On November 4 he raided another house in Tweed, and then on the 12th he struck in Orleans again, with another break-in following on the 20th. Then came three more in December and three more in January 2009, all while the area was under police scrutiny.

  It was in January 2009 that Williams’s career trajectory passed another milestone, his spell at DAR complete.

  Still a lieutenant-colonel, he was posted to the Canadian Forces Language School at the Asticou Centre in Gatineau, across the river from downtown Ottawa and fifteen miles from his home in Orleans. There he spent the next six months immersed in learning French, an essential step toward reaching the next rank of full colonel. The CFLS is a big operation, currently providing more than two-thirds of all the language training for the Canadian Forces. Commanded by a lieutenant-colonel who oversees about 200 civilian teachers and administrative staff and a further 30 or so military members, the curriculum blends classroom instruction with written exercises and tests, conversation and one-on-one tutoring.

  It wasn’t Williams’s first stab at learning French; he had acquired some basics years earlier while training for the Challenger jet in St-Jean, Quebec. But this was far more intense, and he emerged reasonably proficient. “Russ really enjoyed learning French,” recalls Jeff Farquhar, who himself is fluent in both French and German. “In what I think was our last telephone conversation, in the fall [of 2009], we conversed primarily in French as practice. He threw in the odd local slang, which he had picked up from someone either in class or from someone in town. He definitely had fun with it, but he was always self-critical about his English accent coming through. He paid careful attention to the grammatical side, as per class, but he knew that he needed more ‘immersion’ to truly speak and understand it well … There would be long pauses at times, broken finally by his laughing and saying, ‘Pardon, qu’est-ce que tu as dit?’ [Sorry, what did you say?] Then he would say words to the effect: ‘Man, I’ll never get this down like you!’ He would pick my brain, how I picked it up and what worked for me in helping to memorize grammar rules, et cetera. He took it all very seriously and with great ambition.”

  Though nobody at the time could have had the least inkling, Williams’s diligent efforts to become fluent in French would later have a direct bearing on the sex slaying of Corporal Marie-France Comeau, his first murder victim.

  His secret nighttime life, meanwhile, had taken a couple of alarming turns. Photos Williams took at the time of a November 2008 burglary in Ottawa and carefully stored and concealed on his computer show his perversity reaching new levels. The dwelling he broke into was the home of two children, including a fifteen-year-old girl. In all, he stole twenty-two pieces of clothing: panties, bras, a bathing suit and a nightshirt. And as usual, he took scores of photographs. A total of seventy pictures show him with a pair of panties bearing a menstrual bloodstain. In the pictures, Williams is seen wearing, licking, kissing and finally ejaculating on it. When a couple of the photos were shown in court at the sentencing hearing that followed his guilty plea, spectators shuddered, turning their heads away and gasping in shock.

  He was also becoming more brazen, even reckless. During a December break-in he committed on his own street in Orleans, Wilkie Drive, he left footprints in the snow leading up to the back patio door, which he damaged, along with several window locks.

  Shortly thereafter, on the first and second days of January 2009—the same month Williams began taking French lessons—he twice hit a house on Cara Crescent, a few minutes’ walk from Wilkie Drive. This too was the home of a fifteen-year-old girl, robbed of dozens of pieces of lingerie. But Williams also stole many of the girl’s personal photographs, including headshots done for a modeling agency, together with a piece of paper containing lip-gloss lip-prints. Other items in her bedroom, such as paintings, had been altered and moved. When the Ottawa police examined the room, they also found dried semen in her underwear drawer. When the physical evidence came to light, one of the many photos Williams had taken inside her bedroom showed him holding her makeup brush to his penis as he gazes steadily into the camera. He left the makeup brush behind.

  The double break-ins left the girl so frightened that she began sleeping in the spare room with her dog. Williams, meanwhile, marked the occasion differently. On the computer records he kept of his intrusions, he labeled this one with the initials HNY: Happy New Year.

  And as he grew bolder, he was also becoming more vigilant. A file folder containing scores of photos taken during a burglary in April, also in Orleans, contained a 148-page monthly crime report downloaded from the Ottawa police website, together with a screenshot of the police report on the break-in.

  His pace began to pick up. On a weekend return visit to his Cosy Cove Lane cottage in Tweed the same month, he hit nearby homes on three consecutive nights: April 17, 18 and 19, a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Over the next few weeks he broke in or tried to break in to homes in Tweed and Orleans five times, fleeing with his customary trophies.

  In mid-June, his behavior took a further strange twist, demonstrating new peculiarities. The event was a burglary on Cara Crescent in Orleans, a few doors down from where Williams had struck in January and home to a woman in her twenties and her father, both of whom were out of town at the time. On returning, the woman discovered that her underwear drawer, closet and laundry room had been looted, in what would be Williams’s largest-ever single haul: 186 pieces of clothing. She also noticed that some of her ID had been laid out on a dresser in the spare room and her laptop opened. What particularly surprised her, she told the Ottawa police when they arrived, was that there in plain view was some valuable jewelry, untouched. Entry had been made through a basement window.

  Williams’s record-keeping was in this instance almost unbelievably thorough, even for him. As usual,
he had taken scores of photographs, not only of himself but of the numerous pieces of lingerie he had stolen, spread out on the woman’s bed and on the floor. The photos were subdivided into categories and labeled, showing where he had found them: bedroom; bedroom laundry; basement laundry; spare room. Once again, his obsessive need to organize his trophies was on display. When police later seized his computer hard drive and searched it, they also found a saved screenshot of the woman’s Facebook page, together with five screenshots of the Ottawa police website recording the break-in.

  And there was more. Police would later discover a bizarre letter on Williams’s computer, addressed to the woman he had just robbed. Dotted with misspellings that were clearly deliberate, the letter read as follows:

  Beautiful [followed by the woman’s name]. I’m sorry I took these because I am sentamental to. Don’t worry because I didn’t mess with them. Also I am sure you know your beautiful but trust me your pussy smells fucking awesome! I should know because I been doing this for awhile. But I am going to stop because my moms will fucking kill me if I get caught. She is pretty sure I can be something. Besides your place was kinda like the motherload and I really like that I have a bunch of undies you put on just after you got fucked. I started this with a chick I knew from high school called … who lives down the road from you. I thought it would be cool to have some of her undies. It seems right that I finish with a special chick like you. If you decide to call the cops tell them I am sorry for the trouble and they won’t here from me again. Now that I know all about you, I think it might be cool to meet you. Maybe younger guys don’t turn you on but I think we could be good together. To me teenage chicks are impressed to easy. I guess I would like to be with somebody more experienced. You guys really need to clean out the bath in the basement. It is some gnarly. I hope what I did ain’t pissed you off to much.