A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  “There’s always been a good relationship between 8 Wing and us. It’s a big part of the community, and whenever there’s a change of command it always includes the mayor’s office,” John Williams said later. “So I would talk to [Russ Williams] maybe a number of times a week, at an event or over the phone. There were a lot of events that both of us would be at—Christmas at the base, museum events. He was fairly quiet and difficult to get close to, not one to kibitz. It was difficult to carry on a conversation. He was not a warm person, just, ‘Here’s my job.’ I’ve found other wing commanders to be very outgoing, but he was not. He was very correct and military, very well respected by those who worked with him, and obviously they thought he was going to the top. You don’t get to be a colonel and be in charge of a major base without that kind of reputation.”

  Midway through September, in an episode whose timing would later leave Mayor Williams stunned, the new wing commander issued an invitation. He was heading to the Arctic for a couple of days to have a look at operations up there. Would Mayor Williams like to come along for the ride? The mayor said he would, and packed a small bag.

  In one of the soon-to-be-replaced Hercules CC-130s, which usually hauled freight, they flew to Canadian Forces Station Alert, on the tip of Ellesmere Island in the territory of Nunavut—the most northerly permanently inhabited place in the world. Administered by 8 Wing, the small, remote base is what is termed a signals intelligence intercept facility, a combination weather station/science station/listening post, home to a rotating group of about sixty military personnel and civilians attached to the defense and environment departments, chiefly scientists.

  The trip required a twelve-hour flight each way, and Mayor Williams recalls it well. The group left on September 14 and returned two days later. Colonel Williams was not at the controls of the aircraft and seemed preoccupied, sitting at the back of the plane by himself, where it was chilly because a heater had malfunctioned. There’s not a lot to see at CFS Alert, which dates back to the 1960s and the Cold War era: an airstrip, a handful of equipment-filled buildings and a beautiful, dramatically empty Arctic landscape. But the mayor nonetheless found the experience interesting, and on returning to Trenton at around seven in the evening on the 16th, he thanked his host and went home.

  So too did Colonel Williams. He headed up Highway 37 toward his cottage in Tweed. He had a big night ahead.

  The young Russ Sovka, as Williams was known then, as a student at Birchmount Park Collegiate in Scarborough. (photo credit i.1)

  Yearbook photo from Upper Canada College in 1982. Sovka, as he was still known, was a talented trumpet player in his teenage years. (photo credit i.2)

  During his first year at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, Williams grew a beard and reverted to the use of his birth name. His interest in the trumpet was soon to disappear, and he rarely mentioned it in later life. (photo credit i.3)

  The 8 Wing/CFB Trenton headquarters, where Williams’s office was on the top floor. He was base commander from July 2009 until his arrest in February 2010.

  The National Air Force Museum of Canada at 8 Wing, home to the largest number of stationary military aircraft in the country. Thousands of memorial stones bearing the names of honored air force members line the walkway, including that of Corporal Marie-France Comeau.

  Williams on the day of his swearing-in as the new base commander of 8 Wing/ CFB Trenton, in July 2009, attended by both his father and his mother, who sat separately. The photo was taken by an Ottawa neighbor—but no one from Tweed was invited. (photo credit i.4)

  Victoria Street, the main street that cuts through the center of the village of Tweed.

  The cottage at 62 Cosy Cove Lane, which Williams and his wife Mary Elizabeth Harriman purchased in 2004.

  The house on Wilkie Drive in the Ottawa suburb of Orleans, where Williams and Harriman lived for fourteen years, the longest he lived anywhere in his life.

  Corporal Marie-France Comeau. “She had found her calling,” her former boyfriend said of the slain flight attendant. (photo credit i.5)

  Comeau’s house on Raglan Road in Brighton, west of the 8 Wing base. Williams broke in twice, each time through a basement window on the east side of the house, on the right.

  Jessica Lloyd. “Many people have said it took our angel to bring Russell Williams down,” Lloyd’s aunt said at the killer’s emotional sentencing hearing. (photo credit i.6)

  Lloyd’s house on Highway 37, which connects Belleville to Tweed. Williams drove past it twice a day as he commuted between his cottage in Tweed and the 8 Wing base.

  Looking out onto Stoco Lake from Williams’s house on Cosy Cove Lane, where Jessica Lloyd was held captive for about sixteen hours before she was murdered.

  Williams being interviewed by Detective Sergeant Jim Smyth at Ottawa police headquarters on February 7, 2010. (photo credit i.7)

  The boot print found at the back of Jessica Lloyd’s house, and photos of one of the boots Williams was wearing when he went in for the interview. (photo credit i.8)

  The patch of woods, off Cary Road in Tweed, where Jessica’s body was left by Williams amid a cluster of rocks.

  A small sample of Russell Williams’s meticulously organized collection of stolen lingerie. (photo credit i.9)

  Countless photos were found of Williams modeling the underwear of women and girls. These were taken in November 2007, two months after the first break-ins to which he later pleaded guilty.

  Andy Lloyd, older brother of Jessica, speaking to reporters outside the courthouse during a break in the sentencing hearing of Russell Williams. (photo credit i.10)

  Russell Williams leaving court on October 21, 2010, after being sentenced to life imprisonment. He was dispatched directly to Kingston Penitentiary. (photo credit i.11)

  Mary Elizabeth Harriman, Williams’s wife, February 2010. (photo credit i.12)

  8

  UP THE LADDER

  It was shortly after midnight on September 17 when Williams stepped out of his cottage on Cosy Cove Lane and walked through the surrounding woods toward his target, once again a thief in the night. Well inside his comfort zone, he was probably feeling confident, and perhaps just a little nervous. Two years had passed since his first break-in in Tweed, just around the corner from where he was heading now, and aside from the one close call in November 2007, he appears to have entirely eluded scrutiny. Since then, he had carried out more than thirty lingerie thefts in Tweed, and not one had been reported to police. Now he was about to dramatically raise the ante.

  In his confession, and in the two highly detailed pages that he wrote and concealed on his home computer, Williams said he decided to attack Jane Doe—the name that he himself gave to his twenty-year-old victim in his records—after glimpsing her one day when out in his boat on Stoco Lake and thinking she was “cute.” That could be true. While accurate in its broad brushstrokes, the confession was also replete with self-serving untruths and evasions, all of them evidently designed to “minimize the impact on my wife,” as he put it. And particularly suspect is the apparently casual manner in which he claims he selected his victims, most notably Corporal Marie-France Comeau. “I didn’t know any of them,” he told Detective Sergeant Jim Smyth, suggesting he had acted on the spur of the moment rather than having stalked the women.

  In fact, great planning and preparation preceded Williams’s attacks, and the one he was about to commit was very likely no exception. But he may have been speaking truthfully when he said he first spotted Jane Doe from his boat, because she was at home with a newborn daughter, her house was not on any route that he normally traveled, and she had only lived there for about a month. Certainly she had never previously met the colonel, she told police after his arrest.

  Alone with her infant child in the lakeside cottage, Jane Doe was sleeping in her bedroom when Williams broke in through a side window by cutting a screen. He was wearing a sweatshirt and dark pants, his face partly concealed with a small dark hat. When the attac
k began, she thought she was having a bad dream.

  She awoke to the realization that someone very strong was holding down her head as she lay in bed, clad in a tank top and pajama pants. A struggle ensued, in which Jane Doe broke a chain around Williams’s neck, but he subdued her by pressing the weight of his body down on hers. Over the next thirty minutes or so, her head still firmly in Williams’s grasp, a conversation of sorts took place. Jane Doe asked him if he was going to kill her and he said no. He told her it was around one o’clock in the morning and inquired where her spouse was. She refused to say.

  He then maneuvered her onto her stomach, sat on her, and after a brief struggle struck her hard on the head three times with his hand, warning her to be quiet and to make no attempt to see his face. A curious exchange followed, a further illustration of Williams’s contradictory impulses: Jane Doe told him he did not seem to be the type of person who would do something like this, upon which, she said later, he seemed to get “nicer.”

  With some difficulty, Williams tied her up. He first tried to use a pillowcase, then a couple of blankets, before finally succeeding in binding her hands with the pillowcase. Another pillowcase was placed over her head and repositioned to turn it into a blindfold, and she heard him take what proved to be his camera out of the bag he’d brought with him. In a desperate bid to make him go away, she told him that giving birth had left her fat and unattractive. Not at all, he said, she was “perfect,” and once again he assured her he was not going to hurt her. Nor would her baby be harmed.

  In all, Williams was inside Jane Doe’s house for about two hours. The photo session began with him pulling down her tank top, fondling her breasts, removing her pajama pants and forcing her to pose with her legs apart, hands still tied behind her back, eyes still blindfolded. She became extremely distressed; Williams reassured her that there was no need to fret because he was soon going to leave. She heard him leave the room, then return and open the drawers of her bedroom dresser. She later discovered he had stolen bras and other undergarments.

  After pawing her breasts one last time (and asking her the age of her infant daughter), he told her he was leaving and ordered her to count out loud to three hundred. She stopped at seventy, but he was still there and instructed her to resume counting. At the two-hundred mark she paused once more, yelled out loud and removed the blindfold. He was gone.

  Using a flash, Williams had taken just nine photographs. The two pillowcases he used to restrain Jane Doe he left in her daughter’s bedroom. Before fleeing into the night, he stripped a sheet and a baby blanket off her bed and took them, along with a shirt she owned, most likely because they were items he had touched; he didn’t want to leave any of his DNA behind. (Williams kept the five underwear items he had stolen, but later told police he’d disposed of the sheet, blanket and shirt at the Tweed public dump.)

  In acute distress, Jane Doe called her mother-in-law, then 911, and police and friends soon arrived. As it got light, forensic experts and a police canine unit scoured the area in and around her home but found nothing useful. No one in the area reported having seen or heard anything. No cars or boats had been spotted leaving the vicinity.

  The OPP officers trying to make sense of these events were perplexed. Nothing remotely similar had ever happened in Tweed before, and they had no physical evidence at all to go on, save for the two pillowcases. All they had was the account of the extremely distraught Jane Doe, who, never having seen her assailant, could offer only the vaguest description of him. She guessed he was between thirty and fifty, with a demeanor she described as fatherly—seemingly thoughtful and concerned, even as he was tormenting her, something that the detectives found particularly puzzling. She said it sounded as if he had tried to make his voice sound deeper than it was—a ruse Williams repeated when he attacked Jane Doe’s neighbor, Laurie Massicotte, two weeks later. Jane Doe also said she thought he was wearing hiking boots and a tight sweater, which she ripped during the short struggle at the beginning. He was clean-shaven and wore a ring on one of his hands. He smelled dirty.

  As a crime and a crime scene, it was as baffling as anything the police had seen. And once again, they sought guidance from Detective Sergeant Van Allen, the OPP criminal profiler who, among his other tasks, was also assisting Ottawa police in the Orleans lingerie break-ins. He opened a fresh file. No one, least of all Van Allen, had the remotest idea the two sets of circumstances were connected: different types of crimes in jurisdictions more than 120 miles apart. And none of the earlier lingerie thefts in Tweed had been reported.

  Van Allen examined the OPP’s two-and-a-half-page report on the Jane Doe assault and was unsure whether he was dealing with fact or fiction. Over the years he has encountered many false accusations of sexual assault, and his tentative conclusion was that this might be another one. There was no physical evidence of an intruder, no description of him, and Jane Doe had declined to seek any medical attention because she had not been raped or sexually penetrated. What also puzzled Van Allen was Jane Doe’s account of the almost conciliatory way in which the intruder had spoken and behaved. “She said—and this was a direct quote—the guy had told her to roll over on her tummy. I couldn’t ever remember a sex offender using that phrase, ‘Roll over on your tummy.’ So I thought her disclosure was problematic, and it wasn’t until the second one happened [the Laurie Massicotte assault] that we knew for sure that what she had said was probably true.”

  In the detailed, diary-style account of the attack that Williams wrote shortly afterward, he gave a slightly different version of events than would later appear in the agreed statement of facts. Rather than first seizing her by the throat, he said that he stood over the sleeping Jane Doe for several minutes and then finally struck her hard on the side of the head, “trying to knock her out.” Instead she awoke, and the struggle began.

  In flat, casual prose Williams described the encounter as though it had been the most ordinary of everyday events. He wrote that after snapping her picture a number of times, “she stood up to let me pull her pants back on—very civilized.” Yet he was also acutely aware of the risks he was taking. After the assault he walked back through the woods to his cottage; his account noted that “a white police car went down the lane within 8 minutes of my return.”

  What the police were completely unaware of until after Williams confessed was that his assault on Jane Doe didn’t mark the end of his activities in her house. Incredibly, just twenty-four hours later, on the night of September 18, he returned to the scene. Only Jane Doe wasn’t there; she and her baby had gone to stay with friends. Williams broke in again, this time through an open window. He stole another fifteen pieces of lingerie, took more photographs and left.

  He came back again the following night, September 19, but he noticed that the father of Jane Doe’s child had returned home and decided not to venture inside. Earlier that same evening, before heading down the road to Jane Doe’s house, he had had dinner at his Cosy Cove Lane cottage with his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, and a friend, Jeffrey Manney, who was staying over. Before retiring for the night, Harriman remarked to Manney that her husband often liked to go for late night walks before he went to bed.

  And then Williams showed up a fourth time at Jane Doe’s house, on September 22, when the house was once again empty. He stole more undergarments and took more photos, including a couple of himself standing naked, wearing only one of Jane Doe’s thongs.

  In between these raids, the almost unbelievably brazen Williams resumed his normal life. A few hours after the September 17 attack, he met in Belleville with members of Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario to discuss an upcoming charity event for wounded soldiers. Later the same morning, at CFB Trenton, he watched a strongman (Lutheran pastor Kevin Fast from Cobourg) break a Guinness world record by pulling one of the newly acquired, 200-ton C-17 Globemasters across the tarmac. Then he visited the 8 Wing engineering shop.

  September 18 saw him exhort members of the air base to take a role in the
Wing Commander’s Challenge, an annual medley of games and races in support of the United Way. “I very strongly encourage members of 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, military and civilian, to achieve a healthy lifestyle, including regular exercise,” he said in an address. “General [Rick] Hillier used to say that if he could find time to exercise he was pretty sure that the rest of us could as well … That’s my challenge to you.” Later the same day he attended a Belleville Bulls OHL junior hockey tournament press conference where they dedicated their 2009–10 season to the “heroes” of 8 Wing. His friend Jeffrey Manney attended the game too, then accompanied Williams back to his cottage for dinner and a stay-over.

  On September 19, Williams attended a special hockey ceremony where he and his right-hand man, Chief Warrant Officer Kevin West, dropped the pucks for a game between the Bulls and the Peterborough Petes. On the 20th he was on hand at 8 Wing to greet the returning coffin of Private Jonathan Couturier, Afghan casualty number 131. He also attended a Battle of Britain commemoration that day. And still on the 20th, he found time to compose on his home computer an extremely detailed account of his assault on Jane Doe three days earlier.

  On September 22, Defence Minister Peter MacKay—someone Williams appears to have liked and respected, judging by complimentary remarks he made to his friend Jeff Farquhar—stopped by 8 Wing to announce another $334 million in funds for the on-going base expansion. On the 23rd, Williams hit the first ball at the annual wing commander’s charity golf tournament, where almost $10,000 was raised.