A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  Williams’s new home must have been a rude shock to him. Detention centers for accused criminals awaiting trial or a bail hearing tend to be more confined and generally less welcoming than federal penitentiaries, where there are programs for the inmates and where the rhythm of daily life lends a certain stability. The 228-bed Napanee lockup, visible from Highway 401, is a bleak little compound of concrete and rusting chain-link fence, with a remote-controlled wire-mesh gate that creaks open each time a car drives in or out. Visitors must park on an adjacent mud lot, walk to the gate and speak through the intercom before they’re allowed through.

  For anyone locked up there, the crashing boredom and the nail-biting uncertainty of not knowing what the future holds are bad enough. But for Williams, daily life was even more restrictive, because on arrival he immediately had to be segregated from other prisoners. There were several reasons for this: he was an accused sex offender, always the lowest and most despised rung in the prison hierarchy; until his arrest he’d been a person of considerable authority, which to many jail inmates is not much different from having been a cop; and added to that was his overnight notoriety. Placed among other prisoners, he’d have been an instant target, so he was lodged in one of the cramped protective-custody cells. That meant being locked up twenty-three hours a day on most days, with one hour to shower, use the phone and walk around the small exercise yard, usually alone. It’s an environment that’s a recipe for despair, similar to the circumstances in which Williams will almost certainly spend the rest of his life.

  What he did not do was stop speaking to the police—quite the contrary. He kept talking and talking, even after he was persuaded (possibly by his wife) to engage the services of Ottawa defense lawyer Michael Edelson. Court records show that while incarcerated at the detention center in Napanee, Williams was interviewed by Smyth six more times—three times in February, twice in March and once in May.

  It’s unusual in Canada for someone accused of first-degree murder to keep cooperating with the police, unless there’s some chance the charge might get knocked down to second-degree murder, a near impossibility in this instance. Unlike manslaughter, which commonly involves an unintended homicide, second-degree murder typically implies that the killing was deliberate but not planned ahead of time. First-degree murder, by contrast, means the homicide was either 1) planned, 2) committed during a sexual assault or 3) committed while the victim was being forcibly confined. The killings with which Williams was charged seemed to qualify on all three grounds. His willingness to continue talking to Smyth thus speaks volumes, not only about his resigned state of mind but about the rapport Smyth had built with him.

  In the outside world, meanwhile, Canadians in general and the military in particular were struggling to make sense of an accused sex killer who’d given no clue whatever about his double life. Nor was there any insight from the police, who over the entire eight months of the investigation held just one press conference, at the very outset, when the murder charges were announced. When Williams finally pleaded guilty, the facts of the case were laid out in considerable detail, but until then the police probe remained one of the most secretive ever seen in Ontario, and those involved received no-nonsense warnings from OPP commissioner Julian Fantino (now a Conservative member of Parliament) that they would be wise to keep things that way. Similarly stern instructions came from the provincial attorney general’s office in Toronto.

  All through the months of brief videolink court appearances and pretrial discussions, the perennial concern among police and prosecutors was that leaks might undermine their case, by providing ammunition for the defense to contend that Williams’s right to a fair trial had been compromised. There was also speculation the saturation media coverage in and around Belleville would prompt Edelson to seek a change of venue, a move that would probably have foundered, given that the story was being aired from coast to coast.

  But because the events were so extraordinary and the competition for scoops was so intense, the leaks kept coming, the principal ones being that Williams had confessed to murder and sexual assault, that he had also admitted to dozens of fetish-driven burglaries, and that he seemed to have no interest in pretending otherwise. As early as April, six months before he was convicted, the Globe and Mail reported that Edelson and the prosecution team headed by Hastings County Crown attorney Lee Burgess had reached an agreement in principal that would see Williams plead guilty to everything.

  And because of his acknowledged guilt, the big issue that hovered over the proceedings was whether this was just the tip of some frightful iceberg. It seemed nearly impossible that at age forty-four, a respected military man with an apparently flawless track record would suddenly plunge into a netherworld of sexual deviancy, rape and murder. Surely he must have started before, the thinking went. Williams, however, assured Smyth and the other detectives that he had not, even though his unusual sexual preoccupations stretched back many years. And to some extent they believed him, insofar as there seemed to be no evidence anywhere of prior crimes.

  But no one else knew what to think. In the months ahead, when Williams appeared several times in court via videolink from the detention center, frequently on hand was his air force colleague Lieutenant-Colonel Tony O’Keeffe, who had known Williams for nine years and was now acting as a kind of liaison officer between the military and the colonel. O’Keeffe paid several visits to Williams in jail, and he had the courage to talk briefly to reporters about what he had found, summing up the feelings of so many others. “The guy in front of the courts is not the guy I know, this is beyond anything I can imagine,” he said after an appearance by Williams in March. “I’m really uncomfortable, I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”

  Without exception, everyone who’d had any relationship with the killer over the years and was willing to talk about it (few though they were) seemed to be saying the same thing, often using identical language: the Russ Williams they’d known was an entirely decent human being, albeit sometimes a slightly awkward one, smart, thoughtful, generous and 100 percent reliable. Now it seemed as though they had been completely deceived. “I worked every day with this man,” said Captain Anne Morin, 8 Wing’s chief public affairs officer. “He has been nothing but a good leader and to hear of the alleged acts the man has done comes as a complete surprise and shock.”

  The dismay was widespread. In Tweed, which finally had an explanation for the two sex attacks in September that had so traumatized the village, most people hadn’t even been aware of Williams. Then they were learning that a sex killer had been quietly living among them. “And if we were shocked, think of what it was like for the City of Quinte West and the people around Trenton,” says Tweed reeve Jo-Anne Albert. “This was someone who was the father to everybody on that base and all of a sudden he’s accused of these horrendous crimes.”

  Kathleen Rankine, morning news anchor at Belleville’s Cool 100 country radio station and a staunch, longtime supporter of the military, spoke for many when she described being not just deeply perturbed at the revelations but also angry. “ ‘How dare you? How dare you do this?’ That’s what everybody was thinking about [Williams]. To take that trust and just throw it all away. For me, sitting in a newsroom writing the story every half hour, trying to find different ways to write it, I found myself saying repeatedly, ‘You bastard.’ Every time I looked at his name on the page, that was my reaction. Then, when the eighty-two break-in charges were laid, it was like, ‘Oh my God, now what?’ ”

  It was the same on Raglan Street in Brighton, where Comeau had lived and died, and which was home to many other former and current members of the armed forces. “It was just unbelievable,” recalls neighbor Terry Alexander, who had seen Comeau’s boyfriend, Paul Bélanger, stumble out of her house after finding her body. “A top-notch colonel in the forces? Who would ever, ever have suspected?”

  And in Belleville, the horror blended with a sea of grief over the dreaded confirmation that Jessica Lloyd was dead. On a fr
igid Saturday, five days after her body was located near Cary Road in Tweed, close to a thousand mourners converged on the city’s John. R. Bush Funeral Home to pay their respects and articulate their affection for one of the small city’s best-liked young women. Air force personnel wore black armbands, the strains of “Amazing Grace” were piped out to the overflow crowd in the parking lot, and along with praise for the police, the many tributes included one from her cousin, John Lloyd, who lauded her as “a positive person who could find the light in darkness.”

  For a while, the bad news in and around Belleville just kept coming. Year-to-year statistics show that, as in most Canadian communities, crime in what has long been called “the Friendly City” was actually falling. A clutch of unrelated homicides, however, suggested otherwise, and one of the worst took place in March: the exceptionally brutal double shooting deaths of a mother and her fourteen-year-old daughter in their Mountain View home, six miles south of Belleville. The alleged killer was an eighteen-year-old, Dean Brown, also accused of badly wounding his former girlfriend in what prosecutors contended had been a fit of jealous rage. Brown had also once lived in Tweed; and in May that village became the site of yet another homicide, when a 27-year-old Mississauga man was beaten to death in the campground area of Trudeau Park. Four visitors were subsequently charged with murder. There was no discernible pattern to the half dozen or so killings that bracketed Williams’s arrest, but as short-term crime trends go, through the eyes of some they made the Quinte region look like Murder Central.

  As spring turned to summer, the Canadian military, too, had to struggle with other unwelcome baggage. In May, the commander of the 2,800 Canadian troops in Afghanistan, Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard, was ousted from his post and brought back to Canada for allegedly having a sexual relationship with a female soldier under his command. In July, the same thing happened to Colonel Bernard Ouellette, chief of staff at the United Nations mission in Haiti, over allegations he had an improper relationship with a civilian employee working at UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince. Then, in October, during the same week Williams was convicted, infantry captain Robert Semrau was demoted and dismissed from the armed forces for shooting a wounded Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan, in what Semrau—the first Canadian soldier ever prosecuted for a battlefield death—said was a mercy killing.

  But those black marks paled against the stain left by the Williams arrest, and along with the collective shock, the blame game swiftly commenced. There were isolated anecdotal reports of soldiers in Trenton being heckled or even spat at by passersby, but nobody suggested that was a strong public sentiment. The consensus among the citizens of the area was, and remains, that the crimes Williams was charged with were an aberration never seen before, and that they had no bearing on the Canadian military as an organization. Instead, the prevailing instinct was to rally round the troops and reassure them that they were still held in great esteem and affection.

  But at the more rarefied high-command level, the questions were pouring in fast and furious. How could a sex killer and pervert have been put in charge of Canada’s most important air base? Were no checks and balances in place? How had Williams been able to rise through the ranks undetected? Why had the safety nets failed? Three days after the charges were laid, General Walter Natynczyk, Chief of the Defence Staff of the Canadian Armed Forces, held a press conference at the Trenton air base that Williams had commanded, in the cavernous passenger terminal used by troops on their way to and from Afghanistan. Flanked by Lieutenant-General André Deschamps, who headed the air force, and navy chief Vice-Admiral David Rouleau, along with other senior officers, Natynczyk described how the criminal charges felt like “a body blow, and I was winded,” but said that his message to the troops on the base earlier that day had been clear. “I told them to stand proud … Let’s move forward.” Canada’s top soldier also spoke of how the “sacred trust” invested in the military had been violated, and of how an administrative review was already under way. “We need to know, did we miss something?” he admitted, on what must have been one of the most difficult days of his 35-year career. Then a reporter thrust a microphone in Natynczyk’s face and asked him in an accusing tone if he felt “personally responsible” for having a killer on the payroll.

  It was the wrong question. As the complexities of Williams’s mental disorder emerged, it became more and more clear that the killer/rapist-in-waiting had stayed off the radar not just because his crimes seemed so wholly out of character and apparently started so late in life, but because they were all committed during the off-work hours of his highly compartmentalized existence. On the job, the near-universal consensus over the previous twenty years had been that his performance was exemplary.

  Williams’s military medical records contain no mention of mental disorders of any kind. Like everyone else in the armed forces, he’d been subject to an annual performance review, and like everyone else, his in-house career file included a psychology component. In the run-up to each of his half dozen promotions, he’d been examined for any sign of problems in his professional and personal life, and from what’s known there were no red flags at all. The military panels that interview candidates for promotion, however, don’t normally include psychologists.

  There are some members of the armed forces who undergo regular psychological screening. They include members of the special forces (unorthodox combat specialists), instructors who teach captivity survival, military police and soldiers who work in the intelligence field. The screening comprises aptitude tests, clinical psychological tests and the MMPI, short for Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, commonly used by mental health experts seeking to identify personality structure and detect signs of any underlying psychopathology. The results get analyzed, and the person is asked to address any troublesome issues that may have surfaced.

  But most officers rising through the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces don’t get screened, and neither do pilots—although they do in some other countries, including Australia. John Proctor, vice president of Ottawa-based Risk Operations, specializing in security and risk management, is familiar with the military’s screening process and suggests its scope could be broader. “If you were extremely bright, you could probably dodge a lot of it. So could [Williams] have bluffed his way through it? Absolutely, because he doesn’t fit any profile whatsoever. But if you’re not given [the screening] in the first place, there’s no chance. He would have done nothing that would have required psychological screening, ever, including getting his security clearance. This is one of the things Canadian Forces is struggling with, and over the years there’s been many different ways of looking at it.”

  Jack Vance, the retired lieutenant-general who lived just down the road from Williams in Tweed but was unaware of it, also knows a thing or two about the promotions process. For five years he oversaw the forces’ personnel operations, and he believes that no screening system could have detected Williams’s latent criminal instincts. “None of [the major public-oriented] professions use psychological assessment of people. There’s no careful decision-making like that,” he says, his sense of betrayal by Williams still raw. “Promotions and performance reviews have a completely different focus. You’re looking as carefully as possible at core principles: integrity and truthfulness, loyalty, selflessness, self-discipline. The rest is devoted to how well you do your job, and how well you get along with people.”

  Yet another puzzle, particularly after word leaked out that Williams’s house in Ottawa had contained a trove of incriminating evidence, involved his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman. How was it possible for her not to have known, or at least suspected, what her husband had been up to for the past two years and more? Along with Williams’s parents and many of his closest friends and acquaintances, Harriman uttered not a single word in public, nor did she attend any of the court proceedings, though she did visit her husband regularly at the Quinte Detention Centre. All the police would say was that she was in no way suspected of
having been an accomplice or of having broken the law in any other way.

  After it transpired that Williams had confessed, many were wondering what he planned to do next. He told Detective Sergeant Smyth that he had no interest in retaining counsel, and that one of his priorities, along with trying to keep Harriman’s distress to a minimum, was to keep his legal costs down. The widespread public assumption was therefore that matters would be dealt with quickly, probably within weeks, and that a quick confession would translate into a quick guilty plea. But it didn’t work out that way. A few days after Williams was charged, he hired Michael Edelson, well known in Ottawa despite his low profile and with a long-standing reputation as one of the city’s most combative legal advocates.

  Edelson has had numerous prominent clients over the years, many of them in serious trouble with the law. He defended Margaret Trudeau, the former prime minister’s estranged wife, on a charge of impaired driving, and secured an acquittal by successfully arguing that her right to counsel had been breached. More recent clients have included Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien, found not guilty of influence peddling, and Roman Catholic bishop Raymond Lahey, accused of possessing and importing child pornography.

  At age sixty, Edelson was famous for his forceful style. At a conference of the Ottawa Defence Counsel Association more than twenty years earlier, he had advised lawyers defending clients accused of sexual assault to “whack the complainant hard” at the preliminary hearing, the pretrial forum where it’s decided if there’s sufficient evidence to proceed. “My own experience is, the preliminary inquiry is the ideal place in a sexual assault trial to try and win it all,” Edelson told his audience, in remarks first reported by the Lawyers Weekly publication in 1988.

  You can do things … with a complainant at a preliminary inquiry in front of a judge which you would never try to do for tactical, strategic reasons—sympathy of the witness, etcetera—in front of a jury … You have to go in there as a defence counsel and whack the complainant hard at the preliminary. You have to do your research, do your preparation, put together your contradictions, get all the medical evidence, get all the Children’s Aid Society reports, and you’ve got to attack the complainant with all you’ve got, so that he or she will say “I’m not coming back in front of 12 good citizens to repeat this bullshit story that I’ve just told the judge.”