A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  But the Murdochs were very much in the minority. The few people in Tweed who did brush shoulders with Williams encountered a courteous, distant figure, invariably calm and polite. He and Harriman, an executive director of the Ottawa-based Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, had purchased the big cottage at 62 Cosy Cove Lane in August 2004, two months after he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and took the helm of the Trenton 8 Wing air base’s 437 (“Husky”) Transport Squadron—the same base he would later command in its entirety after reaching full colonel five years later. They paid $178,000 for the blue-gray frame bungalow on the edge of Stoco Lake, the longtime residence of an elderly couple who could no longer take care of it. It was a second home for Williams and Harriman, their main residence being a handsome house in the eastern Ottawa suburb of Orleans that they had bought brand new. After Williams was transferred away from 437 Squadron, the cottage on Cosy Cove Lane remained as a weekend getaway spot. Then, with his promotion in July 2009 to full colonel and commander of the 8 Wing base, he was back at work in Trenton and back living in Tweed, an easy 45-minute commute down Highway 37 and then along the busy 401.

  The cottage’s commanding view of Stoco Lake was impressive, the building itself less so. A glimpse inside after it had been searched and ripped apart by police following Williams’s arrest showed thin gray paneling on the walls, cheap ceiling tiles and Formica countertops. Furnishings included a battered beige carpet, an ancient wooden crate-turned-table that had once contained dummy bombs, a green-and-white striped couch, an old piano, a heavy ceiling fan and various floor lamps. Down below was an unfinished basement, and in the adjoining garage was the man of the house’s favorite recreational toy: a sixteen-foot Lowe bow rider with a big Evinrude outboard to power it on his many fishing trips. On the sloping back lawn, facing the lake and the boat dock, was a large ornamental wishing well.

  Harriman’s name adorned the mailbox along with that of Williams, but over the years she had visited Cosy Cove Lane only intermittently, and to the people of Tweed she was, if possible, an even more remote figure than her husband. Certainly there was no reason to believe either of them was connected even in the slightest to the twin break-ins that had taken place in September. Nor were there any other suspects in sight. And that’s where things stood a few weeks later, when amid the simmering fear and alarm the police investigation took a huge wrong turn.

  October 29, 2009, was a Thursday, two days before Halloween, and it was around one-thirty in the afternoon when Larry Jones’s universe began crashing in around him. He was returning to his Cosy Cove Lane home empty-handed from a partridge hunt, dressed in his customary camouflage gear, his small dog, Wes, by his side. What happened then, he says, “was like the end of the world.” At sixty-five, Jones was a lifelong Tweed resident, a vigorous, talkative figure, and not a universally popular one. Now he was about to become a pariah, shunned by almost everyone he knew.

  Jones has lived on Cosy Cove Lane for much of his life. His house was one of twenty-one mostly winterized residences dotted along the road, nestled comfortably on the Stoco Lake shoreline, and it sat immediately next door to the cottage belonging to Williams and Harriman. Jones and his wife, Bonnie, had lived at their place for thirteen years. Retired from his job as a surveyor with the Ministry of Natural Resources, Jones was and is endlessly busy: onetime head of the Stoco Lake ratepayers association; a Legion member; trail warden for the snowmobile club, with authority to dispense fines to scofflaws; occasional manager of the sports arena; local handyman.

  Some people in Tweed say unhesitatingly that they don’t much care for Jones. Many years earlier, the police had become involved in some minor domestic trouble at the Jones household, and he was once shot in the hand by an angry neighbor. Ask around Tweed about Jones and you will hear complaints that he has long had a reputation for being overbearing and abrasive.

  Yet domestic stability is also a hallmark of Jones’s life. A grandfather, and married to the same woman for more than forty years, Jones has had plenty of disagreements with neighbors, but he has never been arrested and his violations of the law, he says, can be summed up by a single speeding ticket. Along with his wife, treasurer for the Municipality of Centre Hastings, his numerous friends include many police officers.

  But there was nothing friendly about the small army of Ontario Provincial Police officers who were waiting for him as he pulled his Jeep up in his driveway that October afternoon. They didn’t tell him right away why they were there. In all, there were twenty or more cops standing around his house, including plainclothes police, two or three to a car. Jones’s first thought was that he had been broken into.

  “Oh no, sir, it’s way worse than that,” was the reply. “But we can’t tell you right now.” Jones soon gleaned that they wanted to talk to him about the two home invasions that had occurred nearby a few weeks earlier, one just a few doors down from the Jones home.

  This was not Jones’s first encounter with the police in connection with the attacks. A few hours after the September 30 assault, as tracker dogs and armed police scoured the woods, uniformed officers went door to door, canvassing neighbors. Had they heard or noticed anything suspicious overnight? Had any strangers been spotted in the neighborhood recently? And as they made their way along Cosy Cove Lane, Jones saw them knock at number 62, immediately next door to his house. It belonged to Williams, the air force officer who had bought it five years earlier and after some time away was now living there again while he ran the 8 Wing/CFB Trenton air base. Not that he was seen a great deal; he usually did the commute back and forth to Trenton when it was dark, while on weekends he would generally head back to Ottawa to be with Harriman.

  Jones recalls that September 30 morning vividly. “They walked on to Russ Williams’s place there, knocked on the door and waited for a few minutes. Then I walked out and met them. One of them went to another neighbor and the young cop stayed here and talked to me and asked me if I’d heard anything that morning or seen anything.

  “And he said, ‘Who lives next door there?’ and I said, ‘Russ Williams,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I see that on the mailbox. Same name as the commander of CFB Trenton.’ And I said, ‘No, that is the Russ Williams of CFB Trenton, that’s him,’ and he said, ‘Oh, really, you’re not kidding. Well then, I guess we don’t have to look at him.’ ”

  The police canvass moved on.

  Now, almost a month later, here they were again. A glance at the search warrants the police had brought with them showed Jones just how ominous things were. The warrants stated that the police were seeking, among other things: computer digital storage devices; women’s underwear, including black and purple La Senza brassieres and thong underwear with the logo of a poodle; two baby blankets; pornographic photos and videos; a pair of white shoes; zip ties. The cops crowded into Jones’s house, examining and seizing a wide range of items: a laptop, a DVD reader, a CD reader, USB sticks, memory sticks. Also scooped up were his hunting knife, his work boots—around a hundred items in all.

  Incredulous and stunned, Jones found himself in a squad car being read his rights on the way to the Madoc OPP detachment for interrogation. “We’ve been investigating you for three weeks, sir. We know all about you,” he recounts one of the cops telling him. “We got a really good tip, sir. That’s why we’re here.”

  At the police station, Jones managed after some difficulty to call Bonnie at her workplace to tell her he’d been detained for questioning in the sex assaults. Her initial reaction was to tell him to quit fooling around. Then she realized it was all deadly serious. “It was unbelievable,” she said later.

  The next few hours were the worst of Larry Jones’s life.

  The OPP is a formidable organization, made up of close to six thousand uniformed officers, plus civilians and auxiliaries, serving a province of more than 12 million people. Part of its hub in Orillia, in central Ontario, is its cerebral, highly specialized Behavioural Sciences and Analysis Services unit. And one of those experts was on
hand now, in charge of interrogating Jones, to whom it was made plain he was squarely in the police sights.

  How did he break into the two houses? he was asked. Did he have a key? (In both instances there had been no signs of forced entry.) What was going through his mind when he was doing this? Other, more personal questions were asked: As a child, had he been molested or beaten? What were his sexual interests? Police also listed for him the charges he would be facing if he was, indeed, the masked intruder. And one particularly loaded line of inquiry remains seared into his memory. Paraphrased, it went like this: “If you were the person who broke into Laurie Massicotte’s house on September 30, and tied her up and sexually assaulted her—if you were—would you be guilty?”

  Three times Jones was asked that question, and three times he refused to answer it because of the way it was framed. Instead, he kept repeating his unequivocal denial. “I said, ‘No, I wasn’t there.’ ”

  Other, peripheral issues surfaced in the interrogation. Many years earlier, he and Bonnie had had a rowdy altercation that had briefly drawn police attention. The couple ended up apologizing to each other, but now that incident was revived—as indicative of Jones’s unstable temperament, it was suggested.

  During the search of Jones’s home, half a dozen ancient copies of Penthouse magazine had been unearthed, the most recent dating back to 1981. Pornography on the premises, eh? went the line of questioning. What’s the significance of that? Jones told them there was none.

  In the course of the questioning, he also learned why the police had turned their attention on him. A few years back he’d stopped by Laurie Massicotte’s house to look at some floor-tile work she’d had done. After that she’d dropped by his house several times, unasked and never staying for long. But the acquaintanceship would end up being unfortunate for Jones. A week or two after she was assaulted, Massicotte had called police to tell them that although she was blindfolded and never saw her attacker’s face, she now believed she recognized his voice, and that it was the voice of Jones.

  Confronted with the police suspicions, Jones denied everything, his mind reeling as he insisted once again that a dreadful mistake had been made. But along with protesting his innocence, Jones also did the smart thing. Instead of clamming up in a panic and perhaps calling a lawyer (who would assuredly have instructed him to stop talking immediately), he willingly gave the cops everything they wanted, except a confession: a DNA sample, extracted from a saliva swab; fingerprints; palm prints. Later he took a polygraph test and passed it with flying colors. Why not? he reasoned. He had nothing to hide.

  Nor did his physique match that of the assailant, described by Massicotte as apparently a young man. And so, early that evening, badly shaken after three hours of interrogation, Jones was allowed to go home. The police weren’t completely through with him, though. Even after it was made clear to him that he was probably in the clear, the OPP detective heading the Massicotte investigation, Constable Russ Alexander (later to take a key role in Williams’s arrest), continued to ask neighbors if they’d ever been bothered by him, Jones says. Had they ever seen him peeking through their windows? Notice anything else suspicious about Jones?

  The day after Jones was picked up for questioning and then released, Massicotte recalls, “Russ Alexander phones me up and says, ‘We searched Larry Jones’s house. However, we didn’t find anything.’ ” She asked the detective about Jones’s status. “Let’s put it this way: he’s certainly a person of interest,” was Alexander’s response, she says. Police also remained suspicious of Jones’s son, Greg, and asked him to take a polygraph, which on the advice of his father he declined to do.

  But the damage had already been done. No crime, murder included, engenders the fear and social disgust that instantly attaches to a person suspected of a sex crime, wrongly or not. Some defense lawyers will tell you they would rather have a client convicted of bank robbery or drug dealing than acquitted of a sex offense, because of the lasting opprobrium.

  So it was with Jones, and so it would remain until Williams was arrested. “My heart broke for Larry and his wife, because I know their grandchildren, they’re the same age as mine,” says Jo-Anne Albert, the reeve. “Kids are cruel. Parents are going to talk at home and not care that the kids are listening. They have four [grandchildren] up there in school, and for them it was a bad time.”

  Jones himself says the experience was devastating. “Nobody came for two or three months. I was all by myself, except for my very close friends. They’ve all come back now, but I can tell you, this was very scary.”

  Back home after his long inquisition at the Madoc OPP detachment, Jones now had to deal with the unpleasant reality that the source of his troubles was Massicotte, who, while not a close friend, was someone he’d known for years. Later—after Williams was arrested—she apologized profusely, Jones says. “She says to me, ‘Larry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t really want to phone the police and tell them it was you.’ ”

  So why did Massicotte make that fateful call? She says today it was a combination of confusion and being urged by a friend to pick up the phone and give the police Jones’s name. The friend was one Jonas Kelly, a man related to Jones through marriage and who didn’t much like him. “I was told by Jonas Kelly what to do. He told me to phone my detective and tell them that I recognized the voice,” she says. “When I phoned them to tell them I thought I recognized the person’s voice, I didn’t even want to say who it was, I was so scared. But then they came right out and asked me. The detective suggested to me it wasn’t Larry, it was his son Greg. And I said, ‘No, Larry.’ And he said, ‘Oh, Laurie, do you think you could come down to the station right away and give us a statement.’ ”

  So she did. Police picked up Larry Jones the same day. There was no other evidence against him.

  Jones now believes that Massicotte was unstable and therefore easily influenced by Jonas Kelly. As for Massicotte, she was not reluctant to speak out about her ordeal. After Williams was arrested, she gave several interviews to the media in which she excoriated the OPP for not having issued a warning after the first attack.

  Most remarkable, however, was her willingness to forgive her attacker. “I’m not in the judgment department, but I’m in the forgiveness department, and I feel everybody has a God-given right to forgive,” she says. “He let me live. It was like he didn’t want to kill me. I always look at the good in people. I can’t speak for any of the others, I can only forgive him for what he did to me, and now he has to live the rest of his life [in a prison cell]. I despise him, but I can forgive him, because of the simple fact that he let me live, and that’s what I wanted most. And I have to be able to forgive to move on.”

  News that Jones had been picked up and questioned at length about the twin attacks spread swiftly through Tweed. And it reached Williams too. Jones knows that, because even though it never occurred to him at the time that the colonel might be the real predator, he was anxious to learn how widely word of his troubles with police had spread. So, through a mutual friend, he asked a civilian Trenton air base staffer who knew Williams well whether the colonel had by any chance mentioned that Jones—his next-door neighbor—was a prime suspect in the unsolved attacks. The subject had indeed come up, and Williams’s response was curiously casual, Jones recounts. He seemed to have heard something about Jones being detained and questioned but appeared entirely unperturbed. “Get out of town. Larry Jones wouldn’t do something like that,” was how Williams’s response was relayed back to Jones.

  Jones chatted briefly to Williams several times after that, talking about nothing very much, and the matter was never raised. “He could have asked me what was going on, but he didn’t,” Jones says. “He carried on like nothing had happened.”

  In hindsight, two other incidents—one before Jones was taken in for questioning and one after—took on a distinctly sinister bent in Jones’s mind.

  Few visitors ever came to the Williams home, and Jones remembers the day in July 2009 when
his neighbor took over as base commander. The commander had laid on a big party on his back lawn. Tables were set up, the grass was newly mowed, a portable toilet was rented. “I thought he was expecting a hundred people from the way it was all set up,” Jones says. But none of the neighbors on Cosy Cove Lane were invited, and not many others showed up either—perhaps fifteen in all.

  Given the absence of cordiality, Jones was a little surprised by a conversation he had with Williams in September 2009, the same month the two women were attacked in their homes. Dressed in his camouflage gear, Jones was heading out to shoot a few grouse, and was just loading his shotgun into his truck when his next-door neighbor wandered over. Uncharacteristically inquisitive, Williams wondered where Jones’s hunting camp was. Jones told him it was about six miles away, in the thick forest that lines each side of Cary Road, an isolated gravel road southeast of Tweed village. At first the colonel wasn’t sure where exactly that was. Jones gave further directions. Williams responded, “Ah, yes,” and there the conversation ended.

  Initially Jones didn’t give the encounter much thought, even after a friend of his spotted Williams in the area a few weeks later, on foot, staring off into the distance and appearing lost. But when Williams was arrested, the exchange rushed back to haunt Jones. A few hours after Williams was charged, the body of his second murder victim, Jessica Lloyd, was located. It lay in the woods about a mile from Jones’s hunting camp, some forty feet in from Cary Road, half concealed among a pile of rocks.