Far more credible was the possibility that Williams had committed a cold-case homicide that to this day remains unsolved: the August 1987 sex slaying in Scarborough of 21-year-old Margaret McWilliam. Williams had completed university more than a year earlier, and was by then no longer living in Toronto. Nonetheless, at first glance the links appear compelling. McWilliam was found raped and strangled to death in Warden Woods Park, about three miles from Williams’s old home on Lakehurst Crescent, which Nonie and Jerry Sovka still owned at the time. (They sold it in November 1987 for $349,000.) As with Williams’s two known murder victims, the cause of death was asphyxiation. And there was a possible further connection: McWilliam had moved to Toronto a year earlier after graduating from Kemptville College, south of Ottawa. But she had been raised in Deep River, the first place Williams lived after immigrating to Canada from Britain. Could their shared roots have led to an acquaintanceship? In addition, an unconfirmed report after Williams’s arrest said that someone resembling a jogger had been seen fleeing the Warden Woods Park crime scene—a young man wearing a red baseball cap.
McWilliam’s parents still live in Deep River, and their hopes were briefly raised that their daughter’s ghastly murder almost twenty-three years earlier might finally be solved. But it was not to be. McWilliam’s killer had left behind some DNA, and it does not match that of the former colonel, according to the Toronto homicide detective who heads the cold-cases section.
On leaving university in 1986, Williams was at a loss as to what to do next. Still in Scarborough, he rented the basement of a well-kept townhouse not far from the campus, and found himself a couple of part-time jobs. One was waiting tables at the Red Lobster, a seafood chain. The other was a summer position as a clerk in the university’s financial services department, where he pulled another prank that can only be described as bizarre.
Long retired and now living in Britain, June Hope worked in the personnel unit across the corridor from the finance department. She remembers Williams as “a nice kid”—tall and good-looking, with a prominent jaw, a jazz aficionado who seemed lonely and “wouldn’t talk about his mom and dad very much except to say they were abroad.”
One morning Hope walked into her fourth-floor office, or at least tried to. What greeted her was a sea of crunched-up balls of old-style computer paper, the type that was aligned to the printer by means of a ribbon of holes along the margin. “It filled the room,” Hope remembers. “I couldn’t find my desk or my chair or my computer. It was all obscured by paper. I opened the door and was met by a wall of paper.”
The previous night, Williams had persuaded one of the secretaries to let him into Hope’s office, where he had spent hours crunching up the paper and spreading it around.
“I was gobsmacked,” Hope says. “I walked in, I was just amazed.” And as she stared, she turned and heard a “click” noise behind her. An amused Williams was standing there with a camera, recording her moment of astonishment. Unimpressed, she asked him if he had nothing better to do with his time, and he replied that he did not.
Very soon, however, he did. He had resolved to become a pilot.
Twenty-five years after its release, Top Gun may not hold a spot in the lexicon of great moviemaking. Inevitably, the pre-digital simulated air stunts look dated, redolent of a video game. Worse are the tissue-thin plot, cliché-soaked dialogue, garage-band soundtrack and endless close-ups of Tom Cruise’s face, alternately cool and confident and riven with angst. “You’re one of the best pilots in the Navy, what you do up there is dangerous,” a wide-eyed, hard-to-get Kelly McGillis tells the morose protagonist as he nurses a drink and ponders his bleak future. “But you’ve got to go on. When I first met you, you were larger than life. Look at you. You’re not going to be happy unless you’re going Mach-2. You know that …”
Hackneyed or not, Top Gun and its only-the-best-will-do-in-the-military mantra left Williams deeply impressed. “Russ became a nut about Top Gun,” Farquhar recalls. “We all joked about it. He was really hung up on that movie. It was a huge fascination to him back in 1986. He was fixated on it, nothing less. He could recite you the lines forward, backward. He watched that movie so many freaking times, we all teased him about it. ‘Oh, there goes Top Gun.’
“And it went beyond a joke. He really, really soaked it up. And then, when he announced his career as a pilot, I said, ‘C’mon, you’ve watched Top Gun too many times. You’re going to join the air force? We don’t have aircraft carriers here.’ I said to him, ‘You took politics and economics—why’d you bother?’ ”
Tom Cruise’s determination to win the affections of his instructor also seemed to resonate with Williams as he struggled with his breakup with Misa. “I used to joke about that behind his back,” Farquhar says. “I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, he thinks this is going to win her back. He’s going to show up in his F-14.’ ”
Shortly before graduation, it was an uncle of Farquhar’s who gave Williams his first flying lesson. “My uncle liked to pat himself on the back because he taught Russ how to fly. He used to take me up in his Cessna all the time, and we’d fly over the cottage, fly down to the University of Windsor where my sister was, go out for dinner, come back. And then one day Russ was hanging around and my uncle said, ‘You guys want to go out for a flight?’ ‘Yeah.’ So we went up, Russ moved behind the controls and my uncle let him take over. And I remember my uncle commenting, ‘Wow. He’s a natural. He’s really good at it.’
“And [Williams] met him a few more times. He’d go to the cottage and my uncle would be there and they’d talk about things that my uncle would bring up—the latest plane he’d been on down in Florida, that type of thing. And my uncle’s next-door neighbor, when he moved to Burlington, was a current Air Canada pilot. I introduced Russ to him and I remember that had a huge impact on him.”
Williams also took flying lessons at Toronto’s Buttonville airport. And when he was accepted by the military early in 1987, he didn’t hesitate. Yet in one of the other twists in the early life of Russ Williams, he came close to becoming a police officer instead. At around the same time he applied to the air force, he also applied to the RCMP, and the Mounties came calling first. “He had a telephone call from the RCMP, they’d sent him a letter accepting him, but he was still waiting for the air force and he wanted to defer,” Farquhar recalls. “They said, ‘No no, if we come calling for you, which we have, we don’t wait for you, you’re either our guy or you’re not.’ And he was really surprised, a little bit disappointed, but he really wanted to wait for the air force. So they said, ‘Goodbye, that’s it.’ ”
Williams’s short-lived aspirations to be a police officer are worth noting, and not only because years down the road he would keep many police busy as a predator and serial killer. Like any other successful candidate, he would only have been accepted by the RCMP after rigorous screening and background checks, with particular emphasis on mental stability. A rule of thumb in police recruitment is that the best predictor of a person’s future behavior is his or her past conduct, and extensive interviews with friends, current and former, are a staple in the process. But at age twenty-four, there was evidently nothing in Russ Williams’s history that caused the RCMP any serious concern.
The six friends from unit C8 pursued different paths. Williams’s closest friend from those first two years became a successful fundraiser with the March of Dimes, earning himself the country’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada, only to commit suicide a few years later by jumping from a bridge onto a busy highway, an event that caused Williams great distress when he learned of it. Another, an exchange student from Hong Kong, had to abandon his expensive condominium and his Porsche and flee to Taiwan as authorities probing a shady financial deal closed in. A third former roommate became a successful lawyer, a fourth made a good living as a car dealer specializing in expensive models. The fifth ex-roommate became an investments adviser.
As for the colonel-to-be and future killer, in mid-1987 he packed a coupl
e of suitcases and headed west for basic training at CFB Chilliwack in British Columbia. His path was set.
5
A PILOT SOARS
The Canadian Armed Forces in 1987 was an unhappy, often bewildered organization still struggling to define itself. Under Liberal defense minister Paul Hellyer, an eccentric figure who later in life became obsessed with space aliens, the three branches of the military had been integrated during the 1960s, with a unified rank structure and under a single command. On paper there was good reason for the overhaul. The army, navy and air force had long been tugging a succession of governments in competing directions. As well, there was deep concern within the Liberal Party that the military had become too independent-minded: a credible report has claimed that during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Canada’s military leaders resolved between themselves that if nuclear war erupted between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union, they—not the government in Ottawa—would determine Canada’s response.
In practice, integration was a good idea that went disastrously wrong and damaged the military for years. The restructuring was intended to consolidate and unite, but it had the opposite effect. The top-down, one-size-fits-all approach engendered wide hostility among all three branches, each of which resentfully defended its bit of turf. The result was an operational chain of command that was at best inefficient, at worst incoherent.
Now, in the mid-1980s, the end of the Cold War was stirring renewed gloomy debate about the whole purpose of the Canadian military, and whether it was even worthwhile having one. There were suggestions the armed forces should restrict themselves to doing what they did best—wearing blue helmets and keeping the peace in foreign hot spots—and leave it at that. And up ahead lay more trouble: the convulsive Somalia Affair, which in 1995 resulted in the disbanding of the Canadian Airborne Regiment, and big budget cuts that would strip large sections of the military to the bone.
Williams, the pilot-to-be, was hardly affected by any of this. On the contrary, the disorder and general malaise offered opportunity for a confident 24-year-old with exceptional organizational skills and great technical aptitude. In many ways, he was exactly the quasi-corporate breed of modern officer the politicians said they were looking for: forward-looking, an informal but committed team player, comfortable with high-tech and the mushrooming communications revolution.
From the start, he belonged to an elite. At the downtown Toronto military recruitment office where he first applied, plenty of other walk-ins said they wanted to be pilots too, and at that time only about one in ten made it to the next phase, the week-long aircrew selection process. Aircrew selection encompassed aptitude tests, a rigorous physical exam, and visual and spatial orientation tests. Recruiters also tried to assess the personalities of the applicants. Fighter-pilot potential, for example, is different from transport-pilot material. In the year Williams signed up, the elimination rate from within that aircrew recruitment pool was also about 90 percent; just one in ten was approved and went on to join the air force. So of the original intake of budding pilots, 1 percent made the cut.
“They don’t just pick guys and send them up the ranks,” says an air force member, still in the military, who joined the same year as Williams and went through pilot training with him at CFB Moose Jaw. “They’re looked at very closely and put into very specific situations and scenarios to see how they handle it. Then they might go, ‘Yeah, this person has the potential to become a good leader,’ and then they develop that person, start pushing them if they’re willing, and then away they go.”
One mental trait is of particular interest to recruiters assessing prospective pilots: the ability in an unexpected situation or crisis to make a snap judgment and then instantly focus 100 percent on whatever needs to be done, distracted by nothing, for as long as it takes. It was a quality Williams had in spades, all his life. When he was young, his keen capacity for detail took the form of being diligent and thorough. Later, it would become compulsive and obsessive. All through his life, people marveled at his encyclopedic ability to store facts in his mind and retrieve them at will.
Once through the door, his first stop was basic training, better known as boot camp, which as an officer cadet meant a fourteen-week stint at CFB Chilliwack in south-central British Columbia. Basic training is an intense experience designed to weed out the keen-but-weak ones, which it does very well. The course is and was a blend of rudimentary military skills, such as weapons handling and first aid, together with classroom sessions on leadership fundamentals and ethical values. Above all, the emphasis is on fitness, and despite his strength and excellent physical condition, Williams found the experience grueling.
“Boot camp was brutal, absolutely horrible,” recounts Farquhar, his former university friend. “In the first couple of days he remembered one guy breaking his leg, and he talked about the grind, all the running through the bushes and doing it for days on end, not getting much sleep or [much to] eat. It was a big endurance test. He said to me, ‘Oh man, they’re making or breaking you right there. If you can’t hack the first two weeks, that’s it.’ ”
He did hack it, and from there he was dispatched to the CFB training school in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, for a few weeks’ instruction in the basics of flying. Then it was on to CFB Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, often referred to as 15 Wing Moose Jaw, a longtime training base for pilots. There, Williams learned to fly by mastering the Avro-manufactured Tudor jet, a big, lumbering airliner descended from the famous British Lancaster bomber.
“I remember when he was in Moose Jaw, he said this was the point that would make or break him as a pilot,” Farquhar recalls. “He wanted to fly, but he was not going into helicopters—he was deathly fixed on not becoming a helicopter pilot. That was not where he wanted to be. He said helicopters were old and useless, and they were widow makers.”
From day one he was a natural pilot, says the former rookie who trained alongside him, picking up the basics with an ease that impressed his instructors. His skill marked a lifelong aptitude with airplanes and many other mechanical things. Years later, Williams would master the Airbus, an extremely complicated aircraft, in just a few days.
Along with his prowess at flying and the confidence that went with it, he began to show a side of his personality that would later seem utterly at odds with his crimes, but which many of his peers observed throughout his career: a generosity, even kindness, in his dealings with younger, less experienced colleagues. “How I remember him from Moose Jaw was as this very helpful type of person,” recalls the former fellow rookie. “He started out at the bottom like everyone else, but later, as a senior student, part of his job was to help the junior guys coming in. And he did—he was really nice to them. He was just a very nice guy.”
It took Williams a little under three years to earn his wings, which is about the average. Now he was a fully qualified military pilot, and it was during the next stage in his career that it began to be apparent what a good one he really was. From Moose Jaw he returned to the training school at Portage la Prairie, this time as an instructor, with the rank of lieutenant. In those days not many pilots went straight from learning to teaching, but Williams did, and the former air force major who oversaw him explains why.
Former air force major Greg McQuaid, now retired and living in Kelowna, B.C., had about twenty instructors under his supervision, half of them freshly minted pilots, and Williams stood out. “Of the new instructors, he was one of our best, one of the top one or two. Russ was an excellent instructor, perfect, very bright. A big thing with being a flight instructor is the ability to observe and analyze errors, and determine what correct course of action would fix them, to develop a style so you could present your criticism without sounding overly critical.”
His flight-instructor course under McQuaid lasted about eight weeks. Then he began teaching in a classroom setting. But most of his instruction was done in the air, typically consisting of two instruction missions a day. “Russ was in his right niche, an
d I would see the results in his students, who were very quick to sum up who their instructors were,” McQuaid says. “They were under great pressure, so it was very important for them to get a top instructor. He was one of the more popular ones, and his students tended to have good results.”
McQuaid knew Williams for two years. “I would have seen him every working day—all the kibitzing, all the rainy-day volleyball games, Friday nights in the officers’ club, all that—and I found him to be sociable. I’ve heard others say, since [the criminal charges] came up, that they found him on the cold side. I didn’t see that at all, though of course I had a different relationship than some others might. I wasn’t his buddy, I was his boss. I was a major, he started out as a lieutenant, and under my tenure he became a captain. And I helped him become a captain. I wrote his personnel evaluation report. He got a shiny personnel evaluation report from me, and he earned it. He was a sharp guy, and I suspect that aided him in hiding his crimes.”
Like so many others, McQuaid later looked back and wondered how well he had really known Russell Williams. “Was this always there, all subdued? Did something go off in his life? When I first heard of it, I said, ‘I don’t believe it, there’s a mistake—there is a mistake.’ Then, as the evidence starts coming out, you ask yourself: ‘Did I miss something?’
“He was intense, no question. I recall talking to him when it seemed like he was looking at the back of your head through your eyes. But he was also cool. I’ve been a pilot for thirty-eight years, and a big part of my life has been screening pilots. And one of the things we look for in a pilot is the ability to remain calm and cool under pressure, and he struck me as having that ability … And in a sense, it turns out maybe he had it too strong.”
A New Kind of Monster Page 7