Indeed, Williams may well have rooted through the linen closet during one of his intrusions. But he was probably not there when Marsan-Cook and Gray stopped by her house on the afternoon of the 17th. The telltale date-stamped photos he took in the house were in two batches. The first group was recorded between around 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. on the 17th, while the second was shot shortly after midnight on the 18th. Williams the prowler was very much a nighttime creature, and it seems unlikely that he lingered in Marsan-Cook’s home through the day until she and Gray showed up in the afternoon. He told detectives that he broke in two separate times, and that’s likely true. On his second visit to the house, empty of occupants once more, he would have realized that Marsan-Cook had returned home in the interim and noticed her sex toys were missing. So he tormented her by leaving the message, which he also photographed before departing. (He even took a picture of one of her cats.) And the incorrect spelling of the word “your” to read “you’re” was almost certainly no accident. As with the clumsy, quasi-apologetic message he had written but never sent to the young Ottawa woman, this looks to be another effort to make himself appear less educated than he was.
Beyond dispute is that the close encounter left Marsan-Cook badly shaken. She had heard something about the two unsolved home-invasion sex attacks up the road in Tweed a few weeks earlier, and she immediately drew a connection. The Belleville police who subsequently came to her house, however, appeared to know nothing about those incidents, which were under investigation by the OPP and had garnered little attention outside Tweed. Marsan-Cook says that one of the uniformed Belleville officers asked her, “Why, what’s going on in Tweed?”
Marsan-Cook emerged from the experience with a deep sense of gratitude for having survived, which was later heightened when she learned what Williams did next. “Ever since, I’ve realized I could have been killed. But I realized I was meant to live, that I was being protected at that moment. This wasn’t about learning a lesson, this was bigger than that. I was spared, and there was a reason for that.”
10
A SOLDIER SLAIN
Quebec-born Corporal Marie-France Comeau joined the reserves in 1995 and had been with the military full-time for twelve years. Her family was originally from New Brunswick and she was raised in Quebec, New Brunswick and Germany. Like her father, Ernest, who spent forty-two years with the Canadian Forces, and like her grandfather before that, she was a career soldier. At thirty-seven, she owned the house on Raglan Street, part of a tidy new Brighton subdivision that was home to many other military households, having moved in a little less than a year earlier.
She was content. “She had found her calling, she had no worries and everything was going well,” says Canadian Forces basic-training instructor Alain Plante, who had lived common-law with Comeau for four years. Comeau had become a devoted stepmother figure to Plante’s two teenaged sons, one of whom, Etienne, in a later tribute on Facebook called her “the best stepmother that could possibly have set foot in our lives.”
In the late 1990s, Comeau was stationed at the big NATO base in Lahr, Germany, as a member of the army, before switching to the air force. Then followed a tour of duty in which she shone. In 2002 she was posted to Afghanistan, part of the first Canadian contingent of troops to be rotated through after the U.S.-led invasion and the ousting of the Taliban. There and at Camp Mirage, the air base in the United Arab Emirates that served as the chief conduit for the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, Comeau served as a traffic technician, moving cargo. She drove a forklift truck, loading and unloading the big Hercules aircraft that ceaselessly flew in and out, and it was a taxing environment—hot, dusty and demanding long hours.
“She did an incredible job,” a former colleague, retired Master Corporal France Breault, told the Northumberland News newspaper. “Tough conditions, but I never heard Marie-France complain. She did her job with her usual smile, really making a difference … She was just the friendliest person there is. All her supervisors were thrilled to have her working for them.”
Comeau had been at 8 Wing for about a year, attached to the base’s 437 Squadron, where she initially worked the Trenton–Germany–Camp Mirage run. But in the early summer of 2009, shortly before Williams took charge of the base in July, she was picked to work on the VIP flights that flew the prime minister and other dignitaries, a highly prestigious position in which social skills were considered paramount.
Seven days after breaking into Comeau’s home the first time, Williams returned. Late in the evening of Monday, November 23, he switched off his BlackBerry, locked the door of his top-floor office at 8 Wing headquarters in Trenton and made the short trip to Brighton. He arrived there shortly before eleven, and once again he parked his vehicle a few hundred yards away in a patch of woods and walked down Raglan Street to Comeau’s house.
Her travels with Prime Minister Harper to Japan, Singapore and India had taken her right around the world—first west across the Pacific Ocean and then back to Canada via Europe and across the Atlantic. It had been a tiring haul and she was still recuperating, so she wasn’t expected in at work the next day. With his easy access to her work schedule, Williams was well aware of that fact.
He paused outside her house and listened. She was talking on the phone. When the house went quiet, he once again used the same point of entry to slip inside: the horizontal, two-foot-by-five-foot basement window on the east side of the house. He was wearing a sweatshirt, Dockers pants and running shoes, his features masked by a small black cap and a wide black band that concealed his lower face, so only his eyes were visible. With him was what could be called his rape kit: rope, duct tape, lubricant, a flashlight and of course his camera equipment, all of it carried in a blue duffel bag.
The unfinished basement looked like countless others in newish homes: a concrete floor; pink glass fiber insulation in high wood-frame walls that had not yet all been closed in with drywall; a spare bed; a furnace in one corner. And it was there by the furnace that Williams silently stood for more than half an hour, waiting for his prey one floor up to retire for the night. In his hand was the same weapon he had used to club Laurie Massicotte, his heavy red tubular flashlight.
But Comeau did not go to bed. Instead, dressed only in a shawl, she walked down the wooden basement stairs in search of one of her two cats, calling out to it. Of course, there was a reason the cat was lingering in the basement: it had spotted the intruder hiding by the furnace and was staring fixedly at him, Williams later told police. And as Comeau came downstairs, she caught sight of him too. In the dim light and with his face covered, it is unlikely that she recognized the base commander—Williams later insisted she did not—but her reaction on finding an intruder in her home was swift and vocal. She shouted out, “You bastard,” began screaming, and a struggle ensued. It ended when Williams struck her over the head several times with the flashlight, forcefully enough to cause extensive bleeding and bruising.
Comeau made an attempt to escape, but he pushed her to the floor, binding her arms behind her back with the rope, so tightly that it left burn marks on her forearms and wrists. He wrapped her entire face in the silver-colored duct tape he had brought along, leaving an airhole around her nose for her to breathe through. He hauled her to her feet and tied her to a metal post in the center of the basement that served as a ceiling support. Among the numerous injuries sustained by Comeau and recorded by pathologist Dr. Michael Pollanen was a wound to her back, inflicted by a metal pin in the post. Then Williams reached for his camera and took a couple of photographs.
His captive secure and blindfolded, he began taking elaborate precautions to ensure he would not be disturbed. First he went back outside the house and replaced the screen on the basement window through which he had entered; bloodied footmarks were later found in the walkway between the two houses, and also on the basement stairs. He found a key for the front door of the house, inserted it in the lock and snapped it off, so the door could not be opened from the outside. He went int
o Comeau’s bedroom and draped a sheet over its single window. He removed all the small night-lights from the living room and the spare bedroom.
Then he returned to the basement, untied Comeau from the metal post and hustled her to the foot of the basement stairs, where another struggle took place as she once again fought back against her attacker. Large quantities of blood were found spattered about, and a section of the drywall was dented. Comeau was knocked unconscious and she ended up lying on the staircase, naked with her hands still tied behind her back. Williams took four more photographs, carried her upstairs to her bedroom and reapplied the duct tape to her face. She was still bleeding from the head wounds, which stained the bedroom carpet.
He placed her on the bed, the long rope binding her hands lying on the floor and neatly coiled in a figure eight. Around her head he wrapped a burgundy towel, tightly secured with duct tape. Then he turned on his video camera and proceeded to create a macabre record of his deeds, not to mention the most damning physical evidence imaginable.
Over the next two hours, he repeatedly raped Comeau, recording the assault with video and dozens of still, close-up photos, shot with a handheld camera. He seems preoccupied with obtaining as much variety in his footage as possible, in terms of angles and close-ups. And he too is very much part of the nightmarish photos and video clips that police found on one of his computer hard drives. The first glimpse of him on camera shows him naked except for the balaclava-like mask on his head and face. He even shot video of himself taking still photos, the video camera’s lens trained on the Sony camera he grasped in one hand, held inches away from what he was photographing. That way he had two sets of images for his collection.
There is no merit in describing in detail Comeau’s ordeal over the next two hours. Suffice to say that the colonel tasked with protecting the country and the people serving under him shows not a shred of mercy. At one point Comeau struggles to speak through the duct tape; he leans in and whispers, “No.” She can be heard saying, “Get out, get out, I want you to leave.” His response is to sit back thoughtfully, then take more pictures of her face.
At one point he kisses her on the cheek, then mugs for the video camera with a half smile, having removed his balaclava. At another time she is heard pleading with him to loosen the rope tightly binding her hands behind her back. He ignores her. He produces a tube of lubricant jelly and displays it for the video camera, holding it between his knuckles.
And still Comeau fought back. Midway through the two hours Williams paused and went to the living room window to make sure no one was coming. She struggled to her feet and ran to the bathroom, still tied and blindfolded, where he caught up with her, struck her several times more on the head with his flashlight and dragged her back to the bed.
He removed some of her lingerie from a drawer, placed it on her and took more pictures. He began raping her again, and as he did so, Comeau was crying out: “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.” Williams placed a pillow over her face, but even though still bound and gagged, she briefly managed to pull it away and fight him off. He forcefully ordered her to “Shut up,” saying that if she did, he would allow her to breathe. The autopsy showed that Comeau also sustained injuries to her eyes and neck, thought to have occurred at around this stage when Williams exerted pressure on the jugular veins on the side of her neck.
He reached for his roll of duct tape and there was a further struggle, leaving Comeau on the floor screaming, “No.” Again he warned her to be quiet or he would suffocate her. He got dressed, ordered her to get to her feet and led her by the rope still binding her hands to a corner of the bedroom.
“I want to live so badly,” Comeau can be heard saying. “Did you expect to?” Williams replies, and the mumbled response is, “Yes … Give me a chance. I’ll be so good, I don’t deserve this … Please go, please go away, please.”
He told her he was not going to kill her, but as with Jessica Lloyd two months later, it was a lie. As Comeau cowered in the corner, her face still wrapped in the duct tape save for an airhole for her nose, Williams completed the act of murder by placing another piece of tape over the hole. She slumped to the floor, her last words a muffled plea for her killer to “Have a heart, please. I’ve been really good. I want to live.” And Russell Williams watched her die, the video camera still rolling. He then took two more still photos, the last one at 4:23 a.m.
He cleaned up. He took the sheets from the bed and ran them through Comeau’s washing machine, dumping in a bottle of bleach, shooting yet more video and still photos as he did so. He went back to the bedroom and removed the duct tape from Comeau’s face, placed her body on the bed and covered it with a duvet. Finally he took nine pieces of her underwear, put them in his duffel bag and left her house by the back patio door. He walked up the road to where his Pathfinder was parked and drove away up to Highway 401, headed for Ottawa. He switched on his BlackBerry. It would still be dark for another couple of hours. He had an early morning meeting to attend.
11
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Marie-France Comeau was murdered in the early hours of Tuesday, November 24, and her body lay undiscovered for more than thirty hours. Still on leave after her long-haul overseas trip to Asia, she was not expected at 8 Wing that day, and it wasn’t until almost one in the afternoon on the Wednesday that the Northumberland OPP got the 911 call. It was Brighton’s first homicide in more than thirty years.
Retired printing-press operator Terry Alexander lived directly opposite Comeau’s house, and he had never had a conversation with her. But he knew her well enough to say hello as she came and went, driving back and forth from work or picking up groceries. He was outside on his front porch, awaiting a visit from a plumber, when he realized that something was terribly amiss. “It’s sometime after twelve and a guy comes out of the house and he’s crying. He said to me, ‘Did you see anybody around here who shouldn’t have been here? Did you see any strange people or strange cars? She’s laying in there dead.’ That’s what he said to me. Then he sat down in the driveway, leaned against the wheel well of his car. He’d already phoned 911, because about two minutes later all the cars came rushing down—police cars, ambulance, the fire chief, everything.”
The man was Paul Bélanger, Comeau’s boyfriend, also in the military and stationed in Quebec, and it was he Comeau had been chatting with when Williams was lurking and listening outside her house on Monday night. They had arranged to have dinner the following evening, and when she didn’t show and didn’t answer the phone he drove over to her house on Wednesday to find her silver-colored Toyota Yaris still parked in the driveway. First Bélanger tried the front door, then he went around to the back, where he found the patio door unlocked. He gave a shout, got no response and went inside.
Crime in Brighton is rare, and still more so in the tranquil subdivision nicknamed Brighton by the Bay. So for the next several weeks residents remained extremely uneasy, despite police reassurances that there was no cause for alarm over what looked to be a domestic-related incident. Williams’s intrusion via the basement window had gone undetected, despite the blood traces in the walkway, and police found no other sign of a forced entry, suggesting that Comeau had known her killer and had let him into the house. For that reason, Bélanger was of immediate interest to the detectives pursuing the murder investigation. They also learned from him that after the burglary on November 16, Comeau had noticed her belongings had been disturbed and that she had accused him of being the culprit. Not until Bélanger passed a polygraph test several days later was he cleared.
Then another possible suspect surfaced, a pilot at 8 Wing who was put through two extremely distressing high-pressure interrogations, with a third one scheduled for the day on which the murder charges against Williams were announced.
In the meantime, Comeau’s neighbors were wondering if a killer was in their midst. Police wouldn’t release the cause of death, viewing it as holdback evidence, but it was obvious the quiet, pleasant air
attendant from 8 Wing had been murdered. Terry Alexander and his wife, Mary, had sold their house in Mississauga and moved to Brighton three years earlier, in part because Mississauga, just west of Toronto, was experiencing too much crime. “I moved away from all that, I came from a place where there’s murders, I come here and there’s one right across the road. It was mind-boggling for me,” Terry Alexander says. “Everybody was very nervous, it was very tense, because we didn’t know anything. All that I wanted to know was that he [the murderer] was out of here. We didn’t know if anybody had been remanded or if someone down the street might be next, or what. The police didn’t mention anything. We kept asking, ‘How did she die?’ and they said, ‘We can’t divulge that.’ But they asked all kinds of questions and they were around here for weeks. Everybody on the street was interviewed, and on the next street too.”
Comeau’s house was torn apart in the search for evidence, from the floors to the ductwork to the insulated walls, requiring extensive repairs when the police were done. The best clue they had was the bloodied footwear impressions Williams had left behind in the outside walkway (he subsequently discarded the running shoes he’d been wearing), but of course there was nothing to compare them to. And the same was true of the DNA traces Williams left in Comeau’s bathroom sink, where he had washed his hands.
The killer colonel, meanwhile, once again resumed his normal life.
As Williams would later tell police, on the Tuesday morning, a few hours after murdering Comeau, he drove from his cottage in Tweed to Gatineau, across the river from Ottawa, where he participated in an 8:30 a.m. meeting regarding the recently acquired C-17 Globemasters. He remembered the meeting, he said, because the big aircraft—a vital component of the Afghanistan war effort—had been so much a part of his job when he’d been working in Ottawa at the Directorate of Air Requirements a couple of years earlier. It was very foggy on the morning he made the drive, he also recalled.
A New Kind of Monster Page 15