A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  The Belleville cop’s judgment call would look different had the Pathfinder been sitting by the road or in some other public place, appearing abandoned. But it was parked on private property in a field, and there were any number of reasons why it might be there, even if it did look out of place. Up and down rural Highway 37, plenty of other trucks and vehicles were not parked neatly outside their owners’ houses either. In this instance, the remarkable thing is that when driving by at night the officer had noticed anything at all, and had taken the trouble to stop to knock at the door.

  Williams waited a little longer in the darkness, then drove back up Highway 37 to his cottage, where he changed his clothes and collected what he needed for what he was planning. Then he headed back down the highway toward Belleville and Lloyd’s house, leaving his BlackBerry behind.

  This time Lloyd was home, her white Dodge Neon in the driveway. Once again Williams parked his Pathfinder on the far northeast end of the property by the fence line and walked around the edge of the field, pausing at the back to watch the house. Then he moved in. Lloyd had returned sometime after 10:15 p.m., and at 10:36 had sent a text message to her friend Dorian O’Brian telling him she was safely home. It was the last time anyone ever heard from Jessica Lloyd. She was in bed asleep when Williams re-entered her house, this time through the patio door.

  The precise timing of this second entry is unclear, but the first photos Williams took were time-stamped at 1:19 a.m. on January 29, suggesting he came back at around 1:00 a.m. As with Jane Doe and Laurie Massicotte, he had intended to strike or seize Lloyd while she slept, he later told police, but she awoke as he stood over her. He ordered her to lie on her stomach, then he tied her hands behind her back with a rope he had brought along and blindfolded her with duct tape.

  For the next three hours, he orchestrated another horrific photo session, taking scores of still photos and recording long segments of videotape, all of it illuminated with elaborate arrangements of table lamps. Throughout the long sexual assaults he constantly gave his victim orders, with which, plainly terrified, she complied. “You want to survive this, don’t you?” he says calmly at one point. Lloyd nods and says yes. “Okay, good, you are doing good,” Williams responds.

  As with the murder of Comeau, he videoed himself taking still shots with a handheld camera, close-ups recording the multiple attacks in nightmarish detail. But that was not the worst of it. He also forced Lloyd to perform oral sex on him, placing a zip tie around her neck and telling her: “I feel something I don’t like, I pull on that and you die, got it?” As well, he compelled her to pose in various pieces of underwear, still blindfolded, her arms still tied behind her back with rope.

  Like Comeau, Lloyd displayed extraordinary courage. Comeau, who was physically strong for her size and had some knowledge of self-defense, fought back physically. Lloyd struggled for her life by doing something that in such a terrifying situation was surely harder still: she made every effort to placate her attacker by cooperating with him—behavior that must have been truly unbearable for such a strong-spirited, independent woman, but which was her only hope.

  As the attack was under way, there was another sighting of Williams’s Pathfinder parked in the cornfield. At around 3:20 a.m., a local handyman named Lyle Barker and a relative were driving along Highway 37 when they spotted it. It looked odd, as it had to the Belleville policewoman, and after Lloyd’s mysterious disappearance began to reach the local airwaves later the same day, they informed police of what they had seen, though they could not say what kind of a truck it was.

  Sometime around four-thirty, Williams marched Lloyd across the field to his truck, still tied and blindfolded with duct tape, and with his captive in the passenger seat he drove up the highway to his deserted cottage in Tweed. An hour or so after arriving, he forced her to take a shower with him, and he photographed and videoed the spectacle, Lloyd still bound and blindfolded, the zip tie still around her neck. He then allowed her to sleep for a few hours, he told police. Meanwhile, he dispatched an early morning message to 8 Wing, saying he had stomach flu and would not be able to make the luncheon in the officers’ mess at eleven.

  Lloyd awoke, and at some point soon after, she experienced what appears in the video to be a seizure. Later, when the admitted facts of the case were entered as evidence, it was suggested by a relative of Lloyd’s who attended the court hearing that she had no history of seizures, and that this one may have been a desperate ruse designed to induce Williams to take her to a hospital, as she repeatedly implored him to do. Something she said, captured on video, suggests it was indeed a trick. “We have to go [to the hospital] because I only have twenty minutes from the time it starts,” Lloyd tells Williams, as if seizures were something she was familiar with. What is clear is that she is in enormous torment, and Williams again displays the same macabre quasi-compassion he had shown during the two sex attacks in Tweed, alternating between merciless cruelty and what in another context could be construed as concern. “What can I do to help you?” he says at one point. “Relax, Jessica, don’t bite your tongue …” All the while, he kept taking more photographs and video, and as he did so she was crying, begging him to dress her and take her to the hospital.

  Near the end of that segment of the video footage, as he is pulling a sweater over her head, she is still weeping. She says, “If I die, will you make sure my mom knows that I love her?” She continues to cry and Williams says nothing. And then he turns off the camera.

  He pulled some clothes on her and allowed her to sleep some more, on the floor, shooting video of that too. She woke up at around one o’clock in the afternoon, and Williams told her he was going to set her free but that he first wanted to take some more pictures of her modeling her underwear, which he had brought with them from her house in Belleville. He used the zip tie again, for the same purpose as before, and he once again raped her, gazing calmly into the video camera as he did so.

  After several more hours of degrading sexual assault, Williams dressed Lloyd in her blue jeans and a hooded Roots sweatshirt, gave her some fruit to eat and told her once again that she was going to survive. And perhaps she believed him, because in one of the most chilling moments of the video she appears sitting up on the bed, still blindfolded with duct tape and with her hands still roped together behind her back, but with a broad smile on her face.

  At around eight-fifteen that evening, still tied up and now with duct tape over her mouth as well as her eyes, so she had to breathe through her nose, Lloyd was led toward the door of the cottage. As she walked through the living room, Williams clubbed her from behind with the same heavy red flashlight he had used in his earlier attacks on the other women, cracking her skull and knocking her unconscious. He then strangled her with a piece of rope. He told police it was the only time he hit Lloyd during her almost-24-hour ordeal, and that before he did so he had spent some hours pondering how to murder his prisoner. But it was not the blow that killed her; the cause of death was strangulation, the autopsy found. As she lay on the floor of his cottage, blood pooling around her head, Williams took three more photographs.

  He carried Lloyd’s body out to the garage and cleaned up some of the blood in the living room. Then, somewhere between nine and ten that evening, he got into his Pathfinder and drove back down Highway 37 to the 8 Wing base in Trenton, where he said he spent the night.

  Once again, Williams was able to resume his normal life with astonishing ease. Early the next morning, Saturday, January 30, he flew with some troops to southern California, where they were to do some training, and he returned to Trenton early the same evening. He worked in his office for a while, then drove to Ottawa, rejoined his wife at their new home in Westboro and spent the rest of the weekend there.

  On the Tuesday night, Williams drove back to Tweed and retrieved Lloyd’s clothed, frozen body from the garage, and late that evening or early Wednesday morning he took her out to the thick woodland that surrounds Cary Road, a little-traveled gravel road fifteen
minutes’ drive east of his cottage—the same patch of woods where Larry Jones’s hunting camp was. He left Lloyd’s body in a clump of rocks, not concealed as such but hard to find unless a person knew the precise place, particularly at night with snow on the ground. After he confessed, Williams had to take police there, in handcuffs, because they were unable to locate it. It’s a lonely and distinctly spooky spot, about forty feet in from the road, surrounded in winter by bare deciduous trees, and unmarked by any memento or shrine.

  It took Williams no more than a minute or two to dump Lloyd’s body there. Then he returned to his cottage on Cosy Cove Lane and did some more cleaning up, vacuuming and wiping the floors as best he could and doing the same with his Pathfinder.

  That Wednesday evening he traveled to Toronto to attend a top-secret conference addressing security plans for the upcoming G8 and G20 summit meetings in June. His task was to help coordinate the arrivals and departures of the hundreds of dignitaries, and to assist in arrangements for protecting the airspace. The meeting was held at the Denison Armoury, headquarters for Joint Task Force Central, which coordinates army, air force and navy operations in Ontario. Brigadier-General John Collin sat at the head of the table, surrounded by his support staff and the various commanders, all of them gazing at a PowerPoint presentation projected onto a big screen. Williams didn’t say much, according to a person who was there.

  The meeting ended sometime after midnight and he drove back to Tweed right away, arriving home in the early hours of Thursday, February 4. In the morning, he went to work at 8 Wing.

  14

  “CALL ME RUSS, PLEASE”

  When he walked into Interrogation Room 206 at the Elgin Street police building on Sunday, four days after dumping Jessica Lloyd’s body in the woods and then attending the meeting in Toronto, Russ Williams was familiar enough with rudimentary criminal law procedures to know that he didn’t have to say anything at all. The rules in Canada and the United States in these situations are not quite the same, in that an American suspect’s so-called Miranda Rights provide slightly more leeway to abort a police interrogation than do their Canadian equivalent. Nonetheless, Williams was free at any point during the ten-plus hours of interrogation that lay ahead to exercise his constitutional rights and reach for the lawyer of his choice, who would assuredly have instructed him to clam up immediately. Doing so would have made him look even more suspicious than he already did, but it might have bought him some time.

  And no one was more keenly aware of that fact than OPP Detective Sergeant Jim Smyth, as he prepared for what would be a duel of wits between two extremely intelligent men. By three in the afternoon, when the interrogation began, Smyth and his police colleagues were fairly sure Williams was responsible for the disappearance of Jessica Lloyd, among other crimes—the lie he’d told Constable Alexander at the roadblock about the sick child looked particularly suspicious—and as the afternoon wore on and the off-site investigation progressed, they became completely sure. The trick would be to keep Williams talking until he admitted his guilt.

  But there is a catch-22 with extracting a confession. If a suspect has not been advised very clearly of his right to remain silent and of his right to counsel, any subsequent admission of guilt is not admissible as evidence in court, although it can be useful to police in other ways. On the other hand, once those rights have been read, more often than not the interview abruptly ends, especially in something as serious as a murder investigation. So for the detective stickhandling such a conversation, a key question is always one of timing: when will I advise the suspect of his rights? There is no obligation to do so at the outset, especially if the interrogation begins as an informal chat, but until that caution has been issued, any confession that spills forth is at best only half usable.

  So it is instructive to see that Williams’s rights were not only explained to him by Smyth at the very beginning, right after the pleasantries and the offer of coffee, but also repeatedly emphasized. Three separate times Williams is also told that audio and video recorders are monitoring everything taking place inside the small room. Such cautions are routine in police interrogations, but the thoroughness in this instance suggests two things. First, it was of paramount importance to the police that down the line no defense lawyer would be able to argue that Williams’s rights had been infringed upon. But it also seems apparent that the detectives and the forensic psychiatrist who crafted what would later be hailed as a brilliant, even textbook interrogation believed Williams was confident he could steer his way through the shoals up ahead and would not be scared off.

  Certainly he looked brash enough as he strode in, removed his yellow rain jacket, sat down, grinned into the closed-circuit video camera overhead and agreed that, yes, this was the first time in his life he’d been seriously questioned by police. He exuded cooperation, even as he prepared to give an account of events that was almost entirely a lie.

  Yet even early into the interview he was clearly struggling, as shown for example in his insistence that he had met Comeau—“one of my people,” as he called her—just one time, which as has been seen was by every indication a lie. They had flown together once, soon after he took command of 8 Wing in July 2009, he told Detective Sergeant Smyth, but he couldn’t recall the precise circumstances. Here is what he said:

  Uh, I can’t even remember I think it was a one day trip uh I did a number of trips uh in Canada transporting um our um you know troops for the first leg out of Edmonton uh and we tend to hopscotch them across uh until they get into [unintelligible] so anyway I, I can’t remember which trip it was but uh I did a number of them out to Edmonton just to pick up the troops bring them to Trenton and then uh put a fresh crew on and uh cause we fly out and back in the same day so pushing the edge of that uh fresh crew on and continue on after a couple hour delay.

  His mind in overdrive, Williams was sputtering nonsense, as he did a moment later when asked when and where he learned about Comeau’s death. Given the gravity of the news, most people would have a vivid recollection, especially a person as sharp-minded as the base commander. This was his tortured reply:

  Well, I can’t remember what again what day that uh the message came in just a second um no I can’t remember what day the day of the week but I um let me just think there was all a bunch of activity uh spun up as a result obviously [sighs] no I, I can’t remember the day of the week um I’m just trying to think through the news reports I read no I, I’m sorry I can’t remember what day from act was that the um the MPs [military police] had learnt uh of her death I think quite a bit after her body had been discovered … I had been in Ottawa earlier in the week uh for some meetings over in uh in Gatineau for one of the um [unintelligible] C17 [Globemaster aircraft] acquisitions, I was a project director when I was here in Ottawa for that so just some follow up stuff on that … so I had been here um at some point in that week again I can’t remember how the days all fell together but um I seem to remember that I got this word shortly after having come back from Ottawa I, seems to me it was the same week.

  In detective jargon this is “dissonance”—a stress-induced babble, as the brain races and tries to synchronize itself with the torrent of words pouring out. The interrogator keeps the process going by smoothly but abruptly jumping from topic to topic, as Smyth—a polygraph specialist—did throughout much of the long interview.

  When Smyth pursued the topic of a possible relationship between Williams and Comeau, the suspect’s response was equally telling, but in a different way. “Is there any reason at all that you can think of why Marie-France Comeau would have specifically referenced you in some of her, uh, some of her writings?” he asked Williams.

  It was an extraordinarily serious allegation: a woman found raped and murdered was writing about you in her diary—what do you have to say about that? An innocent person would almost certainly respond along the lines of, “What? Are you kidding me? Writing what?”

  Williams replied, with a small chuckle: “No, not at all �
� absolutely not.”

  Smyth may have been bluffing about the diary. In a police interrogation, trickery is par for the course. A detective is allowed to lie and deceive, it’s regarded as tradecraft, and in this instance the idea was to see which way Williams would jump. And he didn’t jump at all; Smyth’s hugely accusatory question seemed of little interest to him.

  Smyth continued: “… Anything that she ever said to you that led you to believe that there may be something here more than a passing interest with her toward you?”

  “No, not at all. We spent, you know, one flight together talking, I’d go back occasionally and talk, no I uh, if that’s the case uh that’s very surprising.”

  For Smyth, the game throughout consisted of maintaining the rapport he was steadily building. When he politely asks Williams for his fingerprints, a blood sample and an imprint of his boots, for example, an hour or so into the interview, he explains that the purpose is to “help me move past you in this investigation.” No problem, Williams responds—but by now he must have been getting worried.

  At the outset Smyth had made clear to Williams why he had been asked to come in. There was a clear geographical connection between him and the four occurrences the OPP were now examining as a group: the two sex attacks in Tweed in September, the murder of Comeau in Brighton two months later and now the disappearance of Lloyd. So when he was asked for the samples, Williams could have had no doubt that he might be in major trouble. But if he did not provide them, or if he walked out of the unlocked interview room—as Smyth had emphasized he could do anytime he pleased—he would look very suspicious indeed, and he knew those suspicions would not fade away, quite the reverse. It was at this point that his world began to crumble.