A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  Smyth and his colleagues did not invent the interrogative technique that was about to unravel Williams’s web of deceit. Rather, it is largely based on a type of counseling known as motivational interviewing, developed by two American clinical psychologists, Professors William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, who have done much critically acclaimed work with drug addicts. In contrast to many other forms of therapy, motivational interviewing does not confront the client and dwell on his/her failings. Instead, it is nonjudgmental and confidence-building, empathizing with the person’s plight, gently pointing out the contrast between who they are and who they want to be, while offering possible solutions. Adapted to a police interrogation room, that translates into a dialogue built upon courtesy and expressions of friendliness and understanding, even warmth. All through the long interview, Smyth remains the quintessential nice guy trying to help Williams out of the jam he’s in, displaying not a hint of frustration or aggression.

  “I’ll treat you with respect and I’ll ask you to do the same for me,” he says at the beginning. He stresses repeatedly that Williams doesn’t have to talk to him. He explains that he is what’s termed a person in authority, “probably similar to what you may be considered on your [air] base.” He calls him “Bud,” and “Russ.” He tells him he has sat across the table from many other suspects in a similar predicament. His body language imitates that of Williams—leaning in, leaning out, sitting back, sometimes thoughtfully cupping his chin in one of his hands. In sum, Smyth behaves as though he is Williams’s only friend on the planet. And that approach, which yielded such spectacular results, was not dreamed up on the fly. It reflected the fact that the detectives circling Williams knew that there were key buttons that could be pushed to great effect. But the empathy act was only part of what was going on in the interrogation room. Even as he seemed to drip with goodwill, Smyth kept piling on the pressure, peeling back layer after layer of damning facts, some of which were literally being uncovered as the interview progressed. Throughout the afternoon and early evening, as the search warrants were producing fresh evidence, Smyth was kept apprised of developments, periodically going out of the room to confer with colleagues while Williams was left alone with his thoughts. And he made sure that Williams understood what was going on.

  But it had to be done piecemeal—the tire tracks, the boot prints, the anticipated DNA findings, the computer searches—because if Williams were to be confronted with everything at once, there was a risk he would be overwhelmed and simply shut down. So, even as he relentlessly turned the screws, Smyth also constantly emphasized that bad as things were, and rapidly getting worse, Williams could make them marginally less so by summoning up the fortitude to tell the truth. Otherwise, Smyth gently explained, he would be buried in the avalanche of evidence that was about to land. And where would his credibility be then? What if, for instance, Lloyd’s body were to be found? “That might even happen tonight for all I know, once that happens then I don’t know what other cards you would have to play … What are we going to do?” With or without you, it was made plain to the colonel, the facts were going to come out. “Your opportunity to take some control here and have some explanation that anyone’s going to believe is quickly expiring,” Smyth told him, tapping into Williams’s innate, lifelong preference for order and control over chaos.

  Long silences were another tool, as they often are in a police interrogation. For a suspect flailing to conceal the truth, it’s unnerving to sit face to face with a detective who is talkative one moment and completely uncommunicative the next, staring hard all the while. The suspect’s instinct is to try to fill the vacuum by saying something—anything, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense, as happened with Williams several times.

  And there was an additional key element to the confession, masterfully deployed: Williams’s extreme distress, articulated many times, over what his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, was going through as her cherished, brand new house was being ripped apart by the police.

  What follows is the exchange that immediately preceded Williams’s admission of guilt. Smyth has just explained that, whatever efforts Williams might have made to clean up the contents of his computer, it was a futile exercise because the police tech guys could readily identify anything that had ever been there. Nor will any expense be spared, Smyth says; millions of dollars are available, whatever the police want for this investigation they will get, they don’t even need to ask, that’s how big a deal it all is. Even on a Sunday afternoon, sixty or seventy people are working on the file, he tells his quarry. By now Williams knows he is trapped, yet even as disaster looms, his instinct is to reach out to the friendly interrogator. “Call me Russ, please,” he says, and Smyth is happy to oblige.

  “So what am I doing, Russ?” Smyth concludes. “I put my best foot forward for you, bud, I really have, I don’t know what else to do to make you understand the impact of what’s happening here … Do we talk?”

  Williams pauses, his body language saying everything as he slumps forward, gazing downward, defeated. “I want to, um, minimize the impact on my wife,” he says finally.

  “So do I,” Smyth instantly replies.

  “So how do we do that?” Williams asks.

  “Well,” Smyth responds. “You start by telling the truth.”

  Another long pause.

  “Okay,” Williams finally says, and Smyth repeats that word. Then Smyth asks: “All right, so where is she [Jessica Lloyd’s body]?”

  Williams pauses, then speaks the now-famous words that signaled the end. “You got a map?”

  There was nothing accidental about Smyth’s triumph. The OPP’s Behavioural Sciences and Analysis Services unit to which he belongs has grown since it was created in 1995 and now comprises more than a hundred uniformed and civilian members. Based at OPP headquarters in Orillia, a hundred miles north of Toronto, the BSAS’s broad mandate is behind-the-scenes sleuthing that not only probes the complexities of criminal behavior but also bridges the information gaps that often keep turf-conscious police at odds. The BSAS houses an array of skills and resources, from criminal profiling and polygraphy to threat assessment and the upkeep of the provincial sex offenders registry. The computerized backbone of the network is VICLAS, the national Violent Crime Linkage System, which constantly seeks links between seemingly disparate crimes. BSAS’s expertise has a formidable reputation and is in constant demand by outside police departments. Only two other Canadian police agencies have their own behavioral science units: the RCMP and, more recently and on a smaller scale, the Sûreté du Québec.

  A criminal profiler with BSAS before switching to its polygraph (lie detector) unit in 2007, and trained at the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico, Virginia, Smyth was thus very much part of a team when he went into the interview room with Williams that Sunday afternoon, and several of the other players, unseen, were watching the on-camera proceedings with fascination. Also key to the outcome were the insights of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Peter Collins, attached to Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the OPP’s longtime in-house expert in difficult cases, particularly sex-oriented ones. Dr. Collins declined to be interviewed about the case, but over the years he has taken a role in hundreds of investigations.

  The approach taken by the interrogator varies as much as the suspect does, and in this instance it was clear that the top priority had to be winning Williams’s confidence, even as he lied, and retaining it. Smyth had ample experience to fall back on, his courteous demeanor honed in numerous homicide investigations during his twenty-three years as a police officer. He began his career with York Regional Police, north of Toronto, transferred to the OPP in 1997, and has taken a role in two of Ontario’s most high-profile homicide investigations, both involving children. One was the 2003 kidnap/sex murder in Toronto of ten-year-old Holly Jones, in which software developer Michael Briere was convicted. After Briere was interviewed by police without result, Smyth and others spent hours scrutinizing the videotape
and shaping a second interview that then produced an exhaustive confession. More recently, he was part of the team investigating the disappearance in April 2009 of eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford from Woodstock, Ontario, for which two people were later charged with murder. For more than three months Tori’s body was unaccounted for, until Smyth pursued what he said was just a hunch and located it in a thickly wooded area near Mount Forest.

  Polygraphy and its accoutrements, his specialty, have changed significantly since the early days. Gone is the scratchy pen that leaps upward on the graph paper when the suspect experiences a surge of stress, replaced by sophisticated computer software. What hasn’t altered is the underlying physiology of the person under scrutiny, as the interviewer watches for fluctuations in blood pressure, pulse rate and electrodermal (skin) activity. And because that expertise is rooted in the art of separating truth from fiction, and detecting minute but significant shifts in tone, the polygrapher is one of the most sought-after experts when a challenging criminal interrogation arises. Many of the detectives who in 2006 interviewed suspects in the so-called Toronto 18 terror investigation, for example, were polygraph specialists. Which was one of the main reasons Smyth was sitting across from Colonel Russell Williams that day in the windowless interrogation room.

  As the pre-confession portion of the interrogation unfolded and Williams’s mind raced to keep track of what he was being told, not all of which was true, one of the tricks Smyth used to keep him off balance was to keep changing the topic. Look, for example, at this series of exchanges:

  First Smyth asks him once again if he had ever seen or spoken to Jessica Lloyd. Williams reiterates that he never had.

  “Okay, all right, and you mentioned doing some renovations at your property in Tweed there, I think you said something earlier about tearing up carpet, correct me if I’m wrong but …”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Okay, when did all that happen?”

  “In two thousand and four or five.”

  “Okay, any recent uh renovations?”

  “No.”

  “Okay alright, just want to make sure I’m covering all the bases here, okay what kind of tires do you have on your Pathfinder?”

  “I think, um, I think they’re Toyo.”

  “Okay but do you have a brand name or sorry … the make?”

  “Um I don’t, sorry the, the make is Toyo … I don’t know the model.”

  Smyth then turns the conversation to the security system at CFB Trenton, and the swipe cards used to get in and out, noting that Williams didn’t use his on the day Comeau was found murdered. Why would that be?

  Williams explains that he was in Ottawa that day, attending a meeting and then having dinner with his wife.

  So Smyth then wants to know where they had dinner, asking twice, but Williams can’t remember. Nor can he recall the moment when he learned Comeau had been murdered, which may have been his most conspicuous memory lapse of all. When her death was first raised by Smyth, near the beginning of the interrogation, Williams had responded much more plausibly. “I mean, obviously [when] one of your people gets killed it gets your attention,” he said.

  But by now the lies were pouring forth. Never once, however, did Smyth interrupt Williams, correct him or point out the inconsistencies. To do so would have invited exactly what was not wanted: a yes-I-did, no-you-didn’t confrontation that could spell an end to the interview.

  So Smyth let him ramble on. Williams had dug himself into the deepest hole possible, and in his helpful way Smyth allowed him to keep on digging.

  15

  BETRAYAL IN UNIFORM

  People often remember where they were when they learned of something that really stunned them, and so it was with the February 2010 arrest of Colonel Russell Williams. Outside military circles, very few Canadians had even heard of him, but because the allegations were so disturbing and because he’d been running the nation’s top air base, with all the political weight that position carried, a wave of bewilderment swept the country. In Trenton, Tweed, Belleville and Brighton, the shock was still more severe, as consternation blended with an acute sense of personal betrayal. After the initial disbelief, few doubted the accusations were true. Mistakes get made in homicide investigations, everybody knew that. But rarely on this scale, and rarely when the killer has admitted his guilt, as became widely reported within a day or two of the murder and sexual-assault charges being laid. The fact that Williams had also confessed to dozens of bizarre lingerie thefts quickly leaked out too—another layer of disgrace. And for those who knew him personally, especially those who had known him well, or believed they had, the impact was devastating.

  Major Garrett Lawless, an air force captain with 8 Wing’s 437 Transport Squadron at the time, was in a French-language class when he got word. “My legs just gave, they buckled, though I didn’t actually hit the floor. Some people in the room were crying, others were angry, they were all out of their minds.” Many at the base sought counseling and even medical help. Jeff Farquhar vomited on his living room floor when the news came on the television that night. The distress that the news caused the killer’s wife, parents and other relatives can only be imagined. His brother, Harvey, faxed to news organizations a statement distancing himself from Russ’s recent life, saying he and his mother had largely lost touch with him. Then, like the rest of the family and almost everyone else who’d ever been close to Williams, he retreated behind a wall of silence.

  News of the arrest quickly traveled abroad. Britons followed it with particular interest, not just because Williams was born in the Midlands, but because the accused rapist-murderer had once been the personal pilot to the Queen. U.S. television networks, the Associated Press and the New York Times picked up the story too.

  And for a handful of women in the Trenton–Belleville area, the bombshell was especially alarming, because it stirred memories of disparate encounters that at the time had seemed ordinary enough but which now took on an ominous cast.

  Among those who had had an unusual experience is great-grandmother Buelah Beatty, who lives alone on the outskirts of Tweed, close to the cutoff leading up to Cosy Cove Lane. In mid-January, a couple of weeks before Jessica Lloyd was kidnapped and murdered, Beatty had twice spotted a tall man lurking outside her home in the predawn darkness, clad in a khaki coat. The second time, she called out to him. He shouted back that he was looking for a dog, jumped into his vehicle and sped away. Beatty couldn’t see his face, but later found footprints in the snow outside a side window. And it was around the same time that Beatty’s twenty-year-old granddaughter Cattia Beatty, who was staying with her at the time, said she had been approached and propositioned by a man whom she was later certain was Williams; she recognized his Pathfinder too. The incident in a small park overlooking Stoco Lake left the granddaughter shaken and Beatty wondering if the two sets of circumstances were connected, and if her granddaughter was being stalked. “It was very scary after we learned what was going on,” she says. “Why Tweed? It was always so quiet. I’ve never locked my doors before, never. Well, we sure do now. I’m still a little leery of going out at night.”

  There had been other strange encounters. In the city of Trenton, home to the 8 Wing base, at least two other women who recognized Williams’s post-arrest photo told of him appearing unexpectedly on their doorsteps in recent months. In one instance he claimed he was seeking directions, saying he was looking for Wooler Road (a major thoroughfare, not a side street). In the other he had inquired about properties for sale in the area, and asked if he could step in for a moment to see what a house of that design looked like from the inside. (His request was refused.)

  Williams appears to have been doing some clandestine research as well. A female civilian employee at the 8 Wing base recounted a conversation with him in which he’d remarked on some house renovations she was doing. He mentioned other details about her home life and told her casually that he’d been chatting with her husband, a pilot at the base. Only la
ter did she discover that her husband had never spoken to Williams at all. Two young women in Belleville who share a home also recalled peculiar conversations with the base commander, in which he seemed to know all kinds of details about their lives. He told each of them he’d been given the information by the other housemate, which was false.

  In all those instances there was not much for police to pursue, since apparently no laws had been broken, except perhaps trespassing, and compared to the offenses Williams had already admitted committing, it was relatively minor stuff. But there was at least one other encounter that could have turned out very badly indeed. In response to a magazine article about Williams, a woman wrote in alleging that she was sitting in a park in Trenton on a Sunday afternoon in August 2009 when a very tall man approached her. He left his car idling while he offered to take her for a ride, but she refused. And when she later saw Williams’s picture in the newspaper after his arrest, she was sure he was the mysterious stranger. Her account could not be verified, however.

  After confessing to Smyth on the Sunday evening, Williams did not remain in Ottawa for long. In the early hours of Monday morning he was driven to the woods outside Tweed where he had left Jessica Lloyd’s body, and he showed Smyth and another detective the spot, which police had been unable to locate despite fairly precise directions.

  Later that day, he appeared briefly in court in Belleville, where the charges of murder, sexual assault and forcible confinement were read out. From there he was taken to the Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee, halfway between Belleville and Kingston, where he would remain for the next eight months. He made no effort to secure bail, and like most accused murderers had little prospect of getting it.