A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  Williams never had many friends, but there were a few people he cared deeply about. Over the years, he’d grown fond of Farquhar’s parents and family, for example, and stopped by their Burlington home many times for dinner and other visits. Then, in February 2009, Farquhar’s mother died after a protracted illness, and Farquhar passed along the word to Williams by email. But the message went to an outdated address and Williams didn’t learn what had happened until later. Farquhar says today it was the only time in their 27-year friendship that Williams blew up at him. “He said to me, ‘What? You could have called.’ He was very upset because he was very fond of my mom and my dad, and it was all too bad because my mom was very taken with Russ.” Although this incident occurred well after Williams had launched his crime career, he had not physically harmed anyone at this stage. It nonetheless seems highly improbable that a psychopath would become upset over not being apprised that a friend’s mother had died.

  “I am glad my parents aren’t around to see any of this, because he was like a second son to them, and my grandmother, same thing,” Farquhar says. “Russ was accepted into this family from age nineteen on. And I think that’s what he always cherished about my family: he saw us do everything together. He saw us go out for dinners, twelve of us. He saw Sunday dinners at that dining room table, and I know he thought, ‘Gee that’s nice.’ And he was always welcome. Some of the happiest times I’ve seen Russ was around my family, either at the cottage or around here. He’d spend hours talking to my dad about mechanical things.”

  The Farquhars weren’t the only family to which Williams was strongly attached. Still living in Toronto, near the famous Casa Loma castle, is a retired couple with a son roughly Williams’s age who became even closer to him than the Farquhars. They had a cottage in Georgian Bay that he would often visit. Like so many other former friends—including the two women he dated before he got married—they are most anxious not to be in any way identified with Williams. But there is no doubt that he was very fond of them.

  The best single piece of evidence that Williams knew right from wrong is the fact that he was not willing to acknowledge possessing the child pornography found on his computer hard drives. Not because it would have made any difference to the sentence of life imprisonment he was already facing, but because it would be too disgraceful. The material had been downloaded from the Internet, and as child porn goes, it was not absolutely the worst of its kind, in that it chiefly depicted adolescent girls in sexual situations—but it was loathsome stuff all the same, and very clearly illegal.

  “This was not just one or two images, and it was the one thing he could not summon himself up to admit to,” says a source who took a direct role in the proceedings. “He would plead guilty to everything else, but not to that. That’s an important clue as to who he is, and so you can see why he did not want a trial. This is a guy who structured his life around how he saw others act, and that’s how his morality base came about. In the military you can kill people, it’s accepted, that’s one of the things that you do, it’s within the realm of human behavior. And in war, rape is within that realm as well. The one thing that isn’t, and stands outside that, is [sexual abuse of] children. There’s no one else within his group that engages in that, so that would make him truly alone.”

  But it would be a mistake to believe that in providing such an exhaustive confession Williams had undergone some profound character transformation and was telling the whole truth, because very clearly he was not. There are said to be three useful rules to bear in mind when dealing with sex killers: they lie, they lie and they lie. Williams admitted to the eighty-eight criminal charges because he had no choice; he had carefully recorded all the details of his crimes, and he knew the police would find those records. Yet at the same time, it can be seen that his account of events was riddled with self-serving lies and evasions, all designed to minimize his bad intentions and the considerable planning he had put into his crimes.

  His disingenuous explanation of how he had come to know Comeau, for example, occurred early in the interrogation, well before he admitted his guilt. But even after he did confess to killing her, he stuck to the story that he had met her just once, and the logic is evident: a sex killer who suddenly spins out of control and perhaps can’t help himself—“if I could have stopped, I would have,” might be the subtext—could be viewed as fractionally less evil than the methodical predator who stalks his victims and makes elaborate preparations. The outcome is the same, when caught, but the optics are marginally less bad, and possibly the distinction could have some bearing on whether parole is granted, many years down the line.

  Williams’s attachments and his conscience may set him apart from many other killers, certainly most serial killers, but his conscience is not why he confessed. He did so because the evidence against him was overwhelming, and when forced into a corner, confronted by facts, he reverted to type: he became the realist, too smart to fight a losing battle even in this, the worst moment of his life. So the issue became one of damage control. Trapped, he was willing to admit to rape and murder because he had no choice, but even as he did, he struggled to gloss over his crimes and salvage whatever he could. So he didn’t really stalk Marie-France Comeau and he didn’t really stalk Jessica Lloyd, he would prefer people to believe; he just sort of noticed them.

  Asked by Smyth if he had liked or disliked the four women he attacked, he replied casually, “I didn’t know any of them.” Williams was a crude and clumsy killer, and an astonishingly skillful burglar who could come and go almost without a trace. But he didn’t want to be thought of as a stalker, for the same reason he was not willing to plead guilty to child pornography charges: it would make him look even more hideous than he already did.

  So if there was a good component to the character of Russ Williams, akin to Dr. Jekyll in the famous story, how to account for his demons? Some key elements of his twisted personality leap out. The most compelling by far is that by any yardstick he must be classed as a paraphiliac, or sexual deviant, with sexual obsessions rooted so deeply that once he gave them rein, they took over his life.

  The American Journal of Psychiatry, the journal of the American Psychiatric Association, lists four criteria used to identify paraphilia, and Williams fits all of them: a preoccupation with nonhuman objects; suffering or humiliation inflicted on another person or on oneself (hence, perhaps, the grotesque posturing in stolen lingerie, even though he showed no homosexual inclinations); a sexual interest in children; and coercive sex involving nonconsenting partners.

  As well, it is evident that he harbored enormous pent-up rage against women. Particularly telling was the violence he used against Comeau, who fought back and paid for it by being beaten very badly before she was suffocated. Where that anger has its origins is moot—Williams told police he didn’t know—but in the vast majority of cases, the urges that drive sex killers are traced back to childhood. It is also conceivable, though unlikely, that his long-ago rejection by Misa, his girlfriend at university, had some relevance, and certainly the police were interested in that episode.

  As for his fetishes, it is far from unusual for a sex murderer to start out by committing lingerie thefts and then go on to kill, which was Williams’s apparent trajectory. Writing in 1999 in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, authors Louis Schlesinger and Eugene Revitch reviewed the histories of 52 American killers aged 17 to 46 who had committed at least one sexual homicide. Of those 52 men, 22 (42 percent) had also committed sexually driven burglaries, a figure consistent with other research. The groundbreaking article cited three similar but smaller surveys that put the figure in the range of 32 to 46 percent. Indeed, some of the most infamous serial sex killers of the twentieth century also committed sex burglaries. They include Ted Bundy, executed in Florida in 1989 after he killed at least thirty women; Jerry Brudos (1939–2006), nicknamed the Shoe Fetish Slayer, who killed four women in Oregon in 1968–69; Albert DeSalvo (1931–1973), better known as
the Boston Strangler, who murdered thirteen Massachusetts women; and Richard Ramírez, the Satan worshipper dubbed the Night Stalker who terrorized Los Angeles County in the mid-1980s and is still on death row at San Quentin prison for murdering thirteen women and men. There are numerous other examples.

  But that link to sex burglaries among sexual killers is not strong the other way around. Within the much larger pool of sexually motivated burglars—a bigger group than some might suspect—very few do what Williams did, over a relatively short period of time (slightly more than two years): accelerate from theft to sexual assault to murder. A composite picture of the lingerie thief shows a furtive, lonely misfit, frequently a voyeur, who plucks up his courage and commits a hasty, often impulsive snatch-and-run. Williams’s meticulous planning, his willingness to linger at the scene, often for hours, the vast amounts of underwear he stole and hoarded, and later his extreme aggression—all those factors set him well apart from most fetish burglars.

  What also separates him from most of the pack is an underlying psychiatric disorder that many who knew Williams well had long recognized, and which in part explains why he was such a good military commander. He was obsessive and fixated on detail, and he had been all his life. But by the time of his arrest, what had once been no more than a mild and even amusing neurosis—the Drill Sergeant and Mother Goose were two of his nicknames at university—seems to have evolved into a full-blown case of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). Proof is found in his extraordinarily detailed accounts of his many crimes. It is not unusual for serial killers to keep track of what they do. Convicted in 1982 for the sex slayings of eleven young people in British Columbia, Clifford Olson wrote long, rambling accounts of each homicide, complete with sketched maps. But Williams took the process to a whole new level.

  The chief hallmark of OCPD, which may be genetic in origin, is an extreme and constant fixation on tidiness, orderliness, rules and regulations, and a need for everything to be perfectly in place. With Williams, it seems this trait became more and more pronounced as the years passed. Farquhar recalls an event that occurred when he visited him one time at his home in Orleans in the fall of 2004. “I remember joking with Mary Eliz in Ottawa about Russ and his o/c, because he’d gotten so much worse than I remembered. Over the past two or three years he’d become much more fastidious with details. When I first came into Wilkie Drive that day, I wanted to hang up the coats, opened the closet door and I thought I was in Eaton’s or something. Everything was lined up an inch and a half apart.”

  Then Farquhar made the mistake of touching Williams’s new stainless steel refrigerator, leaving a mark. “Mary Eliz had poured us a couple of drinks and we were standing there at the center island and I put my hand on the fridge while I’m talking to Russ. And he’s there staring at my hand. And I said, ‘Oh, for Chrissakes Martha [Stewart], would you get over it.’ I thought it was ridiculous.” Williams reached for a special cloth to remove the mark. “And he says to Mary Eliz, ‘I told you we shouldn’t have bought stainless steel.’ She just laughed.”

  Along with a need for cleanliness and good order, OCPD also frequently manifests itself in hoarding, or collecting things. Mingled with his high-octane sexual drive, the disorder seems to have helped turn Williams’s psyche into a witch’s brew. It is hard to overstate the scale of the sexual obsessiveness that was characteristic of his crimes. The extraordinary cruelty displayed in the videos he made when he violated Comeau and Lloyd was matched only by his attention to detail as he elaborately orchestrated his documentation of their suffering. And of course, there was the immense collection of the spoils of his two and a half years of break-ins: 1,400 items of lingerie—possibly many more—a collection so big that twice he had to destroy some of it. And then there was his vast digital collection: an astonishing 3,000-plus photos of himself and his trophies, far more than he would ever be able to look at.

  Williams told police that he had not had sex with his wife for years, and certainly one facet of his sexuality is that he was a chronic, lifelong masturbator with an unquenchable need for gratification. But also clear, and so much more unusual, is that he was addicted to his macabre photo-taking. He was asked why he had killed Comeau and Lloyd when he had allowed his two victims in Tweed to live. He replied that in both instances he feared that if he freed them, police would immediately connect the lengthy picture sessions to the Tweed attacks. Yet Williams, an extremely bright man, must have come to that realization long before he made preparations to slink into their homes armed with his cameras and other equipment—duct tape, rope, the disguise he wore to conceal his face. Some sex murderers kill their victims without initially intending to do so, often when they fight back and events spiral out of control. But by bringing his cameras along to the houses of Comeau and Lloyd, Williams had effectively sealed their fates ahead of time. He had to have his photos, just as he had to have his huge trove of stolen undergarments. As he told Laurie Massicotte, as long as he could get his photos, everything would be all right.

  It’s evident that Williams was in the grip of something resembling a sexual addiction, although it assuredly remained his conscious choice to do what he did. The largest question hanging over his crimes was one of timing: if he had been bottling up his urges for so many years without acting, as he claimed, what was the catalyst that sent him down the slope? In the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was a potion that transformed the good doctor into a fearsome monster. What might Williams’s trigger have been?

  During his confession, he was asked precisely that question by Smyth—what had made him commit such horrendous crimes? “Have you spent much time thinking about that?” he was asked.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know the answers, and I’m pretty sure the answers don’t matter,” Williams replied.

  Smyth also asked Williams this: “If for whatever reason you didn’t end up on our radar, so to speak, do you think it would’ve happened again?”

  Williams replied: “I was hoping not, but I can’t answer the question.”

  As for his apparent late start in life as a predator, at age forty-four, Williams couldn’t explain that either. He conceded it was unusual and was not sure why he began when he did, but he insisted it was a relatively recent development. He told Smyth he thought his obsession with women’s undergarments dated back to his twenties or thirties, but that for most of his adult life he had been able to rein it in.

  The OPP officer who oversaw the investigation said he too had no clue as to what made Williams snap, and why he escalated so swiftly from thief to killer. “It was a very troubling case to investigate,” Detective Inspector Chris Nicholas said outside the Belleville courtroom after Williams was convicted and sentenced. “I have no idea why he killed those two women. It’s one thing to break into a house and take lingerie, but those women were killed needlessly. I don’t think anyone could come up with an answer that will satisfy anybody.”

  During another segment of the confession, however—a blacked-out portion redacted from the court exhibit—Williams did provide some insight into his state of mind during his two-and-a-half-year rampage, without suggesting he had any excuse or explanation for what he did. “He said there were two things that had been causing him distress,” said a source close to the investigation. “One was a medical problem for which he was taking some medication, though he didn’t blame the medication. The other was the death of his cat.”

  People who knew Williams recognized that both factors were significant in his life, particularly his state of health, an arthritic condition that, not long before he took command of 8 Wing, had briefly threatened his career.

  The cat was Curio, euthanized at age eighteen around the end of 2008, more than a year after Williams began the break-ins, and many months before his behavior sharply ramped up into sexual assault in September 2009. Curio was cherished by both Williams and Harriman, who had had her since she was a kitten, shortly before their marriage in Winnipeg i
n 1991, and was perhaps the child the couple never had. When she died, “both of them almost had tears in their eyes,” recalls former neighbor Shirley Fraser, who lived directly across the street from them in Orleans and often fed Curio when her owners were away. George White, who lived a few doors down, concurs. “It was their baby. Russ would sit out on the veranda with it on his lap. Her death was heartbreaking to them, but they kept it to themselves.”

  The black-and-white Curio was an indoor cat and a peculiarly bad-tempered one, Fraser says. Even when being fed by a benign neighbor she would wave a paw, growl and hiss. “The only people she got along with were Russ and Mary Elizabeth.” At the time of his arrest, Williams had accumulated hundreds of photos of Curio, one of which served as the wallpaper on his BlackBerry. A pilot who knew Williams at the 8 Wing/CFB Trenton base recalls a mutual female friend commiserating about Curio’s death. “And the conversation ended right there, very abruptly. Russ just said, ‘What do you know about my cat?’ and he just walked away.”

  Curio was soon replaced by Rosebud, adopted as a kitten from the local humane society, and also female and black and white (though much friendlier than Curio). Rosebud stayed with Harriman, and in his short post-confession note to his wife, Williams mentions the animal. But Curio, it seems, was hard to replace. “The striking thing about the interrogation was the clinical, matter-of-fact way he talked about the most horrendous conduct,” says the source familiar with the investigation. “He’d say, ‘And then I threw her down and then I raped her.’ With other [killers] you’ll see them stumbling over the first letter of the word, or they lower their head. With him it was as if he was describing a commonplace thing.