A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  “But when he gets to his cat, he’s different. He really mourned that cat. He mentions it on two or three occasions. None of this was offered as an excuse, it was more in passing. ‘What were the kinds of things that happened to you at around that period of time?’ So he told them. But as to why he is what he is, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know why he did what he did, and why it came on so late in life.”

  Also clear is that in the years prior to his arrest Williams was taking a strong combination of prescription drugs for arthritic pain in his back and joints. Farquhar recounts the time he visited the colonel at his Tweed cottage in July 2009, a couple of days before he took command of the 8 Wing base. “I saw approximately eight good-size prescription bottles in the bathroom, and I got the impression that some of it was painkillers, but there were many different labels. I wasn’t snooping and I didn’t examine the labels. It was just plainly evident on the bathroom counter, right next to the sink. As you were washing your hands, you could see them. And I thought, ‘Gee, that’s a lot.’ ”

  Williams rarely talked about himself, and complained more rarely still. But he made no great effort to conceal his health problems. His next-door neighbor in Tweed, Monique Murdoch, has recounted him mentioning the pain he sometimes suffered, and his efforts to find the right combination of drugs to treat it.

  Paul Ferguson, program director at Cool 100, Belleville’s country radio station, remembers playing golf with Williams at the September 2009 annual wing commander’s charity golf tournament. The colonel hit the first ball and it was an excellent shot, coming within five yards of the pin. He nonetheless appeared to be in some discomfort, Ferguson said afterward. “He didn’t often use a driver. He said that if he used a driver all day long, his back would be ruined, so he hit with a hybrid club.”

  The cocktail of drugs Williams had been ingesting included prednisone, a corticosteroid used to treat inflammation and arthritis, among other ailments. And prednisone—an immunosuppressant drug prescribed over decades to millions of patients—can also have adverse side effects, including insomnia, euphoria and, much more rarely, manic behavior.

  Williams’s arthritis had begun with inflamed tendons in his feet and the pain later extended to multiple joints and his back, according to a person familiar with his condition. And in the summer of 2007, a few months before his first acknowledged break-in, he began taking prednisone, initially ingesting a relatively high daily dosage, tapering off over the next two years to a lower one. As well, he was taking sulfasalazine, another anti-inflammatory agent.

  It seems unlikely that either drug pushed Williams over the edge. Among those who have taken prednisone, by far the most common complaint is of extreme irritability, and occasionally even uncontrollable anger. Yet whatever deep-rooted rage may have lurked within Williams’s psyche, it is clear that his two and a half years of lawbreaking were anything but uncontrolled. His burglaries, sex assaults and murders, some of which took place over periods of many hours, all seem to have been planned with a frightening precision.

  His health problems nonetheless drew attention. And toward the end of 2008 they came under scrutiny by a panel of senior officers and medical personnel tasked with ensuring Williams still met Department of Defence rules about deployability. According to the source familiar with his medical condition and the drugs he was taking, he would need to undergo regular blood testing. Forced early retirement was a distinct possibility. Instead, however, he was deemed fit to serve, and soon after came his promotion to full colonel (approved by Lieutenant-General Angus Watt) and commander of 8 Wing.

  Despite the smorgasbord of pills Farquahar glimpsed at Williams’s home, it appears unlikely he was secretly taking any unauthorized medication. Under stringent military regulations, he was required to be 100 percent mentally alert when behind the controls of an airplane, as he was early in December 2009, in between the Comeau and Lloyd murders, when he piloted the plane from Cologne, Germany, back to Trenton. Under those rules, the military doctor known as the flight surgeon must be apprised of any medication ingested by the pilot, even an aspirin, and under the honor system, it’s up to the pilot to tell the flight surgeon what, if anything, he has taken. Williams, whose whole life had essentially become a lie, was clearly capable of deceit. Nor, as wing commander of the base, did he have anyone looking over his shoulder. At the same time, however, the drugs he was taking were prescription drugs, and if they were not approved by a doctor on the air base, the physician who did prescribe them was compelled under protocol to inform the base.

  After Williams’s conviction, the military would not disclose anything about his medical condition and the drugs he had been taking, citing right-to-privacy constraints. But there was no mention of drug use in the detailed statement of facts that accompanied his guilty pleas. And while his health problems plainly caused him distress, it seems a stretch to suggest prescription drugs were the major catalyst that helped transform him into a serial sex killer. Certainly he himself suggested no such thing during his lengthy confession and nor, presumably, did he say as much to Edelson, who would have seized upon whatever extenuating circumstances he could during the eight months that separated Williams’s arrest in February and his guilty pleas in October. A few days before the guilty plea, Edelson dispatched his client to Ottawa for a psychiatric examination by Dr. John Bradford, often consulted by defence lawyers, but evidently gleaned nothing useful.

  There was another factor of possible relevance. In June 2007, a few months before Williams’s first acknowledged break-in, there was wide media coverage of a former Revelstoke, B.C., RCMP officer, the married father of a young child, who was jailed for a year for breaking into the homes of four female colleagues whose underwear he stole and soiled in much the same way that Williams would later do. A huge cache of pornographic pictures and videos was also found in the ex-officer’s house. A sentencing report suggested the man’s sexual arousal stemmed from “creating real or imagined circumstances in which he can feel sexually potent without fear of rejection or criticism.” Might the pathetic tale have contributed to Williams’s decision to cross the line that divides fantasy from lawbreaking?

  It is possible that it did. The difficulty here is that we don’t really know when his life of crime began. Williams said he committed his first burglary in September 2007, but there is no good reason to believe that. While it seems increasingly improbable that he killed anyone before Comeau and Lloyd, the police view of his sex-related prowling is that it very likely began much earlier than he was willing to concede. Whether the pattern began as voyeurism or perhaps snooping around friends’ homes, what is clear is that the timeline of the break-ins he acknowledged committing corresponds precisely to the detailed records he had hidden on his computer hard drive, and which he knew would be found. In other words, he was admitting what he had to admit. There may well have been many prior incidents for which there was no evidence. Worth noting, for instance, is his very aggressive conduct during that first admitted break-in, where he targeted the bedroom of a twelve-year-old girl in Tweed whom he knew well, lingering there for hours as he took photo after photo. Such confident behavior suggests this was not his first home invasion.

  But whenever the precise point of departure, the question remains: what was the trigger? Something must have happened to him, and clearly it did. But it was almost certainly not an external event, such as the effect of the drugs, the loss of Curio, a dramatic change in his relationship with his wife or any other single catalyst. Rather, in the collective opinion of the police, forensic psychiatrists and other justice system officials who took a role in the prosecution, there was a convergence of factors whose defining event was a conscious decision by Williams to indulge his long-suppressed instincts. He thus crossed the line into lawbreaking and took the first rapid steps up what criminal profilers call “the ladder.”

  “The ladder is a quick, dramatic escalation,” says a police source who was part of the investigation. “What goes with intelligen
ce is the ability to control your behavior, and he picked a time when he thought he was good. Maybe he didn’t feel a lot of pressure at work and it was his biological clock ticking, he’s in Tweed, his wife is in Ottawa and he says: ‘Fuck it, now is the time.’ Before that, maybe he didn’t have that burning need, maybe he hadn’t hit that threshold.”

  Among the many things that sets Williams apart from other serial killers and rapists, aside from his not being a psychopath, is the rigid self-discipline that had made him such a good soldier and a star athlete. And for much of his career, it appears, that same discipline enabled him to keep his sexual urges in check. But they built and kept building, until they finally uncoiled like a tightly wound spring, most likely at a point when his after-hours life was no longer under much scrutiny, as when he returned from Camp Mirage and began working the desk job at the Directorate of Air Requirements in Ottawa. And once he succeeded—and kept succeeding, concealed by a respectable veneer that placed him far above suspicion—his confidence surged. The lie he told at the roadblock, for example, when he foolishly said he was in a rush because he had a sick child to tend to, was unnecessary and surely a mark of hubris.

  And there is one overarching reason why we can be reasonably confident that it was an internal trigger rather than any external event that launched Williams’s descent into depravity and murder. As has been seen, he was deeply ashamed of his conduct, which is why his account of events is filled with exculpatory falsehoods and evasions, none of which made much difference to the criminal case against him because the evidence was so strong. Those lies had a single purpose: Williams was struggling to salvage from the situation what little he could, if only for the sake of his wife, and he did so by continually minimizing the preparation and planning he had put into his crimes, and by painting an almost casual picture of his dreadful deeds.

  So if there had been a single event that had changed him, we would know about it—because Williams would have told us. He would have cited anything, anything at all, that might have helped explain or excuse what he did. But no such excuse was ever made, not in the initial confession and not in the many hours of subsequent police questioning. There was no potion, akin to Dr. Jekyll’s mix, though it would have been more satisfying if there had been. In terms of his crimes’ rapid acceleration, the most significant single tipping point, noted by Jim Van Allen, the former OPP profiler who aided the Ottawa police investigating the Orleans burglaries, may have occurred when Williams made the decision not just to break into women’s homes but to be inside the house at the same time as they were.

  And because his disorder lurked so deeply within him, it seems unfair to fault the Canadian Armed Forces for not detecting it. Conceivably there were shortfalls in his medical evaluation near the end of 2008, after which he was promoted. But no military screening or checks-and-balances system could have detected the sickness of a murderous human freak like Russ Williams, an exemplary soldier and commander who committed all his crimes while off-duty, wreaking such destruction and heartbreak, and who started so late in life. That’s how unusual he is—rarely seen before and unlikely to surface again—and he is not a symptom of anything but himself. Most serial killers are losers: the recluse who lives in a basement, the schizophrenic who hears voices in his head, the resentful misfit who has failed in life and hates the world. Williams was a winner, a powerful high-achiever, and nothing like any of them. And neither did he want to get caught—an enduring myth about serial killers.

  “Why did he do it? Because he’s a bright, bright guy who’s intelligent, intelligent guys get bored easily, and he’s got this deviant thing,” the police source says. “And while we on the outside look at his life and say, ‘Wow, he’s at the top of his heap, he’s flown the prime minister, he’s in charge of his own air base,’ that wasn’t enough for him. His dark side is deviant sexuality, it’s his preoccupation, and he made the decision to act on it. That’s all. He’s a big boy.”

  In his cage at Kingston Penitentiary, or in some other place very similar, Williams will have the rest of his life to ask himself that same question: why? He told Smyth he didn’t know, and that he suspected the answers, whatever they might be, made little difference to anything. There he was wrong. He holds a spot among Canada’s very worst killers, and many people remain bewildered by him—not only by his particular brand of cruelty but by his willingness to betray everything he was supposed to represent, all for his own sexual gratification.

  He’s unlikely to provide any more answers than he already has. In large part his tailored confessions were seen by his inquisitors as his only means of salvaging any shred of control from his hopeless situation. But as well, they helped him unburden himself of some guilt. And when done, he told police he had no interest in further discussing his crimes with anyone, least of all the media. What could it possibly achieve? Williams is intelligent enough to know that however enormous his shame, he can never be forgiven and no parole board can ever set him free.

  But he doesn’t mind talking to other people casually—off the record, as it were. Two days after he pleaded guilty to all the charges, he told a guard at the detention center that had he known his plea and sentencing would be such an enormous news event, he would not have gone ahead with it. It was one more lie, and a very obvious one. He knew very well that if his crimes had gone to trial, all the horrific evidence would have come out anyway, along with a great deal more, including disclosure of his kiddie-porn collection. As well, his already substantial legal fees would have swelled by tens of thousands of dollars—costs he told Smyth he was particularly anxious to avoid. The remark nonetheless shows how painful the media onslaught was, and how acute his sense of humiliation.

  Nor is any more light likely to be shed by the Ontario Provincial Police, despite their successful investigation and the copious amounts of evidence presented in court. When Williams was convicted, the OPP said that after the thirty-day appeal period, investigators would be willing to entertain questions. But then, when the thirty days elapsed, orders came from newly minted commissioner Chris Lewis, Fantino’s recent successor: out of deference to the victims and their families, it had been resolved there would be no more discussion of the Russ Williams case by the police officers or anyone else involved, all of whom were ordered to comply. It looked to be a clumsy move, because most of the questions probably had good answers: whether the residents of Tweed were given sufficient warning about the twin sex attacks; why the agreed statement of facts omitted the unfortunate but significant incident when the Belleville policewoman drove up to Lloyd’s house and then departed, as Williams skulked in the darkness; whether the various police forces investigating different crimes could have liaised differently; whether Williams was ever under police scrutiny before he was nabbed at the roadblock that night (from the outset, the OPP was adamant he was not, but doubts persisted).

  All of this could probably have been addressed fairly easily. The other big, unstated reason for the police reticence, however, was the ever-familiar overconcern about investigative techniques being compromised. As well, Stephen Harper’s federal government was anxious to see the last of a tragedy and scandal that had been so injurious to the armed forces, and pressure was felt from the Prime Minister’s Office to make the story quickly vanish, according to OPP sources. And so it was decided to say almost nothing, leaving the impression that, once again, a big Canadian police force had circled its wagons and retreated into silence—even after scoring such a ringing victory.

  Most of the hundreds of people directly affected by Russell Williams’s betrayal—thousands, if the Canadian military is included—had doubtless already drawn their conclusions about who or what he is. And for most, there may be comfort in knowing he will never again prey upon the fellow Canadians he was sworn to protect. For many, too, there is justice in knowing he will spend the rest of his days in a nightmarishly claustrophobic environment that will bring him great distress. In the victim impact phase of the sentencing hearing in Belle
ville, Lloyd’s mother, Roxanne, a pendant containing some of Jessica’s ashes dangling from her neck, spoke for many as she described through her tears the experience of seeing her daughter in a coffin: “No amount of suffering Russell Williams will feel after today can compare with the suffering we have felt.” And a young woman named Kirsten, one of Jessica Lloyd’s best friends, also expressed what many were feeling. After Williams acceded to Kirsten’s challenge to look her in the eye, she told the court: “I hope he rots.”

  Two weeks after Williams was dispatched to the penitentiary, Governor General David Johnston formally revoked his military commission, sealing his expulsion from the Canadian Armed Forces. Then, in December, the Department of National Defence announced that his two medals would be shredded, along with his commission scroll. And in the interim, the military would perform a curious act of exorcism.

  The people who live along Cosy Cove Lane in Tweed, and on adjoining Charles Court, had long wearied of gawking tourists driving by for a glimpse of the house of horrors where Jessica Lloyd died, and that was, in a sense, the epicenter of events. No one expected the blue-gray cottage ever to be inhabited again—if and when it is leveled, next-door neighbor Larry Jones has said he might buy the land—but in the meantime, the property’s status had for months been on hold, frozen by a judicial order stemming from Jane Doe’s lawsuit against Williams and Harriman.

  Then, one day in the third week of November, at around the same time that Williams was being given a medical examination that sealed his formal discharge from the military, a minivan pulled up outside number 62 Cosy Cove Lane. In it were four members of the 8 Wing base at Trenton, including two military police officers, who with Williams’s permission unlocked the door and went inside. Ninety minutes later the van departed, loaded with all the fallen commander’s military clothing and equipment: uniform, boots, shirts, headdress, books. When anyone leaves the armed forces, it is standard procedure to retrieve his or her gear, and if possible recycle it. And it may be that that’s what happened to some of Williams’s stuff.