A New Kind of Monster

Crime sites in Orleans neighborhood, Ottawa.

Crime sites in Tweed.

H
e looked like a haunted man, marched into court every day in handcuffs and ankle shackles, a burly police officer on each arm. Clean-shaven and neatly groomed, still a colonel in the Canadian air force, Russell Williams wore a dark jacket and slightly mismatched pants, brown shoes and a pale, open-necked shirt, no tie allowed. The dozen other cops always stared at him hard as he was led to the glass-walled prisoner's box a few minutes before the proceedings began, and so did everyone else in the packed courtroom. But he never glared back. He would stand for a moment to have the cuffs removed, his eyes averted, and then meekly sit down.

At age forty-seven, Williams remained a muscular figure, six foot two, 180 pounds. He'd kept fit inside his cramped cell at Quinte Detention Centre over the past eight months with a rigorous push-ups regimen. And during his four-day guilty plea and sentencing in Belleville, two hours east of Toronto, there was always concern among court officials that he might suddenly try to bolt or lunge for a weapon of some kind. What did he have to lose? He would never walk the streets again, and he'd already made an imaginative attempt to kill himself while in custody. But he never did step out of line—he always behaved.

He resembled a husk of a human being, a forlorn portrait in misery and disgrace, the first colonel in the history of the Canadian Armed Forces—and there have been more than 16,000 of them—to be charged with murder. Many killers have dead, lizard-like eyes, indicative of a lifelong indifference to the suffering they have wrought. But Williams's eyes were alive, bright with torment. A couple of times during the proceedings he wept, and from three yards away his grief seemed genuine, though he was surely sniffling as much for himself as for anyone else. Mostly he just gazed at the courtroom floor, as though deeply ashamed of who he was.

And he
was
ashamed. The most closely guarded secret of the Russ Williams story is the fact that along with the tsunami of evidence of unspeakable crimes that police found on his home computer, there was also child pornography. And that was the one offense to which he refused to plead guilty. Murder, rape and bizarre sexual assaults, scores of terrifying, fetish-driven home invasions—he was ready to admit to all of that, in a series of confessions that were mostly truthful, although sprinkled with self-serving evasions. But he was not willing to acknowledge downloading child pornography from the Internet, and during the pretrial negotiations he'd been adamant: child porn charges would be a deal-breaker. If they were laid, there would be no guilty pleas on the murder and sexual assault charges. Instead, everything would go to trial—an outcome that neither the prosecution nor the defense was eager to force.

As he sat in the prisoner's box, flanked by two officers of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Williams would occasionally take a sideways peek at the courtroom, or glance up at the two flat TV screens at the front of the room where the photo exhibits provided a glimpse into his secret world of horror.

Here he was: the formerly proud commander of the country's most important air base, the popular career soldier with top-level
military-security clearance, the crackerjack pilot who'd once flown a Polaris Airbus to London to bring Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to Canada for a royal visit. Here he was, via the damning photographic evidence: in the bedroom of a teenage girl whose home he had invaded in the dead of night while everyone was away. His lean, naked frame was stretched out on her neatly made bed as he leered confidently into the expensive Sony camera he'd carefully set up. One arm was draped around a large white stuffed animal; his other hand gripped his erect penis as he masturbated into the girl's underwear.

Dozens of similar pictures were shown, excruciating close-ups of the killer's genitalia and his face as he posed in his stolen trophies, gaze unflinching. Many were unnerving to look at—spectators in the courtroom often averted their eyes—and his computer hard drives had held thousands of such images, adroitly concealed within folders and subfolders. And this was not the worst of it. Not by far. These were just the pictures of himself and his lingerie keepsakes, and the least offensive of them were released to the public as court exhibits, chiefly pictures showing Williams modeling some of the 1,400-plus items he admitted stealing. Not screened in court, because they were deemed too disturbing, were the long, grotesquely choreographed videos of the bondage, rape and deaths of the two women he had killed, spectacles of numbing violence and cruelty in which he was scriptwriter, director and star. He had taken scores of still pictures as well.

Now he was nearing the end of the line. Early each October morning outside the ornate Belleville courthouse, police dogs barked in the darkness as squads of cops waited, preparing to hustle Williams inside, behind a black canvas screen that shielded
him from the television cameras. Reporters began lining up at five in the morning for a spot in the 153-seat courtroom, and an overflow room with a videolink one floor down held many more spectators. Curiosity in Belleville and the environs was intense as the last scenes in this horrifying saga of murder and sexual obsession were played out.

But there was nobody there in court for Williams as the curtain came down: no family, no members of the military, not a single ally save his well-paid Ottawa lawyers. Russ Williams had become a toxic commodity because he had betrayed everything and everyone: his country, the armed forces, his wife, his parents, his few friends, the many people who had admired him and loyally worked under him during his sterling 23-year career. A few days after his conviction on all eighty-eight charges, he was formally stripped of his rank and medals; later his uniform was burned in an incinerator at the air base he had once commanded, and the two medals were shredded. Williams will serve his life sentence in an isolated prison cell the size of a small bathroom, under 24-hour camera surveillance. His chances of parole are around zero, and he will almost certainly die in that claustrophobic cell in Kingston Penitentiary, or in one very much like it.

And for what?

In large part the answer was up there on the big TV screens, as Hastings County Crown attorney Lee Burgess and colleagues read in the lengthy agreed statement of facts that accompanied Williams's guilty pleas to two counts of first-degree murder, two of sexual assault, two of unlawful confinement, and eighty-two home break-ins. It was all about sex—sexual fantasy, sexual obsession and sexual control, taken to a homicidal level that most people in the courtroom could barely comprehend. The other motivations were strong but secondary: the power he wielded
over his victims, and the thrill of taking ever more risks in the belief that he was smart enough to stay ahead of any pursuit.