A New Kind of Monster (27 page)

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.

P
eople 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 later 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.

Williams's new home must have been a rude shock to him. Detention centers for accused criminals awaiting trial or a bail hearing tend to be more confined and generally less welcoming than federal penitentiaries, where there are programs for the inmates and where the rhythm of daily life lends a certain stability. The 228-bed Napanee lockup, visible from Highway 401, is a bleak little compound of concrete and rusting chain-link fence, with a remote-controlled wire-mesh gate that creaks open each
time a car drives in or out. Visitors must park on an adjacent mud lot, walk to the gate and speak through the intercom before they're allowed through.

For anyone locked up there, the crashing boredom and the nail-biting uncertainty of not knowing what the future holds are bad enough. But for Williams, daily life was even more restrictive, because on arrival he immediately had to be segregated from other prisoners. There were several reasons for this: he was an accused sex offender, always the lowest and most despised rung in the prison hierarchy; until his arrest he'd been a person of considerable authority, which to many jail inmates is not much different from having been a cop; and added to that was his overnight notoriety. Placed among other prisoners, he'd have been an instant target, so he was lodged in one of the cramped protective-custody cells. That meant being locked up twenty-three hours a day on most days, with one hour to shower, use the phone and walk around the small exercise yard, usually alone. It's an environment that's a recipe for despair, similar to the circumstances in which Williams will almost certainly spend the rest of his life.

What he did not do was stop speaking to the police—quite the contrary. He kept talking and talking, even after he was persuaded (possibly by his wife) to engage the services of Ottawa defense lawyer Michael Edelson. Court records show that while incarcerated at the detention center in Napanee, Williams was interviewed by Smyth six more times—three times in February, twice in March and once in May.

It's unusual in Canada for someone accused of first-degree murder to keep cooperating with the police, unless there's some chance the charge might get knocked down to second-degree murder, a near impossibility in this instance. Unlike manslaughter, which commonly involves an unintended homicide, second-degree murder typically implies that the killing was deliberate but not
planned ahead of time. First-degree murder, by contrast, means the homicide was either 1) planned, 2) committed during a sexual assault or 3) committed while the victim was being forcibly confined. The killings with which Williams was charged seemed to qualify on all three grounds. His willingness to continue talking to Smyth thus speaks volumes, not only about his resigned state of mind but about the rapport Smyth had built with him.

In the outside world, meanwhile, Canadians in general and the military in particular were struggling to make sense of an accused sex killer who'd given no clue whatever about his double life. Nor was there any insight from the police, who over the entire eight months of the investigation held just one press conference, at the very outset, when the murder charges were announced. When Williams finally pleaded guilty, the facts of the case were laid out in considerable detail, but until then the police probe remained one of the most secretive ever seen in Ontario, and those involved received no-nonsense warnings from OPP commissioner Julian Fantino (now a Conservative member of Parliament) that they would be wise to keep things that way. Similarly stern instructions came from the provincial attorney general's office in Toronto.

All through the months of brief videolink court appearances and pretrial discussions, the perennial concern among police and prosecutors was that leaks might undermine their case, by providing ammunition for the defense to contend that Williams's right to a fair trial had been compromised. There was also speculation the saturation media coverage in and around Belleville would prompt Edelson to seek a change of venue, a move that would probably have foundered, given that the story was being aired from coast to coast.

But because the events were so extraordinary and the competition for scoops was so intense, the leaks kept coming, the principal ones being that Williams had confessed to murder and
sexual assault, that he had also admitted to dozens of fetish-driven burglaries, and that he seemed to have no interest in pretending otherwise. As early as April, six months before he was convicted, the
Globe and Mail
reported that Edelson and the prosecution team headed by Hastings County Crown attorney Lee Burgess had reached an agreement in principal that would see Williams plead guilty to everything.

And because of his acknowledged guilt, the big issue that hovered over the proceedings was whether this was just the tip of some frightful iceberg. It seemed nearly impossible that at age forty-four, a respected military man with an apparently flawless track record would suddenly plunge into a netherworld of sexual deviancy, rape and murder. Surely he must have started before, the thinking went. Williams, however, assured Smyth and the other detectives that he had not, even though his unusual sexual preoccupations stretched back many years. And to some extent they believed him, insofar as there seemed to be no evidence anywhere of prior crimes.

But no one else knew what to think. In the months ahead, when Williams appeared several times in court via videolink from the detention center, frequently on hand was his air force colleague Lieutenant-Colonel Tony O'Keeffe, who had known Williams for nine years and was now acting as a kind of liaison officer between the military and the colonel. O'Keeffe paid several visits to Williams in jail, and he had the courage to talk briefly to reporters about what he had found, summing up the feelings of so many others. “The guy in front of the courts is not the guy I know, this is beyond anything I can imagine,” he said after an appearance by Williams in March. “I'm really uncomfortable, I don't even know what I'm looking at.”