A New Kind of Monster (32 page)

As Judge Scott continued, Williams seemed to be listening closely. “Russell Williams's fall from grace has been swift and sure. His crimes have adversely affected this country and our community and the many families and individuals, all victims alike. The residents of Tweed say they've lost their innocence and their sense of safety. Members of the military speak of their sense of betrayal and seek a better explanation from their superiors [as] to what actually happened and why it happened. The victims of the attempted break and enters and break and enters and theft from the many private residences share the common theme that their lives and their homes have been violated. My wish to you is that in the fullness of time, your lives will return to normal.

“But we all understand why we are here today. Not to take away from the seriousness of the other crimes, but it is the
serious acts of violence towards four women, two of whom were murdered, that must be the centred focus of our attention. Our thoughts and prayers are with all the victims, but these special victims and their families are the most damaged by the criminal behaviour of Russell Williams.

“Marie-France did not have to die. Jessica did not have to die. May all of you find the peace that you desperately deserve.”

Then Judge Scott did something else that had not been anticipated.

Along with the prison time for the sex assaults and the break-ins, he handed Williams twin life sentences for the two murders, which translates into a minimum of 25 years behind bars. A conviction for first-degree murder always means at least 25 years' incarceration, but at the 15-year mark the killer can seek permission for a parole hearing, though few get it. When there is more than one victim, however, that so-called “faint hope clause” does not apply. As well, the judge imposed a lifetime ban on the possession of weapons, and ordered that Williams be registered as a sex offender, provide DNA samples to the police data bank, and pay a $100 victim surcharge for each charge, for a total of $8,800. He also acceded to Burgess's earlier request that Williams's Nissan Pathfinder be crushed, and that his camera be destroyed too, together with the hoard of stolen lingerie and the ropes he used.

What was highly unusual was that he also specified where Williams was to be locked up: Kingston Penitentiary. Normally, in Ontario, men who have just been sentenced to two years or more are shipped to Millhaven Penitentiary, which doubles as a classification center, where they are assessed for a few weeks and then placed somewhere in the federal prison system. But Williams was to go straight to Kingston, which would mean a cell in the facility's high-security segregation block.

And with that, still in handcuffs and shackles, Williams was for the last time led away. He shuffled out of the courtroom without a backward glance, was taken downstairs to the waiting prisoners' van and sped east along Highway 401 toward the ancient penitentiary. He had spent much of his adult life traveling Canada and the world. Now he was heading for a tomb.

Almost as soon as he was gone, the Belleville courthouse began resuming its normal appearance. The black canvas screen erected outside the back door was taken down, the walk-through metal detectors were removed, the parking barriers that had reserved space for the television trucks were dismantled. In nearby Trenton, military leaders gathered at 8 Wing/CFB Trenton for a media conference, where Lieutenant-General André Deschamps, Chief of the Air Staff, said the former base commander would be discharged, stripped of his rank and medals, and forced to repay the roughly $12,000 monthly salary he had accumulated since his arrest. The killer would be able to keep his pension, Deschamps said, because there was no legal basis for removing it.

Back in Belleville, Andy Lloyd and his mother, Roxanne McGarvey, stood on the courthouse steps, thanked everyone who had worked on the case and expressed a measure of satisfaction with the outcome. Ms. McGarvey said she was surprised at Williams's apparent remorse but that she had been glad to see it. “We're just all thankful that it is over and we can maybe now start to get on with our lives,” she said, still holding the framed portrait of Jessica.

Her son echoed that. “It's over with, it's done with,” Andy Lloyd said. “This is the best thing that's happened to our family since this stuff has happened. We just want to be normal again.”

The police, too, had a few words to say outside court. Detective Inspector Nicholas stood with Crown attorney Burgess, Belleville
police chief Cory McMullan and OPP Sergeant Kristine Rae, who had handled most of the media inquiries over the previous eight months. Together they praised the justice system for delivering the right verdict, reiterated their sympathy for the many people who had been so grievously harmed by Williams, and voiced hope that now it would be possible to move on.

As for what happens to the convicted killer, it was Andy Lloyd, whose broad shoulders had carried so much of the family's burden over the past eight months, who had the last word.

“As long as he dies in jail, I'm happy,” he said.

I
n the media, Russ Williams was routinely referred to as a psychopath, as though the term was a synonym for “deranged criminal.” He was nothing of the kind—he was far more unusual than that. But there were plenty of the genuine article to be found where he was headed next.

It took less than an hour for him to be whisked east along Highway 401 to Kingston Penitentiary, where a group of police briefly gathered outside the front gate to form a derisory welcoming committee. Built in 1835 and extensively renovated in recent years, the fortresslike maximum-security prison sits on Lake Ontario's north shore not far from downtown Kingston and has long been synonymous with doing hard time. Its population is usually around four hundred, with an additional hundred or so housed at the Regional Treatment Centre, inside the penitentiary walls, which treats sex offenders. Each inmate has his own cell, but most have a measure of contact with other prisoners, at mealtimes and during the various programs made available.

Not Williams. For the same reasons he had been kept segregated from other prisoners at Quinte, he was immediately placed in the penitentiary's dissociation wing, a cheerless, two-level cell block whose twenty to twenty-five protective-custody residents live in almost complete isolation, aside from the inhospitable jail
guards who control their every move. There are no windows in the whitish-colored cells, only a spyhole in the solid door. His next stop, which could also be his last, was most likely the penitentiary's H Block, home to Paul Bernardo, Michael Briere, the killer of Toronto child Holly Jones, and other inmates who would be instantly vulnerable to attack if placed in Kingston Penitentiary's general population. Bernardo has for many years been lodged in the cell at the far end of the lower level of H Block, so other prisoners don't pass him on their way to and from the small exercise yard. Even so, Plexiglas was installed to cover the front of his barred cell, which measures eight feet by ten, and is fitted with a cot bolted to the floor, a desk, a sink and a toilet, because he has more than once been attacked by other H Block residents, and feces were once hurled into his cell. Williams is likely to be no more popular.

It is not a pleasant environment. Meals in H Block are served on trays slid through a horizontal slot in the cell door, which is barred rather than solid to allow better closed-circuit camera surveillance. Prisoners can watch television, if they buy one, and can have writing materials and approved books. But there's no access to email or the Internet. The H Block inmates have no physical contact with each other, although they can sometimes manage shouted conversations with fellow prisoners they rarely see. For one hour each day, alone and in rotation, they are allowed to pace around the high-walled, 65-by-100-foot exercise yard. They can't receive incoming telephone calls, but they can phone people on an authorized call list (provided they pay for the calls) and are allowed occasional visits from relatives and friends, who must also be preapproved. When they gaze through the bars of their cell doors, the view is a concrete wall, illuminated by diffused light that filters through thick, reinforced windows high above.

This would be Williams's new life, an open-ended regimen of crashing monotony likely to be harder for a one-time pilot and
military commander than for less worldly prisoners. Not that there was a speck of sympathy for him anywhere. Instead, debate swirled about how and why he was able to retain his military pension, worth close to $60,000 a year and only severable by means of a special, ad hoc regulation that would have to be approved by the Prime Minister's Office. A few weeks after he was imprisoned, public interest was rekindled when it emerged that his wife planned to file for divorce and in the meantime was pursuing a sealing order that—as with similar efforts over the lawsuit filed by Jane Doe months earlier—would shield her financial records and other documents from scrutiny. Every new detail in the Russ Williams saga seemed newsworthy.

Even after the court hearing and the voluminous revelations contained in the agreed statement of facts, many fundamental and haunting questions remain. Who was the real Russell Williams? And why did he begin his criminal activity when he did, at a relatively advanced age and when he was nearing the pinnacle of a glittering career?

It was fairly easy to see what Williams was not. He was clearly not insane, which in a criminal context broadly means not knowing that what you are doing is wrong. Neither was he mentally unfit to stand trial, which means you don't understand what's going on. Technically he could not be classed as a pedophile, despite the child porn found on his computer, because his sexual interests were much wider than that. He didn't fit the usual profile of a panty thief either.

Most important, and in marked contrast to Bernardo, Clifford Olson, Charles Manson and other notorious killers, Williams cannot be described as a psychopath; in fact, he is not even close to being one. Through overuse, the terms
psychopath
and
sociopath
have largely come to mean the same thing, and the definition is not complicated: a detached, indifferent person with no empathy or sympathy for the rest of the human race and its needs, very often a cold, narcissistic manipulator who has learned to hide behind a facade of pretending to care because that's what society expects. Plenty of selfish people in different walks of life show signs of psychopathy, and while most may not be particularly nice individuals, only a fraction break the law. Among those who do, what often accompanies that selfishness is a history of disregarding society's rules, and the criminal courts, of course, encounter many psychopaths.

But Williams was not that kind of murderer at all. The police and assorted justice system officials who dealt with his case quickly realized that he had feelings, emotions and attachments of all kinds: he cared about his wife, he cared about the military, he was devoted to his cats, and he also appears to have a moral compass—a conscience. That's why, in passing sentence, Judge Scott said he believed Williams's remorse was sincere—even as he described him as a sadistic sex killer who had committed some of the most disturbing crimes in Canadian judicial history. In other words, Williams knew that what he had done was wickedly wrong, and he knew so when he was doing it. And it was the fact that he chose to act anyway that made him so immensely dangerous.

Look, for example, at what Detective Sergeant Smyth said to him at one point during the interrogation. The interview had been going on for a little under three hours at this point, Williams was struggling, knew he was sinking fast, and he had just asked Smyth what his options were. Smyth replied: “Well, I don't think you want the cold-blooded psychopath option, I might be wrong eh, cause don't get me wrong I've met guys who actually kind of enjoyed the notoriety, got off on it, got off on having that label, [Paul] Bernardo being one of them … I don't
see that in you, if I saw that in you I wouldn't even be back in here talking to you quite frankly. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe you got me fooled, I don't know.”

Police interrogations can be full of trickery, but this was not a trick. As he did numerous times, Smyth was appealing to Williams's good side, because he knew there
was
a good side—the same positive side that so many other people had recognized and appreciated over the course of his life, and one that was entirely at odds with the heinous crimes he acknowledged committing. Another button pushed repeatedly by Smyth as Williams neared the cracking point was the acute distress of Jessica Lloyd's family as the hunt for her went on. And even as Williams viciously tormented and abused his captive victims, he had displayed peculiar flashes of empathy for them: getting the aspirin for Laurie Massicotte, telling Jane Doe that her baby would not be harmed, reassuring Lloyd that she would be all right when she had her apparent seizure.

The enormous gulf that separates the two faces of Russ Williams was the hardest thing for former friends and colleagues to deal with, because it seemed in hindsight as though they'd been fooled, and that the man they had known for all those years had been a total impostor. This helps explain why so few people had the courage to do what Jeff Farquhar, Garrett Lawless and a small handful of others were willing to do: stand up in public and say that the Russ Williams they'd known had been a thoroughly decent guy. Because as far as can be ascertained, that's true. All those qualities he had displayed—kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity, a certain sense of humor—had been real, but they had in the end been subsumed by a dark internal force that, once unleashed, proved far stronger.

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.