A New Kind of Monster (34 page)

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 in 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.

“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 intelligence 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.