A New Kind of Monster (6 page)

Constructed amid great secrecy and built in part by German prisoners of war, the Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratories were created in 1944 by the federal government as part of the nuclear Manhattan Project, which created the A-bomb. The basic idea, enthusiastically promoted by Winston Churchill, was that U.S. and British know-how would fuse with Canadian uranium, all in a suitably isolated location. Deep River was the company town built to house the scientists and their families who poured in.

To this day the myth persists that Chalk River was the source of the plutonium in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In fact, the war had ended by the time
the first Chalk River nuclear activity began. Nonetheless, it remained for many years a highly enigmatic enterprise. Both Deep River and Chalk River were patrolled by armed guards, with access to either place controlled by military checkpoints. Deliberately placed upwind and upriver from Chalk River to avoid possible fallout from its reactors, Deep River sits between the Trans-Canada Highway and the Ottawa River, about 125 miles northwest of Ottawa and a 45-minute drive from the big Petawawa army base.

Everything in Deep River was meticulously planned—so much so that years before the Williams family arrived, its critics mocked it as sterile, artificial and oppressive. In a jaundiced and now-famous article in
Maclean's
magazine in 1958, author Peter Newman painted a picture of a community that could sometimes be stifling, likening Deep River to “a utopian attempt to create a happy environment where all is ordered for the best.” The writer quoted a poem penned by a resident that mocked Deep River's entrenched sense of good order:

But the poet was assuredly in the minority among the mostly urban-educated professionals who lived in and around Deep River. Writing in 1970 as Deep River marked its twenty-fifth anniversary, visiting
Globe and Mail
reporter Rudy Platiel marveled at what he called “a town with few parallels.” He noted the energetic volunteerism, the busy library, the enthusiasm at the weekly newspaper, and the scores of clubs and social groups—everything from yachting and drama to track and field, curling,
bridge and a symphony orchestra whose conductor doubled as a neutron physicist. “This town is clubbed to death, always has been,” according to Hickey the realtor. “Access to the big city didn't used to be what it is today, and people made do with what they had.”

In short, Dave Williams and his family had arrived in a small town with a sophisticated urban feel to it, full of skilled professionals with high expectations. The work was steady, the money was good, and home was a big three-bedroom duplex on Le Caron Street that the Williamses bought in March 1968, the same month Russell turned five.

An elderly English-born widow who lived in the other half of the duplex at the time and is still in Deep River today remembers his parents as standoffish and aloof. Russell, however, was a lively, friendly little boy who would chat across the fence, sometimes in very English-oriented slang. One time he solemnly informed her that his younger brother, Harvey, had just “spent a penny” in the garden flowers, a euphemism for relieving oneself that was dated even then. Like everyone else who learned of his arrest four decades later, the former neighbor was horrified by the news. “He was a smart kid, very smart. I don't know where he went wrong, but something went wrong. I hope they throw the book at him.”

No less stunned was retired teacher Erma Wesanko, who taught Williams in the kindergarten class at Deep River's T.W. Morison Public School. A snowbird, she was vacationing in Florida when she got word. “It was a tremendous shock, quite a surprise. His name rang bells when I heard it, and when I saw his picture I absolutely remembered him as this little blond boy I had known. I could just picture him. He was a quiet little boy. I can't remember him being tremendously outgoing. He was just a normal little boy, very attractive, gorgeous really. It's just a very
sad story. It hurts me terribly to think about how this could happen to someone.”

Wesanko remembers her teaching days in the community with great fondness. “Deep River was such a great place for children, a safe town with all kinds of activities and all kinds of things to do.”

But beneath the smooth veneer of familial stability was an undercurrent of turbulence, barely concealed then and today widely acknowledged: a permissive 1960s sexual ethos was flourishing in the community. “It was like Peyton Place [the New England town in the classic novel about the sordid secrets that lie beneath a placid exterior], quite a little den of iniquity. People were trading partners and sleeping with one another's wives,” says retired schoolteacher Dianne Murphy, who also taught at Morison when Williams attended.

Many marriages ruptured, “and a lot of people stayed with their new partners,” Murphy remembers. “They had what they called the Key Club, and quite a few people participated. A lot of the professionals would have been involved, more than the techies. The population was heavily loaded with British immigrants, and there was a certain kind of class system that was incorporated into this town. Some neighborhoods were designed exclusively for the professionals, others were for the tech people.”

Karen Bigras, too, recalls the Key Club, a conduit for wife swapping. A participant would go to a party at the club with his or her spouse and then leave with someone else's partner. Bigras first heard about these goings-on when she was seven. “You put your keys in a hat. My parents were shocked and horrified when they found out about it. They had been asked to join.”

Retired family therapist Peter Addison, who spent six years as chief counselor at the Deep River high school, knew both of
Williams's parents and tried unsuccessfully to help them when their marriage faltered. “It was an exciting time, it was all happening, this nuclear thing was going to be their salvation,” he says of the Deep River residents. But Addison also recalls a social milieu that was “neurotic as hell,” in which sexual experimentation seemed to blend with an adherence to conventional middle-class values. “It was a strange society. None of that free-spirited stuff was as free-spirited as it appeared to outsiders. The parents were pretty traditional. Some of them didn't understand why kids would have a choice about what they wanted to do. I remember arguing with parents when kids would want to drop Latin or something. It would be, ‘No, they can't do that.' ”

Some who lived in Deep River at the time remember Williams's father, David, as a loud, authoritarian figure who would insult his wife in front of others and insisted on having his way. Neither parent was overtly affectionate, several people said; both seemed preoccupied with their busy lives. “Russell's mother would come down to the [Yacht and Tennis] Club and leave him on his own to play on the waterfront,” remembers a former resident who was a few years older than Russell and knew the family. “Frankly, the teenagers at the club really did not like the father at all. He became the subject of many pranks. He had a quick, sharp temper and was easily provoked.”

How much impact any of this had on Williams's psyche and how much it shaped his future life is subject for speculation. What is certain is that his home life was soon going to change radically.

Living on Birch Street a couple of blocks from the Williams house was another family drawn to Deep River by the Chalk River project: Jerry and Marilynn Sovka and their three young children. An Alberta-born nuclear physicist, the son of Czech immigrants, Jerry Sovka was educated at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and he too had attended the University of Birmingham, on a scholarship, which is where he may have first met Christine Williams. “Jerry Sovka was very much involved with the Yacht and Tennis Club—and many other things,” says retired AECL electrical engineer Bill Bishop, who has lived in Deep River since 1967. “He was a very social person, maybe too much so. He was a ladies' man, he liked women, he had an air about him. He was a real hustler.”

The Williamses and Sovkas were close, and nowhere more so than at the Deep River Yacht and Tennis Club, the epicentre of social life where live rock bands often played on Saturday nights. The club also had a reputation as a “meet market.” (Some people had a less genteel term: the Deep River Twat and Penis Club.) “The Brits brought—I won't say peculiarities—but they brought a freer kind of attitude,” opines another long-ago Deep River resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If you went to a dance, you didn't just dance with your wife, you danced with three or four other partners … It was socially accepted in Britain, probably an offshoot from the postwar years. It was pre-Woodstock, but the acceptable threshold was steadily winding its way down. It was just a very fluid marital scene in some circles. I don't know what was going on behind closed doors, but at the yacht club dances, for example, they were definitely pushing the envelope.”

Peter Addison recalls the yacht club well, and recounts crewing with both David Williams and Jerry Sovka. “Sometimes I'd be the assistant—I was the first mate and they were the captains. David was a tough captain when we were sailing together. Usually they had separate boats, but occasionally they sailed together.” And even in a community brimming with high achievers, both men stood out. “David was one of the top nuclear metallurgists, and you don't get to that level unless there's a certain part of your personality that's able to be obsessive,” Addison
says. “He and Jerry in their respective fields were among the top people in the world at the time, and that's why he was able to move wherever he wanted to, because he was in demand. And he was competitive—anyone at that level is competitive. I remember that from when we skied together a couple of times in Quebec, he and I and another buddy. He was interested in music, theater and nuclear metal. And he was a hell of a good singer.” He could also be extremely stubborn, Addison recalls. “I remember once he and I organized a dance for something or other, and we had a big argument about what kind of orange juice to use.”

Christine Williams, as she was known then, a tall, accomplished tennis player, “was as charming as she was good-looking,” in the words of another former Deep River resident. “It was always small talk, but she always had a pleasant remark to make.”

Yet there was a pronounced conservative streak. Addison recalls a weekend when Christine Williams took care of his young son and daughter, aged three and four. To the surprise of both, she insisted that they change into their bathing suits in different rooms. “She was a little bit prissy, and they thought that was pretty amusing, because that was the hippie time in Canada, too, and we would sometimes go swimming without bathing suits.

“Chris was extremely attractive, yet the funny thing was, David used to put her down all the time. David was in charge. She was expected to wait on him, and everything he did was expected to be wonderful. David and Chris had a lot of marital problems, and I don't think he understood the whole thing about relationships … I don't think he had much connection with the kids even when he was there.”

In October 1969, Christine Williams filed for divorce. In a day when a divorce application had to cite a reason for separating, hers was on grounds of adultery, stating that her husband had been having an affair with Marilynn Sovka. The application
was not contested and the Williamses split up. Christine sold her husband her share of the house, gaining custody of their two sons, and the three moved out. For a short spell she and the boys lived in nearby Petawawa, home to the big army base. The former duplex neighbor recalls helping her haul the furniture down Highway 17.

Meanwhile, Jerry Sovka had filed his own divorce petition against Marilynn, also alleging adultery with Dave Williams. Both divorces were made final in February 1970, with the three Sovka children remaining with Marilynn.

With her divorce just four months old, Christine remarried in June of that year—the bridegroom being none other than Jerry Sovka, who had taken a job as a senior engineer with Ontario Hydro in Toronto. They would stay together for the next thirty years before separating—an event that would prove greatly upsetting to Williams, judging by his response, which was to sever almost all contact with his mother. At the time of her son's arrest, Nonie Sovka, as Christine Williams was now known, was living in an elegant condo on Toronto's Harbourfront, and even though she was approaching seventy, was still working as a physiotherapist at the city's acclaimed Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

David Williams stayed on in Deep River for another year. A newspaper photo from February 1971 shows him singing with the local choral group, which he directed. But the romance with Marilynn Sovka—“a very nice woman,” as Addison remembers her—did not last, and soon he had kindled a relationship with another woman, again married with children. She left her family to move with Williams to Germany, where he had a new job, but that relationship too soon fizzled.

The ever-peripatetic David Williams, to whom Russell would remain close for most of his life, later returned to North America, first to New York and then eventually to a position
with General Electric's Nuclear Products Division, based in San Jose, California. He also became a naturalized American. At the time of Russell Williams's arrest he was employed at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was editor-in-chief of the journal
Biomaterials
. Father and son never lived together after Dave and Christine divorced, but they maintained a strong bond and would often visit each other, according to people who knew them both. During his confession and in subsequent talks with police, however, Russ Williams more than once made it clear that he did not want his father to visit him behind bars.