A New Kind of Monster (10 page)

From the start, he belonged to an elite. At the downtown Toronto military recruitment office where he first applied, plenty of other walk-ins said they wanted to be pilots too, and at that time only about one in ten made it to the next phase, the week-long aircrew selection process. Aircrew selection encompassed aptitude tests, a rigorous physical exam, and visual and spatial orientation tests. Recruiters also tried to assess the personalities of the applicants. Fighter-pilot potential, for example, is different from transport-pilot material. In the year Williams signed up, the elimination rate from within that aircrew recruitment pool was also about 90 percent; just one in ten was approved and went on to join the air force. So of the original intake of budding pilots, 1 percent made the cut.

“They don't just pick guys and send them up the ranks,” says an air force member, still in the military, who joined the same
year as Williams and went through pilot training with him at CFB Moose Jaw. “They're looked at very closely and put into very specific situations and scenarios to see how they handle it. Then they might go, ‘Yeah, this person has the potential to become a good leader,' and then they develop that person, start pushing them if they're willing, and then away they go.”

One mental trait is of particular interest to recruiters assessing prospective pilots: the ability in an unexpected situation or crisis to make a snap judgment and then instantly focus 100 percent on whatever needs to be done, distracted by nothing, for as long as it takes. It was a quality Williams had in spades, all his life. When he was young, his keen capacity for detail took the form of being diligent and thorough. Later, it would become compulsive and obsessive. All through his life, people marveled at his encyclopedic ability to store facts in his mind and retrieve them at will.

Once through the door, his first stop was basic training, better known as boot camp, which as an officer cadet meant a fourteen-week stint at CFB Chilliwack in south-central British Columbia. Basic training is an intense experience designed to weed out the keen-but-weak ones, which it does very well. The course is and was a blend of rudimentary military skills, such as weapons handling and first aid, together with classroom sessions on leadership fundamentals and ethical values. Above all, the emphasis is on fitness, and despite his strength and excellent physical condition, Williams found the experience grueling.

“Boot camp was brutal, absolutely horrible,” recounts Farquhar, his former university friend. “In the first couple of days he remembered one guy breaking his leg, and he talked about the grind, all the running through the bushes and doing it for days on end, not getting much sleep or [much to] eat. It was a big endurance test. He said to me, ‘Oh man, they're making or breaking you right there. If you can't hack the first two weeks, that's it.' ”

He did hack it, and from there he was dispatched to the CFB training school in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, for a few weeks' instruction in the basics of flying. Then it was on to CFB Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, often referred to as 15 Wing Moose Jaw, a longtime training base for pilots. There, Williams learned to fly by mastering the Avro-manufactured Tudor jet, a big, lumbering airliner descended from the famous British Lancaster bomber.

“I remember when he was in Moose Jaw, he said this was the point that would make or break him as a pilot,” Farquhar recalls. “He wanted to fly, but he was not going into helicopters—he was deathly fixed on not becoming a helicopter pilot. That was not where he wanted to be. He said helicopters were old and useless, and they were widow makers.”

From day one he was a natural pilot, says the former rookie who trained alongside him, picking up the basics with an ease that impressed his instructors. His skill marked a lifelong aptitude with airplanes and many other mechanical things. Years later, Williams would master the Airbus, an extremely complicated aircraft, in just a few days.

Along with his prowess at flying and the confidence that went with it, he began to show a side of his personality that would later seem utterly at odds with his crimes, but which many of his peers observed throughout his career: a generosity, even kindness, in his dealings with younger, less experienced colleagues. “How I remember him from Moose Jaw was as this very helpful type of person,” recalls the former fellow rookie. “He started out at the bottom like everyone else, but later, as a senior student, part of his job was to help the junior guys coming in. And he did—he was really nice to them. He was just a very nice guy.”

It took Williams a little under three years to earn his wings, which is about the average. Now he was a fully qualified military pilot, and it was during the next stage in his career that it began to be apparent what a good one he really was. From Moose Jaw he returned to the training school at Portage la Prairie, this time as an instructor, with the rank of lieutenant. In those days not many pilots went straight from learning to teaching, but Williams did, and the former air force major who oversaw him explains why.

Former air force major Greg McQuaid, now retired and living in Kelowna, B.C., had about twenty instructors under his supervision, half of them freshly minted pilots, and Williams stood out. “Of the new instructors, he was one of our best, one of the top one or two. Russ was an excellent instructor, perfect, very bright. A big thing with being a flight instructor is the ability to observe and analyze errors, and determine what correct course of action would fix them, to develop a style so you could present your criticism without sounding overly critical.”

His flight-instructor course under McQuaid lasted about eight weeks. Then he began teaching in a classroom setting. But most of his instruction was done in the air, typically consisting of two instruction missions a day. “Russ was in his right niche, and I would see the results in his students, who were very quick to sum up who their instructors were,” McQuaid says. “They were under great pressure, so it was very important for them to get a top instructor. He was one of the more popular ones, and his students tended to have good results.”

McQuaid knew Williams for two years. “I would have seen him every working day—all the kibitzing, all the rainy-day volleyball games, Friday nights in the officers' club, all that—and I found him to be sociable. I've heard others say, since [the criminal charges] came up, that they found him on the cold side. I didn't
see that at all, though of course I had a different relationship than some others might. I wasn't his buddy, I was his boss. I was a major, he started out as a lieutenant, and under my tenure he became a captain. And I helped him become a captain. I wrote his personnel evaluation report. He got a shiny personnel evaluation report from me, and he earned it. He was a sharp guy, and I suspect that aided him in hiding his crimes.”

Like so many others, McQuaid later looked back and wondered how well he had really known Russell Williams. “Was this always there, all subdued? Did something go off in his life? When I first heard of it, I said, ‘I don't believe it, there's a mistake—there
is
a mistake.' Then, as the evidence starts coming out, you ask yourself: ‘Did I miss something?'

“He was intense, no question. I recall talking to him when it seemed like he was looking at the back of your head through your eyes. But he was also cool. I've been a pilot for thirty-eight years, and a big part of my life has been screening pilots. And one of the things we look for in a pilot is the ability to remain calm and cool under pressure, and he struck me as having that ability … And in a sense, it turns out maybe he had it too strong.”

Midway through his tour at Portage la Prairie, Williams did something that surprised his few close friends: he got married. Jeff Farquhar recalls first hearing about the bride-to-be. “I had tripped out to Winnipeg and we were driving along number 1 highway toward Moose Jaw when he brought it up. He said, ‘Hey, I've got a girlfriend … I met her in Calgary.' ”

Williams was marrying someone whose long professional career and pleasant, self-effacing personality would complement his own. After his arrest, some people who knew the couple casually said the union looked to be less a marriage of great affection than one of convenience, and one that seemed to work extremely well. But others said there was a genuinely strong bond between
husband and wife, and certainly Williams's palpable distress about her during his police confession suggests that.

Mary Elizabeth Harriman was an only child, five years older than her husband, and after marrying Williams she retained her maiden name. When they met, she had a University of Guelph bachelor's degree in applied science, specializing in nutrition, and had just completed an MBA in adult education at St. Frances Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Now she was working with the Dairy Nutrition Council of Alberta, part of a lifelong commitment to health-related causes. She went on to join the Ottawa-based Heart and Stroke Foundation, for whom she would work for many years, rising to the prestigious position of associate executive director, the post she held when her husband was arrested. The federal government's lobbying database, which keeps track of how corporations and associations try to influence policy, shows that she had by then spent more than ten years pressing for tougher government action in combating smoking, trans fats in foods and childhood obesity.

Before getting married, Williams and Harriman shared a rented apartment in Portage la Prairie, listed in the phone directory under both of their names. Then, one day before they married, they paid $75,000 for a detached home on Wilkinson Crescent. The small, nondenominational wedding ceremony took place at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on June 1, 1991.

Williams was twenty-eight, Harriman thirty-three. Both sets of parents attended, as did the onetime girlfriend Williams had dated before going to U of T. Farquhar was the master of ceremonies, a favor Williams reciprocated at Farquhar's own wedding four years later. “It was nice, a little less formal than I was used to,” he recalls. “About eighteen people were there, I think, but I didn't really know her at all. I really met her on the date of the wedding.”

The topic of children came up that day, Farquhar says. “I remember slapping him on the back after they'd taken their vows and saying, ‘Are we going to see a bunch of little Williamses running around?' And he said, ‘Ah no, Jeff. We've discussed this and it's just not in the cards.' ” Another wedding guest asked Williams the same question and got the same answer. The world was too unstable a place to bring any more children into it, he said glibly. More likely, he simply wasn't interested. “Russ was never hugely child-oriented. He was good when kids were around, but he would only tolerate them so far,” says Farquhar.

Harriman's father, Frederick, was a former military man and Second World War veteran who later became a geologist with a mining company in the small northern Ontario town of Madsen, where he met his future wife, Irene, and where Mary Elizabeth was raised. Williams warmed to both his in-laws, and was happy to school Fred Harriman in the use of computers. Both the older Harrimans have since died, but after Williams and their daughter bought a home in Orleans in 1995, Fred and Irene were for several years occasional visitors.

Back at Portage la Prairie, Williams's two-year stint as a pilot trainer was nearing its end. And as it did so, there came a strange glimpse of the low-key but unmistakably narcissistic facet of his personality that ultimately would have such a bearing on his hideous life of crime: his love of taking pictures of himself, and of being a showman.

The occasion was in 1992. A much-admired, now-obsolete air force demonstration team nicknamed “Musket Gold” was to perform its final air show, flying four bright-yellow, single-engine CT-134 Beech Musketeers that were soon to be taken out of service. McQuaid, Williams's boss, handpicked him to be one of the four pilots, and the Musketeers, as they were dubbed, spent weeks training for the team's swan song. The exercise went
off flawlessly and Williams added a special touch. He brought along a VHS video camera and filmed himself inside the cockpit, smiling widely against a backdrop of the other Musketeers wheeling and maneuvering their planes high up in the sky. He edited the footage and added a soundtrack, the eerie song “Exile” by the Irish artist Enya, featured in the 1991 movie
L.A. Story
. The other pilots were given copies of the video as mementos.

The air show was a huge personal success for him, and he was promoted to captain soon after. His two years at Portage la Prairie were a natural springboard for the next phase in the steady upward trajectory of his career: electronic war games, played high above the Atlantic ocean.

In July 1992, Williams and Harriman sold their home for a small profit and headed for Canadian Forces Base Shearwater in Nova Scotia. Harriman took a job with a provincial nutritional-awareness program. Located on the eastern shore of Halifax Harbour, CFB Shearwater was home to the 434 Combat Support Squadron, and one of the smallest air bases in the country. Williams's new mission was at the controls of one of the base's three CC-144 Challenger jets, small, versatile planes designed primarily for electronic warfare and coastal patrol work.