A New Kind of Monster (15 page)

Meanwhile, some additional expertise was called in, in the shape of Detective Sergeant Jim Van Allen, a seasoned criminal profiler attached to the OPP's Orillia-based Behavioural Sciences and Analyses Services unit who has taken a role in hundreds of murder and sex-assault investigations. Van Allen's task was to assess the disparate information about the break-ins and make a highly educated guess as to the type of person responsible. He didn't like what he saw at all.

The intruder was becoming more aggressive, even as he stealthily evaded detection. In one Orleans home, he left a message on the home computer taunting the occupants by telling them he had been there. In another, he left a trail of leaves leading into the house. In a third, he placed on the floor a photograph of the woman whose underwear he had stolen and he masturbated on it.

“He was messaging the victims and the victims' family by disturbing their living space, and he was getting a kick out of it,” says Van Allen, who has since retired after thirty-one years
with the OPP and is now a criminal profiling consultant in the private sector. “I look at all behavior on a continuum, and one of the things I'm seeing here is this: He could have just stolen the underwear off of a clothesline or something like that, but he's getting into the homes. He's in the beds, he's trying the underwear on, and I see that as a psychological movement toward the victims' bodies.”

In hindsight, Van Allen is unsurprised that Williams went on to rape and kill, although he says the speed at which Williams raced up the sexual deviance ladder is startling. “The guy we were looking for was right in that neighborhood, and the frequency of the break-ins and the repetitiveness showed he had this arrogance. And I thought: ‘This is a guy who could escalate.' You can't forecast whether it will be days, weeks, months or ever, but it certainly suggested he was going to continue in that manner. I concluded that he seemed to be very careful about avoiding contact with people, but that anytime that changed, the danger of a hands-on sexual assault would go right up.”

The geography of the burglaries, all clustered in the Fallingbrook subdivision, underlined the likelihood of there being a single predator who lived in the neighborhood. But who he might be, the Ottawa police and Van Allen had no idea until Williams was arrested. And there was no predictable time pattern. More than once a cluster of burglaries was followed by a long pause before the next one took place.

For a while, suspicion in Ottawa centered on a local man who had been charged with possessing child pornography. When police spoke to him, he reacted very cagily, and shortly afterward a pile of burned lingerie was found in a nearby field, marking one of two occasions when Williams disposed of some of his loot. “It was very coincidental, and it didn't do much to help eliminate this guy,” remarks Van Allen. But when a further
break-in occurred while the suspect was under police surveillance, it became clear he was not responsible.

If Williams was worried about the October 31 police alert, it didn't show, although he had by now begun monitoring the Ottawa police website as it tracked and publicized the mounting number of occurrences. On November 4 he raided another house in Tweed, and then on the 12th he struck in Orleans again, with another break-in following on the 20th. Then came three more in December and three more in January 2009, all while the area was under police scrutiny.

It was in January 2009 that Williams's career trajectory passed another milestone, his spell at DAR complete.

Still a lieutenant-colonel, he was posted to the Canadian Forces Language School at the Asticou Centre in Gatineau, across the river from downtown Ottawa and fifteen miles from his home in Orleans. There he spent the next six months immersed in learning French, an essential step toward reaching the next rank of full colonel. The CFLS is a big operation, currently providing more than two-thirds of all the language training for the Canadian Forces. Commanded by a lieutenant-colonel who oversees about 200 civilian teachers and administrative staff and a further 30 or so military members, the curriculum blends classroom instruction with written exercises and tests, conversation and one-on-one tutoring.

It wasn't Williams's first stab at learning French; he had acquired some basics years earlier while training for the Challenger jet in St-Jean, Quebec. But this was far more intense, and he emerged reasonably proficient. “Russ really enjoyed learning French,” recalls Jeff Farquhar, who himself is fluent in both French and German. “In what I think was our last telephone
conversation, in the fall [of 2009], we conversed primarily in French as practice. He threw in the odd local slang, which he had picked up from someone either in class or from someone in town. He definitely had fun with it, but he was always self-critical about his English accent coming through. He paid careful attention to the grammatical side, as per class, but he knew that he needed more ‘immersion' to truly speak and understand it well … There would be long pauses at times, broken finally by his laughing and saying,
‘Pardon, qu'est-ce que tu as dit?'
[Sorry, what did you say?] Then he would say words to the effect: ‘Man, I'll never get this down like you!' He would pick my brain, how I picked it up and what worked for me in helping to memorize grammar rules, et cetera. He took it all very seriously and with great ambition.”

Though nobody at the time could have had the least inkling, Williams's diligent efforts to become fluent in French would later have a direct bearing on the sex slaying of Corporal Marie-France Comeau, his first murder victim.

His secret nighttime life, meanwhile, had taken a couple of alarming turns. Photos Williams took at the time of a November 2008 burglary in Ottawa and carefully stored and concealed on his computer show his perversity reaching new levels. The dwelling he broke into was the home of two children, including a fifteen-year-old girl. In all, he stole twenty-two pieces of clothing: panties, bras, a bathing suit and a nightshirt. And as usual, he took scores of photographs. A total of seventy pictures show him with a pair of panties bearing a menstrual bloodstain. In the pictures, Williams is seen wearing, licking, kissing and finally ejaculating on it. When a couple of the photos were shown in court at the sentencing hearing that followed his guilty plea, spectators shuddered, turning their heads away and gasping in shock.

He was also becoming more brazen, even reckless. During a December break-in he committed on his own street in Orleans,
Wilkie Drive, he left footprints in the snow leading up to the back patio door, which he damaged, along with several window locks.

Shortly thereafter, on the first and second days of January 2009—the same month Williams began taking French lessons—he twice hit a house on Cara Crescent, a few minutes' walk from Wilkie Drive. This too was the home of a fifteen-year-old girl, robbed of dozens of pieces of lingerie. But Williams also stole many of the girl's personal photographs, including headshots done for a modeling agency, together with a piece of paper containing lip-gloss lip-prints. Other items in her bedroom, such as paintings, had been altered and moved. When the Ottawa police examined the room, they also found dried semen in her underwear drawer. When the physical evidence came to light, one of the many photos Williams had taken inside her bedroom showed him holding her makeup brush to his penis as he gazes steadily into the camera. He left the makeup brush behind.

The double break-ins left the girl so frightened that she began sleeping in the spare room with her dog. Williams, meanwhile, marked the occasion differently. On the computer records he kept of his intrusions, he labeled this one with the initials HNY: Happy New Year.

And as he grew bolder, he was also becoming more vigilant. A file folder containing scores of photos taken during a burglary in April, also in Orleans, contained a 148-page monthly crime report downloaded from the Ottawa police website, together with a screenshot of the police report on the break-in.

His pace began to pick up. On a weekend return visit to his Cosy Cove Lane cottage in Tweed the same month, he hit nearby homes on three consecutive nights: April 17, 18 and 19, a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Over the next few weeks he broke in or tried to break in to homes in Tweed and Orleans five times, fleeing with his customary trophies.

In mid-June, his behavior took a further strange twist, demonstrating new peculiarities. The event was a burglary on Cara Crescent in Orleans, a few doors down from where Williams had struck in January and home to a woman in her twenties and her father, both of whom were out of town at the time. On returning, the woman discovered that her underwear drawer, closet and laundry room had been looted, in what would be Williams's largest-ever single haul: 186 pieces of clothing. She also noticed that some of her ID had been laid out on a dresser in the spare room and her laptop opened. What particularly surprised her, she told the Ottawa police when they arrived, was that there in plain view was some valuable jewelry, untouched. Entry had been made through a basement window.

Williams's record-keeping was in this instance almost unbelievably thorough, even for him. As usual, he had taken scores of photographs, not only of himself but of the numerous pieces of lingerie he had stolen, spread out on the woman's bed and on the floor. The photos were subdivided into categories and labeled, showing where he had found them: bedroom; bedroom laundry; basement laundry; spare room. Once again, his obsessive need to organize his trophies was on display. When police later seized his computer hard drive and searched it, they also found a saved screenshot of the woman's Facebook page, together with five screenshots of the Ottawa police website recording the break-in.

And there was more. Police would later discover a bizarre letter on Williams's computer, addressed to the woman he had just robbed. Dotted with misspellings that were clearly deliberate, the letter read as follows:

Remarkably, Williams then itemized all the break-ins he had committed in Orleans, from the first one in May 2008 up to and including this one, thirteen months later. The list matches exactly the inventory of offenses to which he later pleaded guilty. (The dozens of fetish break-ins he had by then committed in Tweed went unmentioned.)

There is no evidence that he ever mailed the letter to the woman, or even intended to, and she was unaware of it until after his arrest. Nor, quite plainly, should it in any way be taken at face
value. The overall tone, however, seems apparent: Williams is apologizing for stealing her underwear, even as he gloats about what he has been doing with it. The faulty grammar and spelling and self-reference to “younger guys” show him pretending to be someone even younger than she is (she was twenty-four), as does the reference to “my moms.” Further, he is also suggesting that this will be the last of his break-ins and that “it seems right that I finish with a special chick like you.” Tell the police I won't do it again, he says in the next sentence.

Conceivably, the letter is evidence that Williams was at this point struggling with himself in an effort to cease his break-ins before he was caught. And had he done so then, before he had physically harmed anyone, he might have stayed below the police radar forever. But he didn't or couldn't stop, and perhaps the letter is a sign that he realized that.

Williams waited three weeks before striking again, this time in Tweed. And when he did so, he displayed a terrifying new boldness.

The incident took place just up the road from his cottage on Cosy Cove Lane, at a residence that he was clearly fixated upon, because he broke in there a total of nine times. This was intrusion number six, on July 10, 2009.

Williams had been watching and waiting in the wooded backyard, and at around one-thirty in the morning the woman of the house stepped into the shower. No one else was at home. Williams stripped off his clothes, leaving them outside, broke into the house and walked naked down the hallway, past the bathroom where the woman was showering, and into her bedroom. He stole from her a black thong, took no photographs and quickly departed. But a note that he later wrote to himself,
found by the police on his computer, showed what might have happened. It read as follows:

Williams's willingness to take risks was clearly accelerating, and—coincidentally or not—his new audacity coincided with the successful conclusion of his French-language studies in Gatineau. In July 2009, the same month, he was promoted to full colonel, and together with his new rank came a new and immensely prestigious posting: he was to take command of 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, the busiest air base in Canada.