A New Kind of Monster (2 page)

The detectives who took his detailed confessions had had to look no further than his two homes to find most of the physical evidence they sought. Williams had not only stored and carefully itemized the spoils of his obsessive break-ins, a collection of stolen women's underwear so extensive that twice he had had to take some of it to fields outside Ottawa and burn it. Along with the videos and thousands of still photos of himself, he had also documented everything in copious typed notes, describing each one of the crimes to which he was now willing to plead guilty.

Other serial killers have kept diaries too, and it was plain that for practical purposes he
was
a serial killer. The strict definition of the term as used by the FBI and the RCMP is that he or she has claimed at least three lives, and Williams killed two people. Yet there is no doubt whatever among justice officials close to the investigation that he would have murdered again had he not been caught, and would have continued to kill. And he all but said so himself.

As well, it was evident that he had long been a sexual deviant, and now here he was: a stalker and cunning sex killer who had been commanding 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, Canada's most important air base, the air force's operational hub.

How was that even conceivable?

In thirty years of writing about crime in Canada and conflict abroad, I thought I'd seen every kind of killer. But Russell Williams did not resemble any of them, and in one way he seemed the scariest of all, because so many different people who'd dealt with him had respected him and liked him so much. Throughout his long military career he'd been almost universally seen as a smart, decent guy, a stickler for organization and a bit awkward socially, but also
generous and very often kind. What had changed him into the monster now before the court? Or had everybody just been fooled all along? It was suggested, and the analogy was not entirely fanciful, that he resembled a Jekyll-and-Hyde character: by day, an exemplary, upstanding citizen; by night, transformed into a loathsome, terrifying predator.

Eight months had now elapsed since Williams had been charged with murder, and it was becoming increasingly evident that no additional cases were likely to be laid at his door, suggesting he had unleashed his instincts unusually late in life. And if so, then why? What was the trigger? That was what everyone was asking, and none more so than the people who had known him—or had thought they did. And nobody, it seemed, had an answer.

N
eatly dressed in casual clothes, the tall, lean man didn't have a lot to say as he patiently waited his turn in the barber's chair that Saturday morning. Saturdays are often a busy time for Tweed barber Reg Coté, a fixture on the village main street for thirty years, and in that regard October 3, 2009, was no different. Longtime customers, mostly middle-aged, stop in for a sixteen-dollar haircut and a chat with whomever is there, including the agreeable Coté, a good talker and listener whose Quebec accent remains strong. There's no red-and-white striped barber's pole outside his shop, but there's a makeshift one inside, and his salon resembles the traditional model: an informal, walkin business with a single barber's chair and an L-shaped seating arrangement, where men who know each other can catch up on local developments, good and bad.

But this was no ordinary Saturday morning in Tweed. The usually tranquil village was struggling to make sense of an unusual piece of local news. Two days earlier, under the headline “Public Safety Concern,” provincial police at nearby Madoc had issued an unsettling press release:

Some particulars were missing from the release. Nothing conveyed the fact that the attacks had been sexual in nature, and that after being blindfolded and tied to chairs, both women had had their clothes cut off before nude photo sessions began. Nor that the home invasions had lasted hours, and that they had occurred within a few hundred yards of each other, on adjoining roads on the rural outskirts of town.

A half hour's drive north of Belleville, Tweed lies roughly midway between Toronto and Ottawa. Once a bustling way station on the Toronto–Montreal rail line, these days Tweed is a laid-back community of about 1,600, with three times that number in the greater area. Yet it is also a fairly worldly place, home to many retirees, and most households have access to the usual modern telecommunications devices. So word of the twin assaults spread quickly.

Already, out-of-town undercover officers had been spotted—faces not familiar in Tweed—in unmarked cars and in at least one instance peering out the windows of someone's borrowed house. In undercover surveillance, a good rule of thumb is that the smaller the venue, the harder it is to remain unseen. And it hadn't
taken long for some of Coté's more astute customers to notice that something unusual was afoot in the Cosy Cove Lane area, a few minutes' drive from Victoria Street, the main thoroughfare.

So on this Saturday morning, the barbershop conversation consisted of little else but the mystery intruder and what he might do next. “Suddenly there's people coming into the shop and talking about all this,” Coté recalls. And as he clipped and snipped, Coté was not the only person in the shop paying close attention to the discussion. So too was the tall man with the brush cut waiting to get a quick trim.

The chatter was laced with rebukes for the police. Why hadn't they put out the full story? And why hadn't they issued an alert after the first home invasion, on September 17? Why did they wait for the guy to strike again?

It was an issue that would become a sore point in Tweed, although there was a certain logic to the information gaps. Police investigating serious crimes routinely withhold details that can only be known by the perpetrator, such as the caliber of a gun or the quantity of cash stolen in a robbery. In this instance, moreover, investigators were navigating a fine line between warning the public and trying not to trigger panic—and an instant media blizzard—which is what might well have happened if all the bizarre details had become known. As well, an undercover operation was supposed to be under way. What's more, there had initially been a credibility issue with one of the two women who'd been attacked.

But that's not how many people in Tweed saw things, at least not at the time, as the talk buzzed in Coté's barbershop that morning. And as it did, most of his customers very likely had little idea who the tall, well-dressed man might be as he sat there quietly listening. But Coté knew, because he was one of his regulars; he'd been cutting his hair for several months. He was Colonel Russell Williams, forty-six, wing commander of the sprawling
8 Wing/CFB Trenton air base, a 45-minute drive southwest of Tweed, and for several years a resident of the short, winding road named Cosy Cove Lane.

Rich in history and folklore, perched on the edge of Stoco Lake, Tweed feels different from many small Ontario towns, perhaps a bit more sophisticated. A dwindling handful of dairy and cattle farmers still make a living in the hills outside town, and nineteenth-century brick buildings line Victoria Street. Along with its numerous retirees are many others who have exchanged big-city stresses for a smaller paycheck and a more low-key lifestyle. Tweed is the former home of Patrick LeSage, the retired judge who presided over the sensational Paul Bernardo murder trial in 1995. Provincial Liberal cabinet minister Leona Dombrowsky is a lifelong Tweedite too. It's a place where plenty of people still go to church, patriotism and small-c conservatism run deep, and some of the newer arrivals in town will tell you it can take years before you are accepted by the old guard. Yet Park Place Motel owner and Indian expatriate Neil Patel says that during his four-plus years in mostly white Tweed he has yet to encounter a racial slur. Nor has he once had to call police to deal with unruly guests at his well-run hostelry, tucked on the shoreline beach of Stoco Lake at the entrance to town.

Now, almost overnight, the comforting sense of security had evaporated. No one had the least idea of the identity of the Tweed Creeper, as he became known. But it didn't look as if he lived very far away. Tweed residents began locking their doors and many started keeping a loaded gun at hand.

“My mom didn't really want me walking anywhere, and when I walked to the bus stop in the morning, it was dark in the morning back then, so I was always looking over my shoulder, and
I was really scared at night,” says Ruth, a Tweed teenager who would learn months later, to her great horror, that her home had been broken into and robbed of underwear by the same intruder who had attacked the two women. “It was hard to sleep. I was thinking that someone was going to come in my house. I always woke up in the middle of the night, at like two in the morning, because that's when all this stuff happens.”

Amid the speculation and rumor, the police were working with full reports of the two bizarre attacks, which had occurred on adjacent roads connected by a wooded footpath. The first victim, known as Jane Doe, was a young mother in her early twenties who had been asleep in her recently rented lakeside cottage with her weeks-old baby; her spouse, a truck driver, was away, working up north for Ontario Hydro. In an account that police initially seemed to doubt because it sounded so improbable, she told them the intruder came inside, probably through an unlocked door, and woke her. He then struck her—hard—before blindfolding her, tying her to a chair and taking out his camera for a lengthy nude photo session. When he was finished, he fled into the night. There was no sexual penetration or sexual assault in any usual sense. She never saw the attacker's face. Her baby was left unharmed, and did not waken.

A report form was filled out, but there was little follow-up at first. The investigating Madoc OPP officers wondered briefly whether the attack—if it had even taken place—might have been the work of the woman's spouse, but they swiftly discounted that possibility. And the cops' problem was not merely that their rural and small-town experience had left them unprepared for a strange case like this, which seemed to belong in the pages of a big-city tabloid. It was also that the intruder, whoever he might be, had left behind nothing that could be traced—no items of clothing, no fingerprints and no samples of DNA.

Moreover, fairly or not, the young woman had a reputation for being erratic, and perhaps in this case she was possessed of an overactive imagination. Among the few Tweed residents who heard of the incident, there was the quiet suggestion that she might be suffering from postpartum depression.

Then, thirteen days later, the second attack took place.

A former accountant and telemarketer, and mother of three, 46-year-old Laurie Massicotte lived alone in her lakeside cottage on nearby Cosy Cove Lane. She recounted in an interview what happened.

As she often did, she had fallen asleep under a blanket on her living room couch, watching late night television. And the TV was still on when she woke, finding herself under assault from a man she could not see. The blanket was over her head and he was repeatedly punching her in the head and face. For many long minutes he kept his hands tightly on her throat—she feared she was going to be throttled—and as he did so, he warned her not to resist or to try to look at him.

The intruder had entered her home through an unlocked window at the back of the house, out of sight from the road. He told her that a robbery was under way, that he had accomplices who were in the house and that his job was to control her. With Massicotte's head still under the blanket, the man reached underneath and blindfolded her with a strip of pillowcase material he had sliced up. A second strip was used to bind her hands behind her back.

What followed was more than three hours of terror. “After he got my blindfold on me, he stood up, obviously, and he barked at me, ‘Are you looking at me?' And I said, ‘Oh no, God no.' ” It was the wise thing to say. “You don't want to see me,” was his reply. The robbery story was a ruse, and though she didn't realize it until later, there were no accomplices. Instead, the invader made
her sit on the couch and, with the blindfold still on, he tied her up with a kind of harness he had fashioned from another pillowcase. He then stripped her naked by cutting off her clothes, wielding the blade with great precision. “It didn't leave a scratch on me,” she said. Then the photo session began. The assailant took dozens of photographs, directing Massicotte as he obtained shots from numerous angles. She could hear the camera clicking.

But before any photos were taken, something curious took place. She told her attacker that her head was throbbing from the blows and that she needed some aspirin. Still in her blindfold, she was led to the bathroom and given two before being returned to the couch. “He was patting my head after he brought me back to the couch. As we were walking, he was rubbing my head softly, and he was apologizing, saying, ‘Sorry for that,' ” she recounts. “He was sorry for punching me in the head.”

The intruder made many other conciliatory gestures, constantly reassuring Massicotte that if she cooperated he would not kill her. In a tone she is sure he deliberately kept low so as to disguise his voice, he called her “Laurie” many times, made small talk and said she seemed like “a nice person.” Only fleetingly did he touch her sexually, and when she protested he stopped.