A New Kind of Monster (26 page)

Yet even early into the interview he was clearly struggling, as shown for example in his insistence that he had met Comeau—“one of my people,” as he called her—just one time, which as has been seen was by every indication a lie. They had flown together once, soon after he took command of 8 Wing in July 2009, he told Detective Sergeant Smyth, but he couldn't recall the precise circumstances. Here is what he said:

His mind in overdrive, Williams was sputtering nonsense, as he did a moment later when asked when and where he learned about Comeau's death. Given the gravity of the news, most people would have a vivid recollection, especially a person as sharp-minded as the base commander. This was his tortured reply:

In detective jargon this is “dissonance”—a stress-induced babble, as the brain races and tries to synchronize itself with the torrent of words pouring out. The interrogator keeps the process going by smoothly but abruptly jumping from topic to topic, as Smyth—a polygraph specialist—did throughout much of the long interview.

When Smyth pursued the topic of a possible relationship between Williams and Comeau, the suspect's response was equally telling, but in a different way. “Is there any reason at all that you can think of why Marie-France Comeau would have specifically referenced you in some of her, uh, some of her writings?” he asked Williams.

It was an extraordinarily serious allegation: a woman found raped and murdered was writing about you in her diary—what do you have to say about that? An innocent person would almost certainly respond along the lines of, “What? Are you kidding me? Writing what?”

Williams replied, with a small chuckle: “No, not at all … absolutely not.”

Smyth may have been bluffing about the diary. In a police interrogation, trickery is par for the course. A detective is allowed to lie and deceive, it's regarded as tradecraft, and in this instance the idea was to see which way Williams would jump. And he didn't jump at all; Smyth's hugely accusatory question seemed of little interest to him.

Smyth continued: “… Anything that she ever said to you that led you to believe that there may be something here more than a passing interest with her toward you?”

“No, not at all. We spent, you know, one flight together talking, I'd go back occasionally and talk, no I uh, if that's the case uh that's very surprising.”

For Smyth, the game throughout consisted of maintaining the rapport he was steadily building. When he politely asks Williams for his fingerprints, a blood sample and an imprint of his boots, for example, an hour or so into the interview, he explains that the purpose is to “help me move past you in this investigation.” No problem, Williams responds—but by now he must have been getting worried.

At the outset Smyth had made clear to Williams why he had been asked to come in. There was a clear geographical connection between him and the four occurrences the OPP were now examining as a group: the two sex attacks in Tweed in September, the murder of Comeau in Brighton two months later and now the disappearance of Lloyd. So when he was asked for the samples, Williams could have had no doubt that he might be in major trouble. But if he did not provide them, or if he walked out of the unlocked interview room—as Smyth had emphasized he could do anytime he pleased—he would look very suspicious indeed, and he knew those suspicions would not fade away, quite the reverse. It was at this point that his world began to crumble.

Smyth and his colleagues did not invent the interrogative technique that was about to unravel Williams's web of deceit. Rather, it is largely based on a type of counseling known as motivational interviewing, developed by two American clinical psychologists, Professors William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, who have done much critically acclaimed work with drug addicts. In contrast to many other forms of therapy, motivational interviewing does not confront the client and dwell on his/her failings. Instead, it is nonjudgmental and confidence-building, empathizing with the person's plight, gently pointing out the contrast between who they are and who they want to be, while offering possible solutions. Adapted to a police interrogation room, that translates into a dialogue built upon courtesy and expressions of friendliness and understanding, even warmth. All through the long interview, Smyth remains the quintessential nice guy trying to help Williams out of the jam he's in, displaying not a hint of frustration or aggression.

“I'll treat you with respect and I'll ask you to do the same for me,” he says at the beginning. He stresses repeatedly that Williams doesn't have to talk to him. He explains that he is what's termed a person in authority, “probably similar to what you may be considered on your [air] base.” He calls him “Bud,” and “Russ.” He tells him he has sat across the table from many other suspects in a similar predicament. His body language imitates that of Williams—leaning in, leaning out, sitting back, sometimes thoughtfully cupping his chin in one of his hands. In sum, Smyth behaves as though he is Williams's only friend on the planet. And that approach, which yielded such spectacular results, was not dreamed up on the fly. It reflected the fact that the detectives circling Williams knew that there were key buttons that could be pushed to great effect. But the empathy act was only part of what was going on in the interrogation room. Even as he seemed to drip
with goodwill, Smyth kept piling on the pressure, peeling back layer after layer of damning facts, some of which were literally being uncovered as the interview progressed. Throughout the afternoon and early evening, as the search warrants were producing fresh evidence, Smyth was kept apprised of developments, periodically going out of the room to confer with colleagues while Williams was left alone with his thoughts. And he made sure that Williams understood what was going on.

But it had to be done piecemeal—the tire tracks, the boot prints, the anticipated DNA findings, the computer searches—because if Williams were to be confronted with everything at once, there was a risk he would be overwhelmed and simply shut down. So, even as he relentlessly turned the screws, Smyth also constantly emphasized that bad as things were, and rapidly getting worse, Williams could make them marginally less so by summoning up the fortitude to tell the truth. Otherwise, Smyth gently explained, he would be buried in the avalanche of evidence that was about to land. And where would his credibility be then? What if, for instance, Lloyd's body were to be found? “That might even happen tonight for all I know, once that happens then I don't know what other cards you would have to play … What are we going to do?” With or without you, it was made plain to the colonel, the facts were going to come out. “Your opportunity to take some control here and have some explanation that anyone's going to believe is quickly expiring,” Smyth told him, tapping into Williams's innate, lifelong preference for order and control over chaos.

Long silences were another tool, as they often are in a police interrogation. For a suspect flailing to conceal the truth, it's unnerving to sit face to face with a detective who is talkative one moment and completely uncommunicative the next, staring hard all the while. The suspect's instinct is to try to fill the
vacuum by saying something—anything, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense, as happened with Williams several times.

And there was an additional key element to the confession, masterfully deployed: Williams's extreme distress, articulated many times, over what his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, was going through as her cherished, brand new house was being ripped apart by the police.

What follows is the exchange that immediately preceded Williams's admission of guilt. Smyth has just explained that, whatever efforts Williams might have made to clean up the contents of his computer, it was a futile exercise because the police tech guys could readily identify anything that had ever been there. Nor will any expense be spared, Smyth says; millions of dollars are available, whatever the police want for this investigation they will get, they don't even need to ask, that's how big a deal it all is. Even on a Sunday afternoon, sixty or seventy people are working on the file, he tells his quarry. By now Williams knows he is trapped, yet even as disaster looms, his instinct is to reach out to the friendly interrogator. “Call me Russ, please,” he says, and Smyth is happy to oblige.

“So what am I doing, Russ?” Smyth concludes. “I put my best foot forward for you, bud, I really have, I don't know what else to do to make you understand the impact of what's happening here … Do we talk?”

Williams pauses, his body language saying everything as he slumps forward, gazing downward, defeated. “I want to, um, minimize the impact on my wife,” he says finally.

“So do I,” Smyth instantly replies.

“So how do we do that?” Williams asks.

“Well,” Smyth responds. “You start by telling the truth.”

Another long pause.

“Okay,” Williams finally says, and Smyth repeats that word. Then Smyth asks: “All right, so where is she [Jessica Lloyd's body]?”

Williams pauses, then speaks the now-famous words that signaled the end. “You got a map?”

There was nothing accidental about Smyth's triumph. The OPP's Behavioural Sciences and Analysis Services unit to which he belongs has grown since it was created in 1995 and now comprises more than a hundred uniformed and civilian members. Based at OPP headquarters in Orillia, a hundred miles north of Toronto, the BSAS's broad mandate is behind-the-scenes sleuthing that not only probes the complexities of criminal behavior but also bridges the information gaps that often keep turf-conscious police at odds. The BSAS houses an array of skills and resources, from criminal profiling and polygraphy to threat assessment and the upkeep of the provincial sex offenders registry. The computerized backbone of the network is VICLAS, the national Violent Crime Linkage System, which constantly seeks links between seemingly disparate crimes. BSAS's expertise has a formidable reputation and is in constant demand by outside police departments. Only two other Canadian police agencies have their own behavioral science units: the RCMP and, more recently and on a smaller scale, the Sûreté du Québec.

A criminal profiler with BSAS before switching to its polygraph (lie detector) unit in 2007, and trained at the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico, Virginia, Smyth was thus very much part of a team when he went into the interview room with Williams that Sunday afternoon, and several of the other players, unseen, were watching the on-camera proceedings with
fascination. Also key to the outcome were the insights of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Peter Collins, attached to Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the OPP's longtime in-house expert in difficult cases, particularly sex-oriented ones. Dr. Collins declined to be interviewed about the case, but over the years he has taken a role in hundreds of investigations.

The approach taken by the interrogator varies as much as the suspect does, and in this instance it was clear that the top priority had to be winning Williams's confidence, even as he lied, and retaining it. Smyth had ample experience to fall back on, his courteous demeanor honed in numerous homicide investigations during his twenty-three years as a police officer. He began his career with York Regional Police, north of Toronto, transferred to the OPP in 1997, and has taken a role in two of Ontario's most high-profile homicide investigations, both involving children. One was the 2003 kidnap/sex murder in Toronto of ten-year-old Holly Jones, in which software developer Michael Briere was convicted. After Briere was interviewed by police without result, Smyth and others spent hours scrutinizing the videotape and shaping a second interview that then produced an exhaustive confession. More recently, he was part of the team investigating the disappearance in April 2009 of eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford from Woodstock, Ontario, for which two people were later charged with murder. For more than three months Tori's body was unaccounted for, until Smyth pursued what he said was just a hunch and located it in a thickly wooded area near Mount Forest.

Polygraphy and its accoutrements, his specialty, have changed significantly since the early days. Gone is the scratchy pen that leaps upward on the graph paper when the suspect experiences a surge of stress, replaced by sophisticated computer software. What hasn't altered is the underlying physiology of the person
under scrutiny, as the interviewer watches for fluctuations in blood pressure, pulse rate and electrodermal (skin) activity. And because that expertise is rooted in the art of separating truth from fiction, and detecting minute but significant shifts in tone, the polygrapher is one of the most sought-after experts when a challenging criminal interrogation arises. Many of the detectives who in 2006 interviewed suspects in the so-called Toronto 18 terror investigation, for example, were polygraph specialists. Which was one of the main reasons Smyth was sitting across from Colonel Russell Williams that day in the windowless interrogation room.