A New Kind of Monster (29 page)

As Edelson and his colleagues began sifting through the thousands of pages of evidence disclosed by the Crown, the police were looking hard at Williams's past. To them too, it seemed highly improbable that he had launched his career as a fetish-driven sex killer so late in life. So they cast their net as widely as they could, examining every phase of his adult life.

In the world of unsolved homicides, DNA technology has become by far the most valued tool, a constantly refined science that grows more precise almost every year. One of the newest
frontiers is what's termed “familial search,” which tracks connections between the similar but not identical DNA markers shared by close relatives. And it might be thought that when a suspect has confessed to murder and has provided a DNA sample, it would be a straightforward task to run it through the national, RCMP-administered DNA bank on a sort of fishing expedition, to see if it ties in with any other crimes. But until the person has actually been convicted, Canadian law doesn't allow that. Case-by-case analysis can be done; if DNA has been obtained in one investigation, it can be compared with the sample found in another. But for the same reason a search warrant must, for example, specify an apartment number rather than blanket the whole building, preconviction DNA comparisons have to be specific.

There were, nonetheless, plenty of other unsolved murder cases for the Williams investigation team to look at, all involving women. As seen, evidence ruled out any involvement in the 1987 Margaret McWilliam rape-strangulation in Scarborough, where Williams had graduated from university a year earlier. Another case police looked into was the June 2001 slaying of nineteen-year-old Nova Scotia native Kathleen MacVicar, found raped and stabbed to death at the 8 Wing base in Trenton. Williams, who had been living and working in Ottawa at the time, was swiftly excluded in that murder too.

Police in Halifax contacted the OPP in connection with three unsolved murders that took place while Williams was at the Shearwater, Nova Scotia, base from 1992 to 1994: the killings of Andrea King, 18; Shelley Connors, 17; and Kimber Leanne Lucas, 23. In all three, no connection could be drawn. The same was true with an old Winnipeg murder that had occurred in 1991, that of Glenda Morrisseau, 19, while Williams was at the nearby Portage la Prairie flight school. And there was interest in
U.S. law-enforcement circles too. Detectives in North Carolina, where Williams's father, David, had a home, inquired whether there might be a link to the double murder in 2008 of Allison Jackson Foy and Angela Nobles Rothen, both stabbed to death and dumped in a patch of woods near Wilmington. The OPP detectives handling the Williams investigation found no link in that case nor in any of the dozens of other cold cases whose details piled up on their desks.

“They went over everything,” says a police source familiar with the Williams case, “his timeline, his travels, his credit card receipts, and they went looking in all those areas for different occurrences that would match anything he is now known to have done, and they've come up with nothing. They've also responded to over a hundred requests from [other police] agencies looking at the possibility of him being involved in some of their unsolved cases. There's zip.”

What did emerge a few weeks after Williams was charged with the two murders and the two sex attacks was confirmation that they had been preceded by two years of fetish burglaries. Word of the break-ins had already leaked out, but the sheer number of charges laid in April—eighty-two in all—brought astonishment. Apart from anything else, how had the commander of such a busy air base found the
time
to commit so many break-ins? And that was before it became widely known that Williams's obsession with photographing, uploading and cataloging his stolen lingerie collection, including countless pictures of him wearing his trophies, had generated an inventory of homemade pornography that ran into thousands of images. Managing that, too, would have been time-consuming, even if he didn't often look at the pictures, which presumably he did. Add to that his writing of highly detailed accounts of each burglary—who, where, when, how—and his energy seems almost inhuman.

So how
did
he find the time? One answer is that in the virtual world of email and texting, a decision maker in a high position can do a great deal of his work from afar, which meant, in Williams's case, by means of his well-thumbed BlackBerry. But in addition, an intriguing partial explanation comes from veteran and greatly respected psychologist Bill Marshall, attached to Rockwood Psychological Services in Kingston, Ontario, who has examined and treated thousands of sex offenders over the past forty years. What most people underestimate, he suggests, is how much time they spend on small tasks and small diversions that are of little consequence: ten minutes here, twenty minutes there. Over the course of a day it adds up to more time than you might think. If all those bits of time are devoted single-mindedly to what really interests—or obsesses—you, Marshall suggests, a big window opens. “I had a client back in the seventies who admitted to having molested 426 boys over a 26-year period,” he recounts. “And you'd think to yourself, ‘What the hell else was he doing?' Because he had to hustle the boys—it was not just the time he spent molesting them. He was obsessive-compulsive, and he kept detailed diaries.”

So while the man was incarcerated in Kingston Penitentiary (where Williams is now) Marshall and his colleagues examined his diaries, which itemized everything he'd done. The remarkable conclusion: his crimes took up only 8 percent of his waking hours. The rest of his time was devoted to being a law-abiding citizen with an ordinary life. “He had a job, he was an accountant, he went to an old folks' home, and he read them stories on a Sunday. I was quite amazed, really. You and I do so many humdrum things every day that are pro-social but boring, but this gave me a different way of looking at sexual offenders. Most of them are pro-social most of the time, not anti-social in the everyday sense, but very few of them go this far.”

In his isolation cell at the Quinte Detention Centre, Williams spent a lot of time reading during his first weeks of confinement. To the jail staff he appeared reasonably good-spirited and compliant, sufficiently so that he was removed from the round-the-clock suicide watch that had monitored him when he first arrived. That meant he was allowed to wear regular prison clothes, instead of a suicide-proof type of smock that couldn't be ripped, to eat regular meals, rather than food that had to be eaten by hand (no utensils permitted), and to enjoy the occasional cup of hot tea.

But his apparent satisfaction with his conditions may have been a trick designed to lull his jailors into a false sense of security, because over the April 2010 Easter weekend, Williams tried to kill himself—and almost succeeded. He had collected some scraps of tinfoil and cardboard, compressed them into a cardboard toilet-roll cylinder and forced the tube down his throat, jamming the lock in his cell door with more tinfoil before he did so. But first, he'd written a message on the wall of his cell, using packets of mustard he'd squirreled away from his meals, telling the world that he'd put his affairs in order as best he could, and that he found his plight unbearable. Through the cell-door window, jail guards spied him choking and managed to force the door open and save his life.

After that, there was a guard watching Williams twenty-four hours a day. But Colonel Mustard, as he was mockingly nicknamed, still appears to have been plotting, because among other things, he began writing letters in code. The sentences alternated between everyday descriptions of his dull life behind bars and gibberish that no one could comprehend, a source inside the center said. There was a short-lived hunger strike too, whose purpose was never clear. The speculation was that
Williams and his lawyers were planning to argue that he wasn't mentally capable of standing trial, meaning he didn't understand what was going on. Shortly before his guilty plea, he was sent to Ottawa for a psychiatric examination, but whatever the outcome of that assessment, the issue of mental fitness never arose in the court proceedings.

In between his short videolinked court appearances, Williams was able to socialize a little, because he was not the only prisoner in the segregation wing. Southeastern Ontario experienced a rash of unrelated homicides in 2009–10, and among the dozen-plus accused killers awaiting trial in the Quinte Detention Centre at the time were Mohammed Shafia, 56, his wife Tooba Yahya Mohammed, 40, and their son Hamed Shafia, 19. Of Afghan origin, the trio had lived in Dubai for many years before immigrating to Canada, and were now accused of murdering the three teenaged Shafia sisters, together with an older woman who was Mohammed Shafia's first wife. The four victims' bodies had been discovered in a submerged car in a Kingston canal in June 2009.

Father and son were in the Quinte segregation wing, standard procedure for inmates accused of murdering women. And Williams, who had once spent six months in Dubai as commander of Camp Mirage, was occasionally allowed to step outside his cell to talk to them. He would spend hours talking to Hamed Shafia about the Middle East, a prison guard said, and perhaps he appreciated the diversion. Certainly it was better than thinking about what lay ahead.

The suicide bid, the message in mustard, the letters in code, the hunger strike: to many of those watching the Williams case and hearing bits of news and gossip that trickled out of the Napanee detention center, it all looked as if he was scheming. And when it transpired that in March, six weeks after Williams was arrested and charged, he and his wife, Mary Elizabeth
Harriman, had expedited a kind of property swap, the suspicions grew. Property records at the Ontario land registry office show that on March 26, Harriman acquired full ownership of the couple's new home in Ottawa by paying her husband $244,500—$62,000 in cash and $182,500 worth of assumed mortgage debt. Simultaneously Williams gained exclusive title to the much less valuable cottage on Cosy Cove Lane where he had killed Jessica Lloyd, for which he paid nothing.

On May 6, the young woman he had blindfolded, stripped and photographed in the first of his two home-invasion sex assaults back in September 2009 cried foul. That day, Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit in Belleville demanding nearly $2.5 million in damages from Williams for what she described as his “harsh, vindictive, malicious, horrific and reprehensible” conduct. Her statement of claim contended she'd been so traumatized by what he did to her that she'd been compelled to develop “certain psychological mechanisms in order to survive the horrors of the assault,” including “denial, repression, disassociation and guilt.” Jane Doe said she'd lost the ability to trust other people, and that for practical purposes she'd become unemployable. Her claim broke down as follows: $500,000 in general damages for pain and suffering; $500,000 for loss of future income; $500,000 for aggravated damages; and a further $500,000 in punitive damages. She also sought $250,000 in special damages for lost income; a further $100,000 for unspecified special damages; and $100,000 for the therapy and medical attention she anticipated she would need.

Along with Williams, the lawsuit also targeted Harriman, claiming that the “secret” property exchange—“unadvertised” might be the better word—was a ruse to forestall any civil claims against Williams for monetary compensation: if he had no assets, he would be hard put to pay anybody for anything. The transaction had occurred “in unusual haste” and under “suspicious
circumstances,” the lawsuit claimed, expressing concern that Williams and Harriman would “remove assets from the jurisdiction or otherwise dispose of or dissipate them in an effort to defeat the plaintiff in any attempt to recover upon the judgment, if the plaintiff is ultimately successful.” The Belleville judge's response, on May 13, was to order Williams and Harriman not to sell or otherwise dispose of either piece of property until the lawsuit was resolved.

Williams issued no immediate statement of defense, and had still not filed one when he was convicted and sentenced. But Harriman did. In a sworn affidavit signed on June 2, she denied any wrongdoing and said the sole purpose of the property swap had been to provide her with a measure of stability in the years ahead, now that “my previously anticipated future and financial security have become jeopardized” as a result of the criminal charges against her husband. “The timing of the transfer was not unusual given the crisis facing the marriage,” her Ottawa lawyer, Mary Jane Binks, wrote.

As well, Harriman sought a publication ban on the evidence she planned to present if Jane Doe's claim went to trial, including personal financial statements and details about her work at the Heart and Stroke Foundation. “The revelation of the criminal charges against the Defendant Williams and my identity as his wife has been devastating to me,” she wrote. “The publication of further particular details of my professional life, personal financial situation, and legal affairs could have a significant negative impact upon me personally and professionally.”