A New Kind of Monster (5 page)

So she did. Police picked up Larry Jones the same day. There was no other evidence against him.

Jones now believes that Massicotte was unstable and therefore easily influenced by Jonas Kelly. As for Massicotte, she was not reluctant to speak out about her ordeal. After Williams was arrested, she gave several interviews to the media in which she excoriated the OPP for not having issued a warning after the first attack.

Most remarkable, however, was her willingness to forgive her attacker. “I'm not in the judgment department, but I'm in the forgiveness department, and I feel everybody has a God-given right to forgive,” she says. “He let me live. It was like he didn't want to kill me. I always look at the good in people. I can't speak for any of the others, I can only forgive him for what he did to me, and now he has to live the rest of his life [in a prison cell]. I despise him, but I can forgive him, because of the simple fact that he let me live, and that's what I wanted most. And I have to be able to forgive to move on.”

News that Jones had been picked up and questioned at length about the twin attacks spread swiftly through Tweed. And it reached Williams too. Jones knows that, because even though it never occurred to him at the time that the colonel might be
the real predator, he was anxious to learn how widely word of his troubles with police had spread. So, through a mutual friend, he asked a civilian Trenton air base staffer who knew Williams well whether the colonel had by any chance mentioned that Jones—his next-door neighbor—was a prime suspect in the unsolved attacks. The subject had indeed come up, and Williams's response was curiously casual, Jones recounts. He seemed to have heard something about Jones being detained and questioned but appeared entirely unperturbed. “Get out of town. Larry Jones wouldn't do something like that,” was how Williams's response was relayed back to Jones.

Jones chatted briefly to Williams several times after that, talking about nothing very much, and the matter was never raised. “He could have asked me what was going on, but he didn't,” Jones says. “He carried on like nothing had happened.”

In hindsight, two other incidents—one before Jones was taken in for questioning and one after—took on a distinctly sinister bent in Jones's mind.

Few visitors ever came to the Williams home, and Jones remembers the day in July 2009 when his neighbor took over as base commander. The commander had laid on a big party on his back lawn. Tables were set up, the grass was newly mowed, a portable toilet was rented. “I thought he was expecting a hundred people from the way it was all set up,” Jones says. But none of the neighbors on Cosy Cove Lane were invited, and not many others showed up either—perhaps fifteen in all.

Given the absence of cordiality, Jones was a little surprised by a conversation he had with Williams in September 2009, the same month the two women were attacked in their homes. Dressed in his camouflage gear, Jones was heading out to shoot a few grouse, and was just loading his shotgun into his truck when his next-door neighbor wandered over. Uncharacteristically
inquisitive, Williams wondered where Jones's hunting camp was. Jones told him it was about six miles away, in the thick forest that lines each side of Cary Road, an isolated gravel road southeast of Tweed village. At first the colonel wasn't sure where exactly that was. Jones gave further directions. Williams responded, “Ah, yes,” and there the conversation ended.

Initially Jones didn't give the encounter much thought, even after a friend of his spotted Williams in the area a few weeks later, on foot, staring off into the distance and appearing lost. But when Williams was arrested, the exchange rushed back to haunt Jones. A few hours after Williams was charged, the body of his second murder victim, Jessica Lloyd, was located. It lay in the woods about a mile from Jones's hunting camp, some forty feet in from Cary Road, half concealed among a pile of rocks.

Was Williams trying to frame Jones? A second mysterious incident suggests that perhaps he was. On the same night that Lloyd was kidnapped, January 28–29, 2010, Jones says someone broke into his garage, across Cosy Cove Lane from his house, where he keeps his boats and snowmobiles. Curiously, however, only three items appeared to be missing: a blue cigarette lighter, a pair of work gloves and an old coat that his dog, Wes, a West Highland terrier, was fond of sleeping upon. What happened to those items remains a mystery. Jones wonders if Williams could have taken the items with the idea of using them to frame him for a crime, but he concedes he may never know.

As for what he went through with the OPP, Jones takes a charitable view. “Half of those guys are friends of ours, we've played hockey together—my niece and my nephew are both OPP officers. So all this wasn't their fault. They just weren't trained for an investigation of this magnitude.”

Tweed settled down a bit in the next few weeks, but the tension lingered. Residents pitched in to knit a giant scarf in support of Canada's athletes at the Vancouver Olympics, as the We Believe campaign sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce took hold. “Tweed was at its best, prouder and stronger, because people felt as though they were finally involved in something that brought them together,” remembers Lisa Ford, who with her husband operates the By the Way coffee shop on Victoria Street.

Then two things happened. Midway through November in the rural outskirts of Belleville about midway up Highway 37 as you head towards Tweed, there was a break-in at the house of an artist and music teacher whose husband was away. The intruder took some sex toys and underwear. And, terrifyingly, he left a taunting message on the woman's home computer, suggesting he had been in the house at the same time she was on the previous evening, hiding in an upstairs linen closet.

Few people in Tweed heard about the burglary, and the Belleville police who investigated it seemed to know nothing about the two earlier sex attacks around Cosy Cove Lane.

About a week later, there came word of what sounded like a domestic-related homicide in Brighton, just west of Trenton along Highway 401, an hour's drive from Tweed. A flight attendant attached to CFB Trenton had been found murdered in her home, where she lived alone. Provincial police from Northumberland County took charge of the case and urged local residents to stay calm. “There are no present issues with regard to public safety,” an OPP officer said on November 30, five days after Corporal Marie-France Comeau's asphyxiated, bloodied body was discovered in her bedroom, wrapped in a duvet.

To the residents of Tweed, there was no special reason to make any connection between the events in their community and either of these incidents, particularly the Comeau homicide.
Brighton seemed very far away. And for the handful who did hear about what had occurred, the least likely person to be in any way involved would probably have been the pleasant, seldom-seen military figure who had arrived in Canada from England more than four decades earlier.

D
avid Russell Williams was born into a world of middle-class privilege, filled with high achievers. Later in life he would tell friends he didn't remember much about his early childhood, and whether that's true or not, he rarely spoke about it, even when pressed. After his arrest, when it became clear that his extraordinary cruelty and violence had been directed exclusively at women, observers looked to his roots for possible clues as to what might have fostered his rage, and some were there to be found.

Deep River has long been one of the jewels of the upper Ottawa Valley, the lush, green Laurentian Mountains on the northern Quebec shore of the Ottawa River providing a spectacular backdrop. Tucked into the river's south shoreline, all but invisible from the nearby Trans-Canada Highway that links it to the Chalk River Research Laboratories ten miles down the road, the small town was the first place in Canada that Williams called home. He was a few weeks shy of five when he, his British-born parents and his younger brother, Harvey, arrived there more than forty years ago, riding a wave of incoming scientists, technicians and their families attracted by high-paying jobs and what in many ways was an idyllic existence.

Affluent and remote, a white-collar oasis of Ph.D.-toting intellectuals plunked down in a rugged northern landscape,
Deep River was by any yardstick unusual. Naturally, much has changed since then. The trees that dot Deep River's neat, curvy residential streets are thicker and taller. The many sailboats that used to be moored off the Deep River Yacht and Tennis Club—the town's social hub during the two years that Williams lived there—have largely been replaced by houseboats.

The small downtown core looks different too, reconfigured after a big fire tore through it in 1998, destroying the landmark Giant Tiger store and half a dozen other businesses. No longer an all-white enclave, there is a growing immigrant population, mostly from Asia. And the town's relationship with Atomic Energy Canada Limited, the Crown corporation tasked with managing the country's nuclear program, has also evolved. Deep River has always been called A-Town—A for atomic—and is still joined at the hip to Chalk River, with AECL remaining by far the area's principal employer. But no longer does the corporation own the big, comfortable houses in which the scientists and their families lived.

“They used to own everything. It was a company town. You pretty much had to work at Atomic Energy to keep a house,” says realtor Jim Hickey, who has lived in Deep River since 1945. Hickey and his family spent their first few years in rented accommodation. “And my father would warn me to keep the grass cut, because there was a shortage of housing, the implication being that we'd better keep it cut or we might lose it. I was twelve when he died, and I remember one of the [AECL] employment officers coming to the house with his wife and telling my mother, ‘When this guy's old enough to work, send him in to see me.' ”

But Deep River's current population of around 4,400—7,600 in the greater Deep River area—hasn't changed much, nor have the town's attractions. Waves lap at the golden beaches, a magnet
for family picnics, just a few minutes' walk from the downtown. Sunrises over the river are legendary, and a short drive away is the eastern edge of Algonquin Park. Stroll around Deep River and you will be hard put to see a piece of litter. Serious crime barely exists. In 2009, the ten-officer police force recorded 199 occurrences, two-thirds involving theft or other property crime. Residential neighborhoods don't have sidewalks, because everybody knows to drive slowly and safely.

“People who come here for the first time call this God's Country,” enthuses Karen Bigras, deli manager at Fleury's Super-Valu, the anchor retail outlet in the small downtown. Bigras moved to Deep River in 1969, when she was four, a year after the Williams family arrived, and she recalls a very happy childhood. “I absolutely loved it. We didn't have to worry about anything, we were allowed to ride our bicycles and walk on the road, we didn't have any fears. All the kids went to playgrounds, and there was always things to do outside: camp days, arts and crafts. The word
bored
didn't exist when we were children. I don't know anybody who didn't have a wonderful childhood here. A lot of the people I went to school with have moved back here to raise their children.”

But it was not the town's agreeable environment and lifestyle that brought the Williams family to Deep River. Rather, it was Chalk River's cutting-edge lab facilities, whose jobs lured scientists from around the world, principally from Britain. The Chalk River Laboratories were the sole raison d'être for Deep River, as they are today. Chalk River remains the source of more than one-third of the world's—and almost all of North America's—supply of medical diagnostic isotopes, a safe radioactive material used chiefly to diagnose illness.

The atomic theme is ubiquitous in the town. Numerous schools and streets are named after pioneers of Canada's nuclear
development, a stylized atom logo adorns city stationery, and A-power has long had a place within the local culture. A 1950s rock band called themselves Phil Rowe and the Atomic Five, and there was a men's basketball team named the Neutrons.

This was the milieu to which the Williams family transplanted themselves, six years after Canada's first nuclear power plant, the CANDU prototype, went online near the Chalk River Labs. And for a four-year-old boy uprooted from the English Midlands, moving there must have been a grand adventure.

Williams was born on March 7, 1963, in the small town of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, southwest of Birmingham, where both his parents attended university after marrying in Wales the year before. Russell's father, Cedric David Williams—Dave was the forename he used all his life—had emerged from his studies as a skilled metallurgist. In an era when most Britons could readily immigrate to Canada if they chose, opportunity beckoned in the shape of a job offer from AECL. So, in early 1968, the Williams family—Dave, Christine, Russell and Harvey—packed their bags and launched their rather strange new life.