A New Kind of Monster (9 page)

Another ex-roommate describes an incident when he needed to speak to Williams and stopped by the home of Misa, also in residence. “I knocked on the door and I was told by the other women that Russ and [Misa] were up in her room. So jokingly I said, ‘Russ, put your clothes on and come down.' Well, he didn't come down and then I found out a few days later that he and his girlfriend were very upset that I had made a comment like that,
which quite surprised me. I made a point of apologizing to him and to her.”

The breakup with Misa sent Williams into a depression, according to Farquhar, and he struggled to achieve a reconciliation. He sent her a dozen long-stemmed roses, and would hover around places on campus where he knew she would be. But she sent the roses back, and even entreated Farquhar—by no means a friend of hers—to persuade Williams to back off. “She was getting really pissed,” Farquhar says.

When it became evident to Williams that the separation was permanent, he was inconsolable. “I don't know of him dating anybody after Misa, not at all,” says Farquhar. “That doesn't mean he wasn't well liked—God, I mean a lot of women liked him because he was a great guy. The only time I ever pushed him was if there was an event or an upcoming dinner at the university and you were expected to have a date. And Russ would say, ‘No, not going.' ”

Williams was not the only student on the Scarborough campus with some serious issues involving women. One year behind him, also pursuing an economics-related course, was a blond, fresh-faced student destined to become the most notorious sex killer of his generation. His name was Paul Bernardo, and he was convicted in 1995 on two counts of first-degree murder and multiple other charges, including two of aggravated sexual assault, in which he used a knife. So heinous were his crimes, and so numerous, that he was designated a dangerous offender, a classification that reduces parole possibilities to almost nothing.

Bernardo committed at least eleven extremely violent rapes—probably many more—and most of them occurred in the large Toronto suburb of Scarborough, generating widespread local terror and earning him his pre-arrest nickname, the Scarborough Rapist. Trial testimony from his wife and accomplice Karla
Homolka (convicted of manslaughter and released after serving out a full twelve-year prison term) strongly suggests Bernardo was responsible for a long-term pattern of sex attacks that were never solved. The first two attacks for which he was convicted took place in Scarborough on May 4 and 14, 1987, a few weeks before he graduated from U of T with a degree in commerce and economics. After Williams was arrested in February 2010, an imaginative newspaper story that garnered widespread attention amid the saturation coverage speculated on the basis of comments from an invisible police source that the two killers may have been “pals” who had partied together or had even “competed against each other.”

There's not a shred of evidence to support this thesis. Williams and Bernardo graduated in different years (not both in 1987, as the story stated) and there is nothing to indicate they ever met. Toronto police swiftly examined the ostensible connection and drew a blank. So too does Farquhar, who says today that if Williams had known Bernardo, he would have been aware of Bernardo too, and he was not. The author of the newspaper article even consulted Bernardo, via his father, to see if he could recall a Russell Williams from his Scarborough university days. Bernardo (always glad of a diversion as he serves out a sentence of life imprisonment in solitary confinement) told his father he did not.

Far more credible was the possibility that Williams had committed a cold-case homicide that to this day remains unsolved: the August 1987 sex slaying in Scarborough of 21-year-old Margaret McWilliam. Williams had completed university more than a year earlier, and was by then no longer living in Toronto. Nonetheless, at first glance the links appear compelling. McWilliam was found raped and strangled to death in Warden Woods Park, about three miles from Williams's old home on Lakehurst Crescent, which Nonie and Jerry Sovka still owned at
the time. (They sold it in November 1987 for $349,000.) As with Williams's two known murder victims, the cause of death was asphyxiation. And there was a possible further connection: McWilliam had moved to Toronto a year earlier after graduating from Kemptville College, south of Ottawa. But she had been raised in Deep River, the first place Williams lived after immigrating to Canada from Britain. Could their shared roots have led to an acquaintanceship? In addition, an unconfirmed report after Williams's arrest said that someone resembling a jogger had been seen fleeing the Warden Woods Park crime scene—a young man wearing a red baseball cap.

McWilliam's parents still live in Deep River, and their hopes were briefly raised that their daughter's ghastly murder almost twenty-three years earlier might finally be solved. But it was not to be. McWilliam's killer had left behind some DNA, and it does not match that of the former colonel, according to the Toronto homicide detective who heads the cold-cases section.

On leaving university in 1986, Williams was at a loss as to what to do next. Still in Scarborough, he rented the basement of a well-kept townhouse not far from the campus, and found himself a couple of part-time jobs. One was waiting tables at the Red Lobster, a seafood chain. The other was a summer position as a clerk in the university's financial services department, where he pulled another prank that can only be described as bizarre.

Long retired and now living in Britain, June Hope worked in the personnel unit across the corridor from the finance department. She remembers Williams as “a nice kid”—tall and good-looking, with a prominent jaw, a jazz aficionado who seemed lonely and “wouldn't talk about his mom and dad very much except to say they were abroad.”

One morning Hope walked into her fourth-floor office, or at least tried to. What greeted her was a sea of crunched-up balls of old-style computer paper, the type that was aligned to the printer by means of a ribbon of holes along the margin. “It filled the room,” Hope remembers. “I couldn't find my desk or my chair or my computer. It was all obscured by paper. I opened the door and was met by a wall of paper.”

The previous night, Williams had persuaded one of the secretaries to let him into Hope's office, where he had spent hours crunching up the paper and spreading it around.

“I was gobsmacked,” Hope says. “I walked in, I was just amazed.” And as she stared, she turned and heard a “click” noise behind her. An amused Williams was standing there with a camera, recording her moment of astonishment. Unimpressed, she asked him if he had nothing better to do with his time, and he replied that he did not.

Very soon, however, he did. He had resolved to become a pilot.

Twenty-five years after its release,
Top Gun
may not hold a spot in the lexicon of great moviemaking. Inevitably, the pre-digital simulated air stunts look dated, redolent of a video game. Worse are the tissue-thin plot, cliché-soaked dialogue, garage-band soundtrack and endless close-ups of Tom Cruise's face, alternately cool and confident and riven with angst. “You're one of the best pilots in the Navy, what you do up there is dangerous,” a wide-eyed, hard-to-get Kelly McGillis tells the morose protagonist as he nurses a drink and ponders his bleak future. “But you've got to go on. When I first met you, you were larger than life. Look at you. You're not going to be happy unless you're going Mach-2. You know that …”

Hackneyed or not,
Top Gun
and its only-the-best-will-do-in-the-military mantra left Williams deeply impressed. “Russ became
a nut about
Top Gun,
” Farquhar recalls. “We all joked about it. He was really hung up on that movie. It was a huge fascination to him back in 1986. He was fixated on it, nothing less. He could recite you the lines forward, backward. He watched that movie so many freaking times, we all teased him about it. ‘Oh, there goes
Top Gun.'

“And it went beyond a joke. He really, really soaked it up. And then, when he announced his career as a pilot, I said, ‘C'mon, you've watched
Top Gun
too many times. You're going to join the air force? We don't have aircraft carriers here.' I said to him, ‘You took politics and economics—why'd you bother?' ”

Tom Cruise's determination to win the affections of his instructor also seemed to resonate with Williams as he struggled with his breakup with Misa. “I used to joke about that behind his back,” Farquhar says. “I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, he thinks this is going to win her back. He's going to show up in his F-14.' ”

Shortly before graduation, it was an uncle of Farquhar's who gave Williams his first flying lesson. “My uncle liked to pat himself on the back because he taught Russ how to fly. He used to take me up in his Cessna all the time, and we'd fly over the cottage, fly down to the University of Windsor where my sister was, go out for dinner, come back. And then one day Russ was hanging around and my uncle said, ‘You guys want to go out for a flight?' ‘Yeah.' So we went up, Russ moved behind the controls and my uncle let him take over. And I remember my uncle commenting, ‘Wow. He's a natural. He's really good at it.'

“And [Williams] met him a few more times. He'd go to the cottage and my uncle would be there and they'd talk about things that my uncle would bring up—the latest plane he'd been on down in Florida, that type of thing. And my uncle's next-door neighbor, when he moved to Burlington, was a current Air Canada pilot. I introduced Russ to him and I remember that had a huge impact on him.”

Williams also took flying lessons at Toronto's Buttonville airport. And when he was accepted by the military early in 1987, he didn't hesitate. Yet in one of the other twists in the early life of Russ Williams, he came close to becoming a police officer instead. At around the same time he applied to the air force, he also applied to the RCMP, and the Mounties came calling first. “He had a telephone call from the RCMP, they'd sent him a letter accepting him, but he was still waiting for the air force and he wanted to defer,” Farquhar recalls. “They said, ‘No no, if we come calling for you, which we have, we don't wait for you, you're either our guy or you're not.' And he was really surprised, a little bit disappointed, but he really wanted to wait for the air force. So they said, ‘Goodbye, that's it.' ”

Williams's short-lived aspirations to be a police officer are worth noting, and not only because years down the road he would keep many police busy as a predator and serial killer. Like any other successful candidate, he would only have been accepted by the RCMP after rigorous screening and background checks, with particular emphasis on mental stability. A rule of thumb in police recruitment is that the best predictor of a person's future behavior is his or her past conduct, and extensive interviews with friends, current and former, are a staple in the process. But at age twenty-four, there was evidently nothing in Russ Williams's history that caused the RCMP any serious concern.

The six friends from unit C8 pursued different paths. Williams's closest friend from those first two years became a successful fundraiser with the March of Dimes, earning himself the country's highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada, only to commit suicide a few years later by jumping from a bridge onto a busy highway, an event that caused Williams great distress when he learned of it. Another, an exchange student from Hong Kong, had to abandon his expensive condominium and his Porsche and flee
to Taiwan as authorities probing a shady financial deal closed in. A third former roommate became a successful lawyer, a fourth made a good living as a car dealer specializing in expensive models. The fifth ex-roommate became an investments adviser.

As for the colonel-to-be and future killer, in mid-1987 he packed a couple of suitcases and headed west for basic training at CFB Chilliwack in British Columbia. His path was set.

T
he Canadian Armed Forces in 1987 was an unhappy, often bewildered organization still struggling to define itself. Under Liberal defense minister Paul Hellyer, an eccentric figure who later in life became obsessed with space aliens, the three branches of the military had been integrated during the 1960s, with a unified rank structure and under a single command. On paper there was good reason for the overhaul. The army, navy and air force had long been tugging a succession of governments in competing directions. As well, there was deep concern within the Liberal Party that the military had become too independent-minded: a credible report has claimed that during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Canada's military leaders resolved between themselves that if nuclear war erupted between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union, they—not the government in Ottawa—would determine Canada's response.

In practice, integration was a good idea that went disastrously wrong and damaged the military for years. The restructuring was intended to consolidate and unite, but it had the opposite effect. The top-down, one-size-fits-all approach engendered wide hostility among all three branches, each of which resentfully defended its bit of turf. The result was an operational chain of command that was at best inefficient, at worst incoherent.

Now, in the mid-1980s, the end of the Cold War was stirring renewed gloomy debate about the whole purpose of the Canadian military, and whether it was even worthwhile having one. There were suggestions the armed forces should restrict themselves to doing what they did best—wearing blue helmets and keeping the peace in foreign hot spots—and leave it at that. And up ahead lay more trouble: the convulsive Somalia Affair, which in 1995 resulted in the disbanding of the Canadian Airborne Regiment, and big budget cuts that would strip large sections of the military to the bone.

Williams, the pilot-to-be, was hardly affected by any of this. On the contrary, the disorder and general malaise offered opportunity for a confident 24-year-old with exceptional organizational skills and great technical aptitude. In many ways, he was exactly the quasi-corporate breed of modern officer the politicians said they were looking for: forward-looking, an informal but committed team player, comfortable with high-tech and the mushrooming communications revolution.