A New Kind of Monster (16 page)

B
eing handed the keys to 8 Wing/CFB Trenton marked the pinnacle of Williams's 23-year career in the military. Canada's chief hub for air operations of any size at home or abroad, 8 Wing has roughly 3,000 regulars and reserves on the base (one-quarter of the air-force-uniform total) and 600-plus civilians. When Williams arrived there in mid-July 2009, the war in Afghanistan remained the main event, and it was a bad month, with four repatriation ceremonies. Rich in symbolism, 8 Wing is where the bodies of slain Canadian Forces personnel arrive home before being driven down a stretch of Highway 401—dubbed the Highway of Heroes—to Toronto, where autopsies are held. Arctic operations are also based at 8 Wing, as are all major search-and-rescue missions in central Canada. As well, 8 Wing is a key jumping-off point in responding to foreign disasters, such as the earthquake that struck Haiti six months later, in January 2010, just two and a half weeks before Williams committed his second murder.

One of thirteen wings (bases) nationwide, from Gander, Newfoundland, to Comox, B.C., 8 Wing is also a big economic contributor to adjoining Trenton and Quinte West, and as in the village of Tweed, ties between the military and local citizens are strong. The base dates back to 1929, when close to a thousand
acres of farmland near adjacent Trenton were bought up by the federal government. Royal Canadian Air Force Trenton, as it was then known, was officially opened in August 1931. In the summer of 2009, when Williams took charge, the base was in the throes of a big, five-year, $1-billion construction boom.

He was replacing Colonel Mike Hood, whom he had known for almost twenty years, and the changing of the guard took place on July 15 in front of 8 Wing headquarters, in a parking lot that occasionally doubles as a parade ground. The 230 or so participants included representatives from all sections of the base, an assortment of civilian dignitaries, Williams's wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, his brother, Harvey, his father, David, and his mother, Nonie Sovka (seated separately). Also invited were some neighbors from Wilkie Drive in Orleans.

“He was happy that day. He seemed very relaxed and confident, the usual Russ,” recalls a retired air force officer who attended the handover. “Maybe it was like he finally felt he'd arrived, but without making a big deal about any of it, which he never did with anything. But obviously it was a real big deal for him. Mary Elizabeth was very proud too.”

George White, Williams's friend and neighbor from Orleans, also remembers the day well. “I met his mother. Her voice sounded familiar, so I approached her, a tall, thin lady with grayish hair, and asked her if she was so-and-so and she said, ‘No, I'm the mother.' She was sitting in the front row, but she seemed to stay out of the limelight, and I didn't see her at the reception afterward.”

Williams was selective, however, about whom he asked along. Nobody in Tweed was invited, although he'd lived intermittently in the staunchly pro-military village for more than five years. Nor was his longtime friend from university Jeff Farquhar, a conspicuous omission. Farquhar and a girlfriend had stopped
by Williams's cottage in Tweed just two or three days before he took up his new post. They were driving from Toronto to Ottawa and Williams had suggested they swing by en route to catch up, after a hiatus of several months. So they did, stopping off first at the Tim Hortons down the road (the one that Williams never visited) to pick up coffee and bagels. When the couple pulled up to the cottage, Williams was outside, fixing a roof panel in the interior of his BMW. As usual, he greeted his friend heartily with a bear hug, explaining that he couldn't chat for too long because he had a flight to Winnipeg to catch.

What he didn't tell Farquhar was that he was heading to air force command headquarters to finalize the arrangements for taking charge of 8 Wing a couple of days later. Farquhar only learned of his friend's glittering promotion afterward, and was mildly hurt to learn he had not been invited to the handover. He chiefly perceives the omission as further evidence of Williams's extreme self-effacement and lifelong reluctance to talk about his own achievements. Conceivably, his modesty about success also cloaked deep shame regarding his double life. Whatever the reason, Farquhar only learned Williams was a colonel in charge of his own air base when he read about it online.

The swearing-in ceremony went ahead under sunny skies with band music and all the requisite pomp and ceremony. Chairs were set out for the guests, each of whom was escorted to an assigned seat. The outgoing Colonel Hood addressed the crowd and introduced Williams, and as cameras snapped, the two commanders signed what are termed the handover scrolls, and Williams was given the pennant that went with his new job. He inspected the troops and there was a march past the reviewing stand, to the accompaniment of the 8 Wing Pipes and Drums Band. Colonel Hood presented Harriman with a bouquet of flowers, and Williams did the same for Hood's wife.

“These are exciting times for the air force,” Williams told the crowd after formally taking the reins. “I am confident that the team here is up to the task, and I look forward to getting right into that work. We're going to have a number of exciting milestones to witness as we go along.”

Presiding over the ceremony was Major-General Yvan Blondin, commander of 1 Canadian Air Division in Winnipeg and Williams's immediate superior. Observing that Williams was “a leader not of machines but of people,” Blondin urged the new wing commander not only to lead but to mentor, and to be a role model. And in remarks that today bear a terrible irony, Blondin also told Williams he should be asking himself this question: “What more can you do than what you are doing now to take care of our people? … It's a real command so enjoy it, and take care of your family.”

Williams responded: “It shall be an honor to represent you, the men and women of 8 Wing for the next few years, and I guarantee we shall give you our very best in terms of both leadership and support. You will have our complete and undivided attention.” At the time he was uttering these ostensibly sincere words, Williams had already committed sixty-two of his fetish burglaries. The next would come just six days later, and of course, far worse was soon to follow.

The formalities over, a reception took place in the officers' mess, open to all ranks, and in the early evening Williams held a small party at his lakeside cottage on Cosy Cove Lane. In a subsequent interview with
Contact
, 8 Wing's weekly in-house newspaper, he spoke modestly and gratefully about being awarded the prestigious job. “Certainly, I was keen to get the opportunity, but you never know. There are a number of qualified people who could do the job and that's why I say that I feel very fortunate to have been appointed.” He was also pleased to note the continuum between his previous job at the Directorate of Air
Requirements, overseeing the acquisition of the four big C-17 Globemasters and the fleet of Hercules planes, and his new one at 8 Wing, where the aircraft would be based. “I've had the opportunity to keep a close eye on the development necessary to support these fleets and the collateral advantage the rest of the base has enjoyed, and will enjoy, in the coming years.”

Many of the uniformed and civilian members of 8 Wing already knew Williams from his earlier spell at the head of the 437 Squadron, and among them was transport pilot Captain (now Major) Garrett Lawless. Williams was clearly glad to see him again, and asked what kind of watch he was wearing these days—a reference to their shared enthusiasm for Swiss timepieces.

At the same time, however, friendships between soldiers of different ranks only go so far, underlining the highly compartmentalized, often isolated life of the man at the top. “I was a familiar face, a bit of history, but I don't think I was any better friends with him than anybody else,” Lawless says. “He was two ranks ahead of me, and then three, so I would never have expected to have close, in-depth personal interactions, especially at a base like this, where it's not impossible but very difficult to develop friends. When you're on the road together you hang out and talk, but when we come back we never make plans to get together because our schedules, working within the transport community, are all so erratic. You might not cross paths with someone again for three weeks or three months.

“And it gets progressively lonelier as you climb the ranks. The higher you go, the more you hang out with your rank level plus or minus one. For him, the closest other full colonel was a hundred miles away, in Kingston, with a completely different background. And when he does go down to the mess, he's the wing commander, so the people he's talking to will talk to him as the wing commander. There's not going to be any small talk.”

Williams settled into his new life, commuting from his cottage in peaceful Tweed, where he was largely unknown, to 8 Wing, where the pace was almost invariably hectic, a nonstop assembly line of formal duties and informal functions. His first full day on the job, July 16, brought bad tidings from Afghanistan. In a rare firefight with Taliban insurgents in the Panjwayi district south of Kandahar, 26-year-old Private Sébastien Courcy of St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, had been killed when he stepped on a hidden roadside bomb and was thrown off a cliff edge, the 125th Canadian soldier to die in the Afghan conflict.

July 19 saw Williams attend the Ottawa funeral of a young air force squadron corporal. Four days later he was at a Trenton charity event, smiling cheerfully and donating televisions to needy children. Shortly after that, he presented a commendation to a military policeman for his role in helping secure the scene of a crime scene investigation. (A 36-year-old civilian living on the base had been stabbed to death; a second man was charged with second-degree murder.)

Meanwhile, he had resumed his parallel secret life with a quick succession of break-ins. On July 21, he burgled a house on Cosy Cove Lane; on the 24th, he broke into a home on nearby Sulphide Road; and on the 25th and 26th, the last weekend of the month, he committed two back-to-back burglaries at the same address on Mathieu Drive in Orleans. Williams later told detectives that he returned for a third time on the 27th, but he noticed the residents had returned home and walked away. In all, he stole fifty-two items from the house during the course of his two break-ins and took dozens of photographs, all similar to the earlier ones.

It's far from unusual for serial killers and predators to keep careful track of their crimes. Williams, however, took the process to a whole new level. His photo-taking was nothing short of obsessive, and as with most things technical in his life, only the
best equipment would do. His preference was a Sony digital single lens reflex camera, a type he had used for many years, which employs a sophisticated mechanical mirror system to direct light from the camera's lens to an optical viewfinder on the back of the camera. He had many different lenses for it, and his knowledge of memory cards and memory sticks was extensive too. It was the same with the home computer into which he would download his stolen images. He had long been an Apple enthusiast, and at the time of his arrest he owned a model of Macintosh computer more common in commercial applications than in home use.

August was another busy month for Williams at 8 Wing, a steady flow of functions, ceremonies and charity events. Midway through, the base welcomed a new commander at its Canadian Forces Land Advanced War Centre, which teaches combat skills in assorted different environments, from the jungle to the desert to the Arctic. Williams also provided 8 Wing with an update on construction of its new Canadian Forces Aerospace Warfare Centre, begun a year earlier. The $20-million project was on track to be completed in the summer of 2010, he confidently told the base in a mass mailer.

In his off-hours, he was working just as hard. He committed five nighttime break-ins that month, all on Cosy Cove Lane in Tweed or on adjacent Charles Court. He broke into one home three nights in a row, the same place that he targeted a total of nine times, stealing underwear in eight of the nine raids. There, once again, he posed for his camera in front of a bathroom mirror, wearing the woman's bra and panties as he masturbated.

In September, his calendar was again full. On the 3rd, he toured 8 Wing's new six-story, state-of-the-art air traffic control tower, six years in the works and now nearing completion. On the 8th, he helped launch Operation Santa Claus, dispatching tractor-trailer loads of donated gifts to Canadian troops in
far-flung locations. “Having received one of those boxes, and speaking with others who have, I can say that it means a great deal, it really makes Christmas a lot easier,” Williams told an enthusiastic crowd gathered outside a Sobeys supermarket in Brighton. “It's a connection to home, that link to the local community. It's hugely important.”

But he was not always to be seen. On September 12, for example, he skipped 8 Wing's annual Scottish-Irish Festival, a big event, dispatching Chief Warrant Officer Kevin West in his place. “I've been MC-ing the Scottish-Irish Festival since its inception, sixteen or eighteen years, and I can't ever recall a wing commander missing that function,” says Loyalist College media studies professor Steve Bolton, a lifelong supporter of the military who helps run 8 Wing's remarkable National Air Force Museum and helps out with many other activities. Bolton brushed shoulders with Williams several times, generally finding him stiff and awkward. “He struck me as a get-it-done kind of character. He certainly didn't seem to be breaking any mold. I didn't know him as well as I knew some of the other wing commanders, but there seemed nothing out of the ordinary. He just seemed like another good colonel who'd come in to run this big base, and it's got huge challenges.”

Toward the end of September, Williams once more raised eyebrows by being a no-show, this time at the annual dedication of memorial stones at the museum, an event attended by about two thousand people. At the last minute he once again sent someone to speak on his behalf. Over the next few months, there would be several other nonappearances.