A New Kind of Monster (19 page)

In his confession, and in the two highly detailed pages that he wrote and concealed on his home computer, Williams said he decided to attack Jane Doe—the name that he himself gave to his twenty-year-old victim in his records—after glimpsing her one day when out in his boat on Stoco Lake and thinking she was “cute.” That could be true. While accurate in its broad brushstrokes, the confession was also replete with self-serving untruths and evasions, all of them evidently designed to “minimize the impact on my wife,” as he put it. And particularly suspect is the apparently casual manner in which he claims he selected his victims, most notably Corporal Marie-France
Comeau. “I didn't know any of them,” he told Detective Sergeant Jim Smyth, suggesting he had acted on the spur of the moment rather than having stalked the women.

In fact, great planning and preparation preceded Williams's attacks, and the one he was about to commit was very likely no exception. But he may have been speaking truthfully when he said he first spotted Jane Doe from his boat, because she was at home with a newborn daughter, her house was not on any route that he normally traveled, and she had only lived there for about a month. Certainly she had never previously met the colonel, she told police after his arrest.

Alone with her infant child in the lakeside cottage, Jane Doe was sleeping in her bedroom when Williams broke in through a side window by cutting a screen. He was wearing a sweatshirt and dark pants, his face partly concealed with a small dark hat. When the attack began, she thought she was having a bad dream.

She awoke to the realization that someone very strong was holding down her head as she lay in bed, clad in a tank top and pajama pants. A struggle ensued, in which Jane Doe broke a chain around Williams's neck, but he subdued her by pressing the weight of his body down on hers. Over the next thirty minutes or so, her head still firmly in Williams's grasp, a conversation of sorts took place. Jane Doe asked him if he was going to kill her and he said no. He told her it was around one o'clock in the morning and inquired where her spouse was. She refused to say.

He then maneuvered her onto her stomach, sat on her, and after a brief struggle struck her hard on the head three times with his hand, warning her to be quiet and to make no attempt to see his face. A curious exchange followed, a further illustration of Williams's contradictory impulses: Jane Doe told him he did not seem to be the type of person who would do
something like this, upon which, she said later, he seemed to get “nicer.”

With some difficulty, Williams tied her up. He first tried to use a pillowcase, then a couple of blankets, before finally succeeding in binding her hands with the pillowcase. Another pillowcase was placed over her head and repositioned to turn it into a blindfold, and she heard him take what proved to be his camera out of the bag he'd brought with him. In a desperate bid to make him go away, she told him that giving birth had left her fat and unattractive. Not at all, he said, she was “perfect,” and once again he assured her he was not going to hurt her. Nor would her baby be harmed.

In all, Williams was inside Jane Doe's house for about two hours. The photo session began with him pulling down her tank top, fondling her breasts, removing her pajama pants and forcing her to pose with her legs apart, hands still tied behind her back, eyes still blindfolded. She became extremely distressed; Williams reassured her that there was no need to fret because he was soon going to leave. She heard him leave the room, then return and open the drawers of her bedroom dresser. She later discovered he had stolen bras and other undergarments.

After pawing her breasts one last time (and asking her the age of her infant daughter), he told her he was leaving and ordered her to count out loud to three hundred. She stopped at seventy, but he was still there and instructed her to resume counting. At the two-hundred mark she paused once more, yelled out loud and removed the blindfold. He was gone.

Using a flash, Williams had taken just nine photographs. The two pillowcases he used to restrain Jane Doe he left in her daughter's bedroom. Before fleeing into the night, he stripped a sheet and a baby blanket off her bed and took them, along with a shirt she owned, most likely because they were items he had
touched; he didn't want to leave any of his DNA behind. (Williams kept the five underwear items he had stolen, but later told police he'd disposed of the sheet, blanket and shirt at the Tweed public dump.)

In acute distress, Jane Doe called her mother-in-law, then 911, and police and friends soon arrived. As it got light, forensic experts and a police canine unit scoured the area in and around her home but found nothing useful. No one in the area reported having seen or heard anything. No cars or boats had been spotted leaving the vicinity.

The OPP officers trying to make sense of these events were perplexed. Nothing remotely similar had ever happened in Tweed before, and they had no physical evidence at all to go on, save for the two pillowcases. All they had was the account of the extremely distraught Jane Doe, who, never having seen her assailant, could offer only the vaguest description of him. She guessed he was between thirty and fifty, with a demeanor she described as fatherly—seemingly thoughtful and concerned, even as he was tormenting her, something that the detectives found particularly puzzling. She said it sounded as if he had tried to make his voice sound deeper than it was—a ruse Williams repeated when he attacked Jane Doe's neighbor, Laurie Massicotte, two weeks later. Jane Doe also said she thought he was wearing hiking boots and a tight sweater, which she ripped during the short struggle at the beginning. He was clean-shaven and wore a ring on one of his hands. He smelled dirty.

As a crime and a crime scene, it was as baffling as anything the police had seen. And once again, they sought guidance from Detective Sergeant Van Allen, the OPP criminal profiler who, among his other tasks, was also assisting Ottawa police in the Orleans lingerie break-ins. He opened a fresh file. No one, least of all Van Allen, had the remotest idea the two sets of circumstances
were connected: different types of crimes in jurisdictions more than 120 miles apart. And none of the earlier lingerie thefts in Tweed had been reported.

Van Allen examined the OPP's two-and-a-half-page report on the Jane Doe assault and was unsure whether he was dealing with fact or fiction. Over the years he has encountered many false accusations of sexual assault, and his tentative conclusion was that this might be another one. There was no physical evidence of an intruder, no description of him, and Jane Doe had declined to seek any medical attention because she had not been raped or sexually penetrated. What also puzzled Van Allen was Jane Doe's account of the almost conciliatory way in which the intruder had spoken and behaved. “She said—and this was a direct quote—the guy had told her to roll over on her tummy. I couldn't ever remember a sex offender using that phrase, ‘Roll over on your tummy.' So I thought her disclosure was problematic, and it wasn't until the second one happened [the Laurie Massicotte assault] that we knew for sure that what she had said was probably true.”

In the detailed, diary-style account of the attack that Williams wrote shortly afterward, he gave a slightly different version of events than would later appear in the agreed statement of facts. Rather than first seizing her by the throat, he said that he stood over the sleeping Jane Doe for several minutes and then finally struck her hard on the side of the head, “trying to knock her out.” Instead she awoke, and the struggle began.

In flat, casual prose Williams described the encounter as though it had been the most ordinary of everyday events. He wrote that after snapping her picture a number of times, “she stood up to let me pull her pants back on—very civilized.” Yet he was also acutely aware of the risks he was taking. After the assault he walked back through the woods to his cottage; his account
noted that “a white police car went down the lane within 8 minutes of my return.”

What the police were completely unaware of until after Williams confessed was that his assault on Jane Doe didn't mark the end of his activities in her house. Incredibly, just twenty-four hours later, on the night of September 18, he returned to the scene. Only Jane Doe wasn't there; she and her baby had gone to stay with friends. Williams broke in again, this time through an open window. He stole another fifteen pieces of lingerie, took more photographs and left.

He came back again the following night, September 19, but he noticed that the father of Jane Doe's child had returned home and decided not to venture inside. Earlier that same evening, before heading down the road to Jane Doe's house, he had had dinner at his Cosy Cove Lane cottage with his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, and a friend, Jeffrey Manney, who was staying over. Before retiring for the night, Harriman remarked to Manney that her husband often liked to go for late night walks before he went to bed.

And then Williams showed up a fourth time at Jane Doe's house, on September 22, when the house was once again empty. He stole more undergarments and took more photos, including a couple of himself standing naked, wearing only one of Jane Doe's thongs.

In between these raids, the almost unbelievably brazen Williams resumed his normal life. A few hours after the September 17 attack, he met in Belleville with members of Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario to discuss an upcoming charity event for wounded soldiers. Later the same morning, at CFB Trenton, he watched a strongman (Lutheran pastor Kevin Fast from
Cobourg) break a Guinness world record by pulling one of the newly acquired, 200-ton C-17 Globemasters across the tarmac. Then he visited the 8 Wing engineering shop.

September 18 saw him exhort members of the air base to take a role in the Wing Commander's Challenge, an annual medley of games and races in support of the United Way. “I very strongly encourage members of 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, military and civilian, to achieve a healthy lifestyle, including regular exercise,” he said in an address. “General [Rick] Hillier used to say that if he could find time to exercise he was pretty sure that the rest of us could as well … That's my challenge to you.” Later the same day he attended a Belleville Bulls OHL junior hockey tournament press conference where they dedicated their 2009–10 season to the “heroes” of 8 Wing. His friend Jeffrey Manney attended the game too, then accompanied Williams back to his cottage for dinner and a stay-over.

On September 19, Williams attended a special hockey ceremony where he and his right-hand man, Chief Warrant Officer Kevin West, dropped the pucks for a game between the Bulls and the Peterborough Petes. On the 20th he was on hand at 8 Wing to greet the returning coffin of Private Jonathan Couturier, Afghan casualty number 131. He also attended a Battle of Britain commemoration that day. And still on the 20th, he found time to compose on his home computer an extremely detailed account of his assault on Jane Doe three days earlier.

On September 22, Defence Minister Peter MacKay—someone Williams appears to have liked and respected, judging by complimentary remarks he made to his friend Jeff Farquhar—stopped by 8 Wing to announce another $334 million in funds for the on-going base expansion. On the 23rd, Williams hit the first ball at the annual wing commander's charity golf tournament, where almost $10,000 was raised.

Two days after that, midway between the September 17 attack on Jane Doe and the subsequent one on Laurie Massicotte on September 30, a most peculiar episode took place at the Forces' flying school in Portage la Prairie, near Winnipeg. The event was the graduation dinner for the newest batch of proud pilots to be getting their wings. Williams had been asked to fly in and attend as reviewing officer and guest of honor, and after the dinner he rose and started to make his congratulatory address to the half-dozen new pilots and the crowd of eighty or so guests.

Someone who was there that evening tells what happened next. “He's there making his speech, and he has everyone's total focus and attention. It was kind of somber comments he was making, talking about very serious things. He was standing there in his mess kit, everyone else sitting there at their tables. And then he suddenly just stopped. People at these things sometimes like to have a pregnant pause—it focuses everybody—and I thought it was just one of those, and we're all just sitting there.

“But the pause went on. He just stood there looking at everybody with this grin on his face. Not a word was said, everybody was just stone quiet, any conversation that was going on while he was talking just totally stopped. People started looking around and looking at him. I remember looking at the people I was with and going, ‘That's really odd, that's a long pause.' It was very out of character for him.”

The pause lasted for up to a full minute, the witness says. “And he's just standing there looking at everybody. It wasn't like he'd zoned out, he didn't have a lost look on his face—he just stopped. I thought he'd just lost his train of thought and was trying to regroup and refocus. But he didn't, he just stopped. Finally, after the minute or whatever was up, he says something along the lines of, ‘Well, that was different,' and everybody just chuckled, and he went on with his little speech and everything was fine. And at the
time I just put it down to the pressures of being a wing commander, with so much on his mind. Afterwards I said to him, ‘That was a pretty good speech, but not quite sure about that pause.' And he says, ‘Yeah, that was a little different.' ”

And perhaps it happened with good reason, because by now Williams must have been firing on all cylinders. He made his awkward speech on September 25, a Friday, flying into Portage la Prairie and returning almost immediately to Trenton. One day before that, on September 24, he had broken into the home of Laurie Massicotte, three doors down from his cottage in Tweed, when she wasn't home. He stole just one pair of panties, and the next day—the same day he gave his speech to the graduating pilots—he photographed himself wearing them. Then, on the 26th, after returning from Manitoba, he broke into Massicotte's empty house once again. This time he stole four pieces of lingerie.