A New Kind of Monster (21 page)

The next morning, November 18, Marsan-Cook had to work, and Gray drove her home and waited downstairs while she went up to the office on the second floor, where she needed to make some photocopies. That's when he heard her scream.

On the screen of an older, rarely used computer (no log-on code was needed) was a message in place of the screensaver. It was still dark outside, and the text was visible as soon as she walked into the office. In large letters it read: “GO AHEAD. CALL THE POLICE. I WANT TO SHOW THE JUDGE
YOU'RE REALLY BIG DILDOS.” Marsan-Cook noticed this time that her lingerie drawer had been ransacked.

In this, his second theft from the Marsan-Cook home in less than twenty-four hours, Williams stole a total of 116 pieces of her underwear. For a while she thought the culprit was perhaps a long-ago, unstable boyfriend who had stalked her and resurfaced a couple of years earlier and sent a threatening email telling her she had wrecked his life. But whoever the intruder was, the terrifying implication of his message was that he had been in the house the previous afternoon, when Marsan-Cook and Gray were debating whether to call the police about the first theft, and had overheard them talking. Certainly that was how things appeared to her at the time. “He was hiding in the linen cupboard up there in the hallway. We know that, because all the things there were upside down and it's big enough for three people in there.”

Indeed, Williams may well have rooted through the linen closet during one of his intrusions. But he was probably not there when Marsan-Cook and Gray stopped by her house on the afternoon of the 17th. The telltale date-stamped photos he took in the house were in two batches. The first group was recorded between around 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. on the 17th, while the second was shot shortly after midnight on the 18th. Williams the prowler was very much a nighttime creature, and it seems unlikely that he lingered in Marsan-Cook's home through the day until she and Gray showed up in the afternoon. He told detectives that he broke in two separate times, and that's likely true. On his second visit to the house, empty of occupants once more, he would have realized that Marsan-Cook had returned home in the interim and noticed her sex toys were missing. So he tormented her by leaving the message, which he also photographed before departing. (He even took a picture of one of her
cats.) And the incorrect spelling of the word “your” to read “you're” was almost certainly no accident. As with the clumsy, quasi-apologetic message he had written but never sent to the young Ottawa woman, this looks to be another effort to make himself appear less educated than he was.

Beyond dispute is that the close encounter left Marsan-Cook badly shaken. She had heard something about the two unsolved home-invasion sex attacks up the road in Tweed a few weeks earlier, and she immediately drew a connection. The Belleville police who subsequently came to her house, however, appeared to know nothing about those incidents, which were under investigation by the OPP and had garnered little attention outside Tweed. Marsan-Cook says that one of the uniformed Belleville officers asked her, “Why, what's going on in Tweed?”

Marsan-Cook emerged from the experience with a deep sense of gratitude for having survived, which was later heightened when she learned what Williams did next. “Ever since, I've realized I could have been killed. But I realized I was meant to live, that I was being protected at that moment. This wasn't about learning a lesson, this was bigger than that. I was spared, and there was a reason for that.”

Q
uebec-born Corporal Marie-France Comeau joined the reserves in 1995 and had been with the military full-time for twelve years. Her family was originally from New Brunswick and she was raised in Quebec, New Brunswick and Germany. Like her father, Ernest, who spent forty-two years with the Canadian Forces, and like her grandfather before that, she was a career soldier. At thirty-seven, she owned the house on Raglan Street, part of a tidy new Brighton subdivision that was home to many other military households, having moved in a little less than a year earlier.

She was content. “She had found her calling, she had no worries and everything was going well,” says Canadian Forces basic-training instructor Alain Plante, who had lived common-law with Comeau for four years. Comeau had become a devoted stepmother figure to Plante's two teenaged sons, one of whom, Etienne, in a later tribute on Facebook called her “the best stepmother that could possibly have set foot in our lives.”

In the late 1990s, Comeau was stationed at the big NATO base in Lahr, Germany, as a member of the army, before switching to the air force. Then followed a tour of duty in which she shone. In 2002 she was posted to Afghanistan, part of the first Canadian contingent of troops to be rotated through after the
U.S.-led invasion and the ousting of the Taliban. There and at Camp Mirage, the air base in the United Arab Emirates that served as the chief conduit for the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, Comeau served as a traffic technician, moving cargo. She drove a forklift truck, loading and unloading the big Hercules aircraft that ceaselessly flew in and out, and it was a taxing environment—hot, dusty and demanding long hours.

“She did an incredible job,” a former colleague, retired Master Corporal France Breault, told the
Northumberland News
newspaper. “Tough conditions, but I never heard Marie-France complain. She did her job with her usual smile, really making a difference … She was just the friendliest person there is. All her supervisors were thrilled to have her working for them.”

Comeau had been at 8 Wing for about a year, attached to the base's 437 Squadron, where she initially worked the Trenton–Germany–Camp Mirage run. But in the early summer of 2009, shortly before Williams took charge of the base in July, she was picked to work on the VIP flights that flew the prime minister and other dignitaries, a highly prestigious position in which social skills were considered paramount.

Seven days after breaking into Comeau's home the first time, Williams returned. Late in the evening of Monday, November 23, he switched off his BlackBerry, locked the door of his top-floor office at 8 Wing headquarters in Trenton and made the short trip to Brighton. He arrived there shortly before eleven, and once again he parked his vehicle a few hundred yards away in a patch of woods and walked down Raglan Street to Comeau's house.

Her travels with Prime Minister Harper to Japan, Singapore and India had taken her right around the world—first west across the Pacific Ocean and then back to Canada via Europe
and across the Atlantic. It had been a tiring haul and she was still recuperating, so she wasn't expected in at work the next day. With his easy access to her work schedule, Williams was well aware of that fact.

He paused outside her house and listened. She was talking on the phone. When the house went quiet, he once again used the same point of entry to slip inside: the horizontal, two-foot-by-five-foot basement window on the east side of the house. He was wearing a sweatshirt, Dockers pants and running shoes, his features masked by a small black cap and a wide black band that concealed his lower face, so only his eyes were visible. With him was what could be called his rape kit: rope, duct tape, lubricant, a flashlight and of course his camera equipment, all of it carried in a blue duffel bag.

The unfinished basement looked like countless others in newish homes: a concrete floor; pink glass fiber insulation in high wood-frame walls that had not yet all been closed in with drywall; a spare bed; a furnace in one corner. And it was there by the furnace that Williams silently stood for more than half an hour, waiting for his prey one floor up to retire for the night. In his hand was the same weapon he had used to club Laurie Massicotte, his heavy red tubular flashlight.

But Comeau did not go to bed. Instead, dressed only in a shawl, she walked down the wooden basement stairs in search of one of her two cats, calling out to it. Of course, there was a reason the cat was lingering in the basement: it had spotted the intruder hiding by the furnace and was staring fixedly at him, Williams later told police. And as Comeau came downstairs, she caught sight of him too. In the dim light and with his face covered, it is unlikely that she recognized the base commander—Williams later insisted she did not—but her reaction on finding an intruder in her home was swift and vocal. She shouted out, “You bastard,”
began screaming, and a struggle ensued. It ended when Williams struck her over the head several times with the flashlight, forcefully enough to cause extensive bleeding and bruising.

Comeau made an attempt to escape, but he pushed her to the floor, binding her arms behind her back with the rope, so tightly that it left burn marks on her forearms and wrists. He wrapped her entire face in the silver-colored duct tape he had brought along, leaving an airhole around her nose for her to breathe through. He hauled her to her feet and tied her to a metal post in the center of the basement that served as a ceiling support. Among the numerous injuries sustained by Comeau and recorded by pathologist Dr. Michael Pollanen was a wound to her back, inflicted by a metal pin in the post. Then Williams reached for his camera and took a couple of photographs.

His captive secure and blindfolded, he began taking elaborate precautions to ensure he would not be disturbed. First he went back outside the house and replaced the screen on the basement window through which he had entered; bloodied footmarks were later found in the walkway between the two houses, and also on the basement stairs. He found a key for the front door of the house, inserted it in the lock and snapped it off, so the door could not be opened from the outside. He went into Comeau's bedroom and draped a sheet over its single window. He removed all the small night-lights from the living room and the spare bedroom.

Then he returned to the basement, untied Comeau from the metal post and hustled her to the foot of the basement stairs, where another struggle took place as she once again fought back against her attacker. Large quantities of blood were found spattered about, and a section of the drywall was dented. Comeau was knocked unconscious and she ended up lying on the staircase, naked with her hands still tied behind her back. Williams took four more photographs, carried her upstairs to her bedroom and
reapplied the duct tape to her face. She was still bleeding from the head wounds, which stained the bedroom carpet.

He placed her on the bed, the long rope binding her hands lying on the floor and neatly coiled in a figure eight. Around her head he wrapped a burgundy towel, tightly secured with duct tape. Then he turned on his video camera and proceeded to create a macabre record of his deeds, not to mention the most damning physical evidence imaginable.

Over the next two hours, he repeatedly raped Comeau, recording the assault with video and dozens of still, close-up photos, shot with a handheld camera. He seems preoccupied with obtaining as much variety in his footage as possible, in terms of angles and close-ups. And he too is very much part of the nightmarish photos and video clips that police found on one of his computer hard drives. The first glimpse of him on camera shows him naked except for the balaclava-like mask on his head and face. He even shot video of himself taking still photos, the video camera's lens trained on the Sony camera he grasped in one hand, held inches away from what he was photographing. That way he had two sets of images for his collection.

There is no merit in describing in detail Comeau's ordeal over the next two hours. Suffice to say that the colonel tasked with protecting the country and the people serving under him shows not a shred of mercy. At one point Comeau struggles to speak through the duct tape; he leans in and whispers, “No.” She can be heard saying, “Get out, get out, I want you to leave.” His response is to sit back thoughtfully, then take more pictures of her face.

At one point he kisses her on the cheek, then mugs for the video camera with a half smile, having removed his balaclava. At another time she is heard pleading with him to loosen the rope tightly binding her hands behind her back. He ignores her.
He produces a tube of lubricant jelly and displays it for the video camera, holding it between his knuckles.

And still Comeau fought back. Midway through the two hours Williams paused and went to the living room window to make sure no one was coming. She struggled to her feet and ran to the bathroom, still tied and blindfolded, where he caught up with her, struck her several times more on the head with his flashlight and dragged her back to the bed.

He removed some of her lingerie from a drawer, placed it on her and took more pictures. He began raping her again, and as he did so, Comeau was crying out: “I don't want to die, I don't want to die.” Williams placed a pillow over her face, but even though still bound and gagged, she briefly managed to pull it away and fight him off. He forcefully ordered her to “Shut up,” saying that if she did, he would allow her to breathe. The autopsy showed that Comeau also sustained injuries to her eyes and neck, thought to have occurred at around this stage when Williams exerted pressure on the jugular veins on the side of her neck.

He reached for his roll of duct tape and there was a further struggle, leaving Comeau on the floor screaming, “No.” Again he warned her to be quiet or he would suffocate her. He got dressed, ordered her to get to her feet and led her by the rope still binding her hands to a corner of the bedroom.

“I want to live so badly,” Comeau can be heard saying. “Did you expect to?” Williams replies, and the mumbled response is, “Yes … Give me a chance. I'll be so good, I don't deserve this … Please go, please go away, please.”

He told her he was not going to kill her, but as with Jessica Lloyd two months later, it was a lie. As Comeau cowered in the corner, her face still wrapped in the duct tape save for an airhole for her nose, Williams completed the act of murder by placing another piece of tape over the hole. She slumped to the floor,
her last words a muffled plea for her killer to “Have a heart, please. I've been really good. I want to live.” And Russell Williams watched her die, the video camera still rolling. He then took two more still photos, the last one at 4:23 a.m.