A New Kind of Monster (22 page)

He cleaned up. He took the sheets from the bed and ran them through Comeau's washing machine, dumping in a bottle of bleach, shooting yet more video and still photos as he did so. He went back to the bedroom and removed the duct tape from Comeau's face, placed her body on the bed and covered it with a duvet. Finally he took nine pieces of her underwear, put them in his duffel bag and left her house by the back patio door. He walked up the road to where his Pathfinder was parked and drove away up to Highway 401, headed for Ottawa. He switched on his BlackBerry. It would still be dark for another couple of hours. He had an early morning meeting to attend.

M
arie-France Comeau was murdered in the early hours of Tuesday, November 24, and her body lay undiscovered for more than thirty hours. Still on leave after her long-haul overseas trip to Asia, she was not expected at 8 Wing that day, and it wasn't until almost one in the afternoon on the Wednesday that the Northumberland OPP got the 911 call. It was Brighton's first homicide in more than thirty years.

Retired printing-press operator Terry Alexander lived directly opposite Comeau's house, and he had never had a conversation with her. But he knew her well enough to say hello as she came and went, driving back and forth from work or picking up groceries. He was outside on his front porch, awaiting a visit from a plumber, when he realized that something was terribly amiss. “It's sometime after twelve and a guy comes out of the house and he's crying. He said to me, ‘Did you see anybody around here who shouldn't have been here? Did you see any strange people or strange cars? She's laying in there dead.' That's what he said to me. Then he sat down in the driveway, leaned against the wheel well of his car. He'd already phoned 911, because about two minutes later all the cars came rushing down—police cars, ambulance, the fire chief, everything.”

The man was Paul Bélanger, Comeau's boyfriend, also in the military and stationed in Quebec, and it was he Comeau had been chatting with when Williams was lurking and listening outside her house on Monday night. They had arranged to have dinner the following evening, and when she didn't show and didn't answer the phone he drove over to her house on Wednesday to find her silver-colored Toyota Yaris still parked in the driveway. First Bélanger tried the front door, then he went around to the back, where he found the patio door unlocked. He gave a shout, got no response and went inside.

Crime in Brighton is rare, and still more so in the tranquil subdivision nicknamed Brighton by the Bay. So for the next several weeks residents remained extremely uneasy, despite police reassurances that there was no cause for alarm over what looked to be a domestic-related incident. Williams's intrusion via the basement window had gone undetected, despite the blood traces in the walkway, and police found no other sign of a forced entry, suggesting that Comeau had known her killer and had let him into the house. For that reason, Bélanger was of immediate interest to the detectives pursuing the murder investigation. They also learned from him that after the burglary on November 16, Comeau had noticed her belongings had been disturbed and that she had accused him of being the culprit. Not until Bélanger passed a polygraph test several days later was he cleared.

Then another possible suspect surfaced, a pilot at 8 Wing who was put through two extremely distressing high-pressure interrogations, with a third one scheduled for the day on which the murder charges against Williams were announced.

In the meantime, Comeau's neighbors were wondering if a killer was in their midst. Police wouldn't release the cause of death, viewing it as holdback evidence, but it was obvious the quiet, pleasant air attendant from 8 Wing had been murdered.
Terry Alexander and his wife, Mary, had sold their house in Mississauga and moved to Brighton three years earlier, in part because Mississauga, just west of Toronto, was experiencing too much crime. “I moved away from all that, I came from a place where there's murders, I come here and there's one right across the road. It was mind-boggling for me,” Terry Alexander says. “Everybody was very nervous, it was very tense, because we didn't know anything. All that I wanted to know was that he [the murderer] was out of here. We didn't know if anybody had been remanded or if someone down the street might be next, or what. The police didn't mention anything. We kept asking, ‘How did she die?' and they said, ‘We can't divulge that.' But they asked all kinds of questions and they were around here for weeks. Everybody on the street was interviewed, and on the next street too.”

Comeau's house was torn apart in the search for evidence, from the floors to the ductwork to the insulated walls, requiring extensive repairs when the police were done. The best clue they had was the bloodied footwear impressions Williams had left behind in the outside walkway (he subsequently discarded the running shoes he'd been wearing), but of course there was nothing to compare them to. And the same was true of the DNA traces Williams left in Comeau's bathroom sink, where he had washed his hands.

The killer colonel, meanwhile, once again resumed his normal life.

As Williams would later tell police, on the Tuesday morning, a few hours after murdering Comeau, he drove from his cottage in Tweed to Gatineau, across the river from Ottawa, where he participated in an 8:30 a.m. meeting regarding the recently acquired C-17 Globemasters. He remembered the meeting, he said, because the big aircraft—a vital component of the Afghanistan war effort—had been so much a part of his job when he'd been working in
Ottawa at the Directorate of Air Requirements a couple of years earlier. It was very foggy on the morning he made the drive, he also recalled.

The meeting wrapped up mid-afternoon and later he had dinner at a restaurant with his wife, kissing her goodbye and then heading back to Tweed, he said. But in an odd memory lapse, he was unable to tell Detective Sergeant Jim Smyth where the couple had dinner, even when pressed, except to say that it was somewhere in Westboro, the upscale Ottawa neighborhood where their new house was being built, now nearing completion. Nor could he remember who paid for the meal, only that it would have been paid with MasterCard.

On November 25—the same day Comeau's battered and bloodied body was discovered in her home—Williams took part in a charity stunt that in hindsight can only be described as grotesque. As the 8 Wing commander usually did, he lent his weight to Trenton's annual United Way fundraiser. In a corny but effective attention-getter known as Jail 'n' Bail, organized at numerous workplaces across Canada, bosses and celebrities get rounded up and “arrested” on absurd charges, sometimes by good-humored cops. From a mock jail, the prisoners then frantically appeal to friends and colleagues to bail them out, and the money goes to charity. Williams cheerfully pitched in. He was arrested on a charge of being “too young to be a wing commander” (he was forty-six), while Lt. Col. Sean Lewis, 8 Wing's Logistics and Engineering Officer, was accused of “having a full length mirror in his office and looking at it too often.” Under the caption “Jail and Bail event locks up the worst Wing offenders,” the December 4 edition of 8 Wing's weekly newspaper carried a picture of Williams grinning into the camera, his hands tied behind his back.

It was not long before official word of Comeau's murder reached the base commander. Before he confessed, Williams told police he
wasn't sure when and where he found out—an astonishing gap in the memory of such an efficient, detail-oriented commander—but emails obtained under an Access to Information request show that a few minutes after midnight on Thursday, November 26, he was informed there had been “a significant occurrence” and that Corporal Comeau was dead. From his Tweed cottage, Williams acknowledged the news at 6:40 a.m., firing off a rather antiseptic message in reply. “Understood. Thank you,” he typed on his BlackBerry. “I'll catch up when I get in, if there is additional information.” He then drove to the base in Trenton.

Over the course of the day, numerous emails went back and forth between the senior 8 Wing officers, who were dealing not only with the police who had carriage of the investigation and were trying to reach Comeau's next of kin, but also with a flurry of media calls. Late in the morning, a press release went out from the base, after a couple of minor amendments by Williams. He corrected Comeau's first name to read Marie-France instead of Marie, and the reference to 437 Squadron, to which she belonged, was changed to read “437 (Transport) Squadron.” Early in the afternoon, the 8 Wing military police commander emailed him a news update from
The Trentonian
newspaper's website, and Williams replied with an assurance that if he learned anything new, “I'll keep you in the loop.”

Williams's breathtaking sangfroid held firm over the next few days. Comeau's funeral, which he did not attend, was held on December 4 at the National Military Cemetery in Ottawa. Hundreds of friends, family and military personnel were there, including both Alain Plante, her former longtime boyfriend, and Paul Bélanger, whom she had been seeing more recently. Padre Paul-Alain Monpas delivered the eulogy, lauding the murdered soldier's accomplishments, her great sense of adventure and her integrity and devotion to duty. “Marie's respect for those around
her aided her career in the military,” the pastor said. “She always found the words for those having difficulty. She was never scared to get involved, she was full of talent, and whoever knew her can say she made a difference in their lives. Marie, a ray of sunshine to her friends and family, embarked on a lifelong quest to seek truth in her life. She lived her life to the fullest.”

Other tributes were paid, and Williams had made a contribution too. Earlier in the week, he had written to Comeau's father on his official letterhead, expressing his condolences on behalf of the 8 Wing base. “Please let me know whether there is anything I can do to help you during this very difficult time,” he concluded. “You and your family are in our thoughts and prayers. With our deepest sympathy …”

After the funeral, he was given an update by a senior officer who was there. “I'm pleased to hear that the service went as well as could be expected, given the very sad circumstances,” Williams replied in an email. “Take care. Russ.” He had spent the day in Trenton, attending another charity function, and at a turkey-carving later in the day, smiling broadly, he posed for a shot with the youngest private at the base, who was declared honorary Wing Commander for the Day.

On December 8, a memorial service for Comeau was held at the 8 Wing chapel. Williams did not attend that ceremony either, possibly because he was flying. At around that time, early in December, he helped pilot an Airbus 130 on the Germany–Ottawa–Trenton leg of a return trip from Camp Mirage in the U.A.E. Garrett Lawless had brought the plane from Mirage and the flight home marked the last time he chatted to Williams before the arrest. It would also be Williams's last overseas trip, though he flew at least once to Edmonton over the Christmas holidays, always a busy time at an air base. Designed for medium- and long-haul flights, the wide-bodied Airbus was bringing
home twenty or so assorted celebrities who'd been entertaining the Canadian troops in Kandahar with a morale-booster: folk singer Bruce Cockburn; retired hockey great Guy Lafleur; Canadian Football League hall-of-famer Peter Dalla Riva. Williams was introduced to them and was his usual courteous self, but he seemed subdued. “In hindsight, I remember he was very twitchy, though he may just have been tired,” Lawless remarks. “He talked about how he was going to miss flying if he was further promoted or transferred, because very rarely does a full colonel have an operational flying position. Flying to Trenton from Ottawa, I remember him saying his favorite time to fly was at night because the air was so smooth.”

Right around that same time, on December 6, he and Harriman took possession of their new house in Ottawa. They had already sold the home on Wilkie Drive in Orleans, where they had lived for fourteen years, and now they were relocating to Westboro, an established upscale neighborhood a few minutes' drive from the city center. Former neighbors on Wilkie Drive say the upkeep on the old house had become too time-consuming for the couple and their busy schedules, but the move also shortened the commute for Harriman, whose offices are situated in a downtown high-rise office tower.

Most of the homes on Edison Avenue have been there for many years, but like the property next door, number 473 was brand new, purchased from the Prestwick Building Corporation. For $693,819, Williams and Harriman got a three-story, three-bedroom townhouse comprising 2,200 square feet. As often happens with new houses, completion ran a bit behind schedule, so Harriman had stayed with friends for a few weeks after selling the Orleans property, while Williams had lived in Tweed.

On December 15, Williams welcomed the Olympic torch when it stopped at Trenton en route to the Olympic Games in
Vancouver. In all, fourteen military bases took part in the ritual. “It's very exciting to be a part of this,” he said.

In the December 18 issue of
Contact
, his Christmas message to the men and women under his command urged them to “reflect upon our collective accomplishments and to look toward the future.” He and Chief Warrant Officer Kevin West listed some of 8 Wing's achievements for the year: “We have maintained the support lifeline to our mission in Afghanistan, saved fellow Canadians through Search and Rescue operations, conducted all aspects of Air Mobility support, whether VIP or materiel transport, and returned to Canada our fallen [soldiers] with honour and dignity.” With the approach of Christmas, Williams concluded, “We know that many of you will be thinking of our comrades serving elsewhere, away from their loved ones. We thank you for the support we know you will provide their families here at home.”

Christmas came and went, then New Year's Eve, which Williams marked by attending two parties at the 8 Wing officers' mess—a formal, dress-kit function followed by a more relaxed get-together with some of the civilians attached to the base. He stayed for a drink and then departed.