A New Kind of Monster (23 page)

January 3 saw one of the largest-ever repatriation ceremonies to stem from the Afghan conflict. In a biting wind, Williams watched as the coffins of Sergeant George Miok, Sergeant Kirk Taylor, Private Garrett Chidley, all from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, and Corporal Zachary McCormack, a reservist with the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, were unloaded. And there was a fifth coffin, that of award-winning journalist Michelle Lang, seconded to the Canadian Press from the
Calgary Herald
and reporting from the Kandahar area for less than three weeks before she was killed. Lang had been traveling with the others when their armored vehicle was ripped apart by a roadside bomb.

The New Year brought fresh demands for 8 Wing. Along with its ongoing, multi-million-dollar infrastructure expansion and the ceaseless back-and-forth supply mission to Afghanistan, it was gearing up to provide air support for security operations at the Vancouver Olympics. As well, the seventeen-strong fleet of new CC-130J Hercules transport planes was soon to start arriving. Williams told the Belleville
Intelligencer
that his first half year as wing commander had been “a lot of fun, but very, very busy, some major pieces are getting under way.” One of the big challenges, he said—probably the biggest—was juggling day-to-day operational needs with the big infrastructure changes afoot at 8 Wing in the shape of new roads and buildings. He also offered thanks to the people of Trenton and Belleville: “What has really impressed me in the last few months is how outstanding the support from the local community continues to be. I can think of very few events that have been less than positive.”

On January 5, 2010, he attended the swearing-in ceremony of Belleville's new deputy chief of police, Paul Vandegraaf, where he mingled and spoke with the police officers and other dignitaries.

Then, on January 12, a huge earthquake devastated Haiti, killing more than 230,000 people and posing a major, obviously unforeseen challenge for CFB Trenton, which overnight became ground zero for relief operations and Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team. Operation Hestia, as the Canadian Forces humanitarian response to the earthquake was dubbed, was a very big deal for Canada in general and for 8 Wing in particular, which was the main point of departure for a 2,500-mile “air bridge” linking Canada and Haiti via Jamaica. As the base funneled the first of two thousand troops and hundreds of tons of food, water and medical supplies to the stricken country, on January 17 it was toured and praised by Defence Minister Peter MacKay and General Walter Natynczyk, Chief of the Defence
Staff, Canada's top soldier. Other visitors included Chief of the Air Staff Lieutenant-General André Deschamps along with Honorary Colonel Pamela Wallin, who spoke of being struck by “the incredible amount of energy here.”

Other, less urgent matters helped fill up the colonel's calendar. On Wednesday, January 27, he attended a meeting for the 8 Wing museum's board of directors, where it was proposed that a memorial wall be erected to honor the Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Williams suggested that some sort of finance committee be set up to examine costs.

And amid the hectic schedule, there was special recognition for the base commander. At a black-tie dinner on January 15, Deschamps presented Williams with the Canadian Forces Decoration First Clasp, marking his twenty-two years of “faithful service.” The award was a kind of upgrade for a medal he had already received, fastened to his chest alongside the South-West Asia Service Medal he'd been awarded for his work in Camp Mirage and Afghanistan. Presented after a town hall meeting at an 8 Wing gymnasium, the recognition apparently came as a surprise to the colonel, but he was unfazed. The career soldier and pilot who a few weeks earlier had raped and murdered a corporal under his command, and who two weeks later would rape and kill another woman, smirked into the camera.

S
now lay on the ground and a raw February wind whipped across the surrounding farmland as the police cruisers maneuvered into position, blocking the two-lane highway in each direction. A checkpoint was being set up, with cars from two police forces, the Belleville Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police. Behind the wheel of one of the OPP cars that pulled up was Constable Russell Alexander, a career officer from the small Madoc detachment who was nearing retirement. He stepped out onto the asphalt.

It was this same constable who in late October had suspected Larry Jones, Williams's next-door neighbor, of being responsible for the twin home-invasion sexual assaults on and near Cosy Cove Lane, and his presence at the roadblock may have been a coincidence. But what was rapidly becoming clear in the fast-widening investigation was that those two attacks were almost certainly linked to the recent mysterious disappearance of a popular young Belleville woman, and that the unsolved murder of Corporal Marie-France Comeau two months earlier in Brighton was probably part of the picture too.

This was an early Thursday evening, February 4, 2010, around seven o'clock, and the checkpoint on Belleville's northern outskirts, where Highway 37 stretches toward the sleepy village of
Tweed, was what's termed a rolling roadblock. Mobile and set up without warning, rolling roadblocks are routinely deployed in rural Ontario to nab drinking drivers and—increasingly, under toughened provincial legislation—speeders. And at first glance that would have seemed to be the purpose of this one, which in part it was. As a trickle of motorists slowed down and obligingly rolled down their windows, the first question was friendly, unremarkable: “Good evening, sir. Good evening, madam. Any alcohol tonight?” On this evening, however, something more than drunken drivers was on the minds of the cops, whose roadblock remained in place through the night until almost six the next morning, long after Belleville's bars had closed for the night.

One week earlier, almost to the hour, a vivacious, independent-minded woman of twenty-seven had inexplicably vanished overnight from the brick-and-siding bungalow where she lived alone, right where the police checkpoint now straddled Highway 37. So as the passing motorists pulled up and the police discreetly sniffed for a whiff of booze, drivers were asked to cast their minds back a few days. Had they been traveling this way the previous Thursday evening, January 28, or early on Friday? Did they recall seeing anything unusual? Did they know of anyone else who did?

Belleville is a mostly blue-collar city of fifty thousand inhabitants, a two-hour drive east of Toronto along Highway 401. And like authorities anywhere else, its police are well accustomed to fielding missing-person reports. Unless they involve youngsters or the elderly, such disappearances rarely stir much concern at the outset. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, most people turn up unscathed and perhaps apologetic for having caused such a fuss.

But from the first hours of Jessica Lloyd's vanishing, alarm bells rang. She'd texted a friend shortly after ten-thirty at night to say she'd arrived home safely after spending the evening with him at a mutual friend's house and was turning in for the night.
But she'd failed to show up for work the next morning at the bus company where she'd worked for the past two years, Tri-Board Student Transportation Services Inc. in nearby Napanee. And because she was always punctual, colleagues at work swiftly realized something was very wrong.

January 29 was a Friday, and at around nine o'clock Lloyd's mother, Roxanne McGarvey, got a call from the school bus company in Napanee telling her that her daughter had not shown up for work that morning. McGarvey headed for Jessica's house, stopping off en route at the office of Jessica's doctor in Belleville to see if by any chance she was there. On arriving at her daughter's house, she found the car still in the driveway, the doors locked and no signs of a break and enter. Inside was everything Jessica would normally have had with her: her purse and identification, her BlackBerry, her eyeglasses, her keys. McGarvey began phoning family members and friends, and Jessica's older brother Andy, to whom she was close, was among the first to get the call. A confident, burly figure who had a warehouse job with the Beer Store, working the midnight shift, Andy Lloyd would become the public face of his sister's family and many friends in the weeks and months ahead, answering the barrage of reporters' questions with unfailing patience.

“It drew a red flag so quick,” he said of Jessica's disappearance. After Williams was arrested, Andy Lloyd recounted to CBC television how he had learned something was amiss. He had just come home from work. “I'd only been laying down for half an hour and my mom phoned and told me she was missing and it didn't really register … So I rushed right over to my sister's house, where my mom was, and it all just kind of converged from there. Within an hour a lot of friends and family were over. And the police were there obviously. We called them right away and they were there very quickly and it just kind of exploded from there.”

The police arrived shortly after noon, and quickly spotted two sets of footprints in the snow, leading from the house to a set of tire tracks about 150 yards away, on the edge of the cornfield at the north end of the property. Scores of volunteers began fanning out and scouring the woods and surrounding fields, and they were joined by personnel from CFB Trenton together with police from Belleville and from the small, neighboring Stirling-Rawdon police department. The OPP brought in a helicopter, as did the military at 8 Wing, a big yellow search-and-rescue Cormorant, the deployment of which was approved by the base commander, Colonel Russell Williams. Hundreds of posters were quickly printed and distributed, plastered on cars and hydro poles, seeking a young woman who was five foot five, weighing 125 pounds, with bright green eyes, brown shoulder-length hair and an intricate, L-shaped tattoo across her lower back. There was widespread concern about the disappearance, as Lloyd had lived most of her life in Belleville and was extremely well liked. An ad hoc Facebook group, “Find Jessica Elizabeth Lloyd,” sprang to life, as more than 48,000 people—including family and friends, but mostly strangers—pitched in with sympathy, thoughts and advice. Deputy Belleville Police Chief Paul Vandegraaf called the collective response “amazing.”

Despite the blitz, however, a week after Lloyd had disappeared without a trace, there had been no breakthrough, nor any sign of one. And the sense of foreboding that built with the passing days soared on Wednesday, February 3, when Belleville police issued a stark warning to the city's women, especially those living alone: keep your doors locked; vary your daily routine; try to be with friends; report anything or anyone suspicious.

There was good reason for the police alert because, sinister as Lloyd's disappearance was, the larger picture police were by now looking at was becoming more threatening as they joined up dots from the past four and a half months: the two bizarre sex attacks in Tweed, the murder in Brighton of Corporal Marie-France Comeau, and now what looked to be the abduction of Lloyd in Belleville—different types of crimes, in different places, under scrutiny by different police. Still absent from the mix was any connection to the dozens of lingerie break-ins in either Tweed (all but one of which had gone unreported) or Ottawa, more than 125 miles away. Nonetheless, the ingredients were in place for what could have been a reprise of the cross-jurisdictional chaos that hampered the big Paul Bernardo murder investigation in the early 1990s, which was badly marred by interdepartmental police rivalry in Toronto and Niagara Region.

But this time, it didn't turn out like that. Jessica Lloyd was a Belleville resident and her disappearance was a Belleville case. Because it was so entirely out of character, however, the city's new police chief, Cory McMullan, had approached the OPP shortly after Lloyd vanished to see if there might be a connection to any other unsolved crimes.

Indeed there might, she was soon told. One of the most useful tools in the OPP's inventory at its headquarters in Orillia is what is termed the VICLAS computer system, acronym for Violent Crime Linkage System, part of a national network that's mostly run by the RCMP. VICLAS grew out of a still-earlier investigation, in the 1980s, involving British Columbia serial killer Clifford Olson, and its broad function is to track and analyze common threads in seemingly disparate investigations. Scrutiny of these four recent incidents showed several possible links: all took place within an hour's drive of each other, all involved home invasions and all took place late at night. As well, the Comeau
murder and the Tweed sex attacks a few weeks earlier showed similarities in the way the predator had tied up his victims. Could that same assailant now be responsible for the disappearance of Jessica Lloyd? Quite possibly, the police had concluded—hence the warning to Belleville's women.

But where Lloyd might be, no one had a clue.

Jessica Elizabeth Lloyd was born in Ottawa, where her father, Warren Lloyd, spent more than twenty-five years at CFB Ottawa in the Canadian navy's communications section. On retiring in 1990, when Jessica was eight, Warren Lloyd and his small family relocated to Belleville. Home was the red-brick bungalow on Highway 37, which was built for her parents and which later became Jessica's property after her father died of cancer and her mother moved into a smaller place in Belleville. At the time of her death, Jessica had owned the house for less than nine months.