Trying to find what made Williams a monster

Opinion

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This article was published 30/04/2011 (5272 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A New Kind of Monster

The Secret Life and Chilling Crimes of Colonel Russell Williams

By Timothy Appleby

Random House Canada, 277 pages, $30

THE guy Canada’s military trusted to pilot aircraft carrying the Queen, former Gov. Gen.Michaëlle Jean and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and who later became commander of Canada’s “most important airbase, the air force’s operational hub” at Trenton, Ont., is one sick puppy.

But if you think you’ve heard and read all there’s to know about ex-colonel — he was stripped of his rank in 2010 — Russell Williams’s violent crime rampage, think again.

Veteran Toronto crime reporter Timothy Appleby does a fine job of reconstructing Williams’ crimes.

To his credit, he doesn’t play up the lurid. But the lurid abounds nonetheless. You might want to sleep with the lights on after reading Appleby’s recounting of details disclosed at Williams’s four-day sentencing hearing.

He also renders a vivid picture of the sleepy town of Tweed, near CFB Trenton, and the upscale Ottawa neighbourhood of Orleans, where Williams marauded and murdered.

But he fails to convincingly explain Williams’ collapse of the borders of sex and violence. Or how lust became bloodlust.

And that’s because he can’t find anything in Williams’ background that would engender a double life as a serial killer and rapist.

Williams, according to Appleby, remains, at base, inscrutable. The behind-his-back nickname subordinates tagged him with — “cyborg” — in hindsight seems cruelly apt.

He is in the words of the book’s subtitle, “a new kind of monster.” And maybe the most unlikely serial killer of all time.

Williams was a well-to-do upper-middle-class kid. Though the offspring of divorced parents, he maintained a good relationship with both his mother and father after their split. He later built a healthy connection with his stepfather following his mother’s remarriage.

He went to one of Canada’s most prestigious private schools, Upper Canada College, and then the University of Toronto, from which he graduated with a degree in politics and economics. He was not only a good student but also a gifted athlete and musician.

Besides being a murderer and rapist, Williams was a master break-and-enter felon, whose specialty was photographing and videotaping himself wearing his victims’ underwear, while still in their bedrooms, so he could later store the images in his computer.

All told, he entered guilty pleas to 88 charges in a Belleville, Ont., courtroom in October 2010.

But Appleby discloses that the plea bargain he and Crown prosecutors entered into hinged on what he refused to publicly admit to — child porn.

“Murder, rape and bizarre sexual assaults, scores of terrifying, fetish-driven home invasions — he was ready to admit to all of that, in a series of confessions that were mostly truthful, although sprinkled with self-serving evasions,” writes Appleby.

“But he was not willing to acknowledge downloading child pornography from the Internet, during the pretrial negotiations he’d been adamant: child porn charges would be a deal-breaker.”

Williams and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, have a Manitoba connection.

Williams did a two-year stint as a flying instructor at the Canadian Forces Base training school in Portage la Prairie. The couple married in Winnipeg in 1991. Prior to their marriage, they bought a house together in Portage.

Subsequent to his arrest, police investigations in the Portage la Prairie area disclosed no crimes Williams could be linked to.

Appleby diligently searches for a root-cause pathology. But everything about Williams’s childhood, adolescence and air force career screams normal, sane and upright.

He never does figure out what crucible forged this “monster.”

It’s an admission that makes the ex-colonel all the scarier.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.