‘Cocky’ colonel tried to frame me: neighbour

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This article was published 13/02/2010 (5810 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TWEED, Ont. — It was grouse hunting season, mid-fall, when Larry Jones had a conversation that has suddenly, after all that has happened in this eastern Ontario town, taken on more significance.

Jones, a perpetually active 65-year-old, was dressed in camouflage hunting gear and loading his shotgun into his pickup when his normally solitary next-door neighbour walked over and started to chat.

This in itself, Jones said, was unusual. Col. Russell Williams would typically arrive at his two-bedroom home on Cosy Cove Lane in the dark and leave the next morning before dawn. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home at all.

Jones considered his neighbour "cocky" and aloof. Williams had made it clear he wasn’t interested in idle conversation.

But here he was, this 46-year-old high-achiever, the commander of Canada’s largest air force base, suddenly intrigued by Jones’s three-hour hunting trip.

Jones humoured him, and told him he was hunting birds. The colonel wanted to know where, exactly where.

Jones, a lifelong Tweed, Ont., resident, told him of the road 10 kilometres away, a place where he and a friend have a hunting camp.

The colonel indicated he had not heard of the road.

Near the golf course, Jones told him and the colonel’s eyes flashed with recognition.

"Ya, ya, I know the road," he said. "Good luck with the hunt!"

Nearly three months later, Williams was arrested and charged with killing two young women and sexually assaulting two others, an event that has reverberated across Canada.

For Jones, a husband, father and grandfather, the arrests first brought a sense of relief. Jones had been interrogated in the fall as a suspect in the two sexual assaults for which Williams is charged. Jones’s name had been cleared.

But the day after his neighbour’s arrest, Jones had a startling experience. That day, police set off in a grim convoy to retrieve the corpse of 27-year-old Jessica Lloyd, a Belleville, Ont., woman who had been missing for nearly two weeks. The police convoy was headed in the direction of Jones’s hunting camp.

The colour drained from his face. Williams tried to frame me, Jones recalls thinking. "That son of a bitch."

He suddenly remembered another odd event. Someone had broken into his workshop in late January — and instead of stealing any of his toys (which include a fishing boat, a deck boat and two shiny snowmobiles) — they took a dirty work coat, a pair of work gloves and a small blue lighter he used to spark the occasional backwoods cigar.

The lighter, he said, had grease marks so thick you could probably see his fingerprints with the naked eye. He says the strange theft happened Jan. 28, the night Lloyd disappeared.

"So is my coat, my gloves and my lighter with her body?" he said recently. "Or is it in his house here? Where is it?"

Williams has not been charged in connection with Jones’s suspicions.

Late last fall, police hauled Jones into a station in nearby Madoc, Ont., and put him through 3 1/2 hours of questioning. They told him he was a suspect in the two separate sexual assaults and burglaries on his street in September. The victims were both women who lived alone. The attacks occurred in the dead of night. The intruder bound the women with duct tape, blindfolded them with pillow cases, tied them to chairs and photographed them.

"They asked all kinds of things. Did my father beat me? Did my mother molest me?" he says. "Personal stuff, like ‘What kind of sex do you like?’ "

Police told him it was one of the victims who had identified him.

"They told me this lady down here," he says, gesturing down Cosy Cove Lane, "recognized my voice when I was there in the room tying her up and stuff. This is what they told me. Maybe they were trying to get me going."

That came as a body blow to Jones, who has lived on the same tiny street for 43 years and is called by some "The Mayor of Cozy Cove."

A former provincial government employee, Jones has managed the local arena, run a gas station and worked as a carpenter in recent years.

He heads the local Stoco Lake ratepayers association, is a member of the legion and is a trail warden for the local snowmobile club, deputized to hand out $250 tickets to non-compliant sledders.

When the Ontario Provincial Police detective questioning him got tough, threatening to dig up the skeletons in his closet, Jones says he told him, "Go ahead, mister, I’ve had one speeding ticket in my whole life."

However, news spread fast that Jones was a suspect in the sexual assaults and he became a pariah in town. "It’s like the end of the world," he said.

On Wednesday, Jones went to the bar at Trudeau’s Resort in Stoco Lake to hoist a couple beers with friends.

He told them the whole story. It was the first time he felt people believed him.

— Canwest News Service