A New Kind of Monster (20 page)

The two burglaries were a prelude to Williams's second sexual assault, in which the victim would be Massicotte herself. As to why he targeted Massicotte, after his arrest he would once again offer vague explanations to the effect that he didn't know her name and had only spoken to her once or so but he knew she lived alone. Such statements were almost certainly disingenuous and self-serving, intended to make the assault appear spontaneous rather than premeditated. Certainly that's what Massicotte believes. “Thinking back now, I think he had been in my home many, many times, he'd been stalking me many times,” she says.

As with Jane Doe, the most peculiar component of Massicotte's terrifying experience was the attacker's blend of vicious domination and purported concern for her well-being—getting her a couple of aspirin, repeatedly reassuring her that if she cooperated he would be out of her home and on his way. Williams also
made clear to her the paramount importance of him getting his photographs. When he stripped her clothes off by slicing them with a sharp blade, she panicked, thinking she was about to be raped. He responded: “No, there'll be no need to rape you if I get these pictures.”

In the attack on Jane Doe, Williams took just nine photos, but in this instance he took twenty-nine, and they provide an indication of how his sexual aggression was accelerating. Most are pictures of his captive, in her blindfold and restraints, being forced to present herself in assorted pornographic poses. But in the final three, Williams is seen too, displaying his erect penis and—the final picture—standing fully clothed in front of a mirror, wearing a black tuque, his face wrapped in one of Massicotte's undergarments so only his eyes are visible.

A week or so later, he augmented that photo file by taking additional pictures in his home of his most recently acquired lingerie trophies. And shortly thereafter, he added still more—photos of the October 7 edition of the weekly
Tweed News
, whose front page gave a prominent account of the two attacks on September 17 and 30. Williams had placed the newspaper in the fireplace of his Tweed cottage, set it alight and photographed it seven times while it burned. Also found in the same group of photos were more than a dozen screenshots of news and police websites reporting on the two sexual assaults.

Clearly, Williams had by now crossed a major threshold, and conceivably it made him cautious for a while, because he did not carry out another break-in for more than three weeks. Meanwhile, he lost no time in resuming his regular life. A few hours after the September 30 assault on Massicotte, he was back at 8 Wing for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The same day he also presented a $700 check to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada—the Ottawa-based charity of which his wife was an executive director.

Williams's schedule at 8 Wing during October reveals nothing remarkable: a workout and photo op for Fire Prevention Week, the colonel clad in a bright yellow firefighter's protective suit; a speech at the Air Force Association of Canada's annual meeting, held that year at the Trenton base; an appearance as a “celebrity chef” at a United Way fundraiser.

His life of crime, too, was relatively low-key that month. The only break-in he committed, on October 24, targeted an all-male household of a father and two sons, who lived in Tweed down the road from Cosy Cove Lane. Williams walked in through an open door, realized there were no women living there, and departed without stealing anything, though he did take four photos.

Then he became bolder. On November 5, he hit a home on Minnie Avenue in Tweed, closer to the downtown core than his usual zone of operations, stealing nine pieces of women's underwear and snapping nine photos. He had raided the same home almost exactly a year earlier, and he marked the anniversary in a post-burglary note he wrote to himself, illustrating not only his customary obsession with detail but a new temerity:

Two days later, on November 7, and farther still from his usual geographic comfort zone, Williams was in the home of a mother and her teenaged daughter on Tweed's River Street, where he stole twenty-two items of clothing, including a skirt and a slip. Mother and daughter were out of town for the weekend, visiting the daughter's older sister in Ottawa, and like almost everyone else in the village who was robbed, they knew nothing about it until after Williams was arrested.

When they did find out, they were deeply perturbed, and wondered why he had targeted their house. “I have to walk to my bus stop to go to school, so we figured he maybe saw me walking or something, because there's a story he was seen at the nursing home across the street,” says the teenager, Ruth, who requested that her full name not be printed. “I cried, I was so shocked. To think of some man coming into your room, and knowing he was probably in my room and touched my stuff—I don't know what he touched. After we found out, I searched through my room, wondering what he could have taken, because we don't know if he took my underwear or my mom's. When I found out it had happened, every time I walked in my house, or up my driveway, it was like, ‘He took these steps, he went into my house.' ”

Discovering that Russell Williams was responsible was a three-stage process for Ruth and her mother. Shortly after he was charged with murder and began chronicling for police his scores of lingerie raids, the family were visited by detectives, who assured them they were not in danger but were vague as to what was going on. “They sat down with our mother and asked who all lived here and how long we'd lived here, if we'd noticed anything was missing. They asked that question multiple times
and we didn't really know what it was about,” recalls Ruth's older sister, Ann. Their mother asked neighbors if they too had been questioned, and learned they had not. “So we knew it was something specific to do with us.”

The evening before the break-in charges were announced in April, Ruth and her mother were advised over the phone that an arrest had been made in connection with their case. But not until the next day was Williams named as the perpetrator.

When the family did finally connect the dots, there was a further dimension to their dismay. Tweed is a small place, and Ruth and her mother knew both Jane Doe and Laurie Massicotte, the two women Williams had attacked back in September, and were keenly aware of what they had been through. “When all this was happening, we were sleeping with stuff beside our beds, like a hammer,” Ruth recounts. Now they were being told by police that the same intruder who had committed the bizarre twin assaults had been in their home as well. “Looking back at it, we were thinking, ‘What if we would have been home,' if that would have made any difference, if we could have been killed,” Ruth says.

And they were not wrong to be so fearful, because the predator's appetite was growing.

Nine days elapsed before Williams struck again, and when he did so, he strayed again from his usual territory. On the evening of Monday, November 16, he drove his Pathfinder toward the small town of Brighton, just west of Trenton. He was heading for the home of a 37-year-old flight attendant under his command at 8 Wing, a soldier he knew by sight and by name and probably much better than that: Corporal Marie-France Comeau.

T
he well-kept brick house on Brighton's Raglan Street that belonged to Corporal Comeau was empty that evening when Williams arrived there. She was away on a mission accompanying Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Singapore, Japan and India. As base commander with ready access to her schedule, Williams would have known that. He nonetheless took precautions, parking his vehicle in a wooded area about 650 yards from her house. He broke in by removing the screen of a small basement window at the side of the house and squeezing through. Once inside, he looked around, then headed for the bedroom and the lingerie drawer. He played with and put on some of Comeau's garments, stealing seven pieces when he departed. And, as usual, he took dozens of photos, including images of his erect penis as he modeled the undergarments and shots of Comeau's military uniform, with her name on it. After about ninety minutes of this, he left by one of the doors, carefully replacing the screen on the basement window, and headed toward his cottage in Tweed.

Later, Williams would tell police that he barely knew Comeau, that he had met her just once before, on a flight. All the evidence, however, suggests that is untrue and that they had had several previous encounters. Garrett Lawless describes one at 8 Wing
Trenton: “We had a squadron mess dinner just after I got back from Afghanistan, about four months prior [to her murder]. She was sitting right across from me, and he was sitting about five seats up, at the head table. We later conjectured that would have been the first time that he saw her, because he would have seen her, he would have been aware of her, she definitely would have stood out.” Others say the same. Corporal Comeau is remembered not only as generous, with a sunny, outgoing disposition, but also as attractive and very fit.

And she had also helped Williams with his French. In September 2009, a few weeks before Williams killed her, he had a telephone conversation with his old university friend Jeff Farquhar, in which he specifically mentioned Comeau's name and said she was giving him some pointers in learning French. Farquhar recalls the exchange because he asked Williams if “Comeau” was spelled the same way as Baie-Comeau, former prime minister Brian Mulroney's Quebec parliamentary constituency.

Nothing suggests there was any romantic relationship between the two, which for a colonel and a corporal serving on the same base would have been conspicuous and highly unacceptable. But it appears certain that Williams and Comeau knew each other better than he ever admitted and that—as with numerous aspects of his confession—he was striving to make his actions appear spontaneous and unpremeditated, and hence perhaps marginally less heinous than they were.

His lingerie trophies in his burglar's bag, Williams sped away from Comeau's house. But he was not yet done for the night. During his almost two and a half years of known break-ins, encompassing more than eighty different burglaries, there were only four occasions on which Williams raided two different homes on the same night. This was one of them, and he returned to the second home the next night as well, in a pair of back-to-back
intrusions that illustrate how swiftly his aggression and risk-taking were picking up pace.

After leaving Comeau's house in the early hours of November 17, he drove east along Highway 401 then headed north on Highway 37, which links Belleville and Tweed. On the rural outskirts of Belleville, close to the city limits, he pulled into the driveway of a darkened 150-year-old farmhouse with outbuildings, on the west side of the highway. The house belongs to transplanted Quebecer Anne Marsan-Cook, an artist and musician in her late forties who moved to Belleville in 1999 with a degree in mining technology but chiefly makes her living through teaching music. A lively, engaging figure with a ready laugh, she has two adult sons who have left home and is married to a mining engineer and consultant who is often out of town on business, as he was that night.

Williams told police after his arrest that he selected Marsan-Cook's home after noticing that a relatively young woman lived there. And that may be true, because the house sits right by Highway 37, the front door and driveway visible from the road. But once again, he was very likely downplaying the planning and preparation he put into his break-ins and attacks, because among other assignments, Marsan-Cook taught piano and organ at two different schools at the 8 Wing base in Trenton. She says she was never aware of Williams until his arrest, but he may have spotted her on the base, and as its commander it would not have been difficult for him to figure out who she was and where she lived.

Sometime after three a.m., he climbed through an unlocked window into her sprawling, deserted farmhouse and followed his usual routine. He grabbed more than forty pieces of Marsan-Cook's underwear, along with three sex toys and a sex movie, and he took an assortment of photos, including six shots of himself wearing some of the lingerie and masturbating.
Then—at some point—he departed. A key question would later be when that was.

November 17 was a Tuesday, and Marsan-Cook had spent the previous night away from home. Late that afternoon, she returned briefly to change her clothes because she was going out again that evening, just down the road to a friend's house, to celebrate her forty-eighth birthday. She tells what happened next: “I came home. I'm a party girl, I love drinking and dancing, and I was in a rush to get out. So I went straight to my bedroom, and the two drawers [in the bedside table] were open, and I thought, ‘How unusual.' I had been alone for a few days and I knew nobody had been here. So I looked in and there was nothing missing on my husband's side … but on my side I realized there were a couple of sex toys that were gone.”

Marsan-Cook didn't immediately notice that any underwear was missing, but the theft of the sex toys was evident, and at first she thought it was a practical joke. After calling friend and neighbor Howard Gray, who rushed over, she realized it was probably not a joke, and they debated calling the police. Confused about what had happened and wary of not being taken seriously, she decided not to do so. So she and Gray checked the downstairs doors and windows and then headed to the small birthday party, where she stayed over for the night.