Child porn found on Russell Williams’ computer, but no charges laid: book
Winnipeg Free Press
Posted: 03/29/2011 1:10 PM
By: Paola Loriggio, The Canadian Press
TORONTO – Police found child porn on serial sex criminal Russell Williams’ computer but laid no charges in exchange for him pleading guilty to murder and sexual assault, a new book says.
The former commander of Canada’s largest military airfield wouldn’t admit to downloading pictures of teenaged girls in sexual positions, Globe and Mail reporter Timothy Appleby writes in “A New Kind of Monster.”
A source quoted in the book said Williams couldn’t face the stigma attached to child pornography, though he was willing to plead guilty to murder, rape and a series of bizarre sexually motivated break-ins.
“This is a guy who structured his life around how he saw others act, and that’s how his morality base came about,” said the source, who was involved in the case.
“In the military, you can kill people, it’s accepted … it’s within the realm of human behaviour. And in war, rape is within that realm as well. The one thing that isn’t, and stands outside that, is (sexual abuse of) children.”
“There’s no one else within his group that engages in that, so that would make him truly alone.”
Williams, 48, was convicted in October of first-degree murder in the sex slayings of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 37, of Brighton, Ont., and Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, Ont.
He also pleaded guilty to 82 fetish break-and-enters and thefts as well as two sexual assaults.
Williams methodically chronicled and catalogued his crimes, shooting videos and still photos of himself in the act and amassing a huge collection of undergarments stolen from women and girls. Dozens of gruesome photos were shown during his trial.
Still, little is known about what sparked Williams’ double life and turned him into a predator so late in life.
For most of his life, Williams “was able to control himself and contain himself, but there was a fuse burning,” Appleby said Tuesday.
“I don’t think there was an external catalyst that suddenly turned him into a killer. I think it was an internal decision that he made that he was going to go up the ladder,” he said.
“I think the good side of Russell Williams — and there was a good side — was really quite genuine,” rather than a front meant to dupe those around him, he said.
“It’s just that the dark side, the evil side, though that’s a word I try very hard not to use … became much more powerful than that.”
The book argues that Williams’ sense of shame, strong emotions and close personal attachments set him apart from most serial killers.
Investigators and justice officials quickly realized Williams cared about his wife, the military and his cats — emotions that break with the traditional profile of a sociopath, the book reads.
What’s more, “Williams knew that what he had done was wickedly wrong, and he knew so while he was doing it. And it was the fact that he did so anyway that made him so immensely dangerous.”
Though Williams isn’t officially considered a serial killer — the term applies to those who kill at least three people — justice officials are convinced he would have continued killing if given the chance, according to the book.
Williams is currently serving a life sentence in Kingston Penitentiary with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
The Canadian Forces stripped him of his rank of colonel after his conviction and burned his uniform — a move that some military veterans say is unprecedented.
Note to readers: This is a corrected version of an earlier story that incorrectly gave Comeau’s age as 38.
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Child porn found on Russell Williams’ computer: book
CTV
Updated: Tue Mar. 29 2011 2:17:10 PM
The Canadian Press
TORONTO — A new book about former colonel Russell Williams says police found child porn on his computer but laid no charges in exchange for him pleading guilty to murder and sexual assault.
“A New Kind of Monster,” written by Globe and Mail reporter Timothy Appleby, says the convicted killer wouldn’t admit to downloading pictures of teenaged girls in sexual positions.
A source quoted in the book says Russell couldn’t face the stigma attached to child pornography, though he was willing to plead guilty to murder, rape and a series of bizarre sexually motivated break-ins.
The book argues that Russell’s sense of shame, strong emotions and close personal attachments set him apart from most serial killers.
The former commander of Canada’s largest military airfield pleaded guilty in October to two counts of first-degree murder, two counts each of sexual assault and forcible confinement, and 82 break and enters that date back to 2007.
Williams faces life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
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Sex killer Russell Williams had child porn, but no charges laid
Toronto— Globe and Mail Update
Published Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011 12:50PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011 3:34PM EDT
Tu Thanh Ha
Police found child pornography on Russell Williams’s computer, but prosecutors didn’t lay charges because that would have been a deal-breaker in persuading him to plead guilty, says a new book about the sex predator who terrorized rural Eastern Ontario until his 2010 arrest.
Mr. Williams could own up to being a burglar, a lingerie thief, a murderer, a rapist and a cross-dressing fetishist – but possession of child pornography was too loathsome for him to acknowledge, says the book, A New Kind of Monster, by Globe and Mail crime reporter Timothy Appleby.
To avoid having to go to trial, the prosecution and Mr. Williams’s defence agreed not to pursue accusations relating to the child porn in return for his guilty plea on other charges.
The material investigators found in Mr. Williams’s computer were pictures of adolescent girls in sexual situations; the photos had been downloaded from the Internet.
“This was not just one or two images, and it was the one thing he could not summon himself to admit to,” a source says in the book. “He would plead guilty to everything else, but not to that.”
The presence of the child porn is consistent with the fact that, in 13 of the 48 homes he burglarized, Mr. Williams targeted the bedrooms of female minors, taking photos, stealing hundreds of pieces of underwear and posing in them.
Nevertheless, “technically, he could not be classed as a pedophile despite the child porn found on his computer, because his sexual interests were much wider than that,” the book says.
Once a promising colonel who commanded CFB Trenton, Canada’s largest air base, Mr. Williams is now serving concurrent life sentences, with no chance for parole for 25 years, after pleading guilty in the fall to two murders, two sexual assaults and 82 burglaries.
Two days after pleading guilty, Mr. Williams told a guard at the detention centre that he wouldn’t have entered a plea had he known the media interest the court proceeding generated.
“It was one more lie, and a very obvious one,” the book says.
“He knew very well that if his crimes had gone to trial, all the horrific evidence would have come out anyway, along with a great deal more, including disclosure of his kiddie-porn collection. As well, his already substantial legal fees would have swelled by tens of thousands of dollars – costs he told [Ontario Province Police investigator Jim] Smyth he was particularly anxious to avoid. The remark nonetheless shows how painful the media onslaught was, and how acute his sense of humiliation.”
Mr. Williams was never officially diagnosed as a psychopath, manipulative and devoid of empathy, but there has been much speculation over whether he fits the profile. Others also wondered why his crime spree began when he was 44.
The book notes that the key evidence against Mr. Williams came from his computer, where he began carefully cataloguing his crimes, starting in 2007.
A few months before Mr. Williams’s first admitted burglary, an RCMP officer had been in the news in June, 2007, for a similar burglary.
Was that well-publicized incident a catalyst? The book says that police investigators suspect there were earlier incidents of either voyeurism or snooping that Mr. Williams never mentioned.
“He was admitting what he had to admit,” the book says.
It mentions Mr. Williams’s assured, forceful manners in the first of the crimes he had confessed to, a September, 2007, break-in into the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl in the village of Tweed where he remained at the scene for more than two hours to take pictures.
“Such confident behaviour suggests this was not his first home invasion,” the book says.
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Russell Williams: A murderer with a soft side
Toronto Globe and Mail
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011 7:51PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011 9:11PM EDT
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
In his new, hot-off-the-presses book about the deviant sex killer Russ Williams, The Globe and Mail’s Tim Appleby concludes, with backup from the few people who knew Mr. Williams well and some sharp observations of his own, that the former air force colonel is not a psychopath.
“He is not even close to being one,” Appleby writes.
(We regularly call one another by our last names and I can’t bring myself to use the usual honorific.)
“Williams was not that kind of murderer at all,” Appleby says. The rising military star “had feelings, emotions, attachments of all kinds: he cared about his wife, he cared about the military; he was devoted to his cats, and he also appears to have a moral compass …”
Appleby’s not talking out of his rear. He has interviewed many people of importance in Mr. Williams’s life, including several who had the courage, given the lengths to which some have gone to put as much distance as possible between them and the former colonel, to speak on the record.
As one of them, Jeff Farquhar, a former roommate at the University of Toronto who remained a lifelong friend, told Appleby, the bewilderment in his voice evident even on the page, “He [Mr. Williams] had a conscience, he always had a conscience.”
Though no one can ever know for sure, my hunch is this is probably true – Appleby marshals a convincing case – and the thesis certainly makes for a compelling book.
But as anyone who knows the paper’s famously rumpled crime reporter even a little would know, believing this – that there was and is something human, broken but still recognizably human, about Mr. Williams – is probably the only way that such a tender man as Appleby could have written about such sordid and soul-destroying material.
For months, one of the nicest and most decent people I know had to immerse himself in Russ Williams’s secret world.
As with a few other colleagues at the paper, I’d hear from Appleby occasionally, as he came up for air, miserable from his reading and interviews and desperate for a hint of normalcy. You could practically hear his always wild hair standing on end.
I also sat right beside him in Belleville last fall for the several days of Mr. Williams’s guilty pleas and sentencing, and saw how affected he was by the grim evidence recited in that courtroom. Other reporters were troubled too, but for many of them, youngsters, it was their first exposure to such sordid stuff; Appleby is a veteran, presumed to be hard-boiled, and on one level he is that.
And I don’t mean that his book, A New Kind of Monster, is the product of some rosy view of humanity; it’s not, rather the result of hard work and exclusive and lengthy interviews with key people in and astute observers of Mr. Williams’s life.
It’s just that I can’t imagine Appleby, lovely as he is, could have written a book about a guy who was just an ordinary garden-variety psychopath.
The curious kindness he discovered in Mr. Williams – to those in the military, particularly subordinates; to Mr. Farquhar, who saw Mr. Williams angry only once, when he didn’t call to tell him that his mother had died; to Curio and Rosebud, his two cats; even, weirdly, to one of the two women he sexually assaulted, Laurie Massicotte, for whom he got some aspirin for the headache she developed from the blows he’d rained down on her to subdue her – is Appleby’s most startling find and the most persuasive.
There’s news in the book too, notably that Mr. Williams had child porn on his computer and that his quick agreement to plead guilty was entirely dependent on that being kept quiet.
“The most closely guarded secret of the Russ Williams story is the fact that along with the tsunami of evidence of unspeakable crimes that police found on his home computer, there was also child pornography,” Appleby writes. “And that was the one offence to which he refused to plead guilty.”
Appleby’s theory is that Mr. Williams is deeply ashamed of who he was, which would render him a rare beast among his fellows, and that this is why, though he could admit to rape, torture, murder, astonishing underwear-and-lingerie thefts in which he masturbated compulsively – and the obsessive videotaping and photography of all of the above – he couldn’t acknowledge he liked child porn.
Mr. Williams’s grotesque cruelty, particularly to the two bright young women he killed, Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd (he watched Ms. Comeau die, with video camera still rolling, and as Ms. Lloyd lay on the floor of his cottage, blood pooling around her head, he took three more photographs), is already well established.
What’s much more interesting, and more bearable to read, are the signs of goodness, the hints of the ferocious internal struggle that must have been going on within the former colonel.
A retired air force sergeant named Lucy Critch, who worked under his command for more than a year, told Appleby: “He was funny, he liked to laugh and was beloved by everyone in the squadron, definitely someone often described as a nice guy.”
Of all the scary things about Russ Williams, that’s surely the scariest.
cblatchford@globeandmail.com
I finished reading this book a few weeks ago. Definitely very nauseating.
And the really scary thing about Russell Williams is just how ‘normal’ he appeared.
The “death penalty” should be “restored” -In some ways CANADA & its “Laws” are very “wimpy” to say the least !