In 2007, the year I moved to Thompson to edit the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I had commuted for a time less than six months earlier from my home in Wellington, Ont. for about 30 kilometres a day north along Highway 33, the Loyalist Parkway, to work in Trenton.
I went to journalism school years ago at Loyalist College in nearby Belleville, Ont. In 1981, I was living in Boston, but flew home that summer to attend my best friend's wedding in Tweed at Stoco Lake. And in 2004 and 2005, I was the editor of the Brighton Independent, covering the Canadian Forces Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) deployment from nearby CFB Trenton to tsunami-stricken Sri Lanka in January 2005. That's the same team that is now working in earthquake ravaged Haiti.
While CFB Trenton since 2005 has become a well-known place name for most Canadians as it is the repatriation base for almost all of our fallen soldiers whose remains are being returned from Afghanistan, I'd venture to say that until a few days ago, references to Brighton, Tweed, Stoco Lake, Highway 37, perhaps even Belleville, and the RCMP-run Violent Crime Linkage System (ViCLAS), may have been unfamiliar to most, although certainly not all, Northern Manitobans.
Not any longer. The arrest of 8 Wing CFB Trenton commander Col. Russell Williams Feb. 7 on two charges of first-degree murder in the recent slayings of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, and Corp. Marie-France Comeau, 37, stationed under his command at CFB Trenton, who was found dead in her Brighton home last Nov. 25, has made the towns and roads in that small section of eastern Ontario some of the best-known geography - for the most horrendous of reasons - in all of Canada this week.
Williams, of course, is presumed innocent until proven guilty. He is also charged with sexually assaulting two women two weeks apart on Cosy Cove Lane in Tweed last September.
Both of their homes were within walking distance of a cottage Williams, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, a Manitoba native, own. The women had their hands bound with zip ties and their heads were covered as they were bound naked to chairs. They were then photographed by their attacker. According to a search warrant issued last Oct. 29 in connection with another suspect in those cases, Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) were looking for digital storage devices, a black La Senza bra, a purple La Senza bra, thong underwear with a poodle, two baby blankets, pornographic photos and videos, white shoes, and zip ties, among other items. The victims' identifies are shielded by court orders.
Police criminal investigative analysts or "psychological profilers" as they are more commonly known, call the items of clothing belonging to the women police are looking for "trophies" that sexual predators and serial killers often collect from their victims at the crime scene.
In the mid-1990s, while working as a reporter at the Kingston Whig-Standard, I had the chance to listen to presentations by Insp. Ron MacKay, officer-in-charge of the Violent Crime Analysis Branch at RCMP Headquarters in Ottawa, who had returned in 1991 from training at the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia and set up the Violent Crime Linkage System (ViCLAS), along with sergeants Greg Johnson and Keith Davidson and RCMP civilian computer science and software engineering experts John Ripley and Paul Leury. I also had the opportunity to hear retired FBI Agent John Douglas, who headed the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, speak as well. Douglas was the model for the Jack Crawford character in both the book and 1991 movie, The Silence of the Lambs.
MacKay said research has shown that serial offenders are motivated to commit crimes by an insatiable fantasy. They may change their method and/or locations but their fantasy will remain constant. "The fantasy ritual will continue over time and space. The guy that rapes out of anger when he's 25 will rape out of anger when he's 35."
The five investigative units of the OPP's Orillia-based Behavioural Science Analysis Services are key players in the Williams' case in which he had an interview last Sunday with Det.-Sgt. Jim Smith, who last year obtained a statement in the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Tori Stafford of Woodstock, Ont. Lloyd's body was found soon after the interview.
On Feb. 4, police set up a version of the familiar impaired driving roadside spot check on Highway 37, looking to match unusual tire treads found outside Lloyd's house, also near Highway 37. Williams, behind the wheel of his Pathfinder, was one of the motorists stopped in the roadside check.
The psyche of Williams will be relentlessly scrutinized in the weeks ahead. Serial killing cases create an automatic media frenzy no matter who the accused perpetrator is. You can multiply that tenfold in the Williams' case.
There are fewer than 100 full colonels serving in the 95,000-member Canadian Forces. Williams is among the best and the brightest serving in the Canadian Forces, command-tested and watched by superiors for almost 20 years with ever-increasing responsibilities until he wound up last July commanding Canada's most important air base. His military record, by all accounts, isn't simply unblemished; it is stellar.
The answers to this crime puzzle at the end of the day may not be all that reassuring. While we understandably comfort ourselves by reaching for clinical terms such as psychopath and sociopath to create and describe a convenient "other" - a monster distant from us - working for five years as daily newspaper court reporter long ago taught me the line between normal and abnormal is often shockingly thin. As we may be about to see.
