Col. David Williams

[sadie1263]

I watched a show about Col. Williams and his crimes last night. It was just truly awful. But I guess what rang in my head was Lin's comment about being able to tell something about people from looking at them. This was a monster in plain sight.....in charge of high level things. Even flew with the Queen of England..........

So what happened here......was just nobody really looking? Almost like the TDK killer.....married...seemed to fit into society just fine........it's a really disturbing thing to think about.

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Experts Review Canadian Commander’s Sadistic Crimes
By IAN AUSTEN and BENEDICT CAREY
Published: October 20, 2010


OTTAWA — He had a privileged upbringing, a highly successful career and sadistic sexual urges that would qualify as extreme even by the morbid standards of serial killers.
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Canadian Commander Videotaped Murders (October 20, 2010)
Yet for those who track such cases, perhaps the most striking element in the crimes of Col. David Russell Williams, a former Canadian military commander hanging his head in an Ontario courtroom this week, is how late in life it apparently started, experts say — and how quickly it escalated.

According to evidence presented so far, Colonel Williams, 47, began breaking into houses near his own two homes to steal girls’ and women’s underwear only in the past several years, growing ever more brazen and reckless until he committed his most serious crimes: two sexual assaults in September 2009, a rape and murder in November that year, and another this January.

He kept obsessively detailed records, photographing himself thousands of times in the underwear and comprehensively videotaping his most brutal attacks. He pleaded guilty to scores of charges on Monday.

“Most sexual killers begin in their 20s, peak in their mid-30s and start to taper off by their 40s,” said Dr. Michael H. Stone, a New York psychiatrist who wrote the book “The Anatomy of Evil” (Prometheus, 2009).

He and other forensic psychiatrists said it was impossible to offer anything like a complete assessment of Colonel Williams without knowing more about his life and interviewing him directly.

But the evidence of his particular mental twists has been mounting as prosecutors have outlined his crimes during his sentencing hearing. On Monday, they showed many of the photographs — some showed him, aroused, in girlish underwear decorated with cartoon characters or, arms akimbo, in ladies’ lingerie. Most were close-ups of his genitals protruding through the cloth.

Some of the homes he broke into were those of acquaintances. He masturbated with bedroom objects and then put them back in place; he left thank you notes on his victims’ computer screens.

On Tuesday, the prosecutors described videotapes of the protracted assaults on the two women he killed. The first victim found him hiding behind her furnace while she was looking for her cats; he bashed her in the head with a flashlight, bound her and brought in lamps to improve the lighting before he recorded himself repeatedly raping the bleeding woman.

On Wednesday, the prosecutors played video recordings from a 10-hour police interrogation. Colonel Williams initially appears confident as he meets an officer from a behavioral science unit in an interrogation room at an Ottawa police station.

“I have never been in a room like this,” he says, grinning up at a camera.

Later, however, after the interrogator tells him that the unusual tread pattern of his sport utility vehicle matches tracks found in a snowy field near his second victim’s home, Colonel Williams drops his head. He confesses for hours.

Forensic psychiatrists said that many sexual killers made records of their acts or kept mementos to revisit the experience. Dr. Angela Hegarty, a forensic psychiatrist at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, who also teaches at Columbia University, said, “I would say the No. 1 reason he kept these meticulous records is to recreate the Proust moment, the ‘biting into the madeleine’ that brings back the rich memory.”

The records are so full, she suggested, because for the killer, “You don’t know going in which detail is going to provide that.”

In the interrogation, Colonel Williams said he became interested in women’s underwear in his 20s or 30s, but did not act on it until a few years ago.

Psychiatrists call such desires paraphilias, a broad class of unusual compulsions that include pedophilia and sexual sadism; they are thought to be rooted in neural abnormalities traceable to early brain development. They usually surface early in life, and those who act on them tend to begin in young adulthood.

“But if what we’re hearing is true, it almost has the quality of a breakdown,” said Dr. Hegarty. “It’s like the person who’s never smoked marijuana suddenly going on a binge and doing everything, all drugs, all at once.”

Colonel Williams certainly seemed in control, at least publicly. He was a married, highly organized, widely respected commander who for a while kept his two lives wholly separate. “This capacity for compartmentalization is in fact quite common in people like this,” said Theodore Millon, a former Harvard professor who is an expert on personality disorders. “It’s only the contrast to public appearances that makes it so startling.”

Dr. Stone, who keeps a database of serial killers that now includes 152 cases, said they tended to fall into two broad categories: those who maintain responsible public lives, and those who are loners, misfits. Colonel Williams is clearly in the former group, he said, along with John Wayne Gacy, the Illinois businessman who strangled more than 30 boys, and Dennis L. Rader, known as the B.T.K. killer (for bind, torture, kill), a civil servant in Kansas who pleaded guilty to killing 10 people.

David Russell Williams was born in Britain, the son of a metallurgist who emigrated to Canada to work in the country’s top nuclear research facility.

The only obvious sign of upset during his youth was the collapse of his parents’ marriage when he was 7.

There was no apparent lack of money in the family. For his final two years of high school, Colonel Williams boarded at Upper Canada College, an elite private school in Toronto.

After graduation, he studied economics and political science at the University of Toronto. He joined the military in 1987 and rose swiftly, piloting military jetliners that provided official transportation for the prime minister and playing a direct role in some of Canada’s largest military procurement programs.

As commander of Canada’s biggest air base, at Trenton, Ontario, he was not only one of the largest employers in a mostly rural area along the shores of Lake Ontario, he was also a community leader. He appeared in local newspapers presenting checks to charities, posing with hockey players and dropping pucks at season-openers.

Colonel Williams clearly moved between his two lives with great fluidity.

For example, after killing Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, a flight attendant under his command, he drove for about three hours to an aircraft procurement meeting.

Later, fulfilling his duty as base commander, Colonel Williams sent an official letter of condolence to her father.

The morning after his second murder, he piloted a troop flight to California.

His activities may have been aided by the largely separate life he lived with his wife, an executive with a large Canadian charity. During the week, he lived alone in a cottage near the base. He spent weekends with his wife in Ottawa.

He confessed, he said, to “make her life easier.”

On Thursday, a judge sentenced Colonel Williams to two life terms for two murders, plus 102 years for other crimes.
Ian Austen reported from Ottawa, and Benedict Carey from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 23, 2010


An article on Thursday about a sentencing hearing for Col. David Russell Williams, a former Canadian military commander who had confessed to scores of crimes, described incorrectly, in some copies, part of the nickname of another serial killer. That man, Dennis L. Rader, was known as “the B.T.K. killer” — for bind (not blind), torture and kill. (On Thursday, a judge sentenced Colonel Williams to two life terms for two murders, plus 102 years for other crimes.)

[Deleted]

I guess what rang in my head was Lin's comment about being able to tell something about people from looking at them. This was a monster in plain sight.....in charge of high level things

Was he a monster in plain sight? It is easy to be wise after the event, but how many people who knew him looked at each other before they knew about the offences and said "there goes a potential killer"?

[sadie1263]

The show was just jaw dropping....the same day of the murders there is news video of him being interviewed for things going on at the base....he's smiling and hosting people/other high ranking individuals......even one of him with Santa Claus........in the middle of this he was coordinating the relief efforts to Haiti after the earthquake.....

He's the picture of a well trained, disciplined soldier. It's really disturbing.