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For those of you who do not live in Canada, this is our most recent serial killer. He is a high ranking officer in our military.
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For those of you who do not live in Canada, this is our most recent serial killer. He is a high ranking officer in our military.
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Re: Dear Lord!
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-size: 17pt">Russell Williams pleads guilty; colonel stripped of his military rank</span></span>
<span style="font-style: italic">A photo of underwear and lingerie collected by Russell Williams, presented as evidence in his trial in Belleville, Ont. on Oct. 18, 2010</span>
<span style="color: #FF0000">READER WARNING: The following story contains graphic and disturbing material</span>
LIVE COVERAGE: Follow the Col. Williams trial online with updates from National Post reporter Adrian Humphreys. Live coverage will continue on Tuesday.
BELLEVILLE, Ont. — Early on July 11, 2009 — or as Colonel Russell Williams, the disgraced air force commander put it in his habitual military lingo, “0140” hours — he stood in the backyard of a house in Tweed he had broken into six times before and watched a woman inside climb into the shower. He then stripped himself naked and, leaving his clothes outside, broke into her house.
He walked down the hallway to the bathroom and considered sneaking in to grab the underwear she had just removed but dismissed that as being “entirely obvious” and instead continued on to her bedroom, where he found her underwear drawer and made off with a single black thong. It was, he later admitted to police, an escalation of his dozens and dozens of previous fetish burglaries as he started pushing himself to “take more risks.”
Indeed, court heard yesterday in a detailed recitation of a shocking litany of precision perversion, his dangerous behaviour rapidly escalated to sexual assaults and murders.
The gravity of Williams’ obsessive activities was drummed into an emotionally drained courtroom in such a dizzying stream of increasingly bizarre and preposterous photographs of fetish panty raids and explicit self portraits of him squeezed into children’s underwear and befouling women’s lingerie that for spectators they quickly blurred one into another.
But it became clear that for Williams, 47, who until his arrest in February was an elite military pilot and the decorated commander of the largest airbase in Canada, each home invasion was a distinctive, memorable event, carefully catalogued and meticulously organized and cross-referenced by time, date and location in secret computer files, showing the splendid organization that had made him such an asset to military command.
The hearing, held under high security in Belleville, a city between Ottawa and Toronto, started with Williams standing before Justice Robert Scott and dozens of his victims’ family and friends to plead guilty to all charges: two first-degree murders; two sexual assaults; two forcible confinements and 86 break, enter and thefts in his feverish hunt for “trophies,” typically intimate apparel of women and girls and photographs of their owners.
From the fall of 2007 until his arrest this February, he attacked 48 different homes — 23 in Tweed and 25 in Ottawa — many of them more than once. He crept through open windows, pried open unlocked patio doors, pushed in basement windows and even picked front door locks, one time spending 30 minutes on a lock.
His stealth and fixation on stealing underwear rather than valuables meant that only 17 of those entries had been reported to police before his arrest.
After all, one victim later told police, “there was a sense of security in the community at that time.”
After his arrest, Williams confessed his crimes, telling police he targeted the homes of attractive women from their late teens to early 30s, court heard. A police investigation, however, revealed that 13 of the bedrooms he defiled belonged to underaged girls as young as 11.
The young age of many was hardly in doubt. Spectators gasped aloud when picture after picture was shown on two large television screens of Williams masturbating in tiny panties, each in the bright colours of childhood and often decorated with cartoon characters, inside bedrooms decorated in Little Mermaid themes and filled with dolls.
He compulsively photographed himself inside the homes, where he sometimes languished for hours. He roamed around naked, rummaging through drawers, photographing himself naked, modelling intimate apparel, and masturbating on the beds of women and girls, often with their underwear or toys as props.
The sexual assaults were also photographed by Williams and, prosecutors said, the sexual assaults and murders of Marie-France Comeau, 38, and Jessica Lloyd, 27, were videotaped.
The imagery was stored on two computer hard drives that Williams hid above the ceiling of the basement of the Ottawa home he shared with his wife. It all made comparisons to the notorious case of schoolgirl killer Paul Bernardo inescapable.
Even veteran reporters, some who covered Bernardo and Homolka cases, say they have not seen anything like this.
The facts of the Williams case, said Crown Attorney Lee Burgess, are “extremely disturbing.”
“Both murders were planned by him and were deliberate. Both murders were committed in the course of committing a sexual assault on the victims and both murders were committed while he forcibly confined his victims,” he said.
“While it is necessary for us to provide a full account we are mindful of the profound emotional turmoil that the victims, family and friends of his victims have already endured.”
Court heard and saw his disturbing, obsessive behaviour quickly escalate. At the start, court was shown his masturbating pictorials inside women’s bedrooms.
In one of the photographs, his own clothes were visible overtop small panties, and, prosecutors noted, the dark blue pants and light blue shirt he wore match the regulation air force uniform.
By the afternoon, even the shell-shocked visitors in the packed courthouse gasped aloud at his ever more dangerous excursions.
He took pictures of the personal identification of the owners of the garments he stole, sometimes passports, sometimes letters, school diplomas and certificates.
He sometimes stole framed photographs of the victims and later photographed himself back at his home or in a wooded outdoor area wearing the stolen panties and holding the stolen photos.
And then he left a message on the computer in the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl.
The next day she found a document on her screen that read: “Merci.”
Throughout his excursions, he remained keenly organized. He took photographs of the items stolen from one location — which sometimes was more than 100 — carefully arranged and grouped together and then of each item individually.
“It is a process he did over and over and over again,” said Assistant Crown Attorney Robert Morrison.
“It shows his obsession with the organization of the items he stole.”
Also part of his collection were screenshot of the Ottawa police website whenever one of his thefts was noted in its public releases or articles in newspapers about one of his break-ins. Each was catalogued and stored along with the photographs he took during that specific attack.
When his collection of trophies became too unwieldy, he took much of it to a field on the outskirts of Ottawa and burned it, only to start anew.
At the start of the proceeding, Williams showed an interest in the pictures, looking up slowly at the screen as prosecutors described the circumstances of the photograph. He looked for a few seconds and then returned to his standard pose of his head bowed as he sat in the prisoner’s box.
By afternoon, he no longer looked up, sitting almost immobile in a well-tailored dark suit and light collared shirt.
As the day drew to a close, the details of his first graphic sexual assault began. The woman had given birth eight weeks before and her baby was asleep when Williams broke into her home.
She awoke to find a man holding her head down. She thought she was dreaming, prosecutors said, but three hard blows to her head made her realize the reality.
She told him she was fat from her pregnancy and not attractive. Williams said she was perfect.
He blindfolded her with a pillowcase and bound her hands with another. He photographed her in various degrading positions.
He then said to count to 300. At 70 she stopped and he ordered to keep going. At 200 she called out and hearing nothing she struggled free and called 911.
Williams lived in Ottawa with his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, and in 2004, they bought a cottage residence in Tweed, Ont. During his activities, he lived at the cottage and commuted to his base at CFB Trenton, where he commanded 3,000 employees.
He generally only went home to his Ottawa house on weekends.
The hearing is expected to continue all week.
National Post -
Re: Dear Lord!
WOW
- that is true sickness!
How did they catch him?Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
you can see the more pictures here
military leader
his wife never knew. the guy had a steamer trunk of girls/women undergarments and she didn't notice
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Re: Dear Lord!
oh my dear lord...thats some serious freakishness. What possesses a person?
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Re: Dear Lord!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: SueSumba</div><div class="ubbcode-body">you can see the more pictures here
military leader
his wife never knew. the guy had a steamer trunk of girls/women undergarments and she didn't notice </div></div>
I guess I will see this story on an episode of "<span style="font-weight: bold">Who the Bleep Did I Marry</span>?"
<span style="font-style: italic">
That's a real TV show pan the Investigation channel.</span>
Crazy!
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Re: Dear Lord!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: WeNdY</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: SueSumba</div><div class="ubbcode-body">you can see the more pictures here
military leader
his wife never knew. the guy had a steamer trunk of girls/women undergarments and she didn't notice </div></div>
I guess I will see this story on an episode of "<span style="font-weight: bold">Who the Bleep Did I Marry</span>?"
<span style="font-style: italic">
That's a real TV show pan the Investigation channel.</span>
Crazy! </div></div>
They have an investigation channel to??Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
Yeah .. and I have to admit ..I am addicted
I think Forensic and dem tings deh a mi real calling.
The whole channel is dedicated to real life criminal cases of all walks of life.Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
i wonder do i get that channel? i've pretty much seen every episode of Snapped ten times over.Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Jazz</div><div class="ubbcode-body">WOW - that is true sickness!
How did they catch him? </div></div>
Tire tracks at the scene of one of the murders prompted police to set up a roadside stop to inspect the tire tracks of passing cars (this was in a small rural town). Colonel Williams car pulled up and <span style="font-weight: bold">BUSTED!</span>Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: loops</div><div class="ubbcode-body">i wonder do i get that channel? i've pretty much seen every episode of Snapped ten times over. </div></div>
I have FIOS and it is channel 123 here.
My TV stays lock on that channel especially om Weekends.
I can bet Producers are unto this story this minute for re-enactment
"Who the bleep did I Marry" is a new series an it features some very scary men
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Re: Dear Lord!
!
this is Canada, what else unno did expect ??Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Kotch_Foot_Milo</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Jazz</div><div class="ubbcode-body">WOW - that is true sickness!
How did they catch him? </div></div>
Tire tracks at the scene of one of the murders prompted police to set up a roadside stop to inspect the tire tracks of passing cars (this was in a small rural town). Colonel Williams car pulled up and <span style="font-weight: bold">BUSTED!</span> </div></div>
Cop who noticed the track didn't pull over Russell right away. That's because Russell was the highest ranking guy in town. Cop went and told his superiors about the similarity of the track, and it was afterward that they arrested Russell.
I know someone from that town (Tweed) and she said it was surreal. Everybody knew him, no one suspected a thing.Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: pleXxed</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> !
this is Canada, what else unno did expect ?? </div></div>
serial killers arent a canadian monopoly, even ones who pose in their victims' clothes.
it is ironic though that this guy went to school with Paul Bernardo, another sadistic serial killer who's locked away.Comment
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Re: Dear Lord!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: MGee</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: pleXxed</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> !
this is Canada, what else unno did expect ?? </div></div>
serial killers arent a canadian monopoly, even ones who pose in their victims' clothes.
it is ironic though that this guy went to school with Paul Bernardo, another sadistic serial killer who's locked away. </div></div> they were at U of T together....not clear if they even knew each other .....dem mek it sound like they were high school buddiesWhen its hot in the jungle of peace I go swimming in the ocean of love.....Comment
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