WARNING EXPLICIT CONTENT
Men should weep.
They bruise women’s bodies, they humiliate us in the House of Commons, they expend great effort in keeping us pregnant, booting us away from the bigger salaries, they are tireless in their attempts at control and resent our efforts to advance. Frequently, they kill women. Russell Williams is a monster but there will be other monsters in the years to come.
We know this to be true. I am a feminist but all women know what I mean because they live it every day.
These thoughts filled my mind this week as I tried to distract attention from a man I hate as much as I have ever hated anyone — that Russell Williams creature — and put two beautiful, courageous women at the forefront of this case. Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd fought for their lives with a bravery that left us all breathless as it was described in court.
The narrative was so entirely about male desire and male violence that the suffering of the female victims was overshadowed.
And then it all changed. I tell you, men should cheer.
And I’ll be cheering for them. The world doesn’t work unless men and women are united, working together for a common good. It happened at this trial. The trial was not about men and women, but about humanity.
Here’s how it unfolded. I hesitate to offend readers. Stop reading if you’re squeamish about . . . no, this will revolt even the emotionally armoured and the sexually blasé.
Everyone in court was bored to the core by the sight of Williams’ penis, endless photos of the ubiquitous organ hovering over the underwear drawers of little girls, reflected in mirrors, intruding into every scene like a gatecrasher at a party. These were in the horrible photo collection displayed by the Crown Attorney throughout the day as he detailed the prisoner’s increasingly violent crimes. He did this to ensure Williams is never paroled.
Please don’t complain about the photos you saw in the paper or on TV. They were tame, trust me, compared to what the Crown showed the court. I now know that man’s private bits the way I know my own driveway. I’d had enough.
And then yesterday something miraculous happened. We were watching the videotaped interrogation of Williams by a wonderful man named Jim Smyth, a detective sergeant with the OPP’s behavioural sciences unit. His poise, electrical sense of detail, artful display of casual Canadian guy friendliness and brilliant use of the deceptively accepting word, “Okay” finally extracted, over 10-1/2 hours, a confession from the man we hated.
It was strange watching the two men together, one decent and one evil. When Williams would stand up, his face away from the ceiling camera, you’d see the top of the two men’s heads. Both were balding, which I found touching in Smyth’s case and pathetic in Williams.’
Smyth was pretending to be Williams’ pal. Yet you knew that Comeau and Lloyd had a good man fighting for them, a man with morals and a more agile brain.
As sickened as we were by Williams’ bored monotone on the subject of penetration, suffocation and strangulation, there was a comfort knowing that he walked into that small interrogation room puffed up and grinning like a big ole colonel and left like someone who’d been exiled from the human race. Smyth did great classic police work.
It is true that the Belleville and Ottawa police should have alerted women earlier that there was something evil on the loose, something Jessica Lloyd herself referred to as the “Tweed creeper.” Women were left helpless by their lack of knowledge. But the work of the police once they found a tire track and footprints in the snow outside Lloyd’s home was stellar.
It was fast. They called in the experts. I don’t know if Smyth was exaggerating but he told Williams, “This investigation will end up costing no less than $10 million. Any requests are approved. [The attitude is] `Don’t even bother asking.’ ” There’s an army of cops outside this room, he told Williams. They’re smart and they’re ready.
At the beginning, Williams emphasized his military status and kept saying “my wife” to emphasize his normality. “My wife and I went out to dinner at a restaurant.” He’s not a freak, he has Mary Elizabeth Harriman. She is his wife, his mask.
Smyth didn’t react.
I didn’t know there was a guy whose understanding of tire-track identification and wheel-base width is continent-wide. Didn’t know that footprint identification was as good as fingerprints but there’s another guy who does that.
There was a parade of men — and yes, there should be more women in this gang — who were doing everything in their power to find the man who raped, tortured and killed women in this peaceful province.
I kept remembering the fatigue in the Crown Attorney’s voice as he’d dryly say, “Once again we see Mr. Williams’ penis protruding into the photograph. And here we see his penis again, in a pink thong selected from the previous photograph…” There was a team of Crown Attorneys because their voices kept giving out.
The judge was patient but kept the case moving briskly. The armed police in the court were endlessly polite. Even the poor cop saddled with letting Williams in and out of his handcuffs all day did his duty, without expression.
I can’t explain why the victim impact statements were made almost entirely by women, and why female relatives of the victims packed the court. Perhaps the men had to steer away from the naked pain of looking at Williams and saying, as one female family member did, “He doesn’t even have the courage to look me in the eye.”
Williams then did, sort of.
Jessica Lloyd’s brother Andy made a powerful victim impact statement in court, describing his love for his dear sister and saying how he hated media intrusion but someone had to tell the world how much Jessica was loved.
“I would die for her,” Lloyd’s mother told the court.
What astounded me was the level of parallel feeling in the room. Everyone, male and female, honoured the violated women. There was a wonderful unanimity in the place that gave me hope that men and women will one day team up and see the best in each other.
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