BELLEVILLE—The charges against the colonel took 36 minutes to be read out to a silent courtroom.
David Russell Williams stood facing the clerk listing his crimes, his head bowed as if the weight of his deeds were crushing him.
To the first count of murdering Marie-France Comeau, a flight attendant who worked at his air force base, he pleaded in a clear voice: “Guilty, your honour.” To the second count of killing Jessica Elizabeth Lloyd, his guilty plea was barely audible.
Crown attorneys then took turns revealing the full extent of Williams’ depravity, evidence that left family members of victims covering their eyes and gasping — “He’s sick,” one said. In an overflow courtroom, some members of the public got up and left. “Oh, my god,” said one woman. “Disgusting,” said one man.
By day, Russell Williams was the commander of Canada’s biggest air force base, CFB Trenton. By night, he broke into homes, taking pictures of himself modeling the bras and panties of little girls.
He escalated quickly, from fetish break-ins, to sex assaults with no penetration to rape and murder. He logged his crimes, kept track of police reports of his crimes and left notes and messages for his victims. “Merci,” he thanked a 12-year-old in a typed message on her computer.
“Merci beaucoup,” he captioned a souvenir photo he took of his penis strapped to a sex toy he stole from a 24-year-old Ottawa victim in June 2008.
We learned that Williams made a video of his brutal beating and asphyxiation of Comeau after breaking into her home Nov. 24, 2009. He also made sex tapes of Lloyd after kidnapping her the night of Jan. 28, taking her to his cottage in Tweed, raping and torturing her for at least a day before dumping her corpse in a field.
Lloyd’s mother, Roxanne, sat in the front row, cradling a framed portrait of her daughter.
We learned that Williams, 47, had paedophile tendencies, stealing underwear of girls as young as 9 years old during the 82 fetish home invasions and attempted break-ins between Sept. 2007 and November 2009. He broke into 48 different homes in the Belleville-Tweed area and Ottawa. One, he hit nine separate times. And he was good at it.
Sixty-one of the 82 break-and-enters went either undetected or were not reported. He targeted homes where attractive women lived, but as is disturbingly evident in photos of him naked and masturbating in young girls’ rooms, he had other tastes.
Williams took “thousands” of pictures of his crimes, Crown attorney Robert Morrison said, all of which he kept on his computer. The court saw numerous pictures of Williams dressed in the panties and bras he stole, often lying on the beds of his victims, masturbating.
There were photos of him wearing the stained pink underwear of a girl under what looked like his air force issued pants. Morrison suggested Williams might have worn the stained pink panties to work at the base he commanded.
There were photos of him lying in beds surrounded by the stuffed toys and panties of little girls, or of him wearing negligees and camisoles. In all the photos, his expression was stern, as if on parade for inspection.
On New Year’s Day 2008, he broke into a home in the Ottawa neighbourhood where he lived and sprayed semen on a 15-year-old girl’s dresser. He then took a picture of himself with the girl’s make-up brush touching his penis.
“There is nothing to suggest that make-up brush was stolen,” Morrison added to the audible gasps of the family members.
Throughout most of the day, Williams sat with his head bowed low, as though he wanted to crawl under a bench. But he looked at the video screens when pictures of himself in women’s lingerie were posted.
“The offences emphasize his obsessive behaviour,” Morrison said.
There was a pattern to the photos he would take during a break-in: He would first photograph the bedroom of his victim, then the underwear in her dresser. He would then arrange the lingerie neatly on a bed or on the floor, before modeling them and ejaculating.
Another ritual was to turn his back to the camera and peer back over a shoulder. There were also many close-ups of his penis, protruding from women’s underwear.
He collected hundreds of panties and bras from his break-ins, so many that he twice took some of his “trophies” to a field in Ottawa and burned them. He kept the photographs, though, and hid them on hard drives he stored in the ceiling above the basement of his Ottawa home. He used a system of deep electronic folders to make them more difficult to find.
There were four crown attorneys in court, and it soon became clear why so many. The reading of the facts took such time that voices croaked before handing over the task to another.
The court heard of Williams’ chilling escalation from fetish burglaries, to sex assault and finally murder from September 2007 to January 2010. On July 10, 2009, he was at a neighbour’s house in Tweed, which he would eventually break into nine times. This was his sixth visit.
At 1:30 a.m., he watched as the young woman stripped and stepped in the shower. Williams stripped naked, broke into her home, walked to her bedroom and stole her panties. “He admitted that at this point he wanted to take more risks,” Morrison said.
In another escalation, he hoped to watch a teenager undress, and while waiting outside her window, stripped naked in the bushes and masturbated.
Near the end of the first, long day of facts, crown attorney Burgess turned the attention to the first of two sex assaults, in September 2009, near Williams’ Tweed cottage. The victim, known as Jane Doe, is already suing Williams and over the incident. He broke in while she and her newborn baby slept.
He beat her, bound and blindfolded her with pillow cases and fondled her while taking pictures of her naked. Two hours later, Williams left.
The day in court began with a warning.
“I caution the court and the public that these facts will be extremely disturbing,” Burgess told the court at the outset. Referring to the 40 family members of victims in attendance, he added: “We recognize that representation of the evidence will further cause them emotional pain.”
Outside the courtroom, Andy Lloyd, Jessica’s brother, said the facts you heard were “horrible man. It’s terrible, terrible stuff.”
He said his mother brought a framed portrait of Jessica to court to “bring my sister’s face back into it, so that it’s not all about him, and what he’s done and to try to remember that there are families who are very angry at what he’s done.”
Williams, he said, looked “like a broken man,” but noted that he did occasionally look up to see his trophy pictures on big screen televisions set up in court.
As Williams sat in court, the military moved to remove him from the forces, beginning a month-long process that will strip him of his rank and medals. However, Williams will still have a right to his military pension.
Williams became a suspect when he was stopped at a police roadblock Feb. 4 on Highway 37, leading from Belleville to Tweed, where Williams owns a cottage on Cosy Cove Lane. The tire treads on his vehicle matched those found at Lloyd’s home, along Highway 37, the day after she disappeared.
Questioned at an Ottawa police station Feb. 7, Williams confessed to his crimes, Morrison told the court.
His first known break in was September 2007, when Williams invaded the home of his next door neighbour on Cosy Cove Lane. He was friends with the family. They would have dinner together and go fishing. He broke into their home three times.
One of the photos shows Williams lying naked on the bed, masturbating with a red panty believed to have belonged to his neighbour’s daughter. Fourteen of the photos he took that night show him “with his penis protruding from (stolen) underwear,” Morrison said.
As the photos flashed on the screen, a family member of the Cosy Cove victim sobbed at her seat in the courtroom. She left the courtroom during a break and didn’t return.
On Nov. 1, 2007, he broke into the home of another neighbour on Cosy Cove Lane. He spent at least two hours taking photographs in a bedroom.
“Here, Mr. Williams is kneeling on a bed wearing a camisole, with his penis in his hand,” Morrison told the court, describing the picture on the screen. “There are many similar photos.”
Morrison often noted Williams’ “obsession with organizing the items he stole,” first taking pictures of the whole stash he stole, and then taking pictures of each item individually.
“This is a process he carried out over and over again,” Morrison added.
Williams did everything to get into houses: he picked locks, he pushed through window screens and, often, he walked in through windows and doors left open. In many cases, the victims didn’t know they had been burglarized, and didn’t call police.
He left few clues, aside from a muddy footprint here and there. Forensic experts were unable to get DNA evidence from semen he left in one of the homes.
He was obsessed with gathering personal information of his young victims, often taking pictures of documents that identified them, or of the photos of family and friends they had in their rooms.
When he couldn’t identify girls he targeted, he would refer to them, in his computer, as “the mysterious little girls.”
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