DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Canadian Air Force Commander, Gets Life for Fetish-Fueled Murders

I watched this on some show last night, I think it was 48 hours or something, the sentencing was from late last year. It was one of the most bizarre things I have ever watched, due to his stature and the fact that he had what appeared to be a very normal and successful life before all of this, it was scary to watch.

Wondering if posters like Lamp or Canada can add any insight. It was really chilling to watch.



Canada: Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?

Canadians struggle to understand one of the most unusual serial killers in their country's history.

Sandro ContentaOctober 26, 2010 06:14Updated October 31, 2010


BELLEVILLE, Canada — It’s a Jekyll and Hyde story that adds a new twist to the study of serial killers.

Russell Williams — a colonel in the Canadian air force — was found guilty last week of brutally beating, raping and murdering two women, sexually assaulting two others, and committing or attempting 82 fetish home burglaries.

But how did the commander of Canada’s biggest air force base turn into one of the most notorious killers in Canadian history?

“I have committed despicable crimes, your Honour,” Williams, 47, told the court as he had his say before sentencing. “I deeply regret what I have done and the harm I know I have caused.”

During his four-minute statement, he alternated from seeming to be overcome with emotion to sounding as though he were reading from a script.

He was then handed life sentences. He can apply for parole after 25 years, but few believe he’ll ever see the outside of a maximum-security prison. Williams was led handcuffed and shackled from the courtroom, taking the reasons for his depraved double life to a cell barely bigger than a grave.

.“This guy is quite unusual,” said psychologist Vernon Quinsey, who spent 16 years assessing criminals at the Oak Ridge maximum-security psychiatric hospital in Ontario.

Nothing suggests Williams was abused as a child. He studied at the country’s elite schools. He had a successful military career, a long, apparently loving marriage, and didn't embark on a life of crime until he began his fetish home invasions in September 2007, at the age of 44.

“It's very unusual for a guy who's got his act together like that ... to all of a sudden start committing crimes at a late age,” said Quinsey, now professor emeritus of psychology, biology and psychiatry at Queen's University.

“The guys you typically see start earlier,” he added. “Almost nobody starts a life of crime when they're in their 40s.”

Clifford Olson, the British Columbian who pleaded guilty in 1982 to 11 murders, was known to police by the age of 10. He was well on his way to a life of theft, armed robbery, fraud and sexual sadism by the time he served his first prison sentence at 17.

Ted Bundy, the American who killed more than 30 women during the 1970s, was a compulsive thief in high school. He was arrested twice as a juvenile, and some evidence suggests he committed his first murder in his teens.

Quinsey dismisses suggestions that Williams might be schizophrenic.

“The most common variety [of schizophrenic] that commits murder is completely disorganized,” he said. “They kill someone and wander off into the arms of the police.”

Williams was calculating. He planned his crimes. His regular jogs through his neighborhood in Ottawa, where he owned a home, and in the hamlet of Tweed, where he owned a cottage, were reconnaissance missions.

Williams is what experts call a paraphilic — a sexual deviant. Deviants like Williams get “turned on” by “hyper-dominance, sexual coercion and rape,” Quinsey said.


Williams poses in lingerie stolen during various fetish break-ins in this combination of evidence photos released by the court.
(Handout/Reuters)

Prosecutors at his trial showed some of the thousands of pictures Williams took of himself during those break-ins. Many showed him modeling women’s underwear he stole, his penis often protruding from tight panties. In others he lay on the bed in the rooms of his victims, masturbating with lingerie. He raided the underwear of girls as young as 9.

In one photo, he wore stained stolen panties, with what appeared like his military-issued slacks at his hips. The prosecutor suggested Williams might have worn the stolen pink panties to work at his air base that day.

Equally unusual was Williams’ escalation from panty fetish to sex assault to murder. Most serial killers assault and kill in tandem, right from the start.

During his two sexual assaults, he beat, bound and blindfolded the women — one of whom lived three doors from his cottage. He cut off their clothes, took pictures, but he didn’t try to rape them.

Then, in November 2008, he broke into the home of Marie-France Comeau, 38, a corporal at his airbase. He smashed her skull with a metal flashlight, tied her to a pole in the basement and raped her repeatedly before asphyxiating her.

In January 2009 he broke into the Belleville home of Jessica Lloyd, 27, in southern Ontario. He beat, bound and raped her repeatedly before killing her.

Williams left tire treads and footprints on Lloyd’s property the night he kidnapped her. In February, police set up a roadblock in front of Lloyd’s home, checking the treads of all vehicles that passed. Williams was stopped and police noticed a possible match.

Three days later, he was called to an Ottawa police station for questioning. He arrived driving the SUV he used to kidnap Lloyd, and wearing the boots whose prints he left on her property. It showed a level of arrogance, or stupidity, rarely seen.

He waived his right to a lawyer, and even volunteered a DNA swab and boot print when asked to do so. He eventually confessed after confronted with the matching boot print and tire treads during a masterful interrogation, part of which was played in court.

Prosecutors described his crimes in grim detail and left many in the courtroom’s public gallery gasping and crying. The tapes, and the worst of his picture collection, were not shown at the sentencing hearing.

“I stand before you,” Williams told the judge, “indescribably ashamed.”


http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/canada/101025/serial-killer-russell-williams

This sounds like a person who has had a total break from what we all consider 'reality.'

The details of this case leave me wondering about the line between sanity and madness... and how easily it may be crossed by any of us, under the 'right conditions.'

The humanitarian half of me wants to understand why his mind snapped him into this place; if we can understand what happened to him, we might take steps to help others from diving this deeply into depravity- and by doing so, protect innocent people from becoming victims of the same sort of thing.

The realist in me says that we can't EVER know the microscopic intricacies of the mind enough to figure out the roots of depravity this profound, and we can never be equipped to prevent the horrors that people like this beset upon the world of 'decent folk.'

I choose to see it this way: Consider 'society' to be a complex organism, much like the human body. Systems work in concert for the good of the whole. Each system is made up of similarly-encoded people, who perform specific tasks... much like the individual cells in a Human body. (Some develop into cells that are devoted to the brain, some are skin cells, some are found in the kidney, etc.)

Then... there are those cells which, no matter where they are found or what their original function might be, metastasize into a cancerous entity. They break all ties with their 'assigned function,' and behave in idiopathic ways- for no good reason. To date (as I understand it) , there is no definitive scientific understanding as to why human cells become cancerous... it's still being researched. We know that outside influences can increase the chances that cancer will manifest itself, but we don't yet know WHY or HOW it happens. It's one of the remaining Big Mysteries of Life.

Take another step with me here... is it possible that people such as Russell Williams, Theodore Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, et al are simply 'societal cancer cells' within the Body Human? Could they simply be 'metastasized Human Beings,' with no readily accessible explanation as to why they deviated from The Norm?

It would go a long way to explaining people like Adolph Hitler, Genghis Khan, Osama Bin Laden, etc walk this planet with the rest of us. After all- we may not know what CAUSES a cancer... but we do know how quickly a cancer can corrupt those cells near it, and how quickly it can spread.

Jules- I gots no answers for this one. All I have is more questions. All I do know is that I see folk like this as cancer cells in The Body Human.... and based upon what we know at the time, the only tenable course of action we have available to us is to excise the tumor from the body.

I've always been philosophically opposed to The Death Penalty... but I gotta admit to all my DT Poundmates tonight... I'm not so sure I've always been right.

Perhaps, some people are simply cancerous. It may or may not be their fault for turning out that way, but the harm they have done to society simply cannot be denied. Do we condemn them to death via the legal process? Do we "give them The Shot," line them up in front of a firing squad, hang them from a rope, put them on the guillotine?

I wish I had the answer. The only thing I do know at this point is my gut reaction to this stroy... and my gut tells me that this world would be one step closer to The Human Ideal if this man weren't still a part of it. Lock him away for life, end his existence.... whatever, just get him the hell away from the rest of us. No good can come from our continued exposure to man such as this.

This post probably says as much about me as it does about him. I can live with it... for now- until we have better answers for heinous stuff like this.

Thanks, kiddo- for giving another point to ponder, while I wrestle with my insomnia.....

I got your answer right here,...the death penalty.

But,...it obviously did nothing to deter this idiot, who did everything possible to get himself caught.

Weird.

There is no answer Clem.


Some people do stupid stuff, some do sick stuff. Some people are good and some are evil.


Just the way some DNA has developed over the centuries. These people know right from wrong, so they aren't insane, but they also have a urge they can't control, so in a way it isn't their fault, it is just the way it is.

All you can do is remove them from society and scratch your head.

I took a lot of psych courses in college, but by no means claim any expertise in the field. Psychology, in my amateur opinion, is philosophy-posing-as-science. It describes behaviors and assigns labels, but explains nothing. I recall the writings of a schizophrenic young man about his condition:

"It's Oedipal complexes, and passive-aggression; it's obsessive-compulsive, reaction-formation, dissociative, delusional, hallucinatory ... BULLS***! BULLS***! ... IT'S THE <BLEEPING> BLUE BEAR AND IT'S GOT ME!"

I paraphrased, because I can't get my hands on the quote, but that is the gist of it. Of all the reading and classes, that stayed with me, and I remember thinking during a class on multiple personality ... "it's easier to believe in possession than this noodling mish-mash of theories.".

Psychology has theories and labels, but no answers; true medical science cannot solve the mysteries of the brain (the soul?) and how it affects behavior. Maybe its the devil?