General Chat

This has been in your own news reports, it's so odd.

(Please believe me when I say that my interest has nothing to do with any opinions about anyone's armed forces or what they get up to. There are sociopaths *everywhere*. This situation would be about as odd if the individual were a cabinet minister or bishop or a leading cardiac surgeon. But just because of the nature of military careers and military command and military communities, it does seem extra bizarre.)


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/tire-tracks-led-police-to-williams/article1461548/

[CFB Trenton = Canadian Forces Base Trenton, about 2 hours east of Toronto.
I've changed the order of the article to make it easier to follow.]


Since September, detectives in three different communities near CFB Trenton have been searching for clues in what, on its face, appeared to be three separate incidents. In September, over a span of two weeks on a quiet lakeside road in the village of Tweed, two women living just a short walk from each other were tied up in the middle of the night and photographed by an unknown assailant.

Two months later, 78 kilometres west, in the town of Brighton, the boyfriend of CFB Trenton's Corporal Marie-France Comeau discovered his girlfriend dead in her home, the victim of what was quickly deemed a homicide.

Little more than a week ago, a Belleville woman, 27-year-old Jessica Lloyd, was reported missing when she failed to show up for her shift with Tri-Board Student Transportation in the town of Napanee.

Police found her body Monday morning.


Last Thursday, on a stretch of rural highway, they set up the equivalent of a RIDE-program spot check, only this time they were looking not for drinking drivers, but certain vehicles.

Luck was on their side, because Col. Williams happened to be caught in the roadside check.

It was on Sunday afternoon that Col. Williams, a decorated pilot who has delivered prime ministers and soldiers to remote locales around the world, agreed to sit down with a behavioural science expert from the Ontario Provincial Police.

What has happened since that interview has shaken the Canadian Forces, and the citizens of three small towns in Eastern Ontario: Police charged Col. Williams, the commander of Canada's largest Air Force base, with the murder of two women, and assaults on two others.

And as quickly as the charges were laid against Col. Williams – he became the prime suspect in a string of unexplained attacks on women only five days ago – the detectives' net is widening even faster. Investigators are examining crime-scene evidence from several Eastern Ontario cities and additional charges are anticipated, sources familiar with the investigation said late last night. One officer close to the case said: “This may be all, but we suspect – a guy just doesn't start doing murders out of the blue.”

Wow, not seen it in our paper.

You wonder, if as they say he has possibly been responsible for many more cases, how he has escaped capture for so long. Very clever? Or very lucky? I suspect they will be mapping out his postings and seeing if there are any unsolved cases in those areas. You'd almost automatically trust somebody that high up in the armed forces I guess.

it's such a very weird story!

It also stretches to Dubai doesn't it? He was posted to a very secretive base somewhere in that region for 6 months.


I wonder if his wife suspected anything?



sylvia

That's what they're doing, Ann -- tracing his trajectory.

Yes you would almost automatically trust -- you just assume vetting all along the way. And what I meant by military communities: so tight-knit, you'd think it would be very hard to be weird and not get noticed.

Dubai, Sylvia?? Good grief. Quite the international embarrassment it could turn out to be, not meaning to trivialize the actual horror it could involve for people outside Canada.

Is he married, I couldn't see whether it said in the article? His poor family, he must be a real Jekyll and Hyde character. I wonder if he has ever been based in UK?

I'm not seeing anything about family either ...


http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/762663--could-trenton-murders-be-serial-killings

I'm editing this a bit for mature content.



We asked Mark Safarik, one of the FBI’s serial-killer hunters with the famed Behavioral Analysis Unit, about the likelihood that crimes like that were the work of a first-time offender.

After 22 years in the bureau, Safarik now operates a Virginia-based consultancy with Robert K. Ressler, the FBI investigator credited with popularizing the term “serial killer.”

After considering some of the published details, Safarik observes, “People don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to abduct someone and murder them.’ I’m sure there’s a history.

“For me, the surprise is the number of assaults in a relatively short period of time,” Safarik says. “He’s obviously intelligent. He’s careful. So what’s happening with him? Is there some sort of mental decompensation? Did something trigger this?”

“Usually there’s a progression,” Safarik says. “First, prowling, peeping, ... . At some point, offenders decide that’s not enough. ...

The offender in the latest crimes sounds like someone at the mature end of that progression, Safarik believes.

... “I’d be checking back into his late teens. I’d probably start at age 18,” Safarik says. That would leave police poring over cold case files, many of them seemingly minor crimes, going back to early ’70s.

“I’d be running the whole gamut, going deep into this guy’s history,” says Safarik. “I know that’s what they are doing.”

Interesting, and frightening too to think that somebody so apparently normal has got away with it for so long. You never know who your neighbours are do you? Bet that is what a lot of people are thinking now.

He's married,

his wife is the Associate or Assistant Director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada in Ottawa


doesn't seem to have any children ................. the media says there are none listed on his Forces biography.


Yes ..... there's a very secretive base somewhere in the Dubai region, serves/services the forces in Khandahar for example, and i read that he had been posted as Commanding Officer there for 6 months, but can't now find the reference as to which year.



sylvia

frightening also is that apparently a 65 year old neighbour of his in Tweed has been seriously investigated on several occasions by the police as a major suspect in the two September incidents.

Now, he might have a history, that isn't said in the media reports ................... but the police obviously went after him.




Williams has the house in Tweed, and a new very expensive house in Ottawa




sylvia

Ah, so they likely spend much of their time apart, her in Ottawa and him in Trenton (it's about 2.5 hours between them).

If the behaviour is long-term one would wonder she was not aware of strangeness, but if she has long had her own career and not been with him everywhere he was, and he has been careful, it may be a devastating revelation for her.

Can't start to imagine how a spouse deals with this situation.

OK I am off to bed now, hoping I don't find this chap cropping up in my dreams!!!

Interesting!

Very often child abusers are perfectly ordinary seeming people who gain the trust of sometimes single mothers and then abuse the children. Or a friendly neighbour who you get to know and one day he/she even/ offers to babysit or take your child out for a treat and that's when the abuse starts or happens the once, depending on what happens afterwards.

Look at the chap who murdered his girlfriend's daughter last year, after the couple had been together for a while and as a treat, he took the little girl aged 9, out in his lorry. The woman and child trusted him and the girl was excited to go, then sadly things turned horribly wrong, and she was found dead in his cab. The man went off before the child was discovered and hanged himself in a nearby wood. The little girl's family were devastated, they never suspected for a minute that this man couldn't be trusted to care for the girl and behave properly towards her.

So tragic that people can cover their black side so well that even people close to them don't suspect a thing.

Lizx

This is shocking. No doubt due to too much tv & crime reading, I thought that such killers couldn't handle authority and so wouldn't normally reach such a high position.

It begs the question - are there many more high-functioning murderous sociopaths unlikely to be caught in the way their more chaotic cohorts are?

I seem to remember reading that female serial killers are more widespread than previously thought, and have escaped capture because of the assumption that most such killers are awkward loner males?

I searched for this story on all the Sky tv news channels I receive - not a peep.

At first I thought this thread might be about all the washed up feet you guys were finding - that was also very odd.

Hi Jen, I think I read a theory about the feet that was plausible but blowed if I can remember what it was. Lot of use I am, sorry.

Hi Ann x

It's ok, it was just one of those "popped into my head" things; I could google.

Nice to see your name.

x Jen