David Russell Williams was born in Bromsgrove, England, on March 7, 1963, and emigrated to Canada as a child. He joined the Canadian Forces in 1987, flew VIP transport aircraft carrying the prime minister, the governor general and the Queen, served in Dubai, and in July 2009 was given command of CFB Trenton in Ontario, the largest air force base in the country and the point through which Canada's war dead were repatriated.
From 2007 he was breaking into houses near his homes in Ottawa and Tweed, sometimes dozens of times in the same neighbourhood, stealing women's and girls' underwear and photographing himself wearing it. There were eighty-two such burglaries. In September 2009 he escalated to two violent sexual assaults on women in their own homes at Tweed. In November 2009 he murdered Corporal Marie-France Comeau, thirty-seven, a military flight attendant under his own command, at her house in Brighton. In January 2010 he murdered Jessica Lloyd, twenty-seven, of Belleville.
He was caught by tyre tracks. Police canvassing a road near Jessica Lloyd's house on February 4, 2010, ran a routine roadside check and noticed that the tread on Williams's Pathfinder matched impressions at the scene. He was interviewed at Ottawa police headquarters on February 7 by Detective Sergeant Jim Smyth, and the ten-hour recording of that interview, in which Williams moves from confident denial to a full confession and then draws a map to Jessica Lloyd's body, was played at his sentencing and is used in police interview training worldwide.
He pleaded guilty in October 2010 to eighty-eight charges and was given two concurrent life sentences with no parole for twenty-five years. He was stripped of his commission and his medals, and his uniform was burned. The Canadian Forces conducted a review of how a man conducting eighty-two burglaries had passed every security screening for a command appointment.