Russell Williams commanded 8 Wing at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the country's largest air base, from July 2009 until his arrest in February 2010. In those months, and in the two years before them, he carried out dozens of break-ins at homes in Ottawa and in the towns of eastern Ontario, sexually assaulted two women in Tweed, and killed two more: Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, a flight attendant serving at his own base, and Jessica Lloyd, a 27-year-old from the Belleville area. In October 2010 he pleaded guilty to every one of the 88 charges against him. The judge who sentenced him called him "Canada's bright shining lie," and the military he had served for 23 years took the extraordinary step of revoking his commission.
David Russell Williams was born on March 7, 1963, in the Midlands region of England, CBC News reported in a biography published after his conviction. His family moved to Canada when he was a boy, settling first in Chalk River, Ontario, and later in a home near the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto. In 1978 and 1979 he attended Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute under the name Russ Sovka. He finished high school with two years at Upper Canada College in Toronto, where in 1982 he was elected a prefect in his boarding house. At some point he returned to the surname Williams.
He studied economics and political science at the University of Toronto and took flying lessons at Buttonville airport. Those who knew him later described him as a keen photographer, fisherman, musician and runner.
Williams joined the Canadian Forces in 1987, after earning his degree, and received his pilot's wings in 1990. He spent two years as a flight instructor at 3 Canadian Forces Flying Training School in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, then flew the CC-144 Challenger jet, first with 434 Combat Support Squadron at Shearwater, Nova Scotia, and then with 412 Transport Squadron in Ottawa, transporting VIPs. In that role he flew prime ministers, and during a 2005 visit he was a pilot for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Associated Press reported.
He was promoted to major in 1999 and worked as a career manager for multi-engine pilots. In 2003 and 2004 he earned a master's degree in defence studies at the Royal Military College in Kingston. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel in June 2004, he commanded 437 Transport Squadron at Trenton for two years. From December 2005 to June 2006 he commanded Camp Mirage, a logistics base whose existence the government did not officially acknowledge and which was widely reported to be near Dubai. He then served as a project director in the Directorate of Air Requirements, completed French-language training in 2009 and was promoted to colonel.
On July 15, 2009, he succeeded Col. Mike Hood as commander of 8 Wing Trenton. Early in his career the military's leadership had described him as a brilliant airman and leader, Radio Canada International later recalled, and he had been given steadily greater responsibility. In 23 years of service he never saw combat, the Associated Press reported, though he was stationed across Canada and abroad. He was married. The couple had no children. They had a home in Ottawa, where they lived for years in the suburb of Orleans before moving to Westboro, and a cottage in Tweed, Ontario.
On January 17, 2010, as commander, he was photographed with the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, and the Minister of National Defence, Peter MacKay, during their visit to the base and an inspection of an aircraft heading to support relief efforts in Haiti.
The first break-in to which Williams later pleaded guilty took place in Tweed in September 2007. Others followed around Tweed and Belleville and, from May 2008, near his home in Orleans. The Canadian Encyclopedia, in its entry on the case, records 82 documented break-ins in all, in which he took women's and girls' clothing. In Orleans, 25 families had their homes entered, and 15 of them reported it to the police.
An Ontario Provincial Police criminal profiler, Det. Sgt. Jim Van Allen, studied the Orleans break-ins and warned that the intruder was becoming more dangerous. Police placed undercover officers in the neighborhood without result. The 82 break-in charges came only after Williams's arrest, from a review of unsolved crimes in the places where he had lived.
In September 2009 the crimes escalated. On September 17 a woman in Tweed was sexually assaulted. On September 30 a second woman in Tweed was sexually assaulted. Both women survived. The OPP issued a public warning to Tweed residents only after the second attack, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. Williams pleaded guilty to sexual assault and forcible confinement for each attack.
Marie-France Comeau was born in Quebec and grew up on military bases around the world, as her family moved with her father's postings, The Globe and Mail reported. She followed him into uniform, serving for 12 years at bases across Canada and in Afghanistan. Her father had served for 42 years. Her grandfather, the paper reported, was a decorated Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, and she had aunts and uncles in Quebec and New Brunswick. She had become a flight attendant with 437 Transport Squadron at Trenton, working on VIP flights, and had been with the squadron for six months. A close friend, a basic-training instructor, had lived with her for four years.
She was found dead in Brighton, Ontario, on November 25, 2009, at the age of 38, and her death was ruled a homicide. On December 4, 2009, she was buried at the National Cemetery in Ottawa. Her killing remained unsolved until Williams's confession in February 2010.
After the arrest, her father told The Globe and Mail that the news had shaken his trust in how the military chose its leaders. "This has broken my confidence," he said, adding that a base commander "is supposed to take care of his men and women."
Jessica Lloyd was 27. She was born in Ottawa and moved to Belleville at the age of eight. She worked for Tri-Board Student Transportation Services in Napanee, which arranges school bus service in the region. At her funeral, relatives described a lively, strong-willed young woman who loved country life and the look of the fields on a frosty morning, whose taste in music ran from hip-hop to country, and who followed hockey, especially the Toronto Maple Leafs. She liked to tease her brother, with whom she was especially close, over whose motorcycle was the newer model. "Those green eyes could catch the attention of anyone from across the room," a cousin said in her eulogy. Another cousin said, "You can't cover Jess with one song."
On the evening of January 28, 2010, at 10:36 p.m., she sent a text message to a family friend. It was her last known contact. The next day she did not arrive at work, and her family said that her silence was out of character. On January 30, Belleville police asked the public for help in finding her, and Deputy Chief Paul Vandegraaf said the case was being treated as suspicious. The OPP flew a helicopter over the Belleville area the following day. Volunteers canvassed and put up posters across the region, and a Facebook group set up to find her passed 34,000 members within days. Police asked people with information to call them rather than post it online. Within two days of her disappearance, her brother later told Global News, the family had received reported sightings from New York state, Pennsylvania and Vancouver.
Investigators had recorded distinctive tire tracks during the search for Lloyd, and the tread pattern narrowed the list of vehicles that could have made them. On Thursday, February 4, 2010, the OPP set up a roadside check on Highway 37, a rural highway in the Belleville area. It looked like a routine stop, but officers were looking for particular vehicles rather than impaired drivers. Williams was among the drivers stopped. He told officers that he traveled the road often, had seen nothing unusual and did not know Lloyd, Maclean's reported from the agreed statement of facts read in court. The tread on his tires matched, a neighbor later told The Globe and Mail, and from that point he was under surveillance.
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 7, Williams went to Ottawa police headquarters at the request of Det. Sgt. Jim Smyth of the OPP, a specialist in behavioral science interviewing. He entered the interview room at 3:03 p.m. and declined to have a lawyer present. By 5:30 p.m. he had given a DNA sample and an impression of his boots, which investigators concluded were similar to prints left in the snow. Smyth then told him that he was the suspect and that police were about to search his homes and his vehicle. At that point Williams began to give information. He was formally arrested and confessed to the offenses, and the questioning continued until about 1:30 a.m. Jessica Lloyd was found dead near Tweed on February 8. In a further interview on February 11 he confessed to the break-ins.
While he was being questioned, OPP officers searched his cottage in Tweed and his house in Ottawa under warrant. The search of the Ottawa house was finished by February 18.
On Monday, February 8, 2010, Williams appeared briefly in a Belleville courtroom in a prison jumpsuit, stated his name clearly and answered quietly when asked whether he understood the charges. He was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Jessica Lloyd and Marie-France Comeau and with two counts each of forcible confinement, breaking and entering, and sexual assault in the two Tweed attacks. The Chief of the Air Staff, Lt.-Gen. Andre Deschamps, relieved him of command of 8 Wing, citing "the seriousness of the charges." Det. Insp. Chris Nicholas of the OPP said investigators were tracing Williams's movements over several years. A defence official at headquarters in Ottawa described the staff there as stunned; the colonel they knew had seemed a "straight up, hard working air force guy."
Jessica Lloyd's funeral was held in Belleville on Saturday, February 13. The service was private, but hundreds of people came, and dozens stood outside with candles and signs reading "RIP Jessica," listening to the eulogy through loudspeakers. The acting base commander, Lt.-Col. David Murphy, attended. "There's a hole in everybody's heart," a woman who had helped with the poster campaign told Maclean's.
On February 18 Williams appeared by video link from the Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee, where he would spend the next eight months, represented by the Ottawa defence lawyer Michael Edelson. Over the Easter weekend guards stopped an attempt to take his own life, and on April 5 he was placed under constant watch. Days later he was reported to have begun a hunger strike.
On April 29, 2010, after a review of unsolved crimes across the areas where he had lived, police laid 82 further charges covering break-ins in Ottawa, Belleville and Tweed: 61 counts of breaking and entering and theft, 11 of attempted breaking and entering, and 10 of breaking and entering with intent to commit an indictable offense. On August 26 Williams waived his right to a preliminary inquiry and was ordered to stand trial. On October 7 his lawyer told the court that he intended to plead guilty. Outside the courthouse, Jessica Lloyd's brother said that he was not sure closure was the right word, but that the family could now move forward.
On Monday, October 18, 2010, before Justice Robert F. Scott of the Ontario Superior Court in Belleville, Williams pleaded guilty to all 88 charges: two counts of first-degree murder, two each of sexual assault and forcible confinement, and 82 counts of breaking and entering and related offenses. He faced an automatic sentence of life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years. Over two days the Crown read an agreed statement of facts, which a Crown prosecutor summed up as a case police had built from very few initial clues. On Tuesday, October 19, the judge found him "guilty on each and every count."
On the day of the pleas the Chief of the Defence Staff had issued a statement saying that the events had stunned Canadians, especially members of the Canadian Forces, and that once the conviction was formal the military would begin the process of releasing him. "Today's guilty plea is the first step in a healing process that will no doubt take many years," Gen. Natynczyk said.
Relatives and friends of Jessica Lloyd read victim impact statements to the court. "Because of him I can never hold my daughter Jessica in my arms again, hug her and tell her that I love her," her mother said. One aunt spoke of the future the family had imagined: "We all planned on seeing Jessica get married and have beautiful babies." Another said simply, "We all miss Jess terribly." Throughout the hearing her mother sat holding a framed photograph of her daughter.
Williams addressed the court before sentence was passed. He said he was "indescribably ashamed" and that his crimes had "traumatized many people." He apologized to the families of the two women he had killed and said he had "betrayed my family, my friends and colleagues and the Canadian Forces." "I shall spend the rest of my life knowing that I ended two vibrant, innocent and cherished lives," he said. Letters of apology to some of the victims' families were read in court.
The Crown attorney, Lee Burgess, called him "simply one of the worst offenders in Canadian history" and said he had betrayed both his community and the military; he was all the more troubling, Burgess said, because he had been "considered above reproach." The Crown did not seek to have him declared a dangerous offender, calling such an application superfluous: the sentence was already the maximum, and the full record of the case would be before any parole board, which in Burgess's view "will keep him behind bars forever." Edelson raised no objection to the Crown's proposed sentence, pointing to the guilty pleas, which spared the families a long trial, to the detail of the confession and to Williams's cooperation with police.
On Thursday, October 21, 2010, Justice Scott imposed two concurrent life terms with no parole eligibility for 25 years, 10 years for each sexual assault and each forcible confinement, and one year for each of the 82 other counts, all concurrent. He added a $100 victim surcharge on each count, a lifetime weapons prohibition, lifetime registration as a sex offender and an order for DNA samples to go to the national data bank, and ordered that some of the seized evidence be destroyed while other material was kept for any future parole board. The judge said he believed the apology was sincere, and he stressed that eligibility for parole after 25 years was no guarantee of release. "The depths of depravity demonstrated by Russell Williams have no equal," he said, adding that such crimes were, fortunately, very rare in Canadian society. CTV News reported that he said Williams would be remembered as a "sadosexual" serial killer.
Outside the courthouse Jessica Lloyd's brother said the sentence gave the family closure. "As long as he dies in jail, I'm happy," he said. "We just want to be normal again." Belleville's police chief, Cory McMullan, said Williams had betrayed the community's trust but that the community would heal. Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that members of the Canadian Forces had been "very badly wounded and betrayed."
On October 22, 2010, the day after sentencing, Governor General David Johnston revoked Williams's commission and approved his release from the Canadian Forces on the recommendation of Gen. Natynczyk, leaving him without any rank. "His actions have constituted a fundamental breach of trust, duty and valour, upon which the commission is based," Natynczyk said, calling the revocation an extraordinary and severe decision that might be the first of its kind in Canadian history. MacKay said Williams had committed crimes against the citizens the Canadian Forces swear to protect. The military said it would strip him of his medals, stop his pay and recover what he had been paid since his arrest, deny him severance, and release him under "service misconduct," the most serious category available.
His pension was another matter. Natynczyk said there were no grounds to revoke it under the superannuation law, and the pension, reported at about $60,000 a year, continued. Harper said contractual obligations made it difficult simply to cut off a pension, though he argued that people convicted of serious crimes should not receive voluntary payments from the government.
The military retrieved the uniforms Williams kept at his Tweed cottage and burned them at a military facility in Trenton. Because his name was written in all of them, the military decided against returning them to circulation; Cmdr. Hubert Genest told CTV that it was the only case in his 25-year career in which returned uniforms had been burned. On November 17, 2010, the Canadian Forces recovered the clothing, equipment and publications issued to him, and the clothing was disposed of the next day. The Department of National Defence also recovered his South-West Asia Service Medal with Afghanistan bar, his Canadian Forces' Decoration with clasp and his commission scroll. On December 10, 2010, it announced that his release was complete.
After sentencing Williams was taken to Kingston Penitentiary, the maximum-security prison that had opened in 1835. The lead OPP detective, Det. Insp. Chris Nicholas, said he would serve his time in the segregation unit that also held Paul Bernardo. In April 2012 the federal government announced that Kingston Penitentiary would close, and that high-risk inmates such as Williams would be moved to maximum-security cells in other prisons over the next two years. The Canadian Encyclopedia, in an entry first published in 2016, places him at the maximum-security institution in Port-Cartier, Quebec. Maclean's later reported that he had not paid the victim surcharge and that a collection agency was pursuing it, while his pension continued; Steve Sullivan, executive director of Ottawa Victims Services, said the pension was hard to accept when most offenders receive none.
In June 2010 the first woman he sexually assaulted in Tweed filed a civil suit for $2.45 million against Williams and his wife. Jessica Lloyd's mother and brother sued for $4 million. Both suits alleged that the transfer of property to his wife about six weeks after the arrest was a fraudulent attempt to shield assets: under a domestic contract signed in March 2010, she paid him $62,000 and took on the mortgage of their Ottawa townhouse, while he kept the Tweed property, which was later sold and the proceeds held in trust. His wife denied any wrongdoing, said the arrangement was for her own financial security, and described herself as a victim too. In June 2010 she said in an affidavit that the charges had devastated her.
About four years after the sentencing, Williams settled both suits out of court on confidential terms. The plaintiffs' lawyer, Michael Pretsell, said the settlements were reached "to the mutual satisfaction of all parties," and the claims against his wife were dismissed without costs.
The second woman assaulted in Tweed filed a $7 million claim against Williams, his wife and the province, alleging that the OPP had failed to warn the neighborhood that a predator was at work and that his wife had known of his conduct without reporting it. The province said police had acted in good faith, and his wife's lawyers called the allegations frivolous. Superior Court Justice Martin James allowed the claim to be amended to include the allegation against his wife, finding it relevant, but refused to add a Charter challenge to the law that shields military pensions from such claims. The OPP settled with the woman in 2015, The Canadian Encyclopedia records. None of the allegations in the civil suits was tested at trial. His wife began divorce proceedings after the guilty pleas; Maclean's later reported that they had stalled.
Other crimes. When he was charged, police said they would look into whether Williams had any role in a 2001 unsolved case near CFB Trenton and would compare the seized evidence against other unsolved cases. He has been charged with no other offense, and no other crime has been attributed to him in court.
Sentencing date. CBC News and the Department of National Defence place the sentence on October 21, 2010, with the commission revoked the next day; The Canadian Encyclopedia gives October 22 as the date of sentence.
Marie-France Comeau's age. Most reports give her age as 38; some later reports, including a 2020 Global News piece, give 37.
The victim surcharge. CBC News put the total surcharge at $8,800, at $100 a count; Maclean's later reported an unpaid surcharge of about $8,000.
March 7, 1963: David Russell Williams is born in the Midlands region of England; his family later moves to Chalk River and Toronto, Ontario.
1978 to 1982: attends Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute, as Russ Sovka, then Upper Canada College.
1987: joins the Canadian Forces after a degree from the University of Toronto.
1990: receives his pilot's wings.
1999: promoted to major.
June 2004: promoted to lieutenant-colonel; commands 437 Transport Squadron at Trenton for two years.
2005: a pilot for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during their visit.
December 2005 to June 2006: commands Camp Mirage.
September 2007: first break-in, in Tweed.
May 2008: break-ins begin near his home in Orleans, Ottawa.
July 15, 2009: takes command of 8 Wing, CFB Trenton.
September 17 and 30, 2009: two women are sexually assaulted in Tweed.
November 25, 2009: Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 38, is found dead in Brighton; she is buried in Ottawa on December 4.
January 17, 2010: photographed with Gen. Natynczyk and Peter MacKay at Trenton.
January 28, 2010: Jessica Lloyd sends her last text message at 10:36 p.m.; she misses work the next day.
February 4, 2010: stopped at an OPP roadside check on Highway 37.
February 7, 2010: questioned at Ottawa police headquarters; arrested and confesses.
February 8, 2010: charged in Belleville; Jessica Lloyd is found dead near Tweed; relieved of command.
February 13, 2010: Jessica Lloyd's funeral in Belleville.
April 2010: suicide attempt at the Quinte Detention Centre; placed under constant watch on April 5.
April 29, 2010: charged with 82 break-in offenses.
June 2010: first civil suit filed.
August 26, 2010: waives a preliminary inquiry.
October 18, 2010: pleads guilty to all 88 charges.
October 19, 2010: formally convicted.
October 21, 2010: sentenced to two concurrent life terms, no parole eligibility for 25 years.
October 22, 2010: commission revoked by the Governor General.
November 17 and 18, 2010: military clothing recovered and disposed of.
December 10, 2010: release from the Canadian Forces completed.
April 2012: closure of Kingston Penitentiary announced.
About four years after sentencing: civil suits by the first Tweed survivor and the Lloyd family settled out of court.
2015: the OPP settles with the second Tweed survivor.