Belleville (Ontario):
Before being sentenced to two concurrent life sentences on Thursday, the Canadian military commander unmasked as a serial sexual predator and killer admitted in a halting voice and on the brink of tears that he had "committed despicable crimes."
The commander, Col. David Russell Williams, 47, was sentenced to two additional 10-year terms for sexual assaults, and one-year concurrent sentences for each of approximately 80 break-ins. He will have no chance of parole for 25 years. He was also fined 8,800 Canadian dollars -- 100 dollars for each offense he confessed to -- to be paid into a victims' impact fund.
The sentence ends a hearing that over four days tracked, often in horrifying detail, a series of crimes that began several years ago with break-ins of houses near his own two homes to steal girls' and women's underwear. But the crimes grew ever more brazen and reckless, culminating with two sexual assaults in September 2009, a rape and murder in November that year, and another this January.
Colonel Williams, the commander of Canada's busiest air force base during the period covering the crimes, kept obsessively detailed records, photographing himself thousands of times in the underwear and comprehensively videotaping the most brutal attacks.
On Thursday, he initially struggled to speak to the court, pausing for an extended period after addressing the judge.
"I stand before you, your honor, indescribably ashamed," Colonel Williams said, sniffing at time as he spoke.
After apologizing to his dozens of victims, Colonel Williams added: "I will spend the rest of my life regretting most of all that I have ended two vibrant, innocent and cherished lives."
Outside the court, his statement of remorse was rejected by relatives of the two women he killed. Because he pleaded guilty to first degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence, his remarks had no effect on the sentencing.
The presiding judge, Robert F. Scott, told the court: "Russell Williams will forever be remembered as a sado-sexual serial killer. Russell Williams' fall from grace has been swift and sure."
His is being taken to a prison in Kingston, Ontario, about 40 miles east of the court here, where he will likely be kept in isolation in a special unit for sex criminals.
At a news conference at the military base west of here, which Colonel Williams commanded until his arrest in February, Lt. Gen. Andre Deschamps, the Canadian Armed Forces' chief of air staff, said that Williams would soon be stripped of his rank and military decorations.
While Colonel Williams will be required to pay back salary he has received since being put on leave in February, the military said it is legally unable to block his pension.
Experts who have examined the case remain mystified, noting that he began far later in life than other such criminals, and that his crimes escalated so rapidly.
"Most sexual killers begin in their 20s, peak in their mid-30s and start to taper off by their 40s," said Dr. Michael H. Stone, a New York psychiatrist who wrote the book "The Anatomy of Evil" (Prometheus, 2009).
He and other forensic psychiatrists said it was impossible to offer anything like a complete assessment of Colonel Williams without knowing more about his life and interviewing him directly.
But the evidence of his particular mental twists has been mounting as prosecutors outlined his crimes. On Monday, they showed many of the photographs -- some showed him, aroused, in girlish underwear decorated with cartoon characters or, arms akimbo, in ladies' lingerie. Most were close-ups of his genitals protruding through the cloth.
Some of the homes he broke into were those of acquaintances. He masturbated with bedroom objects and then put them back in place; he left thank you notes on his victims' computer screens.
On Tuesday, the prosecutors described videotapes of the protracted assaults on the two women he killed. The first victim found him hiding behind her furnace while she was looking for her cats; he bashed her in the head with a flashlight, bound her and brought in lamps to improve the lighting before he recorded himself repeatedly raping the bleeding woman.
On Wednesday, the prosecutors played video recordings from a 10-hour police interrogation. Colonel Williams initially appears confident as he meets an officer from a behavioral science unit in an interrogation room at an Ottawa police station.
"I have never been in a room like this," he says, grinning up at a camera.
Later, however, after the interrogator tells him that the unusual tread pattern of his sport utility vehicle matches tracks found in a snowy field near his second victim's home, Colonel Williams drops his head. He confesses for hours.
Forensic psychiatrists said that many sexual killers made records of their acts or kept mementos to revisit the experience. Dr. Angela Hegarty, a forensic psychiatrist at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, who also teaches at Columbia University, said, "I would say the No. 1 reason he kept these meticulous records is to recreate the Proust moment, the 'biting into the madeleine' that brings back the rich memory."
The records are so full, she suggested, because for the killer, "You don't know going in which detail is going to provide that."
In the interrogation, Colonel Williams said he became interested in women's underwear in his 20s or 30s, but did not act on it until a few years ago.
Psychiatrists call such desires paraphilias, a broad class of unusual compulsions that include pedophilia and sexual sadism; they are thought to be rooted in neural abnormalities traceable to early brain development. They usually surface early in life, and those who act on them tend to begin in young adulthood.
"But if what we're hearing is true, it almost has the quality of a breakdown," said Dr. Hegarty. "It's like the person who's never smoked marijuana suddenly going on a binge and doing everything, all drugs, all at once."
Colonel Williams certainly seemed in control, at least publicly. He was a married, highly organized, widely respected commander who for a while kept his two lives wholly separate. "This capacity for compartmentalization is in fact quite common in people like this," said Theodore Millon, a former Harvard professor who is an expert on personality disorders. "It's only the contrast to public appearances that makes it so startling."
Dr. Stone, who keeps a database of serial killers that now includes 152 cases, said they tended to fall into two broad categories: those who maintain responsible public lives, and those who are loners, misfits. Colonel Williams is clearly in the former group, he said, along with John Wayne Gacy, the Illinois businessman who strangled more than 30 boys, and Dennis L. Rader, known as the B.T.K. killer (for bind, torture, kill), a civil servant in Kansas who pleaded guilty to killing 10 people.
By contrast, the loners tend to have clear evidence of neglect or abuse in their childhood.
David Russell Williams was born in Britain, the son of a metallurgist who emigrated to Canada to work in the country's top nuclear research facility.
The only obvious sign of upset during his youth was the collapse of his parents' marriage when he was 7; the two married members of a couple they had been close friends with.
There was no apparent lack of money in the family. For his final two years of high school, Colonel Williams boarded at Upper Canada College, an elite private school in Toronto, where he was known as a conscientious student and a talented musician.
After graduation, he studied economics and political science at the University of Toronto. He joined the military in 1987 and rose swiftly, piloting military jetliners that provided official transportation for the prime minister and playing a direct role in some of Canada's largest military procurement programs.
As commander of Canada's biggest air base, at Trenton, Ontario, he was not only one of the largest employers in a mostly rural area along the shores of Lake Ontario, he was also a community leader. He appeared in local newspapers presenting checks to charities, posing with hockey players and dropping pucks at season-openers.
Colonel Williams clearly moved between his two lives with great fluidity.
For example, after killing Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, a flight attendant under his command, he drove for about three hours to an aircraft procurement meeting.
Later, fulfilling his duty as base commander, Colonel Williams sent an official letter of condolence to her father.
The morning after his second murder, he piloted a troop flight to California.
His activities may have been aided by the largely separate life he lived with his wife, an executive with a large Canadian charity. During the week, he lived alone in a cottage near the base. He spent weekends with his wife in Ottawa.
He confessed, he said Wednesday, to "make her life easier."