Getting It Wrong

That's just the way it is. People who attain to high levels of recognition, of standing in a community, whose experience and professional capabilities have landed them in highly respectable positions, are thought to be beyond reproach.

Their position as high achievers in politics or business or society earns them high regard from the public. And who could stretch their imagination to the point where, logically, someone representative of the law or of a country's armed services in a Democratic country like Canada, would have a secret life of brutal psychopathy?

Well, the criminal investigating authorities for one. A police officer simply finds it too difficult to envision the commander of a military base to have a sinister secret withheld from all; a pathologically devious intent to commit rape and murder. If a law enforcement officer cannot trust that a commander of a military base is beyond suspicion for horrendous civil criminal abuses, it is hardly surprising.

And when the Ontario Provincial Police were investigating break-ins and rapes, and sending their officers to fan out in the general area where these crimes were taking place, they questioned community residents, going door-to-door, and gave a wide berth to the very residence where the rapist lived, directly in close community to where the crimes were perpetrated.

Instead, they focused on the elderly neighbour of the criminal as their primary suspect.

And because the commander of CFB Trenton felt he was inviolable because of his position of trust, and would never be a suspect because of that very position and the respect awarded him by those he commanded, and those within the wider community, he felt empowered to proceed from rape to murder. Because his activities were not apprehended, two women were raped and murdered.

Until finally, the man's own lack of attention to details led investigators to suspect him.

Simple forensic evidence incriminated him and finally brought him to arrest. And when it was publicly revealed that CFB Trenton base commander Col. Russell Williams had become the primary suspect in two murders and a string of home invasions and rapes, the shock was immense, spreading over the base, the town, the province, the country.

This was a man whose professionalism was well recognized and rewarded. He was fast-tracked at a relatively young age to responsibly elite positions within the military. He had a wife and a seemingly stable relationship in marriage. His psycho-social state seemed normal and his neighbours were shocked that they were unable to recognize the man they knew nor accept that he could be a murderer-rapist.

If his wife of long standing, in this stable, emotionally caring relationship had no idea that she was married to a viciously violent monster, and his military colleagues still shake their heads in disbelief, it is little wonder that experienced members of the law-enforcement community were side-tracked in their investigation.

Seemingly normal, egotistically psychotic, the very picture of a societal menace as a psychopath. Justice has yet to be served.