"It's Been Awful For Her"

There are some news stories to which people are drawn as though to a magnet. These are the stories that defy human imagination, in outlining how people who appear on the surface to be perfectly normal harbour deep within them a malignancy so vividly evil that the disbelieving public reads all it can relating to the sordid events in an attempt to understand just how seemingly ordinary people can in reality represent the troublingly extraordinary.

In some societies malevolent psychopaths attain positions of power and wield that power to great effect, destroying peoples' lives and populations' hope for a decent future. Those are the malefactors of ill repute like dictators and tyrants who manipulate their societies to reflect their values, disentitling any who protest; arresting, incarcerating, torturing and murdering them. These are obviously not advanced civil societies, but backward, tribal societies.

In advanced, free and democratic societies we can usually weed out personalities who are overtly anti-social and prevent them from achieving high political office. In these societies people whose orientation happens to be sociopathic and who succumb to psychotic behaviour are the criminal class, although there are also those who have become skilled in successfully shielding their sociopathic tendencies from public scrutiny.

Those like mass murderer Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo and former Trenton base commander Russell Williams whose deep and fundamental downward spiral into the sadistic pleasures they derived from inflicting pain on helpless victims drove them to careers in multiple-murders, are thought to be just like anyone else until their arrogant carelessness betrays them and they are apprehended.

All of these men were married. All of these men, finally caught through incontrovertible evidence implicating them in merciless killings of helpless victims, lived seemingly normal lives on the surface, complicated by savagely distorted desires. In Bernardo's case, he was paired with a woman whose horrible fantasies complemented his own. In Olson's case, his wife seemed content to have her husband extort money on her behalf from the RCMP (taxpayers) to reveal where his victims' bodies might be found.

In the case of former Trenton commander Russell Williams, his wife appears on the evidence available, unwilling to allow her personal life to be too severely discommoded by her husband's revealed activities, and his subsequent murder sentence. What emerges from the brief public outline of Mary Elizabeth Harriman is a sketch of a not very engaged person. Is it even remotely possible for two people in a long-term intimate relationship not to know one another?

What emerges from what little public profile Ms. Harriman has allowed is a sketch of a very private person who hugely resents her private life made public. Any intrusion in the way of news coverage into her persona is unwelcome and understandably so. Yet there is an unmistakable outline of an entitled woman unwilling to proffer any public statement, and on the record inordinately concerned about her financial future.

This is not a woman who has been left bereft of a loving husband whose career supported her socially and financially. Ms. Harriman has her own career which is more than capable of sustaining her well into the future. The picture we have is that of a woman angry that her prize dream of a perfect home setting has been disturbed. In the police investigation that followed her husband's arrest for murder, she is irritated that scratches appear on the hardwood floors of her new home, insisting in tax-paid repairs.

A survivor of one of her predatory husband's horrible assaults on vulnerable women is in the process of suing her husband and by extension, herself. To protect her financial investments she colluded with her husband to transfer ownership of property to her name. She is now in the process of seeking a divorce from her life-sentenced husband, thus further separating their financial investments and shielding her from potentially being absorbed into the compensation that might arise from the lawsuit.

Her lawyer has requested of an Ottawa court that a sealing order be brought down to protect her client from the"voluminous" national media attention that revelations of a personal and financial nature as required by the proceedings for divorce may attract. Ms. Harriman's lawyer characterizes the proceedings as a "purely personal matter" between her client and her client's husband.

Appearing to overlook the reality that there is a consuming public interest in her husband, once a highly trusted member of the Canadian Armed Forces, on the fast-track to an elite command position at an even higher standing than his previous command. A man so highly respected that he was trusted discretely as an air force pilot to safely ferry diplomats and high-ranked politicians.

It is exceedingly difficult to have sympathy for Ms. Harriman's wish to be thought of as anonymous, for she is anything but that. Attention is given to her as the wife of a psychopathic murderer, someone who preyed savagely on woman and children for years. Perhaps it is possible for a woman to be oblivious to the inner mind and proclivities of her husband, but it is exceedingly curious.

So the "undue" interest that her lawyer alludes to her client having been subjected to is anything but undue, given the circumstances. And it is hardly surprising that a "lot of media has focused on her". And that it has "been awful for her", may be incontestable, but one has a tendency to focus rather on how awful it must have been for her husband's victims to plead for their lives unavailingly.

It is more than natural for people to muse on these circumstances and differences in those circumstances, and to feel that as a compassionate, concerned human being Ms. Harriman has come out looking quite wan indeed given her personal focus and seeming disinclination to demonstrate any manner of sympathy for her husband's many victims.