The wait is over.
For 15 years, during which his name has been frequently invoked – as the perennial, usually imaginary suspect in many of the country’s unsolved murders; for the legal precedents set by his criminal trial; as the embodiment of horror – Canadians have been braced for another Paul Bernardo.
With a lengthy agreed statements of facts now on the record at Ontario Superior Court in this small eastern Ontario city, the murders of two glorious young women described as fully as they ever will be officially, a former high-flying air force star, Colonel Russell Williams, fairly can be described as the new Bernardo.
Col. Williams – only now that he has been formally convicted can the military start the process of stripping the 47-year-old of his rank – was pronounced guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, two bizarre sexual assaults and forcible confinements, and 82 lingerie break-ins Tuesday by Judge Robert Scott.
There are, of course, differences between the two killers.
Chiefly, unlike Mr. Bernardo, Col. Williams didn’t have a nimble helpmate like Karla Homolka to help him work the video camera, and thus had the bother of having to hold it himself in one hand while violating his victims, sometimes with the other hand.
Col. Williams’s wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, wasn’t involved in his crimes. The two spent long periods living apart – she in their Ottawa home, he at their Tweed, Ont., cottage, close to the base he ran.
(There has never been a suggestion Ms. Harriman had any idea what her husband was up to, though the evidence presented in court makes it clear she was astonishingly uncurious – Col. Williams kept well hidden his treasured videos and pictures, but left piles of stolen underwear and sex toys in ordinary boxes and bags all over the basement and spare room of their Ottawa house.)
And where Mr. Bernardo and Ms. Homolka videotaped their lethal sexual assaults upon three teenagers (her sister Tammy, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristin French) as well as other assaults on girls who survived, the pair stopped short of filming the actual murders.
Col. Williams did not.
He videoed the moment of Marie France Comeau’s dreadful death – with the camera still rolling, he taped what is believed to have been duct tape to her nose and she went limp, pleading in her last breath, “Have a heart please. I’ve been really good. … I want to live.”
Then her head rolled slightly and fell onto the wall she was leaning against.
As prosecutor Lee Burgess read aloud in court, “She stops breathing and appears to have just suffocated to death. The video stops.”
The 37-year-old corporal, who followed her father into the Canadian Forces and served as a military flight attendant, fought Col. Williams tooth and nail from the moment she happened upon him, hiding in her basement, when she went looking for one of her cats before she went to bed.
Neither that death footage nor any pictures of the assaults on Ms. Comeau or 27-year-old Jessica Lloyd, Col. Williams’s next murder victim, were shown in court or to the media out of deference to their families.
The other significant difference between the two killers is that where Mr. Bernardo was a low achiever, a failed accountant who then turned to cigarette smuggling, Col. Williams was a bright light in both his professional military life and in the burgeoning criminal career he began, from all the evidence the police investigation has found, at the advanced age of 44, rather long in the tooth for such fellows.
Indeed, though Col. Williams turned off his BlackBerry when he ventured off to the homes of Ms. Comeau and Ms. Lloyd – taking time away from his job as commander of CFB Trenton down the highway – having killed them, he went straight back to work.
