After he watched Ms. Comeau die, he cleaned up her house, stole some underwear and drove directly to Ottawa for a “C-17 acquisition” meeting.
Similarly, after strangling Ms. Lloyd with some rope at about 8.15 p.m. on Jan. 29 this year – about 22 hours after she text-messaged a friend she was home safe, only to fall into his clutches for that period – Col. Williams left her body in the garage of his Tweed cottage, drove to CFB Trenton, slept there overnight and then flew troops to California the following day.
Only on Feb. 2 did he get around to driving her body to an isolated part of Tweed and dumping it.
He had skills Mr. Bernardo could only dream of – the ability to function at a high level in both halves of his life. An Ontario Provincial Police written summary of the videos noted repeatedly how calm and controlled he always was, even in the midst of the blood and violence he was inflicting.
But where the two men are alike is in the way they controlled their victims.
They both used whatever worked – raw violence, as when Col. Williams beat Ms. Comeau unconscious or tied Ms. Lloyd’s hands behind her back so tightly that they turned purple in the video; death threats, as when he fashioned a noose out of black zip ties around Ms. Lloyd’s neck, tightened it and asked, “You feel that? I feel something I don’t like, I pull on that and you die, got it?”; lies, as when Ms. Comeau asked, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” and Col. Williams denied it.
They both issued whispered instructions – at Mr. Bernardo’s lengthy trial, this practice was called “scripting” – to their victims to get them into the poses they wanted. They both forced their victims to role-play: As Mr. Bernardo dressed Ms. French in a schoolgirl’s kilt and had her pretend, with Ms. Homolka, to be putting on makeup for a night on the town, so Col. Williams showered with Ms. Lloyd during her captivity, and frequently kissed her – as though they were lovers, not hostage-taker and prisoner.
Both men also loved the camera – Col. Williams’s only recorded smiles came, the OPP report noted, as he was raping Ms. Comeau and looking back to the lens – and were utterly fixated on genitals, their victims’ of course, but mostly their own.
Mr. Bernardo even had a pet name for his penis – “Snuffles” – and it was with Snuffles literally in hand over a cowering girl that he would sometimes say, “It’s good to be the king.”
Well, the king is dead. There’s a new boy in town now.
cblatchford@globeandmail.com
