Sex killer Russell Williams had child porn, but no charges laid

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Police found child pornography on Russell Williams's computer, but prosecutors didn't lay charges because that would have been a deal-breaker in persuading him to plead guilty, says a new book about the sex predator who terrorized rural Eastern Ontario until his 2010 arrest.

Mr. Williams could own up to being a burglar, a lingerie thief, a murderer, a rapist and a cross-dressing fetishist – but possession of child pornography was too loathsome for him to acknowledge, says the book, A New Kind of Monster, by Globe and Mail crime reporter Timothy Appleby.

To avoid having to go to trial, the prosecution and Mr. Williams's defence agreed not to pursue accusations relating to the child porn in return for his guilty plea on other charges.

The material investigators found in Mr. Williams's computer were pictures of adolescent girls in sexual situations; the photos had been downloaded from the Internet.

"This was not just one or two images, and it was the one thing he could not summon himself to admit to," a source says in the book. "He would plead guilty to everything else, but not to that."

The presence of the child porn is consistent with the fact that, in 13 of the 48 homes he burglarized, Mr. Williams targeted the bedrooms of female minors, taking photos, stealing hundreds of pieces of underwear and posing in them.

Nevertheless, "technically, he could not be classed as a pedophile despite the child porn found on his computer, because his sexual interests were much wider than that," the book says.

Once a promising colonel who commanded CFB Trenton, Canada's largest air base, Mr. Williams is now serving concurrent life sentences, with no chance for parole for 25 years, after pleading guilty in the fall to two murders, two sexual assaults and 82 burglaries.

Two days after pleading guilty, Mr. Williams told a guard at the detention centre that he wouldn't have entered a plea had he known the media interest the court proceeding generated.

"It was one more lie, and a very obvious one," the book says.

"He knew very well that if his crimes had gone to trial, all the horrific evidence would have come out anyway, along with a great deal more, including disclosure of his kiddie-porn collection. As well, his already substantial legal fees would have swelled by tens of thousands of dollars – costs he told [Ontario Province Police investigator Jim]Smyth he was particularly anxious to avoid. The remark nonetheless shows how painful the media onslaught was, and how acute his sense of humiliation."

Mr. Williams was never officially diagnosed as a psychopath, manipulative and devoid of empathy, but there has been much speculation over whether he fits the profile. Others also wondered why his crime spree began when he was 44.

The book notes that the key evidence against Mr. Williams came from his computer, where he began carefully cataloguing his crimes, starting in 2007.

A few months before Mr. Williams's first admitted burglary, an RCMP officer had been in the news in June, 2007, for a similar burglary.

Was that well-publicized incident a catalyst? The book says that police investigators suspect there were earlier incidents of either voyeurism or snooping that Mr. Williams never mentioned.

"He was admitting what he had to admit," the book says.

It mentions Mr. Williams's assured, forceful manners in the first of the crimes he had confessed to, a September, 2007, break-in into the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl in the village of Tweed where he remained at the scene for more than two hours to take pictures.

"Such confident behaviour suggests this was not his first home invasion," the book says.