The move meant he and his wife would have to sell their two-storey home in the Orléans area of Ottawa, and split their days between the lakefront home in Tweed, a 45-minute drive from Trenton, and a new, $700,000 townhouse in the trendy Ottawa enclave of Westboro Village. “They were the perfect couple,” says Shirley White, who lived two doors down from the couple in Orléans. When Williams was sworn in as the base commander, Shirley’s husband, George, was invited to the ceremony.
Today, roughly a dozen ice fishing huts are visible from Williams’s back porch. Until news of his arrest, ice fishing and a 315-foot Canadian flag scarf knitted by Tweed women in honour of the Olympics were the town’s winter obsession. Williams and his wife were drawn to the town of 5,600 because of the view and affordable lakefront property. In 2004, the couple paid $178,000 for a light-grey bungalow and a piece of land on Cosy Cove Lane, a tree-lined dirt road hugging the lake about five kilometres outside of town.
Williams and his wife were sporadic weekenders on Cosy Cove. When they were around, though, Williams’s wife, Mary Elizabeth, was the more outgoing of the two, while Williams himself seemed to come and go at odd hours. “I’d never heard of the guy before the news,” said Lawrence Ramsay, owner of the local pub. “I’d never seen him before in my life.” He didn’t own a snowblower or a lawn tractor. “He did everything the old-fashioned way,” said Larry Jones, his next-door neighbour.
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Over the last five years Jones had minimal contact with his neighbour. A retired surveyor with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, Jones found Williams to be friendly but quiet, only speaking when spoken to. Williams came over once for a party, and Jones would sometimes plow Williams’s driveway when Mary Elizabeth asked. Late last October, Jones returned home to find several police cars outside his house. “Did I get broken into?” Larry asked. “No, Larry, it’s way worse than that,” replied a police officer.
Throughout October, police had been looking for a suspect in the two cases of home invasions in the area, in which the female victims were tied up and sexually assaulted. The first victim, a woman from the Toronto area who had moved to Tweed barely a month before the Sept. 17 attack, lived on Charles Road, accessible from Cosy Cove Lane through a wooded path.
The next victim, who was attacked in the early morning hours of Sept. 30, lived even closer, a few doors down from Jones. This woman fingered Jones to the police, who—still unaware of Williams’s alleged involvement—came armed with a search warrant for Jones’s house. They were looking for several pairs of panties, some La Senza brand brassieres and a baby blanket–evidence from the first victim, the mother of a baby who was reportedly in the house at the time of the assault. “The cops told me that [the second victim] recognized my voice in the room with her,” Jones said. “I said she was either lying or she was badly mistaken because I wasn’t there.”
The police hauled away Jones’s hunting knife, boots, camera and two old computers destined for the landfill. He volunteered to do “anything to clear my name,” and provided DNA, fingerprints and a polygraph. “I had nothing to hide. After that, the cop says, ‘Larry, go home, put your feet up, and have a cold beer. You’re clear 100 per cent.’ ” Still, because no arrests were made, he continued to live under a cloud. His wife, Bonnie, the treasurer of a neighbouring municipality, received a phone call one day shortly after police visited their house. “What’s it like to live with a murderer?” asked the female caller, according to Jones.
The second victim, who lives down the street, has said little. Earlier this week, she drove through a phalanx of TV trucks, past a police checkpoint and onto her property, a bungalow less than a 30-second walk from the home of the man who allegedly assaulted her. “Thank you,” she said, when a reporter expressed sympathy for her ordeal. She then dragged out a large “No Trespassing” sign, placed it beside her front door, and went inside.
