As busy as he was, the colonel continued to display the calm and control that earned him the admiration of his subordinates. Even under such strain—from obvious sources and otherwise—he remained quick with a compliment, never micromanaged, and not once seemed irritated or exhausted. “My son sustained a fairly significant eye injury around the time of the earthquake, and Williams was very pointed in keeping up with his progress,” says Lt.-Col. David Alexander, another one of his advisers. “He very much demonstrated—whether it was valid or not—what I would consider very appropriate empathy for the situation our family was going through. But I don’t know. I look at a picture of him now and I just wonder what was going on behind those eyes.”
He is not alone. Everyone who earns a living inside Trenton’s “bubble”—the headquarters’ hallway, sealed on either end by locked doors—is still struggling with the idea that Williams the colonel could be Williams the killer. What clues did we miss? What was he really like in the days after Lloyd vanished? How could we be so fooled? “The joke is that one day, the people who worked directly for him for 60 hours a week are going to become a case study into how we couldn’t recognize this,” Lewis says. “The group of us are still beating ourselves up because we spent the most time with this guy. Every single day.”
They have reached one conclusion: it’s Mr. Williams now, not Col. Williams. His once-loyal subordinates understand that the charges have not been tested in court, and that he remains an innocent man unless proven guilty. But in their eyes, he is no longer the officer that inspired such awe. He has stained the uniform, and cast a suspicious shadow over every man who wears it. “The military didn’t create this monster; he was an aberration,” Alexander says. “He betrayed so many fundamentals of our institution, and that sense of betrayal is very real. I feel absolutely horrible for his wife. She is not as much of a victim as Marie-France Comeau or Jessica Lloyd or the women attacked in the Tweed area, but her life has been changed and altered for no fault of her own.”
Harriman is staying with friends while police comb through her Ottawa townhouse, and could not be reached for comment. She did, however, contact Kevin West in the days after her husband’s reported confession. “I’d rather not get into that because that’s personal to her,” he says. “All I know is she is being taken care of.”
