David Russell Williams: The Kinky Killer Colonel
Arrest
Police blocked off roads around Belleville as they struggled to find Jessica Lloyd and her abductor or killer.
Among those stopped on February 4, 2010, was Col. David Russell Williams. An officer at the roadblock recognized that the tires on Williams' Pathfinder SUV matched the unusual tracks which police believed had been left by an SUV that a passerby had noticed on the day of Lloyd's disappearance parked incongruously in the middle of a field near Lloyd's home.
On Sunday, February 7, Williams received a call at his Ottawa townhouse. The Ontario Provincial Police requested that he come to Ottawa Police Service Headquarters for questioning. Once there, he grinned at his interrogator and announced he'd never been "in a room like this." Told about the matching tire treads and the mounting evidence linking him to the other crimes, Williams confessed. And then he spent nearly 10 hours giving Inspector Jim Smyth, a behavioral science expert in the Ontario Provincial Police, the full details of his weird and finally lethal criminal desires. Consistent with Monique Murdoch's memories of chronic pain making it difficult for Williams to sit through their card games, Williams remained standing for most of his ten-hour confession.
The colonel wasn't able to explain his motivations fully to Inspector Smyth. All he could say was, "I don't know the answers, and I'm pretty sure the answers don't matter."
But he could explain why he confessed: to make things easier on his wife. At the end of his signed confession, he wrote her a note apologizing and asking her to take good care of their cat, Rosebud .
As Williams told them they would, investigators found Jessica Lloyd's body near his Tweed cottage. They determined she'd been alive in the cottage for 15 hours before being strangled.
Investigators searched the cottage and his home and Ottawa, and discovered the copious notes, photographs and souvenirs that corroborated Williams' account of the attacks. He'd twice burned his stash of lingerie in a rural area outside Ottawa, but there was plenty of material left to incriminate him, including photos of a stuffed animal-filled room shared by twin 11-year-old girls, and 87 pairs of underwear from a single underage girl.
Within 24 hours of his arrest, the case against Williams was all but wrapped up.