A New Kind of Monster by Timothy Appleby Page A

widespread attention amid the saturation coverage speculated on the basis of comments from an invisible police source that the two killers may have been “pals” who had partied together or had even “competed against each other.”
    There’s not a shred of evidence to support this thesis. Williams and Bernardo graduated in different years (not both in 1987, as the story stated) and there is nothing to indicate they ever met. Toronto police swiftly examined the ostensible connection and drew a blank. So too does Farquhar, who says today that if Williams had known Bernardo, he would have been aware of Bernardo too, and he was not. The author of the newspaper article even consulted Bernardo, via his father, to see if he could recall a Russell Williams from his Scarborough university days. Bernardo (always glad of a diversion as he serves out a sentence of life imprisonment in solitary confinement) told his father he did not.
    Far more credible was the possibility that Williams had committed a cold-case homicide that to this day remains unsolved: the August 1987 sex slaying in Scarborough of 21-year-old Margaret McWilliam. Williams had completed university more than a year earlier, and was by then no longer living in Toronto. Nonetheless, at first glance the links appear compelling. McWilliam was found raped and strangled to death in Warden Woods Park, about three miles from Williams’s old home on Lakehurst Crescent, which Nonie and Jerry Sovka still owned atthe time. (They sold it in November 1987 for $349,000.) As with Williams’s two known murder victims, the cause of death was asphyxiation. And there was a possible further connection: McWilliam had moved to Toronto a year earlier after graduating from Kemptville College, south of Ottawa. But she had been raised in Deep River, the first place Williams lived after immigrating to Canada from Britain. Could their shared roots have led to an acquaintanceship? In addition, an unconfirmed report after Williams’s arrest said that someone resembling a jogger had been seen fleeing the Warden Woods Park crime scene—a young man wearing a red baseball cap.
    McWilliam’s parents still live in Deep River, and their hopes were briefly raised that their daughter’s ghastly murder almost twenty-three years earlier might finally be solved. But it was not to be. McWilliam’s killer had left behind some DNA, and it does not match that of the former colonel, according to the Toronto homicide detective who heads the cold-cases section.
    On leaving university in 1986, Williams was at a loss as to what to do next. Still in Scarborough, he rented the basement of a well-kept townhouse not far from the campus, and found himself a couple of part-time jobs. One was waiting tables at the Red Lobster, a seafood chain. The other was a summer position as a clerk in the university’s financial services department, where he pulled another prank that can only be described as bizarre.
    Long retired and now living in Britain, June Hope worked in the personnel unit across the corridor from the finance department. She remembers Williams as “a nice kid”—tall and good-looking, with a prominent jaw, a jazz aficionado who seemed lonely and “wouldn’t talk about his mom and dad very much except to say they were abroad.”
    One morning Hope walked into her fourth-floor office, or at least tried to. What greeted her was a sea of crunched-up balls of old-style computer paper, the type that was aligned to the printer by means of a ribbon of holes along the margin. “It filled the room,” Hope remembers. “I couldn’t find my desk or my chair or my computer. It was all obscured by paper. I opened the door and was met by a wall of paper.”
    The previous night, Williams had persuaded one of the secretaries to let him into Hope’s office, where he had spent hours crunching up the paper and spreading it around.
    â€œI was