Victims chase lingerie killer colonel for £7m

Victims of double murderer and sex attacker Colonel Russell Williams are suing him for £7 million while he serves two life sentences.

The
killer, born and raised in Bromsgrove, was jailed in 2010 for murdering
a corporal and a waitress and committing a series of sex attacks while dressed in women’s underwear in Ontario, Canada.

The perverted pilot, aged 51, had stolen the lingerie from girls’ bedrooms, one was aged just 11.

Now
he is being sued for four million Canadian dollars (£3.8m) by the family of murder victim Jessica Lloyd. Williams raped, kidnapped and held the 27 year-old waitress hostage for hours before strangling her inside a holiday cottage he owned in January 2010.

He
is also being sued by his former neighbour Laurie Massicote for seven million Canadian dollars (£3.8m) and a woman who can only be named as Jane Doe, for legal reasons, for four million Canadian dollars (£2.1m).

It’s understood the victims are trying to gain access to Williams’ assets, savings and military pension.

Williams’
shocking crimes emerged during his glittering career which saw him rise
from his modest middle class roots in Worcestershire to become the head
of Canada’s largest air base.

The
highly decorated Air Force commander once flew the Queen and Prince Philip on an official engagement during a state visit to Canada.

But he was leading a double life.

He emigrated to Canada with his family while he was a child.

And
was appointed commander of Base Trenton in Ontario a year before he was
charged with two murders and two counts of sexual assault in May 2010.

He is not eligible for parole until 2035.

Ontario Provincial Police have released video footage of the sadistic killer’s confessions.

 

They
spent hours grilling him after officers pulled him over in his car while carrying out routine inquiries into his first murder victim Corporal Marie-France Comeau.

He killed the 37 year-old at Base Trenton in 2009.

The
footage shows Williams admit everything – including the location of where he had dumped Ms Lloyd’s body – during an interrogation on the afternoon of Sunday 2 July 2010.

 

A warrant had been issued to search the father-of-four’s home at the time.

Smiling
at the cameras Williams admits he has never been interviewed by the police in this way before and takes a coffee, black with sugar, before he admits to his crimes.

“It’s hard to believe this is happening,” Williams tells the interviewing officer.

“My only two concerns right now is what my wife is going through and how this is going to impact on the Canadian Forces.

“I’m struggling with how upset my wife is right now.

“I’m concerned that they’re tearing apart my wife’s brand new house.”

“I want to, um, minimize the impact on my wife,” he continued, a few minutes later.

“My interest is in making my wife’s life a little easier.”

When asked where Ms Lloyd’s body was he said: “You got a map” and admits that he dumped her on a roadside a week earlier.

He
goes on assure officers that they “do not need to rip the house apart” and tells them that he is willing to tell them everything that they needed to know about his crimes.

When police did search his home they found a pillowcase in the garage and multiple boxes stuffed with stolen women’s clothing.

And at his holiday cottage 200km away they found another duffel bag filled with hundreds more pieces of lingerie.

Prosecutors
claimed that Williams was a “dangerous sexual predator” who had an obsession with collecting women’s underwear that led him to commit burglaries, two sexual assaults and two murders.

Before
he murdered Cpl Comeau he was stalking women and committed dozens of break ins after which he photographed himself modelling hundreds pieces of stolen lingerie.

His perversions escalated from fetish burglaries to sexual assault and then murder.

He pleaded guilty to 88 charges and is serving a life sentence at Quebec’s maximum-security Port-Cartier Prison.

If he lives to be 72, he will then be eligible to apply for parole.

Williams attacked Laurie Massicotte on her couch at home after stripping her naked at knife point in September 2009.

He then ordered her to pose for his camera.

Weeks later he murdered Cpl Comeau.

Williams stripped Ms Doe and tied her up before repeatedly photographing her naked body while her newborn daughter slept nearby.

She has described the assault as “harsh, vindictive, malicious, horrific and reprehensible”.

It took the clerk of the court at Williams’ trial 40 minutes to read the full catalogue of charges against the Colonel.

He pleaded guilty to two first-degree murders.

He also pleaded guilty to a series of break-ins and fetish thefts.

Police across Canada re-opened scores of cold case files after they arrested Williams.

They also looked again at eight unsolved murders and 48 sex crimes dating back to the 1980s.

Detectives feared that Williams could have started killing long before the murder spree that saw him locked up.

The latest amendments to the lawsuits were filed at the end of December and all three cases are ongoing.

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Posting to Facebook? Consider skipping the bikini selfie

When you post to Facebook, do you share a bikini selfie or one of you all pumped up from the gym? As studies are increasingly showing, who you project yourself to be on social media matters — especially to teens.

Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat clearly don’t have to cause people to freak out about how other people perceive them and then rush to the plastic surgeon. But in some social media circles, as with certain cliques in high school, postings can actually cause others to place more of an emphasis on their self-image.

You’re probably familiar with the idea of objectification, which is when someone views someone else as more of an object (usually a sexual object) than a person with thoughts and feelings. Social media provides an easy way for people to portray themselves — yes, themselves — in an objectified manner. It’s called self-objectification.

Perhaps they only post selfies with their tummy sucked in, or when their makeup is just so, or when their clothes look good, or when they stand next to a clean and shiny car. You get the (perfect) picture.

Well, there’s reason to believe those images of unattainable perfection could actually affect the people who see them.

In one online experiment, Dutch researchers Dian de Vries and Jochen Peter had 221 women between ages 18 and 25 participate in what the women thought was a consumer survey. They were shown fragrance advertisements that depicted either a perfume bottle (non-objectified ad) or a sexy woman in lingerie (objectified ad).

Then the women had to create an online profile and write a description of themselves. Some were told it would be seen by an online audience, while others were told it wouldn’t.

Those who were primed with “sexually objectifying stimuli,” as the study put it, and who believed their profile would be public, were more likely to get caught up in the “glory” rat race. In their self-descriptions, they were more likely to say they were interested in fashion or cosmetics, or describe their physical characteristics in positive ways. Essentially, they were more likely to self-objectify.

The study shows how images in the media — and the power of public attention — may alter the way people perceive themselves, causing them to place more value on physical qualities and less on the human element.

In an unofficial survey, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery released information about a change noticed by its plastic surgeons. A third of those surveyed saw an increase in 2013 over the previous year in requests for plastic surgery stemming from people being more self-aware of their looks because of social media.

Can a proliferation of selfies online really propel people toward Botox and rhinoplasty?

We don’t really know. Only 69 doctors answered the question in a Survey Monkey poll, so the review wasn’t scientific by any means — though it proved good fodder for debate in blogs.

But the idea that social media can change the way people think and act is a powerful one. Facebook and Twitter have aided revolutions. They can certainly affect how people, particularly teens, feel about themselves — for good or bad.

As one recent study found, emotions online can be kind of contagious. After examining a billion updates from a million or so Facebook users, researchers found that when people post something sad or grumbly, it can cause others to post downbeat messages, too. Though the effects were relatively small, the same happened with upbeat messages: Positive posts generated more positive posts.

So the next time you’re itching to share something about your day, think twice about posting your lingerie or Speedo selfie and making the rest of us feel bad about ourselves. Or, perhaps the rest of us should just get over it and use our knowledge about the emotional ripple effect of social media to prevent ourselves from getting swept up in the unrealistic expectations glaring out from our Facebook news feed.

 

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