It was a quiet, dead-end dirt road in the country. Then the military man next door was charged with rape and murder. Now, the 21 houses on the lane and the nearby village are bubbling with rumours and gossip. Some of them may even be true
Published On Sun Feb 28 2010
Jim Rankin
Sandro Contenta
TWEED–Police tape no longer surrounds the blue-grey cottage at 62 Cosy Cove Lane. Gone, too, are the media satellite trucks and idling Ontario Provincial Police SUVs, its officers coming and going with tools, bags and boxes of potential evidence.
But an alleged serial rapist and killer – the colonel who lived at No. 62 – has left a mark, fuelling rumours and suspicions. In a rural lane where doors were left unlocked, keys are now required.
"I don't think anything (bad) ever happened before this," says Ernestine Cole, who is in her 80s and has lived on the dirt road for two decades with her husband Frank. "We used to call it Geritol Lane because it was full of old people."
Now, she has a new name for Cosy Cove: "Danger Bay."
Life began changing in September when, in the space of two weeks, two women were blindfolded, tied up, photographed and sexually assaulted, one on Cosy Cove and one in a nearby home, reached by a path from the end of the lane.
Suspicion fell on the affable "mayor" of the lane, Larry Jones, when his home was raided by Ontario Provincial Police last October. Police searched for lingerie stolen by the rapist from his victims. Jones pleaded his innocence, but word spread quickly though the close-knit community, and many drew their own conclusions.
Seemingly unconnected crimes followed. A soldier was murdered in her home in Brighton, about 80 kilometres south of Cosy Cove. Then another young woman who lived alone, 35 kilometres south on Highway 37, disappeared.
Three weeks ago, attention turned to the one-storey blue-grey home of Colonel Russell Williams, the soft-spoken base commander of CFB Trenton. A decorated pilot who once flew around VIPs, including a prime minister, he was charged with two rapes and two murders.
"There was not a clue," says Lt.-Col. John Komocki, who has worked and golfed with Williams for the past decade. "There wasn't anything like some facial tic that made you wonder, mmm. No, the guy was a professional."
Komocki is commanding officer of 437 Squadron at Trenton, which flies troops and VIPs on Airbuses. Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, who was found dead inside her Brighton home Nov. 25, worked as a flight attendant in his squadron.
The Star has learned that Comeau and Williams flew together on a job to Germany last fall.
Such connections have many in this community looking to make more links. Among them, the Jan. 23 disappearance of Deborah-Ann Rashotte, 27, of Belleville. She left her home without her wallet and phone. Police and relatives say she often roams and believe her disappearance is unrelated to Williams, but in recent days police have ramped up searches near Tweed, where she has relatives.
Jones, 65, recalls Williams being curious about the location of his hunting camp. Police found the body of 27-year-old Jessica Lloyd near the camp, on Cary Rd., reportedly with the help of Williams.
"Everybody thought it was me," says a relieved Jones.
Two weeks ago, Williams appeared in a Belleville court through a video link from a detention centre. He looked a broken man.
"His job and his wife were everything to him," says Williams' neighbour and friend, Monique Murdoch. "That's what nags me – why? I have to look at this house every day and it kills me because I don't understand how anybody could just throw it all away."
TO UNDERSTAND the life residents hope one day returns, look no further than the hand-painted wood sign at the lane's entrance: "Cozy Cove." It was the handiwork of a now-deceased resident. No one is bothered enough by the spelling error to change it.
The lane hugs one side of a heart-shaped inlet on the northern end of Stoco Lake, named after a Mississauga chief who killed a Mohawk rival and drove away his band. It's lined at points by soaring pines.
Little visible evidence remains of the events that wrenched the residents of this dead-end road out of their idyllic reverie. The ice fishing is good and locals play shinny on a cleared section of the lake.
There are 21 houses – a few traditional cottages, most converted into year-round homes. Several are inhabited by retirees, Larry Jones among them. The other residents are a mixture of local and former city people who commute to work. Williams' daily trip to CFB Trenton took an hour each way.
In the winter, fishing huts and pickup trucks dot the bay. Kids on ATVs do doughnuts. Come summer, it's mainly about the fishing. "Pickerel, pike, muskie, bass, sunfish, crappies, mudcats, suckers – everything," says Jones.
After retiring from the Ministry of Natural Resources, he became Cosy Cove's handyman. He maintains the private road, can fix a leaky pipe, build a house and tell a city-slicker neighbour – namely Williams – where to get lawnmower blades sharpened.
From late October until the arrest of the colonel, Larry Jones was also, in the minds of many, the area rapist. Police searched his home two days before Halloween.
He also sat down for a series of interrogations, during which he says he gleaned a few clues about who police were looking for: a strong, young, hairless man. Jones, married 43 years, is none of those things.
"I'm as hairy as they come, eh," says Jones, opening his shirt.
"This poor guy was getting blamed for everything," says Cosy Cove neighbour Bill Page. "We knew it was never Larry. He told me he has a lot of friends who think he did it. It'll be a while to get trust back."
From the window of his garage, which is tricked out with a full bar, Jones has a clear view of Williams' home. He would see Williams work his remote-controlled camera to photograph birds. He would see Williams stomp on the grass before mowing the lawn to chase out frogs and spare them a horrible fate. And he would see Williams stroll around with his cat, Rosebud, over his shoulder, stroking it "just like it was a baby."
Williams was born in England in 1963. His parents, Nonie and David Williams, soon moved to Canada, where his father, a metallurgist, took a job at Canada's nuclear research lab in Chalk River. The couple had another son, Harvey, but their marriage didn't last.
Williams' mother married Jerry Sovka, a nuclear scientist, in the 1970s. In the late '70s, Sovka's work took the family to South Korea. Williams began high school at Birchmount Collegiate, but finished at Upper Canada College.
A fellow boarder at the college remembers Williams being locked in his room by other students as a prank. The boarder, who asked not to be identified, says Williams got out by tying together bed sheets and climbing out the window.
In the military, one of his first postings, in the early 1990s, was as a rookie flight instructor at the Canadian Forces flying school at Portage la Prairie, Man. There, he married Mary Elizabeth Harriman.
In 2001, Williams' mother and stepfather reportedly divorced. His brother, a Bowmanville doctor, told the National Post that the second divorce caused a deep rift between Williams and him and their mother, which they recently made efforts to repair.
Jones saw Williams' birth father last summer, out in the yard on Cosy Cove pruning a bush with kitchen scissors. Jones offered David Williams an electric trimmer.
Contacted by The Star, the father, who lives in the southern United States, declined to comment. "Please respect my privacy," David Williams wrote in a brief email. Then came a similarly worded email from Williams' mother, Toronto physiotherapist Nonie Sovka, which ended with: "Please respect my need for privacy at this terrible time."
Neither has spoken publicly since their son's arrest.
Harriman and Williams bought the Cosy Cove cottage in 2004 for $178,000. In December, they paid $694,000 for a townhouse on Edison Ave. in Ottawa.
Williams spent most of the year at the cottage. Harriman, executive director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, lived and worked in Ottawa. They would see each other on the weekends. But Murdoch says the cottage became a permanent residence last fall, while they waited for their new Ottawa home to be finished.
"They would walk by and they were always walking hand in hand," said Monique Murdoch, 47, who lives on the other side of 62 Cosy Cove from Jones. "I really think he really loved his wife."
Of the residents of Cosy Cove Lane, Murdoch perhaps knew the couple best. They played cards together, and her husband would sometimes ice fish with Williams.
"We actually taught him how to play cribbage, and he caught on pretty quickly. And he liked ... water skiing – he kind of enjoyed that too," says Murdoch. "He was never cocky or aloof or a loner – I can tell you that much."
The arrest has been hard on her son, a guitar player who bonded with Williams over a mutual love for music.
"I think anybody that really knew him are asking that question: `How could this be possible?'"
Murdoch has kept in touch with Harriman by email since the arrest. Harriman is on leave from her job.
"She's an absolutely wonderful person, a very caring and considerate woman," says Ross Fetterly, the air force officer assisting Williams' wife.
Janet Wright was Williams' executive assistant for two years while he was head of 437 Squadron at Trenton, a position he held until 2006. During that stint, he also served six months as commander of Camp Mirage, a secret air force staging base in Dubai. Williams invited Wright to Cosy Cove soon after he'd bought it. "He was very happy. It was just what they were looking for, he'd say."
She says Williams "couldn't have been nicer" as a boss, but she did recall one incident that stuck with her. "One day I went into his office and the phone looked like it had been broken, you know, like when you put the receiver down really hard."
Wright spoke with Williams after the home invasion sexual assaults had turned Cosy Cove upside down. Williams said he didn't know much about the attacks, but mentioned that "Mary Elizabeth is upset about it."
She last spoke with Williams the week before his arrest. Nothing seemed amiss. The news that he'd been charged not only with the attacks but with murder, hit hard. She has received counselling from a psychologist and padre at the base.
IN THE VILLAGE of Tweed, population 1,500, it is hard to find anyone who doesn't know someone who is part of the Cosy Cove drama. Take Michael Devolin, a 55-year-old meat cutter at the Value Mart. His cousin is Jones' wife. Her nephew is with the local OPP. Devolin works with a relative of one of the sexual assault victims.
"Everybody is going on living, but people don't talk more than three minutes before gravitating to this subject. Everyone is just freaked out," Devolin says. "You know what a small town is like. Everyone embellishes the story."
There's talk along the lane that the Williams cottage should one day be razed, as was done with the Port Dalhousie home of killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
"It'll be pretty hard to walk by that house," says Cosy Cove resident Bill Page. "Everybody is thinking about it. Come spring, when everyone gets outside, it'll be a little better."
Coincidentally, the judge who handled the Bernardo trial, Patrick LeSage, was in Tweed in October to sell the family cottage on Stoco Lake. He grew up here. His family ran a car lot and garage, and later a fuel business.
LeSage's cottage is a short stroll from both Cosy Cove Lane and the home where the first woman was attacked, but he'd never heard of Williams before he was charged.
"It just puts a whole community under a pall for a long time," says LeSage, "everybody looking, you know, sort of at everybody else, saying, `Who did this?'"
Police have officially released 62 Cosy Cove Lane to Williams' family. After a fresh carpeting of snow this week, the driveway, which Larry Jones used to offer to plow, remained unshovelled.
There are no signs of life.
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