Canadian True Crime - Russell Williams Debrief - with Criminologist Lee Mellor

Episode Date: October 13, 2019

[Bonus content between episodes ] I had lots of questions after covering Russell Williams - so I had a conversation with Dr Lee Mellor - Canadian profiler, author, criminologist and serial killer expert. He's also the host of Murder Was The Case.In typical Lee fashion, he doesn't hold back on any of his opinions. Definitely lots of food for thought. Disclaimer voiceover: Robin Warder from The Trail Went ColdTheme song by We Talk of Dreams Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Please note that this episode contains views, thoughts and opinions that are intended to shed light on this case, but do not necessarily reflect those of the Canadian True Crime podcast. Please use your discretion when listening. Hi everyone. Don't worry, the next episode is still coming as scheduled on October 15th. But in the meantime, here's a bit of bonus content for you, something that I haven't really ever done before. As I was putting together the Russell Williams episodes, I had so many questions about why he did the things he did. So I wrote them all down and had a conversation with someone educated in the space that I know could shed some light. And that is Dr.

Lee Mellor, Canadian serial killer expert, author and fellow podcast host. I will let him introduce himself. So without further ado, here's our conversation. Hey Lee, how's it going? Actually pretty good. I have returned to Brighton, Ontario recently, moved away from the big smoke. And I find myself out here and you're asking me about Ross Williams. Well, Ross Williams killed a woman in Brighton, Ontario while I was living here last. And this is a town of 10,000 people or less. So I'm actually kind of eager to revisit these crimes. It's been about a decade since I really spent time with them, but at the time they're at front

and centre of my life. When I came to the end of this case and I realised that I had so many unanswered questions about Russell Williams and the circumstances, I couldn't think of anyone better to ask these questions to than you. And I was wondering if you could give my listeners a little bit of background information on who you are and how you came to be, the person that I ask about, Russell Williams. Well, it began with me writing the first exhaustive book on Canadian serial murder. It started that back in 2009. Of course, that was right around the time that Russell Williams became

active in November, I believe it was, of 2009. And then I was writing it through 2010. So literally as I was writing the book on Canadian serial murder, at the same time I have a serial murderer operating around the area that I'm in, which is probably the least likely place for a serial murderer to be. So I was kind of pinching myself. I'm watching the news headlines and part of me is going, it's a serial killer, it's a serial killer. Another part of me is going, no, you're just thinking that because all you're doing is eating, breathing, you know, drinking, sleeping serial killers. And it turned out to be an actual serial killer. After I'd finished writing that book, I then published it, sold over 5,000 copies of it.

And then I wrote the sequel to that rampage Canadian mass murder and spree killing. When that was published, I was then enrolled in a PhD program. Those books apparently counted as a master's for me. So that was handy. And I enrolled in this PhD program in which I used psychology, sociology, criminology and semiotics to study abnormal homicide and sex crimes. So everything from serial murder to colts to rapists and pedophiles, necrophilia, all that. And I've achieved my doctorate. And since then, I've been doing my podcast, Murder was the Case. I interview all kinds of people around the topic of murder and violence, sex crime. So I've had authors, podcasters, cops, criminals who did it, criminals who didn't do it, jurors, filmmakers,

you name it, just to begin. So there's all that. And plus, I also am the chair of the Academic Committee for the American Investigative Society of Cool Cases. And I've worked probably about a dozen cool case homicides through that organization. That's really, really cool. And for that reason, I wanted to get started on asking you my leftover questions after finishing the Russell Williams case. So my first question is, why did he start acting on his deviant thoughts so late in life? Like, we know that he was in his 40s when he actually started breaking and entering, and then it escalated from there. But why was it that he waited for so long? Do you think? Well, I think I would preface that by saying we can safely assume

that the first recorded incidents were in his 40s. But I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in his life, he'd also broken into homes or committed some sort of fetish burglaries. That doesn't mean he was doing it his whole life. He might have decided to kind of clamp down at that at one point and kept the lid on it. So what he's displaying is compulsive, paraffelic, violent behavior. And so this means he would have developed these sort of tendencies from a very young age, maybe as early as like, you know, 10s sometimes, but certainly by the time he was done high school, he would have formed sexuality based on dominance of women. And let's just call them say, fetishistic or paraffelic disorders. So I think that the reason that he didn't act out to his 40s

is that there were plenty of social controls or and personal controls in his way. I don't think that he really ever wanted this side of his personality to blossom. So he was always manning the gate to make sure that it didn't. And so the kind of controls that he would use to keep that at bay was being so ambitious as a start. If you look at the guy's life, he's a workaholic. When he's not a workaholic, he's playing sports, he's involving himself in community events. And I think he's doing this all for like to the extreme that he's doing it, and he's excelling in the military and other aspects of life, because it's literally his way of warding off this dark side of himself. And along the way he gets married, I think that his wife once again comes in very

handy as a type of control. So he can he doesn't have to worry about being perceived as being, I don't know, perhaps gay or unable to meet a woman or unwilling to she normalizes him. She closes that avenue of conversation down. Look, I have a wife now, right? I'm married, no questions asked. I'm normal. And then what happens in his 40s is that he moves away from his wife. I don't think that that is necessarily what does it. It's not like him moving away from his wife means that that cover goes away. He can still use that social cover. But I think that she probably had somewhat of a regulating effect on him, knowing that he couldn't just do whatever he wanted at any time in his own home. And so that gate then opens at the same time. He probably

reaches the zenith of where he can go in his military career. He's commander of the most important Air Force Base in Canada, CFB Trenton. So now he's got to the final level of his professional ambitions. And he's also likely coming face to face with the end of his own sexuality. And realizing that if he waits any longer, all of the fantasies that he's had that he's been struggling to control throughout his whole life that he's really not ever going to be able to realize them. You know, the older he gets, the more difficult what he wants to do is going to be. And I think there's probably another factor that we don't know about. I've read that he was on some sort of different medication. And apparently there's a secret here that hasn't

been released to the public. So there is an X factor. And I think that that when combined with everything else I've just talked about is what brought the wall crashing down and allowed the sex murderer, tentacle, fetish monster to come pouring into reality through Russell Williams. How did you find out about this secret that you're talking about? It was in the newspaper actually, Dr. John Bradford, who is a psychiatrist, I believe, either that or very well respected psychologist. He said that Russ Williams agreed to sit down and talk to him about what it was that happened and that they had that conversation. But he will never say what it is because Williams agreed on the terms that Bradford never reveal it.

And as Bradford is by far the older of the two, I think we can expect that he'll probably take that secret to his grave. And, you know, so it's not like Williams gonna die first and he can say, okay, I can finally tell you guys what it is. So unless you're able to contact him and have no work, you're trying to convince him on getting into what that thing that Russ confided in him was, you're gonna have to do with my speculative but informed analysis in the meantime. I have zero charm so back to his wife. Do you think that he had like genuine feelings of romantic love towards her or he was just kind of fond of her or and obviously this is just speculation but it seemed like he really truly loved her and cared for her. Do you think

that that exists with alongside the man that he was on the inside? We're getting a little bit Freudian here and that's always suspect but when I conceptualized this case, I thought she's his mother figure. She is what keeps him being sensible and keeps him on the track and keeps him clean and presentable. And I think their relationship was very much one of convenience from what I've read about their relationship. It was basically sexless. In fact, they might never have had sex to be honest with you. It's almost like, look, I need a husband but I'm not really into a sexual relationship with men but I need a cover and I still want some companionship. Great, me too. Let's do this thing. That's the type of relationship that I believe that they had

and given his crimes, I don't think he could arise to the level of what we would call love although that term itself, you could argue, are we even talking about the same thing when we say love much less consensus than hate? But I would say no, not what we would think of as true romantic love, probably more like the sort of attachment that one would have to a female relative or really close female friend and that he did care about her but I think he probably cared more about her opinions of him and that's where that mother aspect comes in is he wants to always look good in her eyes. Wow, what do you think is the difference between these people who have the dark thoughts and don't do anything about it and then those who act like notwithstanding this

secret that you're talking about? Well, there can be any number of things that cause them to act but the stock explanation is that they simply have a different brain so we're talking about poor functionality in the prefrontal cortex of the brain which allows for people to restrain themselves and control their impulses and urges. Another is the amygdala part of the brain where people have empathy for others and that's sort of the emotional center so obviously if you don't feel bad about hurting people whether they are individual victims or society as a whole that is another missing control as would be the impulse regulation of the prefrontal cortex if it wasn't functioning properly so those are sort of the stock answers and those can be impaired to

different degrees and I think in Russell Williams case they were likely not quite as impaired as most serial murderers but still would have been that way. We also have to wonder about him going on this medication and if Bradford's secret had anything to do with that and so a change in the chemical composition of somebody's brain obviously could lead them to act completely differently than they have for the rest of their life. What I'm not saying is that this would have brought up all of these sexual desires and fetishes in him and the desire to commit violence against women but it might have kicked down the door at least sort of lubed up the hinges so the difference between those who act and those who don't is I would say largely biological but then we also

have to look at the circumstances of someone's life as well and people are subject to different strains and stresses some people go through traumas and hardships that others don't and the more of those that you encounter and the way in which you choose to handle them will dictate the way that you think about your place in the world and how much you want to adhere to what is supposed to be done anymore how much you want to keep walking the line and some people just decide that they're on the outside now or that they'll never have a slice of the pie and that the world owes them something or any number of justifications like that and when so you can have that paired with the biology or it can be something altogether separate or it can just be the biology so there's no one

answer to your question but I think I've given you a kind of buffet there where you can see how that the many routes that someone would take to arrive at the point where they go from dark thought to dark action he is clearly an intelligent man I often wondered as I was going through the crimes why did he do such stupid things along the way for example he didn't appear to wear a condom there was DNA found everywhere because he ejaculated it all over the place all the photos and the videos he took he was careless with you know his tire tracks and his boot prints in the snow do you think that he perhaps wanted to be caught why was he so careless okay so I'll start with just the why was he so careless part and but I've got to divide it into

two things because but I've got to divide it into two things because I think there's two separate answers to different mistakes that he made so we're gonna start with ejaculating all over the place in the age of DNA not using a condom taking photos and videos I would group that into what I would call his signature behaviors so it is his motive he's not going to enjoy doing this unless he ejaculates he's not going to enjoy it unless there's a condom involved he needs the photos and videos so that he can relive his fantasy so the reason he does that is because it's the entire motive for the crime like it would be probably easier to get away with robbing a bank if you didn't take any money but if your goal in robbing the bank is actually to take the money and that's

at the core of your motive then even if there's a die pack that explodes on you or the bills can be traced or whatever you're still gonna do it because you're motivated by money he's motivated by sex without a condom involving ejaculation and then reliving the whole experience through photos and videos now when it comes to the other parts of the forensic evidence that are not related to his sexuality so leaving the tire tracks the boot prints I think that's a little bit more difficult but how I would conceptualize that is just because you're in just because you're in sorry just because you are an intelligent person in an institutional way so you know how to follow the rules you can learn skills how to fly a plane or whatever I think that's different than criminal competence

the sort of cunning and street smarts that you get from frankly probably having committed lots more crimes before and having been caught for lesser things so because Williams doesn't have a criminal record before all of this comes to light we can assume that he's never been caught for doing this sort of thing in the past and it's the sort of what doesn't kill me makes me stronger principle in that if you are constantly committing crimes and getting caught for them and you live a criminal life you learn through negative results what not to do so you often hear rapists who graduate to murder say well I got caught because a witness told on me next time I'm going to kill them so they don't do that so they can't do that and the same would go for

simple little things that seem obvious to us looking from our point of view but mistakes that we might make ourselves because especially if we were driven by this sexual compulsion like he was so I imagine that he was so much into this idea of being the commando the professional the home invader I think that was very much how he conceptualized himself as almost like this elite recon person and so he was so much into playing out that role even picking the locks which to be honest with you no burglar does that it takes too much time you just smash the window and reach in but I think that was a part of his fantasy too not necessarily the sexual part holy but a fantasy of who he was and he got caught so much in the wearing camouflage or sorry dark

clothing and you know sort of blocking out his face aspect of it that he forgot about the little things like hey if I park my car in the snow it's going to leave tire tracks so two separate answers to that question but I'm pretty confident with with my answers to those Do you have a passion project that you're ready to take to the next level? Squarespace makes it easy for anyone to create an engaging web presence grow a brand and sell anything from your products to the content you create and even your time when I launched this passion project six years ago I needed some kind of online hub to manage all the non-podcasting tasks that come with podcasting I chose Squarespace because it's an all-in-one platform that seamlessly

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your visibility in search engines and I love the powerful insights I can get from the analytics tools helping me better understand who's visiting the site where they came from and how they're interacting with it do you have a passion project or business idea or something to sell go to squarespace.com slash ctc for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code ctc to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace.com slash ctc with offer code ctc and get your passion project off the ground today. This might be a stupid question but it is one that came to me nonetheless why did he always strip completely naked like one would think that you could just keep your

shirt on if your goal was was sexual why why did he always have to be naked why was he standing in a backyard naked and I'm going to give you probably what sounds like a very stock answer to that and it's simply that in his fantasies that he had been masturbating to thinking about this behavior throughout his whole life he was naked in those fantasies I think also there may have been a quality of him that was somewhat exhibitionist like no joke intended but it's going to be funny the kind of like look at it sort of attitude yeah that simple really it certainly wasn't due to forensic awareness or anything like that because we've already covered the fact that he left plenty of clues so yeah I would just say that that's what he wanted sexually so it goes to

signature again interesting another thing I noticed was with marie france komo he was violent from the start and and she fought back hard and that seemed to be like quite taxing on him so with Jessica Lloyd he seemed to tell her again from the get go that he was going to let her go make her believe that if she complied that he would let her go is this some kind of tactic to make her more compliant and and make the whole thing easier for him or was he just trying something else out to see how it would affect her or I think potentially both we were talking before about learning from previous crimes so he might have reflected back on the marie france komo murder and said wow the way that I went about that was not smart I almost lost control of her so maybe

this sudden blitz attack without any without emphasis on the I'm just trying to do this that's not going to work and also but we have different victims too I mean marie france komo is military and Jessica Lloyd is civilian so that might have colored the way that he thought that they may have reacted to him and thus has chosen ammo ammo is what we're talking about here and how it differs from signature and I would say that he went from what we would call more of a more of a reliance on a blitz attack approach in the marie france komo murder to using ruse in the Jessica Lloyd murder so yeah he never thought that that he was going to let her go that was never on the box he was just hoping to get her to be compliant so that he could use her

for as long as he wanted and for whatever he did wanted and the best way to do that is through telling a lie look just give me what I want and you can go home so I'm always advising people whenever someone pulls a gun on you or threatens you with violence and says if you simply do this then everything will be okay you have to really take that with a grain of salt and you should be wary of all the things that could potentially happen if you don't resist now I'm not saying that that means you should resist but you should be cognizant of something like say somebody bursts into your kitchen with a gun and points it at you and says I only want to rob you let me tie up you and your family that that person could be instead of being just a criminal desperate for money it

could be someone who's just lying to you and that person would have been BTK killer Dennis Rader so yeah I think he just said it so that Jessica would go along with it and as long as she thought if I just keep giving him what he wants I'll get out of this situation I mean that's that's pretty much it so he got to maximize his fantasy and pleasure with her and then at the end of it just didn't live up to his promise my next question is about the child porn that was found on the computer that he refused to acknowledge it seemed to be revealed exclusively in a book called a new kind of monster by Timothy Appleby and in the book the quote was technically he would not be classed as a pedophile despite the

child porn found on his computer because his sexual interests were much wider than that I'm wondering if you can shed some light on what this means yeah I hate to be uncharitable to Timothy Appleby but I don't think he has a very good understanding of criminals or whoever he was consulting does not have a solid understanding of the type of murderer that Ross Williams is so to begin it's called a new kind of monster and the premise of the book is he's a serial killer but he's not a psychopath we have a new kind of monster it's like Tim there's a bunch of them that aren't psychopaths just because the majority are it doesn't mean that they're all psychopaths so even the title of his book the premise of that is flawed and that carries over to

the we can't call him a pedophile because he has other sexual interests quote that you just gave me you can be a pedophile and have other sexual interests in fact it's known that people with paraphernalia tend to have an average of four so it's not like I'm just a pedophile and nothing else it's like no you can be a pedophile foot fetishist sexual sadist who isn't the balloons and the sound they make when you rub on them I mean that's entirely possible so I would just say that he doesn't really have a decent understanding or any understanding whatsoever of what paraphernalia is and what people with paraphernalia are like so I don't want to throw shit at Tim but it is what it is I'm sorry that's why I asked you I it didn't it didn't ring true to me can you explain

this psychopath thing that you're talking about so you don't think that Russell Williams was a psychopath or a sociopath or am I reading that right Timothy Abelby said that Russell Williams wasn't a psychopath and so before we had this talk tonight I decided I would check that myself because I actually know how to administer the test and I have enough information on Williams where I thought I could do so and get within a reasonable approximation of his psychopathy score now going into this I was biased towards the thought that he probably isn't a psychopath now what I mean by a psychopath is somebody who scores a 30 or higher on the psychopathic checklist revised by Robert Hare and yeah I was pretty confident that Russell Williams would not hit

that score and he fell pretty short of it I would say he's about maybe two two and a half times more psychopathic than the average person but I'm not sure that that explains his crimes whatsoever so yeah definitely not a psychopath and not a sociopath either but one thing that we have to understand about psychopathy is it's not categorical it's not you are a psychopath or you are not a psychopath it's a gradient and if you look at it as something that happens at the brain level you could almost pair this with the degree of non-functionality in those areas I talked about so we talked about the prefrontal cortex and how it blocks us from acting on impulses we don't want to and we talked about the amygdala and how it allows us to empathize or sympathize and relate

to other people and know that they're feeling now it's not like those are just on or off they can be sort of on you know think of it as a skill of one to one hundred of how much they can be damaged and so yeah Williams is slightly psychopathic but not much and I think that you might see that reflected in his brain scans you know there might be some white matter more so than average in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala but not really enough to be having that as the explanation for his crimes certainly not a sociopath because sociopaths are defined by patterns of criminality and they're essentially products of society and Williams came from a very privileged societal position and he shows no other pattern of crime. So just to go off topic what would you say are

the main differences between Russell Williams and say Paul Bernardo who I've read was definitely classified as a psychopath? Yeah Paul Bernardo is highly psychopathic I've actually run the test on him too and yeah he's always got a score somewhere hovering around the mid 30s the maximum score you can get is 40 so Bernardo if you look at his life before the arrest for the murders yeah he wasn't necessarily convicted of any crimes but he was making his living off smuggling cigarettes he was committing minor crimes all the time like stealing license plates to put on his card to help with smuggling he raped and sexually assaulted countless women yeah I mean I think at this point we're realistically looking at over 50 what I'm getting at here is that his criminality

is constant and it's versatile and with Williams the only type of crime he really seems to be focused on are these sexual homicides unlike Bernardo so that is a main difference there too. Also if you watch their affect in the interviews Bernardo is very much stereotypical of a psychopath in that he seems bored like he's in hot water but he's he's really not interested in being there anyways he's you know these cops are boring and he's arrogant when he's speaking with them and he quickly takes control of the conversation and that's exactly what you would expect of a psychopath that's right out of the playbook. Russ Williams seems like a completely normal guy up until the point where it becomes obvious to him

that he's in deep trouble and not getting out of it and that's when we start to see him reluctantly let his dark side out a bit but you can tell that whereas Bernardo doesn't really have a problem with himself and what he did that Williams is very much ashamed of it and doesn't want to be viewed as a criminal so that last part got a little bit off-topic there but I mean honestly I could talk for an hour about the differences between them as a you know psychopath and non-psychopath but I would say those are the strongest indicators and manifestations of the psychopathic serial killer behavior versus the non-psychopathic serial killer behavior. So another question I had was I was quite surprised by how upset Russell got about the divorce of his mother and his stepdad

and as we know it caused a huge family rift involving his brother and he barely spoke to his mom or his brother for for the next seven years and they tried to make amends with him but it didn't go anywhere. I noticed you know Russell was in his late 30s when they divorced and it seems like his reaction and and the grudge that he held over the years was completely disproportionate and weird for for a grown man who was married in his 30s to have. Do you have any insight into that and did do you think it may have played a part in his his actions? I have a hypothesis but before I say it I do want to put this on the table it's just very possible that he had a heat of the moment argument with his mother and brother in which some things were said by both sides or one

side that he took umbrage with and just reacted by thinking well you know what if that's what you're going to say or that's what you think or you know typical family arguments I'm just not going to have anything to do with you. It could be something that simple you know they do have lives that are comparable to our own however if you want to go back to the sort of mother theory my hypothesis is that he likely had a cold mother an unaffectionate mother who didn't really have a lot of time for him and probably not for his brother but certainly not for him and that actually this interest in women's underwear might have been him going into his mother's space and because he couldn't physically or emotionally get close to her maybe putting on some of her bras or panties or

lingerie and that being his way of dealing with the fact that he never actually felt close to his own mother and then actually playing a part in the development of his sexuality so if he had these sort of feelings towards his mother I think that later on in life he might have become very angry at his mother and that the slightest thing could cause him to just want to expel her from his experience and disown her maybe it's a way of saying like well you know you weren't there for me you never showed love for me so I don't need you you know I'm gonna shut you out so that's just a hypothesis but I think if you focus on the connection between mother and the dynamics in childhood there and his penchant for women's clothing I think it's a pretty decent hypothesis

considering we're more or less otherwise fumbling around in the dark no pun intended by all accounts Russell seemed to be quite remorseful he he was seen to cry he issued what appeared to be a sincere apology to the families of the victims but then it came out that he had not paid the $8,800 that he owed in victim surcharge fines and then a debt collection agency pursued him for those I feel like if he was sincerely remorseful then he would have paid those fines at least what what do you have to say about his expressions of remorse and the sincerity of those Russell Williams didn't have remorse Russell Williams had regret and when he cried he cried for himself potentially for his wife a little bit but mostly he was crying for

the fact that his reputation had been soiled and that all his dirty secrets would be coming out and that he'd be spending the rest of his life behind bars now he might have channeled that in a way which made it appear that it was remorse but as you said there's like actually walking the walk and talking the talk and so he talked the talk reasonably well I never did believe him but afterwards when he asked to walk it it becomes pretty evident that yeah I was confirmed in my suspicions that it's regret that he felt not remorse do you feel that his wife there was a chance that she had an inkling that anything was happening there like she she said that she had no idea and she was devastated and destroyed by by the revelation of what he'd done but I feel

like she surely must have seen or known something about about any of this that's very difficult to say it is hard to imagine her having no inkling she might have had a kind of cognitive dissonance and looked past certain behaviors and then forgot about them you know her not wanting to address there's something up with my husband so I'll just put it out of my mind and and dealing with it like that but it's also possible that he used his career in the military at a very high level to obfuscate some of the telltale signs so I'll give you a concrete example when they went and searched his garage I believe it was they found all kinds of underwear that he had taken from these fetish burglaries in boxes in the garage that's if I remember it correctly

it could be the basement or something but yeah whatever he had yeah like hundreds of pairs of underwear that he'd stolen and you're thinking well how come she didn't know about that that's really strange that you'd be able to keep all that well if he pulled the don't go into the garage or don't look into here because it's top secret classified confidential Canadian military stuff on her then she would have a reason to respect that especially someone who is pretty I would say pretty married to a straight-laced place in the system type of life so yeah all he needs to say is that and then she thinks okay well I can't go in there because it's secret documents and I don't want to get russ in trouble and I wouldn't understand them anyways I'm not really interested

and in reality it's underwear from fetish burglaries or photographs that he'd taken you know you can't use this computer because this is the one for my military stuff I think that he very much would have used that to cover for the criminal activities that he was doing yeah so with all of the questions that I've asked and your knowledge on this case and your qualifications is there anything else that you think my listeners might want to know about this that I haven't asked okay yeah there's something that really disturbs me about this case that seems to indicate that Williams has a more disturbing pathology than perhaps Bernardo and that's hard for us to believe but Bernardo recorded the sexual assaults of his victims but he never recorded the murders of them and so I think when we look at the

Bernardo case we can look at somebody who is a sexually sadistic rapist and we can say well look he's creating porn of himself with his victims for himself but it is about the torturous and violent sexual assault but it is about the sex ultimately even though that has a heavy dominance aspect what Russell Williams recorded with Marie France Como was her death slowly suffocating on duct tape why would he record her death why would he do that I mean you can assume that Bernardo recorded it because he didn't need it to get off maybe it was just a chore to be done later and maybe he thought well this will really get me in trouble if anybody ever finds this so it's just smart not to record it but for Williams he found it necessary to record her slowly dying and because I believe

he was using all of this media as pornography we then have to ask was Russell Williams actually aroused by watching Marie France Como die to the point where he wanted to record it and later watch it and masturbate to it because it was so arousing to him I think that's a really sinister thought but the evidence certainly seems to point in that direction I mean why not just turn off the camera at that point well that's that's like super interesting and terrifying thanks again to Lee Mella for giving up his time to answer my questions definitely a lot to unpack in this case if you'd like to hear more insights from Lee and his special guests go and check out his podcast murder was the case one thing that might be of interest is his recent interview with Rodney

Stafford the father of Victoria Stafford which was actually recorded in a small office at the royal cinema right before our live show in Toronto this summer so I'll sign off now and I'll be seeing you again in just a few days with the next scheduled episode you you