A New Kind of Monster by Timothy Appleby

go off in his life? When I first heard of it, I said, ‘I don’t believe it, there’s a mistake—there
is
a mistake.’ Then, as the evidence starts coming out, you ask yourself: ‘Did I miss something?’
    â€œHe was intense, no question. I recall talking to him when it seemed like he was looking at the back of your head through your eyes. But he was also cool. I’ve been a pilot for thirty-eight years, and a big part of my life has been screening pilots. And one of the things we look for in a pilot is the ability to remain calm and cool under pressure, and he struck me as having that ability … And in a sense, it turns out maybe he had it too strong.”
    Midway through his tour at Portage la Prairie, Williams did something that surprised his few close friends: he got married. Jeff Farquhar recalls first hearing about the bride-to-be. “I had tripped out to Winnipeg and we were driving along number 1 highway toward Moose Jaw when he brought it up. He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a girlfriend … I met her in Calgary.’ ”
    Williams was marrying someone whose long professional career and pleasant, self-effacing personality would complement his own. After his arrest, some people who knew the couple casually said the union looked to be less a marriage of great affection than one of convenience, and one that seemed to work extremely well. But others said there was a genuinely strong bond betweenhusband and wife, and certainly Williams’s palpable distress about her during his police confession suggests that.
    Mary Elizabeth Harriman was an only child, five years older than her husband, and after marrying Williams she retained her maiden name. When they met, she had a University of Guelph bachelor’s degree in applied science, specializing in nutrition, and had just completed an MBA in adult education at St. Frances Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Now she was working with the Dairy Nutrition Council of Alberta, part of a lifelong commitment to health-related causes. She went on to join the Ottawa-based Heart and Stroke Foundation, for whom she would work for many years, rising to the prestigious position of associate executive director, the post she held when her husband was arrested. The federal government’s lobbying database, which keeps track of how corporations and associations try to influence policy, shows that she had by then spent more than ten years pressing for tougher government action in combating smoking, trans fats in foods and childhood obesity.
    Before getting married, Williams and Harriman shared a rented apartment in Portage la Prairie, listed in the phone directory under both of their names. Then, one day before they married, they paid $75,000 for a detached home on Wilkinson Crescent. The small, nondenominational wedding ceremony took place at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on June 1, 1991.
    Williams was twenty-eight, Harriman thirty-three. Both sets of parents attended, as did the onetime girlfriend Williams had dated before going to U of T. Farquhar was the master of ceremonies, a favor Williams reciprocated at Farquhar’s own wedding four years later. “It was nice, a little less formal than I was used to,” he recalls. “About eighteen people were there, I think, but I didn’t really know her at all. I really met her on the date of the wedding.”
    The topic of children came up that day, Farquhar says. “I remember slapping him on the back after they’d taken their vows and saying, ‘Are we going to see a bunch of little Williamses running around?’ And he said, ‘Ah no, Jeff. We’ve discussed this and it’s just not in the cards.’ ” Another wedding guest asked Williams the same question and got the same answer. The world was too unstable a place to bring any more children into it, he said glibly. More likely, he simply wasn’t interested. “Russ