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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Episode 127. And I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weyborg Thun. I am in the middle of moving, so I apologize if this episode reaches you a few hours later than my usual punctual uploads. It truly is quite stressful to move house.
And I'm really looking forward to recording my next episode in my new home office. I am overwhelmed by all the kind words from my dear listeners that have come in the last weeks. Not just from the USA, but the entire world. I really do appreciate it.
It is calming in these troublesome times to know that we can connect as fellow humans across continents. Someone who did not appreciate his fellow human beings is tonight's subject. I have been looking forward to covering this case for quite a while, and I thought it appropriate to revisit the pleasant land of Canada once again.
To my shame, I have not been able to visit Canada in person yet, and looking at how the world seems to, well, frankly, burn, I doubt I will have the chance any time soon. But, thanks to the internet, I can visit, even though it is only a virtual visit.
To provide some much-needed escapism, I start tonight's brand-new Serial Killer Expo, say, by traveling back in time. You see, this is part one in a longer series on none other than the Killer Colonel himself, David Russell Williams.
Before we start the show proper, I want to, as always, publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club.
These twenty, and I am sad to see a few have left since last time, serial killer aficionados are as follows: Anne, Anthony, Cassandra, Christie, Evan, James, Jennifer, Jesse, Kathy, Lisa, Lizbeth, Mark, Mickey,
Monica, Russell, Samira, Skortnia, Vanessa, William, and Zarsha. You truly help keep this show alive, and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
If you wish to join the TSK Producers Club, or if you just want exclusive bonus content like ad-free episodes on a wide variety of depraved and dark human behavior, go to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast now. Deep River has long been one of the jewels of the Upper Ottawa Valley.
The lush, green Laurentian mountains on the northern Quebec shore of the Ottawa River providing a spectacular backdrop.
Tucked into the river's south shoreline, all but invisible from the nearby Trans-Canada Highway that links it to the Chalk River Research Laboratories ten miles down the road, the small town was the first place in Canada that Russell Williams called home.
He was a few weeks shy of five when he, his British-born parents, and his younger brother Harvey arrived there more than forty years ago, riding a wave of incoming scientists, technicians, and their families, attracted by high-paying jobs, and what in many ways was an idyllic existence.
Affluent and remote, a white-collar oasis of Ph.D.-toting intellectuals plunked down in a rugged northern landscape. Deep River was by any yardstick unusual. In many ways, it perhaps resembled the nuclear scientists with their families that settled in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II.
Deep River has always been called an A-town and is still joined at the hip to Chalk River, with AECL remaining by far the area's principal employer, but no longer does the corporation own the big comfortable houses in which the scientists and their families lived. Naturally, much has changed since then.
the trees that dot deep river's neat curvy residential streets are thicker and taller the many sail-boats that used to be moored off the deep river yacht and tennis club the town's social hub during the two years that russell williams lived there have largely been replaced by house-boats
The small downtown core looks different too, reconfigured after a big fire tore through it in 1998, destroying the landmark Giant Tiger Store and half a dozen other businesses. No longer an all-white enclave, there is a growing immigrant population, mostly from Asia.
And the town's relationship with Atomic Energy Canada Limited, the Crown Corporation tasked with managing the country's nuclear program, has also evolved. Back in the glory days, the whole town was owned by the company. You had to work for the company to live in the houses there. Today, unlike secret sites like Oak Ridge in the US, Deep River lives on and thrives.
There are about 7,000 inhabitants living there, and most of them are quite affluent. If not rich, they're mostly, just as Russell Williams' family was, solidly upper-middle class. Waves lap at the golden beaches, a magnet for family picnics, just a few minutes' walk from the downtown.
Sunrises over the river are legendary, and a short drive away is the eastern edge of Algonquin Park. Stroll around deep river and you will be hard put to see a piece of litter. Serious crime barely exists. In 2009, the 10 officer police force recorded 199 occurrences, two-thirds involving theft or other property crime.
Violent crime is almost unheard of. Parents can also rest assured that their children can play in or near the residential streets, as everyone there knows to drive slowly and safely. But it was not the town's agreeable environment and lifestyle that brought the Williams family to Deep River.
Rather, it was Chalk River's cutting-edge lab facilities whose jobs lured scientists from around the world, principally from Great Britain.
The Chalk River Laboratories were the sole reason for existence for Deep River as they are today. Chalk River remains the source of more than one-third of the world's, and almost all of North America's, supply of medical diagnostic isotopes, a safe radioactive material used chiefly to diagnose illness.
The atomic theme is ubiquitous in the town. Numerous schools and streets are named after pioneers of Canada's nuclear development. A stylized atom logo adorns city stationery, and atom power has long had a place within the local culture. A 1950s rock band called themselves Phil Rowe and the Atomic Five
and there was a men's basketball team named the Neutrons. This was the milieu to which the Williams family transplanted themselves. Six years after Canada's first nuclear power plant, the Can Do prototype went online near the Chalk River Labs. And for a four-year-old boy, uprooted from the grey English Midlands, moving there must have been a grand adventure.
william's background was one of economic comfort and high achievement not just by him but most of his peers and neighbors as well it has proven difficult to find much details about william's early childhood much because he himself has refused to elaborate much on it
Later in life, when he eventually ended up under arrest and his deviant and extreme crimes became public knowledge, many people have tried to find out if something in his past triggered his bloodlust in adulthood. There are some details we can gleam, although sparse. David Russell Williams was born on the 7th of March, 1963.
in the small town of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, southwest of Birmingham, where both his parents attended university after marrying in Wales the year before. Russell's father, Cedric David Williams, Dave for short, had emerged from his studies as a skilled metallurgist.
In an era when most UK citizens could readily immigrate to Canada if they chose, opportunity beckoned in the shape of a job offer from the company Atomic Energy Canada Limited. So, in early 1968, the Williams family packed their bags and launched their rather strange new life.
Constructed amid great secrecy and built in part by German prisoners of war, the Chonk River Nuclear Research Laboratories were created in 1944 by the federal government as part of the Nuclear Manhattan Project, which created the atom bomb.
The basic idea, enthusiastically promoted by Winston Churchill, was that US and British know-how would fuse with Canadian uranium, all in a suitably isolated location. Deep River was the company town built to house the scientists and their families who poured in.
To this day, the myth persists that Chalk River was the source of the plutonium in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In fact, the war had ended by the time the first Chalk River nuclear activity began.
Nonetheless, it remained for many years a highly enigmatic enterprise. Both Deep River and Chalk River were patrolled by armed guards with access to either place controlled by military checkpoints. Deliberately placed upwind and upriver from Chalk River to avoid possible fallout from its reactors,
Deep River sits between the Trans-Canada Highway and the Ottawa River, about 125 miles northwest of Ottawa, and a 45-minute drive from the big Petawawa Army Base. Everything in Deep River was meticulously planned, so much so that years before the Williams family arrived, its critics mocked it as sterile, artificial and oppressive.
Everything was regulated, color-coded and prim and proper. Behaving outside of the strict norm expected, not just by your peers, but by the company who owned the town, was not only frowned upon, but downright illicit. In short, Dave Williams and his family had arrived in a small town with a sophisticated urban feel to it,
full of skilled professionals with high expectations. The work was steady, the money was good, and home was a big three-bedroom duplex on Lechheron Street that the Williamses bought in March 1968, the same month Russell turned five.
An elderly English-born widow who lived in the other half of the duplex at the time, and is still in Deep River today, remembers Russell's parents as standoffish and aloof. Russell, however, was a lively, friendly little boy who would chat across the fence, sometimes in very English-oriented slang.
One time he solemnly informed her that his younger brother Harvey had just spent a penny in the garden flowers, a euphemism for relieving oneself that was dated even then. Like everyone else who learned of his arrest four decades later, the former neighbor was horrified and extremely surprised by the news.
His primary school teacher remembers young Russell as a quote-unquote gorgeous blonde boy that was quiet but very intelligent and pleasant. Some who lived in Deep River at the time remember William's father, David, as a loud authoritarian figure who would insult his wife in front of others and insisted on having his way.
Neither parent was overly affectionate, several people said. Both seemed preoccupied with their busy lives. Russell's mother would come down to the yacht and tennis club and leave him on his own to play on the waterfront. Teenagers in the area really did not like the father at all. He became the subject of many pranks.
He had a quick, sharp temper and was easily provoked, which of course only spurred them on even more. How much impact any of this had on Russell's psyche and how much it shaped his future life is subject for speculation. What is certain is that his home life was soon going to change. Living on Birch Street, a couple of blocks from the Williams house,
was another family drawn to Deep River by the Chalk River Project, Jerry and Marilyn Sovka and their three young children. An Alberta-born nuclear physicist, the son of Czech immigrants, Jerry Sovka was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, today known as MIT, and he too had attended the University of Birmingham on a scholarship
which is where he may have first met Christine Williams. Jerry Sofka was very much involved with the yacht and tennis club where Russell's parents often hung out. Sofka was a very social person. He was a ladies' man. He liked women and he had a certain erotic tension about him. Locals interviewed in later years remembers him as a quote-unquote real hustler.
The Williamses and the Sovkas were close, and nowhere more so than at a Deep River Yacht and Tennis Club, the epicenter of social life where live rock bands often played on Saturday nights. The club also had a reputation as a meat market. Some people had a less genteel term, the Deep River Twat and Penis Club.
The place had a definite reputation for being a hotspot for those we today term swingers. Russell's mother, Christine, was by any standard a gorgeous and attractive woman. The sentiment at the time was that Russell's father, Dave, didn't appreciate what he had, and he did not treat his wife particularly well, and Sofka knew to exploit that.
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.
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In a day when a divorce application had to cite a reason for separating, hers was on grounds of adultery, stating that her husband had been having an affair with Marilyn Sofka. The application was not contested, and the Williamses split up. Christine sold her husband her share of the house, gaining custody of her two sons, and the three moved out.
For a short spell, she and the boys lived in nearby Petawawa, home to the big army base. The former duplex neighbor recalls helping her haul the furniture down Highway 17. Meanwhile, Jerry Sovka had filed his own divorce petition against Madeline, also alleging adultery with Dave Williams.
Both divorces were made final in February 1970, with the three Sovka children remaining with Marilyn. With her divorce just four months old, Christine remarried in June of that year, the bridegroom being none other than Jerry Sovka, who had taken a job as a senior engineer with Ontario Hydro in Toronto.
They would stay together for the next 30 years before separating. David Williams stayed on in Deep River for another year. A newspaper photo from February 1971 shows him singing with a local choral group, which he directed. But the romance with Marilyn Sofka did not last, and soon he had kindled a relationship with another woman,
again married with children. She left her family to move with Williams to Germany where he had a new job. But that relationship too soon fizzled. David Williams later returned to North America. First to New York and then eventually to a position with General Electric's Nuclear Products Division based in San Jose, California. He also became a naturalized American.
At the time of Russell Williams' arrest, Dave was employed at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was editor-in-chief of the journal Biomaterials. Father and son never lived together after Dave and Christine divorced, but they maintained a strong bond and would often visit each other, according to people who knew them both.
As was, and still is, by far the most common practice, Russell's mother got sole custody of the children. And even though Russell loved his father and were closer to him than his mother, he had to live with her. In some aspects, living with his new stepfather, Mr. Sovka, would prove somewhat of a relief for the young man. His father had been a rigid and authoritarian disciplinarian,
Sofka, on the other hand, was far more easygoing. Neighbors interviewed after Russell's arrest remember Mr. Sofka as funny, energetic and tolerant of his two new stepsons. As a boy, Russell Williams was well-behaved, shy and polite.
As a teen, some thought him a snob, but mostly he is remembered as intelligent and self-effacing, reluctant to talk about himself or to make a big fuss about anything. Also visible in his early teen years were signs of the rigorous self-discipline and dependability that would help shape his military future.
He had an early morning newspaper route, and he was always punctual, and he had no interest in drugs or booze. He was well organized, never happier than when organizing others, and he was a quick learner, provided the topic interested him. He was fastidiously hygienic, and invariably well dressed, even in casual clothes, two lifelong traits. Whatever the task,
Russ Sovka, as he was known, would apply himself hard, mocking slackers. And that energy also shaped his twin passions, sport and music. He excelled at both, especially music, first as a pianist, an interest shared with his brother Harvey, and then as an impressively powerful trumpet player.
When Williams began attending Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute on Danforth Avenue in 1978, he soon distinguished himself as a jazz trumpeter, quickly rising to become a member of the senior band. Yearbook photos from that year show a serene-looking youth with a helmet and neatly coiffed hair swept across his forehead, gazing confidently at the camera.
The family seemed to have a blissful life at their new home in Scarborough Bluffs, overlooking Lake Ontario. They stayed there for more years than Russell had stayed any other place in his young life, and he had just started to feel at home when his life was uprooted once again.
Jerry Sovka, his stepfather, had gotten a job offer from a company in South Korea, and he took his new family with him in 1979, when Russell was 15 years old. Their new home was the city of Pusan, on the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula. He didn't stay long in South Korea, though, only one year.
William's year in South Korea marked the last time he and Harvey ever lived with their mother and stepfather. While the mother and stepfather stayed on in Busan, Russell and Harvey were sent back to Toronto in 1980. Russell first, with Harvey following close behind.
There they were enrolled as boarders at Upper Canada College, the elite midtown boys' school.
Since its founding in 1829, UCC has been a crucible for Canada's ruling class and high achievers. Its alumni comprise numerous lieutenant governors, judges, premiers, Olympic athletes, and Rhodes scholars, and at least 40 have been inducted into the Order of Canada.
In many ways it resembles the far more famous British boarding school of Eton. Then, as now, UCC was two schools in one, encompassing a prep school and an upper school, grades 9 to 13, with a total of roughly 600 students.
And while UCC ties often stretched from generation to generation, the Williams brothers were sent there because of its sterling reputation and because their parents could afford the fees, which were around 6,000 Canadian dollars per year for boarders. In today's money, that's around 14,200 Canadian dollars. There were two boarding houses at UCC.
seatons and weds where williams lived both had an untrenched sports culture volleyball soccer tennis softball and squash which williams would play relentlessly for hours in the courts on the west side of the building smashing ball after ball against the back wall
He was also a member of the Jazz Ensemble, which sometimes interacted with the Drama Club, providing a musical accompaniment to the well-attended plays the club put on. While at UCC, Russell seems to have become more and more isolated. People who went there at the same time remembers Russell Williams, or Sofka as he was known at the time,
as a person with lacking social skills and who came off as stuck up. He was very fond of jazz, but this wasn't exactly the coolest thing you could do back in the early 1980s as a teenager. However, he wasn't actively shunned and seemed to have fitted in as a kind of fly on the wall kind of guy.
Williams graduated from UCC in 1982, and the two brothers' paths then diverged. Harvey was to head for Montreal's McGill University and the beginnings of a career in medicine, while Russell enrolled at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus. As far as is known, Williams didn't maintain contact with a single person he had known at UCC.
Later, at university, his love of playing and listening to music would seem to vanish overnight. I have found no sources to determine why. Russell himself has never commented on the fact other than he simply stopped being interested. While at college, Russell Williams did not make a lot of waves and few people remember much about him from that time.
He tried his best to blend in and was successful at it. He never drank to excess and never took any sort of drugs. He was never bullied, never ostracized and there was at least one girl he liked which he dated for a brief period. Other than her, she was named Sarah, he had very few, if any, romantic relationships in college.
He did have a few male friends and told them he didn't want to be trapped by a quote-unquote gold digger. His sudden lack of interest in music could perhaps be explained by his increasing enthusiasm for sports and fitness. A diet-conscious regimen of hard jogging and other self-punishment kept him in exceptionally good shape.
The extreme interest and dedication to physical fitness in many ways defined Russell Williams for his whole life, except his crimes, of course. When I read about his preppy reputation, his exercise regimes, his dedication to always being well-dressed, being clean-cut and groomed, I cannot help but draw parallels with the fictional character Patrick Bateman.
He is the protagonist in the excellent novel and later film by the same name, American Psycho. It tells the tale of Patrick Bateman, a yuppie, clean-cut young man who also happens to be a deviant sexual psychopath and serial killer. This quote from the introduction in the film could, as I see it, just as easily have been spoken by a young Russell Williams.
I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet, in a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water-activated gel cleanser. Then, a honey almond body scrub. And, on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub.
Then I apply an herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm, followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion."
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And so ends part one in this saga covering Russell Williams. I hope you enjoyed listening to me telling it to you. The next episode, number 128 in number, will continue his saga. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you, good night, and good luck.
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