Officer & Murderer

Last week we watched An Officer and a Murderer on Netflix, it had originated on Lifetime TV channel. I wasn't aware, until the movie ended, that it was based on real life events, though the way the film moved on to its final scenes did arouse suspicions of that. The tale was, indeed, a true one. It is based on events involving Colonel Russell Williams between 2007 and 2010 in Canada, "a walking Jekyll and Hyde" who suddenly embarked on a life of crime in 2007, escalating from panty thief fetishist to murderer.

There's a good, all-encompassing article about the actual events, written in October 2010 by Jim Rankin and Sandro Contenta, staff reporters at the star.com:
Col. Russell Williams: A serial killer like none police have seen.

SNIPS only - to give brief outline:

In Ottawa, a burglar was stealing lingerie in a middle-class neighbourhood, careful to break in when no one was home.In Tweed, 200 kilometres west, two women were sexually assaulted by a man who took pictures but did not attempt penetration. In Brighton, south of Tweed, an air force flight attendant was badly beaten, raped and murdered.

The modi operandi could not have been more different. Police considered a link to the Tweed sexual assaults when Jessica Elizabeth Lloyd, 27, went missing in late January from her home near the village. But nothing could have prepared them for the suspect they finally caught. Col. David Russell Williams — who this past week indicated through his lawyer that he intends to plead guilty on Oct. 18 to two murders, two sex assaults and a string of fetish break-ins — is a serial killer like none they have ever seen.

“This guy is quite unusual,” says psychologist Vernon Quinsey, who spent 16 years assessing criminals at the Oak Ridge maximum security psychiatric hospital in Penetanguishene.
“We haven't seen guys like this in the past and we don't expect to see a lot of them in the future.”

Williams had a successful career and a long, apparently loving marriage, and didn't embark on a life of crime until he began a series of fetish home burglaries in September 2007, at the age of 44.

“It's very unusual for a guy who's got his act together like that ... to all of a sudden start committing crimes at a late age,” says Quinsey, professor emeritus of psychology, biology and psychiatry at Queen's University.....“Almost nobody starts a life of crime when they're in their 40s.” Equally unusual was his escalation from panty fetish to sex assault to murder. Most serial killers assault and kill in tandem, right from the start.

Williams seems a walking Jekyll and Hyde: by day, commander of CFB Trenton, the biggest air force base in Canada; by night, a sexual predator.

But Quinsey dismisses suggestions of a split personality, describing it as a popular but misused term, long associated with schizophrenics. And Williams is no schizophrenic...........

Both Quinsey and Woods speculate that a sudden, significant event might have triggered Williams' life of crime. “We all have stressors that put pressure on us and we all have different ways of relieving it,” says Woods, who left the RCMP in 2007 and now runs a company that trains police forces on criminal profiling. “Some people go for a run, others have a glass of wine, and sexual predators go out and rape.”

Says Quinsey: “The only scenario I can think of is that this guy had these interests for a long time, but he was able to control them. And then something sets him off and he can't control them any more.”

What set him off?.....

ASTROLOGY

Crime experts were surprised and puzzled - I'll don my Sherlock Holmes hat and try to discover whether astrologers would be surprised and puzzled too.

Russell Williams was born on 7 March 1963 in Bromsgrove, UK. No time of birth is known, chart is set for 12 noon, so Moon position will not be exact, nor will rising sign.

First impression, in general: lots of oppositions. It doesn't surprise me that this man had two distinct sides to his nature. Many people have charts with configurations such as this this though, without weird outcome.

Getting to the nitty-gritty...what was going on in 2007 that might have triggered Williams' crime spree? Transiting Uranus, planet of change and the unexpected, conjoined his natal Pisces Sun!

When Williams was born, Neptune at 15 Scorpio was conjunct fixed star South Scale, aka Zuben Elgenubi. Interpretation of South Scale with Neptune:

With Neptune: Morose, melancholy, isolated, shrewd, cunning, evil use of occult powers and of poisons or drugs, cynical, dangerous, broods over some secret, peculiar death, often suicide. [Robson*, p.206.] (See Constellation of Words.)

It was reported that Williams did actually attempt suicide in his jail cell. A generation had this Neptune/South Scale conjunction in their natal charts, but not all had it connected by aspect to personal planets. Williams had the conjunction in harmonious trine to his natal Sun, also in uncomfortable square aspect to Saturn. Coincidentally film director, screenwriter, producer and actor Quentin Tarantino, born around three weeks later than Williams, in the USA, also had Neptune & South Scale square Saturn. In his case it could be said that his films' subject matter, an "aestheticization of violence", and neo-noir style reflect this aspect.

I'm guessing that latent negative characteristics, indicated by the Neptune/South Scale conjunction's aspects to personal planets, were triggered when Uranus conjoined Williams' natal Pisces Sun - whose ruler is Neptune.