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.

Embarrassed Again....by a Pulitzer Prize Winner too!

I remember, not long ago, on 8 January actually, writing: "Any time our home state, Oklahoma, gets itself into the news it's always for something either horrific, or vaguely embarrassing!" Here we go again! This time it's relating to something both horrific and embarrassing.

In the February issue of Vanity Fair Buzz Bissinger, a Pulitzer prize-winning author has written an article about our home town in Oklahoma, and the dreadful murder which happened here last summer. (See my post here). It's puzzling that Vanity Fair should suddenly bring the topic to the fore once more. Perhaps it's because the three young men accused of the murder will be in court again soon.

Mr Bissinger's article didn't impress me one little bit, Pulitzer prize or not. I felt the article wasn't well-written, and was grossly unfair. He concentrates too much on the town rather than on the crime - as though the town itself were to blame. He trots out the old saw about there being "2 sides of the track" in Duncan. In every town I've lived in, in England, (many, and in all regions) there were equivalent areas to the 2-sides of the track metaphor. In our town it just so happens that much of the poorer area is actually located on one side of the rail tracks.

I get the feeling that Buzz Bissinger, from Pennsylvania - Wikipedia states: "He divides his time between homes in Philadelphia and the Pacific Northwest," obviously suffers from the "fly-over" syndrome, and has little knowledge, and a low opinion of, anything in between. Wiki also says: "In a column published in GQ, Bissinger states he is a shopaholic with an obsession for expensive designer clothes, spending $638,412.97 between 2010 and 2012. " Hmm.

Disclaimer. I have no great love for this town myself. When I'd been here for a month or two I came to the conclusion I'd stepped back in time to the 1950s, wrote to friends in that vein telling them that here, "there's a church on every corner instead of a pub!" The town's (and state's) politics are a complete anathema to me, as would be Buzz Bissinger's. Wikipedia states that he endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012. The town itself, though, is no worse than dozens of others in Oklahoma, and other states. In some ways it is better than many. There is certainly a lot of poor, run-down housing here which does contrast sharply with some huge mansion-type houses in a treed-in area on the north side of town. There's old oil money here, obviously. Haliburton used to be based here. None of that has any bearing on the horrendous random cold-blooded murder of a visiting student out on a quiet road, running, one day last summer.

Even the photograph accompanying Bissinger's piece is misleading. It's supposed to be Main Street, it is, but right at the end of quite a thriving true Main Street, with many non-chain businesses. The street, in reality is far from the description he gives:

"The city had just glossed up its Web site, using as its backdrop a picture of downtown Main Street glittering in the twilight. The image looked warm and inviting, something plucked from a stage set. But in reality downtown had died as a center of commerce long ago."

In every town in Oklahoma and in every other state we've visited, there is an older downtown area, equivalent to Main Street. These were once the hubs of commerce and retail, back in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. Now, in some towns these areas are completely derelict. In some other towns, like Duncan, they have been refurbished; private businesss owners have brought the area back to life. The now inevitable corporate chain businesses continue to grow up elsewhere in every town, almost like a secondary town in some cases.

That dreadful murder of last summer wasn't brought about by location, in my view. It was brought about by many things: ease of access to guns, constant de-sensitisation through depictions of violence in movies, TV, video games; maybe drugs, plus one sociopathic ringleader. Racism? No more here than anywhere else - less if anything, I'd say.

Buzz Bissinger was quite the wrong guy to send on a mission here. He might write a decent novel, but he doesn't seem to understand what I've come to realise. This is "the real USA".....this!. I see it, even though a foreigner here, as well as a US citizen and, shock horror, a socialist!

A Local Murder

My husband has this on his Thinks Happen page today:

 Click on image for bigger version

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps that is true. But often a picture still doesn’t tell the entire story. Sure, here is a small memorial, growing along a main street in a residential area. You’ve seen these before. Someone died here.

He was a visiting Australian athlete, out for his afternoon run. The story so far is that he was shot by three teen age boys who “wanted to see someone die.”

Does this hit you where you live? It is less than a minute from my home.

The site of the shooting is literally just around the corner from where we live. It's a very quiet neighbourhood, right on the edge of a quiet Oklahoma town. The young man murdered was a visiting baseball player from Australia.

NBC report HERE

Report from an Australian newspaper Herald Sun HERE.

What compels young men to act out their apparent disaffection in such violent and pointless ways? According to a piece in the Huffington Post back in April at the time of the Boston Marathon tragedy: as of 2006 in the US boys accounted for 83 percent of arrests for violent crimes. By the age of 17, over a quarter of boys report having carried a handgun. In 2010, there were an estimated 756,000 gang members throughout the country.

Curmudgeonly thoughts lead me along the lines that a mandatory draft into public service of some kind is needed, to try to plant some sense into young heads. Other thoughts remind me that young men from the USA and UK, not far from the age of these youths were fighting and being killed in World War 2, in the hope that their sacrifice would bring about a better world - and this is within my lifetime. What on earth has befallen us?

We seem to be well down a slippery slope towards something I don't even want to contemplate.