A New Kind of Monster

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Book: Read A New Kind of Monster for Free Online
Authors: Timothy Appleby
Jones now had to deal with the unpleasant reality that the source of his troubles was Massicotte, who, while not a close friend, was someone he’d known for years. Later—after Williams was arrested—she apologized profusely, Jones says. “She says to me, ‘Larry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t really want to phone the police and tell them it was you.’ ”
    So why
did
Massicotte make that fateful call? She says today it was a combination of confusion and being urged by a friend to pick up the phone and give the police Jones’s name. The friend was one Jonas Kelly, a man related to Jones through marriage and who didn’t much like him. “I was told by Jonas Kelly what to do.He told me to phone my detective and tell them that I recognized the voice,” she says. “When I phoned them to tell them I thought I recognized the person’s voice, I didn’t even want to say who it was, I was so scared. But then they came right out and asked me. The detective suggested to me it wasn’t Larry, it was his son Greg. And I said, ‘No, Larry.’ And he said, ‘Oh, Laurie, do you think you could come down to the station right away and give us a statement.’ ”
    So she did. Police picked up Larry Jones the same day. There was no other evidence against him.
    Jones now believes that Massicotte was unstable and therefore easily influenced by Jonas Kelly. As for Massicotte, she was not reluctant to speak out about her ordeal. After Williams was arrested, she gave several interviews to the media in which she excoriated the OPP for not having issued a warning after the first attack.
    Most remarkable, however, was her willingness to forgive her attacker. “I’m not in the judgment department, but I’m in the forgiveness department, and I feel everybody has a God-given right to forgive,” she says. “He let me live. It was like he didn’t want to kill me. I always look at the good in people. I can’t speak for any of the others, I can only forgive him for what he did to me, and now he has to live the rest of his life [in a prison cell]. I despise him, but I can forgive him, because of the simple fact that he let me live, and that’s what I wanted most. And I have to be able to forgive to move on.”
    News that Jones had been picked up and questioned at length about the twin attacks spread swiftly through Tweed. And it reached Williams too. Jones knows that, because even though it never occurred to him at the time that the colonel might bethe real predator, he was anxious to learn how widely word of his troubles with police had spread. So, through a mutual friend, he asked a civilian Trenton air base staffer who knew Williams well whether the colonel had by any chance mentioned that Jones—his next-door neighbor—was a prime suspect in the unsolved attacks. The subject had indeed come up, and Williams’s response was curiously casual, Jones recounts. He seemed to have heard something about Jones being detained and questioned but appeared entirely unperturbed. “Get out of town. Larry Jones wouldn’t do something like that,” was how Williams’s response was relayed back to Jones.
    Jones chatted briefly to Williams several times after that, talking about nothing very much, and the matter was never raised. “He could have asked me what was going on, but he didn’t,” Jones says. “He carried on like nothing had happened.”
    In hindsight, two other incidents—one before Jones was taken in for questioning and one after—took on a distinctly sinister bent in Jones’s mind.
    Few visitors ever came to the Williams home, and Jones remembers the day in July 2009 when his neighbor took over as base commander. The commander had laid on a big party on his back lawn. Tables were set up, the grass was newly mowed, a portable toilet was rented. “I thought he was expecting a hundred

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