Read A New Kind of Monster for Free Online Page A

people from the way it was all set up,” Jones says. But none of the neighbors on Cosy Cove Lane were invited, and not many others showed up either—perhaps fifteen in all.
    Given the absence of cordiality, Jones was a little surprised by a conversation he had with Williams in September 2009, the same month the two women were attacked in their homes. Dressed in his camouflage gear, Jones was heading out to shoot a few grouse, and was just loading his shotgun into his truck when his next-door neighbor wandered over. Uncharacteristicallyinquisitive, Williams wondered where Jones’s hunting camp was. Jones told him it was about six miles away, in the thick forest that lines each side of Cary Road, an isolated gravel road southeast of Tweed village. At first the colonel wasn’t sure where exactly that was. Jones gave further directions. Williams responded, “Ah, yes,” and there the conversation ended.
    Initially Jones didn’t give the encounter much thought, even after a friend of his spotted Williams in the area a few weeks later, on foot, staring off into the distance and appearing lost. But when Williams was arrested, the exchange rushed back to haunt Jones. A few hours after Williams was charged, the body of his second murder victim, Jessica Lloyd, was located. It lay in the woods about a mile from Jones’s hunting camp, some forty feet in from Cary Road, half concealed among a pile of rocks.
    Was Williams trying to frame Jones? A second mysterious incident suggests that perhaps he was. On the same night that Lloyd was kidnapped, January 28–29, 2010, Jones says someone broke into his garage, across Cosy Cove Lane from his house, where he keeps his boats and snowmobiles. Curiously, however, only three items appeared to be missing: a blue cigarette lighter, a pair of work gloves and an old coat that his dog, Wes, a West Highland terrier, was fond of sleeping upon. What happened to those items remains a mystery. Jones wonders if Williams could have taken the items with the idea of using them to frame him for a crime, but he concedes he may never know.
    As for what he went through with the OPP, Jones takes a charitable view. “Half of those guys are friends of ours, we’ve played hockey together—my niece and my nephew are both OPP officers. So all this wasn’t their fault. They just weren’t trained for an investigation of this magnitude.”

    Tweed settled down a bit in the next few weeks, but the tension lingered. Residents pitched in to knit a giant scarf in support of Canada’s athletes at the Vancouver Olympics, as the We Believe campaign sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce took hold. “Tweed was at its best, prouder and stronger, because people felt as though they were finally involved in something that brought them together,” remembers Lisa Ford, who with her husband operates the By the Way coffee shop on Victoria Street.
    Then two things happened. Midway through November in the rural outskirts of Belleville about midway up Highway 37 as you head towards Tweed, there was a break-in at the house of an artist and music teacher whose husband was away. The intruder took some sex toys and underwear. And, terrifyingly, he left a taunting message on the woman’s home computer, suggesting he had been in the house at the same time she was on the previous evening, hiding in an upstairs linen closet.
    Few people in Tweed heard about the burglary, and the Belleville police who investigated it seemed to know nothing about the two earlier sex attacks around Cosy Cove Lane.
    About a week later, there came word of what sounded like a domestic-related homicide in Brighton, just west of Trenton along Highway 401, an hour’s drive from Tweed. A flight attendant attached to CFB Trenton had been found murdered in her home, where she lived alone. Provincial police from Northumberland County took charge of the case and urged local residents to stay calm.