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“There are no present issues with regard to public safety,” an OPP officer said on November 30, five days after Corporal Marie-France Comeau’s asphyxiated, bloodied body was discovered in her bedroom, wrapped in a duvet.
    To the residents of Tweed, there was no special reason to make any connection between the events in their community and either of these incidents, particularly the Comeau homicide.Brighton seemed very far away. And for the handful who did hear about what had occurred, the least likely person to be in any way involved would probably have been the pleasant, seldom-seen military figure who had arrived in Canada from England more than four decades earlier.

2
A-TOWN
    D avid Russell Williams was born into a world of middle-class privilege, filled with high achievers. Later in life he would tell friends he didn’t remember much about his early childhood, and whether that’s true or not, he rarely spoke about it, even when pressed. After his arrest, when it became clear that his extraordinary cruelty and violence had been directed exclusively at women, observers looked to his roots for possible clues as to what might have fostered his rage, and some were there to be found.
    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 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. Naturally, much has changed since then. The trees that dot Deep River’s neat, curvy residential streets are thicker and taller. The many sailboats that used to be moored off the Deep River Yacht and Tennis Club—the town’s social hub during the two years that Williams lived there—have largely been replaced by houseboats.
    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. Deep River has always been called A-Town—A for atomic—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.
    â€œThey used to own everything. It was a company town. You pretty much had to work at Atomic Energy to keep a house,” says realtor Jim Hickey, who has lived in Deep River since 1945. Hickey and his family spent their first few years in rented accommodation. “And my father would warn me to keep the grass cut, because there was a shortage of housing, the implication being that we’d better keep it cut or we might lose it. I was twelve when he died, and I remember one of the [AECL] employment officers coming to the house with his wife and telling my mother, ‘When this guy’s old enough to work, send him in to see me.’ ”
    But Deep River’s current population of around 4,400—7,600 in the greater Deep River area—hasn’t changed much, nor have the