OMG, there are so many horrifying details by this victim, it is almost impossible to read. :-(
Laurie Massicotte watches the same two television programs before bed:
Law & Order at 11 p.m., and
Without a Trace at midnight. On that Tuesday evening last September, she followed her typical routine, curling up on the living room couch with an apple, the remote control, and one of her daughters’ old Barbie blankets. Within 15 minutes, she was fast asleep. “It was a busy day,” she says now, one year later. “I spent most of it cleaning: bringing in pots from the yard, rearranging furniture in the basement. I was exhausted.”
When she woke up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Massicotte remembers two specific things: hearing the theme song for the final credits of
Without a Trace, and being smothered under her blanket as someone on the other side delivered punch after punch to her face. In those first few seconds, the 46-year-old was so disoriented and so short of breath that she assumed the house was on fire, and that thick smoke had filled her eyes and lungs. She soon realized the terrifying truth. “Shhh,” said the intruder, in between blows to the head. “I need you to be quiet.”
What transpired over the next 3½ hours was pure terror. Home alone, Massicotte was blindfolded, shackled, stripped naked with the sharp edge of a knife, and forced to pose for dozens of unthinkable photographs before the stranger in her house finally fled. Every time he ordered her to sit this way or lean that way, his threat was the same: “Don’t make me make you.”
“I thought he was going to kill me at any given moment,” she says. “It was just like a horror movie, and I didn’t know what was going to happen in the next scene.”
The scene five months later was almost as sickening. In February, two detectives from the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) visited Massicotte’s home in Tweed, a small eastern Ontario town just north of Belleville. “It’s all over,” one of them told her. “We’ve caught the person who did this to you, and
he has confessed.”
Three doors away, Massicotte could see yellow police tape wrapped around the property. The man who lived there—Col. Russell Williams, the 46-year-old commander of Canadian Forces Base Trenton—was already locked in a jail cell, his alleged double life finally revealed. “I couldn’t comprehend any of it,” she says. “I was in total shock.”
She despises Williams, prays that he spends the rest of his life behind bars, and hopes to sue him in civil court. Yet for reasons that even she can’t explain, Massicotte says she has found it in her heart to somehow forgive him. “I can’t put it into words. It’s between me and him. He let me live.”
In fact, Massicotte saves her harshest words for the police, convinced that the cops could have done more to stop her attacker before he climbed through her window. Hours after her assault, an OPP investigator told her what is now a well-known fact. “He said: ‘Laurie, we have a confession to make,’ ” she recalls. “ ‘Apparently, 12 days ago this same situation happened to a girl just down the road from you. We’re really sorry we didn’t get it out to the public, but I can tell you right now we’re putting out a release and it will be on tomorrow’s news.’ ”
For Laurie Massicotte, the OPP “safety alert” came a day too late.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/05/surviving-colonel-williams/