“A new kind of monster”: Globe crime reporter on Russell Williams

Globe and Mail crime reporter
Tim Appleby doesn’t think convicted rapist and murderer Russell Williams
is a psychopath. “He is not even close to being one,” he writes in his
new book, A New Kind of Monster.

In a Globe column, Christie Blatchford notes that Appleby is “one of the nicest and most decent people I know”, who spent months researching and interviewing people who were close to Williams. Blatchford writes:

“But as anyone who knows the paper’s famously rumpled crime reporter even a little would know, believing this — that there was and is something human, broken but still recognizably human, about Williams — is probably the only way that such a tender man as Appleby could have written about such sordid and soul-destroying material.”

Blatchford says that Appleby was “miserable from his reading and interviews and desperate for a hint of normalcy….I also sat right beside him in Belleville last fall for the several days of Williams’s guilty pleas and sentencing, and saw how affected he was by the grim evidence recited in that courtroom. Other reporters were troubled too, but for many of them, youngsters, it was their first exposure to such sordid stuff; Appleby is a veteran, presumed to be hard-boiled, and on one level he is that.”