WARNING: Extremely graphic content from this case may disturb some readers.
BELLEVILLE, Ont. - Whether his victims fought him off or complied with every perverted command he gave them, convicted sex killer Col. Russell Williams showed no mercy to the two women who begged for their lives before he brutally murdered them, court heard Tuesday.
Williams, 47, sat silent, his head bowed low as the Crown laid out the gruesome final hours of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd -- every moment obsessively recorded with photographs and videotape.
The horrifying details came on the same day court heard Williams was in his 20s when he developed a fetish for stealing women's lingerie that would culminate in murder.
Comeau fought him until the very end -- even as she struggled, bloody and weak, against the duct tape he put over her mouth and the rope that he used to bind her hands behind her back.
Although Williams videotaped both rapes, those videos were not shown in court. Nor was the video he took of Comeau's murder.
Instead the Crown read out a detailed account of the attacks based on an agreed statement of fact.
"The photos of the victims and the videos of the victims are just horrific and it's an invasion of their privacy," prosecutor Lee Burgess said outside court.
"Nobody needs to see those."
Williams repeatedly raped 37-year-old Comeau -- who first caught his eye during a military VIP flight -- after breaking into her home last November and striking her repeatedly in the head with a flashlight.
He paused only to re-adjust his cameras, or to reach for the device during the attack to get a close-up shot of the rape, the court heard.
After nearly two hours, Williams put a piece of duct tape over her nose, cutting off her air supply.
As she slumped to the floor, court heard that Comeau made a final plea: "Have a heart please. I've been really good... I want to live."
She died and Williams turned off the camera.
His next victim, 27-year-old Lloyd, did everything Williams asked of her in an effort not to "upset" him, the Crown said.
Williams broke into her Belleville home in January, tied her up and raped her repeatedly for hours.
Only this time, he fastened a black zip tie around her neck and took her to his Tweed home, where he repeated the torture.
Lloyd was so terrified she apologized when she failed to move into the sexual position Williams demanded. She even asked permission to lower her legs after he had raped her. It had no effect.
Williams forced Lloyd to dress up in lingerie and pose for him as he took photos. At one point he put her in the shower and joined her. When she started to convulse from a seizure, in extreme distress and begging for help, he calmly walked to his camera to turn it on.
At one point, Lloyd pleads: "If I die, will you make sure my mom knows that I love her."
That heart-wrenching detail, read aloud in court, left many in the room sobbing loudly.
Lloyd's ordeal -- which lasted almost an entire day -- is documented in photos and on videotape. He even snapped a photo of her body after he has struck her and strangled her with rope, the blood from the wound pooling near her head.
Williams cleaned up, put her body in his garage, and drove back to CFB Trenton that night. He later admitted to police, he had to fly some troops to California the next morning.
He dumped her body behind a rock in a wooded area four days later.
The police found him through a roadside canvass just days after Lloyd was killed Jan. 29, matching his vehicle to tire tracks found at her eastern Ontario home.
After confessing to police, Williams admitted he developed an "interest" in stealing women's underwear in his 20s, but said he's wasn't sure what triggered him to act, court heard.
He insisted he didn't commit any offences until 2007, when the then 44-year-old military man began breaking into homes and photographing himself wearing stolen underwear -- many taken from girls as young as 11 -- while masturbating.
Those panty raids eventually escalated to sexual assault and murder, according to disturbing and graphic evidence presented in a Belleville, Ont., court over the past two days.
His obsessive need to meticulously document crimes through photos and videotape has astonished experts, who have called it a "Jekyll and Hyde" case.
Police found two hard drives hidden in his Ottawa home, along with boxes and bags full of women's underwear and other trophies he had collected.
Along with the graphic photos and video of Comeau's murder stored on a hard drive, police made a startling discovery that elicited gasps from the packed courtroom: a letter Williams wrote to her father, offering his condolences as her commanding officer.
The former commander of Canada's largest military airfield, who piloted the Queen and other dignitaries, pleaded guilty to all the charges.
He was formally convicted Tuesday of two counts of first-degree murder, two counts each of sexual assault and forcible confinement, and 82 break and enters that date back to 2007.
Williams faces life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
While the evidence presented in court was difficult to sit through, it was necessary to establish Williams as a dangerous killer, police said.
"We have to give a clear picture of what type of person Mr. Williams is in the event that he tries to apply for parole in 25 years," Det. Insp. Chris Nicholas of the Ontario Provincial Police said outside court.
"We want to make sure people who have that decision to make are fully informed on just what type of person they're dealing with."
Court heard how Williams told police he wanted to plead guilty to minimize the impact on his wife and to avoid large legal bills. An excerpt of that video confession is expected to be shown in court Wednesday.
Once a rising star in the Canadian Armed Forces, Williams has become an outcast whose depraved actions have rocked the military to its core.
