- Bernardo
tapes destroyed | Stephen
Williams: 2005 | Marsha
Boulton | Reviews of Williams'
work
-
- Stephen Williams
(2003)
-
- Bernardo author
faces 94 new charges
- More than
50 indictments focus on Web site maintained by investigative
writer
By KIRK MAKIN, JUSTICE
REPORTER, Oct. 23, 2003
The author of two books on
the Paul Bernardo murder case expressed astonishment yesterday
after police laid 94 new charges against him of violating publication
bans and court orders.
"This is obviously an
attempt to demonize me and to influence public opinion and any
judge or jury who might become involved in it," Stephen
Williams, 54, of Harriston, Ont., said in an interview.
More than 50 charges stem from
an Internet site on which Mr. Williams posted vast amounts of
material he had acquired while investigating murders committed
by Mr. Bernardo and his former wife, Karla Homolka.
Almost one-third relates to
his first book, Invisible Darkness . The remainder of
the new charges pertain to his second book, Karla: A Pact
With the Devil .
"I have never acted for
anybody charged with this many offences in my life," Mr.
Williams's lawyer, Edward Greenspan, said. "They have turned
this into a unique case. They want to make it a huge battle,
and that's exactly what they are going to get."
Mr. Greenspan likened the police
action to charging a highway speeder for every tenth of a kilometre
he drove over the speed limit.
"To put it mildly, it
is overreach and overkill," Mr. Greenspan said. He said
Mr. Williams had better lie low or the charges could reach 200.
"We're close to the Guinness record already."
Ontario Provincial Police Superintendent
Ross Bingley said the charges were necessary because Mr. Williams
has repeatedly violated the privacy of sexual-assault victims.
"We take these offences
very seriously, in that protection of sexual assault victims
is paramount in this country," he said. "That's why
the investigation took so long and was so thorough."
But Mr. Greenspan said it is
all about persecuting an author who had the temerity to criticize
and embarrass powerful law-enforcement officials. "Had he
written a book favourable to the government and police, I don't
think we would be here," he said.
Mr. Williams said that if the
authorities were hoping to scare him and like-minded authors
from writing books that cause them discomfort, it is working.
"The damage is already
done," he said. "Anyone thinking of a career as an
investigative journalist will immediately go into dentistry or
law. If I had had any idea that something like this could happen
in this country, I wouldn't have done it myself.
"I'm no hero, and I am
no poster boy for free expression," Mr. Williams said. "I
simply set out to write a book that told these stories. Any thinking
person in this country knows my books are very well done and
that they are indictments of the Attorney-General, the police
and the state."
Mr. Williams was charged in
1998 with viewing banned videotapes involving the murders of
Bernardo victims Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy. Those charges
were withdrawn. He was charged again last May, and his Web site
was shut down.
Yesterday, the OPP informed
the publisher of Invisible Darkness , Kim McArthur, that
she is distributing a book that is the subject of criminal charges.
But they failed to specify the allegations against it.
"It is a huge chill,"
Ms. McArthur said in an interview. "How can they say to
me that they believe this book has illegal material and yet not
tell me what it is?
"I think they should be
out looking for Cecilia Zhang [a 9-year-old who is currently
missing in Toronto] rather than laying 94 criminal charges against
an author who wrote an excellent book about one of the most horrible
crimes ever committed anywhere in the world," she said.
Several weeks ago, police again
searched the home Mr. Williams shares with author Marsha Boulton,
adding to their legal troubles by laying two charges of carelessly
storing a firearm.
"We had been plagued recently
by foxes and raccoons; we have lost 30 chickens," Mr. Williams
said, adding: "Every farm in the country has them [firearms].
"It's just one more thing,"
Mr. Williams said. "This morning, we were down at the OPP
station getting fingerprinted and mug shots. If this keeps up,
we're going to lose the farm."
© 2003 Bell Globemedia
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Homolka author
released on bail
Canadian Press, Thursday,
Oct. 23, 2003
Toronto - The author of two
controversial books about sex killers Paul Bernardo and Karla
Homolka was back in court Thursday to face 94 more counts of
disobeying a court order and violating a publication ban.
Stephen Williams, 54, was released
on his own recognizance by Ontario Court Justice Salvatore Merenda.
The bulk of the new charges
relate to Crown brief materials from the Bernardo case that Mr.
Williams was ordered to hand over to police in May 2002 after
banned information allegedly appeared on his Web site.
Specifically, 58 of them relate
directly to the Web site, while 28 are the result of material
that appears in Mr. Williams's first book, Invisible Darkness
. Eight more relate to Karla: A Pact with the Devil .
A single charge of disobeying
a court order has also been brought against the numbered company
that Mr. Williams and wife Marsha Boulton own and operate from
their home in Harriston, Ont.
Mr. Williams, who's scheduled
to appear in court again Nov. 25, was also charged earlier this
year in relation to Crown material that allegedly appeared on
his Web site in May.
In July, police armed with
a search warrant descended on the Mr. Williams home looking for
material that was to have been turned over to the authorities
after a judge ordered his Web site shut down May 3. Mr. Williams
and Ms. Boulton, also an author, had their computers seized along
with all of their files, making it all but impossible for the
couple to earn a living, he said outside court.
"They've taken everything
away from us," Mr. Williams said, including the latest draft
of his wife's latest project, an historical novel based on the
true story of a Presbyterian cult in Cape Breton in the 1850s.
"I didn't know it was
illegal to write about Presbyterians," he said.
Without any means of income,
the couple is depending on the generosity of neighbours and friends,
said Mr. Williams, who has long maintained he's the target of
a smear campaign by law enforcement authorities. He has faced
charges over his publications in the past.
He was charged with breaching
a court order in 1998 after Invisible Darkness was published.
Those charges stemmed from the belief by authorities upon reading
the book that Mr. Williams must have viewed banned videotapes
made by Mr. Bernardo and Ms. Homolka. He was acquitted of the
charges in 2000.
Mr. Bernardo and Ms. Homolka
are serving prison terms for the death of teens Kristen French
and Leslie Mahaffy.
© 2003 Bell Globemedia
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
OPP raid Bernardo
author's home
HAROLD LEVY, STAFF REPORTER,
Jul. 19, 2003
Early yesterday, police raided
the Harriston-area home of Stephen Williams, author of two books
on sex killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, executing a day-long
search warrant that Williams' lawyer called heavy-handed.
"I am amazed because they
are treating it as treason or murder," said Edward Greenspan.
"He is not Bernardo. He writes about Bernardo, and he doesn't
even like Bernardo. But his book on the Bernardo case ( Invisible
Darkness ) is riddled with criticism of the police and the
crown.
"Never in my experience
has a Canadian author been treated like this by the authorities,"
Greenspan added. "And it looks like the crime is that he
wrote things that were unfavourable to the authorities."
Police executed a warrant at
6 a.m. that authorized a search of Williams' house and car for
documents, computer systems, programs and data, and devices capable
of storing data.
Williams was charged on May
4 for allegedly posting material covered by a publication ban
on Bernardo's trial to a Web site.
Several OPP officers refused
to comment on the search other than admitting investigators were
on the Williams property.
In the afternoon, at the home
halfway between Mount Forest and Harriston, a lone constable
guarded the entrance.
Willams said in an interview
that he and partner Marsha Boulton, herself an author, were woken
by pounding on the front door that reverberated through their
farmhouse. "Until I opened it and saw basically about a
dozen cops, I didn't know what was going on."
According to Williams, he and
Boulton were shown the search warrant, and were told the police
were taking possession of their home, and would remain there
as long as necessary.
The couple left about an hour
later but were turned away by police when they returned to the
house for more clothes and given no indication of when they would
be allowed to return.
"They've taken everything
we have," he said. "All of our computers, all of our
files, all of our work in progress. All of our names and addresses.
Our financial stuff, personal and otherwise."
Williams says he is baffled
by the raid, three months after he was arrested, because he has
done everything the authorities required, including shutting
down the Web site, and surrendering his archives to the court.
In 1998, after Invisible
Darkness was published, he was charged with allegedly viewing
banned videotapes made by Bernardo and Homolka, who killed Leslie
Mahaffy and Kristen French in 1991 and 1991, respectively.
Williams was later acquitted.
Currently, he is under investigation over his 2002 book, Karla:
A Pact With the Devil .
With files from Wes Keller
SHOOT THE MESSENGER,
BURN THE EVIDENCE
Christie Blatchford, National
Post, May 24, 2003
The murders of Leslie Mahaffy
and Kristen French have always been considered special cases,
and I use special in the way that it has come to be used in the
modern world -- as a euphemism to describe those deemed deserving
of extraordinary, meaning particularly gentle, treatment.
Initially, this happened in
a rather genuine way, largely in the public imagination.
It was born in the horrific
nature of the crimes committed upon the two young women; in their
tender years and innate vulnerability; in their parents' profound
decency and palpable agony, and in the then relatively novel
nature of the videotaped evidence which documented the girls'
torture at the hands of their abductors and rapists, the scary
pair of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
This spirit -- of goodwill
toward the Mahaffy and French families and outrage at their daughters'
murders -- then morphed into a series of unprecedented Ontario
court and Ontario government decisions which, taken together
or separately, look more ill-advised with each passing day.
The most recent of these is
the prosecution of author Stephen Williams, who last week was
forced by court order to hand over some of his files -- he has
written two books about Bernardo-Homolka -- to the Ontario Superior
Court of Justice where, like virtually everything else of import
in this case, they were promptly sealed.
Mr. Williams appears to have
made a mistake by briefly posting on his Web site some material
banned from publication by earlier court orders, including a
dated picture of one of the couple's rape victims, known only
as "Jane Doe," and allegedly the names of some of the
women who were raped by Bernardo when he was on the prowl in
Toronto.
When informed that he was allegedly
breaching an order -- and to be fair, there are so many of these,
some of the orders themselves under seal, that keeping them straight
is a full-time job -- Mr. Williams immediately shut down the
site until the offending material could be removed.
But the Crown, alerted by an
April 30 story about Mr. Williams' plan to post documents on
his Web site, had the excuse it needed: Prosecutors sought a
seizure order and also charged him criminally with violating
the publication ban and breaching the court order.
This, in my own jaded view,
was but the pretext.
More significant is the climate
which has always permeated this case, the heavy hand which is
applied to anyone who does not meekly surrender important freedoms
in the name of these special victims -- and Mr. Williams is one
of this small group -- and the fact that the author is perhaps
the harshest critic of the very Crown office now prosecuting
him.
Strip his new book, Karla,
A Pact with the Devil, of the self-aggrandizing bits, and what
is left is a pretty ruthless indictment of the way the Bernardo-Homolka
case was handled by some of the province's top Crown law officers
and certainly by the head of the joint task force which ran the
police investigation. It is clear Mr. Williams had a copy of
what's called the "Crown brief" -- basically, the entire
police and prosecution file -- as well as unprecedented access
to all of Homolka's psychological records, given to him by the
man who was the first psychiatrist who treated her, the late
Dr. Hans Arndt.
Remarkably, Mr. Williams also
managed to establish an instructive correspondence with Homolka,
who, of course, unlike her ex, will soon be leaving prison.
In ruling that he must surrender
the Crown brief to the court, Mr. Justice Robert Blair suggested
this was not a "case of pure [free] speech" because
the contested Web site posting was "at least somewhat in
aid of the sale of his books," said Crown briefs are not
"to be bandied about willy nilly in the public domain,"
and said he found it "hard to conceive of any way in which
Mr. Williams could have come into possession of the contents
of the Crown brief in any lawful manner."
Well, golly, I can come up
with a couple of lawful ways off the top of my tiny pointed head:
Mr. Williams might have been given a copy, as Dr. Arndt gave
him his files, by a member of the prosecutorial or defence teams
or by the police officers who may have had access to the brief.
As Eddie Greenspan, who is defending Mr. Williams on the criminal
charges, said last week, "There isn't a book written on
crime in the history of this country, or a documentary, or a
docudrama, in the entire body of this literature, which doesn't
start with the writer having an idea -- and step one is to get
the Crown brief."
Lest we forget: The sweeping
publication ban imposed upon Homolka's controversial plea bargain
trial saw American reporters and the public barred from the courtroom,
and everything but the bare bones of the plea banned.
The publication ruling that
followed at Bernardo's trial was better crafted but still unusual
-- the worst of the videotapes were never allowed to be seen
by the public or press.
Two of those peripherally connected
but most vigorously prosecuted were Bernardo's first lawyer,
Ken Murray, who had discovered the hidden tapes the police missed
and was charged with obstructing justice for holding on to them,
and, guess who, Mr. Williams, charged with breaching a court
order with his first book when police concluded he must have
seen the banned videos.
Mr. Murray was acquitted, but
not before he was publicly vilified. The Crown abandoned the
charges against Mr. Williams -- though not before seeing he was
publicly punished -- by piously claiming a trial would have caused
the French and Mahaffy families distress.
And, perhaps most stunning,
in December of 2001, at a secret ceremony at a location never
disclosed, the videotapes and a whole whack of other evidence
from the case -- all of it from a public trial held in a public
courtroom in a democratic country -- were incinerated with official
state blessing in the presence of the two families and their
lawyer Tim Danson, who was, as it happens, in court when Justice
Blair recently issued his ruling.
The truth is, Mr. Williams'
real offence was not in getting a copy of the Crown brief, or
even to post material which may have been under ban on his Web
site. It was A) to scrutinize the folks whose actions or ineptitude
collectively led to the pact with the devil and B) to refuse
to pay obeisance to the notion of victim, or in this case victims'
families, as sacred objects.
- Ontario
judge orders author to relinquish Bernardo files:
- Writer charged
over posting of data on Web site must give Crown material he
received about notorious murder case
By KIRK MAKIN, JUSTICE
REPORTER, Globe and Mail, May. 6, 2003
An Ontario judge has ordered
the author of books about Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka to
hand over tens of thousands of pages of sensitive material to
the Crown after a secret hearing.
Author Stephen Williams, who
was charged Sunday with violating a publication ban by posting
allegedly illegal information on his Web site, said his lawyers
are scrambling to overturn the order before it takes effect on
Friday.
"It means to me that I'm
going to be forced to give up everything I spent 10 years accumulating,"
Mr. Williams said in an interview after his release from jail
yesterday. "The time frame they have given us is tremendously
short."
The material includes hundreds
of transcripts, interviews with witnesses, and videotapes that
depict Mr. Bernardo and Ms. Homolka doing everything from touring
their home to engaging in bizarre sex practices.
"What they are trying
to do is get it all back," Mr. Williams said. "And
once they do, we'll never get it again. The bulk of this material
is not in contravention of any publication order and I'm not
in possession of it illegally."
Mr. Williams was released on
$25,000 bail yesterday in connection with two charges of violating
a publication ban. The Crown alleges that he disclosed the identities
of some "complainants and victims" in the Bernardo-Homolka
case -- probably some of the victims of Mr. Bernardo's so-called
Scarborough rapes.
The material comes from a Crown
disclosure package prepared prior to Mr. Bernardo's trial for
the murders of schoolgirls Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.
Mr. Williams said the Crown
seems determined to ferret out the identity of the person who
gave him the disclosure package.
"I would never give up
a source," Mr. Williams said.
"If it ever came to that,
I think if you give somebody your word, you have to die by it."
As he was kept in the dark
about the proceeding on the weekend, Mr. Williams had no lawyers
on hand to challenge Crown arguments that he hand over the material.
The series of events began
last Tuesday, when Mr. Williams told The Globe and Mail of his
plan to post most of the material on his Web site. Within hours
of him starting to do so, police spotted the names they say cannot
be published.
The 53-year-old man was arrested
at his rural Ontario farm on Sunday morning and held in jail
overnight. Mr. Williams, who has claustrophobia and high blood
pressure, said medics were called when he began hyperventilating.
His lawyer, Edward Greenspan,
was highly critical of the police and Crown yesterday for arresting
a writer and keeping him in jail unnecessarily. He said Mr. Williams
would have voluntarily surrendered himself to the police.
"This happens in totalitarian
countries, but it shouldn't happen in Canada," Mr. Greenspan
said.
He also questioned the fact
that prosecutor Michal Fairburn conducted yesterday's bail hearing
despite having been depicted "in a light she cannot have
enjoyed" in Mr. Williams's book, Invisible Darkness .
The book told of how Murray
Segal, director of the criminal branch of Ontario's Crown Law
Office, left his wife and three children during the Bernardo
case to live with Ms. Fairburn.
"I would have thought
that Crown would not be involved in this case," Mr. Greenspan
remarked.
Asked about the issue yesterday,
Ms. Fairburn said: "No comment. It's before the courts."
Several years ago, Mr. Williams
was charged with a similar offence in connection with banned
videotapes of the murder victims. After almost 18 months of pretrial
skirmishing, the Crown withdrew the charge. The Crown made a
successful attempt to force him to reveal his sources in that
case as well. However, it never went so far as to get an order
to seize his files.
Mr. Williams said yesterday
that he and Mr. Greenspan still don't know what he posted on
his Web site last week that was illegal.
"I find the whole process
alarming, astonishing; unacceptable in a democracy," Mr.
Greenspan said. "You would expect this in Iran. I think
the Attorney-General of this province has a lot of explaining
to do. I think it has to do with the fact that he wrote a book
critical of the police and critical of the Crown," he said.
"This is a free country.
If you want to set up a Web site, you can set up a Web site."
© 2003 Bell Globemedia
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Canadian Police
Arrest Author
By Associated Press, May
5, 2003
TORONTO -- An author who posted
details of one of Canada's most notorious murder-rape cases on
a Web site has been arrested for violating a court-ordered publication
ban.
Stephen Williams, who wrote
two books about Canadian killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka,
was released on $17,500 bail Monday at a court hearing. He was
arrested Sunday.
The information posted on his
Web site included evidence from Bernardo's 1995 trial on murder
and sexual assault charges, which was closed to the public.
Both Bernardo and Homolka,
his ex-wife, are imprisoned for the sexual assault and killings
of Leslie Mahaffy, 14, in 1991 and Kristen French, 15, in 1992.
Bernardo is serving a life
sentence, while Homolka accepted a manslaughter conviction and
12-year prison sentence in 1993 in exchange for testifying against
her then-husband.
In her testimony, Homolka portrayed
herself as a helpless victim acting on Bernardo's orders.
Canadian media labeled her
plea bargain "the deal with the devil."
Police investigated the Williams
Web site at the request of the French and Mahaffy families. The
information was no longer available on the site on Monday.
Williams said last week he
would post the material because the public never had full access
to the trial.
"The public got to see
very little about this case," Williams said. "The material
on my Web site was an education. There was nothing in there that
violated the court order."
A separate police investigation
continues into whether information contained in Williams' latest
book on Homolka, titled "Karla: A Pact With the Devil,"
violated conditions of Homolka's plea bargain.
The plea bargain prohibited
Homolka from speaking to the media or benefiting financially
from the crimes.
Williams has said the pair
never discussed the crimes and Homolka received no financial
gain for the book about the plea bargain and prison life.
Homolka has been denied parole
and is expected to go free in 2005 after serving her full sentence.
If police determine she violated conditions of her plea bargain,
though, her sentence could be lengthened.
Copyright © 2003, The
Associated Press
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell