So Russel Williams was known as Russ Sovka until he left university... after his stint at the allegedly abuse-plagued Upper Canada College.-----------------
By 1980, Russ was in Toronto, enrolled as a boarding student at Upper Canada College, a tony private boys school that caters to the city's elite.
The school, founded in 1829, has produced six lieutenant-governors, seven chief justices and three premiers. Another 24 have been named Rhodes Scholars, 10 are Olympic medallists and 40 have been inducted into the Order of Canada.
Modelled on the British public school, UCC regularly faced accusations of racial bias and sexism until the 1970s, when it began to recruit students from visible minorities and offer assistance to the less affluent.
Beginning in 1998, allegations of sexual abuse by teachers began surfacing, including some that occurred while Russ Sovka was at the school. A number led to criminal convictions.-----------------
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Accused+killer+early+years+instability+privilege/2558189/story.htmlAccused killer's early years a mix of instability, privilegeBy Don Butler, Ottawa CitizenFebruary 12, 2010
OTTAWA — If the experiences of our formative years mould our character as adults, what are we to make of the life of Col. Russell Williams?
For the "bright, shining star" of the Canadian Forces, now facing devastating charges of murder and sexual assault, that life was a blend of instability and privilege, alternately exotic and mundane.
It was a life of shifting identities and high achievement, one that improbably coupled a very public career with intense personal privacy.
No wonder Random House has already announced the fall release of a book on his life.
Born in 1963, Williams was not yet five when his British parents left the English Midlands for a new life in one of Canada's most remarkable communities.
Deep River, carved out of the eastern Ontario wilderness 180 kilometres northwest of Ottawa by the federal government in 1945, was an offshoot of Canada's entry into the nuclear age.
Built to accommodate the families of scientists and technicians who worked at the nearby Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratories, the planned town was like no other in the country.
A 1958 story in Maclean's magazine by a young Peter C. Newman described Deep River as a "utopian attempt to create a happy environment where all is ordered for the best."
An affluent, intellectual oasis plunked down in a rural area where most struggled to make a living, it had one of the country's highest ratios of PhDs per capita — 130 in a population of 5,000 in 1971. Crime and unemployment were all but unknown. Local stores stocked caviar and designer-copy clothes. The Strand Theatre screened the best French, Italian, Swedish and Russian films.
To overcome their boredom and isolation, residents threw themselves into planned fun. Nearly 70 clubs offered outlets for everything from glass blowing to fencing. The town's yacht, golf and curling clubs were most popular, each with hundreds of members.
Though seemingly idyllic, this life was oppressive to some. It was, they felt, too perfect and regimented.
"The children are growing up in an artificial atmosphere — and it isn't only the children," one resident told Newman.
Some say Deep River was a repressed society, with sharp class divisions imported by its many British residents. Marital stress was common.
Williams landed in this insular community when his father took a job as a metallurgist in Chalk River.
With his mother and younger brother, Harvey, they lived in a duplex purchased in March 1968.
David Ross, 55, who grew up in Deep River, remembers Williams' father — his first name was Cedric, but he went by his second name, David — as a very proper, handsome man who resembled Robert Redford. His wife, Christine, a physiotherapist, was tall with a good figure and long dark hair — "the best-looking woman in Deep River," according to Robert Hosbons, a metallurgist who moved to the town from Britain in 1967.
They settled into their new home, joining the Deep River Yacht & Tennis Club, where David raced sailboats and his wife played tennis.
It's unclear what role, if any, the atmosphere of Deep River played, but it didn't take long for the Williams' marriage to collapse.
The couple split in May 1970, and Christine transferred ownership of the family home to her husband.
David Williams stayed on in Deep River for another 10 months. But his wife and her two sons moved to Scarborough, Ont., where she married an eminent nuclear scientist, Jerry Sovka.
One of three sons of Czech immigrants, Sovka grew up on farms in Alberta, but spurned agriculture and the lure of oil for the emerging science of nuclear technology.
Sovka accepted a scholarship from the University of Birmingham in England, where it's believed he first met Christine Williams.
Afterward, he returned to take a job with Atomic Energy Canada Ltd., and helped design early Candu nuclear plants.
With divorce and remarriage came new identities. His mother began to be known by her second name, Nonie, and Williams adopted his stepfather's surname. Henceforth, he would be known as Russ Sovka.
The family settled into a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, overlooking Lake Ontario.
For Russ Sovka, it was a period of relative stability. He delivered the Globe and Mail and learned to play the piano, and later the trumpet.
Music, especially jazz, was a passion, and he excelled at it. In his first year at Birchmount Park Collegiate in Scarborough, he played trumpet in the junior, intermediate and senior bands.
A yearbook picture from 1978 shows a handsome youth with longish hair swept left-to-right across his forehead.
By the late 1970s, Jerry Sovka was on the move again, this time to South Korea, where he spent four years overseeing the construction of a Candu reactor.
If Russ accompanied the family to South Korea, he didn't stay for long.
By 1980, Russ was in Toronto, enrolled as a boarding student at Upper Canada College, a tony private boys school that caters to the city's elite.
The school, founded in 1829, has produced six lieutenant-governors, seven chief justices and three premiers. Another 24 have been named Rhodes Scholars, 10 are Olympic medallists and 40 have been inducted into the Order of Canada.
Modelled on the British public school, UCC regularly faced accusations of racial bias and sexism until the 1970s, when it began to recruit students from visible minorities and offer assistance to the less affluent.
Beginning in 1998, allegations of sexual abuse by teachers began surfacing, including some that occurred while Russ Sovka was at the school. A number led to criminal convictions.
By all accounts, Russ Sovka did well at UCC. He's remembered as a hard-working, diligent student, though not one with a particularly high profile. In his final year, he was elected a prefect in his boarding house, Wedd's.
Music remained his greatest passion, and he played trumpet in the school band. His graduation message in the 1982 UCC yearbook quoted Louis Armstrong: "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."
After high school, young Sovka studied politics and economics at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus.
He also took flying lessons at Buttonville Airport, north of the city.
After graduating from university in 1987, Sovka reverted to his birth name of Williams and enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces.
It was perhaps a surprising choice for a university graduate whose parents were both professionals.
But Williams was a natural flyer; so accomplished, in fact, that after earning his wings in 1990, his first job was instructing pilots in CT-134 Beech Musketeer aircraft at the Forces' flying school in Portage la Prairie, Man.
It was there that he met and married his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, in 1991.
Harriman is now the respected associate director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.
In the Armed Forces, Williams' career trajectory was relentlessly upward.
In the 1990s, there were postings to 434 Combat Squadron in Shearwater, N.S., and 412 Transport Squadron in Ottawa, where passengers on his CC144 Challenger jet included the prime minister and governor general.
He and his wife bought a house in the community of Orleans, near Ottawa, where they lived for about 15 years before moving to a house in the capital city's central Westboro area last December.
Neighbours in Orleans share the general astonishment at Williams' arrest.
He and his wife were "an absolutely fantastic and wonderful couple," said Shirley Fraser, who met them when they first moved to the area.
"I would suspect the Pope before I would suspect Russ," declared George White, another neighbour.
By 1999, Williams had been promoted to major and spent four years in the offices of the Director General Military Careers, where he served as the multi-engine pilot career manager.
Life, it seemed, was good. But life can be fickle, as well.
In 2001, his mother divorced her second husband, sparking a rift in the family that continues to fester.
Williams' brother, Harvey, now a doctor in Bowmanville, Ont., said the divorce led Williams to cut ties with his mother and brother. The two reached out a couple of years ago, hoping to repair the family rift, but have had only minimal contact with Williams since.
In 2003, Williams spent a year in Kingston, earning a master of defence studies from the Royal Military College.
His 55-page master's thesis supported pre-emptive war in Iraq, arguing that it can be "an effective tool for building lasting world peace."
By then, he had clearly been selected for rapid advancement.
"He was what we call a streamer," said a ranking military officer who didn't want to be named. "He was getting groomed, fast-tracked."
After spending a year at Royal Military College, Williams was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and appointed commanding officer of 437 Transport Squadron in Trenton.
In 2005, he served six months as commanding officer, theatre support element, at Camp Mirage, a secretive Canadian Forces base in the desert south of Dubai.
The logistics base, whose very existence the Canadian Forces won't confirm, supports Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan.
Around this time, Williams and his wife bought a second home, a bungalow on the shores of Lake Stuco near Tweed, Ont., a sleepy community about 40 kilometres north of Belleville.
The two sexual assaults that Williams is charged with occurred last fall in houses on the same lake.
In both cases, the attacker broke into the houses in the dead of night, blindfolded and tied his victims naked to chairs, then assaulted and photographed them.
Meanwhile, Williams' career continued to advance.
After three years at the directorate of air requirements, he spent the early months of last year learning French at the Canadian Forces language school in Gatineau, Que. — a sure sign of someone ticketed for a position in the most senior ranks.
That assessment was confirmed when, in July 2009, Williams was appointed commander of 8 Wing at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Canada's largest airbase with 3,500 military and civilian staff.
He had risen so far and so fast because he was an impressive soldier, dedicated, hard-working and intelligent.
Yet he did so while revealing surprisingly little of himself.
"A hard guy to get to know," Quinte West Mayor John Williams told the National Post.
The mayor met weekly with Williams after his appointment at CFB Trenton.
"He was very much reserved. He just wasn't a person you would feel warm about."
Police say that after his arrest on Sunday, Williams told them where they could find incriminating evidence in his Ottawa home.
On Monday, he led police to the body of Jessica Lloyd, one of two women he's accused of killing.
With files from Kristy Nease, Citizen staff, and Adrian Humphreys, National Post
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
