https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/russell-williamss-wife-knew-he-was-a-predator-victim/ Laurie Massicotte—who was attacked on her couch, stripped naked with a knife, and ordered to pose for Williams’s camera just weeks before he committed his first murder—alleges in newly filed court documents that Mary Elizabeth Harriman “was aware” of her husband’s “illicit conduct” but “did not report that conduct to the police.” Massicotte also claims her assailant’s longtime spouse “gained financially from this illicit conduct” by acquiring Williams’s assets after he was captured, including his half of the couple’s new Ottawa townhome.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/famed-detectives-interrogation-techniques-derail-murder-case Dim-witted, with an IQ of about 70 and intellectual functioning in the extremely low to borderline range, Mr. Armishaw started dating Kayla Lindeman in the summer of 2006, when she was 8-months pregnant with Jaydin, her second child, and by November he was living with her in the basement of her relatives’ home. She viewed him as “pretty useless” and just “a placement,” and both police and Mr. Armishaw believed she was still in a sexual relationship with Jaydin’s father. After Jaydin died, from brain injuries consistent with shaking, police also interrogated Kayla, but failed to pursue inconsistencies in her evidence, Judge Langdon wrote. Eight months after the crime, with the investigation effectively stalled, Mr. Armishaw was arrested “out of the blue” and charged jointly with a sexual assault that the judge described as minor, and which was not ultimately prosecuted, but which likely added to the sense that police were “overwhelming” him, the judge wrote. In custody, and advised by his lawyer to keep silent, Mr. Armishaw was subjected to the same interrogation techniques used on Williams, then one of Canada’s top military minds. It began as a casual chat, in which Det.-Sgt. Smyth expressed sympathy over Ms. Lindeman’s disloyalty, and said the time had come to accept responsibility. Leaning forward into Mr. Armishaw’s space, speaking calmly in a tone the judge described as “quietly relentless,” Det.-Sgt. Smyth said the investigation was complete, solved by science. “That’s all been explained to us by the medical evidence and the experts and the CSI people who do their job and they do it very well, okay? That evidence is all there. All right? There’s no issue about what happened. There’s no issue about the fact that you’re the one that caused these injuries to Jaydin, okay?” Det.-Sgt. Smyth said in the interrogation. “One does not need a diploma in psychology to understand that a person with the psychological and mental impairments [that Mr. Armishaw has] is a uniquely vulnerable individual when confronted with a vastly more clever interrogator who is in a position of authority in relation to him,” Judge Langdon wrote. “I am persuaded that Mr. Armishaw’s will was overcome. He simply caved in to the tactics to which Staff Sergeant Smyth subjected him. The most effective seems to have been his use of false evidence to convince Mr. Armishaw that he was guilty.”