Retired profilers in Canada and the U.S. say it's highly unlikely an individual waits until mid-life to start committing multiple sexual assaults and murder.
Col. Russell Williams, 46, was charged Monday with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of sexual assault stemming from four incidents with four different women in eastern Ontario.
The two break-ins and sexual assaults occurred at two homes in Tweed in September.
On Nov. 25, Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 37, was found murdered in her Brighton home. Two months later, on Jan. 29, Jessica Lloyd, 27, disappeared from her Belleville home. Her body was found Monday after Williams' arrest.
While retired RCMP and FBI profilers were cautious to comment on a case they are not involved in, they all agreed that history shows very few individuals start committing multiple sex assaults and murders in their mid-40s.
"It gives me food for thought when I think if someone is just coming to the police's attention at 46 years old," retired RCMP Supt. Glenn Woods said. "We know from our experience, guys that act out this way, both sexually and graduate to homicide, someone that age didn't just start when they turned 46 years old."
Woods, a certified profiler and former head of the RCMP's behavioural sciences branch, said most individuals who rape and murder start fantasizing about it in their teens.
"Their sexual thoughts are a lot different from yours and mine," Woods said. "Their sexual thoughts have to do with coercion, force and violence all thrown in with sex."
Because those fantasies start early, profilers trace back a timeline of a suspect's life and then see if that timeline intersects with crimes that are similar to the crimes already linked to the suspect.
As police look back at other cases that may be connected to Williams, they'll be assisted by the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System.
That system is an inventory of violent crimes that allows police to match behaviours connected with each crime.
Retired FBI profiler Mary O'Toole said timelines can stretch as far back as when a suspect was born.
"We've done timelines on cases and we take them back to birth ... you want to start looking for behaviour when they're young," O'Toole said. "With other cases we have seen acting-out behaviour even before the teen years.
"You'd be looking for sexual assaults, you'd be looking for other unsolved murders, disappearances of people; you'd basically be going back in time to see what is the extent of the criminal behaviour and does it fit to where that individual lived."
O'Toole said in most cases she has worked on in which individuals were found guilty, you'd look back through their life and see evidence of it at a very early age.
"You don't wake up some morning at 45 or 46 or 40 and start acting out in a sexually violent way," she said.
don.peat@sunmedia.ca
