A New Kind of Monster by Timothy Appleby Read Free Book Online Page B

barely concealed then and today widely acknowledged: a permissive 1960s sexual ethos was flourishing in the community. “It was like Peyton Place [the New England town in the classic novel about the sordid secrets that lie beneath a placid exterior], quite a little den of iniquity. People were trading partners and sleeping with one another’s wives,” says retired schoolteacher Dianne Murphy, who also taught at Morison when Williams attended.
    Many marriages ruptured, “and a lot of people stayed with their new partners,” Murphy remembers. “They had what they called the Key Club, and quite a few people participated. A lot of the professionals would have been involved, more than the techies. The population was heavily loaded with British immigrants, and there was a certain kind of class system that was incorporated into this town. Some neighborhoods were designed exclusively for the professionals, others were for the tech people.”
    Karen Bigras, too, recalls the Key Club, a conduit for wife swapping. A participant would go to a party at the club with his or her spouse and then leave with someone else’s partner. Bigras first heard about these goings-on when she was seven. “You put your keys in a hat. My parents were shocked and horrified when they found out about it. They had been asked to join.”
    Retired family therapist Peter Addison, who spent six years as chief counselor at the Deep River high school, knew both ofWilliams’s parents and tried unsuccessfully to help them when their marriage faltered. “It was an exciting time, it was all happening, this nuclear thing was going to be their salvation,” he says of the Deep River residents. But Addison also recalls a social milieu that was “neurotic as hell,” in which sexual experimentation seemed to blend with an adherence to conventional middle-class values. “It was a strange society. None of that free-spirited stuff was as free-spirited as it appeared to outsiders. The parents were pretty traditional. Some of them didn’t understand why kids would have a choice about what they wanted to do. I remember arguing with parents when kids would want to drop Latin or something. It would be, ‘No, they can’t do that.’ ”
    Some who lived in Deep River at the time remember Williams’s father, David, as a loud, authoritarian figure who would insult his wife in front of others and insisted on having his way. Neither parent was overtly affectionate, several people said; both seemed preoccupied with their busy lives. “Russell’s mother would come down to the [Yacht and Tennis] Club and leave him on his own to play on the waterfront,” remembers a former resident who was a few years older than Russell and knew the family. “Frankly, the teenagers at the club really did not like the father at all. He became the subject of many pranks. He had a quick, sharp temper and was easily provoked.”
    How much impact any of this had on Williams’s psyche and how much it shaped his future life is subject for speculation. What is certain is that his home life was soon going to change radically.
    Living on Birch Street a couple of blocks from the Williams house was another family drawn to Deep River by the Chalk River project: Jerry and Marilynn Sovka and their three young children. An Alberta-born nuclear physicist, the son of Czech immigrants, Jerry Sovka was educated at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and he too had attended the University of Birmingham, on a scholarship, which is where he may have first met Christine Williams. “Jerry Sovka was very much involved with the Yacht and Tennis Club—and many other things,” says retired AECL electrical engineer Bill Bishop, who has lived in Deep River since 1967. “He was a very social person, maybe too much so. He was a ladies’ man, he liked women, he had an air about him. He was a real