Colonel David Russell Williams was commander of Canada's largest Air Force base. He was also a bizarrely organized panty thief who "meticulously photographed" his crimes. His illegal proclivities escalated to rape and murder. Today, he pled guilty to 88 charges.

Williams, according to The New York Times, was frequently tasked with piloting government officials and dignitaries, including Queen Elizabeth II. But when he wasn't flying Queens and Prime Ministers around Canada, he was stealing underwear from his teenage neighbors, keeping "detailed accounts" of his "meticulously photographed" crimes. When police first searched his Ottawa home, they found "hundreds of pieces of girls' and women's underwear." So much for that boring Canadian stereotype, eh?

The first time he participated in his weird, OCD ritual was in 2007, when he broke into the home of family friends and stole the underwear of their 12-year-old daughter after masturbating on her bed. He went on to do the same in some 47 other homes. According to prosecutors, the colonel would break in to the bedrooms of young girls—nine was the youngest—and take photographs of his victims' rooms, beds, hampers, and underwear drawers. He'd then take the underwear out of the drawers and put it on for photo shoots. These are some of the less explicit photos—generally, he liked to take pictures of his dick (in one case being touched by a girl's makeup brush):

He'd jerk off, lying on the kids beds, and then head home, underwear in hand (he took once 87 pairs from a single high schooler in one night) to begin his documentation. At his houses he took photographs of his bizarre collections and sometimes notated the evidence with captions like "Merci beaucoup." The evidence was kept on hard drives he stored in his ceiling.

He kept a record of his break-ins and photo shoots on his computer, presumably in, like, Excel. According to the Ottawa Citizen, the records contained the names of his victims, the items he'd taken, and the date of his break-in. In one case, when he couldn't find out the name of three sisters he'd burglarized, he labeled them "mystery little girls."

Williams was so careful with his break-ins that many of the families victimized didn't know they'd been hit. In September of 2009, he went further, breaking into two women's homes and blindfolding them, forcing them to strip before taking photographs. A month later, he killed a flight attendant whom he worked with, Cpl. Marie-France Comeau. She had been beaten and had her breathing passages blocked with tape. In January, he killed his second victim, Jessica Lloyd and buried her near his home.

He was arrested after police matched treads on his tires to tracks found near her body. A subsequent search of his home turned up his odd database and hundreds of photographs. He was charged in April with two counts of murder and 86 other charges (you can read them all here), and pled guilty on Monday. It took the court clerk 40 minutes to read out his charges.

[NYT; Ottawa Citizen]