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>Stephen Williams is a writer and investigative journalist His reputation was solidified by the international success of two books, Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka and Karla: A Pact with the Devil which were critically acclaimed as “apocalyptic stories set in landscapes of suburban deviance.”
His non-fiction work has been compared to that of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Professor George Elliott Clark wrote “The true crime is, in the hands of artists like Truman Capote and Stephen Williams, is a kind of poetry, a kind of austere grand guignol, exuding gaudy horror.”
“On an aesthetic level, Karla is almost unique in our literature.” poet and publisher Barry Callaghan said. “It is an extraordinary act of the imagination brought to bear on the facts.”
Mr. Williams has been twice arrested to do with his writing, once in 1998 and again in 2003, criminally charged with over one hundred counts of disobeying court orders and publication bans, twice put on trial over the eight-year period between 1998 and 2005, and twice exonerated.
The Attorney General also sued Mr. Williams in 2003 as an enemy of the State, alleging he was in possession of “sensitive” court documents. The lawsuit sought unspecified damages and the seizure of Mr. Williams’ research and archives. Although the courts and police seized his computer and files, the lawsuit did not succeed.
As Mr. Williams told journalist Sandra Martin in 2004 “I did not initiate the battle in which I found myself, any more than the hundreds of thousands of grunts who were sent to Vietnam or Iraq initiated those wars. Other people who live on other planes with multiple agendas did… What can the grunt say when he is ‘in country’ except ‘I’m in the shit now’? To ascribe any responsibility to me for the battle in which I found myself is like ascribing the cause of the Vietnam war to the soldiers who died in it.”
In 2004, Mr. Williams was given the Hellman-Hammett Award by the Human Rights Watch. The Award is presented annually to journalists who have been prosecuted by totalitarian regimes such as China and Iran.
Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett were interrogated in the 1950s by the US Congress House of Un-American Activities Committee and suffered professionally for years afterward. Hammett spent six months in jail for refusing to name names while testifying at the hearings run by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Stephen Williams lives on a farm in southwestern Ontario with the writer Marsha Boulton and their English Bull Terrier, Wally. Together they herd cats (they have seventeen,) shepherd sheep, chase free-ranging Sussex and Dorking chickens and coddle an old American Saddlebred Palomino named Karma.
Mr. Williams is currently working on a new book examining patterns of police ineptitude and prosecutorial malfeasance since J. Edgar Hoover called Law and Disorder.
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