The former base commander at C-F-B Trenton had done a lot of moving around long before he joined the Armed Forces.
The Globe and Mail reports Russell Williams was born in England in 1963, but soon went to Chalk River with his family, where his father worked at a nuclear research laboratory. His mother remarried after the couple divorced, and her new husband transferred to the Toronto area, working for Ontario Hydro. They were off to South Korea next, and then Williams returned to Toronto for his last two years of high school at a private school, where he went by his stepfather’s last name, Sovka.
Sovka eventually took back Williams as his last name, and attended the University of Toronto in the mid-1980’s, a campus haunted by a series of unsolved rapes at the time. He enrolledĀ in the forces in 1987, and was named Eight Wing base commander last July.