Shannon Moroney knew her husband had committed a violent crime in the past, but was madly in love and believed in redemption. (From the archive)
Shannon Moroney wrote a letter to the wife of convicted rapist and murderer Russell Williams. If anyone could understand the singular hell she was going through, Moroney believed she could. For she too had been blindsided by a spouse who committed a horrific crime. She’d been married only a month when, in November 2005, her 36-year-old husband, Jason Staples, abducted two women and raped them in their Peterborough, Ont., house while she was away at a convention in Toronto.
With the shattering news of Staples’s crimes, Moroney learned she was more than a collateral victim: he had photographed her—and others—in their bathroom with a hidden camera. Yet neither she or her family turned away. The memoir charts how Moroney supported Staples through the justice system while despising his crime and the damage he’d caused. She faced stigma herself: some friends shunned her and she lost her job. The situation became a test of sorts, she writes.
Moroney never heard back from Russell Williams’s wife, which didn’t surprise her. She herself had been deluged with ugly mail after her address was made public. The cases are different, she agrees. Staples reoffended, which subjected her to harsher judgment. “People assume I’m a woman who sought out a violent offender but that’s something I don’t relate to.” She bristles at an “I married a murderer” headline about her memoir that appeared in a magazine.
Moroney doesn’t see getting involved with Staples as an error in judgment: “Jason wasn’t the wrong choice knowing what I knew, the beautiful life we shared. What happened had nothing to do with my choice. It only had to do with Jason’s choices.”
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