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His decades of training, unparalleled experience and acute understanding of the human mind had offered no immunity.

Dr. Bradford, 66, the go-to guy for Crown and defence lawyers needing to understand the complex minds of sexual sadists, had been working round the clock on the Williams case.

“I was under a lot of pressure to get the tests done on Williams because the Crown wanted to get on with it,” he says. “To avoid publicity I did all the work at night starting at around eight o’clock at The Royal Ottawa [mental health hospital]. The OPP would transport him and I would work with him at night when there was no Joe Public around. So I’d be there till midnight and I had 30 days to do the work.

“Then I had to go to Orillia to see the tapes. And the tapes are awful. They really are.”

Knowing what happened next to the women is one of the toughest parts, says Dr. Bradford.

“Always with these things you know what the end play is,” he says. “You’re seeing someone alive being sexually assaulted and you know they’re going to die. It’s very, very hard.”

Read Chris Cobb’s full series on post-traumatic stress disorder

What he wouldn’t realize until he went into therapy was that the videos from his many cases had been gradually taking their toll and they rushed back to haunt him on that long drive home.

“I burst into tears and was crying uncontrollably,” he says. “I was shaking. I had never had an experience like that and it felt awful. I was crying and saying my life is a failure and asking myself ‘Why did you choose to do this stuff?’ I was completely self-derogatory and beating myself up. For the five hours back to Brockville I was struggling.