Warning: This story contains details that may be disturbing to some readers

In a cold and nearly emotionless videotaped confession played Wednesday in an Ontario courtroom, disgraced Col. Russell Williams described in vivid detail how he repeatedly sexually assaulted and then killed two young women at the end of a nearly three-year crime spree.

Williams, the former commander of CFB Trenton, was questioned by police in early February, days after he raped and strangled 27-year-old Jessica Lloyd and dumped her body outside Tweed, Ont.

A judge is expected to deliver his sentence on Thursday, after which Canadian Forces officials will make a brief statement. It's expected they will act quickly to strip Williams of his rank.

Williams came to investigators' attention when he was stopped at a roadside checkpoint on Feb. 4, when police were comparing tires on SUVs to treads found outside Lloyd's home. Unbeknownst to Williams, police matched the tires on his Nissan Pathfinder to the tread marks. Three days later he was brought in for questioning, with the entire 10-hour interrogation taped by police.

At first, Williams appears relaxed and polite, dressed in a golf shirt and jeans, chewing gum and smiling at the camera.

But his interrogator eventually tells Williams of the evidence collected that points to him as Lloyd's killer and also connects him to the November 2009 death of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, a flight attendant who once worked on a flight Williams piloted.

When Williams is informed that his Ottawa house and Tweed cottage are being searched, he realizes he's been caught.

Williams folds his arms, falls silent and thinks for several moments before answering the rest of Det.-Sgt. Jim Smyth's many questions.

Williams finally says his main concern is the effect the search and resulting revelations would have on his wife and the Canadian Forces.

"I'm struggling with how upset my wife is right now," Williams said. "I'm concerned that they are tearing apart my wife's brand new house."

"I want to, um, minimize the impact on my wife," Williams said.

"So do I," replied Smyth.

"So how do we do that?" Williams asked.

"Well, you start by telling the truth," Smyth said.

"Okay," Williams replied before asking for a map to point out where outside Tweed he had dumped Lloyd's body.

Williams also points investigators to computer files in the basement and in his office in his Ottawa home in order to spare his wife an intrusive search. The files contained thousands of images of Williams in women's and girls' lingerie, which he stole during dozens of break-and-enters in Eastern Ontario that began in 2007.

On Monday, Williams pleaded guilty to more than 80 charges related to the break-ins, as well as two counts of sexual assault and two counts of first-degree murder.

When he is later asked why he thinks "these things happened," Williams replies: "I don't know. I don't know the answers and I'm pretty sure the answers don't matter."

Jessica Lloyd

After expressing concern for his wife, Williams, in a matter-of-fact manner, detailed the gruesome late-January murder of Lloyd, a 27-year-old woman who worked at a bus company in Napanee.

He described breaking into her home and attacking her in her bed.

"I raped her," Williams said in the video.

"A rape can mean a lot of things. What took place?" the investigator countered.

Williams then went on to describe in painstaking detail the various ways he assaulted Lloyd, how he threatened her and placed zip ties around her neck to control her. He also described to police how he made Lloyd model underwear, and photographed her as she did so.

Williams said he then took her to Tweed, where he lived. The day-and-a-half-long nightmare continued with numerous rapes, photo sessions and eventually with Lloyd suffering seizures, begging for her life.

Williams, after telling Lloyd he was taking her to the hospital, finally seemed to tire of the cruel game.

"And as we were walking ... I hit her on the back of the head," he told investigators in the video, in which he often referred to her by her first name as though they were friends.

"I was surprised that her skull gave way. She was immediately unconscious and I strangled her."

After that Williams explained that he hid Lloyd's body in his garage and went to work because he was flying a military plane to California early the next day. He later returned to get rid of her body and clean up the mess.

Cpl. Marie-France Comeau

In the video shown to the courtroom, Williams also described the murder of Comeau, pronouncing her name with the correct French accent.

He admitted breaking into Comeau's home and hiding in her basement, waiting for her to fall asleep, and how she came down to the basement in search of her cat.

"So when she spotted me I had the same flashlight (and) subdued her, brought her upstairs and, uh, strangled her, well more suffocated her with some tape," he said.

Later in the video he admitted raping and photographing Comeau.

Williams explained in the video that he used duct tape to cover Comeau's mouth and nose, until she suffocated.

"I had thought about strangling her earlier...it was a short-lived attempt because she struggled quite a bit. So I decided I had to suffocate her," he said.

The reason he murdered her, he said, was that there was an obvious link to an assault he had committed on a woman who lived near him in Tweed.

When asked by investigators whether he would have continued to commit murders and sexual assaults if he hadn't been caught, Williams was ambiguous.

"I was hoping not. I can't answer that question," he said.

Williams apologizes

Also presented to court Wednesday were letters Williams wrote shortly after his confession to one of his sexual-assault victims, and to members of his victims' families.

In one letter, Williams told Lloyd's mother that her daughter loved her very much because she "told me so again and again."

Williams also apologized for "having taken your daughter from you.

"Jessica was a beautiful, gentle young woman as you know. I know she loved you very much -- she told me so again and again."

Williams said Lloyd had no idea he was going to kill her because "she believed she was going home."

In another letter, Williams told his wife he was "so very sorry for having hurt you like this," and asked her to take care of their cat, Rosie. He signed off the letter with, "I love you, Russ."

On Tuesday, Williams was formally convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of Lloyd and Comeau, the sexual assault of two other victims, and the 82 fetish break-ins.

On Wednesday afternoon, friends and family members of the victims, as well as women who had personal items stolen during the break-ins, spoke in court about how they have been hurt by Williams's crimes.

Justice Robert Scott, who is presiding over the proceedings, instructed the media to only use the first names of those giving victim-impact statements.

A friend named Lisa said Lloyd had looked forward to being a wife and mother, and said her friend's death "completely diminished" her faith in God.

"How could he create such a monster? The very person whose job it was to protect my country was terrorizing my community," Lisa said while holding a photograph of Lloyd.

The confession video and victim-impact statements followed nearly two days of court proceedings, during which the prosecution meticulously went through all of the charges against Williams, reading the agreed statement of facts and showing photos -- some taken by Williams himself and others taken by forensic investigators.

The prosecution showed dozens of the thousands of images stored on Williams's computer, many of which showed Williams masturbating while wearing lingerie, some of which belonged to girls as young as 11.