N.S. gunman started making fake cruiser in July 2019, RCMP say
Police are also analyzing shooter’s calls to see if he had any accomplices, documents reveal
The gunman who killed 22 people in April’s mass shooting in Nova Scotia had plans to outfit his car to look like an RCMP vehicle almost a year in advance of the shootings and he was well aware that it was illegal.
That’s one of the details revealed in a document released by a Nova Scotia court Friday, in which some material redacted in previously released documents was revealed.
A witness told RCMP officers that the gunman had purchased some vinyl decal sheets from his business on July 3, 2019. At the time, the gunman told the witness that he had a police cruiser that he’d bought at auction and wanted to “do it up like a police car.”
The witness told police that he’d told the gunman he could get in trouble for driving the car with decals; the gunman replied that “he knew and it would be illegal.”
The witness also said the gunman came back three months later, on Oct. 18, to make a second purchase of vinyl decals.
It’s been almost two months since Gabriel Wortman, dressed as a Mountie and driving a replica RCMP car, killed 22 people in northern Nova Scotia, beginning in Portapique, N.S., on the night of April 18 and continuing for the next13 hours until he was shot and killed by police in Enfield, N.S. Killed were RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, Lisa McCully, Gina Goulet, Heather O’Brien, Greg and Jamie Blair, Sean McLeod and Alanna Jenkins, Jolene Oliver, Aaron Tuck and Emily Tuck, Kristen Beaton, Tom Bagley, Corrie Ellison, Dawn Madsen and Frank Gulenchyn, Lillian Hyslop, John Zahl and Elizabeth Joanne Thomas, Joey Webber, and Peter and Joy Bond.
Police are still investigating Wortman’s motives and whether he might have had accomplices.
Lawyer David Coles, on behalf of a consortium of media organizations, has been requesting the unsealing of a series of Information to Obtain (ITO) documents used by the RCMP to request search warrants and production orders.
An ITO document is the rationale submitted by police to a judge in asking for a warrant. A production order compels a person or organization to produce documents and records to police.
Nova Scotia Provincial Court Judge Laurel Halfpenny MacQuarrie released another heavily redacted production order on Friday in which police requested from Bell Aliant telephone records between April 1, 2019, and April 20, 2020, for two landline numbers.
Both of those numbers are for Wortman’s Atlantic Denture Clinic locations, one at193 Portland St. in Dartmouth, the other at 3542 Novalea Dr. in Halifax.
The RCMP said it planned to use the information produced by the telephone company to determine if Wortman had any co-conspirators.
In the production order, police state that Wortman did not have a cellphone of his own and that on the night of April 18, at his warehouse at 135 Orchard Beach Dr. in Portapique, Wortman smashed the cellphone used by his common law spouse. That phone has not been found and is presumed by police to have been burned in the fire that consumed the warehouse.
Police argued that since the gunman had no cellphone access, any possible contact with a co-conspirator would have to be made from the landline telephone numbers.