A TRAGEDY MORE THAN
AS RCMP BELIEVED THE SUSPECT WAS DEAD OR TRAPPED BEHIND THEIR LINES, THE NOVA SCOTIA GUNMAN CONTINUED HIS RAMPAGE, KILLING BOTH BY TARGET AND AT RANDOM
At 10:26 p.m. last Saturday, a man drove a vehicle down the only road in and out of Portapique, N.S., heading for the highway.
He was bleeding from a gunshot wound, in urgent need of medical care, and likely going into shock. What terrors must have gone through his mind as police cars drove toward him, the first responders to the worst spree killing in Canada’s history.
These were real police, and the man, who has survived, told them what had incomprehensibly happened. A police car had just driven by in the other direction, toward the beach, and the driver fired at him as they passed on the Portapique Beach Road. He could see the shooter, a middle aged white man, was dressed like an RCMP officer.
What followed was an atrocity of immense scale carried out over an agonizing 13 hours marked by increasing confusion and panic, and only discovered by police bit by bit, after the killer escaped their perimeter around Portapique and set out across northern Nova Scotia on a murderous rampage to the properties of people he knew and aimed to kill.
In one case, he failed because they saw him coming. Some of his victims died trying to save others. He shot a stranger out walking, pulled two strangers over in his fake police car to murder them at the roadside, and assassinated a police officer.
“To call this a tragedy would be an understatement,” said Supt. Darren Campbell, in charge of support services for RCMP in Nova Scotia, who described the chronology as police know it for the first time Friday.
Portapique itself was burning down as police arrived, from fires set at seven crime scenes, including houses and outbuildings, permanent homes and summer cottages. About 100 people lived there year round.
There were bodies out on the road in front of a house, and more inside, 13 in all shot dead. Three people were injured and survived, two of them in Portapique.
Police knew quite early who their suspect was, but wrongly believed 51-yearold Halifax denturist Gabriel Wortman was either still trapped in their perimeter around Portapique, or dead by his own hand in a burning building, Campbell said. They reasoned this because they knew he owned three real-looking police cars, all Ford Tauruses, two of which were on fire at his Portapique home, and the third found parked in Halifax.
They called for heavy backup: dogs, tactical officers, helicopters, negotiators. Specialized resources were called up from New Brunswick. It was a manhunt, and they knew the target was heavily armed.
But they thought they knew the limits of where he could be, so there was no emergency alert to the wider public.
“That was not a consideration at that particular time," Campbell said Friday.
One crucial thing they did not know, until Wortman’s girlfriend emerged at daybreak from hiding in the surrounding forest, was that he owned a fourth fake cruiser, without licence plates.
This woman had endured a significant assault by Wortman, and was tied up, but escaped into the woods before his house burned down.
Campbell said this assault and her escape “could very well have been the catalyst to start the chain of events,” but said he did not discount the possibility of deliberate planning.
They have learned where he obtained the light bar for his car, for example, and also which decal manufacturer provided him sheeting, but not who printed the RCMP detailing.
Much of the evidence is lost because Wortman’s Portapique house is burned to the ground.
There is a witness who might have seen Wortman’s car crossing a field, which could explain his escape, Campbell said. There is also evidence Wortman came near to police at one point overnight, but avoided detection.
It was not until Sunday morning that police were alerted to the next major series of murders, far north of Portapique in Wentworth, where Wortman killed a couple he knew, and a man who came to help with the house fire he set.
From here Wortman came back south to a residence in Glenholme where he banged on the door, but the residents, who had seen him approach with a long gun, recognized him, and hid inside until he left, then called 911.
He shot a woman walking on the roadside, a stranger to him, then drove on to Debert.
He pulled a vehicle over and shot the driver, then did the same to the driver of a second vehicle.
Campbell denied news reports police found a hit list. He suggested some victim witnesses might have misinterpreted officers’ descriptions of police theories about whom Wortman might have been intending to target.
Contrary to the initial police description of a mainly “random” rampage, this new detailed timeline suggests Wortman deliberately targeted locations and victims he “had an issue with,” as Campbell put it in the case of the Glenholme house.
On Sunday morning, with 19 people already dead, RCMP Const. Chad Morrison was parked in Shubenacadie, between Truro and Halifax, waiting for his colleague Const. Heidi Stevenson, when a police vehicle pulled up. He thought it was her, but it was Wortman who pulled alongside and shot Morrison from the driver’s seat. Morrison drove away, telling dispatch he was heading for medical care. He has survived several gunshot wounds.
At that same time, Stevenson was northbound on Highway 2 when she encountered Wortman coming south. Their cars collided head on, and she engaged him, Campbell said, but he killed her, took her gun and ammunition, and set both their cars ablaze.
He killed a passerby and left in his vehicle, heading south to a home on Highway 224. He knew the woman who lived there, killed her inside, and left in her car, a red Mazda 3.
His movements indicate he was moving south toward Halifax where he lived and worked, but police said nothing about where specifically he might have been heading.
He stopped at the Irving Big Stop gas station at Enfield near the Halifax airport.
By coincidence, a police tactical resources vehicle also stopped for gas here. An officer shot him dead at 11:26 a.m. on Sunday.