National Post (National Edition)
Mothers, grandparents, nurses, a teenager
ONE YEAR AGO, 22 LIVES ENDED IN ONE OF CANADA'S WORST MURDER SPREES
UNTIL THE LIFE OF THE MURDERER HIMSELF WAS ENDED BY POLICE, TWENTY-TWO BIOGRAPHIES WERE CUT SHORT. SOME WERE DELIBERATE TARGETS, OTHERS CAUGHT BY MERE CIRCUMSTANCE, IN THE MOST GRIEVOUS CRIMINAL OUTRAGE IN RECENT CANADIAN MEMORY.
The lives started ending on the night of April 18, 2020, in the uneasy early days of the pandemic, when rural Nova Scotia seemed about the safest place to be.
Over the next 13 hours, until the life of the murderer himself was ended by police, twenty-two biographies were cut short. Some were deliberate targets, others caught by mere circumstance, in the most grievous criminal outrage in recent Canadian memory.
Those victims include a teenager who just days before had inspired the whole province by playing the fiddle over social media; a mother who sang goodnight songs for family friends also in quarantine; a man coming to help his neighbours with a fire; nurses on their way to work; a police officer in the line of duty; a woman out for a walk.
It began in the village of Portapique, near the river mouth on the Minas Basin, on a Saturday night one year ago. The place was on fire, first the killer's property, then the next-door neighbour's.
Joanne Thomas, 58, who studied speech and language development and worked in health-care administration, and her husband, John Zahl, 69, a U.S. Navy veteran who served as a Russian linguist and later worked for FedEx, had recently retired to Nova Scotia, and were members of the local Presbyterian congregation. They had raised their family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, including four children from John's previous marriage and two grandchildren they adopted and raised. They were meant to be on a cruise, but it was cancelled by the pandemic.
Corrie Ellison, 42, an outdoorsman, was visiting his father when they heard gunfire and saw the glow of a fire. He went out and died by gunfire on the road. Soon after, his brother Clinton came out to find him lying there dead, and realized the peril he was also in, so he ran into the woods, terrified when he saw the killer's flashlight behind him. He stayed hidden the entire night and survived.
Police arrived just before 10:30 p.m. The first car to arrive passed a man in a car who said he had just been shot by someone driving past, toward the beach. He said it looked like a police car.
The little community of cottages was in mayhem. Those murdered include Dawn Madsen and Frank Gulenchyn, parents of three, who had recently moved in retirement from Ontario, where Dawn worked in a long-term care home.
Peter Bond, 74, and his wife Joy, 70, were great-grandparents. He was a truck driver and she was a cook and mother to their two sons, and they had moved to Portapique for retirement.
Lisa McCully, 49, a mother of two and teacher at Debert Elementary School, was a former student council president, amateur actor, pianist and dancer, traveller to Guatemala, and charity cyclist who went all the way from Seattle to Boston to raise money for lung disease
Greg Blair, 45, and his wife Jamie, 40, were the parents of four sons and fixtures in the local minor hockey community. They ran a gas and energy business together, and had welcomed a new granddaughter.
Aaron Tuck, 45, died alongside his wife Jolene Oliver, 40 and their daughter Emily Tuck, 17, a fiddler.
The Halifax Examiner's detailed coverage of the crimes includes a list that Aaron, known as Friar, wrote about being a father for a friend's book.
“Teach independence. Make sure your children value their worth and know they can handle anything. Teach them how to live off the land. Emily can build a cabin or a composting toilet. She can chop wood and run a chainsaw. She appreciates the land and can survive in the wilderness,” it read. “Expose them to music. Coming from the East Coast, I introduced Emily to fiddle music. She loved it and wanted to play. She learned very quickly and found she had a unique talent.”
Police tried to secure the area, a helicopter was called for, specialized forces were mobilized from New Brunswick, but the killer got through the cordon, perhaps by driving through a field, then travelled north toward Wentworth Valley, where there is a provincial park and a ski hill.
Police knew by this time who they were after. His house was ablaze, his wife missing, hiding in the woods, herself a victim of his violence but also charged with unlawfully supplying him with ammunition, as are two other men.
It was early Sunday morning, around eight, when Sean McLeod and Alanna Jenkins, both employees of Corrections Canada, were killed in their home in West Wentworth. Their neighbour Tom Bagley, 70, a volunteer firefighter who came to help with the burning house, was shot dead. He was a navy veteran and father of three.
Soon after, two people who live in a house nearby called 911 to report the killer had been at their door, with a long-barrelled weapon, and apparently driving a police car. They knew his name, and he knew them. They did not answer when he knocked at their door, probably saving their own lives.
Lillian Hyslop, who had retired to Nova Scotia from the Yukon with her husband Michael, was out on a walk in her reflective safety vest. “A true adventurer, she lived, worked, and explored Canada from sea to sea to shining sea,” reads her obituary.
Driving south toward Debert, still in the fake police car, the killer pulled over cars, in both cases nurses on their way to work.
Kristen Beaton was a continuing care assistant, newly married with a child, and in the early weeks of a second pregnancy. Her husband Nick told CTV about the emotional upset she suffered when she had to leave her young son to go to work each day on the front lines of pandemic health care, and could not immediately hold him when she got home, for fear of spreading a virus.
Heather O'Brien was a mother to six children and two stepchildren, and also a health-care worker with the Victorian Order of Nurses. She lived in Masstown, near Debert.
Around this same time, Sunday mid-morning, two police officers mistakenly opened fire at a firehall that was being used as a place of shelter for people who could not return to Portapique, narrowly missing another police officer and volunteer firefighters. A recent independent inquiry cleared the officers of wrongdoing.
Confusion like that added to the terror of the morning.
RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson, 48, died in the line of duty. She was a mother of two, a rugby coach, and was once photographed in RCMP Red Serge leading smiling children holding hands. Her obituary described her as “the neighbour who waved at everyone. She was the busy parent who volunteered at the school. She was the friend who delivered cinnamon buns and homemade bread. She was the second mom to many kids who came over to play. She was the gentle smile when you needed it most.”
She had been on her way to meet up with another officer at a highway intersection, but the killer got there first and fired at the other officer, who was injured but drove away and survived. It was shortly after this that the killer's fake police car collided with Stevenson's on the road in Shubenacadie. He killed her, took her gun and magazines.
Joey Webber, a father of three who had worked in a pulp mill and was out running an errand for his family, stopped to help and was killed. The killer set both police vehicles — his fake one and Stevenson's real one — on fire, and continued southbound in Webber's SUV to the home of Gina Goulet, 54, a denturist who had survived cancer twice.
Goulet had been texting with her daughter that morning about the manhunt for the colleague that she knew, but not well. The killer shot her and her dog, which survived.
“Having the ability to literally put smiles on people's faces was one of her greatest and proudest achievements,” her obituary read.
The killer changed his clothes and got into her car, a red Mazda 3, and kept going in the direction of Halifax, stopping at a gas station near the airport. It was a chance encounter with a police tactical officer, who shot and killed the gunman at 11:26 a.m.
A permanent memorial to these people is not yet decided, but an informal memorial walk opened this week in Victoria Park in nearby Truro.