A year after massacre, Nova Scotia demands answers
Ahead of a public inquiry, here are the knowns and unknowns about the largest mass murder spree in Canadian history
HALIFAX—The empty parcel of land looking out over Nova Scotia’s Cobequid Bay appears serene today. It’s only if you stop and look closely that you’ll notice the lingering signs of something sinister: the trees circling the centre of the lot are all blackened on one side.
Here, nearly a year ago, on Portapique Beach Road, next to a small cemetery along the water’s edge, there was a great fire. The trees still bear those scars.
If you triangulate from the blackened bark, you can find the centre of the blaze, where once a house stood. But the remains of that house — by all accounts, a very nice one — have long since been razed. There is no trace. No chimney. No foundation.
The man who lit that fire lived here. Nothing remains of him here, either, but for the scorch marks he left on the community he terrorized. He is long dead, and no one here is lamenting his passing.
Instead, they mourn the 22 lives he took, in a murderous rampage that began on this lot, and ended 13 hours later and 100 kilometres away with his death.
On April 18, 2020, what began as an anniversary celebration with his common-law spouse spiralled into hours of horror, as denturist Gabriel Wortman — dressed as a Mountie and driving a replica RCMP car for much of that time — roamed Colchester county, killing people and setting houses on fire before
being killed by police at a highway gas station the next day.
Now, almost a year later, Wortman’s living victims, his victims’ families and Nova Scotians in general are still coming to grips with the crime that shook a rural community to its roots.
There is grief, and that will not go away soon. There is anger, and that comes and goes in waves. And there are questions, many of them still unanswered. Many of them begging answers from the nation’s police force about its response before, during and after the shootings. The RCMP has remained largely tight-lipped about its actions, citing first its ongoing investigation and, later, the upcoming public inquiry into the massacre.
“I think it’s surprising that we have as many unanswered questions as we do,” said Wayne MacKay, professor emeritus of the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
“It is surprising and disappointing that the RCMP, in particular, and other players involved in this haven’t provided more answers by this point through their own investigations and police work.”
What answers have emerged have largely been the result of an ongoing court fight to make public some of the swathes of redacted text in documents filed by the RCMP in the wake of the shooting.
Ahead of a highly anticipated upcoming public inquiry, here are the knowns and unknowns that hang over the largest mass killing in Canadian history.
The ‘why’
Why did Gabriel Wortman do what he did? We know that the 51-year-old had a temper and a violent streak. We know he physically and mentally abused his common-law spouse. We know he was paranoid and had become increasingly so as the coronavirus pandemic spread. We’re told he held long-standing grudges.
After conducting a psychological autopsy, the RCMP say they believe he may have been an “injustice collector” — someone who felt slighted or cheated by others and nursed those grievances until they boiled over into a rage.
We know he argued with his spouse, Lisa Banfield, that night, on their 19th anniversary, and that, according to Banfield, he later dragged her out of bed, beat her and held her captive in one of those surplus police cars.
How that morphed into a 13hour killing rampage, why he sought out his neighbours and killed them, why he burned houses — including his own — why he slept on it overnight then continued killing in the morning, seeking out some specific targets and randomly killing others — may never truly come to light.
Were warning signs missed?
Neighbours had reported to police, years earlier and on more than one occasion, that Wortman was abusing his spouse, and that he had a stash of weapons. No action seems to have been taken on those reports.
Wortman’s cousin — himself an ex-RCMP officer, along with his brother and Wortman’s uncle — told RCMP after the fact that Wortman put himself through university by smuggling alcohol and tobacco across the border in Houlton, Maine. He also told police that Wortman was “almost a career criminal and doing a lot of stuff, but he never got caught.”
The cousin said he decided, as a police officer, that he had to keep his distance from Wortman.
That same cousin also confirmed a report of Wortman brutally beating his own father during a family trip to the Dominican Republic in 2016.
What about his behaviour before the killings?
Wortman was a paranoid man, witnesses told police. He had hidden compartments and storage rooms both in his house and warehouse in Portapique, and in his house in Dartmouth. As the early days of the epidemic went on, he stockpiled several hundred litres of gasoline. And, in the apparent belief the economy was about to crash, he withdrew $475,000 in $100 bills from the bank. A few days after the shootings, police found $705,000 cash at his home in Portapique.
Where did he get the cars and guns?
We know that Wortman bought four decommissioned police cars — each a white Ford Taurus — at government auction and that he went shopping for parts on eBay to outfit them — including items explicitly labelled as being intended for police use.
The RCMP decals on the car were printed by Peter Griffon, an ex-con who did odd jobs for Wortman. Griffon, who also worked at a sign shop, printed the decals apparently without the owner’s knowledge. The owner of the shop had previously refused to print police decals for Wortman, telling him it was illegal. Griffon has since had his parole revoked.
The guns Wortman used in his killing spree were all obtained illegally — he never had a firearms licence.
Three of them, a semi-automatic rifle and two pistols, were smuggled in from the U.S. A fourth, another semi-automatic rifle, was obtained illegally from a gun shop in Winnipeg.
Who was his spouse?
Although many questions remain, some of the details of those 13 hours in northern Nova Scotia have been answered, to a large extent due to a media consortium’s court challenge of the RCMP’s request to seal its Information to Obtain (ITO) documents — requests to a judge in which police outline their rationale for seeking search warrants.
But also, in a surprise move, one of the most high-profile pieces of information came from the RCMP itself.
In early December, the Mounties released the identity of and information on the shooter’s common-law spouse, Lisa Banfield. They did so by charging Banfield, her brother James Banfield and another man, Brian Brewster, with supplying Wortman with the ammunition he used on his rampage.
Although police stated explicitly in their charges that none of the three had prior knowledge of the killer’s plans on April 19, Banfield’s identity was still a surprising revelation from an organization that had been resolutely mute on its investigation before and has been since. To that point, Banfield’s name had been redacted in all police court documents.
What part did domestic violence and misogyny play?
Wortman had a history of domestic violence against his spouse. As far back as 2013, neighbour Brenda Forbes reported to police that Wortman’s partner had shown up at her door one night saying he had beaten her and she needed to get away. Other neighbours told stories of Wortman strangling and hitting the woman on one of his Portapique properties. No charges were laid following those reports.
Recent research suggests the perpetrators of mass shootings often have a background of domestic violence. And that, in turn, suggests that, on a system
ic level, reports of domestic violence need to be investigated more closely.
In a 2019 Pepperdine University study analyzing mass shootings in the U.S., researchers found a significant portion of mass shooters had a history of either domestic violence or stalking.
“There are very few commonalities among the diverse profiles of mass shooters, but a history of domestic violence is one that appears too often to ignore,” reports the study.
Based on their data, author Jacob Shawn Dunlop argued that, “The next mass attack may be preventable through prudent policy. This paper argues that policy-makers should prioritize better enforcement of existing federal domestic violence laws, (and) restrict firearm access to felon and misdemeanant-level stalkers.”
That delay
When Mounties arrived in Portapique on April 18, in response to 9-1-1 calls, one of the first people they came across was a local resident who told police that when he’d gone to investigate the fire on Portapique Beach Road, he had been shot by someone he suspected was Wortman and that the shooter had been driving a replica police car.
It was another hour, about 11:30 p.m., before the RCMP put out an alert on Twitter about the live shooting situation, and it wasn’t until the following morning at about 8 a.m. that they mentioned, again on Twitter, that the suspect was driving a replica RCMP car.
Why tweets and not the emergency alert system?
Many questions have been asked about this one; the decision by the RCMP to use their Twitter account to let the public know that a gunman — wearing a Mountie uniform and driving a replica RCMP vehicle — was at large.
Why use Twitter to alert the public late at night in a rural area with a population skewed toward the elderly — who are generally not as active on social media — rather than the province’s emergency alert system, which would have broadcast the warning to every cellphone in the region?
“It’s now just recently become a little clearer that the RCMP’s lead role in (requesting an emergency alert) was where the system fell down,” said MacKay. “The most recent evidence is that people were there, from the (provincial) government willing and eager to send out a message as soon as they got the OK from the RCMP. But the OK only came very shortly before the gunman was shot.”
That decision, say many, may have cost lives.
Why did police assume he was no longer a threat?
“Our national police force made that fatal assumption that he had killed himself and burned up in one of those buildings. That should never have happened,” said Tom Taggart, the councillor for that area of Colchester County told the Star.
In fact, shortly after 11:12 p.m., Wortman had parked his replica RCMP car in the back parking lot of a building in an industrial complex, and at a quarter to six the next morning would leave to head up Highway 4, down Hunter Road to where he would kill Sean McLeod and Alanna Jenkins and their neighbour, Tom Bagley, before setting the house on fire.
“Between that and the fact that they didn’t put out that alert, those are fatal mistakes,” said Taggart. “I don’t care how dramatic that seems. But it’s not hard to envision that at least some of those people that died after he left here would have been alive today had there been a provincial-wide alert.”
How did the rampage begin?
The day began with Wortman and Banfield celebrating their 19th anniversary. They took a long drive, during which he showed her a penitentiary where his uncle had been imprisoned, and then, in what now seems like ominous fashion, pointed out the house of Gina Goulet, another denturist who would, the next day, become his last victim before he was killed by police.
Banfield, who was Goulet’s friend, wondered how he knew where she lived.
Returning to Portapique, the two settled down for some drinks in the early evening in the warehouse on Orchard Beach Drive.
They made a video chat call to some friends in Maine. During that call, they told their friends they were going to have a “commitment ceremony” for their anniversary the following year.
“Don’t do it,” one of the friends said.
Banfield, upset, ended the call. Wortman, angered, accused her of ruining their anniversary. Banfield left to return to the house on Portapique Beach Road.
Later, after she’d gone to bed she told police, he came in, ripped the blankets off her, dragged her by her hair across the floor and began to beat her. He told her to get dressed.
The floor was wet from gasoline he’d poured. As he pulled her out of the house, he set the house on fire. They headed to the warehouse so he could burn that, too. He made her walk in front of him and ripped her shoes off and threw them away so she wouldn’t run.
She tried, nevertheless. At one point, she broke away and began to run, but she tripped and he picked her up by the hair and started to drag her toward the warehouse. He fired one of his guns into the ground near her and she begged him not to kill her.
At the warehouse, he locked her into the back of his RCMP replica car while he went upstairs. She tried to kick the windows out, to no avail. Eventually she managed to pry open the partition between the front seat and back and crawled out that way.
She ran into the woods and hid in a hollowed-out tree trunk. She had no phone; he’d taken her cell and smashed it. She could hear gunshots and see fires burning. She hid there in the woods as the temperature flirted with the freezing mark until morning, when she crawled out and knocked on the door of the first house she saw — Leon Joudrey’s. He called the police.
She would later wonder whether all those people would have died if she hadn’t run away.
How did he choose his victims?
Some of Wortman’s victims were targeted, some were people against whom he may have a held a grudge. Others were random targets.
After setting his own home and his warehouse on Orchard Beach Drive on fire, Wortman killed Greg and Jamie Blair and burned their house, and killed Lisa McCully, both of whom lived directly across the road from the warehouse.
He then killed 10 more people in the Portapique neighbourhood and burned two more houses. Among the victims was Aaron Tuck and his family, who lived farther south, in a cul-desac toward the water. Some years previous, Tuck had wanted to sell his house in Portapique and move back to Cape Breton. Tuck wanted about $50,000 for his house; Wortman offered $18,000. There had been an argument over that.
Banfield told police that she felt guilty, wondering if Wortman had gone to places he thought she might seek help and killed their neighbours as he went along.
After spending the night in the industrial park in nearby Debert, Wortman headed north on Highway 4 for half an hour, about 40 kilometres to Wentworth, the last five kilometres on the loose dirt of Hunter Road, to Sean McLeod and Alanna Jenkin’s place.
Banfield remembers McLeod and Jenkins as a couple, both corrections officers, who occasionally came for drinks at Wortman’s house. She said Wortman seemed to like them both, and that there were never any arguments.
Wortman killed McLeod and Jenkins and their dog and set their house ablaze. He killed their neighbour, Tom Bagley, a retired firefighter, when he came to see investigate the fire.
Heading back south on Highway 4, Wortman randomly killed Lillian Hyslop, or so it appears, on the side of the road while she was taking her daily walk. Then in Debert, again apparently randomly, he shot and killed Heather O’Brien and a pregnant Kristen Beaton in their cars along the same stretch of road.
Heading south towards Halifax, Wortman came across RCMP Const. Chad Morrison, who was waiting at the intersection of two highways for Const. Heidi Stevenson. Morrison, thinking the RCMP vehicle driving toward him was Stevenson, allowed the killer to pull alongside. Wortman fired at Morrison three or four times, hitting him, but Morrison floored his accelerator and escaped.
Shortly after, Stevenson arrived, and her car and Wortman’s replica police car collided. Wortman got out and killed Stevenson, then shot and killed Joey Webber, a bystander who stopped to help.
The killer took Stevenson’s gun and burned both his car and hers, then took Webber’s car.
He drove to Gina Goulet’s house on Hightway 224, which he’d pointed out to Banfield the previous day. He killed Goulet and stole her car before heading back south toward Halifax.
“Our national police force made that fatal assumption that he had killed himself and burned up in one of those buildings. That should never have happened.”
TOM TAGGART LOCAL COUNCILLOR
How did it end?
Const. Craig Hubley, an RCMP dog-handler, shot and killed Wortman after recognizing him as he refuelled at a gas station in Enfield, N.S., at about 11:30 a.m. on April 19.
Hubley and his partner pulled into the Irving Big Stop at an adjacent pump to the one where Wortman — now changed out of his Mountie uniform and driving a grey Mazda that he stole after killing Goulet — was parked.
As Hubley got out of the car to refuel, he looked over and observed a man “with a noticeable hematoma and some blood on his forehead,” according to the report on the shooting.
He recognized Wortman from pictures he’d seen at the command post, drew his gun and notified his partner that the killer was in the car next to theirs.
As his partner got out and moved across the front of their vehicle, Wortman opened fire with the gun he’d taken from Const. Stevenson after killing her a half-hour before. Hubley and his partner opened fire, shooting and killing Wortman.
What happens next?
As the one-year mark approaches, the province’s Mass Casualty Commission is beginning to take shape. That public inquiry — which has the power to compel witnesses to testify under oath — carries a mandate to determine exactly what happened during those 13 hours in Colchester County.
Its interim report is expected in May 2022, with a final report that November.
It is there, many hope, that the some of the unanswered questions will finally be answered.
For Nova Scotians, April18 will be marked with flags at halfstaff and by two minutes of silence at 3 p.m.
Following that, a private ceremony will be held for families of victims.