Warning: details in this story may be disturbing to some.
For 19 years, Lisa Banfield lived with a man described as a controlling, violent psychopath who repeatedly beat her.
This long-term pattern of gender-based violence is detailed in a document released Wednesday by the inquest into why Gabriel Wortman fatally shot 22 people in Nova Scotia on April 18-19, 2020 — the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history.
Part of the inquiry’s mandate is to examine the role of intimate partner violence as it formulates recommendations aimed at preventing this kind of tragedy from happening again.
In her own words, Banfield told investigators about the physical abuse she suffered as the killer’s common-law wife.
“The things Gabriel would do to me included: grabbing me sexually (and) physically pushing me around (sideways, on the bed or on the ground/floor),” she said in a written statement provided to the inquest on June 22.
“(He was) pulling me up by my hair to get me off the ground until I felt like my scalp would come off — punching me (body, face, neck) and kicking me. Although I remember he only raped me once. I felt I was his wife and what could I do?”
In addition to the physical abuse, there was also a lot of psychological damage, the statement said.
“He pulled a gun on me and followed me several times saying we were ‘done.’ And I don’t even know how I talked him out of it,” she said.
“He even beat me in front of his friends. They watched and did nothing about it. I knew no one could help me. They were all afraid of him too.”
Banfield, now 53, is expected to testify at a public hearing on Friday.
In a series of interviews this year, she told investigators that she first met Wortman in a Halifax bar in May 2001. Both had left previous marriages. Three months later they live together. At first they lived in an apartment above his dental clinic in Dartmouth, North Carolina
Within a year, he pressured her into signing a document intended to protect his ownership of real estate and other assets.
In previously released interviews with the RCMP, Banfield said the first two and a half years of their relationship had been positive, and she described her husband as “loving, kind and generous.”
But she told investigators his violent behavior began much earlier. In particular, she described an assault she suffered in 2001 or 2002 outside a cottage near Sutherland Lake, north of their summer home in Portapeak, NS Banfield said Wortman hit her when she got into their SUV and she insisted on leaving.
“I jumped out and just ran through the woods,” she said. “And then he grabbed me. I was covered in blood and he was dragging me back to the SUV.”
There were witnesses to the attack. The police were called, but no action was taken. When she returned home, she found Wortman removing the wheels from her car in an attempt to prevent her from leaving.
“Ms Banfield told the panel that throughout her relationship with the perpetrator she had to focus on what was in front of her in the moment rather than what had happened in the past as a means of coping,” summarizes the 100-page summary of evidence say.
“It wasn’t until Ms Banfield went back and read some of the diaries she kept during their relationship that she recognized the frequency of the abuse and how early the abuse had started.”
The final investigation report described Wortman’s frequent infidelities, his chronic alcoholism, and his constant efforts to control Banfield through manipulation, intimidation, threats, and financial coercion.
“Ms. Banfield stated that the perpetrator always made her feel like he would take care of her and that she had nothing to worry about,” the document said, while making it clear that he had kept her name out from any ownership documents.
For years, she worked as his assistant in the dental prosthesis clinic, which provided her only source of income. Her family worried that she was becoming too dependent on him.
“I’m close with my siblings and I talk to them every day, but he didn’t like it,” Banfield told the RCMP. “He wanted my full attention, and if I didn’t give it to him, he was like a little boy who needed something to constantly build me up…Throughout our relationship, he was very controlling.”
She initially told RCMP that she could recall about 10 times when she had been abused by her partner. But she later told investigators the number was higher based on what she wrote in her diaries.
At some point in 2003 or 2004, a neighbor confronted Wortman at his Portapeak home and demanded he let Banfield take her things and leave, the filing said. “No one will enter this house,” he was quoted as saying. “And I’m just letting you know that I have guns here.”
Banfield confirmed that she never told the police about her dangerous living situation, despite encouragement from some of her siblings. At one point they took pictures of her injuries, but those pictures have since disappeared.
“Where will I go even if I leave,” she told investigators. “He knows where (my relatives) live and I didn’t know what he was going to do.
Banfield said she eventually stopped talking to her siblings about the abuse, but they knew his controlling, abusive behavior didn’t stop.
“He’s a psychopath or a sociopath, he’s a narcissist,” Banfield’s sister, Janice, told the inquest, adding that he was a “time bomb”.
The paper concludes with a detailed account of the couple’s final days together in April 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced lockdowns and social isolation around the world.
“He loved Trump,” Banfield said in a written statement, referring to the former US president.
“He was constantly on the internet, listening to Trump and watching the news cycle about COVID… He was telling me he wasn’t afraid of death… But this time he told me he knew when I was going to die… He was talking crazy and that scared me so I just changed the subject.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on July 13, 2022.
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