HALIFAX –
A new document shows that the gunman who killed 22 people in rural Scotland was on police radar until a decade before his two-day rampage in April 2020.
A report released Tuesday by the public homicide investigation says Gabriel Wortman has been the subject of police investigations at least twice and possibly three times.
The first occurred in June 2010, when the RCMP in Moncton, NB, was contacted by the shooter’s uncle. Glyn Wortman told RCMP Const. Len Vickers that his nephew, who lived in the Halifax area, threatened to kill his parents. Later that day, Vickers informed a sergeant. Cordell Poirier of the Halifax Regional Police also received a complaint from Wortman’s father, Paul, about the death threat from his son.
Poirier’s report on the incident says he and another police officer went to the killer’s home in Dartmouth, North Carolina, where they spoke with his wife, Lisa Banfield, at 3:25 p.m.
The document states that Banfield told police that Wortman was asleep. She said he was upset about a letter he received the previous day about a lengthy court battle with his parents over property. Poirier asked Banfield if there were any weapons in the house, and she said no.
Poirier later checked the Canadian Register of Firearms for possible weapons and said that “If 1/8 the perpetrator 3/8 has a weapon, they are not registered.” The document states that Wortman never applied for a firearms license.
Poirier’s report says he ended up talking to Gabriel Wortman, who told him on the phone that he had a pellet gun and two broken antique muskets hanging on the wall of his villa in Portapique, NS
The Halifax sergeant said he had contacted RCMP Const. Greg Wiley, who said he was a friend of Wortman’s and would try to meet with him to discuss the complaint. The document states that Wiley, who worked in the Biblical Hill Squad near Portapique, contacted the killer after responding to a report of theft of tools from his villa around 2007-08.
However, Poirier said he closed the file on August 26, 2010, after failing to contact Worthman’s father. Investigators, meanwhile, said Wiley had told investigators he could not remember talking to Poirier in 2010, and RCMP lawyers later said Wiley could not find relevant notes after searching his home after mass shooting.
A second threat, against the police, sparked a warning from the Truro Police Department, NS, almost a year later. On May 4, 2011, the Nova Scotia Criminal Intelligence Service issued a security bulletin to Wortman police agencies, written by Capt. Greg Densmore, who warned that Wortman “wanted to kill a cop.”
The bulletin is based on information from an unnamed man who told police that Wortman owned at least one pistol and several long rifles, which are stored in a compartment behind the flue in his villa in Portapice.
Poirier took note of the bulletin, which he said was a “viable threat”.
He said he spoke with Densmore, the newsletter author, and Worthman’s father before contacting the Bible Hill RCMP, where Const. John McMinn, the on-duty supervisor, said he was not familiar with the bulletin. Poirier said he provided McMin with his 2010 report, including information about Wortman’s personal car.
The document says McMinn did a database search, but did not provide further details.
The third incident involved a report filed with police on July 6, 2013 by a former neighbor of the gunman in Portapique. Brenda Forbes told the commission of inquiry that she announced her beliefs about illegal weapons during a complaint of a domestic violence incident involving Lisa Banfield, the shooter’s wife.
However, searches of RCMP records following the 2020 mass shooting show that officials were making “minimal notes” at the time. Much of the information has since been cleared, and RCMP investigators eventually concluded that the incident was “beyond the scope of the homicide investigation (mass shooting).”
An RCMP email of June 9, 2020, also said that “there seems to be a discrepancy” in Forbes’ recollections of her call to the police, adding that there was no record of a “domestic event” on the day described by Forbes. “Our member who spoke to her in 2013 said she believed the call was for Brenda, not a housewife against someone else,” the email said.
Forbes later told the investigation in an interview on August 19, 2021, that the police never called her about her complaint and did not make a voice recording when she spoke to them.
Meanwhile, the founding document of the investigation also reveals details of the shooter’s arsenal at his home in Portapic.
This shows that relatives on both sides of his family and others, including neighbors and people who worked on his property, were shown his weapons. Several people were also shown where they were hidden in Portapique’s villa and in a nearby warehouse.
All the weapons described, including high-caliber pistols, assault rifles and shotguns, and the document clearly shows that Wortman was not ashamed to tell people that he had received some of the weapons in the United States.
Lisa Banfield told the inquiry in an interview that he had “Rambo-style weapons and military” and bought his pistols in the United States and brought them back to Canada, hidden in the back of his truck.
When the shooter was killed by police as he stopped refueling in a stolen car north of Halifax, he had several weapons in it.
The document states that the police found a Glock 23 pistol, a Ruger P89 pistol, a Colt Carbine 5.56 semi-automatic rifle, a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a Smith & Wesson Model 5947 pistol belonging to RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, who had just been killed by the shooter.
This Canadian Press report was first published on May 3, 2022.
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