The gunman who would kill 22 people in Nova Scotia in a mass shooting had controlled and abused women around him for years, including his longtime partner and others who were in vulnerable situations.
Public investigation into the mass shooting is examining what happened from April 18-19, 2020, when Gabriel Wortman it destroyed several houses and killed neighbors and strangers throughout the province —Including a pregnant woman — while driving a simulated police car.
Documents released by the investigation include accounts of his de facto partner Lisa Banfield about his years of physical and emotional abuse, and women who had sex with the gunman or who met him briefly while partying in his garage. .
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, a spokeswoman for Women’s Shelters Canada, said one of those interviews, from a woman named EE in the transcripts of the consultation, caught her eye.
EE lived near the gunman’s Portapique cottage and first met him around 2014. He told police he would do occasional work around the gunman’s property, clean his house and he helped build the large garage that would eventually house his police paraphernalia.
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich is a spokeswoman for Women’s Shelters Canada, which is involved in the research in a coalition with the Nova Scotia Association of Transitional Homes and the Be the Peace Institute. (CBC)
It had a small place with no running water. EE said he relied on the gunman for everything from firewood in the winter to food and liquor, as he had no car or job at the time.
“He would take me to his house and pass me the bathtub and take out all my hot towels and always have some special soap for me, everything was ready and everything and then he would feed me.” EE told police .
“At that point in my life … it was like a miracle to me.”
EE said they were always good friends and that they also had an ongoing sex.
Geiger-Bardswich said the situation is worrisome and fits a broader trend of gunslinger predatory behavior with women.
“He was a smart person. He knew there was this dynamic of power. He knew he could use and exploit women’s vulnerabilities and their needs, their basic needs to get what he wanted,” Geiger-Bardswich said. .
EE once described how she and the gunman had group sex with a young woman who was a patient at her dentistry clinic in Dartmouth, NS.
The gunman would focus on patients who were socially assisted or living “on the street,” EE said, and would take them to his cottage and “treat them like queens.”
The former Atlantic Denture Clinic in downtown Dartmouth, NS, was owned by gunman Gabriel Wortman. Photo taken on April 20, 2020. (Craig Paisley / CBC)
The Department of Community Services has confirmed that the Atlantic Prosthesis Clinic, owned by the gunman, received provincial funding to provide services to clients receiving employment and income assistance support, and those from the Support Program. to disability.
Between 2015 and 2020, it received $ 434,406 from the province for these services.
Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson, two Truro nurses who advocate for women’s rights, heard other stories about the prosthesis clinic. They have successfully pushed for the investigation to consider gender-based violence in its tenure.
After the gunman’s name and face were made public, MacDonald and Sarson said they received a call from a woman who had been his patient. She was so “scared” by what she did to him while she was at her clinic that she didn’t finish treatment.
“He felt like he grabbed her alone in the room in the chair and sexually assaulted her,” MacDonald said. “This woman no longer even liked to do this route through her office.”
Jeanne Sarson (left) and Linda MacDonald are women’s rights advocates in Truro, NS, and participants in the public investigation into the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting. (CBC)
A Portapique neighbor, Brenda Forbes, has said no one believed her when she told RCMP in 2013 that Wortman had abused Banfield. Nothing came out of his complaint.
Then, on April 18, 2020, the fury began when the gunman attacked Banfield and threw her into the simulated cruise. She has told police she was able to escape through the car partition and hid in the woods overnight.
It wasn’t the first time. Banfield said there had been at least 10 more physical assaults over the years and that the gunman controlled where he was going. Banfield said he didn’t like talking to his siblings every day because he wanted all their attention.
He once described where two of the gunman’s friends were in the Portapique cottage while the gunman drowned and hit Banfield in a bed. The men asked the gunman to “leave her alone,” but they never intervened, he said.
Continued abuse
Banfield has told police the gunman often blamed her after the assaults.
“I always said, why did you make me do this? It’s your fault. Like, and I knew it wasn’t my fault, I’m not stupid. But, you know, why I put up with it, I don’t know,” he said.
George and Brenda Forbes tried to explain to police Gabriel Wortman’s abuse of his partner and that he had illegal weapons in his home, but they say police did not investigate. (CBC)
Sarson said there is still a long way to go in today’s society to change beliefs and attitudes about couple violence, which is often still considered a “family affair”.
“It’s still, ‘Well, that’s happening in their relationship, it’s not our thing,’ but it’s our business. I think we have to do our business,” Sarson said.
Another woman said she wanted to report the fake police car and the gunman’s strange behavior, but she felt too intimidated to take that step.
EE’s daughter, who was also partying in the gunman’s garage, told police after the mass shooting that the gunman’s fully marked car and RCMP uniforms scared her. She was convinced he was an officer or organized parties with “dirty cops.”
DD later revealed to the commission that he thought reporting the gunman would only make things worse, or he would not believe it.
“You can’t go into a police station … because we didn’t know it and potentially, like, we don’t know how far this goes into the police. It could have been in danger,” DD said.
One of the gunman’s acquaintances in Portapique, Rob Doucette, said the gunman would make aggressive advances with women in the area at parties, sometimes getting naked in a hot tub. Doucette once said he and another man saw him go after Lisa McCully and that “they physically had to get their hands off her.”
McCully was one of the first people the gunman killed on April 18th.
Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row from left: Gina Goulet, Dawn Gulenchyn, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchyn, Sean McLeod, Alanna Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O’Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from above: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)
Doucette said she would see the gunman angry if a woman turned him down: “He’d like to start calling them whores and this and that.”
An expert report for research he said many mass murderers have been violent with women in their lives, and that their partners are often the first victims of such attacks.
A twelve-year analysis of mass shootings in the United States between 2009 and 2020 concluded that mass shootings are often “mixed with acts of domestic violence.” Based on reports of 262 incidents, he found that in at least 53 percent of the mass shootings, the assailant shot a current or former intimate or family partner during the attack.
A photo of the 2017 Ford Taurus that the man took out of service, which he turned into a replica of the cruiser and used during the NS mass shootings from April 18-19, 2022. (Mass Victims Commission )
Women’s Shelters Canada is involved in the investigation, represented by a legal adviser, in a coalition with the Nova Scotia Association of Transition Homes and the Be the Peace Institute. Sarson and MacDonald are also participants, but self-represent themselves.
The investigation is expected to hear more from Banfield in the coming weeks, but no decision has yet been made on when or how he will testify.
The next phase of the investigation, which is expected to last until the summer, will also delve into several issues, such as how gender-based violence and intimate partnering influenced the mass shooting.