22 Murders: Investigating the Massacres, Cover-up and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia

by Paul Palango

Overview

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A shocking exposé of the deadliest killing spree in Canadian history, and how police tragically failed its victims and survivors.

As news broke of a killer rampaging across the tiny community of Portapique, Nova Scotia, late on April 18, 2020, details were oddly hard to come by. Who was the killer? Why was he not apprehended? What were police doing? How many were dead? And why was the gunman still on the loose the next morning and killing again? The RCMP was largely silent then, and continued to obscure the actions of denturist Gabriel Wortman after an officer shot and killed him at a gas station during a chance encounter.

Though retired as an investigative journalist and author, Paul Palango spent much of his career reporting on Canada’s troubled national police force. Watching the RCMP stumble through the Portapique massacre, only a few hours from his Nova Scotia home, Palango knew the story behind the headlines was more complicated and damning than anyone was willing to admit. With the COVID-19 lockdown sealing off the Maritimes, no journalist in the province knew the RCMP better than Palango did. Within a month, he was back in print and on the radio, peeling away the layers of this murderous episode as only he could, and unearthing the collision of failure and malfeasance that cost a quiet community 22 innocent lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781039001282
Publisher:	Random House of Canada, Limited
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	23 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

PAUL PALANGO is a veteran investigative journalist. He started his career at the Hamilton Spectator, his hometown newspaper. In 1977, he joined the Globe and Mail as a reporter, and between 1983 and his resignation in 1990, he served successively as its sports editor, Metro editor, and, eventually, national editor. During his tenure at the Globe, Palango’s reporters swept the Centre for Investigative Reporting Awards in five consecutive years. In 1989, he accepted the Michener Award on behalf of the Globe.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Captain Portapique

A few months before his beachfront village made international headlines, Gabriel Wortman began a winter’s night where he often did, with drinks and a guest at the Black Bear Lodge. The name was emblazoned in block letters on an overturned green canoe that served as the roof of his ersatz tiki bar. He’d named it for a wild bear he had nurtured as a cub. He still hand-fed Tostitos to it, right out of the bag, whenever it showed up in his backyard, which overlooked picturesque Cobequid Bay in the Minas Basin, the easternmost arm of the mighty Bay of Fundy.

Black Bear Lodge couldn’t be found by Google. It wasn’t the resort by that name deep in the New Hampshire wilderness or the rehab facility near Fredericton, New Brunswick. Wortman’s Black Bear Lodge was tucked inside his “warehouse” at 136 Orchard Beach Drive at Portapique Beach in Nova Scotia.

Portapique was the kind of place even Nova Scotians would need a map to find when it made the news that coming April. It was never a rich place. There used to be some money, years ago, and a lot of fun. It once had a dance hall with a two-acre parking lot that could hold 250 cars. Dance halls had been scattered throughout the province. The Kenwood in Mira Gut. The Birches in North Sydney. The Venetian Gardens in Sydney. The Shore Club in Hubbards. The Olympic Gardens in Halifax. And the Portapique Dance Hall, right on the edge of Cobequid Bay. One by one they nearly all disappeared. The Portapique Dance Hall and its massive parking lot were finally gobbled up by the ocean in the mid-seventies.

Wortman owned five properties in Portapique, three personally and two through a corporate entity. Three were vacant land. He had a beautiful, rustic log and stone cottage at 200 Portapique Beach Road. It was one of only two houses on the river side of the road; the other sat a half kilometre away. Wortman told people that after he died he wanted to be wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket and buried next door, at the old Portaupique Cemetery (an old spelling for the community). Any other property along that stretch of the road had washed away years ago as the red-mud shoreline collapsed in places under the enormous pressure of the tides. They are the highest tides in the world. Twice a day the water rushes in and rises more than 13 metres and then back out like a bathtub draining. Scientists say Nova Scotia tilts more than a centimetre every time this happens.

Wortman’s cottage overlooked the mouth of the Portapique River where it empties into the bay. The worn-down foothills of the Appalachians stood off in the distance, the perfect setting for everyday sunsets. In a nod to American Appalachia, on the front porch near the steps to the deck, Wortman had placed a life-sized wood carving of a moonshiner, a single-barrelled shotgun in his right hand menacingly pointing out to the road while a jug of white lightning was clasped in his left.

Wortman also owned a large twenty-acre plot—287 Portapique Beach Road—that ran south, almost down to the water. It was nothing but a tangled tract of scrubby trees and bush. He had assembled two other adjacent parcels of land, which faced onto Orchard Beach Drive. He had visions of doing something big with it all someday.

On his fifth and final plot of land, Wortman had constructed his own entertainment centre, workshop and museum. The design was likely cribbed from a New England barn, complete with a cupola on top. It was a big building, fully covering a 3,200-square-foot concrete pad. It had a loft and bedroom upstairs. There were no grand vistas. No water views. The rising waters weren’t going to get this building. In any direction all one could see were trees and more trees, not a majestic one in the bunch. It was his blind. His snug.

A banner touting Miller Genuine Draft hung behind the bar. It was framed by two diagonally mounted five-horsepower outboard boat motors—odd sentimental trophies. The dusty taxidermied head of a moose with a modest rack of antlers oversaw everything from its spot high above. The bar sat six. A bubble gum machine stood by for those who might want a chew after their brew. Off to the side a small blackboard read “Lisa’s Bar,” written in chalk.

Some of the locals who had seen the place up close described it as exquisite. One was truck driver Eddie Creelman. “It was really done up. It was beautiful in there. It had everything a man could ever want.”

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Unfinished chipboard stuck out here and there. The bedroom was finished with drywall that hadn’t been taped and mudded. Wortman fancied himself an accomplished carpenter and jack of all trades, but filling cracks in drywall defeated him, and he always wanted a better price than any professional would accept to clean up the mess he had made of the job.

Since childhood, Wortman had been obsessed with bikes, trikes and quads. He never stopped collecting and fiddling with them. Along its walls the warehouse was decorated with mini-bikes and dirt bikes that he’d been collecting since his early teens. He would regularly take them out for a spin to keep them fresh, ripping along the few roads that made up the neighbourhood as if he owned it.

Off in a corner downstairs sat Wortman’s pride and joy: a replica Captain America–model Harley-Davidson from the classic 1969 movie Easy Rider. He had erected a makeshift shrine with the chopper posed in front of two crossed American flags. On the wall hung a leather jacket with an American flag on it. He had a colour-coordinated blue-and-white bandana, straight out of the movie, tied to one of the handlebars. An “authentic” helmet with the flag motif was perched on the extended sissy bar, as it’s known, on the back of the bike. Finally, there was a photo of Wortman riding the bike somewhere, next to someone else riding what looks like the same bike.

The story of the bike and the movie it was featured in would provide eerie parallels to Wortman’s own life. The original was created for Easy Rider, which debuted in 1969, the same year Wortman was born. The movie starred Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and a young Jack Nicholson, who stole the show, launching his fabulous acting career. Fonda and Hopper played two laid-back hippie drug smugglers, Wyatt and Billy, respectively. Wyatt and Billy were the personification of the new cool more than fifty years ago. Wortman wanted to be seen as cool, too, and in time the extent to which he leaned on Wyatt and Billy’s examples to craft his own mystique would become clear. But for the most part, real life intruded. He made dentures for semi-empty mouths or those entirely devoid of teeth.

That night at the warehouse Wortman’s guest was one of the local women. Her name was Cyndi. Years earlier he had told others how much he wanted to get into her pants—and those of her daughter, Ocean-Mist, as well. He was particularly fond of a series of photos posted by Ocean-Mist on Facebook, in which she is leaning provocatively over the hood of a car in an impossibly short skirt.

Cyndi and Wortman had been having a thing on the side for three years, though it was anything but exclusive. She wasn’t the first to join him at the Black Bear Lodge, but she was certainly one of the last.

She was a troubled soul, a middle-aged Jesus freak who had careered between God and the bottle, with a lot of sex in between. She had spent some time in jail and had gone through rehab for alcoholism. Wortman was good at reeling in women like her. He had a surprisingly successful way with certain women, who felt they had lost a step or two and craved occasional and enthusiastic confirmation of their allure. He could be soft-spoken and engaging, a cuddler whom some called enchanting, others mesmerizing. He advertised his vasectomy, as if it were his key to opening any woman’s door. He made them feel special, and they loved him for it even if he didn’t really love them back. It was always transactional for him. Tit for tat. Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. No woman ever called him a rapist, but he was clearly a satyr, constantly on the hunt.

He was a long-time fan of strip clubs. His favourite was near where he had grown up. It was Angie’s Show Palace in Dieppe, a suburb of Moncton, New Brunswick, about an hour’s drive west of Portapique. Another of his obsessions was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He had three relatives who were Mounties. Over the years he had collected RCMP items and memorabilia.

Once in the past, he combined the two interests and had Cyndi do a striptease in the red serge RCMP dress uniform. On her tiny frame the uniform was overwhelming. With its high-neck collar and navy-blue epaulettes, the tunic hung closer to her knees than her waist. The sleeves extended beyond her fingertips. The riding boots rode up to nearly meet the tunic. Her head disappeared into the Stetson hat. The striptease was going well, getting down to the part Wortman loved the most—the panties, which had to be sexy and never something comfortable. The spell broke when she ripped open the tunic and sent buttons skittering across the floor. It was a painful moment for Wortman. She wasn’t going to be doing that again.

Now, on this winter’s night, they were both drunk again. It was her first night back on the bottle after having dried out for a long while. It began with a beer and then another and then out came the Grey Goose. The vodka always pushed her over the top. She had once worked in a sex shop and had supplied Wortman with all kinds of S&M and bondage toys—dog collars, hog ties and even handcuffs that had a safety release on them so that they could easily be removed. They had done all that. It was time for something new, something a little crazy.

She wanted to dance on his special car. It would be a good war story for her, she thought, but her recent bout of sobriety had made her a little uncomfortable about being alone with Wortman. She wasn’t planning on a striptease, this time. She called her daughter to come over and she did, bringing a female friend along with her. Wortman was in his element: three women and him.
Cyndi took off her shoes to avoid damaging the paint job and climbed up onto the roof of the car.

She began making some of the moves she knew he’d find seductive. The roof of the car could handle her weight, being reinforced. That’s the way Ford Taurus Police Interceptors are made. Each vehicle is rugged and tough, built to withstand the weight of all the equipment and banging around that is the life of such vehicles.

Cyndi danced as gracefully as she could around the light bar running across the middle of the roof. Her audience was in stitches, cheering her on. When her show-stopping performance was done, she slid down the windshield and onto the hood, coming to a stop with her feet resting on the push bar at the front of the car.

The front doors of the car were decorated with the distinctive buffalo head logo of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, resting under a stylized crown. Throughout all the commotion above, the buffalo never flinched, staring as always into the distance. Circling the buffalo’s head was a nearly untranslatable motto: “Maintiens le Droit.” Some say it means “Uphold the Right,” which might mean enforce the law. Others say it really means “Never Do Anything to Tarnish the Buffalo.”

Whatever it means, Wortman had just christened his own picture-perfect RCMP cruiser, an easily passable counterfeit.

He had even created a fake fleet number for it: 28B11.

It was his self-styled Captain Portapique car.

Table of Contents

Part 1 An Epic Failure in Policing

1 Captain Portapique 1

2 A Whisper in the Night 7

3 A Sunday Stroll … Back into Journalism 25

4 The Vagabond Coppers 33

5 Chief Superintendent Chris Leather 52

6 A Mountie Dies 60

7 Save the Buffalo! 71

8 Frank by Name, Frank by Nature 82

9 The Shifting and Shifty Narrative 94

10 The First Massacre 112

11 The Commissionaire's Error and a Mountie's Twitch 135

12 The Interlude Between the Massacres 151

13 The Second Massacre, Part 1: Hunter Road 160

14 The Second Massacre, Part 2: No Roadblocks 171

15 The Second Massacre, Part 3: A Failure to Communicate 184

16 A Battleship Trapped on a Sandbar 207

Part 2 The Search for the Truth

17 A Little Birdie Drops a Dime 223

18 Gabriel Wortman: The Formative Years 240

19 Battling the Smurfs and Invoking My Grandmother 256

20 Not a White Picket Fence Life 274

21 Dana, Eddie and a Ford Taurus 302

22 Peter Alan Griffon and the Hells Angels 327

23 The Brink's Job and Maclean's Magazine 341

24 The Corporal in the Bushes 356

25 Families March on the RCMP-Then Declare Victory 379

26 Leon Joudrey, the Two Lisas and Cyndi 391

27 New Brunswick: Outlaw Bikers and Dead Informants 416

28 The Weeks, Days and Hours Leading up to the Massacres 432

29 Transparency, One Leaf at a Time 448

30 A Snoring Husband Leads to RCMP Secrets 465

31 Spring Has Sprung and a Robin Is Caught-A Butcher, Too 480

32 True Blue and the 911 Tapes 500

33 The Execution of Gabriel Wortman 533

34 A Massacre? What Cover-up? 550

A Note on Sources 563

Acknowledgements 567

Index 573

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR 22 MURDERS:

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“22 Murders is a must read.” St. Albert Today

PRAISE FOR PAUL PALANGO:
“Why isn’t the Nova Scotia mass shooting a national scandal? It may well turn out to be if Paul Palango has anything to say about it.” NOW (Toronto)

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