Digging for the truth

Winnipeg Free Press

a day ago

For eight hours after home-care nurse Heather O'Brien was shot in the head by Nova Scotia mass murderer Gabriel Wortman, her Fitbit continued to send a signal to her home computer showing heart activity.
The RCMP officer at the scene felt her pulse, then covered her with a sheet and treated her as dead. Senior Mounties had ruled out sending an ambulance, fearing the paramedics would become targets.
O'Brien's family knew she would not have lived, even if she had received treatment. But they wanted the screenshot of her heart activity included in the evidence of the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC), established by the province ostensibly to find the truth and give a voice to the families of the 22 victims of the 2020 shootings.
Andrew Vaughan / The Canadian Press files
In this April 2020 photo, the medical examiner's office team remove Gabriel Wortman's body from a gas bar in Enfield, N.S. after he was shot dead by police.
The commission refused to include the evidence, so the family released the screenshot and their statements on Facebook to let the public know the commission was not providing the full story.
Author Paul Palango calls the O'Brien family's experience a perfect example of how the MCC 'favoured the RCMP's official narrative despite contradictory evidence.'
The veteran Canadian journalist disassembles that narrative on every page of this exposé, from its confrontational title to its final words: 'The story as told by the RCMP, the Mass Casualty Commission and politicians is full of holes.'
Palango won awards for investigative journalism during his tenure as national editor at the Globe and Mail. He is the author of four books about the RCMP, including 22 Murders, also about Wortman's killings, from which he quotes frequently and extensively.
If the Mounties had simply admitted they had been caught off-guard, short-handed and ill-prepared by Wortman's murderous rampage on April 18 and 19, 2020, most Canadians would have forgiven them.
Instead, Palango documents how institutional rot in the RCMP caused the Mounties to make crucial errors in responding to the gunman, who was wearing an RCMP uniform and driving what looked like an RCMP car.
Then, instead of coming clean, Palango says Mounties destroyed and suppressed evidence and lied about what really happened to cover up their own incompetence.
They were aided and abetted by the MCC, the author says, which adopted procedural rules that made it almost impossible to get to the truth.
Was Gabriel Wortman, a Dartmouth denturist by day, a paid police informant?
RCMP handout / Canadian Press files
Gabriel Wortman
After digging through old search warrants and interviewing those closest to Wortman, Palango speculates that Wortman smuggled drugs and weapons across the U.S. border and sold them to the Hells Angels, along with pill presses for the drugs, something denturists have. These ones were bugged, giving the RCMP a direct line on gang activities.
After one too many police raids followed the same pattern, the Hells Angels were likely thinking Wortman was a 'rat' and planning to kill him, Palango speculates.
That would explain Wortman's sudden urge to get out of town. He was selling his real estate and dissolving his business.
Wortman collected $475,000 in cash from Brink's a mere 18 days before he started killing people.
Was the money Wortman received a payout from the police?
No, the commission replied, there was 'no evidence' he was a paid informant.
But the same document concedes that even if he had been, no one would admit it, even after his death.
Palango believes key facts about other aspects of the official narrative were altered or suppressed, including how Wortman was killed, his girlfriend Lisa Banfield's alibi and how two Mounties shot at and almost killed another Mountie, thinking he was Wortman.
Accepting the book's premises requires the reader to take Palango's side against all of officialdom. But his over-sized ego keeps getting in the way.
Anatomy of a Cover-Up
He repeatedly interrupts the narrative to crow about what an outstanding journalist he is, and more importantly, how dull and slow-witted all the other journalists are.
When he finally makes a mistake — and it's a doozy — he owns up to it and apologizes to his print and podcast audiences.
But in the next breath, he absolves himself: 'Another positive was that our wrong assumption didn't get anyone killed.' Cringe.
For readers who can get over tone-deaf passages along those lines, Palango delivers a mother lode of facts and well-informed speculation about the biggest mass shooting in Canadian history.
Palango concedes that he can't be absolutely sure he has all the right answers, but he has done a great service to the victims' families and all Canadians by tirelessly asking the right questions.
Donald Benham is a freelance writer living near Beausejour.