Five years later, the families of the victims of Canada’s worst murder spree are still looking for answers

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Paul Palango is the author of 22 Murders, as well as the forthcoming Anatomy of a Cover-Up: The Truth about the RCMP and the Nova Scotia Massacres.

It’s been five years since Canadians awoke to the news that a man dressed as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was driving around northern Nova Scotia in a fake RCMP cruiser, enacting Canada’s largest, modern-day killing spree.

Here are the facts, as we know them now: The tragedy began the night before, on April 18, 2020, in the hamlet of Portapique, a tiny seaside community about a 25-minute drive west of Truro, where Dartmouth denturist Gabriel Wortman lived. Around 10 p.m., Mr. Wortman set fire to his properties and started shooting his neighbours. Over the next 40 minutes, 13 people were killed, some after the RCMP arrived on scene. Their names are Greg and Jamie Blair, Lisa McCully, Frank and Dawn Gulenchyn, Aaron Tuck, Jolene Oliver and Emily Tuck, Peter and Joy Bond, John Zahl and Elizabeth Joanne (Jo) Thomas and Corrie Ellison. Mr. Wortman managed to slip by overwhelmed RCMP first responders and escape into the night.

The next morning, Mr. Wortman began killing again in Wentworth, N.S., about a 35-minute drive north. The surprised Mounties had speculated, erroneously, that he was dead, and were sending out updates through Twitter, not the Alert Ready public warning system. Meanwhile, nine more people died: Sean McLeod and Alanna Jenkins, Tom Bagley, Lillian Campbell Hyslop, Kristen Beaton, Heather O’Brien, Constable Heidi Stevenson, Joey Webber and Gina Goulet.

Thirteen-and-a-half hours after the massacres began, Mr. Wortman was shot and killed by the Mounties at the ironically named Irving Big Stop service centre near the Halifax airport. When the terror had fully ended, 22 people had been murdered.

In the aftermath, Nova Scotians found themselves emotionally or psychologically damaged by what happened. How, they asked, could this tragedy have gone on for so long?

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As I wrote in my book, 22 Murders, it was anything but a great moment in policing. From the start, the RCMP attributed Mr. Wortman’s actions to the fallout from a long-standing domestic-violence environment exacerbated by paranoia over the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown in Nova Scotia, a narrative that was picked up by the provincial and federal governments. Then, in July, 2020, the families of the victims and their friends and supporters marched on the Bible Hill RCMP detachment, demanding more answers. The outcry led to the government announcing a public inquiry, which would come to be known as the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC). It was heralded as a victory for the victims’ families. They were promised transparency and truth. But they would have to wait until the commission and its investigators did a thorough review.

Five years later, however, many are still waiting.

There have been several obstacles to uncovering the truth. The first is that Canadian public inquiries are prohibited from investigating criminality, which meant Mr. Wortman’s documented criminal activities weren’t investigated. Neither was the possibility that Mr. Wortman or someone close to him had a special relationship with the RCMP as an agent or informant, which, if true, might explain his killing spree, especially if a sting had gone south and he was at risk of being exposed. Instead, the MCC accepted the RCMP’s assertion that it could find “no evidence” of such a relationship.

The MCC also struggled to get off the ground. Key police and civilian witnesses were not interviewed by commission investigators until a year or more after the massacres. According to the MCC’s own final report, it had a difficult time obtaining all the requested documents from the RCMP. In fact, the RCMP issued a moratorium on the destruction of evidence in the case in September, 2020, implying that they had been destroying evidence and that there are facts missing from the record; this was not questioned by the MCC. Furthermore, the MCC’s “trauma-informed” approach meant that RCMP officers were not challenged or cross-examined about their actions, or forced to provide their notes or submit to interviews.

In total, the MCC spent two years and an estimated $50-million on their investigation, and ultimately concluded that the tragedy was born from a domestic-violence situation, as the RCMP initially stated. While it did critique the RCMP’s response, the 130 recommendations in the final report in March, 2023, failed to hold them to account. All RCMP commanding officers were either promoted or allowed to retire, as was almost every civilian or police officer involved in the incident.

Two months later, the federal government announced the creation of a Progress Monitoring Committee to monitor the implementation of the recommendations over a three-year period. But the committee has few resources and no power to implement anything, which has only provided more cover for the RCMP. Since then, not one politician at any level has made a comment or asked a question that might be deemed critical of the RCMP.

Five years later, and tens of millions of dollars now spent, the victims’ families and the public are still left seeking answers to fundamental questions about the massacres. Two class-action suits by the families were filed: one against Mr. Wortman’s estate, valued at $2.1-million, which was reportedly settled recently though the parties are bound by a non-disclosure agreement; and a second against the RCMP and province of Nova Scotia, which is stalled, according to a legal source familiar with the action.

“After five years, the biggest frustration is not knowing what happened to my brother at his house,” said Scott MacLeod, brother of murder victim Sean McLeod. “Wortman spent more time at Sean’s house than anywhere else. The trauma-informed approach was not the best way to get to the truth because people were scared to say what needed to be said because they might hurt somebody else’s feelings.”