The gunman, who was going to kill 22 people in Nova Scotia in a mass shooting, has been controlling and harassing women around him for years, including his longtime partner and others who were in vulnerable situations.
The public investigation into the mass shooting looks at what happened on April 18-19, 2020, when Gabriel Wortman destroyed several houses and killed neighbors and strangers throughout the province – including a pregnant woman – while driving a fake police car.
Documents released by the investigation include stories from his civilian wife, Lisa Banfield, of his years of emotional and physical abuse and women who had sex with the shooter or met him briefly while partying in his garage.
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, a spokeswoman for Women’s Shelters Canada, said one of these interviews with a woman named EE in the transcript of the inquiries caught her attention.
EE lived near the shooter’s villa in Portapique and met him for the first time around 2014. She told police she would do strange work around the shooter’s property, clean his villa and help build the large garage in which the eventually his police paraphernalia will be housed.
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich is a spokeswoman for Women’s Shelters Canada, which is involved in the investigation in coalition with the Nova Scotia Transitional Houses Association and the Be the Peace Institute. (CBC)
It had little space without running water. EE said she relied on the shooter for everything from firewood in the winter to food and alcohol because she had no car or job at the time.
“He took me to his house and let me take the bath and put on all the nice warm towels and there was always a little special soap for me, everything was done beautifully and so on and then he fed me,” EE told police.
“At this point in my life … it was like a miracle to me.”
EE said they have always been good friends and also had a constant sexual relationship.
Geiger-Bardswich said the situation was worrying and responded to the wider trend of the shooter’s predatory behavior with women.
“He was a smart man. He knew there was this dynamic of power. He knew he could use and exploit women’s vulnerability and their needs, their basic needs, to get what he wanted, ”Geiger-Bardswich said.
EE describes once when she and the shooter had group sex with a young woman who was a patient at his dental clinic in Dartmouth, NS
The attacker will focus on patients who are on social assistance or living on the “streets”, EE said, and will return them to his villa and treat them “like queens”.
The former Atlantic prosthesis clinic in downtown Dartmouth, NS, was owned by shooter Gabriel Wortman. Photo taken on April 20, 2020 (Craig Paisley / CBC)
The public services department confirmed that the Atlantic prosthesis clinic owned by the attacker had received provincial funding to provide services to clients receiving employment and income support, as well as those in the disability support program.
Between 2015 and 2020, he received $ 434,406 from the province for these services.
Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson, two nurses in Truro who advocate for women’s rights, have heard other stories about the denture clinic. They successfully urged the investigation to take gender-based violence into account in its mandate.
After the shooter’s name and face became public, MacDonald and Sarson said they received a call from a woman who had once been his patient. She was so “horrified” by what he did to her while she was at his clinic that she did not complete her treatment.
“She felt he left her alone in the chair room and sexually assaulted her,” MacDonald said. “This woman didn’t even like to travel this route around his office anymore.”
Jean Sarson (left) and Linda MacDonald are women’s rights defenders from Truro, NS, and participants in the public investigation into the mass shooting in Nova Scotia in 2020 (CBC).
Portapic’s neighbor, Brenda Forbes, said no one believed her when she told the RCMP in 2013 that Wortman had abused Banfield. Nothing came of her complaint.
Then, on April 18, 2020, the riot began when the shooter attacked Banfield and threw it into the mock cruiser. She told police she managed to escape through the car’s bulkhead and hid in the woods at night.
It wasn’t the first time. Banfield said there had been at least 10 other physical attacks over the years and that the gunman controlled where she went. Banfield said he didn’t like her talking to her siblings every day because he wanted all her attention.
She described once that two of the shooter’s friends were at Portapic’s villa while the shooter choked and hit Banfield in bed. The men asked the attacker to “leave her alone,” but never intervened, she said.
Current abuse
Banfield told police that the gunman often blamed her after the attacks.
He always said, why did you make me do this? It’s your fault. For example, I knew it wasn’t my fault, I’m not stupid. But still, you know why I put up with it, I don’t know, “she said.
George and Brenda Forbes tried to tell police about Gabriel Wortman’s abuse of his partner and that he had illegal weapons in his home, but said police had not investigated. (CBC)
Sarson said there was still a long way to go in today’s society to change beliefs and attitudes about intimate partner violence, which she said was often still considered a “family issue.”
“It’s still -” well, it’s happening in their relationship, it’s not our job, “but it’s our job. I think we should do our job, “Sarson said.
Another woman said she wanted to report the shooter’s fake police car and strange behavior, but she felt too scared to take that step.
EE’s daughter, who was also partying in the shooter’s garage, told police after the mass shooting that the fully marked car and the uniforms of the armed RCMP scared her. She was convinced that he was either an officer or a party with “dirty cops.”
DD later revealed to the commission that she believed that the shooter’s reporting would only make things worse or they would not believe her.
“You can’t just go into a police station … because we didn’t know potentially, like, we don’t know how deep that goes into the police. I could be in danger, “DD said.
One of the Portapic shooters’ acquaintances, Rob Dusset, said the shooter would take aggressive action against women in the area during parties, sometimes entering a hot tub naked. Dusset once said that he and another man had seen him chasing Lisa McCully and that they “physically had to take his hands off her.”
McCully was one of the first people killed on April 18.
Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row left: Gina Gulet, Dawn Gulenchin, Jolin Oliver, Frank Gulenchin, Sean McLeod, Alana Jenkins. Second row: John Hall, Lisa McCully, Joey Weber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O’Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from the top: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joan Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corey Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)
Dusset said he would see the shooter get angry if a woman rejected him – “he would like to start calling them whores and this and that.”
An expert report on the investigation said many mass murderers have been violent against women in their lifetime – and their partners are usually the first victims of such attacks.
An analysis of twelve years of mass shootings in the United States between 2009 and 2020 concludes that mass shootings are often “mixed with acts of domestic violence.” Based on reports of 262 incidents, he found that in at least 53% of mass shootings, the attacker shot a current or former intimate partner or family member during the attack.
Photo of the 2017 Ford Taurus decommissioned by the shooter, which he made in a copy of a cruiser and used during the mass shootings in NS on April 18-19, 2022 (Mass Victims Commission)
Women’s Shelters Canada is a participant in the investigation, represented by a legal counsel, in coalition with the Nova Scotia Transitional Houses Association and the Be the Peace Institute. Sarson and MacDonald are also participants, but self-represented.
The investigation is expected to receive more information from Banfield in the coming weeks, but a decision on when and how she will testify has not yet been announced.
The next phase of the investigation, which is expected to continue in the summer, will also delve into various issues, including how the intimate partner and gender-based violence contributed to the mass shooting.
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