22 Murders: Investigating the Massacres, Cover-Up and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia
By Paul Palango
The crime:
On the night of April 18, 2020, Gabriel Wortman got dressed up as an RCMP officer and into a car made to look like a police cruiser, then went around shooting up the community of Portapique, Nova Scotia. The next day his murder spree continued as he hit the road. By the time he was finally shot by police at a gas station he had killed 22 people. In the days that followed the RCMP would come in for a great deal of criticism over the way they handled the situation and many questions remain unanswered.
The book:
As the subtitle indicates, this is not a narrative history of Wortman’s 13-hour rampage, setting out to provide a definitive account of what happened and why. That’s a story that may never be told, some of the reasons for which are gone into here. Instead, what we get is more of a reporter’s notebook on the tragic events and their fallout, with much to say about the RCMP’s response to it and its media coverage.
Though I’ve never been one to rush to the defense of the police, I initially resisted being taken where Paul Palango was clearly going, which is that the RCMP were involved in a cover-up of their actions (and possibly a cover-up of some deeper relationship they might have had with Wortman). This is the sort of thing that is usually sneered at as conspiracy thinking, with calls for tin-foil hats and the theme from The X-Files playing in the background. But that’s unfair, as conspiracies do exist and in fact can be perfectly mundane, which seems to have been the case here.
“The more research we did,” Palango writes, “the clearer it was becoming evident that this was no conspiracy theory, as my detractors would have it, but rather a bona fide conspiracy.” The thing is, conspiracies are often equated in the public’s mind with highly-involved and sinister machinations when in fact they are often just part of the normal operation of many large bureaucracies or big corporations (Adam Smith: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”).
That seems to have been the case here, as the RCMP, an almost entirely unaccountable organization, has become the preserve of what Palango (borrowing language from The Wire) derides as “house cats”: public employees who have become comfortable in well-appointed sinecures. Within such a government bureaucracy, the code of silence and CYA (Cover Your Ass) are the only operational rules. One rises through the system not by being productive or particularly good at one’s job but by being well connected (family matters in the RCMP) and by steadily advancing to positions that come with higher pay and better benefits but that are really just empty titles without any duties or responsibilities. And all the time the force becomes more and more top-heavy, with proportionately fewer boots on the ground. And these house cats cost a lot of money. One of the numbers Palango throws out is that government employees who move for work (soldiers, civil servants, and Mounties) cost the public purse $500 million a year. Wow! $35,000 per homeowner! That’s a hell of a perk.
In short: welcome to the blighted and bloated world of middle management and office administration. A world that isn’t a conspiracy so much as just the kind of thing you get given the natural and universal habit of people in positions of power and privilege to use those positions to feather their nests. One needn’t attribute to malignancy what is simple laziness and self-interest.
Where conspiracy enters the picture is with the cover-up. Or, as Palango puts it, “a massive cover-up . . . one that tested the natural laws of conspiratorial physics.” Is this going too far? To be sure, police were put in a difficult situation, as Wortman was no ordinary mass killer. There was a lot of confusion on the ground. But right from the get-go the Mounties had trouble keeping their story straight and clearly misinformed the public on several occasions as to what they knew and when they knew it (Palango isn’t reluctant to call them out for “lying”). With the help of a deferential and even pliant media they sought to put forward their own narrative while attacking anyone who would question it.
The official story about Portapique was shaping up to be a perfect modern fairy tale – the Monster and the Maiden. It was a macabre morality play and just about everyone in the media was eager to put it to music. The RCMP’s excuses for its failures were treated with less than an ounce of skepticism. The belief that the media have a duty and responsibility to hold institutions accountable seemed to be overridden by the undeniable and unhealthy deference to authority that permeates much of the Canadian psyche.
So true. So very true. Sing it, Paul!
For example, that reference to the Monster and the Maiden is directed at something Palango spends a lot of time trying to understand: what was going on between Wortman and his wife just before he went on his homicidal bender. Unfortunately, he keeps coming up against the “feminist lens” that was being used to portray her as a victim of domestic abuse. Palango refers to this as “coddling,” but it worked, and it’s still unclear what happened to her on the night of April 18.
As we all know, there are powerful incentives for claiming victim status. Victim credentials absolve you of all responsibility for your actions and allow you to make calls upon public sympathy that can be further exploited. The most egregious example in this case was the number of Mounties who claimed stress leave immediately after Wortman’s rampage. Apparently there were seventy of them. Seventy! In order to deal with their trauma they took the summer off, which came with a bill to the province of Nova Scotia of $3.75 million for hiring replacement officers. Meanwhile, as Palango reports, “The ‘sick’ Mounties got full pay and lounged around their vacation properties, many posting photos on social media.” This shit has to stop. I’ve posted before about the abuse of diagnoses of PTSD and I’ll just repeat here that it’s a disgrace. But I digress.
Given the combination of silence and misinformation the public began to lose trust in the official line. And this is the really bothering point. We live in a post-truth age of alternative facts and false narratives, thinking that shadowy elites in the media and the deep state are lying to us about everything. So when we see a case where something is clearly wrong about the story government spokespeople and newspaper editorials put forth, it deeply damages the foundation of our social bonds. I mean – and I say it this time without irony – if you can’t trust public institutions like the CBC and the Mounties, and I don’t think we can, then who can we trust? Put another way, what if all the sketchy-sounding podcasters who inveigh against the mainstream media and who are always “just asking questions” turn out to be right? Or if not right, at least have a point? This is something Palango is very aware of, pointing out “repeatedly that this is the kind of situation that leads to the flourishing of so-called conspiracy theories.”
It’s not a good place to find ourselves in. There was, inevitably, a board of inquiry into Wortman’s rampage. The Report of the Mass Casualty Commission came out in March 2023 (after this book was published) and it was highly critical of the RCMP, but this is not accountability. At some point something has to be done to restore public trust in such basic institutions as the police and the media or we are in trouble. It’s interesting that just a year before 22 Murders came out there were a couple of other Canadian true crime books that also raised disturbing questions about police (mis)conduct: Justin Ling’s Missing from the Village, on the Bruce McCarthur case that shook the gay community in Toronto, and Silver Donald Cameron’s Blood in the Water, which focused on the ineffectiveness of the Nova Scotia RCMP in dealing with a Cape Breton ne’er-do-well who ended up being killed (I reviewed both books together). Something isn’t working here, and whether you agree or disagree with Palango’s approach you have to give him credit for addressing what has become a real and growing problem.
Noted in passing:
A couple of points came up while reading 22 Murders that I’ve addressed before, but they’re worth returning to for further context.
The first has to do with how swiftly some crimes, no matter how sensational at the time, disappear from our memory. Wortman’s murderous rampage was a huge story, especially in Canada where these kinds of mass killings aren’t everyday occurrences. That said, I have to admit that only a few years after these events I’d already confused them in my head with the 2014 shootings in Moncton, when Justin Bourke shot five RCMP officers, killing three.
Palango has his own experience of this on a visit to a local pharmacy a little over a year after Wortman’s spree.
The thirtyish pharmacy assistant knew a little about me from the pharmacists, who knew a lot about what I had been doing.
“I hear you’re writing a book,” she said. “What’s it about?”
“Gabriel Wortman,” I said.
“Who?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“The Nova Scotia massacres,” I responded. Noting that she was still drawing a blank, I added, “The shootings last year.”
“Someone got shot?” she asked with a look of both astonishment and concern.
It’s surprising the assistant hadn’t heard of the shootings, but maybe not so surprising that she didn’t twig to Wortman’s name. This brings me to the second point I wanted to bring up: the policy in many media outlets, in Canada and internationally, of not providing the names of mass shooters in news reports.
As I’ve said before, I understand where this is coming from, especially in cases where a killer is looking to gain notoriety for a repugnant cause, for which they’ve prepared a manifesto. Think cases like Anders Behring Breivik, Elliot Rodger, and Brenton Tarrant. It’s also true that, with celebrity, or attention, as the only coin of the realm, one doesn’t want to give such individuals anything that smacks of a posthumous victory, much less a platform. That said, deliberately setting out to turn mass killers into anonymous unpersons strikes me as too ideological, while taking the news media away from its core duty to report all of the facts. We don’t call Hitler “the German dictator” by convention. No, the “five Ws” of journalism begins with “Who?” and that’s the way it should be. Alas, in 2020 this was no longer true, or even considered best practices:
A month or so after the massacres, just about every major news outlet had taken the same “ethical” position that it was not going to name Gabriel Wortman. He would only be known by his initials or some euphemism – the shooter, the madman or the denturist. His was a name not to be spoken.
On the front page of the Halifax Chronicle Herald the official editorial policy was announced: “we will only publish the murderer’s name and photo responsibly, when it serves the public good.” This struck me as very dangerous. Who decides what serves the public good? I can get on board with not publishing photos of the crime scenes, but the name of the perpetrator? As Palango puts it, “The rationale for this proud self-censorship was that naming Wortman would only glorify his actions and provide a model for others like him.” How so? Wortman wasn’t looking to go out in a blaze of media glory. He didn’t leave any manifesto or suicide note that I’m aware of. What sort of a model for others would his name provide? His use of a car made up to look like an RCMP cruiser was widely reported, with pictures of it popping up everywhere, and that’s the only aspect of the case that I would have thought another mass shooter might want to imitate.
I’m just not buying it. In such cases the killer’s name is part of the story, and it belongs in the story and not hidden behind some virtue signaling by the press. As Palango demonstrates, there was already far too much ideological and political shaping of the narrative of these events going on in the press and in statements made by the authorities.
Takeaways:
Does it matter that the truth is out there if nobody cares?
True Crime Files
I loved this collection of what originally ran as three Alien-themed miniseries, with an additional prologue and double-barreled coda added to the mix. But before I get to praising it I should give some of the backstory.
Alex Good 