On Oct. 18, a sunny Friday morning less than 24 hours after Brenda Tatlock arrived home, her retired RCMP officer husband Mike Burke shot and killed her with a rifle. Tatlock had just gotten home after visiting her daughter in Cochrane, Alta.Photos courtesy of Tara Graham/Supplied
Brenda Tatlock had made up her mind. As her family tells it, she had just recently returned to the beige bungalow she shared with her husband in the community of Enfield, 30 minutes north of Halifax. A mother of four adult children and “Gammie” to eight grandchildren, she’d spent the last two months visiting her daughters in Alberta – a much-needed break from her husband’s stormy moods and constant surveillance.
Before Tatlock left, she’d told him it was over. Upon her return, she planned to move out.
“Do you feel safe?” Tatlock’s daughter Tara Graham remembered asking her ahead of her flight back to Nova Scotia. “Is he going to hurt you?”
“No, I’m going to be fine,” Graham recalled her 59-year-old mother telling her. “I’m going to go home and I’m just going to leave.”
Tatlock with daughter Tara Graham, who remembers asking her if she felt safe returning home ahead of her flight back to Nova Scotia from Alberta.Photos courtesy of Tara Graham/Supplied
Her best friend, who had recently gone through her own separation had warned her, but Tatlock was adamant: “He’d never hurt me. He’d never hurt me,” Debbie Burke remembered her saying.
On Oct. 18, a sunny Friday morning less than 24 hours after Tatlock arrived home, her retired RCMP officer husband Mike Burke (no relation to Debbie) shot and killed her with a rifle. He texted a family member to say, “phone the police” and then he shot himself.
It was the first of three intimate partner violence murder-suicides in Nova Scotia that would occur in less than three weeks – a rash of killings that set off fierce criticism from family members and advocates who said the RCMP’s failure to openly inform the public about the nature of these cases was contributing to the problem.
The killing of women by their partners or ex-partners is on the rise, occurring on average, once a week across the country. The Mass Casualty Commission (MCC), a public inquiry that examined the circumstances of the 2020 mass killing in Nova Scotia where a gunman killed 22 people following a vicious assault on his spouse, declared intimate partner violence or IPV an epidemic and called for all levels of government to follow suit. In September, Nova Scotia became the first province to pass a bill declaring just that.
In response to questions from The Globe, Nova Scotia RCMP Assistant Commissioner Dennis Daley acknowledged that the Mounties were wrong in how they communicated with the public in Tatlock’s and other IPV cases. In a statement Nov. 8, he said the force will now as a practice start telling the public when homicides are cases of intimate partner violence to help “shine a light on this overwhelming, epidemic.”
Initial police releases announcing the three recent Nova Scotia murder-suicides said “the man and the woman were known to one another” and “there is no threat to public safety” – language that obscured that these were IPV homicides.
Experts have said that such language conceals the nature of the crime and reinforces the societal misperception that intimate partner violence is not a public crime but a private one. This outdated dichotomy, widely embraced by society and the justice system, was addressed in the main findings of the MCC.
The report made sweeping recommendations aimed at stopping gender based violence while also finding that intimate partner violence is very much a threat to public safety.
However, many police forces including the Nova Scotia RCMP continue to treat IPV differently than other violent crime, especially when it comes to providing details such as names of victims and perpetrators, said Myrna Dawson, a sociology professor at the University of Guelph and director of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability.
“What’s the end goal of that? To hide that we have a problem – that’s actually not going to work towards prevention,” Dr. Dawson said. “It’s not all police forces but we’ve seen it across the country ... and most recently we’ve seen it underscored in Nova Scotia.
“Why the lack of transparency? Why the secrecy? Because it just instills public mistrust.”
Nova Scotia RCMP wouldn’t provide The Globe with the names of victims or perpetrators of any of the three murder-suicides. Spokesperson Cindy Bayers said names are only revealed when it would advance an investigation. The other women killed in their homes by their partners took place in Yarmouth on Nov. 1 and Cole Harbour on Nov. 4.
RCMP also failed to disclose that Tatlock’s killer had been one of their own, until three weeks later following pressure from the family – an example Dr. Dawson says of the “the blue wall of silence,” an informal code of silence police use to protect each other.
Part of the problem is that details of femicide-suicides rarely come out. There’s no one to prosecute, so even the bare facts remain hidden, unless family members speak out. Their stories are crucial, said Dr. Dawson, because they help inform the public about ways in which women need to protect themselves and raise awareness of the prevalence of the killing of women by their male partners or ex-partners.
Tatlock’s daughters want people to know who their mother was and for others to understand the danger women face: that their first violent encounter with a controlling and coercive partner could be fatal.
Tatlock was shot and killed by her husband, retired RCMP officer Mike Burke, inside their Enfield, N.S. home on Oct. 18. The murder is one of three intimate partner violence murder-suicides in the province in three weeks.Lindsay Jones/The Globe and Mail
In the couple’s bungalow, at the end of a long gravel driveway, Mike was the man of the house, a towering Mountie who saw himself as the law. He had a rifle mounted above the fireplace and a grey Porsche convertible in the detached garage. At 61, he had been retired for several years following a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder related to his work investigating child trafficking.
Tatlock, chipper with a heart-shaped face, was a feisty pickleball player and belted out country songs at karaoke. Down at the legion, she and Debbie were known as the dynamic duo at darts. At home, she spent hours in her sewing room, stitching colourful quilts and cutting stained glass, crafts that she sold on her Facebook page, Sew Bee-you-tiful Creations.
Tatlock, left, and her best friend Debbie Burke. They were known as the dynamic duo at darts.Photo courtesy of Debbie Burke/Supplied
Over the last several years, her daughters began to notice how Mike, who was not their father, controlled their mother. He texted her constantly and dictated with whom she could spend time. He forbid certain members of her family from stepping foot on the property. If she disobeyed him, he wouldn’t speak to her for days. Debbie also noticed Mike’s jealousy and anger. How once he threw down a man at a dance for paying Tatlock a compliment. Near the end, when the two slept in separate rooms, Tatlock told her that she awoke several times to Mike standing over her, watching her sleep.
While Tatlock was nervous and uncertain about the future, she was also determined to leave.
Her flight landed early the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 17. Exhausted, she told her daughter Ashley Whitten that she was going to bed. Her last communication came the next morning, just after sunrise. She texted Whitten a few photos of tattoos she might like.
Within the next two hours and 12 minutes she was dead, killed by a single gunshot.