A fire-destroyed property registered to Gabriel Wortman at 200 Portapique Beach Rd. is seen in Portapique, N.S., on May 8, 2020. Police interview transcripts describe the moments that led up to the beginning of the rampage.Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
For five weeks before his attack, the gunman behind the mass shooting that terrorized rural Nova Scotia two years ago spent much of his time unwilling to get out of bed, obsessing over Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic, his common-law wife told the RCMP.
Lisa Banfield, in three transcripts of police interviews released through a public inquiry into the mass shooting, described how Gabriel Wortman descended into a depressive state as the first public-health lockdown hit Nova Scotia in March, 2020. After closing his denture clinic and retreating to their cottage in Portapique, N.S., she told police how a man she described as a workaholic became unmotivated to do anything, was consumed by the news about COVID-19 and was sinking into an increasingly negative spiral fuelled by the internet and commentary about the then U.S. president.
The night his attack began, he told her he wanted his life to end.
“I’m so tired of this, I’m just done, he said at the end of the night I’ll be dead, and if you don’t run away from me you won’t be,” Ms. Banfield told RCMP Staff-Sergeant Greg Vardy in an interview 10 days after the attack.
Ms. Banfield described how on April 18, 2020, the couple’s anniversary, the gunman became enraged over a joke a friend made about a commitment ceremony. She told police he dragged her by her hair through their cottage as he doused it in gasoline, shot at her, and locked her in his replica RCMP cruiser, which she escaped from and ran into the woods.
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She was terrified, she said, because the gunman told her after he torched his warehouse, he planned to do the same to his denture clinic, and then go to her sister’s home near Halifax, she said.
“And then he said we’re going to go to Dartmouth and burn Dartmouth and then we’re going to go to Maureen’s. All I could think was he’s going to go for my whole family,” she said.
While she hid, he was whistling as he searched for her in the dark, she said, before turning his rage on their neighbours, ultimately killing 22 people over a 13-hour period. Ms. Banfield’s medical records, also released through the public inquiry, show she spent five nights in hospital for a fractured rib and vertebrae, along with extensive bruising and scrapes.
The public inquiry is on a break until March 29. Ms. Banfield is expected to be among the key witnesses when the Mass Casualty Commission resumes the public portion of its work.
Her statements to police reveal more about the intimidating man she lived with, his drinking problem and his increasingly paranoid state. He talked to her about digging holes for bodies, saying he could kill people, but could never hurt an animal. And he made disturbing comments that suggested he’d been planning his rampage for a long time.
“He always used to say, like, when I go out I’m going with a bang. It’ll be in the news, that’s what he said,” Ms. Banfield told police.
She described their relationship as one of jealousy, violence and fear. The gunman would confront men who looked at her in public, she said, and he’d often accuse her of cheating if she went to visit her sister.
“Throughout our relationship, like, he’d be very controlling in the sense of where are you going or when are you coming back, you know, or you didn’t answer your phone,” she said. “Even at times that he was abusive … like I wouldn’t tell my family because I thought if I get back with him I don’t want them looking at him a certain way.”
Ms. Banfield also told the RCMP while a part of her loved her common-law spouse, and she felt sorry for his difficult, violent upbringing, she also didn’t want to stay with him. But she was afraid of what he might do if she tried to leave.
“I was scared not to, not, like leave kinda thing,” she said. “But that part of me, like I loved him and I would have done anything for him. But it’s just, I didn’t like him and I didn’t like that he didn’t have those kind of morals that I would want somebody to have.”
The gunman’s distorted view of reality became increasingly erratic in the early stages of the pandemic. He told Ms. Banfield he wanted to withdraw all his investments and savings from CIBC, which was about $475,000, because he believed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had “put in a law” for businesses with large cash assets allowing the government to “dig in and take whatever they want and give you shares in the company,” she said.
Ms. Banfield said her spouse wanted to bury all of his cash from other investments totalling around $700,000 in the yard around their Portapique cottage to keep that from happening.
He also told her that he knew how to stay ahead of the police, had bought a police radio, and would be able to leave town quickly, if necessary.
“He used to always want to talk about if he, you know, if ‘I was gonna commit this crime, this is what I would do and I’d direct the police over here and I’d have something going on over here so that they wouldn’t even know where I’m at,’ ” she said.
Ms. Banfield said she didn’t take his comments seriously, and that’s why she never reported him to police.
At one point in the interview on April 28, 2020, the RCMP officer told Ms. Banfield that if she knowingly transported guns from the U.S. with Mr. Wortman, she could be charged criminally. Ms. Banfield, who said she didn’t travel with her spouse when he smuggled guns, was eventually charged with transferring ammunition used in the attack.
Those charges were diverted last week to Nova Scotia’s restorative justice program, clearing Ms. Banfield to begin co-operating with the inquiry.
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