UC San Diego researchers confirm & expand Martin Henry Dawson’s insight from 90 years ago : bacteria communicate with each other

As reported in the journal CELL SYSTEM on April 27 2020, the team of Gurol Suel et al found that bacteria in bio films can retain memories of being shocked by strong light, down at the individual cell level.

Most bacteria prefer to live in biofilms (organized films of bacteria held together by a sticky gooey matrix) if they can.

Bacteria are incredibly small, invisibly small, but they hate to live alone - so they are often found, for example, living an organized life together literally in the trillions, in green slimy biofilms running for metres and metres in length in stream water and planted upon the rock surfaces in the streams.

Rub your tongue over your teeth - feel “wooly” ?  Well that’s a biofilm - time to brush !

And it is that same biofilm of mouth bacteria, now firmly planted inside damaged heart valves that killed most people who died from once deadly rheumatic fever : subacute bacterial endocarditis.

They were once so common and so awful they were known simply as RF and SBE.

It was Dawson’s other big research area that whipped these dreaded biofilms.

Dr Dawson was the first in history to use penicillin as it is used today : as a systemic internal antibiotic : he used it to try to cure and prevent RF and SBE - and succeeded !

But years early, Dawson first demonstrated that bacteria in biofilm engage in collective action, sending out chemical signals when they are ready to be “TRANSFORMED”, ready to receive a horizontal transfer of DNA from another sub-species of that same overall bacteria species.

The process they used is called Quorum Sensing , an extremely simple but also extremely elegant way to communicate : we have since learned that it is used, modified, by all living cells to organize themselves.

When the collective group of cells sense that the number of chemical molecules they are receiving is high enough (quite literally, a Quorum) they know that the transformation will succeed - enough cells will give off their DNA and enough cells will receive it, to successfully affect a transformation of the biofilm from one sub-species to another.

If fact, it was the discovery of Transformation that led to the realization that all living beings’ genetic information was stored in the lowly DNA, hitherto considered basically as mere simple packaging and not in the almighty and complicated proteins.

This is why I study and write about Dr Dawson, because his insights, now almost 100 years old, continue to have great relevance today....

Wortman’s violence began when he went from being an employee to being a professional, businessman & property owner

When I date the **known** incidents of violence, threats of violence and fraud from Gabriel Wortman, I find they form a pattern.

They all seemed to happen AFTER Wortman’s social status SUDDENLY went up a dozen notches.

Practically overnight, he seemed to have gone from being an apprentice mortician employee from a working class home, financially dependent on his parents, to being a registered medical professional millionaire entrepreneur who owned several businesses, several large properties, many cars etc.

A guy with high social standing and deep pockets for the best lawyers.

We’ve all seen the real life TV series called “Who Wants to Sue A Zillionaire ?”

No longer was his only claim to infamy was being the winner of UNB’s asshole loser of the year award, suddenly he was in charge, with all the cards  —- and brother was it ever going to be payback time !

So when he burned down a building with a neighbour’s items in it because he claimed it was on his PROPERTY, what did the neighbour do ?

Nothing.

When he threatened to use his collection of guns against a neighbour if he dared come on his PROPERTY to help carry the clothes of Wortman’s girlfriend, what did that neigbhour do ?

Nothing.

When Gabriel beat the crap out of a young boy waiting at a bus stop because he thought he might have touched his property, what the police do ?

 Basically nothing.

And when he lorded it over his parents by treating them, for once, to an expensive holiday in Cuba and then beat the crap out of his father, what did his father do ?

Nothing.

And when the Mounties came to see the millionaire professional about claims from his parents AND retired RCMP officer uncle that Wortman had threatened to murder his parents, what did the RCMP do ?

Nothing.

I won’t be the first to think that perhaps millionaire professionals can literally get away with murder...

Gabriel Wortman no ordinary rampage killer : all the more important we understanding the early upbringing that bred his hate

After murdering 13 people over the course of maybe an hour around ten pm on the night of Saturday April 18th 2020, Gabriel Wortman went and had a good night’s rest.

Awaking afresh at 5 am, four basic choices lay before him : surrender to police, kill himself, quietly leave the jurisdiction OR resume his killing spree in a new area.

That he chose the later made him a highly unusual type of spree or rampage killer : his deep-seated rage that lay beneath his normally jolly smiling persona literally knew no bounds.

Basically his actions did not fit the definition of either type of mass killer.

 That decision to renew his killing after a seven hour pause, combined with his single-minded determination to shoot or burn everyone or anything in his path : friends, strangers, pets, houses, cars and to do so until his bullets or accelerants ran out or he was captured, made him an extraordinarily hate-filled being.

All the more reason to look into his earliest years where the young brain is plastic enough to be both seriously warped out of shape and yet to bury that twisted nature below the surface.

We have a high school graduation picture of a nerd in 1980s style aviation glasses, a guy who hated to play contact sports : we have a guy in the exact same time period who loved to daredevil wheelies on his motorbike on the way to high school ; a guy who dyed his hair silver and had piercings on his nipples or penis.

 Clearly the real Gabe Wortman has yet to stand up.

As for me, myself, I want to know a great deal more about his father’s family because my gut feeling is that the origins of Gabriel’s weirdness may have begun there.

Nothing about Gabriel’s mother Evelyn or her family has come out in court case documents or in behaviour recalled by Paul, Gabriel’s father, to reporters at the two Frank publications and the Toronto Sun.

But we have heard a good deal about his father Paul and his many brothers and his mother : no mention of Paul’s father so far.

Focus on that side : call it my gut or my instinct....

Bridgedale when Gabriel Wortman grew up there was a fully rural village : basically still is

If you’ve ever recall driving through the very urban and urbane centre of Riverview New Brunswick and now say to yourself, so that is where NS mass killer Gabriel Wortman grew up, guess again.

He grew up way out in the sticks, in the still rural part of Riverview City — in a tiny remote village called Bridgedale. Basically to the west is  the very large built up square of urban streets that is Riverview proper —- way off to the east, beyond miles of woods and up against the river is the little tiny village of Bridgedale - still technically inside the legal boundaries of Riverview City.

Just as urban Halifax is an universe away from Moser River yet both are technically inside the legal boundaries of Halifax City.

If you can’t get urban growth the conventional way, city fathers and provincial government fake it, by including enough rural population till the city population reaches a politically sexy number.

Fraud basically.

Even today Bridgedale is still only nine streets in total, looking somewhat like a premature wannabe urban subdivision built twenty years early and twenty km away from the centre of Moncton.

An ideal place to run about with loud large motorcycles at all hours , a twin passion of Gabriel and his dad, and firing off airguns without worrying about what the urbanites might think.

Grown-up Gabriel had about 20 motorbikes and God alone knows how many illegal high powered weapons and ammo and once again lived much of the time in a remote rural location, off the beaten track where a man can live free, breathe free, blah blah blah : a place where villains can do whatever they want....

Corinna B Kincaid & the Whites Point Digby Neck Quarry

I was reading the most recent copy of a non-MSM publication (that I will call “FM” so as not to trigger adverse panic reactions among the “think only kind thoughts” brigade).

There was a name in the very last sentence on the very last page, a name I was sure I should know.

It niggled and jiggled in my memory banks.

So I Goggled it : ah ,yes, she had once had a very large connection to the Whites Point Quarry down at Digby Neck.

Most people (if they don’t live on the Digby Neck) only remember that Digby Neck Quarry as being the subject of an historical lawsuit from a large American corporation who dared to sue Canada over its environmental laws under an obscure NAFTA clause -and won.

But the quarry didnt start out as a mega-quarry (I am reading these claims, but I don’t mean to imply I totally believe them.)

It was to be a fairly normal sized local quarry - 3.6 hectares I think.

Only unusual in the type of mineral (Basalt) being quarried and where exactly was the steady local market for it.

Then it was revealed the proposed local operator had entered into a partnership with the big American firm and the quarry was truly to be a mega-quarry, about 153 hectares I believe.

All that mountain of stone - and more eventually - to be hauled away to Florida.

Shades of John Prine’s song about Paradise being hauled away in Mr Peabody’s trainloads.

The local firm eventually withdrew from the partnership in 2004 and all eyes and mouths were now focussed upon the big bad American CFAs, the usual comfortable target for Maritimers - J-crowders or activists alike - to attack.

I, as might be expected, want to focus instead on the local “baddies”, if that is a fair term.

That company was called Nova Stone Exporters Inc,  registry # 3058438, set up July 20th 2001.

I’ll take a deep breath now : okay the President, Secretary, Treasurer and Director (presumably of General Duties) was Corinna B Kincaid of the Bridgewater area.

She had first planned to dig all the sand up in some old tourist camps on the Digby Neck —- we learn this only because it came back to bite her American partner, Bitcon Ltd, in the butt : many local residents distrusted Nova Stone & her American partner’s quarry right from the start, as they recalled the sand-removal scheme unfavourably.

Corinna B Kincaid’s partnership deal with Bitcon was sealed in April 2002, not long before she was charged with illegally filling in wetlands in Dayspring NS, about 200 Km from the Digby Neck Quarry.

A busy woman ; with deep pockets.

No sense of where she got the big bucks for such a major show : the possibilities are endless - a bank, a partner, or her family, though a settlement agreement seems a credible possibility if you look more closely at the dates she set up the company....

By 2004, as I said, Nova Stone had been bought out of the partnership with the Americans.

Other than its involvement in contesting the government judgement against it for the illegal infilling, what the sentencing judge described as seven long years of “delaying tactics” and actions of “bad faith” from Corinna,  Nova Stone Exporters seems less active by about 2009, judging from the records at the NS Registry of Joint Stocks.

 It was struck off the Registry, seemingly for good, in just the past few years.

Corrina B Kincaid-Lowe herself still is about - appearing in the media photos for her activities in the adult education field....

Corinna B Kincaid-Lowe’s infilling was definitely an offence under the law - but was it a sin ?

As a well known Green supporter, you might be surprised to find me defending an infiller of environmentally sensitive wetlands.

But I am also a Christian.

I am not at all sure that God rose on the Eighth Day and said here be dry land and here be wet land and they shall both remain so, forever more.

Both the good book of Genesis and the good book of Science confirm we humans were very much a last minute afterthought.

(And perhaps a mistake to be regretted?  God only knows.)

God first created the Universe and for billions of years it alone.

He gave it a good slap after it was birthed - the Big Bang was deliberately chaotic - so it would have a form of free will and  allow it to evolve in totally unexpected ways, constantly fascinating to watch it.

Perhaps God got a little bored or simply wanted some new little kids to play with, because for 3.5 billion years God had the bacteria as the only known lifeform  to enjoy : and boy oh girl, do those guys ever evolve and change quickly. Endlessly fascinating and not just for God - if fact, this blog is supposed to be about a guy (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) who found their evolution fascinating enough to devote his life to observing it.

With salient benefits to Humanity : here cue DNA and Penicillin among others.

But Humanity - when did we arrive ? We’ve been around for only a few hundred thousand years. And Civilized Humanity ? Don’t know, still waiting.

And if the murderous rampage last weekend in Nova Scotia is any indication, we could be waiting a very long time.

That reminds me to get back to Nova Scotia and wet lands.

The blunt fact is that Nova Scotia and Canada has an awful lot of wetland in comparison to some other countries.

You can thank the Ice Ages, the last one in particular.

Time was when Nova Scotia and Canada had a relatively few giant rivers that organized all the rain that fell on it and quickly shunted it to the sea. Then giant glaciers moved rocks and soil all about and  left our surface water all deranged.

But eventually, in a very short time, bogs will fill in and in a very long time, rivers will get bigger and fewer.

Then glaciers sweep across the land and the whole cycle begins again.

Fact is, the environment is in a constantly evolving flux, always has and always will be.

Humans are fully a part of the environment too and we too have free will and so like volcanoes, asteroids and covid-19, we sometimes change the environment drastically.

The human moral requirement that we don’t kill or destroy God’s green earth runs into serious philosophical difficulties everytime we thoughtlessly kill earthworms and other creatures digging a foundation for our new house - or when we daily kill and eat vegetables.

People who see “the environment” as being fixed in aspic back in one golden age and now see it being destroyed are actually revealing more about their need for a totally controlled universe to feel at ease, than they are about the science of evolution.

(I read somewhere that those earthworms in your nice Nova Scotia garden needs to thrive are actually invasive species, brought over by accident centuries ago in ship’s ballast.)

Most all species have expanded well beyond from the geographic point where they first became a species, in the technical sense, making them too invasive.

So, surprisingly, but only a deeply philosophical level, I have a glint of sympathy for Mahone Bay’s Corinna B Kincaid-Lowe and her company Nova Stone Exporters for seeing her infilling activities come before the courts.

Because while many rural Nova Scotians like their wetlands and appreciate their ability to support wildlife and to hold and filter ground water, we sometimes just wish there wasn’t so much of the stuff at a particular spot on our property.

I have often wondered if the fairer trade-off sometimes would be that the landowner must create the same amount of wetland elsewhere on their property to make up for what they are infilling on this particular spot.

As reported by safely MSM* outlets like CKBW radio and the Truro Daily News, Corinna B Kincaid-Lower and her company Nova Stone Exporters were harshly criticized by Bridgewater NS presiding judge Anne Crawford when the judge found the pair guilty of infilling an environmentally sensitive wet land in Dayspring, along the usually beautiful La Have River, back in August 2002.

The case was settled and the $18,379 fine (with 10% victim surcharge) imposed in August 2009 - exactly seven long years later.

The judge directed the reason for the long delay to see justice served at Corinna for her “foot-dragging” and “lack of good faith”.

You see, the land itself was only assessed at $13,400, far far less than the fine and the surcharge.

And don’t get me started on the overall huge costs : for the court system, various government agencies, Corinna Kincaid-Lowe and her company’s lawyer fees and lost opportunity costs over those pointlessly seven long years, it all must have come close to a million dollars I reckon.

This was one stubborn person - stubborn and with the attitude that ‘no government is ever going to push ME around’.

Wasn’t there another Nova Scotian described thusly, very recently, in Nova Scotia? Must be contagious.

Yes I know you can find Corinna B Kincaid-Lowe and Nova Stone Exporting cropping up in other government documents on line, but I thought I’d focus on this one for today....

Book “DEFERENCE TO AUTHORITY” emerged after professor binge-watched too much local Halifax TV

Dr Edgar Z Friedenberg was a highly respected professor of Education at Halifax’s Dalhousie University back when I was a student there.

But then he did a very bad thing.

He began to watch the local media and read the local newspapers, looking for news.

Well of course, it happened, it had to happen : he had a complete nervous breakdown, but when he emerged he had a classic explanation for the eternal - and infernal - Canadian character : usually known by its short title : DEFERENCE TO AUTHORITY.

(The complete title, as I recall, was “Canadians’ Abject, Craven Deference to Authority”.)

Boot licking, in other words.

What made this landmark effort so noteworthy was that he had drawn all his sweeping conclusions from a just few months of binge-watching local reporters “questioning” press officers at official briefings.

If Edgar came back and spent another few months watching the interactions between our local journalists and the authorities’ PR flaks here in Halifax, would he change his conclusions ?

I doubt it : if anything, forty years on, he’d strengthen them....

For Nova Scotian G Wortman, hard to get illegal gun from USA : but for the New Brunswick G Wortman ? Piece of cake !

There really isn’t a border between Maine and New Brunswick, not at least in the sense of those  dreaded borders and border guards you recall from all those old spy movies.

Porous is the term that comes to mind, porous and fluid, particularly back in the old days.

Doesn’t hurt either that northern Maine has a Libertarian, anti-government regulations streak either.

*New Brunswick*, dear folks in the J-Biz, as I have said many times, is where this news story really sugars off.

Getting guns across that border, friendly New Brunswicker visiting good ole buddy in Maine & vice versa ,was a piece of cake.

Maybe still is.

Don’t look ( for God’s Sake !) dark or foreign or poor, and Bob’s your Uncle.

If I were hiring a courier to smuggle a missile across the border, the guy I’d hire would be a local, a medical or legal professional, a millionaire, perhaps someone with Trump or Harper bumper stickers on their expensive late model car...

Dance Music in an 19th century Nova Scotian Presbyterian parlour

For a start, 19th century regular church going Nova Scotia Presbyterians didn’t dance (and Martin Henry Dawson’s parents were literally pillars of Truro’s First Presbyterian, one of the mother churches of Canadian Presbyterian culture.)

But parlour music back then, even in the most Presbyterian Sabbath-keeping of Presbyterian families, was absolutely filled with lively folk tunes.

Just filtered and modulated and sprinkled, for flavour, throughout the works of eminently respectable composers.

Even in the works by the composers of the music used in the Sabbath Sunday religious music singalongs in the parlour of the Dawsons.

Sir Arthur Sullivan, Queen Victoria’s favourite composer, wrote highly respectable music that was also frequently lively in a manner that could only be described as folkish.

What, however, did survive when folk dance tunes were briefly quoted and extensively adapted by what we now call today “classical” composers ?

Above all, it was the unique patterning of accents, which when combined with  their tempo, melodic contour and articulation, was what allowed anyone : folk or classical musician or dancer at contredanses to tell one dance type from another.

At least a hundred different dance rhythms, some dating back to the middle ages, could be heard in middle class parlours in 19th century Nova Scotia while in the most remote rural, folk, parts of Nova Scotia, up in the back hill wilds of Inverness, maybe only 6 different dance types might be actually danced to.

So urban middle class homes in 19th century Nova Scotia actually heard far more ‘folk’ music in one sense of the word (the sense that the folk collectors’ world might use) than did rural working class Nova Scotians who were actively involved in the ‘folk process’ of taking urban composed tunes and rendering them the common property of all....

“Stay the Blazes Home Portapique : no Parties of more than five people” says Premier Stephen

Good advice !

Wonder if everyone in Portapique took it ?

And one more thing Nova Scotia’s premier and Chief Medical Officer pleaded of Nova Scotians, above all Nova Scotians living in more urban centres like Halifax and Dartmouth.

 They said ‘please don’t go to your rural summer homes, don’t spread COVID-19 from its current hotspot in metro Halifax to its current coldspot : Northern Nova Scotia’.

I wonder how many of the summer residents of Portapique took that advice as well ?

Because what happened last weekend isn’t just a mass murder story : its possibly also a Covid 19 story.

If I can draw a parallel to another existential crisis, WWII’s Blitz, there we saw working class East Enders getting the bombing in the neck while well-to-do West Enders took themselves off to stately Country Homes near quiet rural resort towns.

Funk Holers they were called and they weren’t (and aren’t) popular.

On one hand, you can hardly blame metro HRM’s Funk Holers : they see 757 positive Covid in Central Zone HRM versus only 39 positive Covid in the Northern Zone. They don’t want to die of Covid and they have the money to do something about it —- and given their social status don’t really expect rural RCMP charging them for breaking curfew.

But on the other hand, it has mostly been working class residents of metro Halifax who have had to continue to go to work each day, its is mostly working class residents who have tested positive for Covid.

In the deep background, away from the public eye ,well to do metro residents have been beating their gums to Conservative politicians begging them to get the restrictions on summer cottage visiting lifted.

Some Conservatives, spineless, have gone along with the gag. (One is a neighbour, I’m Nova Scotian , I’m nice, so I won’t mention his name.)

 Other Conservatives (big shout out here to Steve Streatch !) have said ‘no way : we have many elderly residents living here in rural Nova Scotia and our hospital facilities aren’t equipped to handle seriously ICU patients, I join with the Liberal premier for once  : stay the blazes home, well-heeled urbanites!”

Killings, Covid & Class Conflict : this will be a complex and complicated case for journalists and historians to dissect...

Silly Billy Web Sleuth : shoot the message, not the messenger

As a history student my profs taught me to be suspicious of post hoc oral recollections (the very definition of most MSM interviews) and to put more faith in hard copy documents created at the time of the event —- before anyone knew it would blow up big.

Now contrary to Silly Billy, the censor chief at websleuths.com, I find that most of the MSM output on the Gabriel Wortman murders would rate as pretty low grade stuff , interviews mostly, in the eyes of historians.

In pointed contrast, the hard copy stuff coming from the pond scum media Silly Billy loathes so much, like the Halifax Examiner and Frank Magazine,  looks pretty hard for a historian to refute, on the surface.

Shoot the messenger Silly Billy if you must : you hate the non-MSM I get it, I really do : and its free country.

But please don’t shoot their messages, not without a careful and thoughtful examination first.

The facts are this : much of what the MSM originally printed about the Wortman Rampage turned out subsequently to be just chaff ; just as much of what the MSM dismissed from the pond scum non-MSM efforts turned out subsequently to remain Number #1 Canadian high grade wheat.

But still Silly Billy plods on : carefully, thoughtfully separating wheat from chaff and then printing the chaff ( “chaff, yes, admittedly, but its MSM chaff !”)

But why Billy Silly, is Frank Magazine and Andrew so untrustworthy and the Toronto Sun and Joe Warmington such a fount of reliability ? Where are your hard facts to back up such a audacious claim ?

Because to an unwary reader like myself, I thought the Sun had merely piggybacked onto the interview with Gabriel Wortman’s father Paul that was first published by Frank Magazine.

One Frank Magazine had it out and got all the flak from the “think nothing but kind thoughts brigade” the Sun bravely stepped to the fore with their me-too article. Clearly the Sun didnt think that Frank Magazine had invented its interview out of whole cloth - and Frank had hard copy documents to back up its tale - more than we have seen from the Toronto Sun to date.

And as for The Halifax Examiner, one of their early stories (April 21st’s “There were 22 Victims...) had a link to an online hard copy court document to back up its assertions re an assault conviction against Wortman .

I mean did Silly Billy even look at that document before dissing Tim and the Examiner ?

I mean it is pages and pages and pages long and just covered in signatures of various judges - are we seriously supposed to think that Tim & crew faked all that up ?

Again, I find Silly Billy has recklessly libelled Tim’s crew, just as they did with Andrew’s crew.

And frankly, I hope both editors sue the ass off Silly Billy for libel and win big time.

These hit and run smear attacks against hardworking journalists has to stop !

And you can thank the likes of Trump for making the assaults of people like Silly Billy somehow socially acceptable....

Gabriel Wortman a skilled arsonist, as well as murderer and fraudster : maybe time to look at fires around his properties in the past ?

Beyond all the fires Wortman set on April 18-19 during his murderous rampage, we know he fired up a neighbour’s building in Portapique in the past and we know of a fire in the building next to his Dartmouth home and residence that ended up conveniently giving him a potentially new parking lot to park his ever growing fleet of RCMP police cars.

HRM’s arson squad should definitely give that fire a much closer going over in light of last week’s tragic events.

And can anyone else think of fires in the vicinity of Gabriel Wortman that that various arson teams should take a second boo at ?

Gabriel Wortman : I was born July 5th 1968 and my parents got married December 16 1967...

Heck, when I was a kid, this sort of thing was the norm. Many such marriages eventually broke up, but equally, some stayed together forever - like Paul & Evelyn Wortman.

But what I find interesting is that basically on  young Gabriel’s 5th birthday , his uncle Alan was made an RCMP officer, in front of the Queen herself at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Force : a really big show. A proud day for the entire Wortman family.

We might try tracing his fascination with mounties and guns to that date...

the MAIN STREAM MEDIA like FRANK MAGAZINE wants you to pay through the nose, to learn facts you could have had here FREE and a week EARLIER...

Yes sometimes even the MSM outlets like FRANK MAGAZINE reads these posts, sigh !

But don’t let that stop you....

“NICE” nova scotians never mention “NASTY” g wortman/ g regan ? Unfortunately for their victims, we did just that for decades...

Its hard to keep the names straight, officer : the waves of nausea and deja vu just keep coming back at me in waves.

Its perfectly in keeping that the terminally NICE Trudeau junior should tell us that we should never ever mention the name of that NASTY Gabriel Wortman.

After all, Trudeau senior said much the same to his concerned cabinet colleagues after the vetting reports came in on the rape rampages of NASTY Cabinet member Gerald Regan : “Let’s not tell the police about what we know.” “NICE Canadians don’t inform on their NASTY neighbours.”  “Let bygones be bygones”.

And Trudeau senior was perfectly consistent in this : he steadfastly opposed prosecuting ex-Nazi murderers living in Canada : “let bygones by bygones”, he told his Montreal riding, dominated by Jewish voters.

And for decades his grateful Jewish voters re-elected him their MP  en masse ; the same guy who had ridden around in a German military uniform as a teenager during the Holocaust, after writing an anti-Jewish play for his high school to perform.

Are Montreal Jewish Canadians nice ? Oh yes : TERMINALLY nice.

(So at least now you know just who Trudeau junior got his fetish for wearing offensive costumes from ...)

Nova Scotians don’t need any help from Ottawa on just how NICE neighbours should never mention NASTY Neighbours to others, like the police, not even when they threaten to kill your NICE husband with their massive gun collection if they dare to step on the NASTY neighbour’s property to help a female victim of domestic violence.

Would 24 people be dead today if the police had been called that night back in 2010 and a search warrant had revealed Wortman’s massive collection of illegal guns?

Whether is being just too darn polite (think kind thoughts) to report G Regan’s rapes or G Wortman’s violence, Nova Scotians are in fact, quite literally , LETHALLY nice...

For Years, the claim that Gabriel Wortman won the dreaded Chuck Cosby Award for being the biggest asshole on the UNB campus remained posted on Facebook Page devoted to Bridges House alumni and none contradicted it

The Facebook poster said that was his recollection then (a dozen years ago), that Wortman was voted the recipient of  the dreaded Chuck Cosby Award  —— and that is his recollection today.

Though he didn’t say so, it seemed crystal clear to me that silent was assent.

For the sort of person looking at the Facebook page were all Bridges House alumni during the years that Gabriel Wortman was there (or their significant others or their best friends).

About one thousand people in all, in the best possible position as eye witnesses, to determine whether the poster’s recollections were accurate or not.

Nobody did so - all the years the post was up there —— and years before Wortman’s murderous rampage coloured people’s memories of him at UNB.

That is pretty strong evidence to me.

Another poster (on another Facebook Page) said  very much the same thing and they are not at all connected to the first poster.

But I believe they only connected Wortman and Chuck Cosby after the shootings, which doesn’t make them mistaken.

It is only that they offer up slightly less compelling evidence then that given years ago when Wortman was not yet know as a mass killer...

What evidence Wortman focussed his violence at women ?

Everyone is entitled to their own personal opinion but no one , not even Trump, is entitled to their own personal set of facts.

Public evidence, so far, details acts of violence from Gabriel Wortman from 2001 right up to last weekend’s rampage.

Most of them involve men : it was the male neighbour Hudson he threaten to use his guns on, not Wortman’s female common law partner, when Hudson went to help her.

It was a boy he assaulted outside his clinic, his father he beat up in cuba, his dad and mom he threatened to kill , his male neighbour building he burned down years ago.

During his rampage he killed or tried to kill anyone and everyone he saw.

He tied up, beat up but DID not kill his girlfriend.

In the end, it may well be about 50/50 in regard to the gender of his victims but I think he tried to kill everything : humans, pets, cars, homes, everything.

His rage knew no bounds....

Why didn’t they pull every marked cop car in NS off the road and put every available chopper in the air to spot the one marked cop car with a mass murderer inside ?

Could eight lives have been saved during this week’s NS Shootings spree ?

Perhaps, if the first tweet from the RCMP had told the truth instead of maintaining the Mounties’ reputation for stiff upper lips, British understatement and always, always, being in total control.

Its a guy thing and the Mounties are still very much a boys’ gym locker.

Hate to think what would have happened if the RCMP had been in charge of the communications net during the morning attack on Pearl Harbour : “a firearms incident is reportedly underway in vicinity of the naval base” ?

But let’s move beyond that to another problem the RCMP is infamous for : wanting to keep everything , EVERYTHING, in house.

NIH, Not Invented Here, might as well be their official as well as un-official motto.

If they had told the truth, back at 1130 Pm on Saturday night, none of Sunday mornings eight deaths might have happened.

They needed to tell the truth : “it a total bloodbath down here in Portapique, already we see more more victims here in one place than in 270 years of NS history  - and the mass killer is still on the loose , in a marked cop car.”

And yes, I am yelling that, in ALL CAPS : “our worst mass murders here in NS in 270 years and the killer, Gabriel Wortman, is still armed and on the loose - driving up to his unwary victims in a marked cop car !!!”

That alone would have pushed the story to the top of the NS news cycle - we won’t have needed the official Provincial Alert to go off - the media and the public would have done it themselves.

I am old enough to have lived —inside— two very scary all-out manhunts for armed repeat killers : the “Boy on a Bike” in Halifax in August 1964 and the “Al MacDonald Killings” at Christmas 1975.

We were scared stiff inside but we were also safe inside : because the police were honest and upfront about what they and we were up against.

No stiffer upper lip stuff, just the unvarnished truth : and the Truth saves lives.

Number One, if the RCMP had just told the truth, lives might have been saved.

Number Two : get everyone involved : pull all the marked cop cars  in North Central Nova Scotia off the road, drive about instead in ghost cars or personal cars, stay in touch via cell phone.

Consider ordering all civilian vehicles also  to pull off the road in North Central NS.

Get every possible chopper in the air over North Central NS : searching for the one cop car still on the road : ambulance, lands and forest, military choppers as well as police choppers : every chopper, even if they were “Not Invented Here,  in Mountieland”.

We don’t need to highly pay and train expensively police personnel to ‘do things by the book’ in a crisis : we could pull minimum wage teenage stocking clerks to read from the book.

Or perhaps we do still need to go by the Book : but the book is big and full of lateral thinking.

To borrow a page from the military, what we needed here were leaders who were objective-driven, not rule-book driven.

Now I suspect some of this thinking is going through minds of the mounties in the lead on the ground during this rampage and  I don’t doubt some of them are going to have severe mental issues over this - or worse - as the loss of those eight additional lives weighs upon their conscience.

It would help them personally if the entire Mountie world, retired as well as working mounties, admitted that just maybe their longstanding internal culture was as much at fault for this as was the woeful decisions made by a handful of mountie lead officers on the ground during that night and early morning....

PUBLICLY, New Brunswickers can’t find anything bad to say about dear sweet young Gabriel Wortman when he was a citizen of New Brunswick

But when Wortman became a citizen of Nova Scotia : now that’s when all the bad things began:

God Only Knows what New Brunswickers are really thinking and saying about Gabriel Wortman PRIVATELY - because the people down here on planet earth sure as hell don’t know.

If you think the Blue Line and its Cone of Silence is strong, you haven’t met the folks from the dulcet land of idyllic potato farms and saw mills.

Even people who grew up in New Brunswick but now live elsewhere are toeing the line : “as a child in New Brunswick, great kid ; as adult in Nova Scotia - a monster”.

“Maybe something in the Bluenose water down there, don't know, can’t explain it”.

At least the few souls from New Brunswick who have gone public with recollections of the early Gabriel Wortman have acknowledged he was from New Brunswick (and in point of fact, spent MOST of his life there).

That more than any of the New Brunswick media has done - the big national outfits as well : too busy averting their collective noses upward to study covid 19 (though New Brunswick is hardly a covid hotspot !) rather than raking muck down at ground level. At best they reprint stories clearly datelined as being written in other provinces.

(Hat tip there to Teddy Bear Roosevelt !)

Printing all the news and only the news ———- that our customers and advertisers want to hear.

But one New Brunswicker didn’t seem to have got the memo, perhaps because he is living in York UK.

While googling Gabriel Wortman I saw a reference to the NS killings on a Makem football site (in Sunderland, NE England if you’re not a soccer fan !)

The Message Board SMB (RTG Sunderland Message) is public to read and the thread was all about the Nova Scotia killings.

A new member “Brunswicker” joined in because he had been following the story since he was a fellow Maritimer originally and Wortman was a very very well known Moncton New Brunswick surname. His girlfriend prompted him.

Women notice jerks far more then men do, I find : (maybe some form of Jerk-Radar ?) . Any way she reminded him that he had once roomed with Wortman.

That’s when the light went on : he had roomed with him, he was very odd, even way back then and he had even been awarded an infamous award, voted the biggest asshole and loser on the entire (15,000 souls) UNB (University of New Brunswick, Fredericton) campus.

The winner of the Chuck Cosby Award for 1986-1987.

The award was designed to act as a social control to restrain creeps at UNB’s biggest and rowdiest male residence : Bridges House (think of a rather mild version of Animal House/Frat House).

A year there was like a year of living in a fishbowl with wild animals and no showers : some means of social control was needed if the majority of the residents hoped to maintain their grades and sanity.

That the Award was seen by most residents as essential was clear when a major student riot (physical violence and property destruction - in staid New Brunswick, of all places !) , broke out when the dean of Residents Mary Lou Stirling banned it in April 11 1991.

She had heard complaints from former recipients (Gabriel among them ?) that it left them shattered and humiliated.

Of course, THEIR victims, also felt the same way.

For let us make it clear that this award was NOT handed out to kids who kept their shirts buttons up to the top, wore pencil protectors and bathed infrequently. it was not awards to nerds and geeks : just to creeps, jerks, assholes and losers.

So, what were the signs that so marked “nice kid” Gabriel Wortman to deserve this asshole award ?

Were there early warnings as far back as 34 years ago that this guy had a propensity for unusual violence?

Could 24 deaths have been prevented ?

Is New Brunswick prepared to look deep into its collective soul and be honest ?

Not talking about Wortman’s victims (if they are alive) (if they are dead, they’re fair game)

The mainstream media, which can be usefully defined as any media outlet with enough assets to be worth suing, is not going to mention the name of any of the still-living victims of Gabriel Wortman’s murderous rampage.

His twenty four dead victims, however, are fair game.

Is this a case of Journalistic-Ethics or is this a case of Journalistic-Fears-About-Being-Sued ?

And in our rush to ensure ever greater privacy (wouldn’t Gabriel Wortman have just loved it, if his shameful court dealings with his family had been sealed forever ?), we might soon not be able to even mention the names of murder victims in the future :

As it is, the RCMP does not release the names of dead car crash victims - or murder victims.

So the MSM has only gained access to those names because the families of the dead announced them on social media and so gave presumed consent.

Wait a minute there sunny james, the dead themselves did not give consent to their name being broadcast - the families just assumed they would.

Just as I assumed that because Wortman is mentioned as the partner of a woman in a public obituary, there was assumed consent to point people to that public obituary.

If I am on shaky moral ground, so  too is the MSM and the families of the 24 dead.

Perhaps I am being provocative  - provocative for a reason  - to make people think a little harder, think a little deeper before they toss off facile nonsense.

Or perhaps, being the kid of a professor of philosophy and logic, I just can’t help myself (-;

did YOU or a FRIEND live in BRIDGES HOUSE, UNB 1986-1987 : then you can help the RCMP inquiry into what led your dorm-mate Gabriel Wortman to kill 24 people

Living in a student dorm - particularly Bridges House (UNB’s Animal House), particularly back in the loosey-goosey 1980s - is like living in a giant fish bowl for a year with no showers : ordinary interactions can begin to get, well, really stinky .

You get to see far more of some of your fellow mankind then you really want to see.

And at Bridges House, in the 1980s, you could do something about it.

The famous and then infamous CHUCK COSBY award, a chance to cast a secret ballot as to the biggest loser, the biggest asshole in the dorm , and by popular acclaim usually the biggest arsehole across the entire UNB campus.

Gabriel Wortman, “the Portapique spree killer” was in the Bridges House residence that year.

A number of his fellow dorm mates and their significant others, say that he won the award that year.

Maybe he did, maybe he did not, maybe he just got nominated - the shame of that was often as bad as the award itself.

But only you one hundred or so fellow dorm mates can answer this question for sure : were there good signs as early as 1987 that Gabriel Wortman was one seriously warped individual ?

Poetic Justice : Wortman who killed because he rode around in a MARKED mountie car was finally killed when he failed to realize there were mounties right next to him, in an UN-MARKED mountie car

The Red Serge bosses didn’t everything wrong that grim day ; one of the smartest things they did, in hindsight, was having some Mounties in the area of Wortman’s route, well armed & well trained, and riding in ghost cars : ordinary by day, visible cop car by night.

Wortman was completely tricked, just as he had tricked two dozen innocent victims earlier : hoisted on his own petard...

If you have a neighbour with a violent side and a fascination with guns, would it be worth an anonymous note to the Gun Registry to see if they were licensed ?

Gabriel Wortman had one hell of a gun collection says his dad Paul , he hunted and I am sure he showed his collection of guns to his select male pals when the hair was down and the glasses full.

His neighbours in Portapique knew he could really lose his temper at times, with his common law partner in particular.

Did anyone of them, knowing that and knowing of his gun fascination AND that domestic violence deaths are our leading form of murder, send that note or make that anonymous call ?

Just asking ....

Wortman’s life between 1987 and 1995 still unaccounted for

You can always rely on the local media here in NS & NB (like the TORONTO Star) to do the heavy digging needed to give us here answers about whether we Maritimers (as a collectivity) should have seen Wortman’s murderous spree coming.

Actually blaming your Maritime readership for Wortman‘s behaviour doesn’t sell many newspapers : but blaming outsider CFAs (like the RCMP) for his failings sure does sells papers here, like a charm.

Let me be more blunt : I believe New Brunswick news editors were given access to two immediate assessments of Gabriel Wortman from fellow classmates in New Brunswick : some individuals said he was a great kid and other individuals reported that in 1987, he had received a well known award, the Chuck Cosby Award, annually voted upon by hundreds of fellow students at UNB, for being the biggest asshole on campus.

The editors separated the wheat from the chaff and printed the chaff: the version that basically said “ hey yes we admit that Wortman was born here, but he was a well loved kid while he was here - all those bad things he did, happened when he took Nova Scotian citizenship. Whatever bad things he did in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

What those NB editors should have done is to weigh a few individual “opinions” against a potentially knowable fact : because the award did exist, was extremely well known, was reported upon at the time : a little digging would establish whether or not Wortman  HAD received the award or was even nominated for it.

***********************

Sigh - but then some things never DO change around here.

In the 1980s, I dared to suggest that we Nova Scotians were partially to blame for not stopping a very powerful politician (Gerald Regan) from raping and molesting women for  50 years : from the late 1940s till the late 1980s, very often in public, at big public events. Nova Scotia is a very small interconnected culture and his carryings-on (which is how most people indulgently viewed them) were an Open Secret, a source of mild titillation at parties.

Nobody thought to get the guy arrested and stopped. When I tried, unsuccessfully, nobody wanted to hear about my motivation for doing so : that we the public were facilitating this criminal by watching but doing nothing. Everybody all wanted to shift the blame away from themselves and towards an external source : Gerald Regan himself.

 I lost a lot of friends, upset that I had dared to repeat what they had so freely said in public at large parties, to the RCMP. “How dare I do that : that was private.”  “No it wasn’t”, I said. “Your gossip involved the abuse of underage children (under 18)  and actually and factually it is a crime , yep a crime, not to report suspected child abuse to the Nova Scotian authorities”.

Still didn’t wash with them.

And yes, I enjoyed spreading the gossip too, for 15 long years, until I suddenly saw my actions repeated in the actions of the members of Quebec Legislative Assembly.

********************************

The Star has added to the Gabriel Wortman timeline we now have out there in the public domain.

As I reported,  Gabriel and his parents spent an unspecified amount of time in the United States when he was about 20 months old : 1970. His parents were in extremely dire financial straits.

We then have a friend describing playing with him when he was old enough to ride a bike alone, in Bridgedale NB (now part of Riverview) - say mid 1970s. Confirmed by his parents presence on voters rolls in that period.

A time when his uncle Alan first joined the RCMP : July 4 1973 he graduated, the 100th anniversary of the RCMP being founded. Even the Queen was there at his graduation. A signal honor. Maybe a landmark event for Gabriel ?

By 1980, Wortman was in junior high and his parents now financially so much better off they could afford to indulge his love of guns.

By 1986 we have him finishing High School in Riverview. He drives around in a very expensive motorbike - this makes him the source of envy to many of his young male acquaintances.

His marks are good enough and his family well off enough to get him into UNB in the Fall of 1986 and into the infamous Bridges House, UNB’s Animal House.

What too many kids like to do when they are far from mom and dad and gran for the first time is to drink. Drink, drink and more drink.

Drinking was very heavy back then at UNB : kids falling out of windows drunk and dying three floors below. Fell or pushed : lots of kids were drunk AND rowdy.

Wortman was voted or at least nominated for being the UNB asshole of the year in the Spring of 1987 : given what we know as to how he tended to act after a few drinks later in life, one wonders if  it was the things he did while drunk that made him such a big asshole in the eyes of his fellow dorm mates ?

I believe Wortman departs UNB after the Spring of 1988, without a degree.

But we’ll never know : if you think the RCMP are secretive, you’ve never met an university.

 Academics are the most secretive, most evasive creatures on earth when it comes to protecting their jobs by protecting their institution’s reputation in the highly competitive global market for students, donors and grant money.

Now the timeline fades for seven years. Perhaps crucial years - we need them filled in.

Because the Toronto Star  next establishes that Wortman took a course as a mortician at a local NS community college and apprenticed at Dartmouth’s Walker’s Funeral Home, these events being between 1995 and 1997.

He is now in Nova Scotia , not in New Brunswick - why ? His drunken behaviour burned his bridges there ?

But he doesn’t complete the effort to become a registered mortician and departs back to New Brunswick.

A gap of four years, though if he did quickly decide to become a fully qualified denturist, that means three years at a college in Ontario, accounting for most all of this gap.

In the Fall of 2001, police records show he is operating the Atlantic Denture Clinic on Portland Street Dartmouth (next door to a big funeral home) when he assaults a young boy for daring to wait for a bus at a public bus stop.

(A bus stop I have frequently waited at - chilling to think it might have been the back of my head, not the kid’s, that could have felt Wortman’s drunken fist and crowbar.)

From 2001, the timeline of where Wortman was living and how he was earning a living seems at least partially adequately covered : examples of  his fraud and drunken violent outbursts are still emerging.

I, myself, have focussed on two gaps in Gabriel’s timeline : from birth to about age three and then his time at UNB and immediately afterwards.

I think what made him a potential super-monster was set in his earliest years - a combo of weird brain chemistry and some sort of prolonged stress.

By the time he was at UNB, his behaviour was unusual enough that hundreds of kids who living in a giant fishbowl called a dorm, felt he deserved being publicly humiliated as UNB’s asshole of the year.. (Chuck Cosby Award).

After that additional stress, I think the die was cast : Wortman’s flashes of sudden violent anger were beyond normal but nothing was done.

He was going to have to kill someone before he was finally stopped - perhaps by killing his parents or a kid on the street or his common law partner.

But that didn’t happen.

The pot kept on boiling until he determined to act on a fantasy I bet he had had for about 35 years : to kill as many people as possible until his bullets ran out or the police caught him : to go out in a blaze of glory , a teenager finally to be FEARED, not laughed at...

Drinking, but not necessarily heavy prolonged drinking, immediately proceeded all of Gabriel Wortman’s violent outbursts that have been exposed to date

Sometimes it was just social drinking, maybe a little heavy social drinking, at a party or a family dinner that turns our ever-joking, ever-smiling nice guy, like turning on a dime, into a potentially extremely violent aggressor.

If that suggests anything, it is that his rage lay just below the surface and was relatively easily revealed —- it should have set up bigger alarm bells than it obviously did.

I don’t drink and I don’t hang around people who do drink heavily.

But just once I was in a journalists’ bar and someone I thought a friend as well as a reporter turned on me when he was very drunk to the extend that I thought he might get dangerous violent.

He had a beef against me, probably a legitimate beef, in my role as a political and environmental  activist.

But he had never expressed it to me when sober, possibly not wanting to burn bridges to a source or something.

We have met many times since and he has always been his usual friendly open self. But I remain shaken to this day, 35 years later, to see the usually hidden depths beneath ordinary individuals.

Mine is a commonplace story - most of you can recall far more incidents than mine where someone’s personality changed greatly for the worse when they drank.

I guess the time we really should intervene until it helps is when violent talk becomes violent action - usually against family but it could be total strangers as well.

By intervene I mean we have to tell the police, and keep on telling the police, until they really feel it as human beings, that we have frequently observed this individual go from smiling jekyll to foaming hyde whenever he/she drinks  —- and now he has actually carried out this threat and we are willing to stand up in court to say so, because we think he might kill someone or many someones, some day....

Fact : not Speculation,Gabriel Wortman did have a common law partner back in 2008 and you have probably already guessed her first name

Look up the very lengthy obituary online for Beulah Mae Banfield, keeping an eye out for the name Gabriel Wortman.

(Written by the family to be published in a province wide newspaper, it is PD, in the public domain, copyright free, by Canadian copyright case law.)

It was originally published in the Halifax Herald on May 18th 2008.

(Beulah was originally a Zinck. a local, and her husband Gilbert was from Bay L’Argent : both sturdy country folk.)

Hidden there this whole time, in plain sight .

But for people used to trying to assemble their family’s history, its old hat to type in words like ”obituary” or “find a grave” “nova scotia” and then the name (Gabriel Wortman) you are seeking.

That’s all I did in this case.....

“Just because Wortman didn’t turn up for his parents’ big day, you assumed the worst Michael”

Yes, and I was right, wasn’t I ?

I didn’t figure Gabriel Wortman was Canada’s worst spree killer because he couldn’t be bothered to show up for his parents’ happiest day.

But he was a self-employed millionaire who had yet neither the time or the money to help his parents wipe out 40 years of their secret guilt : all he had to do was attend a joyous once-only-in-a-lifetime blended family reunion in North Brookfield Mass.

His parents were hoping that day would begin to make up for having to put his younger brother up for adoption because money was just so tight for a young man and woman who got married when they were only 20 and had their first child not long after.

No, I  just figured he was a super inconsiderate jerk and yes - say it again - the rightful owner of the title, the-biggest-arsehole-on-campus, UNB 1987.

The fact I was trying to bring to everyone’s attention was that he also screwed his own dad over when he screwed his very ill uncle out of his home.

I figured there was a lot more dirt under the gravel, as we Nova Scotians used to say about road politics, in Gabriel Wortman’s earlier life, if only journalists - above all journalists in his home province of New Brunswick, bothered to look.

Now Frank Magazine has done an interview with Gabriel’s father Paul and it apparently details how Gabriel once threatened to kill his parents and later in Cuba almost did kill his father.

I haven’t read the whole interview, it is still to be published but I hope it forces journalists of all stripes to look at Wortman’s earlier life from 1987 till 2001 to see if there were any obvious warning signs that he was one heck of a scary dude.....

No one is born RCMP-tough, its internal culture molds you that way

People who had only known Gabriel Wortman in primary or high school were clearly stunned speechless to find he had just murdered 24 lives in Nova Scotia.

I felt much the same way when I opened my Chronicle Herald one morning and discovered that my high school classmate Bev (MacDonald) Busson was now the toughest mountie of the bunch : Commissioner, top alpha dog. The first ever female  head of the RCMP.

Bev MacDonald was in my class at DARTMOUTH HIGH for a couple of years, we weren’t particularly distant or particularly close, but sometimes by hap stance we would be walking the long three km route to home together (we lived in the same general direction).

(Our regular path passed by what was to be Wortman's denturist business, by the way.)

From those rare extended private conversations I got the distinct impression that  in some ways, Bev was a lot more naive and more gentle than what her always bubbly but gentle manner in school had indicated.

So I was a fair bit surprised when we chanced to met a few years later near the Lakefront Apartments and she mentioned she was planning to try and join the RCMP : ‘ because I have some native’ was all she explained.

Decades flew by and I forgot that conversation and Bev until that morning when I discovered that Bev had indeed joined the RCMP and rose and rose and rose - dealing with some very brutal assignments like BC’s violent drug trade - right to the very top.

Clearly one tough smart cookie.

Most of the time, the RCMP’s internal culture  clearly works : it molds super cops out of ordinary Josephines and Joes.

But it can have its limits.

One can go too far into drinking one’s own Kool-Aid and believing one’s own puff press releases.

There are simply times when one is more useful, more efficient, more beneficial to society, when one quickly, openly and fully admits making mistakes.

No one is always “the-smartest-cops-in-the-room” or “the master-cops-of-the-Universe”.

And I hope Senator Bev MacDonald Busson would agree.....

11:32 TWITTER that made the Gabriel Wortman massacre into a major disaster

You have to go all the way back 270 years (1751: Dartmouth) to find a worst mass murder on Nova Scotian soil.

 And yet.

And yet, how exactly did the “we-are-always-in-control-because-we-are-the-mounties” choose to report to the public what they had found at Portapique that horrific night that Gabriel Wortman began shooting, burning and killing anyone in sight ?

“A firearms incident” : this to describe at least sixteen victims, mostly all dead, houses & buildings on fire all over the place, God know how many cars burning and a heavily armed mass murderer on the loose driving a cop car (said a rare survivor.)

No, the RCMP did not piss their pants or lose control on that dark Saturday night.

More’s the pity.

Because if they had, if they had told the truth, eight more people might still be alive today, including one of their own.....

Gabriel Wortman give off warning signs in his school-work patterns?

Gabriel Wortman graduated high school at the normal age and with marks good enough to get him into a demanding university (UNB) in his native province of New Brunswick.

I have seen nothing at all from online comments from his fellow high school students that he was anything but normal, popular, popular with girls, smilingly & helpful friendly.

That’s as of late June 1986. By Fall 1986 he at UNB (taking what ? - he had talked of joining the RCMP).

If people who were in his dorm (BRIDGES HOUSE) recollect rightly, he was now seen as weird and unpopular : unpopular enough to actually win the dreaded CHUCK COSBY award in April 1987 for being the biggest asshole on campus —- or at least unpopular enough to be nominated which was almost as bad.

THIS WAS NOT AN AWARD THAT WAS LIGHTLY HANDED OUT.

Not given to people who merely wore pen protectors, glasses and shirts buttons done up to the top. It was given to people who made living in the same huge dorm with them sheer hell.

Next year he is in a different gentler residence, still unpopular, still seen as odd.

Does he graduate ? My guess is no.

He might have been to vocational school after this,  learning considerable carpentry and plumbing skills, and according to neighbours in Nova Scotia, he intimated as much.

Next, we do know he became a mortician employee at Walker’s Funeral Home in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, hundreds of kilometres from his home.

When ? “Sometime in the 1990s” according to the TORONTO STAR’s informant, former Dartmouth alderman Donnie Walker.

I’d love for a more specific date, but hey, this is Nova Scotia, Canada.  (Note to foreigners : Canadians are rather more vague than they are polite , though they frequently confuse the two with being one and the same thing.)

Not clear if he had formal training in that craft.

But somewhat like the RCMP, its a job that frequently involves dealing at close hand with violent deaths  —- from murders, car accidents, fires, suicides etc.

As a job, it is very much a minority taste.

Apart, neither job alone raises alarms : together - it might show a pattern, particularly when coupled with his love of guns.

Next, by 2001 by the latest, he is still in Dartmouth, many many safe miles away from his reputation for oddness back in New Brunswick, running a denturist business on Portland Street.

Again, I am not clear if by that date, a denturist needed formal training, which is usually done in Ontario and nowadays takes three years.

Now dealing in dentures is as far away as one can imagine from police or mortician work and guns.
His customers loved him.

All this job has in common with his earlier efforts is that it requires good physical skills (social skills too of course) : remember he is very good with his hands.

Good with riding powerful motor bikes, good with guns and hunting , good with fixing up dentures and fixing up houses and fixing up old cars.

But we still have a big gap between 1988 till 2001 to fill in with facts, not speculation.

My gut feeling as to the reason that we are not seeing stories out of New Brunswick  about Gabriel Wortman is not because he barely spent any of his life there but rather the reverse : most of his formative years, hell most of his life, was spent in New Brunswick and the collective feeling about New Brunswickers is we don’t want to be reminded of that fact...

Gabriel Wortman a fan of G&S ? “I’ve Got a Little List“

Apparently mass killer Gabriel Wortman set out on his carefully planned rampage of hate with a little list.

A list of people who may have unconsciously slighted his massive ego in some way years before.

People he figured wouldn’t be missed - along with their partners, kids, dogs, houses, cars, next door neighbours.

I wish I was making this up but I am not. I read it in the Globe & Mail.

GGG : refused to sell me his old cop car, do him and his kin, he won’t be missed.

HHH : made a little joke when I missed a deer years ago - he and his kin wont be missed either.

JJJ : dared to buy the house that should be mine : wont be missed either.

KKK : their dog dared to run over and pooped in my vast backyard once : waste them too.

MMM : dared compete with me for denture clients in the Halifax North End. Won’t be missed.

and so on and so on : a lifetime of imagined slights revenged in a pyre of real blood & fire.

I still refuse to believe, more than ever, that the people who worked closest  & longest with him, the board of the Denturist Society, didn’t notice signs of flakes starting to come off good old Gabe over the years : surely his mask of enforced jolliness must have slipped once or twice, even if only for a moment, and the real Gabriel peeked out ?

For I am not sure that Wortman had finished crossing people off his list when he reached Enfield —- it would be consistent with what we know of other spree killers that he had many targets that were work related (other denturists perhaps), maybe why he was now heading to metro Halifax.

I can well believe that he was totally estranged to those next closest to him : his own family. He really screwed them over.

And I am not sure he actually had long term real friends, such as from the first half of his life in New Brunswick.

I think he only had acquaintances who thought they were friends - but after seeing all those who thought that on this death list, they might re-think that....

Gabriel Wortman had issues with parents as well as uncle and neighbours and passers-by.

Finally, idle speculation about Gabriel Wortman’s motives is being filled out with solid facts from things like court documents.

This story I will tell you about was investigated by Steve Bruce from the Halifax Chronicle Herald  ——though I stumbled upon it in the (British) TELEGRAPH !

Let me focus on what is truly new here and let me say it confirms my earlier suspicions***.

Gabriel’s uncle Glynn is about the same age as Gabriel and suffers from a very serious chronic condition.

This very sick man engaged his brother Paul, Gabriel’s father, to act as his power of attorney in trying to get back property that was rightfully his, back from his nephew Gabriel.

Gabriel’s father, the court document reveals, had one hell of time getting anywhere with his own son to help a seriously ill relative.

Forget - for just one moment - that Gabriel killed 24 people in cold blood.

Just consider this story alone - an ungrateful swine of a millionaire son stealing from a sick relative when he is helpless and then blowing off his own dad, who gave him anything he wanted - expensive motor bikes and expensive guns -  when he was a teenager.

The folks on the EAST ENDERS tv series would have a choice word or two ( that I can print in front of the children) for a man like that : “pond scum” , “a waste of space”.

Yes it is “only a family matter”, but when it comes to explaining mass killers, “family” is the ONLY thing that matters.

I truly believe that whatever warped Gabriel Wortman into one of the planet’s most cold blooded hands-on mass killers ever, happened in his early years before he was five.

Then, when the infant brain is still plastic, a combination of the irregular brain chemistry they were born win combined with a period of prolonged stress (abandonment issues maybe) creates the potential for almost unlimited fear and rage in some people.

It takes further events later in life to unleash that potential : lucky those situations are rare.

This scenario sought me to look back, way back, into Gabriel’s earliest years.

Briefly here is what I found : in early 1970 when Gabriel’s legally married parents, Paul and Evelyn, found they had another child coming along they made the very hard - and very unusual -  decision to put the child up for immediate adoption.

They said that they had serious undisclosed financial problems.

In fact, they were living and working  in Massachusetts, which after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act was no longer that easy for Canadians to do.

Something drastic had driven from their New Brunswick home to find uncertain work in a foreign land.

After Gabriel was fully grown, his parents sought to reunite with the son (who it turns out was a truly wonderful son - a hero in his local community) that they had given up for adoption.

They eventually found him and re-united with him in a very public ceremony with full bonding between both of the boy’s families.

***Except for Gabriel.

The millionaire self-employed son couldn’t find either the money or the time to join his own parents in their moment of extreme happiness.

Some kids never ever react well to mom getting a new baby.

One wonders if Gabriel saw his mom and dad as having buyer regret :  if his parents gushing on and on about their wonderful prodigal son, were also secretly thinking they had put the wrong kid up for adoption all those years ago.

So I speculated at the time that I guessed that Gabriel never did visit his brother, even though his parents promised the local Massachusetts media he would.

Now I am not doing that great a job investigating Gabriel’s earliest years, stuck in an apartment just  a few hundred metres from his LAST home in Dartmouth Nova Scotia but hundreds and hundreds of kilometres and dozens of years from his FIRST homes in Massachusetts and New Brunswick.

Gabriel Wortman spent MOST of his life in New Brunswick, that’s the province that shaped him : that’s the province where the explanation lies.

But it is as if the NB CBC has become totally embedded in the New Brunswick Department of Tourism : “ please don’t breath a word that the killer was from New Brunswick or there goes next year’s tourist season” .

Our publicly funded media should be out there in their home province breaking the hard ground to uncover the  “why” in this tragedy.

Hell, the RCMP Commissioner said as much on the CBC National : we need to do deep background build a profile to explain his actions.

So come on , CBC New Brunswick, stop covering up - start uncovering : its your duty ....