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.
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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.
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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...
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