Some media timelines suggest that Gabriel Wortman burnt up the rural home he had laboured on for 20 years, burnt up his lifetime collection of RCMP cars and 2 dozen Honda dirt bikes —BEFORE — he began killing people.
Suggestively interesting - if true.
Interesting because of what Gabe chose to collect and now to destroy : two icons of his high school years 35 years earlier.
Back then he really really loved the RCMP’s gorgeous uniforms and pretty squad cars and svelte guns and he really really loved all the curves of his top of the line Honda dirt bike, the XR 500R.
Perhaps more than he ever really loved a woman.
Guns and fast cars and dirt bikes are ultra symbols of maleness : but interestingly in High School he actually preferred to hang about the cafeteria with Kathy and Kim. He never ever seemed to have a problem finding girls to be friends and girls to be girlfriends.
But back then - and in his year at UNB’s Bridges House residence - which was 100% male, 100% Animal House - he was noted for having no male friends.
Gabe seemed more relaxed around symbols of manhood then actually mixing it up with actual males.
Interesting...
But back to the semi-illegal police cars and police guns and police uniforms and semi-illegal dirt bikes used on the road : these are what he - first - chose to burn down and blow up completely.
For seemingly, if he couldn’t totally possess them and totally control them, polish them and display them like captured prisoners or butterflies, pinned up to a wall - then , then Chaos was unleashed upon his life.
Perhaps the chaos he had endured as a very small child ?
For what is so striking about the fleeting descriptions of Gabe from his friends is his perfectionism and possessiveness - which is simply a variant on perfectionism.
The calm adult outward acts of perfection-creating often reflects a deep fear of chaos buried so far beneath our conscious mind that we aren’t aware of why we need to control chaos - events that happened when we were very small.
Gabe’s repeated willingness to court legal disaster by burning down a neighbour’s building that was on HIS land, to beat senseless a kid who was on HIS parking lot, to shot a burglar that had HIS fax machine, to have a full frontal confrontation with a barrel full of cops for a car left on HIS urban parking lot, to threaten to shot a neighbour who was on HIS rural driveway speaks to me of a deep-seated need that went beyond Gabe’s rational control.
I mean at any point, if the mounties had ever seriously tried to look into the gun collection of their “Biggest Fan”, the illegal nature of that collection would have brought down Gabe’s house of cards for good.
Yet it was risk he took, time and again.
And boy oh boy, temporarily sharing ownership of something you originally owned with Gabe could almost be lethal - he simply won’t let go of property he really was only the temporary mortgage holder of - its now MINE,MINE, MINE, please dont take my toys away, PLEASE !!
The total chaos that Covid represented - taking away Gabe’s business and his right to drive anywhere, hunt anywhere, party anywhere - must have seemed very threatening to Wortman - for this was a chaos he finally couldn’t control....
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