Why the CBC, once again, drove me into the breech, with their excessive good taste

I never ever wanted to get involved in the Gerald Regan story but it was the excessive caution from the CBC and other media that drove me to it.

While CBC committees debated and CBC lawyers lawyered, after all, more innocent young women were being sexually assaulted by this guy.

It went on for 50 years, from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, according to eye witnesses I trusted - one a former NS premier himself.

I thought those days were long gone - but  I had not really been following the local media for years, or I might of been more cynical.

So Monday night April 20th 2020, 10pm, I am casually googling the names Paul and Evelyn Wortman from Moncton, NB, who I have just found out from the media, were the parents of Gabriel Wortman, the Portapique mass killer.

Like many, I was very interested to see if there had been obvious early warning signs to explain a killer who was literally unprecedented, even on a global scale, in the time scale of his murderously long outburst of lethal rage.

All we in the public had heard was that the kids at his metro Moncton High School where he had graduated circa 1986, thought he was a great, normal, popular kid.

At first, I got nowhere with Google , nothing whether adding in Moncton or New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, but as the USA was right next door to New Brunswick, I added it to the search. Presto :

There it was, at the bottom of page one of Google’s returned search results.

A long, big, front page news story in a mid-Massachusetts weekly : in colour and full of colourful details. Inside were these facts : it was about Paul and Evelyn Wortman from Moncton NB, their first son was named Gabriel and he was about 20 months old in the spring of 1970 - ie born mid 1968 and 18 in 1986.

First, let me say that a genealogist or historian must know grade school permutations and combinations to successfully evaluate new information.

Moncton is a small city - even smaller in 1970 : good news. But Wortman is a very,very common name there, literally a city founding family name : very bad news.

So, there could easily be more than one Paul and Evelyn Wortman from Moncton, even a couple with a son named Gabriel, though the combination of those three names and a small city like Moncton seemed remote.

But add to all this that both potential Gabriels were born in mid 1968 in small Moncton to a Paul & Evelyn Wortman : the odds of all that happening to two such couples were vanishingly small.

So, now the story.

In 1970, the married Wortman couple were living in Fitchburg MA and were in such financial difficulties that they gave up their new second born for adoption.

As they themselves said, a married couple giving up only their second child for adoption was highly unusual at the time - in my opinion, highly unusual in any age and in any place.

I also knew first hand, as I am about the same age as Paul & Evelyn, that it was unusual for a young couple of Canadians (young as inexperienced and not highly skilled) to be working in the US after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act closed the door on easy access for Canadians to work and live in Canada.

Why were they there, in dire straits and not home inside Canada’s social safety net ?

It is a commonplace to say that beyond the set of brain chemistry we are born with, it is repeated stress and trauma in the first few years of a child’s life, up to about Grade One, that can so shape and twist their still plastic brain processes that nothing later on can repair the damage.

From at least Junior High onwards, Gabe seemed to live a settled and a relatively well to do life, according to childhood friends who envied his expensive motorbike and airgun.

That convinced me that whatever warped Gabriel into potentially and then actually being one of history’s most violent of spree killers had to have happened in those first few years of life.

These events in Fitchburg had to hold a part of the explanation we all sought : why ?

Excited I tried to contact a long time friend who worked at CBC Halifax.

It was very late, they were clearly very tired, but they called back.

They indicated that to the CBC, the news of Gabriel having an adopted brother was old news (but unreported news), “all over the social media”.

(Actually what was all over the social media were claims : but I had hard facts, albeit something I had  uncovered practically in my sleep — but clearly no media or member of the public had even done that much.)

Anyway, Paul Wortman had been in touch with CBC, but there were, ah, difficulties.

I then asked couldn't the CBC in New Brunswick do some digging —- after all he was born and raised there and had lived the majority of his life regarding it as his homebase.

CBC New Brunswick , they explained, were very busy with Covid.

New Brunswick ?! I replied, a covid-19 hotspot ?!”

I got off the phone very depressed.

But the next day, other major media reporters, also friends, were much the same :”interesting stuff and we will get to it in time, but not right now...”

So I fired up my old pamphleteer printing press, no longer a photocopier but now a blog, and settled down to write, and to publish, and to bitch, and to gadfly....