Gabriel Wortman the dog kidnapper ?

dotty parent ? or doting parent ?

We know Gabe went out of his way to shot dogs and to let other pets burn to death in his fires, but could there be a dog kidnapping in his distant past ?

Most provinces now have an free on line database of court decisions.

They don’t go very far back, don’t include oral decisions and you still usually have to journey to the local county courthouse and pay a fee to see anything useful.

But its a start.

In New Brunswick, for example, I found a $30,000 (rule 80) small claims court case an Evelyn Wortman made against a Moncton-based car dealer in 2007.

But for more distant cases, the better database is the on-line one maintained by your local chain of newspapers.

Before that same on line world gutted newspaper news rooms, of course.

So again in New Brunswick in May 1989 when Gabriel Wortman was back in Moncton after a year away at UNB, the local daily reports that a Wortman was charged with kidnapping a neighbour’s dog.

When the case went to court four months later, the case collapsed for ‘lack of evidence’ .

One of those many cases where the police can find plenty of evidence to charge a person and leave their reputation dangling in the wind for four months, but suddenly the prosecutor can find no evidence to back up that slur, under oath, in a public court.

“Prosecutorial discretion” is what AG William Barr calls it, when he dropped the charges for his boss’s best bud, General Kelly : victims have no criminal rights or criminal redress if the criminal prosecutor suddenly drops the charges.

Gabriel Wortman was NOT the one charged.

However, it is not unknown that a doting relative agrees to takes the rap so the kid doesn’t have the sort of record that would keep him from joining the RCMP or becoming a licensed mortician or licensed denturist ——- and then going upwards and onwards to kill 23 people...