LAURIE CUVELIER came within a penstroke of preventing Wortman killings

as a COP, as well as a hockey player, LAURIE CUVELIER was one of the good guys

T.S. Elliot was right, April is the cruelest month : the same month that brought us the 22 murdered, stalked by killer Gabriel Wortman, also saw 6 service personnel killed in the crash of helicopter Stalker 22.

(The chopper’s nickname seems just a macabre coincidence.)

But there is a something else connecting both tragedies, something DND chose to call “software bias” but what the rest of us would just call the obvious dangers of excessive hubris.

 The dangers of desk-warrior type brass mindlessly touting “flying-by-wire” or “policing-by-wire”.

The dangers of replacing local human hands-on skills with relying on a centralized glitch-prone computer overriding those human skills.

In the case of the DND helicopter attempting to land on board HMCS Fredericton, as the helicopter turned to come in, the computer’s twisted tiny silicon brain felt the pilot of taking it a little too slow.

So it overrode him and pushed the helicopter forward fast and downward : straight into the ocean !

Desperately the human in nominal control, the pilot, tried to punch in manual controls to get the bird upwards again.

Sorry, does not compute, responded HAL the all-knowing computer, “outside tested aircraft spectrum”.

All of the flight crew’s expensively acquired knowledge turned out to be fatally useless with Freddy-Kruger-the-Computer in charge.

Gabriel Wortman only made one mistake in his 25 years of violent incidents leading up to his murder spree ; only one chance for us to catch him out and stop him in his tracks.

Amazingly, one police constable, relying on old-fashioned human skills, did catch GW out.

(But later, the desk-bound brass of the police and prosecutors services looking solely at their computer screens, judged Wortman to be perfectly safe, at least as safe as Graham James, Gerald Regan, Fenwick MacIntosh, Harvey Weinstein et al ——and let him off the hook, free to renew his life of violence, all leading up to the Big Day.  Exactly why they did that is a story for another day.)

This is a story all about Old Dartmouth and you really have to feel the physical setting to get it.

Constable Laurie Cuvelier and I both grew up in Old Dartmouth, just after it had been renamed a City. Underneath that superficial lick of paint, it very much remained the small Town of Dartmouth. Just as all the other semi-rural communities newly incorporated into Dartmouth didn’t lose their own local cultures.

Almost everyone in Old Dartmouth personally knew at least one policeman, friendly enough for both to safely exchange unofficial gossip together. Most Old Dartmouth policemen had lots of personal friends among the citizens they were hired to babysit. None more so than Laurie Cuvelier.

If you aren’t from Dartmouth and you still know his name, its because you’re a sports fan. His dad Jim was a baseball legend, NS Sports Hall of Famer. Laurie was a NHL pick and still plays Gentlemen’s Hockey with Dartmouth’s rabid hockey fans. Everybody knows Laurie - in Old Dartmouth.

Laurie, after growing up in Old Dartmouth, knowing the area like the back of his hand, joined the Old
Dartmouth police, headquartered at Wentworth & Ochterloney, a scant 400 metres from GW’s two homes at 26 Pine and 191 Portland.

GW moved to 26 Pine in 1996 and lived there with wife Corinna till 2001. Officially the little neighbourhood he joined is called Austenville, but everybody else calls it Slabtown and jokes its the bedrock of Dartmouth. It is literally built on an outcrop of sheer bedrock, which makes the community look and feel different.

As a result, it is a very tight little community, probably the tightest on the entire Dartmouth side of the Harbour : everybody knows everybody. Nothing remains secret for very long.

For an Injustice Collector who really really doesn’t like other kids to touch his toys, GW definitely moved into the wrong neighbourhood. The homes all have zero setback : where the last step of your private front porch ends, the public sidewalk begins.

But the addled brain of Gabe Wortman could never quite get that : he became infamous throughout Slabtown as “the grouchy young man” who was always chasing off kids and yelling at them for walking “too close to his front porch”.

Sometimes, when he had a few beers, he’d attempt to manhandle and punch the children : once severe enough that it looked like the parents might file a formal police complaint.

Gabe knew a criminal conviction would cost him his professional license, that he’d lose all his toys.

The rumour was that Wortman responded to this possibility quickly.

Perhaps something along the lines , “a criminal case is a big time waster and my expensive lawyer will just tear your kid’s reputation to shreds, a civil suit will take years and your lawyer will take most of the winnings - why don’t we cut out the middleman and I give you cash, a sort of informal out of court settlement ?”

Whatever the combo of threats and inducements offered, the child beating never went to court, never entered the formal legal computer database — the computer system the modern “policing-by-wire” centralized cops rely upon so much.

But it remained an neighbourhood “Open Secret” in Slabtown and “known to police” among the police with personal friends in Slabtown.

How can I be so sure of this ? Because I’ve encountered it before.

In every one of the many communities Premier Gerald Regan lived in, his sexual assaults on young women there was always a neighbourhood “open secret” and an incident “known to police” with personal friends in Regan’s neighbourhood.

But the local police couldn’t do anything about it : no formal complaints were made as Regan used a combo of threats and finacial inducements to make his problems go away, time and again.

Like GW, GR always tried to fly below the official (now computer-based) radar. Lawyers are smart that way.

In 2001 Wortman moved to 191 Portland, a home above his brand new denturist clinic. In the 6000 long metres of Portland Street, the block between Maitland and Canal has to be the most rundown, most past its due date. Nobody knew nobody and GW felt safe, emboldened.

This time, when he beat up a kid , he was going to do it right.

October 29 2001, a dark and cold windy night. a child named Matt M is waiting for the bus back to his north end home. I have waited on cold nights at that same bus stop many a time and right up at the bus stop itself is really windy. A bit further back, in the lea of the clinic, its a bit warmer.

And yes, GW again bought a zero setback home : an even worse one for a man with his mania : open private front door, immediately on public sidewalk.

Suddenly Matt hears a man yelling “you’re too close to my door” and scared, he starts walking to the next bus stop a long ways away. Bang, a fist hits the back of his head, hard. Stunned, the child turns around and the man grabs his shirt and begins wailing at his face, Matt cries out in pain time and again.

Suddenly another man arrives from out of nowhere and hits Matt on the back of his head with what feels like a crowbar. Now he’s on the ground, thoroughly stunned and the men together begin kicking him into the dark street and its oncoming traffic.

Matt feels he is about to die under some wheels, perhaps even under the wheels of his own bus.

Thankfully an unexpected passerby/witness cries out “stop he’s only kid !”, the two men look up see the passerby’s cell phone (and its camera) and panicked, run off.

The passerby-witness calls an ambulance and the police. The police interview Matt in his hospital bed, talk to doctors, look at x-rays and medical photos.

The case seems hopeless : Matt didn't see his attackers, its a a dark & lonely street. But while his eyes didn’t see anything, his nose and ears made up for it. The first attacker smelt strongly of booze and he began by yelling “you’re too close to my house”. And where were you standing, Matt, when this happened ? “In front of that new dental clinic“.

Not hard then to find the booze-soaked owner of the clinic. Gabe never proffered alternative evidence that the child broke in and stole things : the child was never charged with property damage or theft.

Just this bizarre excuse for an interrupted attempt to murder a child, a total stranger.  “ He was too close to my (zero setback) door”.

Enter Constable Laurie Cuvelier, old school cop.

  I’ll bet my hat, Laurie knew all about Gabe’s evil reputation back in Slabtown, knew it not through the computer database  —— but by good old fashioned “cop on the beat” stuff : from trusted personal friends who told him of the earlier incident that they had heard second hand, passed from neighbour to neighbour.

Not something you could put in a modern cop computer, sure, but something any old time copper worth his salt kept in the back of his head.

Now when Cuvelier heard that GW had beat the hell out another child, I bet he saw RED.

I bet Laurie stuck to that bastard like shit sticks to a blanket : for after a two month long thorough investigation, on December 29th,  it was Laurie himself who pinned a 266 (A) summons on GW : criminal assault, GBH (grievous bodily harm) etc.

Sworn it out before commissioner of oaths, cop Jim Perrin, later top brass as Superintendent Jim Perrin. Laurie & Jim both got their 15 year awards together : the same generation of cop.

266 (a) means potentially 5 years in jail or at least a criminal record ; no more professional licenses, kiss all of GW’s expensive toys goodbye.

But a current millionaire medical professional still has a lot of green, folded, resources.

He began by using a page out of the Gerald Regan playbook : attempt to bribe and threaten the witness. But Matt, despite coming from a poor family from rural Guysborough, ‘spoke the truth to power’ and said no.

Matt M reminds me so much of legislative page Chris C, she was also from a poor family in the rural Strait area, but this poor kid finally did what dozens of better off, better connected Nova Scotian girls totally failed to do : she bravely stood up to Regan and his bullies.

So plan B,  the millionaire hired Nova Scotia’s most expensive criminal lawyer.

You don’t get to be the top dog lawyer , bill the biggest hours, by working nine to five, Monday to Friday.

So all during that long New Years Day holiday weekend, the phone lines began burning : RED hot.

Hard to gather new evidence or even re-look at old evidence over the NewYears holiday, the quietest point of the year for cop shops, courts and hospitals.

Nevertheless, while cop Laurie saw RED over an adult again trying to murder a kid over the most trivial excuse, the justice system only saw PINK.

For on January 3rd 2002, a few days later, a totally bizarre document entered into the Nova Scotia legal system.

The entire file on this case was put online by the Halifax Examiner. Please examine it together with me.

It began - began - as a neatly typed Information sworn out by Halifax-based Constable Ron Josey before Justice of the Peace Judith Gaul from Fall River.

Josey swore - or intended to swear, judging by the original typed text - that he had reasonable grounds to believe GW had committed a 266 A, punishable by up to 5 years in jail.

Now Judith Gaul is a very meticulous judge, armed with a distinctive fading in-and-out felt tip pen. For example, when she strikes out “affirmed by” at the bottom of the page, because Josey chose to swear it instead, she carefully initials it : something 99% of other JPs won’t bother to do.

But on the face of it, the  typed A in the 266A  charge has been struck out and replaced by a darker ball point pen B.

AND IT IS NOT INITIALLED !

A huge change from 5 years jail to $50 buck fine and it is not initialled !

Did Josey make this very last minute, very drastic change but then why not initial it ?

Or was the change made AFTER Josey had sworn out the Information before the Judge ?

The next page signed by Gaul on the same January 3rd date, with the same distinctive felt pen, has  lots of room for future indications of next court date appearances for this case.

Gaul’s distinctive pen and handwriting starts the ball rolling : She changes the first court date at Dartmouth provincial Court from Jan 10th, as per GW’s original summons, to Jan 17th, before judge  F. I. and crown attorney E.T. No idea about ET but Flora I Buchan was a judge at the Dartmouth Provincial Court in that year.

Some other pen, some other handwriting scrawls in Pink? as  possible defence lawyer.

Irrelevant really as a different ball point pen and a different handwriting records the case is heard on January 11th before judge WBD and crown Barrett and M Taylor for Pink as defence.

Here the charged is formally skated down from potentially 5 years in jail to potentially $50 fine.

In Dartmouth Provincial Court in 2002, we have working there Judge William B Digby, crown attorney David G Barrett and Mike Taylor as associate of Joel Pink, Nova Scotia’s top criminal lawyer.

Barrett originally from the greater Beaverbank area was both CSIS and Mountie before coming a lawyer ; he remains lawyer to the NS Retired Mounties Association.

Bet GW took only a milli-second to let Barrett know he had two highly respected uncles in “The Force” !

Regardless of how it happened, GW skated from the only chance we ever had to give him a criminal record. Without a criminal record in history, the police refused to swear out search warrants to investigate reports of violence and illegal guns that came up again and again against Wortman.

Today - much too late - the barndoor fully closed - with 22 murders on his hands -  GW will finally enter in the official computer database that the policing-by-wire cops so much rely upon...