Wortman, Gabriel : one uncle in the federal Pen & father accused of dog-napping VS two uncles & a cousin in RCMP !

An uncanny ability to “bury the lede” must be what it takes to qualify as a professional journalist these days.

The journalistic “lede” is what us pop songwriters would call “the hook” and what Hollywood green-lighters call “the high concept”.

For me the ordinary newspaper reader, what really jumped out and grabbed me about the latest few semi-un-re-dacted search warrants released this week by a former Crown Prosecutor was startling new revelations about an ongoing human interest story : the really really messed up extended family of mass killer Gabriel Wortman.

All of us have extended families with successful and not so successful close relatives, so who can resist reading about someone else’s messed up family ?

Not I, anyway. Maybe, not you either.

Wortman’s family is beginning to remind me of one of those Hollywood movies set in South Boston, you know the ones : where one Irish brother becomes a federal cop and the other an organized criminal ; then years later they meet up with separate orders to ‘take down’ each other.

Anyway, one of the RCMP interviews that was reluctantly allowed out into the public’s domain by the former Crown was a recollection by Gabriel Wortman’s common law partner, Lisa Banfield, of the quiet drive in the country that the pair took, just before the buildings began being torched and the bodies started dropping.

Lisa told the RCMP that GW drove by a federal prison and casually remarked that was the federal Pen that had once housed his uncle Glynn. The same prison where one of GW’s later murdered victims was employed.

Another interview involved a close cousin of GW who basically grew up with Gabriel, a cousin who later became a career mountie - as did two of his other uncles. The cousin said Gabe was paranoid, violent, obsessed with money and that his parents were , quote, “bizarre”.

Maybe he meant because Gabriel’s father was once accused by Moncton police of being a dog kidnapper - or because he used to “ride the rails” all over North America while his young teenage bride struggled, with no money, to raise Gabe on her own  —- with another kid on the way. 

Unfortunately, with twenty four dead, there is no way this family saga could ever be massaged into a feel-good Hollywood thriller, but wow : to peak inside the family of Doris & Stanley Wortman and to see so much good and so much bad in their kids and their offspring !