all of English Canada’s mainstream print media is now owned by CONSERVATIVES

Once Liberal-leaning Star now bossed by Maxine Bernier’s biggest fan

No doubt this the reason one Liberal premier wants only the mainstream print media at his press conferences : he’s become political suicidal and courting “death by newspaper”.

Fact is voters, if you wanted a balance of  media viewpoints keeping everyone on their toes, whenever your employees decides to hold a press conference (paid by you) you’re going to have to insist that your employees invite all kinds of journalists to the feast.

At the rate of the death of the media dinosaurs, there soon won’t be any print media types to invite, if we don’t......

Boris & Stephen : both more intent on protecting one individual that protecting their electorate

Couldn’t save 30,000 but will save Dominic

At first, second and even at third glance, Boris-the-Tory and Stephen-the-Grit seem to have nothing in common.

Yet both are increasingly so embroiled in defending one individual over that of their entire electorate that both are in danger of being swept out in the next election  ——-even though they were recently hugely popular.

Loyalty to friends & family is widely admired but in the case of  elected politicians, at some point it has to give way to fulfilling their day job.

Because their thousands or millions of employers hired them, at a hefty wage, to look after their interests.

The average voter feels that if you want to work all day protecting family and friends - great do it : but have them pay the nickel —- not us.

Can’t argue with that logic can you ?

 Not unless you are Stephen-Boris.....

PEER REVIEW, far being handed down as Mose’s 13th tablet, is probably younger than you

If you think otherwise, you’ve been reading too many scientists.

Science from scientists : great.

History from scientists : avoid.

They are not just weak on a sense of history, they are actively & avidly anti-history.

Ever notice that you search in vain throughout any scientific article for exactly when an experiment took place, or where ?

Humans crave the W5 of life : but scientists, fully trained scientists, are not human : they are now all a latter day Piere-Simon Laplace, seer and knower of everything in the universe.

Petty time and space are meaningless in their eternal now.

99% of our fundamental scientific beliefs were NEVER peer-reviewed !

Anyway, back to peer-review.

It basically didn’t begin to exist until late in the 1950s.

Examples follow, from science journals that even lay readers have heard of.

SCIENCE and JAMA : after 1940. LANCET : after 1976.

Before that, the sole editor of each journal reviewed potential articles and consulted with a few of the ”elderly guard” of the science discipline involved.

Lucky then that any new ground breaking articles ever got published at all.

But they did, sort of : you “Journal-Shopped” just like the way expensive lawyers shop for judges.

You could always get published somewhere, if your article and yourself were even just half way credible.

There were, back then, a lot of journals about.

But, and it is a very very big but.

Only a very few general science journals (NATURE and SCIENCE and the French and German equivalents) were in the libraries of all of the world’s very few research-oriented universities and institutes.

At only a slightly lower level, the leading journals in each scientific discipline could be reliably found in every university and institute in the world that did research in that field. LANCET is good example.

But below that, the subscribers to a particular journal could be small indeed in both numbers and in terms of geography.

Some journals only came out a few times a year and had small lists of subscribers in maybe only one or two countries because while the articles could be very long and very lightly edited indeed, they had to hue to the editor-publisher’s particular scientific hobby horse.

Others were like the bible in their sub-field  : but only specialists in that small area would read them : you had no way to reach the general scientific reader in even the next sub-discipline over.

The best research often involves a team of people from a couple of closely related fields all coming at it from slightly different fields. At other times, a casual reader in NATURE or SCIENCE reads an article in an area far from their own and suddenly see an application for that discovery in their field.

These all-powerful science journal editors back then had a foot in Published science and also in Popular science.

Published science is merely the sum total of all articles ever published in the world’s science journals, regardless of size.

Popular science is where the real power of old school journal editors  came to fore. It had a very strong promoting ability and a very strong censoring ability.

These editors could instantly publish an article, let it run at almost any length, and place it at the front of the journal.

They could then follow this up with an journal editorial comment and alert the few all-powerful science reporters in the world’s biggest papers, confident that those reporters’ copy would be repeated by the wire services down to even small town weeklies.

Or they could pretend to be willing to take an article they didn’t really like, as long as it made a few, and few more and a few more amendments or further research : “talking it out” like a politician in parliament does to kill a bill quietly when a session ends.

The dispirited researcher would finally decide to give up on getting their paradigm-shaking new research into any widely read journal and  decide to have it published in a much smaller journal, just to be done with it - and then maybe decide not to do any more research in that area.

Because if the article rankled the old guy in the editor’s chair it probably also rankled the researcher’s university department head, the head of the tenure committee, their discipline’s Society’s annual convention’s abstracts selection committee, the head of the grant committee on this or that foundation or government grant agency.

Often these elders all knew each other very well, and while they didn’t agree on everything - on this issue they did agree : it just had to be wrong because it struck at the very foundations of a lifetime of work..... that had propelled them to the top of their field.

My thesis for my book on Martin Henry Dawson’s career in science is that all scientists were gratified by the ever increasing amount of scientific research that was being done from the 1870s onwards.

But sometimes, a few results thrown up by the vast ocean of twentieth century published science severely/completely grated against the certitudes the elders of science had taken as dogma in their nineteenth century scientific youth.

Or, in other words, sometimes specific articles from the generally gratifying results of modernization science  (many more published science articles) so rankled the world’s collective scientific elites that Modernity Science (aka Popular Science) was thrown up to rebut or suppress it.

These annoying articles were far from being wrong ; rather they were far too right and were confirmed so, decades later, in our own era, that of Post-Modernity.

Post-Modernity only began in 1945 after the Atomic Bomb and Auschwitz first cast doubts on the 500 year old Enlightenment Project and it really began taking off after 1965.

But its scientific roots (for I argue at the base Post-Modernity is a fundamental change in all of our personal scientific perspectives) began decades earlier...

the dreaded INQUIRY-2020 virus : protect my brother or protect my province ?

That’s the decision a man in a big office in downtown Halifax is mulling right now.

His covid-19 virus polling numbers are great - just great.

But the only poll numbers that really count are those on our upcoming election night.

Will he do it ?

I don’t think so : the big reason being that his three competitors are almost as afraid of the Inquiry 2020 virus as he is.

They Always get their politician who breaks ranks...

Paul Palango over at the Halifax Examiner has a six letter word just why : S M U R F S.

No politician wants to fight an election with the barn-burning SMURFs organizing dirty tricks against you...

copycat PORTAPIQUE spree killers only interested in the big picture - thank God they don’t have long term memory

Even if the media HAD restricted themselves to repeating only what Prime Minister Trudeau wanted them to say : “an individual dressed in a cop uniform drove around in a cop car for 24 hours,  24 individuals dead, FULL STOP” , this would have been enough to feed the copycat imagination.

“outraged” they might be - thinking clearly, they’re not

But their egos are way too big to care about the name or smiling face of GW - the things so many “Outraged from Orangeville” seem to write letters to editors of the TORONTO SUN about.

They aren’t fascinated in reading about anybody but themselves.

And they don’t need ‘old hat’ details either : that the killer shot people, that the arsonist burned buildings.

Its the totally new way to commit a crime that grabs the copycats and does so for a few years — lucky for the rest of us, they are usually not history buffs and quickly forget each new crime wrinkle after a few years.

Fifty-five years ago, it was a hot thing in these Atlantic Canada parts to steal a great big fishing trawler all by yourself and head out to sea.

Thankfully, that hasn’t been done for decades now....

There is NO unaccounted-for Portapique killings’ victim named Margaret Campbell

RCMP & Justice Dept make a mistake, another one

That was an error by RCMP and Justice lawyers while busy redacting everything useful out of the Search Warrant the judge forced them to release.

I have lots of relatives who never use the first name they were born with (and rarely announce their maiden name either.)

Her obituary in the Chronicle Herald makes it clear though that victim Lillian Hyslop was also born Margaret Lillian Campbell : (Margaret) Lillian (Campbell) Hyslop.

Sloppy police and lawyer work created this additional confusion in the public - I apologize on their behalf ... because they are never going to.....

MARK HEARD got “Nod” right, the first time

His drum beat reminds me so much of  Mumford’s Going Back to Kansas City, only much better 

The late Mark Heard’s “Nod over Coffee” is a much-covered classic : and they’re all dreadful.

Some are done by some pretty big names in the biz, great friends of Mark  : still awful.

This tune seems that rare exception where no cover has come close to the original , let alone surpass it.

I mean their singing is okay, the lyrics come through clearly.

But they lack that wonderfully fractured drumbeat - that originated from Mark’s guitar playing.

Laid back and funky ; perfect ! And oh so very important to the prosody of the lyrics.

Lyrics, even singing alone, isn’t enough : the surrounding bed of sound mustn’t just be danceable : it must support the ultimate, the deepest, meaning of the lyrics.

I say this because I learned most of what little I know about music and recording through the study of different versions (covers) of songs.

Before Youtube it was a hit and miss : one mostly heard different HIT versions of a tune.

But  with YouTube one could hear the non-hit versions : as may as four or five credible artists with sizeable recording budgets might take a serious crack at a tune, knowing it had to be a hit, before one finally got it right.

And no, it was almost never that the successful artist was the best known or backed by the biggest promo push.

They all got the lyrics down right, got the melody aced : but it was the perfect blend of feel and lyrics they missed : the best possible prosody.

Since we are talking about drumming reflecting perfectly the deep prosody of a song, let’s get specific.

In the early 1970s, actress Farrah Fawcett - in LA - made a casual throwaway remark to a casual football friend of her squeeze Lee Majors, a singer-songwriter called Jim Weatherly, that she was taking the ‘midnight plane to Houston’ , to visit family.

Jim liked the phrase a lot and wrote a song about someone becoming a star in LA but not really liking the LA lifestyle.

He  recorded it on his first album. It went nowhere but his publisher sent the song about and a producer in Atlanta (that’s Atlanta, Georgia, you’all) wanted to cut it on his R&B artist Cissy Houston as a single.

 But please could  he change it, for her,  for her poorer and more south eastern target audience , to a train ? and to Georgia ?

Sure,sure said Jim —- thinking : anything for a cut.

 It was like Jim’s version - a nice version, but not a hit, nothing special.

Then an obscure white producer, Tony Camillo, from nowhereville in New Jersey (Sommerville), in his own small studio and with some other equally white bread musicians cut some of the funkiest  R&B tracks ever made.

Frankly Gladys and her bros could have phoned their vocals - Tony’s intro alone sells the song - and that is because it is not just highly danceable but because of its perfect prosody : the drums and brass sound like a train (a steam train) slowly but powerfully pulling out of the station when rail was the only way to travel.

Nostalgia you could eat with a spoon.

I think because Tony was older than the other people in this saga - he got that the sense of the song - ’heading back to a simpler place and time’ - really needed to be via a slower and simpler mode of transport, as well - not a jet plane, not even a fast diesel electric but an old slow steam puffer.

He was so right - he got the prosody right enough to laugh all the way to the bank.

But there is more, much more, because the second big hook in this song of the year cum classic cover version is Glady’s inspired ad libs at the end.

Except that she doesn’t ad lib, never has, can’t ad lib.

But her elder brother Bubba (co-producer with Tony-from-New-Jersey) put her in the vocal booth in Detroit during the overdub session and whispered to Gladys her amazingly lively ad libs.

He also decided for this tune, the Pips were really going to sing, not just dance - sing up high in the mix, really responding dynamically to Gladys as she got more and more impassioned.

Like testifying in church with the congregation spurring you on.

Yes sir, Bob, you can learn a heck of a lot by just following this classic from Farrah to Bubba.

But check out Mark Heard’s amazing Nod over Coffee for some equally funky drumming anyone can do —— if they don’t over-complicate things. The try his “Worry Too Much” either by Mark himself or by Buddy Miller.

There’s a reason why the latter version was song of the year - its even more laidback funky than Mark’s....

REC Girl Margot Cotten : ‘like’ her now, before she is intergalactically famous

Margot Cotten, Intergalactical SuperStar

Margot Cotten is a one-woman-band, churning out flawless cover after cover of Sixties rock’n’folk from her family’s REC room in Paris France.

YouTube her name and be prepared to be overwhelmed.

Yes the Sixties REC room still lives : hard echoing walls and slightly dank atmosphere in the summertime and all.

She is good - really good - particularly when she takes the time to do her one-woman-band versions, instead of her great singing over adequate guitar strumming that she basically has had to do, to get her output up as high as she has.

(Ok, Ok you know my biased views on piano bashing or guitar strumming of endless washes of block chords.)

When she does take the time —- her bass playing, drum playing, lead playing really add to her usual rhythm playing and singing.

Her keyboard is sparse - fills basically - but I could do with hearing more of it.

Yes she is French , as French as French can be.

But you would never ever know it from her singing - some cuts I swear she sings it better - as  in better English idiomatically -  than the original singers.

Margot does play with others in bands that perform small gigs around Paris.

I really believe she has what it takes to become a star - but I sure hope this does not mean she does so by performing endless global tours, a mere dot on a stage, in stadiums of 50,000 people.

Her live small venue gigs, videoed and put on YouTube to beam across the globe and on outwards across the universe, would suit me just fine : I’d even pay to see them, inside a paywall....

WORTMAN : was the 18th the night, fight or no fight ?

Springhill is the home of the famously bare-footed singer, Anne Murray

I might get organized pushback for even suggesting this alternative explanation —- and not for the very excellent reason that currently it is only based on a quite limited single new piece of information.

No the reason for all the pushback is because the Portapique spree killings have been taken up by a very big, very old, very disheartened campaign for a particular social justice, one that has been making little headway despite the huge size of the pool of potential victims.

Here’s what motivates this campaign : it is that the majority of Canadians —- ie women — face a very real - statistically - threat to be physically or psychologically badly hurt or even killed by their male partners over their lifetimes.

Canada’s previous biggest mass killings, in Montreal, at a Polytechnique, was exclusively directed against women.

But it was not sparked by a act of domestic violence by the killer against his partner.

The new, now biggest, mass killing in Canada (Portapique) definitely did begin with an act of domestic violence - the women narrowly avoiding a horrible death when she escaped.

Seemingly then the campaign against domestic violence can finally push past the endless but scattered acts of domestic violence that get so little discussion every time they happen  to tie the issue to a huge, huge media event : Gabriel Wortman’s spree is going to be discussed for many, many decades.

So : a huge ongoing news story - and seemingly tied directly to an direct act of violence against a female partner.

In a horrible way, a sort of break : because the campaign against domestic violence never ever gets a halfway fair shake.

Consider that one of the most censored form of news coverage, censorship of Cold War proportions,   is the form of domestic violence we call murder-suicide  —- as long as the killer is a man - and almost always that is so.

It needn’t involve only the female partner’s death : it can be parents, siblings, grandparents, kids, etc.

As long as all the multiple deaths are within the family, broadly defined, it barely get reported.

But unfairly, if a woman (aka mother) kills her kids —- its huge news.

But if man (aka dad) kills kids and wife, at the same time, its no news.

Its bloody unfair.

Seeing the Portapique spree killings as beginning with an act of domestic violence against the killer’s female partner has been a commonplace amongst all forms of media.

Nevertheless, I was on a Facebook forum today when a new member, from the Cumberland-Colchester area, said that Gabriel Wortman was in Springhill Cumberland County, a large town 50 minutes by car from Portapique on Friday April 17th, the day before the shooting.

He ran into an acquaintance there and after chatting, he concluded by saying “ I always liked you X”, before driving off.

As soon as that acquaintance X heard that Gabriel was the spree killer, he thought back to those parting words of only a few hours before.

Given that GW the imagined grievance-collector had just murdered sixteen others of his acquaintances, I bet he did ! Narrow escape.

The forum member thought that this reflected GW’s suicidal mind, in this case death by cop but not before going out in a real burning and killing blaze of glory.

He felt that GW deliberately picked the domestic fight, to get it started, to fuel his rage.

I think we would need a variety of folks reporting similar “goodbye statements” before we draw a firm conclusion.

As I have said, Gabe might be rich but he was also frugal in a perverse way, always trying to get one over the world by getting the world’s biggest best bargains.

So yes he bought $800 of gas, evidence suggested he planned his little Gotterdammerung  at least a month in advance.

But, equally, it can be argued that as gas keeps for months and he had lots of vehicles of all sorts, maybe he was merely buying lots of gas while covid temporarily put gas at record low prices.

So I won’t rush to judgement on any of this.

Except I am SURE - with no real hard evidence except the distinct lack of hard evidence either way - that wee Gabe had a chaotic uncertain babyhood from birth to about age six.....

How’s the COVID battle going in countries the Canadian media have never even heard of ? (Hint : not so good)

Gosh darn there has been so many good news stories about falling rates of new COVID cases in various Canadian provinces, that I felt at least one media outlet should rain a little on everyone’s parade.

I checked today’s death tolls in various countries around the world - to make the point that the disease is still continuing to spread regardless of local successes.

Now these death totals, grim as they are today, may look laughingly small to future generations but one has to start somewhere.

Peru 3500 dead. Ecuador 3200. Switzerland 1900. Ireland 1600. Indonesia 1400. Portugal 1300. Pakistan 1200. Romania 1200. Poland 1000.

You may have heard a little news about outbreaks in these countries, but if not : Mexico 7500. Turkey 4500. India 4500.

Other than Belgium, no expert feels any nation has over-estimated their death toll : Its more likely that at least a half million have died so far globally.

Basically two months into what might be a four year* long battle....

* From beginnings (Spring 1916) to end (Spring 1920), the so called “1918” Spanish Flu lasted 4 years  —— with at least 4 major outbreaks (and three pauses in between to catch us off guard and make us complacent).

And the complacency gene of humanity has not mutated in the slightest, one hundred years on...

no connection between murdered Trevor Wortman and Gabriel Wortman

The number one question I get asked is Calgary’s murdered Trevor Wortman related to GW, the Portapique spree killer.

The false answer is yes. Yes indeed !

All the many Wortmans in New Brunswick are all related to the family of Georg Wortman who arrived in 1766, as one of the small handful of families that founded Moncton.

But that is hardly what we mean when we say people are related.

Agreed ?

Trevor Wortman, from Calgary, whose murder remains unsolved, was a grandson of Graydon Wortman from Plaster Rock NB. Graydon in turn was son of Allen Wortman.

GW was the grandson of Stanley Otis Wortman of Moncton, 200 km away. Stanley’s father was George Otto Wortman of Moncton.

No real connection between the two.

The ONLY connection I can find is that Graydon’s son Gary lived in Beaverton Ontario at the same time as GW’s uncle Neil and probably uncle Allan did.

Beaverton is very tiny - I know - because my sister lives there and tells me so. Quite often.

A coincidence folks, a strange coincidence, but still just a coincidence....

A list of communities where Gabriel Wortman lived or we think he lived

This is my current list of communities that Gabriel Wortman lived in  —-or might have lived.

In plausible chronological order, with date ranges as best I can determine to date.

Communities with question mark at end have been raised as possibilities by people who actually knew Gabriel, but as yet, have not been supported by documentary evidence.

Gabriel was conceived in October 1967 and born early July 1968. Court documents state that : but no birth certificate as yet, no definite proof as to when he was born or where, a month after the murder spree.

1968  Stoney Creek Ontario ?

Because only the Wortman last name was known, people naturally had to focus on GW’s father’s side.

But his mother Doris nee Scott had parents & lots of siblings in Stratford Ontario - her eldest son Neil was even born there and he went back there to go to university (in London very near by) and was still in Ontario - Beaverton - in 1977 when his father Stanley passed. Also not living far from Beaverton was GW’s uncle Donald and his family. We do know that GW’s brother Alan finished his high school years at Beaverton’s regional High School.

So Paul moving to Ontario to find work is hardly a stretch.

1968-1969 Cleveland Ohio ?

1969-1970 Fitchburg Massachusetts. News story uncontested by the Wortman family.

1972  Phoenix, Arizona  ?

By May 1974, Bridgedale, Riverview, New Brunswick. Electoral Records and telephone books.

1974  to  1987 and then 1987 to 1991. Bridgedale. (1987-1991, part-time, when not at UNB Fredericton.) Recollections of dozens of eye witnesses, High School yearbook.

1987-1991 UNB Fredericton - at least part of that time in  two different dorms, MacLeod House and Bridges House - exactly what years for each not known. Multiple eye witnesses in media and on social media.

1991 Moncton New Brunswick, in his parents’ new home ?

1991-2001 is an oasis of inconsistencies and unknowns.

By 1995, the registrar of NS Morticians Board told the media, Gabriel Wortman had complete a (18 month long ?) course to be a mortician but had not become licensed and his records had been transferred back to New Brunswick.

He may have completed that course at NSCC Kentville between 1993-1995 ?

Donnie Walker of Walkers Funeral Home Dartmouth NS told the media that he remembers employing him as an mortician assistant in the mid 1990s.

A girlfriend on social media remembers Gabe holding down two jobs at the same time, in this period : mortician and denturist.

Walkers Funeral Home was then in easy walking distant from the bottom of Pine Street, Dartmouth - as was the denturist clinic at 193 Portland Street.

(A vision of GW rushing between each job, while washing his hands as best he can.)

A fully licensed denturist today needs to complete an extensive 3 year course and the nearest Canadian schools are in southern Ontario ?

Since GW speaks repeatedly about America and has American relatives, (this from multiple media reports) a denturist school in Michigan remains a possibility ?

His grandmother Doris’s second spouse was from Michigan, had a big influence on GW and his uncle Glynn ; we don’t know his occupation, other than that he was “well educated” : might he be the reason GW switched to mortician or denturist after failing to get into the RCMP ?

From 1996 to 2001, GW did own a house at the bottom of Pine Street Dartmouth with Corinna Kincaid.

In this same period he owned some sort of residence at Lawrencetown Beach NS.

By 2001, court records show that GW was living in the rooms above his denturist clinic at 193 Portland Street. This was still his main residence when he died April 2020.

Sometime around 2002 GW brought property and then more and more property at Portapique NS and spent increasingly more time there as years went by. This summer home is where his murder spree began...

Andreas Lubitz & Gabriel Wortman : warning signs missed - or DISMISSED ?

While we are all allowed to have mental breakdowns, equally we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers too.

When the someone we suspect is having a mental breakdown is a subway train driver or an airline pilot or a brain surgeon, we have a heightened duty to TELL the authorities, all and any of the authorities and to stand our ground until they do something definite - and fast.

You may have already forgotten Andreas Lubitz - mass murderers do tend to come and go these days like the flashes of fireflies - but I haven’t.

If you have ever wondered how the Holocaust was kept so secret by the Germany nation it helps to know that the German culture was - and still is - so totally obsessed with the right to personal privacy that Germans throw common sense and common decency right out the window.

Andreas-Lubitz-the-airline-pilot had gone to literally dozens of doctors (40 plus)  over several decades complaining of mental issues and suicidal thoughts but excessive, obsessive medical secrecy laws prevented any of them from warning the airline authorities that maybe this guy shouldn’t be driving that big plane up there with hundreds of innocent lives on board.

The climax began when he went to a doctor who gave him a note saying he shouldn’t be flying. The doctor didn’t/couldn’t tell his employer and Andreas never showed them the note. Instead, once in the air, he locked the other pilot out of the cockpit and drove the airliner, filled with 149 innocent passengers and crew, as well as himself, straight into the ground.

Death by airliner.

You may recall reports of this happening all over the world, with usually successful attempts to cover it up. Ditto train drivers - and who knows - drivers of buses on mountain passes as well.

And who wants soldiers or policemen, people who regularly carry weapons, to go off the rails unreported ?

Doctors and engineers are less likely to have the opportunity to commit a mass muder-suicide, but what about the messed up waterwork plans or botched operations resulting from their addled brains?

Against today’s absurd agnostically-oriented live and let die privacy laws, I stand with Martin Henry Dawson in suggesting that we still are our brothers and sisters’ keepers  - and always have been - it is what makes us human.

We are a collective society as well as atomized individuals ; we care.

Or at least we should ?

What do you think : was it medical professional Gabriel Wortman’s privacy right to have a mental meltdown on the job, as detailed by Andrew Rankin in this totally revealing interview ?

a MUST-READ article on Wortman’s inner mental processes revealed

Or must all the weird stuff from our medical professionals that we witness as their patients be reported and reported again ,and again, to their licensing boards  —- until they actually get off their well paid and well larded arses to do something, to protect the public as the law that governs them demands ?

Gabriel Wortman, in his own words, preferred the dead to the living : no kidding

Two would-be denture customers of Gabriel Wortman have talked to Andrew Rankin of the Halifax Herald at great length, about their unusual encounters with the denturist about one year ago.

Please view this article while it is still online —- and then read my take on it

It is simply far and away the most informative look inside the brain of the mass killer to date - and given that the couple met Wortman a year ago, it definitely shows that GW the medical professional was clearly off the medical professional rails a year ago, well before any Covid-19 meltdown.

One must simply ask that if the NS Denturist Licensing Board, which only has to regulate about a small classroom worth of  NS denturists, had done its job properly and gently but firmly intervened to help a troubled fellow denturist, would 24 people have died.

I worked as a psych orderly for several years at two hospitals and my sense from reading the account of the two clients is that Gabe was distinctly giving off signs of a serious mental problem of some sort.

Notably the female of the couple was totally put off by Gabe’s rapid and random ramblings - she couldn’t put a medical term to it - but knew it wasn’t somehow mentally normal.

I use the word mental as opposed to psychological, deliberately. Most of Wortman’s actions and statements during this ultra long initial client interview are classic NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) : but his heightened tangentiality of thoughts (his random, rapid, rambling of thoughts) are not — they suggest a mental issue emerging.

And while medical professionals are allowed to have breakdowns as much as the rest of us, there is also a heightened responsibility upon all of us to get them treatment before they harm the care of their patients.

Sorry, but surgeons should not be allowed to go bonkers —— at least not on the job.

Gabriel, as is typical of those with narcissistic personality disorder, loved to feel superior by helping people with their problems. This helpfulness really impressed the young couple at first.

But the male witnessed just what happens when the ‘generosity’ of someone with that disorder is questioned in even the smallest way. Wortman browbeat and demeaned an elderly woman client who had a problem with a fitting - and did so right in front of his new client.

His ‘nice’ mask slipped and ‘nasty’ Gabe took over the brain functions momentarily.

Quickly though , his nice mask returned as he explained away his actions to his new client (as usual with NPD types - it was all the other person’s fault.)

NPD grandiosity was in full display : his successes are paraded over and over - still it was startling to see them displayed even during his supposedly professional medical client interactions.

He openly talked about his act of arson, burning down a barn with another neighbours’ property in it. This too, to me, shows a loosening of probably a lifetime of keeping a lid on his actual thoughts when he was with others - at least as long as he was sober.

Gabe had moved on from telling strangers he had murdered people —-when he was drunk, to telling perfect strangers he had committed arson —— while sober and in the role of a medical professional.

Hello, hello : Denturists’ Board ?

And very much an example of GW’s private world starting to emerge into and across his public mask was his ramblings about his wish to become an owner-operator of a crematory.

This is new - earlier references to his mid 1990s career spoke merely of Gabe being a mortician at a funeral home , rather than at a crematory.

Because with hindsight in the year 2020, crematory work involves both definitely dead people and all-consuming fires —— the chief characteristic of Wortman’s murder spree being his inner need to totally and definitely end situations in a GOTTERDAMMERUNG of death and fire.

Not just to shot someone repeatedly to ensure they are really dead, but then to take the time to burn up their car (or house) as well.

But Gabe revealing his plans for a total career switch to absolute strangers was very off-putting for the young couple.

It was all rather like going to a surgeon for reassurance before they performed a life-threatening operation on you and she admitting to you that actually she felt she was much better in the autopsy room, revealing why operations go wrong and why the patients died.

For after convincing the couple that he was a totally hands-on people-friendly denturist, Gabe then suddenly switched gears and said he would rather embalm and cremate dead bodies in the back room, just as long as he didn’t have to deal with the living relatives in the front room.

GW told them, in probably the saddest insight into the very core of his being, “the dead can’t hurt you, I don’t mind.”

I firmly believe that was the five year Gabe talking, the five year messed-up kid that controlled the inner adult Gabriel Wortman.....

Stan & Doris Wortman’s kids and grands - without exception - had successful careers

Including grandson Gabriel. And then 24 people died.

Stan and Doris had only a modest working class home at 43 Edgett Avenue Moncton, which probably was pretty crowded in the early 1960s with seven people living there. Yet the family steadily advanced up the social scale.

Stan worked for the CNR, as had his dad George before him. He was in the Canadian Navy during the war, though not before marrying Doris, the only Canadian-born member of a family from England who settled in prosperous Stratford Ontario.

Stan wasn’t perhaps overly talkative and he could have a temper, but Doris seemed a lively sort.

Exactly how young Doris ended up working in a factory in less-prosperous Moncton , thousands of km away, is not known.

Eldest son Neil, ended up with a doctorate in Education - a prominent figure in Maritime education circles.And all of his and wife Annette’s three children did well for themselves. He now lives in Shediac.

Paul the next oldest, seemed to have travelled the hard road for a few years, but he and Ev now live along Moncton’s pricy residential waterfront, suggesting that eventually he did alright as an industrial salesman.

 You have already read about the financial success of his eldest son Gabriel and seen pictures of his fine big homes  —- before he burnt them all to the ground.

Jeff, Ev and Paul’s younger son, is a well known and well respected restoration carpenter in New England, a place where they really do treasure their historical heritage —- and the people who restore it.

Alan, the next of Doris & Stan’s sons, became a member of the RCMP , in fact graduated before the Queen herself, at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Force. He had notable successes in Newfoundland and is said to have ended up in the elite SWAT team. Al and Debbie have a couple of great kids, he is crazy about sports, and is retired in Ottawa.

Glynn, the next son, never married but got a great job in the federal government out in Edmonton. he sold his condo there to make the payment on his house in Portapique next to his nephew Gabe.  Glynn lived to party but is now in ill health in a nursing home in Moncton.

Cris the youngest son, also joined the RCMP - his graduation was attended by Gabe, in what may be a formative event in his life. Chris finished his career in BC where he was a community representative because he had a really great rapport with kids and teachers.

 Cris is retired with his wife Margie in the Chilliwack area where their two sons excel in sports and their daughter is into genealogy.

When Stan died in 1977, Doris had a second spouse, probably from Michigan - a man who may have brought American gun values (and American guns ?) into impressionable wee Gabe’s head. She died in 1997. Gabe’s step-granddad is also dead...