THE MASS MURDERS IN NOVA SCOTIA

If you click your mouse on the underlined words, you will get more information.

Scientists in their attempts get inside the minds of serial killers and mass murderers have found the combination of mental health issues from autism to head injuries with psychological trauma can lead to the committing of violent crimes.

A study at the University of Glasgow is the first of its kind that  identified a complex relationship between neurodevelopmental problems and psychosocial factors. It found that 28 per cent of multiple killers were believed to suffer from autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 21 per cent had suffered a definite or suspected head injury in the past. Of those killers with ASD or a head injury, 55 per cent had experienced traumatic events that caused psychological stress.

Tenuous, at best, people who blame mass shootings on “the mentally ill” are usually reasoning backward from the act itself thereby the person who shot 22 unarmed persons, must be insane.

In fact, scientists have found that  that only a small fraction of people with persistent mental distress  such people with paranoid schizophrenia, which is characterized by delusional thinking and often so-called commands given to them by God.  

I don’t believe that applies to the mass killer who murdered 22 persons in the Province of Nova Scotia.

Before I tell you about that particular mass killer, I will give you my background with respect to my training and experience with solving crimes. I am a criminologist and I studied abnormal psychology at the University of Toronto for a year. I also studied criminal law for two years and I addressed the United Nations Conferences in twelve cities around the world on crimes and the prevention of crime between 1975 and 2010.  Further, I spent five years counselling prison inmates in individual and group sessions.  Although the United Nations has classified me as an expert, in the field of criminal justice, I am not a psychiatrist. However, I do know a great deal about the motives of killers while having talked with many of them.

The mass killer I am writing about in this particular article
was 51-year-old Abriel wort man. I used the word was because he was later shot dead by the police on Sunday at 11:40 am on July 19^th.   

The shootings by Gabriel Wortman, age 51 started on late Saturday night at 11:30 in the small rural town of Portapique that was the home to 100 residents and is located  about 40 kilometres west of the town of Truro in which the police received calls about the shootings minutes later. 

From midnight until around 8 a.m. on Sunday, the shooter’s whereabouts remained unclear. That part of the timeline has become a subject of much scrutiny as the public tries to understand how one person could have eluded the police for so long and caused so much death and destruction in such a small area.

 

Public records show that Wortman owned several properties in Dartmouth and in that small community of Portapiqu, both being in the Province of Nova Scotia. He was the owner of the Atlantic Denture Clinic on Portland Street in Dartmouth working as a denturist.  

Dentists have a higher suicide rate of 2.5 to 5.5 times more than other white-collar workers which make me wonder if he had a   desire to go out big was what motivated this particular dentist so he could  make a name for himself as a mass killer.

Of course, that is just one of the many possible reasons for committing suicide which can include the dentist’s personality type, leading to unrealistic expectations of him/herself and extreme conscientiousness.

Some 0f Wortman’s victims were known to him, and some were not.  He drove down a road in  this quiet part of rural Nova Scotia, in a province where people always seem to know other people.

There were 16 separate crime scenes where his 22 victims were shot dead such as  the side of the road or in their homes. 

Workman’s neighbors later told The Canadian Press that the killer was obsessed with a girlfriend who was living in the town. A lot of mass shooters have toxic misogyny in their lives. This particular mass killer was no exception. There were early suggestions of a domestic problems between Wortman and his girlfriend.

On that fatal Saturday night, the man who would carry out the worst mass shooting in Canadian history, drove over to his girlfriend`s house   and got into an argument with her.   He forced her to go to one of his properties in the mall community where he then assaulted the woman and bound her. She escaped and ran into the forest and hid from her attacker. Now he knew that he was in real trouble.  Nevertheless, he returned to the party.   

The records are consistent with a Global News report that the killings began following the party near Wortman’s Portapique Beach Rd. residence.

At least nine of that killer’s victims owned homes either next or near to Gabriel Wortman’s home. There were bodies in a house and outside the house.

  

His closest neighbour, Lisa McCully, was among the victims. The teacher owned a property on Orchard Beach Road, immediately adjacent to Wortman’s property.

As for Wortman’s motive for going on his shooting rampage, the answer to that most perplexing puzzle raises the question as to “why” he went on that shooting rampage. 

Wortman knew that his girlfriend would call the police and he would be arrested, tried in a court and sent to prison since court records show he was convicted of an assault that happened in 2001.

The RCMP in Nova Scotia  responded to the "firearms complaint" in the small, rural town of Portapiquet . The police told the callers  to avoid  being on the streets  and to stay indoors and  lock their doors.

Unfortunately, the RCMP bungled the warning that should have been sent to all the phones in the homes in that small community.

Instead the police force sent a tweet to its thousands of followers late Saturday, warning the people of Portapique to lock their doors as they investigated a "firearms complaint. “Early Sunday morning, the force sent another tweet with the name and a photo of the shooter and a warning to people in the community that he was "armed and dangerous."

Now ask yourself this rhetorical question. How many people were looking at their computer during the early part of that particular Sunday morning? 

The warning should have been sent to their phones and on television by the alert system instead,  If the victims who opened their doors to their killer had received  the warnings by phone or om their television sets, they  wouldn’t have opened their doors  to the killer. A friend of one of the victims later said, “The RCMP should have used the Alert System.” That is an understatement.

The police`s explanation was that if that particular alert was sent, the people who received the alert wouldn`t even open their doors for real RCMP officers. That explanation is nonsense.  

Supt. Chris Leather later said that officers arriving at the first home had found "multiple casualties.both inside and outside of the home but the shooter was gone. The police knew then that the killer was Fifty-one-year-old Gabriel Wort man.

The Atlantic Denture Clinic was guarded by police in Dartmouth, N.S. on Monday, April 20^th. The business was owned by the Nova Scotia killer.

Mr. Ryan, aged 81, looked out his bedroom window at about 11:15 p.m. Saturday night  and across the Portapique River, where he saw a wharf and, further down the shoreline, a small cabin was engulfed in flames on the property of Gabriel Wortman, whose home overlooks a marshy area of Cobequid Bay.

There is an old saying. It goes like this.  “If you are going to he hunted as a sheep, you might as well be hunted as a wolf.”

Now the killer was going to kill others in the community whom he hated. Police would arrive to the scene that night to find neighbours dead, fires burning, and they spent the rest of the night searching the area for the killer without any success.

The Police said on Friday (April 27^th) that 13 bodies had been found on roads and in homes in the vicinity of Wortman’s property.

                                                                                                          But then they got a break. On Sunday morning, (April 19^th) between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., a woman phoned the RCMP whom police described as a .key witness. She was Wortman’s ex-girlfriend She certainly wold have known what Workman had in his possession at the times of the shootings. He had a handgun and a rifle. She gave the officers that vital piece of information.

Gabriel Wortman also had an RCMP uniform and a replica cruiser that he created and his girlfriend  had a photo of it. Police would later tweet out a picture of Wortman’s mock police vehicle in a warning to the public to stay away from that particular police-looking vehicle. 

According to a timeline released by the force om Friday, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman had already killed a number of people and burned homes in several communities by the time Const. Chad Morrison saw the shooter’s car while believing it to actually be Const. Stevenson since they had agreed to meet.

The gunman pulled up beside Morrison and immediately opened fire, wounding the officer, who managed to drive away to a local hospital. He notified other officers and said that he was shot and that he was en-route to the nearby hospital for emergency medical attention.

RCMP Constable Stevenson then saw the suspect and she realized it was the bad guy, so she rammed her vehicle into Wortman’s vehicle to prevent him  from escaping. That was the right thing to do but she lost her life by doing that since Wortman shot her dead.  Wortman killed the officer before she could pull out her handgun. Stevenson left behind her husband Dean and children, Connor and Ava. She was described as a caring wife and mother, and a dedicated police officer with a strong work ethic. Her sacrifice  obviously saved countless lives.

I don’t know how far this killer was going to go to kill more victims by using his particular vehicle After the collision, Stevenson’s vehicle and the killer’s replica vehicle were both burning. The shooter was no longer able to take advantage of his so-called patrol car that RCMP officials have said was virtually identical to an authentic vehicle. Police have said that some of the murders occurred because the gunman had used the vehicle which was equipped with a replica light bar to pull over victims before he shot them.             

Wortman  subsequently used another  car that was owned by one of his victims

                                                    

Two couples killed during the rampage also owned properties nearby on Orchard Beach Rd. TGhey were  Jamie and Greg Blair, and Dawn Madsen and Frank Gulenchyn. Elizabeth Joanne Thomas and John Zahl owned property on the same street as Wortman, while Joy and Peter Bond lived less than a kilometre away.

A recording of emergency responders made that night shows that ambulances were dispatched to Wortman’s street after 10 p.m. on Saturday.

The RCMP has said the violence began in Portapique but that his victim`s bodies were also found in Wentworth, Debert, Shubenacadie/Milford and Enfield.

Emily Tuck, 17, and her parents, Jolene Oliver and Aaron Tuck, were killed in their home in Portapique. 

The chase covered more than 100 kilometres and ended at an exit off one of the province's main highways towards Halifax. The police caught up with him and when he stepped out of a gas station, the police shot him dead. I don’t know if they shot him because he shot two other officers earlier or they shot him so that the officers wouldn’t get shot in a shooting battle. In any case, the killer is dead. If he was captured alive, he would serve a natural life sentence in prison at the expense of the tax payers. 

It costs $117,000 a year to house a prisoner in a Canadian federal prison.  If he lived to ninety years of age  in prison, the tax payers would collectively fork over ten and a half million dollars to keep him in prison. There has to be a cheaper way to deal with a vicious killer like that evil man. There was a better way. The police executed him with a few bullets.  

What motivates a mass killer to kill people?

There is no template for the path to violence, and rarely can a single cause explain any one atrocity.

As bizarre as these facts in the Nova Scotia massacre were, they are, mixed and murky motivations for the standard so-called lone-wolf attackers, regardless of how  they committed their killings.

For the most part, their motivations are generally for the purpose of  revenge. Wortman hated a number of his neighbors and that is why he chose to kill them and anyone else who got in his way such as the female police officer.

As I said earlier, “If you are going to he hunted as a sheep, you might as well be hunted as a wolf.”  

If he had killed just one person, he would automatically be sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was fifty-one years of age. He would be eligible to be released from prison when he was seventy-six years old.  Since he killed 22 victims, his sentence could have been 550 years.

Don’t laugh. A man in the United States killed three persons. He was sentenced to three thousand years. He appealed on the grounds that the sentence was ridiculous. The court of appeal agreed and reduced his sentence to fifteen hundred years.  One man in Central America was sentence to 7.00 years.

The revelation that the Orlando shooter used gay dating apps and frequented Pulse has led to speculation that closeted self-loathing played a role in the shooting. There is some scientific evidence that self-hate can be outwardly destructive. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people with implicit same-sex desires (revealed by word-association tasks) who identified strongly as heterosexual were more likely than those who were more in touch with their sexual desires to show hostility toward gay people.

The problem with understanding lone-wolf terrorists or mass shooters, however, is that anger or hate alone doesn't necessarily predict violent action. It didn`t predict what Wortman was going to do to his  neighbors until it was too late. 

What we're seeing more and more is that the logical, normal sequence is out of whack

Lone-wolf mass killers like Wortman are less likely to be suicidal than public mass shooters in the United States. Many lone wolves suffer from mental-health problems or personal crises that echo those seen in other killers.

The shooter who carried out an attack on Virginia Tech in 2007 referred to martyring himself "like Jesus Christ," but this isn't usually seen as having religious motivations.

As bizarre as these facts are, mixed and murky motivations are standard for so-called lone-wolf attackers, regardless of whether they are defined as terrorists, experts say. There is no template for the path to violence, and rarely can a single cause explain any one atrocity.

What that means is that researchers and others trying to prevent these attacks are focusing less on ideology and more on behavior. One study of lone terrorists of all stripes found that 83 percent had hinted to others about their plans before becoming violent, said Mia Bloom, a professor of communication at Georgia State University who researches suicide terrorism. The Orlando club shooter was reportedly no exception: NBC has reported that his wife told the FBI that she knew of his plans and tried to talk him out of attacking.

The revelation that the Orlando shooter used gay dating apps and frequented Pulse has led to speculation that closeted self-loathing played a role in the shooting. There is some scientific evidence that self-hate can be outwardly destructive. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people with implicit same-sex desires (revealed by word-association tasks) who identified strongly as heterosexual were more likely than those who were more in touch with their sexual desires to show hostility toward gay people.

Parenting also played a role in this association. In the 2012 study, people who grew up in authoritarian households—those with strict, harsh parents—showed larger gaps between their implicit sexual desires and their outward sexual orientation than people raised by more accepting parents.

The problem with understanding lone-wolf terrorists or mass shooters, however, is that anger or hate alone doesn't predict violent action.

In the past, many scholars looked at terrorism as a destructive, but basically logical, decision. People born to Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland in the 1950s, for example, might have absorbed political messages from a young age about British oppression and then joined a paramilitary group that matched their ideology,

What we're seeing more and more is that the logical, normal sequence is out of whack, Jihadist groups such as ISIS recruit in prisons, luring people who have checkered pasts with the promise of personal reinvention or greater meaning in life. Lone actors may use political causes as a veneer of respectability to cover for personal rage or despair.

Straightforward terrorists—suicide bombers, for example are driven by personal mental-health problems. Mental-health problems are common in suicide attackers

Lone-wolf terrorists are less likely to be suicidal than public mass shooters in the U.S., Lankford told Live Science, but many lone wolves suffer from mental-health problems or personal crises that echo those seen in public mass shooters. A terrorist is defined as someone who uses violence in pursuit of political aims, whereas a public mass shooter is generally driven by more personal motivations.

However, these categories can blur and overlap. For example, the shooter who killed African-American congregants at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, ultimately was not charged with terrorism but rather a hate crime. That was a controversial decision, as many saw his desire to start a "race war" as a political motivation.

It can also be difficult to tease out who is ideologically motivated. For example, the shooter who carried out an attack on Virginia Tech in 2007 referred to martyring himself "like Jesus Christ," but isn't usually seen as having religious motivations.

We just tend to dismiss such claims because we 'know' that Christianity isn't really the explanation for the [Virginia Tech Mass  ss killer

A final complication is that terrorist organizations are constantly changing and adapting. When Israel's security forces started to catch male suicide bombers, Bloom said, terrorist groups started sending women strapped with explosives to checkpoints. In Nigeria, the Islamic militant group Boko Haram has even used children to carry out attacks. ISIS has, at various points, tried to recruit everyone from violent prisoners to do-gooders who feel the urge to help war orphans. The group also exhorts loners with no real connection to ISIS to commit attacks in its name.                                           

Trying to figure a person`s anger and is about to explode is a `study in progress.  No one in Nova Scotia was expecting Wortman to explode in such an ager that he killed 22 of his neighbours.     

When I was doing individual counselling in a detention center in the last century, I interviewed a homeless man who murdered a woman who gave him a place to sleep. In the middle of the night, he went into her kitchen, grabbed a knife and went to her bedroom and stabbed her in her back. The stabbing killed her. I asked him why he did it. He replied, ``I don`t know why I did it.` Killers like him  are the killers who  are really dangerous.  There is no way when such a person is suddenly going to become a killer.

Wortman was a dangerous killer and we know what motivated him to kill his 22 neighbours but nobody took his anger seriously as a warning as to what was going to happen to them.

1. 
   
2. He  used a hand gun  and a long barred gun tp kill his victims. He shouldn`t have been given a fire srms permit to have these guns considering that he previously went to jail after being convicted of an assault.