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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them, Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with Your Host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening, a shocking expose of the deadliest killing spree in Canadian history and how police tragically failed its victims and survivors. As news broke of a killer rampaging across the tiny community of Porta Peak, Nova Scotia, late on April eighteenth, twenty twenty, details were oddly hard to come by. Who was the killer, why was he not apprehended, what were police doing? How many were dead? And why was the gunman still on the loose the next morning and
killing again. The RCMP was largely silent then and continued to obscure the actions of denturist Gabriel Wortmann after an officer shot and killed them at a gas station during
a chance encounter. Though retired as an investigative journalist and author, Paul Polango spent much of his career reporting on Canada's troubled National Police Force, watching the RCMP stumble through the Porta Pete massacre only a few hours from his Nova Scotia home, Plango knew the story behind the headlines was more complicated and damning than anyone was willing to admit.
With the COVID nineteen lockdowns sealing off the Maritimes, no journalist in the province knew the RCMP better than Plango did. Within a month, he was back in print and on the radio, peeling away the layers of this murderous episode as only he could, and earthing the collision of failure and malfeasance that cost a quiet community twenty two innocent lives.
The book that we're featuring this sevening is twenty two Murders, Investigating the massacres, cover Up and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia, with my special guests and journalist and author Paul Polango. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Paul Polango, Thank you for having me, Dan, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us on this incredible, incredible story, twenty two Murders.
Well, it's funny. It's not something I ever envisaged doing. You know, I thought my book writing days were behind me, and for the last twenty years I've been essentially working as a glass artist with my wife, and we have a successful business doing you know, and a wholesale and retail business, and that's kept me occupied except for a brief period of writing a book in two thousand and eight, which was called Dispersing the Fog Inside the Secret World
of Ottawa and the RCMP. I didn't think i'd be doing another one because the previous books I wrote were largely dispelled by the police and politicians, and I was called a conspiracy theorist and all kinds of things, and a lot of people sort of shied away from my writings. So I was resigned to the fact that I wasn't going to do it again until I ended up doing this one.
Now, for our American audience and our international audience that's not familiar with the RCMP, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, tell us just in terms of the FBI or policing in the US, you talk about contract policing, tell us in comparison, what's the difference between the RCNP and the FBI and the RCNP and police forces in Canada.
Well, the RCMP, on its surface looks like a police force and it's heralded around the world as a symbol of Canada. But what it is is especially a regimental army that began in eighteen seventy four in Western Canada to basically protect settlers and Aboriginal populations, and by nineteen oh five, when Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces, it became the provincial police forces for those provinces on a contract basis.
And what that meant was the province has hired the forces to operate under the provincial policing laws, but there were still a federal operation. So the visit imagine the FBI as a federal police force, a federally constituted police force working in South Dakota handing out in mark cars marked FBI, doing radar enforcement and investigating break ins and whatever a municipal or provincial or state police force would be doing. It's sort of a bastardized hybridized form of policing.
And in Canada the RCMP is the majority of the work it does is contract policing, So more than eleven thousand of its sort of twenty thousand odd serving officers eighteen thousand serving officers probably are doing contract policing, and the provinces outside of Ontario and Quebec. So Ontario Quebec are the two largest provinces. They have their own provincial police you know, the Antario Provincial Police and the stee to Quebec, and they have all municipal police forces throughout
the province. But in the other provinces, the RCMP operates as a contract police force. One other note is the RCMP says this is allows them to be a force, a national police force, so they have their figure on the pulse of crime in the nation, but that's not true. The largest urban area that the force polices are a couple of suburbs of Vancouver on the West coast and Monkdon New Brunswick population approxbately one hundred and fifty thousand, and in between there are a rural police force I
call them, and this is not a pejorative. This comes from the old Romany word that dicks from the sticks. So they're essentially a rural police force, territorial police force in the North.
But they're still supposed.
To be operating as a federal police force and they can't. It's just so cumbersome, so hybridized. They can't really do a good job of any of it. So the last point of this. I ran into a guy the other day, at Irish immigrant who lived in Western Canada and now
lives in Nova Scotia. We got talking about this about the RCMP, and he says, I've served in two armies, and he said, what the RCMP is to me is not a police force, but a very poor army, because police forces, in his view, should be localized and understand the local terrain and local population and demographics, and the RCMP is very poor doing that.
Now you speak about the command that these officers are in these rural areas that they have to patrol. If I mispronounced the name of this community, but tell us about Porta Pic, Nova Scotia, and what this community really this area really consisted of.
Well.
Porta Pick is just northwest of a town called Borough in northern Nova Scotia. It's right on the Minus Basin, which is sort of the northeast arm of the Bay of Fundy. And the Bay of Fundy is that large bay in the North Atlantic which separates Maine and Nova Scotia. At its mouth. It runs about two hundred miles. It's quite wide. It's the home of the highest tides in the world. You know, at Parsboro and Burncote Head the tides could run like fifty two feet twice a day.
So it's very dramatic. It's wild and crazy, but you know, peaceful in its own way. So low population. And in Portapec there was a community there of you know, sort of vacation home, some permanent residents. Not fancy by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, at one point, one of the victims in this called the neighborhood Orchard Beach Estate, but hers was sort of the nicest house in the estate seven years ago, so sold for like under two
hundred thousand dollars Canadian. Most of the lots were like an acre and a half and sold for anywhere between eighteen to twenty thousand. So this is not prime land. It's sort of windy, cold, but some people considered idyllic because it's so removed from the everyday, hectic life that goes on elsewhere. And then the other point about this dan is because of its isolation, in its oral nature, it's also in its water access and its proximity to
the United States. It's also a primaria for smuggling drug trafficking and organized crime to go under the radar.
Now tell us about Gabriel Wartman, this deadsurist.
Well, Gabriel Wartman was an odd duck and as I described him in the book, one of the outer ducks you're going to see doing this kind of thing, because you know, unlike the you know, some people want to say nothing about him, but I think it's interesting to see all all aspects of his character. And he was born to this sort of odd, sort of violent at times family in a suburb of Monkton, New Brunswick, place called Riverview. He had two uncles and a cousin who
were royal Canadian amount of police officers. He grew up a lot of people just said he was kind of a quirky fellow. He did some quirky things that I described in the book. He eventually went to university in Fredericton, New Brunswick, but even at that time he was involved in cigarette smuggling and smuggling drugs and stuff across the border in Maine and in league with a crooked homosexual lawyer named Tom Evans, who eventually got hooked up with
defending a crazy side story. Was defending Colombian drug traffickers who cartel members who got caught in New Brunswick came over the border and I think their plane crashed and he had to he defended them. And this sort of puts Workman in this league with, you know, one association with these sort of organized crime figures and cartel members, and that becomes a theme later in the story. And as a dentist, you know, some people saw him as creepy,
even you know, in my glass business. I ran into customers after this this Massacres who said, oh, well he did this work for me, said, oh, he was so beautiful, he was so nice, and he did these things and gave us good prices, and others said he was kind of creepy. He did creepy things, and eventually I described some of those creepy things as I found.
Out about it later.
And he lived in Dartmouth, which is a sort of the other half or one of the eastern side of Halifax across the harbor. There's two bridges connecting them. And he had a summer place on Quortapic Beach Road, which is probably one of the nicest, the nicest place in the community. And it was right along the water, and you know, it's like a log cabin. And he spent most of his time there and then and then about through the woods about four hundred yards or about a
mile driving by road. He had a huge warehouse. You know, the base for the warehouse was like thirty two hundred square feet and it was like a story and a half and that was his man cave at one thirty six or you'd beach drive. So the proximity. These things become important later, right, the location of the house, the location of the warehouse. People following the story for the last two years who haven't been paying close attention think
they're beside each other. If they're not beside each other, it's a bit of a trek, and that becomes important later on the story.
As you write about somebody that had been in this warehouse previous. What was in this warehouse in this man cave.
Well, he had you know, he had his He was a motorcycle, motorbike collector, right and he was constantly importing mini bikes, motorcycle parts, and motorcycles from the United States. His prize possession was ap to the America Bike, which was made famous in the movie. There was nineteen sixty seven movie Easy Rider, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson riding this high handled motorcycle. And the funny thing of the parallel in the story is that they used that bike
to smuggle drugs. And pretty well, that's what Workman was doing in his real life, using motorcycles and motorcycle parts as a cover to smuggle drugs and distribute.
Them here, there and everywhere. Well at the.
Same time pretending to be a dentist making teeth for dentists and other and patients directly, So it was it was his cover. And then the other thing that was unusual about the warehouse is that it had an apartment in it. It also had a secret room with a toilet in behind a panel, which sort of gave one of the women I described in there, a couple of the women who I described as being there as creeping them out. So that was sort of of Workman's sort
of his lifestyle was there. He loved the warehouse. He spent a lot of time there, a lot of drinking there with neighbors and friends. But he never had a lot of guests to his place other than for his relatives of his common law wife Lisa Banfield, who'd been with for nineteen years.
Now.
You read about his personality, some of the exhibiting some of the behavior that's very interesting in light of this massacre massacres. You cite a business dealing with his uncle and others where he loaned money, but also you talk about a violent incident after threatening his father.
Paul.
Yeah, Well, Paul Wortman was well sort of established in this world practice of helping people with houses and then stealing the real estate, basically grinding them out of the real estate, and Gabriel got involved in this as well. So he would help people with their houses and then get them to sign over the deed, then steal the properties from them.
So he was ruthless in that way.
And eventually one of his uncles, his uncle Glynn, was coming out of jail. His uncle Glenn had reacted and stabbed his own father because of violence in the family and ended up going to prison for it. Then he came out and Gabriel or for whatever reason he was, he wanted to buy the property in Puortapic Beach and it was approprily at one thirty five Orchard Beach Drive, which is directly across the street from the warehouse, and it's this nice pavilion style building, one of the nicest
houses in the neighborhood. And that they got into a big dispute about it because Gabriel said, I'll lend you the money. And then when Glenn was getting upset about he wanted to get his money out, Gabriel wouldn't give it back to him because he said.
It's my house.
He thought that the house should be his, and so they ended up in a family dispute. Eventually, this family is it. Around the same time, he gets a fight with his father well on vacation in the Caribbean and beats the crap out of him over other dealings about real estate at his own house because his father had a piece of his house and Gabriel wanted his house.
So all these real estate transacts, these crazy real estate estate transactions were going on, and Workman was you know, showed how violent he could be and how ruthless he could be when it came to money in real estate.
Now let's get to talking about these replica cars and what the police knew about these exact detailed replica cars RCMP cars. You mentioned that his relatives were in members of the RCMP, A cousin and an uncle and I think twouns no two uncles. So let's talk about this. What they knew about this replica car and what other people knew about these How many of these replicas did he have? And even some of the other mammabilia that he was a collector of.
Well, he collected all kinds of RCMP memorabilia. He had uniforms that it's not really clear where all the stuff comes from. It's very you know, did it come from his uncle? He had friend, a close friend on the Halifax Municipal Police Force. He seemed to have some Halifax paraphernalia.
And then in.
Twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, I should say early twenty nineteen, for some reason, he started buying decommissioned police cars. And these are RCMP police cars that we sold at government auction, and you can usually get these cars for a reasonably good price, so they'd be stripped down and no identifying markings on them or anything like that. So he bought three of them in a very short period of time, sort of in the spring of twenty nineteen, moving into
the summer of twenty nineteen. Then eventually he bought a fourth one that only had like probably under two thousand miles on it, and he paid like thirteen thousand and five hundred for it. It had like a little dent in the front there was in fact, it was written off, and a mechanic who looked at it, who I talked to,
said there was hardly any damage. Even the winch old washer fluid container wasn't damaged, and he took her to In twenty nineteen, he started to build this car into a replica RCMP cruiser, complete with decals, light bar, pushbar, silent patrol, mum screen, radios, everything. And he told people that he was doing this as part of his own sort of honoring the RCMP and doing his own sort
of you know, he's a elector. He pursuaded himself as a collector, right and that he told people that the RCMP approved of it as long as he only took it to shows and didn't drive it on the road. Some people say they complained to the RCMP about having him having this police card which he openly displayed on Portapit Beach Road, and there's some allegations that he actually took it and drove it into Truro and elsewhere, but the RCMP did nothing about that.
Let's talk about this common law partner, Lisa Banfield. What is known about her? Tell us about Lisa Banfield and the relationship she had with Warman.
Well, on the surface, if you pay attention to the you know, if you look at the news stories about her, she's never referred to by name until very recently. She's just the abused victim of domestic violence. Lisa Banfield fifty one years old at the time, part of a nineteen
year common law relationship. Banfield Mett Wortman around two thousand and one after her first marriage broke up, and she lived with him from that time sort of on and off, and very little is very little known about her really, you know, like you try to do a biography about her, it's like trying to nail.
Jello to a wall, right. But as I.
Started to dig into her, I found that, you know, there's while she's portrayed to be this innocent victim of domestic violence, from the time she hooked up with Workmen, he was clearly involved in criminal activity. I mean in the neighborhood in Dartmouth where he had his denturous clinic
on Prilan Boulevard. He coveted the properties around him because he fancied himself as a real estate developer, and the properties around him were kind of run down in derelict, and they all started having fires, like three or I think there's three or four fires over a three year period that basic especially destroys all the buildings. But there's of note is one of Wortman's good friends is an arsonist and a convicted arsonist that we know about, a
convicted criminal with a very short of history. Then Banfield doesn't appear to notice any of these things going on. One of the things I noticed about I just recently wrote about Banfield that's not even in the book, is
that I was looking at her. In the book, I have a description of her being involved in a small claims court case in twenty ten, which was very very curious, but I didn't have one of the important details that I only found out after the book was out, which will be in the subsequent version.
Believe me.
I started to look at this against I was learned that there was a second small claims court case about her that would be very revealing about her character. And in that case, back in nineteen ninety nine before she met Workman. It's kind of a crazy case. She went for hair extensions and she met you know, she went to this person who did that, got the hair extensions, was told not to wash her hair for a week, paid like four hundred and fifty dollars for the hair extensions.
Came home and according to the sources, I had immediately washed her hair, used some conditioner, the extension started falling out. So she made up this story that the hairdresser had failed and took them to Small Flames Court. So essentially created a false story and got half her money back from this case. And while I was researching that, I came across the second the most revealing document in the
second case, which was revealing in and of itself. After Wortman's gay lawyer friend Tom Evans died in two thousand and nine, Wortman got his properties in Monkdin, New Brunswick, and a bunch of cash, maybe three hundred thousand dollars and a gun or two, and sort of I think access to evans criminal client base. He bought Banfield four ranks, but he presented them as these ten thousand dollars diamond one of them is a ten thousand dollars diamond ring.
But it was great at S thirteen S twelve S thirteen, which is not even really a grade. Some people think that S thirteen it's not really a quality diamond because it's so included or cloudy. So Lisa gets these diamonds and throws them into a dentrous machine with some cleaning solution and destroys them. So she goes to small Claims part to sue the company that was supposed to repair them. And long convoluted story. And what we found after I wrote the book is a receipt that she offered his
evidence in court for the purchase of the diamond. I mean it came with the usual certificate of authenticity from someone in Belgium, which is essentially worthless. And she offered this receipt that Gabriel Wortman had purchased a diamond for ten thousand dollars from Tom Evans.
The late lawyer.
Right, but the receipt was signed and dated one hundred and thirteen days after Evans had died. The case was thrown out of court and she didn't get any money out of it, but she continued on with her life. So, you know, living with Wortman, there was a just a it seems like a crazy relationship. Worman would spend his Christmases together. She wasn't really there. She was with her family. The only people allowed at the Quartpec Beach Resident cottage
was members of her family. She would not allow anyone else in there. And this all comes to a head basically on April eighteenth, twenty twenty.
Let's talk about the neighbors to Gabriel Whartman. You say that the Blairs, two boys, and Great Blair and his wife Jane. Tell us about this family next door and any if at all relationship with Wharpman.
Well, it's j Amy Blair and Greg Blair didn't live across from the cottage. They lived across from the warehouse, next to Lisa McCully, who bought the eventually bought the pavilion house that Glynn used to own, so she got it right. Wortman always wanted that house. The Blairs lived next door. They had long been going to Portapic Beach and staying by the water. There was like a little
during the summer. People stayed in trailers down there. In one of the highlights of summers there were these giant brush bonfires and people would gather around and party and drink and ru and sometimes fight. The Blairs ran a bit. Greg Blair ran a family business, like a heating cooling type business in Truro. Jamie was his second wife and they had two young kids twelve and ten, two young boys.
So they lived on Orchard Beach Drive. And then if you go up about another one hundred meters two hundred meters, the next house is the Glincheons, who had moved there about ten years earlier, and then Frank Luncheon was renovating the house and for ten years well his wife worked outside of Toronto and she would come down regularly. Then she finally just moved down there in the fall of twenty nineteen. So they are the neighbors immediately near the warehouse.
Right, Let's talk about what and how you hear about this unfolding massacre while everybody's locked down in the Maritimes, like you say, April eighteenth, tell us what the official reports are from the RCMP, what they chose to do rather than you say about this alert that they could have done. Tell us what their response is and where are you and how do you hear about things unfolding.
Well, I live in Chester, based in Nova Scotia, which is on the south shore, sort of sort of between roughly, it's in Mahone Bay, which is sort of between two iconic places in Nova Scotia, Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg. You know, our glass our business is in Chester, which is sort of considered the most New England town on the East coast of Canada. It was, you know, it was largely
founded by American Americans fleeing the Revolution. And I got up that Sunday morning a little late, probably around nine a little after, and my wife, Sharon was down. She had been going on Facebook because we have family in the South Pacific, And eventually she gets a call from her aunt, her aged aunt in Ontario, saying are your doors locked?
What's going on down there?
And Sharon starts to look it up, and as I come downstairs, she says, you know, Aunt Sheila called and said gave us this warning to be careful. Then we looked on you know, this is nine o'clock in the morning, and she said, there's something like a guy, a policeman has gone kind of crazy and killed some people up in some place called Portapec.
I didn't even know where it was.
I've lived in Nova Scotia for twenty one years and I wasn't really aware of quarter a Pick and it's about two hours north of me, a two hour drive.
And then I went online and.
I started to look and what the RCMP had done was in the This event begins around ten o'clock at night on a Saturday night, is COVID lockdown. Bars aren't open, restaurants aren't open. After it begins around midnight, after midnight the RCMP started. I guess the first one is just before midnight, eleven thirty four, So the RCMP but a tweet saying RCMP responding to sounds of gunshots.
In Porta Peck.
So they're saying this at eleven thirty four, but it's an hour and a half after the event began, and more than an hour.
After they were actually on SEATOW.
And then throughout the night they issue sporadic a couple
of sporadic tweets. This is real Nova Scotia. Nobody's on Twitter and tweets don't wait you up and tell you to lock your doors or whatever, because largely people don't lock your doors around here, and then by the morning people there are more tweets because suddenly, around nine thirty there's a fire forty minute drive away from Quartapeck, thirty five to forty minute drive away from porta Peck in college place called Wentworth, and then there's subsequently reports of
car accidents, women shot, and then they keep putting out tweets, but they're always running behind the time and they're not accurate about what's happening. And this goes on. They never put out a public alert, although there's a public alert system, And when the episode finally ends around eleven thirty that morning, Workman had driven probably two hundred kilometers which is probably one hundred and forty miles and actually runs into a
MOUNTI is killed just outside of Halifax Airport. So this is its craziness because at no point during this rampage in which twenty two people die nine on the Sunday the RCMP put up an effective roadblock. Do they get in front of them, do they swarm the scene. They're like entirely paralyzed and running around in circles like Keystone cops. And after Workman is killed, which we'll get to more detail later, they spend three hours saying that they have
the suspect in custody. Wow, when everyone knows he's dead. He's lying there with his chin on the ground at the gas station and it's been photographed. So their behavior is absolutely curious, and that got me into the right away. The last part of this is my glass studio is about one hundred and twenty five feet from my house down the road, so I went up to feed the cats, and the first thing it happened was I was walking down the road when they said there's one tweet that
said the suspect is driving a police car. When they had to finally admit he who's driving a police car in the morning, they said, we've just slurred.
He's driving a.
Police car and he could be anywhere in Nova Scotia. That's what it said on the he could be anywhere
in Nova Scotia. Understand, Nova Scotia seems like a small place, but if you go from the east end of Nova Scota, the east side of the most eastern part of Nova Scotia and Cape Bretton Duns the Cabot Trail Sydney Nova Scotia down to the most westerly part, say Yarmouth, Barrington Bay of FUNDI that area is large enough to encompass all the cities and population in the United States from Boston to Virginia, including New York, Philadelphia, you know, Baltimore, Washington.
That's how much territory there is there. And they say he could be anywhere in Nova Scotia. We have no idea where he is. I'm walking down to my workshop. I'm thinking what happens if.
He comes up the road? What am I going to do?
And that's what most Nova Scotia is felt at that time. I thought, if I see a police cart, do I run to the studio and lock the door? But then Sharon's gonna be alone in the house. Do I call her while she had time enough to respond and like, I don't know what's going on. And that's the state of panic, the level of panic that existed everywhere because of the inability of the RCNP to confront the situation and control it.
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free today on the App Store. Or Google Play. You'll even get five dollars worth of in game rewards when you reach level five. That's friends without the r best Fiends. Now, we mentioned the narrati that was being distributed by the RCMP in this ongoing incredible event, murderous event, stretched over the two days. Let's find out what you do. Find out finally about what really transpired on the eighteenth and the nineteenth, despite what the RCMP had said, well.
The RCP response from the beginning. They had a couple of press conferences where the officers in charge were like red faced and dumbfounded.
They had no idea what was going on.
It was obvious, and yet the RCMP took the position that their response was perfect and they wouldn't do it any different, even the use of Twitter. The Chief Superintendent, Chris Leather said they would do the same thing again in spite of the evidence that was the wrong thing to do.
The narrative that.
The RCMP wanted to put out was that this was a domestic violence situation gone bad, that there had been a virtual party at the warehouse with a couple in Maine and one of the couples said, oh, it's your nineteenth anniversary next year twenty you should have a recommitment ceremony.
And apparently this led to some kind of tiff between Banfield and workmen, and then eventually he ends up killing thirteen people in his neighborhood, burning down his cottage, burning down his warehouse and burning down the house of the galuncheons with them, and the house of John Zall and Elizabeth Joanne Thomas who lived down the road from him.
And Zaul was an.
American from Minnesota, I believe, who's moved to Quortapit for a peaceful lifetime. So yeah, all this crazy, they said, this craziness happened, and they were just befuddled by it.
And I looked at it and I thought, oh, And another part of it was that Banfield had been handcuffed, beaten locked in the back of one of Wortman's decommissioned police cars, had escaped, crawled through the woods, and hid in the books for eight and a half hours, while wearing yoga pants and the spandex top, had on, no shoes, no gloves, no overcoat, nothing. In fact, she threw the overcoat the coach she had away, she said, and she
survived for eight hours and didn't suffer any frostbite. So I thought, this story just doesn't make sense, you know, like there's something not right about this story. And I tried to help other journalists tell the story, because that was my first sort of plan. I know a lot about the RCMP. I've been out of this game for a long time. I'll help other journalists, and I got them to do a couple of stories, a couple of
journalists to do a couple of stories. But it became obvious after about three weeks that the interest was fading away in there, moving on to other things, partly because the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, in his first or second comment on the matter, said that the name of Gabriel Wortman should not be repeated and because this would only sort of glorify his infamy. I think those are the exact words you used, and I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah,
you could say that, you know, cheap sentiment. You know, people go, yeah, raw, Rob is the prime minister. Unfortunately, virtually every journalist in Canada took that message to heart, and you know, and sort of an exacerbating example of wokeism. Nobody would Dame Wortman. Nobody would Dame Banfield because she was considered a victim right off the bat. And I said, well, nobody would name any Nobody would name the officers who
responded because they were traumatized. I said, this is like wocism and it's worst and if I try, you know. And eventually I got so frustrated I wrote an article just for myself, like one Monday, I wrote it. I said, I don't know we're going to publish it. So I try to get it published and no one would publish it. And eventually a reporter came along named Stephen Marr, working from Claims magazine, which is a national magazine in Canada, and he was doing a story and I said, uh.
He said, what would you look at? And I said, well, I would look at Without getting into too much detail here, I says, I would look at the children who were trapped in the basement and leasa mccully's house for hours. He goes, well, where did you get that? I said, I read obituaries.
You know.
One of the nice things about the Halifax Chronicle Herald is that it has the greatest obituaries in the world. Sometimes they're colorful and informative, and so I wrote this. He wrote an article and then he said, I said, I've written this article in this column, and he looked at it and he says he gave it to his editors and they ran it as a sidebar to his story.
And in that column, I said, you know, every time the RCMP gets in trouble, you try to comment on it, and people say, this is not the time for recrimination. You know, wait till a later date. So I kept waiting, you know, for a couple of weeks, and eventually nobody wants to hear the story anymore because there's never a time for recrimination. That time never comes. So I said the last line of my article was now is the time for recriminations and basically declared that I was getting
involved in the story. And that led to sources jumping out of the woodword literally saying, you're on the story.
We want to talk to you.
And so here I am a glass artist, Canada's only investigative glass artists, as it were, and people immediately recognized that I was a person to go to with information.
Now you talk about people coming forward, what is the kind of information that you first have via this person coming forward?
Well, the first person that really comes forward though, you know, the number of people came forward, But the one that really sort of caught my attention was one Saturday afternoon, Sharon and I were in the kitchen and her cell phone ring. You know, we have separate cell phones, we have landlines, you know, in our business, we have lots of phones. But her cell phone rang, and I.
And then sharing answers, and it says it's for you, And I said, uh, hello, and he says hi, Paul, and I go yeah, and he says and I first, I says, why are you calling Sharon McNamara to get to me?
He says her line is associated with you. I go right away, I know I'm talking to someone inside. Yeah, you know, because I'd used her line a couple of times when traveling where I saw Once I saw a drunk driver and I called nine one one. Another time when we're driving back from Philadelphia, and I was in New Brunswick and I saw ten o'clock at night at somebody huddled by the road. I thought they might be trying to commit suicide or something in a freezing night,
and I called nine one one to get help for them. Anyway, this caller said laid me through what they knew was going on, and they said, what really happened is crazier than that. Twenty two people dying. What they're trying to do. And he said, and I'd asked questions of this person I'm calling it He and said, you know, like went through what I knew about the story. I said, well, I know Workman was smuggling cigarettes and drugs. No, no,
it's worse than that. Well, what I went through all these various scenarios, and the sour said, they're destroying evidence and manipulating evidence now to cover up what.
They're doing what they did.
And I thought, well, what could it possibly be? And then I talked to Steven mor about it, and he said, well, maybe someone's a confidential police informant in this. He says, that sort of fits. We don't know that, but we I sort of use that sort of as a way of looking at this story of theory that I could
knock down. Okay, let's use this as an operating theory that Workman or someone close to him has a has a relationship, a secret relationship with the police, either as a confidential informant or as a police agent, or something like that that sort of explains a lot of things, including the replica police card, because one of the things about biker gangs, and especially biker gangs, there's a lot of there's like fourteen different biker clubs in Nova Scotia,
partly as a testimony to the five thousand or three thousand, five hundred kilometers of coastline, and it's a place for smuggling, always has been, so bikers like this place. And one of the things bikers did over the years in Toronto, like several years ago, was pretend to be policemen well a moving drugs around, but also by robbing other drug dealers and things like that. And I thought, well, this is not as far fetched as it seems. So I set out trying to disprove that he or someone close
to him was an agent. And that was the first step in my thinking.
Okay, so how do you try to eliminate this as a as an idea, how do you eliminate the.
Well, it's difficult because under the protocols policing protocols both of all police forces, confidential informants are never identified. In Canada, the RCMPS. We obtained the RCMP's undercover manual Code Undercover Manual, and in it it describes that the police can lie about the existence or identity of an RCMP officer that can never or an undercover agent can never reveal it except when asked by a judge in a properly functioning court. So it's not going to be easy to prove this.
But one of the things that stood out to me was mar had heard that Workman had taken out, had received a million dollars delivered by a brig truck to his dentist office on Portland Street and Dartmouth in the days before April eighteen. That I heard from an individual source, my own individual source separate that it was five hundred thousand dollars and was delivered to Workman at his office
by brains. I thought, this is crazy, Like how would we even know this, that there's these transactions going on?
Like how can that happen? Right?
Like who's saying this is?
This is insane.
So I couldn't get anything into mainstream newspapers because they were all, you know, they're not going to name Worman by name, they're not going to name Banfield, they're not going to talk about anything. They saw me as a conspiracy theorist, because that's what the RCMP says about me, because although everything I write is factual. So I had to figure out another way to tell the story. So what's the best way to reach everyday people. Get yourself
on talk radio. So I got myself on the Rick Howse show and sort of convinced Brick that I had interesting things to say. Well, I wrote some pieces for an online newspaper, the Hell Fact Examiner, so I figured it was a limited audience, but as long as I get stuff published that I have something to talk about. So I got on Rick how and one day I said, Torec how on the show, like I'd end every little segment with some sort of little missive like, is there
anyone out there who can help me with this? Or you know, the Hell's Angels may be involved in this. You know, back in the days, the Hell's Angels used to have a public relations spokesman in Alberta, unbelievable as it sounds, And I said, do they have anyone like that in Nova Scotia? Can you know the Hell's Angels contact me? I have some questions for them. And I remember coming out of that interview and out of my office and Sharon was in the kitchen monitoring it because
it was on tape delay and Insurance says. I come out and Shares says, did you just invite the Hell's agels to our house?
I go, yeah, It's like I have.
No problem with them. I've dealt with bikers all my life. You know, it's my role as a journalist. You know that I'm not hurting their business. I've just got some questions anyway. One of the questions I asked was, we have this story that workman got a million dollars or five hundred thousand dollars delivered by breaks to his office. Does anyone out there know about this?
Anyone else? Does anyone else have any details? And I no.
Sooner got off the phone and I got a call from someone and saying it was four hundred and seventy five thousand, and I said, well, how do you know that? He says, I have a video of him picking it up at the Brinks office in Dartmouth.
You have the video, It's on video. He goes yeah.
And then we gave this long that I described this long involved process of getting the video, and so we do release the video of this sensational video of we're picking up the four hundred and seventy five thousand in one of his decommissioned police cars. Well, the RCMP immediately says, comes out and says, oh, that was just him clearing out his bank accounts.
And then we had.
This former you know the you know, FBI, Counterintelligence and CIA are in the States. Well, in Canada, CEASES, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which is a civilian investigative body for counterintelligence. A next CEASES agent calls McClane's magazines. Oh no, no, that's just a normal process. A lot of times people want to take money out, they just go to Brinks directly and get the money. And I talked to people from Branks, and I can't find anyone who's ever done.
Eventually I find another former c RCMP informat who says, that's exactly how we do it. He says, I can't give you any more than I did it twice once at a BRIKS location in one city and another one that brings location in the other city. And there were significant, sort of six figure amounts that he took out his flash bunny for bike your draw biker.
Activities or stuff.
So it is a process that sort of raises the question about workman's finances and did he have a relationship with the police. Is it conclusive? Hell no, but it raises suspicions. And when you get the government and the RCMP saying, oh, it's just a normal thing, it's not a normal thing. And then of course I immediately had my distant cousins in the mainstream media saying that, oh, here he is conspiracy theorist.
Again.
I had the bloody tapes. What is the conspiracy theory here? I'm just saying, and I have the manual saying how it works. So this has always been in the background of the mainstream media is sort of shooting down anything I've done because they say, oh, yeah, you're just digging around for conspiracies, and so that's their first instinct just to shoot me, you know, shoot the messenger.
But I just kept moving on.
Let's just this as an opportunity to stop for a second for this these messages.
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Now you talked about that. But what we haven't talked about, and for those people listening, we are going to this will be part one of two parts of this incredible story and about discussing this incredible book, twenty two murders. Now, you in your investigation are finding things that are surprising to you and then given your experience investigating the RCMP,
not so surprising. But what we haven't talked about is what officially and why officially the RCMP wanted to or were behind what you say when they're in their tweets in the reports. Why would they be free and loose with the facts with this case and what why would they do that? What was the advantage of them having their own narrative contrary to what you discovered.
Well, I think that putting it in domess. To me, it was like a scenario, a narrative that was written on the back of a cigarette package. Okay, we're going to say Lisa Banfield was a victim of domestic violence and this is a thing that got out of control, and he was a clever perpetrator who basically out foxed us and out maneuvered us.
And it's unfortunate, but we got up at the end of the day. We're all heroes.
That's an easy story to sell.
But what it and.
People bought it for a while, but then you start to break it down into its components and you start to see that, well, there's not that many roads. Look on a map for Porta pick Nova, Scotia. Not that many roads out of there in the middle of the night. They didn't block anything off. They didn't have the proper equipment.
They've been ordered.
After previous bounties were killed in two thousand and five, two thousand and six in Spiritwood, Alberta in Saskatchewan four and mare Thorpe, Alberta three in Monkedin in twenty fourteen, they were ordered to improve and upgrade alder equipment. They never did that. They were ordered fifteen years ago that members on the road should have a night vision equipment didn't have that. Their command structure was completely filed up.
Everything about them was filed up. But it raised the question of other questions, Like early on in the story, it was disclosed that back in twenty eleven ers a workman had threatened to kill a policeman. That file had disappeared from their files. They never even followed up on it, which raised the question again did Wortman have a special relationship with the RCMP, either directly or because his relatives were our CNP members, Like what was going on? Did
the RCNP know him? There's evidence that he partied with RCNP members, not only at a cottages, but there were some parties in Portapic that might best be described as swinger parties that attracted sort of a mix of criminals and police and soldiers and stuff like that. So there's a lot of dirt going on here behind the scenes.
And if he was.
In the employee or someone close to him was in the employee of the RCMP, what were they doing. And I began to look at well, if he was an informant, well who was he informing on? And it became clear to me. It wasn't so much Nova Scotia. But next story in New Brunswick directly has a land border with
Maine where a lot of criminal activity goes on. And if you look at what was going on in New Brunswig ten days before this, charges were laid against two Hells Angels and two Hells Angels support members support club members as the end of a large investigation that had been going on targeting two members of the Hell's Angels nomads, Robin Moulton and and Emery Pitt Martin. Now that are these related? Is this what happened? The operation came down, and then when the charges were laid, I got the
search warrants. And in the search warrants, one of the things that was used to get these guys was a press for pressing drugs and things like that. Sure, and in it a camera was installed. Presses like that are the kind of things workmen could.
Buy through his d interest business.
So I raised this issue, but it's not been confirmed.
We don't know.
I'm just looking around like I'm trying to explain this. I'm not sure where I left off there where I was supposed to go.
But what you're talking about, is that what you found was that the RCMP had a narrative also for why buildings were burnt down, certain buildings were burnt down and others weren't, and why he was able to go to certain places and why certain people were targeted. That you say was very frustrating because it didn't make a lot of sense.
Well, it didn't make sense because they've never really established a timeline who was killed first, who you know, Like one of the things they said at the beginning was Wortman left by ten thirty five pm by the road, the Blueberry Patch Road, which is if you look on a map, you'll see quortera pit beach road. To the
east is Orchard Beach Drive. Then there's a cresset called Quortapic Crescent, and just to the east of that, beyond the tree line, there's a big open field of blueberries, and there's a path that runs up along the tree line up to a ruddy old loop called Brown Loop that exits onto highway to a two lane old highway that you can get out of there. They said he went up there at ten thirty five. That's the original story. And then they when I questioned that they said, well,
he left at ten forty five. But then I found a witness, Dean Dillman, who was at the top of Brown Loop, at the top of the Bluberry Path at ten thirty eighties.
That he didn't come this way.
I was there and we could prove he was there. So then they fudged how he got away and they couldn't really make the timeline fit. And then recently we found out that an innocent visitor to the community, Corey Ellison, who saw the fire where his father's place is about three hundred yards south of the warehouse. He saw the flames, him and his brother, he walked up the road and he was we now know from his phone records he was taking pictures in his phone. He was taking pictures
at ten forty when he was shot. Well, then that raised questions of who shot Corey Ellison because the RCNPS first had he left at ten thirty five, They say were they first got there at ten twenty six, They made this long, cecuitous route and then they found Corey Ellison's body at ten forty nine, and that's the story they're sticking to. But then Corey Elison's brother, Clinton Ellison said, I was walking up the road to find my brother, and these people with flashlights chased me, and then I
had to go hide in the woods. And then he called his father, and his father called nine one one at ten fifty nine, So that it seems that they're all there, including the police, and it raises the question did the police accidentally shoot Corey Ellison? So that becomes part of it. And right across the street is least of Becully's body by the fence. Well when did she die? Was she at the beginning, at the end, did she die around the time Corey Ellison died. It's not really clear.
And the forensic evidence that's now being submitted to the Mascosi Commission is sort of hit and miss. It's quite clear that the RCMP I didn't do much in the work of era of forensics on anyone or gunshot residue or things you would expect, which is very suspicious and adds to the suspicion.
So we don't know what happened.
What the timeline was is a shifting timeline, and it seems clear that workman in his replica police car may have just driven past all the other RCMP cars that were there, who were supposed to be on point duty and just left the scene, driving past the RCMP people who were responding. So that's part of the embarrassment and what the RCNP wants to cover.
So you've got all of.
These elements that he had, the police cars that he committed, the murders that he did, all of these things that there may be an association with the mound, a hidden association that they're hiding, that they deny or they're hiding, but nothing is conclusive. It's just this maw of craziness trying to figure out this story.
I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about these twenty two murders, investigating the massacres,
cover up and obstacles to justice in Nova Scotia. And as I mentioned earlier, this is going to be We're going to continue this discussion next week because what we haven't gone through is the heartbreaking and fascinating, an incredible account of all the people that he murdered, the twenty two murders, the police officer that was killed unsuspecting, the police officer that was wounded, but many of what you mentioned,
Corey Ellison, Good Samaritans, innocent bystanders, people that were uninformed, misinformed that ended up casualties in this incredible as you talk, massacres. So thank you so much, Paul Plango for twenty two murders investigating the massacres cover up and obstacles to justice in Nova Scotia and we will continue next week. Thank you so much, Paul Plango.
Thank you,