Conspiracy Cafe

A still from a video showing Gabriel Wortman in the Brinks office on March 30, 2020.

New evidence including a video of the killer raises questions about his activities prior to the Portapique shooting and RCMP transparency around the case

By Paul Palango, Stephen Maher, Shannon Gormley

June 17, 2020

The man who murdered 22 people in a two-day shooting rampage in Nova Scotia in late April withdrew $475,000 in cash 19 days before he donned an RCMP uniform and started gunning down his neighbours, contacts and random strangers.

Gabriel Wortman withdrew the money from the Brink’s office at 19 Ilsley Ave. in Dartmouth, N.S., on March 30, according to a source close to the police investigation, who provided Maclean’s with two videos.

The first video shows Wortman driving what appears to be one of his decommissioned white police cruisers into the fenced yard of the security facility. He is wearing a baseball cap and leather jacket. In the second video, taken inside, he conducts a transaction, then walks back to his cruiser with a carryall apparently filled with 100-dollar bills, according to the source, and stashes the bag in the trunk of his vehicle.

A uniformed Brink’s employee at the Dartmouth location said recently: “People are always surprised by how much money like that takes up so little space.”

That amount of hundreds would weigh less than five kilograms.

Wortman, a 51-year-old denturist, is said to have arranged the withdrawal from Brink’s after transferring the cash from an account at a major Canadian bank.

In Wortman’s last will and testament, a handwritten document he wrote in 2011, which was published last week, Wortman declared a number of properties assessed for about $700,000. The true real estate market value would likely be higher. He also declared about $500,000 in personal property, RRSPs and insurance policies.

The withdrawal of $475,000 suggests Wortman may have converted all of his liquid assets into cash or that he had a hidden stash of cash.

It is not clear what happened to the money from the moment the killer took it out of the Brink’s location to the time he was shot by RCMP officers during an attempted arrest at a gas station in Enfield, N.S., on April 19.

The lawyer for family members of the killer’s victims said Wednesday that the estate filing at probate court lists a large sum of cash, which he believes was recovered by the RCMP.

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