Mounties who killed N.S. gunman testify they were looking for someone 'vindictive' and 'evil'

Const. Craig Hubley knew he was dealing with a different kind of threat when in Portapique, N.S., he saw Jamie and Greg Blair's little dog, its hind end mangled by a rifle's bullet.

The RCMP dog handler realized the gunman he sought was the type of person so intent on causing harm that he would shoot a family pet that weighed no more than 20 pounds.

"That animal for me was poignant because I've been to other murder scenes, crimes of passion, but never where someone would vent rage like that," Hubley testified Thursday at a public inquiry in Halifax examining the April 2020 mass shootings.

"I believed he was extremely dangerous."

The Blairs were among the 13 people murdered in the rural subdivision. The couple's two young sons had witnessed their parents die and managed to escape. When police arrived at the scene on the morning of April 19, 2020, they found the Blairs' miniature pinscher wounded and waiting on the step where one of its owners had been killed hours earlier.

Hubley and other RCMP officers were assessing the carnage during a "lull" as they evacuated homes and looked for signs of the killer. 

Const. Ben MacLeod, a member of the RCMP's tactical team, said the scene — which included two bodies on the side of a road — didn't compare to any murder or sudden death he'd ever attended. 

"Vindictiveness is a good word and evil is a good word.… To do that was evil," he said.

MacLeod had his own realization about the man who caused the horror when he picked up Lisa Banfield, the gunman's spouse, after she appeared at a neighbour's around dawn. 

Experience had many officers positing that the gunman had killed himself in the woods, MacLeod said, but their perspective shifted when they saw the man's partner, who was "distraught" and nervous to be exposed as she got into a police vehicle. 

"To see she was still so scared that he was searching for her kind of clicked and made us think — made myself think too — that he was still out there ready to finish," MacLeod testified. 

Hours later, Hubley and MacLeod faced the killer at a gas pump in Enfield, N.S., and recounted together in a witness panel the seconds that prompted them to fire 23 bullets, killing Gabriel Wortman.

By that point, he'd been on the loose for more than 13 hours, travelled nearly 200 kilometres and had killed 22 people, among them many strangers, including a pregnant woman and an RCMP officer, Const. Heidi Stevenson. Through much of the rampage, he was driving a decommissioned cruiser he'd outfitted to be identical to a real one. 

MacLeod also reflected on the attention the incident has brought to him and Hubley for killing the gunman, and the toll the past two years have taken on their fellow first responders.