22 murders : investigating the massacres, cover-up and obstacles to justice in Nova Scotia / Paul Palango.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part One. An epic failure in policing. Captain Portapique -- A Whisper in the Night -- A Sunday Stroll ... Back into Journalism -- The Vagabond Coppers -- Chief Superintendent Chris Leather -- A Mountie Dies -- Save the Buffalo! -- Frank by Name, Frank by Nature -- The Shifting and Shifty Narrative -- The First Massacre -- The Commissionaire's Error and a Mountie's Twitch -- The Interlude Between the Massacres -- The Second Massacre, Part l: Hunter Road -- The Second Massacre, Part 2: No Road Blocks -- The Second Massacre, Part 3: A Failure to Communicate -- A Battleship Trapped on a Sandbar -- Part Two. The search for the truth. A Little Birdie Drops a Dime -- Gabriel Wortman: The Formative Years -- Battling the Smurfs and Invoking My Grandmother -- Not a White Picket Fence Life -- Dana, Eddie and a Ford Taurus -- Peter Alan Griffon and the Hells Angels -- The Brink's Job and Maclean's Magazine -- The Corporal in the Bushes -- Families March on the RCMP-Then Declare Victory -- Leon Joudrey, the Two Lisas and Cyndi -- New Brunswick: Outlaw Bikers and Dead Informants -- The Weeks, Days and Hours Leading up to the Massacres -- Transparency, One Leaf at a Time -- A Snoring Husband Leads to RCMP Secrets -- Spring Has Sprung and a Robin Is Caught-A Butcher, Too -- True Blue and the 911 Tapes -- The Execution of Gabriel Wortman -- A Massacre? What Cover-up? -- A Note on Sources -- Acknowledgements -- Index.

As news broke of a killer rampaging across the tiny community of Portapique, Nova Scotia, late on April 18, 2020, 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 Wortman after an officer shot and killed him at a gas station during a chance encounter. Though retired as an investigative journalist and author, Paul Palango spent much of his career reporting on Canada's troubled national police force. Watching the RCMP stumble through the Portapique massacre, only a few hours from his Nova Scotia home, Palango knew the story behind the headlines was more complicated and damning than anyone was willing to admit. With the COVID-19 lockdown sealing off the Maritimes, no journalist in the province knew the RCMP better than Palango 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 unearthing the collision of failure and malfeasance that cost a quiet community 22 innocent lives.