22 Murders by Paul Palango

Author:Paul Palango [Palango, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2022-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

With all the heat he was drawing from people complaining about him to police, Wortman was perilously close to being charged with a criminal offence. That would have been disastrous for his business. He ripped a page out of the RCMP’s crisis management handbook: he buffed his reputation with some instant positive headlines.

Sheri Hendsbee, a single mother who claimed to have lost all her teeth due to a reaction to a medication, was featured on a CTV News broadcast on July 23, 2014. She could not afford to buy dentures. Wortman saw the broadcast and offered her a free set of dentures. “If my mom were here today, she always used to tell me that there’s angels among us that walk on the face of the earth, and to me, that’s what those people are,” the ecstatic Hendsbee told CTV News.

Wortman was suddenly a local hero. “My heart went out to her,” he said in an interview. “There’s so many ways for people to get dentures, but it seems like the people who really need them are the people who are getting left behind.”

Wortman was looking more and more like a modern-day Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He even let another denturist use his shop on Saturdays for her own practice and didn’t charge her rent for years.

In his private life, however, Wortman was making regular excursions to Maine, where he was picking up his motorcycle parts and smuggling into Canada everything from cigarettes and alcohol to guns and explosives. The trips were a real-life version of Easy Rider, and in the two years before the massacres, he made the journey fifteen times, sometimes accompanied by Banfield, who friends described as being in love with all things American. Wortman had been pre-screened for a NEXUS card as a “trustworthy traveller,” which usually allowed him to breeze through customs. During one week in April and May 2019, authorities said, Wortman crossed back and forth five times, once returning to the United States just thirteen minutes after he had left. On at least one occasion (date and reason unknown), Canadian customs officials flagged him down and searched him and his vehicle.

Banfield later said Wortman was outraged by the search and called it harassment. She said he complained vociferously to the Canada Border Services Agency, which fit with his character, and that the CBSA eventually sent him a letter of apology. No one has ever seen the letter, and law enforcement sources are skeptical that it exists. There might be a rare exception deep in the bowels of CBSA headquarters, but customs and immigration officers are not known to be apologetic types.

Banfield told the RCMP in her post-massacres interviews that Wortman hadn’t smuggled anything in from Maine when she was with him in the vehicle.

I tucked all that information into a special compartment deep inside my memory banks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.