The violence began behind closed doors. It ended in Canada’s worst mass shooting

For years, Lisa Banfield stayed silent, her voice stifled by her partner of 19 years — a man who physically and psychologically abused her for the bulk of their relationship and then went on to kill 22 people across rural Nova Scotia over 13 hours in April 2020.

Though sharing her story six years later has been criticized by some of the victims’ families, Banfield, as a longtime survivor of intimate partner violence, says she can no longer stay quiet. 

Her experiences, documented in a book released Tuesday, speak to a wider truth, she says: that the violence that begins behind closed doors can spill into society; that the epidemic of domestic violence that exists in Nova Scotia — in much of this country — is a public health issue, not a private matter. 

“I’ve had more people, stories of people saying [that] because I spoke up, it gave them strength and direction to be able to say, ‘I need help too,'” she told The Current host Matt Galloway. 

“People are going to say whatever they want about me and judge me — but if I could help one person throughout all of this, I can take that.”

The First Survivor: Life With Canada’s Deadliest Mass Shooter details Banfield’s common-law relationship with Gabriel Wortman in the years leading up to the events of April 18 and 19, 2020, when Wortman, disguised as a Mountie, killed 22 people across a 200-kilometre stretch of Nova Scotia before he was fatally shot by police.

But the book reveals how Banfield’s early life was also shaped by violence. She was molested at 14 as a babysitter, a life-changing moment her father brushed off. He used “the belt” on her himself and his struggle with alcohol abuse seeped into his family life. 

These experiences in her rural home in Beaver Bank, N.S., in the 1970s created a tight connection among her and her eight siblings.

But they also very likely harmed her ability to form healthy relationships as an adult, says Kristina Fifield, a trauma therapist and registered social worker who was a participant in the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission, which examined the events of April 2020. 

“There’s some really important pieces of Lisa’s story that I think can help society better understand and respond to the epidemic of gender-based violence,” Fifield said.

She notes, too, that Wortman had been abused as a child, with Banfield’s book detailing how, as an adult, he attacked his father in response. 

What’s important about these revelations, Fifield said, is that they highlight how critical it is to increase violence prevention and early intervention programs targeting high-risk boys and men. 

Boys who are physically abused are more likely to become abusive as men to a future partner or children, according to findings from the Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children in Ontario.

“That’s why accountability and early intervention is so important in these situations,” Fifield said. “The longer a person … has used violence, they continue using violence and it goes on unchecked.”

In Banfield’s case, the abuse didn’t begin immediately. At first, Wortman seemed loving, she said, overwhelming her with gifts and attention. 

“He made me feel special, but over time that changed.” 

Slowly, a more pernicious form of intimate partner violence emerged: what’s known as coercive control. Wortman tried to isolate Banfield from her family, control her appearance and increase her financial dependence, having her sign documents that would negate any claim she might have to assets of the denture clinic they established together. 

The violence escalated. And so did the control: he threatened to harm her family, wanted to know who she was talking to and what she was doing. 

“He showed me parts that he was gentle, and he was kind,” she says. “But then on the flip side, he was a monster. And it was every day, it was an up-and-down, minute-to-minute struggle, not knowing what’s going to set him off.”

On the night of April 18, 2020, their 19th anniversary as a couple, she went to bed early after Wortman became verbally abusive. He later dragged her out of bed and started strangling and beating her; medical records would show he fractured her ribs and her vertebrae, according to the Mass Casualty Commission report. 

Wortman then set fire to their home in Portapique, N.S., and locked Banfield in the back of the replica RCMP cruiser he would use on his rampage across the province in the following hours.

He piled guns and ammunition into the front of the cruiser and told Banfield he would go to her sister’s house. When he left for a moment, she managed to slide through the barrier between the front and back seats and climbed out the front door, she says. He had taken her shoes and destroyed her phone so she ran, barefoot, into the woods.

She stayed in a hollowed-out tree until morning, tying her leggings into knots over her feet against the cold and breathing into her shirt to muffle the sound of her breath. 

She said she stayed there, terrified, worrying that if she ran to someone’s home she would put them at risk of Wortman’s violence. 

‘I don’t even know how I stayed’: Former partner of N.S. mass shooter

Now, she says, she lives with survivor’s guilt, something that resurfaces as she faces questions about why she stayed and why she bought ammunition for Wortman — the latter of which she faced charges for. 

Those charges were dropped in March 2022 and the case referred to a restorative justice process. The Mass Casualty Commission and numerous intimate partner violence experts who spoke with CBC News and the commission rejected the idea of her culpability, calling it “victim-blaming,” a misunderstanding of the power of coercive control.

“She is in no way responsible for the perpetrator’s actions but rather is a victim of his violent acts,” the commission found. 

Still, she faced stigma in the community.

“I was seen as a monster,” she told The Current. “I was seen as just like him.”

The publication of Banfield’s book has drawn criticism from some of the victims’ family members, who say it’s making them relive their trauma.

“She’s making money off of our family story and she’s taking away from the victims,” Tammy Oliver-McCurdie said. “The sympathy that she’s getting from this is challenging, because it’s taking away from the actual victims of the event.”

Oliver-McCurdie’s sister, brother-in-law and 17-year-old niece — Jolene Oliver, Aaron Tuck and Emily Tuck — were killed in the shooting. 

Lisa Banfield on why she feared going to police

CBC News contacted 10 family members to comment on the release of the book, but Oliver-McCurdie was the only one who agreed to an interview, though others expressed their unhappiness on the phone and through social media.

“I feel so sorry for those people because they’re hurt and they want answers and they want somebody to blame and he’s not here,” Banfield said. 

She recalls how she tried to apologize to Nick Beaton — whose pregnant wife, Kristen, was killed — during a hearing about the distribution of Wortman’s assets to his victims’ families as part of a class-action lawsuit.

“I walked over and gently put my hand on his shoulder,” she wrote in her book. “He turned slightly toward me, ‘I’m sorry for your loss and for the loss of the other families.'” But, she writes, he looked down without responding, so she walked away.

Fifield notes the “victim-blaming” Banfield experienced can create a chilling effect, encouraging women to stay silent and potentially to stay with their abusers. 

Both she and Banfield spoke about how they hope RCMP and police protocol will be updated to be more trauma-informed. And she said that since Banfield’s story came out, she has already heard from women who have since recognized unhealthy patterns in their own relationships. 

These stories matter, Fifield said. “Society needs to shift here with the way that they’re looking at victims and survivors.”