Gender-based violence experts say it appears little has changed within the RCMP since police dismissed a Nova Scotia woman who reported having been sexually assaulted and harassed by a man who later murdered her.
On Thursday, an independent police watchdog released a report saying the RCMP mishandled every aspect of Susan Butlin’s case. The 58-year-old was murdered on Sept. 17, 2017, by Ernie Ross (Junior) Duggan, who lived next door to her in the rural community of Bayhead, along the northern coast of mainland Nova Scotia.
Kristina Fifield, a Halifax-based trauma therapist who works with survivors of gender-based violence, says victims are still being dismissed or not believed by police when they reach out for help.
“It’s been some years since (Butlin’s) murder, but things have not shifted. How violence is normalized by police, how misogyny is deeply embedded within policing services, there’s a culture of normalization around this type of violence,” Fifield said in an interview Thursday.
“The RCMP and our province need to sit with that uncomfortable truth, because what’s happening right now is denial around just how bad this is,” she said.
Duggan shot Butlin inside her home about a month after she told police he had sexually assaulted her and was harassing and intimidating her. Police told Butlin there were no grounds to lay criminal charges against Duggan, and they officially closed her sexual assault complaint file three days before he killed her.
In the weeks leading up to her murder, Butlin became increasingly scared of Duggan and slept with a baseball bat next to her in bed, said Thursday’s report by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission. “She told several friends and family members that she believed Mr. Duggan was going to kill her,” reads the report.
The commission’s investigation into Butlin’s case found that police failed to appreciate the seriousness of the escalating violence — even after Duggan’s spouse had called 911 to report that she was afraid her husband would kill Butlin.
Myrna Dawson, the director of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, said that while the report details how the police investigation into Butlin’s case was mishandled at every turn, “I would argue there wasn’t actually an investigation at all.”
“It appears like nothing actually happened, and I’m not quite sure we would find that much is different now,” Dawson added.
In an emailed statement Friday, Nova Scotia RCMP spokesperson Cindy Bayers said the RCMP has strengthened its sexual assault investigations and trauma-informed approach training in the last number of years and increased the number of investigators with specialized training who are dedicated to sexual assault and intimate partner violence investigations.
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Dan Morrow, Nova Scotia RCMP assistant commissioner and commanding officer, said in an emailed statement Thursday, “We failed Ms. Butlin and her family at multiple levels.”
“It’s clear our investigation was inadequate and different steps could have been taken,” Morrow said, adding that since Butlin’s murder, the RCMP has also modified supervision and oversight protocols for those cases.
Police are now reviewing all sexual assault investigations involving Cpl. Patrick Crooks — the lead officer in the botched Butlin investigation — that did not result in charges, Bayers said in an email Thursday.
Crooks, who remains an active member of the Nova Scotia RCMP, was a constable at the time of Butlin’s killing and was promoted to corporal in July 2025. Crooks and the other RCMP members named in the commission’s report have received formal notifications on their files and have been required to complete additional training and receive operation guidance from senior supervisors, Bayers said.
Dawson said the fact that Crooks was promoted, about a year after the commission released its interim report into Butlin’s case, “sends a message that the policing institution doesn’t care about violence against women, it doesn’t care about sexual violence and there’s no accountability.”
“In what other profession would anyone screw up this bad and still even have a job?” she added.
Fifield was an expert panel member during the inquiry into the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. She said the RCMP’s handling of Butlin’s complaint reminds her of how police handled reports of violence and threats by Gabriel Wortman in the years leading up to the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history.
He killed 22 people, including a pregnant woman, during a 13-hour rampage that began after he brutally assaulted his partner.
“With the abuse and violence that (Wortman) used, not just with his common-law partner, other people too … there was a long history, patterns of abuse and it just was so normalized,” Fifield said.
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She is also a member of the committee monitoring the responses by government and the RCMP to the inquiry’s recommendations.
Const. Gregory Wiley, an officer in Butlin’s case, was also involved in a 2010 police call at Wortman’s home.
According to the commission’s report, when responding to Butlin’s harassment complaint, Wiley failed to conduct basic police database checks, did not follow up on information provided by Butlin, failed to recognize the severity of her concerns and “did not conduct any investigative steps.”
Wiley is also the officer who was asked to look into whether Wortman had firearms at his home in Portapique, N.S., in 2010. Around that time, Wortman had threatened to kill his parents in New Brunswick. The RCMP investigation into the alleged death threat did not lead to any charges.
Fifield said police and the provincial government need to create strong accountability measures to prevent future tragedies and protect victims. “This has to be more than sending someone to a training. We need to see that real accountability mechanisms are put in place,” Fifield said.
Dawson agrees. Butlin “was fearful enough to go to police, and then to be dismissed like this must have been awful…. This has to be a watershed moment, another watershed moment, with respect to Nova Scotia RCMP,” said Dawson, who is also a professor at the University of Guelph’s department of sociology and anthropology.
Claudia Chender, leader of the Opposition NDP, said in an interview Thursday the report examining Butlin’s “heartbreaking and enraging” story is further reminder that the provincial government needs to ramp up efforts to tackle gender-based violence and hold the RCMP to account.
“It’s literally a matter of life and death … if we don’t deal with the epidemic of intimate partner violence, that will end up with people losing their lives,” she said.
In a statement Thursday, Justice Minister Scott Armstrong said the Progressive Conservative government will review the report and continue working with policing and justice partners to support meaningful improvements.
“We have confidence that the provincial police have, and will continue to, make the changes necessary to ensure compliance with the recommendations in this report,” he said.
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