Dean Beeby offers Mass Murder, Police Mayhem, in which the former Canadian Press reporter tries to sort out the complex events while wading through the commission’s voluminous research and mostly indigestible findings. The result is a well-written précis of the full report, with little embroidery.

— Literary Review of Canada

In this book Dean Beeby distills the extensive research of the Mass Casualty Commission into a readable account of exactly what happened during 13 chaotic hours when 22 Nova Scotians were murdered in April 2020.

The commission tracked the perpetrator’s movements and pieced together the actions of all involved RCMP members. The Mounties’ fatal errors – failing to believe citizens reporting that the murderer was driving a replica RCMP car and failing to recognize his back road escape route among many others – are documented in the report and set out in this book.

Dean Beeby describes the background to these events, including the numerous times the killer was involved with police and their repeated failures to deal with the danger he represented to his community and the public.

The Commission made 130 recommendations for action, two-thirds of them dealing with the RCMP. Dean Beeby offers a plain language description of each of these recommendations, enabling readers to keep track of how the RCMP and other agencies respond to the commission’s demands for major reforms.

The Mass Casualty Commission’s exhaustive investigation cost almost $50 million, and yielded a massive final report. The report was published in seven volumes of 3,000 pages in total. This book is intended to give readers access to the key content of this important public record.

Dean Beeby was born in Halifax and grew up in Edmonton, Kingston, Kitchener, Dorval, and Toronto. He earned a BA in History from York University and a MA in History from the University of Toronto. He has been a career journalist since 1981, joining the Canadian Press in 1983. In 1987/88 he covered Parliament Hill for CP and in 1988 he became their Toronto Business Editor. He has lived in Halifax since 1990 where he is the Canadian Press Bureau Chief for the Atlantic region. Dean Beeby is a recognized authority on search and rescue. As a journalist, he has covered many disasters including the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111, for which CP Atlantic Bureau won a National Newspaper Award. Beeby is the author of In a Crystal Land: Canadian Explorers in Antarctica and Cargo of Lies: The True Story of a Nazi Double Agent in Canada. He has been a contributor to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, The Canadian Encyclopedia, and the journal Ontario History. In 1987, he was co-editor of Moscow Despatches: Inside Cold War Russia. Beeby is an ardent advocate and user of freedom of information laws, including the federal Access to Information Act. He has been a speaker and panelist at numerous conferences and seminars, including those organized by the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Canadian Newspaper Association and the federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Dean Beeby's profile page

Dean Beeby offers Mass Murder, Police Mayhem, in which the former Canadian Press reporter tries to sort out the complex events while wading through the commission’s voluminous research and mostly indigestible findings. The result is a well-written précis of the full report, with little embroidery.