Warning: This story discusses school violence, sexual assault and suicide.
Bill Shepheard answered thousands of calls during his 35-year career as an Ottawa police officer. Many have receded from his memory. But the one he took on Oct. 27, 1975, remains clear in his mind.
That Monday afternoon, Shepheard was dispatched to St. Pius X High School for a call about someone with a gun. He figured it was a fight between roofers who were working on the school that day.
He never thought a student might be involved.
But what he soon witnessed in the hallway outside Classroom 71, and the larger tragedy that unfolded that day, would upend city residents’ views of what could and could not happen in Ottawa.
In a matter of seconds, an 18-year-old student at St. Pius had burst into the doorway of his religion class, opened fire with a sawed-off shotgun and wounded several students. The shooter, Robert Poulin, then killed himself with the gun in the hallway. One of his victims, 18-year-old Mark Hough, later died in hospital.
Shepheard was one of the first people to come across Poulin’s body. He didn’t know Poulin was the shooter or if there was more than one gunman. There were screams coming from the classroom where students had escaped by breaking the windows with chairs. Others lent what help they could to Hough and the other wounded.
“That’s awful for them to have to now live with that for the rest of their lives,” Shepheard says.
Someone from the classroom eventually pointed to Poulin’s body and explained there was no other shooter to find.
“That’s him there,” Shepheard was told.
Shepheard hadn’t trained for this. This kind of thing didn’t happen in Ottawa. Nor did he have anywhere to turn afterward, as many of his supervisors were from a military background, and strict.
“Nobody talked to me about it. Nobody asked me how I felt,” says Shepheard, now 78.
“We didn’t have any sympathy or anyone [saying], ‘Do you need help?’ There was none of that.
“But that was the time back then.”
Bill Shepheard, an Ottawa police officer, had no blueprint for how to respond to a school shooting at St. Pius X High School on Oct. 27, 1975. (Videography and editing by Mathieu Deroy. Set design by Michel Aspirot.)
A first for Ottawa
The 1975 shooting at St. Pius shook Ottawa to its core, in part because it was one of the first mass shootings to unfold at a Canadian high school.
But the shooting was only one half of Poulin’s violent unravelling that day.
That morning, Poulin had lured a family acquaintance, 17-year-old Glebe Collegiate Institute student Kim Rabot, into his basement bedroom. He stabbed her and raped her before setting fire to the room, leaving Rabot dead.
Poulin then biked to St. Pius with the shotgun hidden in a duffel bag.
It was a series of events unlike any the city had ever experienced — and a nightmare for those involved. Some, like Shepheard, still struggle with its impacts to this day.
“It’s in our nature as police officers to prevent any tragic events occurring,” he says. “I wish I could have done something.”
As families, friends and the city at large grieved in 1975, the situation also became political.
Following on the heels of a fatal school shooting in Brampton, Ont., earlier that year, the St. Pius incident fed into the heated late-1970s debate about gun control and helped pave the way for Canada’s first federal firearm licensing system two years later.
“We live in a [country] where guns, gun violence is still news and still relatively unusual — school shootings very much so,” says Chris Cobb, a journalist who covered the Poulin incident for the Ottawa Journal and who, with colleague Bob Avery, co-wrote a 1977 book titled Rape of a Normal Mind. The book unpacked the issues believed to be at play, including easy access to firearms.
“It had an effect that, in the long term, has proven beneficial to Canadian society,” Cobb says.
At the same time, the events of Oct. 27, 1975, have now faded from the city’s collective memory — except for those who lived through them.
Years ago, Terry Vanden Hanenberg went to the hospital for X-rays and crossed paths with a nurse who started crying when she saw his name.
Vanden Hanenberg, now 68, is one of the wounded survivors of the St. Pius shooting. He still has dozens of pellets in his upper body. The nurse, it turned out, had treated Vanden Hanenberg on the day of the shooting.
“After all those years, she still remembered quite vividly what went on that day,” he says.
In a four-part series launching today, CBC is sharing the experiences of over 20 people whose lives were touched by that fateful day. The interviews were gathered in the months leading to the 50th anniversary of the murders. Each story will also draw from archival materials to reflect how the events were covered by the media, including CBC, half a century ago.
As Vanden Hanenberg puts it: “The more we talk about it, the better it’ll get — I hope.”
Part 1: Behind the curtain
Poulin was in his final year of high school and had attended St. Pius for the previous four years.
So what accounted for what his older sister Sandy calls his “break from reality”?
Sandy, who did not want her married name used, and her sister Marie Poulin ask themselves that question to this day.
“I want to know these answers. I’ve always wanted to know,” Marie Poulin says.
“We were all shocked. To us, it wasn’t him,” Sandy recalls.
Classmates described Poulin as a quiet and studious loner who carried a briefcase and liked to play war-themed board games.
“He [had] no enemies and very few friends,” Father Len Lunney, the principal of St. Pius, told CBC the day after the shooting.
One day after Grade 13 student Robert Poulin of St. Pius X High School in Ottawa opened fire on his religion class, the principal of the school, Father Len Lunney, spoke to CBC about the incident.
In his last conversation with Lunney the previous week, Poulin had sought permission to leave school early the following summer to join the local militia in providing security at the Montreal Olympic Games.
“Robert, with your marks, tell me what date [and] you’ll be there,” Lunney told him.
According to Lunney, Poulin’s main interest was being a part of the Cameron Highlanders, a reserve regiment based in Ottawa.
As a coroner’s inquest into the murders would soon reveal, Poulin’s father Stuart was a former air force pilot and Poulin himself wanted to become an officer in the armed forces, but he had recently been turned down for officer training.
Stuart Poulin kept a rifle in the family home in Old Ottawa South, two blocks away from where Kim Rabot’s family lived.
But Poulin had purchased the shotgun he used in the St. Pius shooting four days earlier, at the Giant Tiger in Ottawa’s ByWard Market.
At the time, only handguns less than 26 inches long and automatic weapons had to be registered, while long guns could be purchased over the counter by anyone 16 or older.
“That’s shocking,” says Trina Constantini-Powell, whose locker at Glebe Collegiate had been next to Rabot’s the previous year, and who shared classes with her.
“But then, 50 years ago, that was the way it was.”
Copycat
Almost immediately, the coroner’s office announced an inquest to examine the events of Oct. 27.
When it came to the shooting, police believed Poulin was a copycat of Michael Slobodian, a 16-year-old student who’d gone on a rampage at Brampton Centennial Secondary School only five months earlier. Three people died, including Slobodian by his own hand, while 13 others were wounded.
Slobodian and Poulin had both kept diaries, premeditated some of their acts and used long guns during the shootings.
The Brampton incident had ratcheted up calls for tighter gun control in Canada because the daughter of then Ontario premier Bill Davis happened to attend the school.
The RCMP estimated there were some 10 million unregistered rifles and shotguns in the country.
The shooting at St. Pius X High School in Ottawa happened on Oct. 27, 1975. Five months earlier, a shooting took place at a high school in Brampton, Ont.
The Poulin shooting galvanized opinion even further, says Blake Brown, a professor of history at St. Mary’s University and the author of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada.
The jury at the Slobodian inquest had urged gun owners to safely lock up their firearms.
They also recommended the Canadian government require anyone who wanted to buy a rifle or shotgun first obtain a gun licence from the police.
“Tragic incidents like these are [a] warning that the time to act is now,” Ottawa Centre MPP Michael Cassidy told the Ottawa Citizen after the St. Pius shooting.
Ottawa’s mayor Lorry Greenberg and the city’s police service launched an amnesty program calling on citizens to turn in their firearms, no questions asked.
More than 100 weapons were surrendered and destroyed at a salvage yard.
As a coroner’s inquest into the St. Pius X High School shooting was underway in December 1975, CBC documented the recent destruction of guns that Ottawa citizens had turned in as part of an amnesty program launched in the wake of the shooting.
“There are a number of people who are frightened because of guns in their home,” Greenberg told Paul Soles, co-host of CBC’s Take 30 news show. “Hopefully, new legislation with gun control will assist as well.”
Louise Robb was just getting to know Rabot at Glebe Collegiate when Rabot was killed. To cope, Robb made her dad get rid of all the guns in their home.
Bernie Runstedler, a friend of Mark Hough’s family, says one of Hough’s sisters encouraged Runstedler’s father to get rid of his guns, too, including mementos from his service in the Second World War.
“My father went and bought extra locks to put on the various cabinets. That’s as far as it went,” Runstedler says.
Anticipation built as the inquest approached. But as Ontario Chief Coroner Dr. H.B. Cotnam warned people, the evidence would include some bizarre materials.
“A lot of students went because we wanted to know why,” says Dennis Curley, who emerged from Classroom 71 physically unwounded but later became a psychotherapist after grappling with the emotional aftermath.
“Why did this happen?”
A third life lost
On Dec. 1, the four-day inquest got underway in a Holiday Inn one block north of the Giant Tiger where Poulin got his gun.
That same day, Hough, whose condition had wavered for over a month, died in hospital.
“Things got very sombre and very quiet very fast after that was announced,” says Vanden Hanenberg, who’d been released from hospital after recovering from his own wounds.
Hough’s family held an open-casket wake despite his head wound because they wanted to show people the damage firearms could do, Runstedler says.
At the inquest, the portrait that emerged of Poulin was of a lonely and severely troubled young man whose mind was caught up in dark fantasies.
Poulin took out a personal ad seeking companionship and ordered a sex doll through a private P.O. box. He possessed hundreds of softcore magazines, hardcore publications depicting bondage, and multiple pairs of handcuffs. He obsessively catalogued pages, rating women on a scale of one to five, as seen in exhibits tabled during the inquest.
“We knew Poulin from school, but we didn’t know there was so much other stuff … that had taken place behind the curtain, so to speak,” Vanden Hanenberg says.
The Ottawa high school student responsible for the murder of a young woman and the subsequent fatal shooting at his school on the same day in 1975 was revealed to have possessed an extensive pornography collection. In an interview with CBC aired while a coroner’s inquest into the murders was underway, Ottawa’s mayor Lorry Greenberg took questions about his views on pornography and ‘immoral places.’
The level of disclosure about the case, both before and during the inquest, was astonishing.
Today when violent incidents happen, police are very reluctant to release much information, according to Brown, the St. Mary’s professor. In 1975 though, “things were very different,” with newspapers publishing parts of Poulin’s diary.
Cobb, the author and Ottawa Journal reporter, says authorities were under intense pressure to shed light on what happened.
“You can’t emphasize enough how traumatic this case was … for every parent that had a child in school back then, and the entire city,” he says. “All those pressure points basically put the police in the situation where they had to release as much information as possible, partly to calm the situation, to calm the community.”
Poulin’s writings showed he had fantasized about committing rape at knifepoint, and he had a list of girls’ names, including Rabot’s.
As Rabot’s classmate Louise Robb describes it, Rabot became the victim of Poulin’s “rage and his misogyny.”
Malcolm Pearce, the Ottawa police constable who read out Poulin’s diary at the inquest, testified it was obvious Poulin was in very bad need of psychiatric help.
Looking back today, Mike Monette, who suffered a very minor wound in the shooting, says Poulin’s story brings up a lot of thoughts about “what we can do in society today to help those who are struggling.”
LISTEN / More on the story from CBC’s This Is Ottawa podcast:
2 killers, 1 militia unit
Among other former St. Pius students, there’s a sense that the shooting could have been even deadlier given what else was learned about Poulin during and after the inquest.
“Lord knows what would have happened” if students had confronted Poulin, who was found with a hunting knife strapped to his chest, says Classroom 71 survivor Dennis Curley.
Liam Maguire, who was in the St. Pius cafeteria when the shots rang out, believes that based on what Poulin reportedly learned in the militia, he could have injured many more students.
In their 1977 book, Cobb and Avery wrote that Poulin and other militia recruits had received unauthorized commando training with the Cameron Highlanders — training that effectively taught them “the best way to kill.”
Recruits did not receive any psychological testing before being allowed to handle weapons, the inquest heard.
One of the people Cobb interviewed for the book was Bruce Hamill, who received militia training at the same time as Poulin and had even gotten into a fight with him.
Hamill himself would go on to commit two killings — including the stabbing of his Ottawa neighbour in 1977 for which he was found criminally insane.
A Department of National Defence spokesperson tells CBC the past five decades have seen “significant evolution in DND’s security policies and training.”
Parenting comes centre stage
The inquest unearthed another troubling revelation: Poulin’s apparent hatred of his family.
On the day of Rabot’s murder, Poulin spread fuel and ammunition around his house, hoping the fire would cause larger damage and financial harm to his family. He’d previously contemplated killing them, according to his diary.
Looking back today, Mark Hough’s sister Janet says she has great sympathy for what the Poulin family went through in 1975.
“As hard as it was for my family, and I imagine that of Rabot, the Poulin family had no public expression of sympathy or support to help ease their pain,” she says. “I can’t imagine. It wasn’t just Kim and Mark who died. Their son died as well.”
Stuart and Mary Poulin both testified at the inquest and came under criticism by the chief coroner for the “unusual” degree of privacy they had granted their son. After the inquest, the Citizen reported a surge of interest in local parenting classes.
Poulin’s “room” was a space literally curtained off from the rest of the basement, and the inquest heard his parents rarely ventured inside.
Curley, the Classroom 71 survivor, remembers Mary Poulin testifying about going downstairs on the morning of Oct. 27 to talk to her son, but stopping at the curtain.
“Hey, I’m a dad,” Curley says. “I would have opened the door.”
Still, Poulin would have found another way to carry out his plan, Curley believes.
“The shooting was in his brain,” he says.
Marie Poulin says she’s not surprised her mom didn’t venture inside.
“It was just a given that, for privacy, they didn’t barge in for any reason,” she recalls.
Gun laws changed
The inquest jury ultimately did not wade into parenting matters.
Instead, the four-person panel called for a ban on all pornographic material showing genitalia — a restriction editors at the Citizen pointed out would bar artworks such as Michelangelo’s David.
The jury also recommended funding for education on mental health, stronger school attendance requirements and random locker searches. The principal at Glebe Collegiate had testified that a loaded handgun had been taken from a student’s locker only a few days earlier.
A firearm ownership permit system was to be launched “as soon as possible,” the jury urged.
Canada finally implemented a licensing system in 1977. It required rifle or shotgun purchasers to first obtain a firearms and acquisition certificate. People could now be prevented from getting a licence for a number of reasons, including being diagnosed with a mental illness that was potentially related to violence, Brown says.
The inquest jury also cautioned against the media reporting explicit details, writing that it “deplored” some of the reporting that had taken place. One paper had run a photo of police bringing the charred headboard of Poulin’s bed to the hotel.
Cobb, who devoted a chapter of the 1977 book to defending the media’s role, says the Journal didn’t look for ways to sensationalize the story: The story’s facts were inherently sensational.
Cobb later revisited the story, extensively covering the shooting survivors’ enduring trauma in 1997.
Claire Turenne, who was a Grade 12 student at St. Pius in 1975, wrote in a 2011 collection of essays called The Militarization of Children that she was disappointed the inquest didn’t dive deeper. She put forth that Poulin had “internalized a particular expression of militarized masculinity.”
“Poulin’s psychosis had led him to scribble ‘You are all sinners — be sorry’ in a book he took with him to St. Pius that fateful day,” she wrote. “But it is the form of militarized masculinity that provided him with the resources to act upon his psychosis in the way that he did.”
Bob Davidson says a strange sense of calm overcame him when a shooting broke out at Ottawa’s St. Pius X High School in October 1975. The experience led him to become a paramedic, a job he went on to do for over 40 years. (Videography and editing by Mathieu Deroy. Set design by Michel Aspirot.)
An unopened box
After Poulin’s death in 1975, his parents hardly ever talked about him, according to his sisters.
“I found out more stuff from reading [the] little blurb from Amazon about [Cobb’s] book [than] I’ve ever known,” Marie Poulin says.
Stuart and Mary Poulin died in 2009 and 2013 respectively. They had continued to live in the house where Rabot was killed until Stuart Poulin’s death.
Sandy expects her parents spoke privately about her brother, “but you figure people will be hating you just because of who you’re associated with.”
She has told her six kids that there’s a box of articles about their uncle on a shelf in her home.
“Nobody’s asked me to read it,” Sandy says.
Sandy remembers when the family was cleaning out the basement after the fire and there was a knock at the door. There stood Rabot’s father, asking to speak to her father.
“I don’t know what they talked about, but I do know that he talked to him,” Sandy recalls.
Janet Hough says the Poulins asked her parents at some point if they could meet.
“Dad told them we weren’t ready yet. [As far as I know], a meeting never did take place,” Janet says. “With all my heart, I wish them peace.”
Marie Poulin has a similar message for the Rabot and Hough families: “They have my deepest sympathies. All our loved ones are in a better place with God now.”
This story is the first in a four-part series.
Part 2 on Oct. 20 will remember Kim Rabot.
Part 3 on Oct. 23 will honour Mark Hough.
Part 4 on Oct. 26 will focus on the survivors of the St. Pius X High School shooting.
If you or someone you know is struggling, here’s where to look for help:
If you’re worried someone you know may be at risk of suicide, you should talk to them about it, says the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. Here are some warning signs:
- Suicidal thoughts.
- Substance use.
- Purposelessness.
- Anxiety.
- Feeling trapped.
- Hopelessness and helplessness.
- Withdrawal.
- Anger.
- Recklessness.
- Mood changes.
