In October 1975, two Ottawa high schools were rocked by murders committed by a troubled student who then took his own life. As the anniversary approaches, CBC is looking back at the changes, both personal and societal, that took place in the event’s wake. (Videography and editing by Mathieu Deroy. Set design by Michel Aspirot.) (Thumbnail photo: City of Ottawa Archives, Ottawa Journal, 028395)

The murder of Kim Rabot and the shooting at St. Pius X High School, 50 years later

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.

Dr. James Dickson, Ottawa's local coroner at the time, stands in the hallway of the school where the gunman, 18-year-old Robert Poulin, took his own life with a sawed-off shotgun. (City of Ottawa Archives, the Ottawa Journal 028384)

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.”

WATCH | ‘That call was difficult,’ says officer who rushed to scene: Retired Ottawa police officer recalls the aftermath of the 1975 St. Pius X High School shooting Duration 3:13 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.