The Devil's Cinema

by Steve Lillebuen

  “Yeah, he called me from a lawyer’s office. He told me not to talk to you guys.”

  “Well that’s fair, I can understand that.” He bobbed his head, thrilled they had at least beaten Twitchell back to his home. “But don’t you want to know what’s going on?” Clark was assessing how much to tell her. “Listen, there’s a chance this guy that’s missing is dead and your husband may have killed him.” He threw his hands up. “We’re investigating and we don’t know where this is going to end up.”

  It took a few minutes, but she let them in.

  Clark and Johnson stepped over baby toys as they walked up into the front room. Both detectives suspected Jess didn’t entirely trust them, but she likely didn’t believe what her husband was telling her either. Both cops darted their eyes around the house, taking it all in. They asked simple questions. Are there any DVDs in the house? Where does your husband produce and work on his films? Where’s his office? Would he keep hard drives there? Jess told them his computer gear was in the basement office, except for a laptop, which he usually kept with him.

  Clark and Johnson hurried back to the car and called Anstey, who told them they likely had enough for a warrant.

  Jess was told the bad news: the police would be seizing her house. And Clark saw her shock from these unexpected circumstances suddenly spill out of her in streams of tears. She trembled. “I don’t know what’s going on.” She looked vacantly ahead, mumbling to herself. Both detectives knew her quiet suburban life was about to change. Her husband was now under police scrutiny and everything she had was potentially in peril because of him.

  Johnson attempted to soothe the distraught young mother, offering to let her stay while police searched her home. It would take a couple of hours, maybe longer. They’d just have to watch her while the police were doing the search.

  Jess shook her head. “No. I can’t be here,” she said. “I’m leaving.” Her pace quickened as she gathered up her clothes and her baby’s things. With her child in her arms, tears in her eyes, she fled to her mother’s, never to return to that house and call it her home again.

  BACK AT HEADQUARTERS, ANSTEY hammered out search warrant requests on his computer. He had four on the go: Twitchell’s car, Johnny’s car, the rented garage, and Twitchell’s St. Albert home. His fingers jammed up on the keyboard a few times. He was a two-fingered typist. Scanning the police notes, writing down all the information they had so far, he let out a loud whoop when he spotted the licence plate number for Twitchell’s Grand Am. He’d have to tell the boys about it later.

  Anstey had been a cop for three decades, a member of homicide for nearly six years. And from all that experience he knew crime, including all the motives for trying to kill someone – money, sex, jealousy, to name a few. Murder investigations seldom were the riveting whodunits of detective lore, featuring ingenious killings and elaborate deceptions. People were predictable. But already he knew this case had veered off the track murder cops were used to following and into the extraordinary. He therefore made his search warrant requests as broad as possible. Was this murder, manslaughter, assault, or kidnapping? Was Johnny alive but being held against his will? Was he seriously injured or had he been brutally murdered? He simply didn’t know. But he had a wild theory. Clark and Anstey had been building on it all night, with Twitchell giving out enough hints to convince him to pursue this unusual angle. It was time to see if something so sinister, born out of urban myth, could possibly be coming true. On each warrant request, Anstey wrote that he was looking for anything related to the film industry, including records or books “pertaining to the production of graphically violent horror and pornographic films.”

  In short, he was looking for a possible snuff film, directed by filmmaker Mark Twitchell. Somewhere within one of those four locations, Anstey believed there could be video footage: something involving an online date, lots of blood, and Johnny Altinger, an innocent victim of an unclear motive and an unknown plan.

  IN THE DAYS THAT followed, Twitchell’s film crew saw their lives turned upside down, each one facing questioning from a team of homicide detectives. How much blood was used for that short film? Have you ever heard of Johnny Altinger? What about Jen? What do you know about snuff films? The police put their normal sleep patterns on hold. Clark was back in headquarters after a four-hour catnap. Mike Young and Jay Howatson, Twitchell’s two production assistants, and David Puff, his director of photography, were interviewed one after another. All were young guys in their late twenties, baffled and astonished by the sudden police attention. None of them knew anything about a red Mazda 3, and they hadn’t been near the garage since a few days after the film shoot. The crew had spent sixteen hours filming at the location on Saturday, September 27.

  Mike Young was confused. When he stopped by the garage a few days after filming, it had been fairly clean. Certainly there was no fake blood left behind from the shoot requiring a big clean-up effort. He didn’t understand why Clark was asking. Footage of the short film was likely downloaded on to Twitchell’s home computer. The eight-minute film, called House of Cards, was a “Dexter spoof,” as Mike remembered it. Based on a series of books by Jeff Lindsay, Dexter had become a popular television drama on the cable network Showtime. Both the novels and the show are told from the point of view of Dexter Morgan, a fictitious blood-spatter expert for the Miami police who helps homicide cops investigate murders. In his spare time, however, he kills criminals he believes the justice system has failed to control. It was Dexter’s own unique moral code to kill only bad people. Many victims were placed in sleeper holds and later stirred awake to find themselves either shrink-wrapped or duct-taped to a large table inside a darkened “kill room” entirely sheathed in plastic sheeting. Victims were frequently dismembered and dumped in the ocean in garbage bags. And Twitchell was a fan of the show. He wouldn’t stop talking about it.

  One promising detail of Twitchell’s life did come out early in the investigation. Many of his friends remembered that he had met Jess through the dating website plentyoffish.com – the same website where Johnny had met his own date.

  DETECTIVES DIDN’T TAKE LONG to locate Scott Cooke, a set builder Twitchell had mentioned in one of his police statements. A big and tall man who sported a goatee and liked to shave his head, Scott was open to questions from officers. The details of Twitchell’s filmmaking background slowly began to emerge.

  Twitchell had sent out an email that August asking for help with a short horror film he planned to make while assembling funding for his next big project. The filmmaker’s take on the genre was to adapt Dexter Morgan’s method for his own purposes. Twitchell’s version would feature a cop-turned-serial-killer whose own moral code would see him lure cheating husbands off dating websites with fake female profiles. When a married man arrives at his date’s house, he is confronted by a man in a mask who knocks him out with a stun gun. The man wakes up duct-taped to a chair, his eyes covered in more tape, only to be tortured for his personal banking information and social-networking passwords before he is eventually killed.

  In one of the first drafts of Twitchell’s script, the victim is decapitated with a samurai sword. Twitchell had two swords on set. The higher quality blade was rarely touched by anybody but Twitchell. He became furious if anyone used it without his permission.

  The script played off the theme of having the killer get away with a murder by making it appear as if the victim is still alive. Once he has his victim’s personal information and passwords, the killer sends out emails from the victim’s account, telling his friends and family that he’s merely on an extended leave. “They’ll just assume you ran off with one of your hussies and decided not to come back,” the killer says in the script.

  The man’s real demise is far more gruesome. The killer dismembers the body, packs the chopped body parts into garbage bags, and then hauls them away in the trunk of his car.

  But at the end of the film, there’s a twist.

  It’s revealed that the ent
ire plot of the film is being written by a writer at his computer. Yet, the writer also has a fake female profile on a dating website, which is visible on the screen for a brief moment before he packs away his laptop. Within the writer’s bag is a hockey mask with the lower jaw section cut off and a stun gun. The implication is that the writer is about to re-enact elements of his script in real life. The film finishes with a rather ominous conversation between the writer and his wife.

  “Off to the gym, honey?” his wife asks him in the script.

  “You bet, gotta relieve some tension from sitting so long.” He kisses her goodbye.

  “How’s the story coming along?”

  “Really well, sweetie,” he replies. “It’s true when they say the best way to succeed is to write what you know.”

  TWITCHELL’S CAR HAD BEEN parked in a police warehouse for more than a day before the forensics team had time to examine it. In the late morning of Tuesday, October 21, the car was circled first with a video camera and then photographs were taken.

  The car was a piece of junk. The Pontiac Grand Am’s maroon paint was dull and caked with mud. A sticker on the car revealed that the four-door vehicle had been purchased from a place called John Keady’s GM Superstore in Davenport, Iowa – a sale yard located more than a thirty-hour drive away in the American Midwest. There was no engine block heater in the car to help it start during bitter winters, another sign it was purchased outside of Edmonton.

  The front bumper was cracked and splintered on one side, with deep gashes on the other. The rear bumper was crushed on the driver’s side. Just below the spoiler, the taillight had been punctured. A piece of clear plastic tape covered a gaping hole.

  A decal on the trunk prompted a few laughs. A Jesus fish was being mounted by another fish titled “Evolution.” Dusting for prints revealed nothing of interest. But now that the forensics team had a signed warrant, issued by a judge just hours earlier, they could finally tear the car apart. This was typically a mundane task; it often took days to catalogue everything in a vehicle or other potential crime scenes, assign exhibit numbers, take photos of each item, sign the paperwork to maintain continuity, and write a detailed report. At times, this task could be as fruitless as it was monotonous.

  But not this time. It was “the gold mine” for every detective on the file. As an exhibit handler, Constable Nancy Allen finally had her work cut out for her compared to what little she had to do in the search of Johnny’s condo. Her discoveries within the car started off slow: a receipt for the movies, a duffle bag, an unpaid speeding ticket, a roll of black hockey tape, and a record of employment. Twitchell had a business card in the car that revealed his film company was called Xpress Entertainment, its motto “Independent Film At Its Finest.” But then the search quickly descended into the bizarre and unbelievable.

  With her red hair held back in a ponytail and wearing gloves, Allen spotted a key for a Mazda 3 left behind in a cup holder. Pressing the button on the key chain made a car horn beep on another vehicle in the impound lot – Johnny’s red Mazda 3 parked nearby.

  Allen found neon-yellow Post-It notes littered around the messy interior of Twitchell’s vehicle. At one point, they must have been pasted on the dash. Some contained detailed maps. One sticky note included directions from St. Albert to the south side of Edmonton, noted later by detectives as a map leading straight to Johnny’s condo building. Another series of maps scribbled on three sticky notes provided directions from St. Albert to an address in Wetaskiwin, a city about an hour south of Edmonton. Twitchell obviously had a short memory or a need to write everything down. The other stickies were reminders of all the things he had to do:

  Ship phone while it’s on (return addy of vic)

  Destroy wallet contents

  Use laptop general WiFi for email

  And another note:

  Ship eBay items

  codpiece

  helmet

  Ending with the cops’ favourites:

  Kill room clean sweep

  Fuck Traci senseless

  Behind the driver’s seat was a copy of Dearly Devoted Dexter, one of the Dexter novels by Jeff Lindsay. There was also a receipt for a hockey mask, purchased a few months ago from an online retailer.

  In the front of the car was one of Allen’s most startling discoveries. She lifted a backpack off the floor of the passenger seat and found that a military blade had been tucked inside. It was a weapon typically used only by combat marines. The rubber-handled, seven-inch carbon-steel blade was still wedged into a black leather holster that could attach to a belt. Red stains appeared to be caked on the handle. Working slowly, Allen grabbed a white marker and began circling each stain. She gently held the knife closer to her eyes, trying to handle it as little as possible. She squinted until the stains soaked into the rubber came into focus, then outlined these in white as well.

  Her gloved hands pulled the blade out of its sheath, inch by inch. There were three or four red spots on the knife. From far away, it looked like rust, but a closer examination showed the stains were patterned in blotches close to where the blade meets the handle. Red stains were also soaked into embedded lettering printed into the steel, detailing the brand as a KA-BAR knife made in the United States.

  Allen found a few more suspicious spots on the handle and the sheath. She then dabbed each spot on a plastic strip from a Hemastix bottle. They all turned dark from the chemical reaction, revealing a suspected bloodstain was behind each one.

  A large red stain had soaked deep into the grey carpet lining of the trunk. A photograph was taken. It looked like the liquid had been transferred on to the carpet when an object was placed inside. The trunk also contained a half-empty plastic jerry can of gas. When the wheel well was popped open, Allen found a dirty steak knife tucked beside the spare tire. There were stains that looked like blood on both sides of the blade.

  A second look at the duffle bag revealed it too had suspected bloodstains on the handle, along several zippers, and within the inside lining. She returned to the backpack that contained the military blade and discovered a Toshiba laptop covered with Spider-Man stickers. There appeared to be blood on the keyboard.

  Allen delivered the laptop to Constable Michael Roszko, a computer forensic analyst in the police tech crimes unit. Given time, he could unlock the laptop like a treasure chest.

  The car had held an unexpected haul of disturbing evidence. Two knives and a trunk covered in suspected blood, sticky notes about sex and cleaning up kill rooms, maps leading from near the suspect’s house to the victim’s – but none of this would compare to what Roszko would pull from the digital files of Twitchell’s computer.

  A FEW HOURS AFTER the car had been searched, Acting Detective Dale Johnson cruised south down the highway, a copy of the yellow Post-It note map leading the way. Another detective from homicide was riding along with him. Having grown up in St. Albert, Johnson was familiar with all of the streets in the area. Reading the map, he recognized the street names written down as leading from the address of Twitchell’s St. Albert house to an unknown home south of Edmonton. After driving an hour in that direction, their car rumbled across railway tracks as the two detectives made it into the centre of the small city of Wetaskiwin. They were looking for the street address from the sticky note, not sure what they’d find at the end of their journey.

  They finally reached a quiet street with a row of trailers on one side and located the address. Just as they were walking up to the front door of the trailer, a young woman in a car pulled in and parked in the back. Seeing them waiting on the doorstep, she hurried to a back door, walked through the trailer, and opened the front door. Two little dogs came racing up with her, barking and nipping at the feet of both detectives. Over the noise Johnson told her they were police officers and he asked for her name.

  Stunned by the sudden presence of detectives on her steps, the woman meekly replied, “I’m Traci Higgins.”

  Johnson shot a look at his colleague, recalling one of
the Post-It notes Twitchell had left in his car, thinking things were suddenly getting interesting.

  “Do you know Mark Twitchell?” Johnson asked.

  “Yes, I do … He was my boyfriend and we went to university together.”

  She invited them in.

  The three of them sat at a small wood table near Traci’s kitchen, about halfway down the trailer. Traci had glasses, her brown hair with blond highlights touching the edges of her frames before her bangs fell down the sides of her face, curling to an end just under her chin. She seemed taken aback from having police officers in her home but listened carefully. The detectives told her they were investigating a missing persons case and Twitchell’s name had come up. Johnson asked her broad questions before slowly moving into her history with Mark Twitchell and when she last saw him.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him recently.” Traci began clarifying before they could even respond. “But it was all platonic. It was nothing sexual. He’s married and I’m going through a divorce.” She stopped for a second, then launched in again. “We’re not those type of people.”

  Johnson pressed her on that point. “Can I ask why he would then write this?” He pulled out a copy of the sticky note from his binder and showed her what was written on it: Fuck Traci senseless.

  “Oh.” Her lips tightened as she huddled closer to the table. “Uh, I have no idea. Maybe that’s just his weird sense of humour or something.”

  She remembered going to the movies with Twitchell, meeting him at a theatre in Edmonton one or two weeks ago. “But he’s never been to my house,” she added. “We’ve always met up in the city.”

  “Then why did he have a map from his house to your house?”

  “Well, I had my address on Facebook for a while. He must’ve got it off there.”

  Johnson was skeptical but didn’t pursue it. He was more worried about her safety. If she was telling the truth, then what were Twitchell’s intentions with this woman? What did it mean to have her address, a map, and a plan written down to have his way with her? As they got up to leave, he asked Traci if she felt safe. He offered to notify the local police about the investigation so officers could be nearby if she felt she was in danger.