Clark made it to the last section, hoping for a big conclusion.
Once again necessity is the mother of invention and my need to get rid of this evidence brought the solution to me like a child showing a parent their latest pencil crayon drawing.
The sewer. Of course, how obvious. No one ever goes down there. The body would rot away completely before anyone ever discovered the bones and by then it would be way too late to identify the person.
Clark flipped the page. “Where’s the rest?” he asked out loud, pinching the paper, trying to see if a couple were stuck together. But there was nothing else. “Where’s the body?” Either Twitchell had left out the ending or tech crimes had failed to locate it. “It doesn’t say where the body is!”
ANSTEY’S INVESTIGATION RAMPED UP quickly. They had a potential serial killer on the loose, a surviving victim to find, and likely a body hidden in a sewer somewhere in the city. He was granted use of thirteen homicide detectives. Before he was finished, at least 112 officers would be involved in the case in some way, far more than any typical homicide investigation.
He littered his desk with sticky notes as he tried to cover off every angle. Anstey read the diary hundreds of times. He had no doubt that it was written by Twitchell and that it told the truth. It was found on his computer, under his company name, and the content matched details they already knew about his life. But with no body, it would be unheard-of to lay a murder charge. These were just words after all, and with no physical remains, a court could find there was reasonable doubt in the case. How could the police be sure Johnny wasn’t still alive?
Anstey knew he would have to prove that the diary was a full and truthful confession to prevent the case from collapsing at trial. As he read the diary, he kept saying to himself, “Can I prove that this is true?” When he could, he marked a sentence down as a task to prove and assigned it to a detective to complete. By the end, 301 tasks would be assigned. Acting Detective Dale Johnson took on many of them.
Everyone saw how the various threads led back to the rented suburban garage. But the forensics team still hadn’t gone inside because the officers were still busy processing evidence from Twitchell’s home and vehicle.
It became a growing point of suspense. What could be in there? What secrets could be uncovered within the garage-turned-film-studio where Johnny Altinger had vanished and another man, identity unknown, had escaped with his life?
IT WAS IN THE early evening of October 23 when police phone calls expressing concern for Johnny’s well-being finally prompted comments to drift on to the Internet.
One of Johnny’s old friends from Vancouver decided to post a message online about the strange disappearance. He signed in to Facebook and wrote on Johnny’s personal profile page: “Edmonton police (homicide) are looking for John. He was last seen Oct. 10th.”
Then something quite odd occurred. About an hour after the message was posted, Johnny logged into his Facebook account and did one simple task: he added a friend. And then, just like that, he logged right back out again. It was very odd indeed.
A PEEK INSIDE
CRUISING THE NORTH SIDE of the city along 137th Avenue, Clark talked shop with his new partner, Detective Paul Link. He had been brought in from the polygraph unit down the hall from homicide on Anstey’s insistence. Someone had to do Twitchell’s arrest interview when he was finally hauled in, and many cops considered Link to be one of the experts at interviewing murder suspects. There was some concern that Clark’s interrogation tactics had alienated Twitchell. He was no longer the first pick for the job. It hadn’t helped that whenever Clark retold the story of seizing Twitchell’s car he added a handful more swear words and colourful insults. Anstey cringed at this, thinking he needed a cop whom Twitchell would trust, not despise, so they’d have a better chance of getting a confession. Link, who was tall with salt-and-pepper hair, could play the good cop role with ease or quickly switch into another mood if he felt the tactic useful. He knew how to deal with any kind of killer, but it also required a great deal of preparation before the planned confrontation.
Clark and Link spent hours at headquarters going over the evidence to bring the detective up to speed. On some nights, they’d cruise around Twitchell’s parents’ house, the radio traffic from the surveillance team buzzing through the speaker like background music.
It was during one of these northside drives when Link revealed he wasn’t entirely convinced that Twitchell was guilty. “I’m fifty-fifty.”
Clark was floored. “How can you be fifty-fifty with what we’ve got?”
“I’m trying to not get tunnel vision.”
“Well, I don’t have tunnel vision, but I’m ninety-ten,” Clark said. His tone was more jesting than hostile. “Until we get the body we can’t be one hundred, but come on!”
“I just wanna keep an open mind.” Link didn’t see how the man who killed Johnny and left behind all this evidence could be the same man who wrote the diary, which made the killer sound like a genius who could commit the perfect murder. In Link’s mind, there was a disconnect. “It’s too bizarre to even believe.”
But the teasing continued for days. Whenever Link walked by a homicide detective, they’d ask for an update. “Still fifty-fifty, Paul?” And they’d share a quick laugh at Link’s expense.
THE GARAGE WAS DREARY. Realtors would have called it a classic “worst property on the best street.” Surrounding the garage was the neighbourhood of Greenview, a small subdivision crowning the north end of the suburb of Mill Woods in the city’s southeast. Those that lived here liked to make the distinction. Mill Woods was working class and recovering from a spate of shootings and Molotov cocktail fights that had earned it unpleasant nicknames like “Kill Hood.” But Greenview was nestled beside a golf course and attracted a slightly more pretentious middle class who liked their weekends quiet and their evenings predictable. The property in question sat on a crest of a small hill, elevated slightly above a neighbouring home to the west. The road in front of the garage curved past a park with short-cut grass, a baseball diamond, and an outdoor hockey rink, just waiting for the icy winds to blow. Beside the road, a walking path meandered through trees and grass, giving the neighbourhood the feel of a leafy English village.
The aging house on the corner lot, with the detached two-door garage and falling-down fence, certainly didn’t match Greenview’s desired image of comfort, quality, and wholesome values. Neighbours had complained about the property for years. The house tenants changed often and were frequently a problem. When the current tenants moved in and barely made a peep, the neighbours were relieved, thinking things in the neighbourhood had finally settled down. They didn’t realize that the claim to the community’s worst tenancy had merely been transferred from the house to the garage, which had been made all the more suspicious by the sudden presence of yellow police tape wrapping the back of the property like a plastic cocoon.
On Friday, October 24, the forensics team arrived in the late morning, expecting the worst considering what horrors the diary had disclosed. Armed with a search warrant, they would be working out of the garage for at least four or five days, processing the scene. Everything of importance would be packed up and taken back to their office for a detailed examination.
Topp, Short, and Allen slipped on white coveralls, the disposable paper-plastic “bunny suits” worn by forensic teams. They snapped blue latex gloves over their fingers and peeked in the back doorway of the garage. They flicked on the light, using the key Twitchell had handed to detectives at the beginning of the week.
The garage was fairly empty. The floor swept and dry. The air was thick. Boxes were pushed to the side walls. After Topp had recorded his usual walk-through with his video camera, Allen began gathering exhibits. She started with a tall wood storage shelf, painted with several coatings of blue paint, standing just to the left of the back door. Allen worked her way down from the top shelf, where she found two rolls of duct tape beside an emerald-green plastic ca
se, about the size of a briefcase. The case had a hard plastic handle and felt heavy, as if it contained many items, like a tool box. A single drop of what appeared to be blood had soaked into the textured green plastic. Allen put it aside to examine later.
She turned her attention to a pair of black handcuffs that had been stashed behind the duct tape. The key taken from Twitchell’s home office desk was retrieved and inserted. It turned the lock.
The lower shelves were blanketed in a thin film of dust and sand. There were two bottles of red food colouring, a roll of garbage bags, and a blue case. Allen opened the case. A handgun shimmered in the light. Silver with a black grip. She picked it up and knew immediately that it was fake. The gun weighed half of what it should have. A sticker on the case identified it as a gas-powered BB gun.
Another storage shelf contained a plastic juice jug with a sticky red substance inside. A layer of red goo was gathered at the bottom and splattered around within it. Beside the jug was a strange find. The object had a black plastic handle and when a button was pressed a metal shaft extended into a baton. The end glowed blue. It appeared to be some kind of stun weapon.
The forensic team’s focus shifted to the other side of the back garage door. Behind a little wooden table they found another shelving unit, containing a discarded television and a worn car tire.
On the first shelf, Allen discovered two long metal pipes. The end of one of the pipes was charred black, the soot gradually fading to a light grey at the opposite end. Allen reached for the second pipe. She quickly recognized the great importance of her find – it was a possible murder weapon. She wanted to handle it as little as possible. Nearly half of the pipe had been wrapped in black clothlike hockey tape that was stained a deep red. It was dry. Allen thought of a term to describe it and settled on “blood-soaked.” The other end of the pipe was exposed, revealing a ring of bare metal threading. Each groove on each thread was filled with tiny pools of what she suspected to be blood. Inside the mouth of the pipe, resting just in from the tip, was a collection of plump shapes, no bigger than grains of rice. A laboratory later determined their exact nature: fragments of skin, fat, skeletal muscle, and bone.
The discoveries began piling up: a bottle of ammonia spotted in suspected blood; a jug of gasoline; sewing scissors spattered in blood; a metal table with its edges stained in blood; a steak knife in the dirt, possible blood on the handle; a bloody tooth fragment sitting on the concrete. The forensics team found blood on the wood table and the sticky substance from the jug plastered on a metal chair. There was an oil drum next to the metal table, to be examined later, and an extensive inventory of cleaning supplies:
Paper towels.
Dust masks.
Industrial-strength liquid cleaner.
Three pairs of gloves.
Full-body disposable coveralls.
An empty package for a plastic drop cloth.
The team noticed a plywood board resting near the garage door. When they turned it around they could see it was painted white on the reverse with big black letters: 5712 – 40 Ave. They grabbed the board and took it outside. It was held up high against the face of the garage, between the two garage doors. There were screw holes in the address board that seemed to line up with holes in the front of the garage. Short pulled out his camera and took a picture.
Before the team left, they scanned each interior wall. A closer look at the two large bay doors took several minutes, but it was worth it. What they found was something the forensics team could not examine. An expert would have to be called in, someone they could trust to take the time to analyze the discovery properly. The process could take days and it might involve complex math, physics, and dozens of photos – whatever was needed to make a judgment call on what this mysterious finding could possibly mean.
Two days later, Clark and Link pulled up to the garage. They had a meeting with the man brought in to assist the investigation, someone who could hopefully explain the unknowns the forensics team had discovered.
His name was Fons Chafe. He was a constable in the Edmonton police force, but his rank revealed little of his skills. He had been called as an expert witness in court cases more than forty times. He was gifted in what he did and had recently returned from Miami, where he had been training others in his unique specialty. What he knew so well, just like the fictitious Dexter Morgan, was blood-spatter analysis. It was his passion.
Like a teacher, Chafe gave Clark and Link a rundown of his conclusions. He had been studying the garage for days, focusing primarily on the two bay doors.
Clark saw that Chafe had drawn hundreds of little black circles all over the interior of the doors. Each circle had a tiny drop of suspected blood inside, like a bull’s eye. By the time he was finished, Chafe had counted 222 possible blood impact stains on the inside of one of the doors. Most of them were located near the floor. He found that some were in the shape of a teardrop, others were round. The teardrop shapes sometimes pointed up, other times they faced down.
This meant nothing to most people, but to Chafe it was a clear road map. The shape of each drop allowed him to determine what direction it had been travelling when it splashed against the door. All he had to do was follow each drop’s trajectory on an invisible string back to its source.
There was one hiccup. He noticed there was blood spatter outside the garage too, both on the garage door frame and sprayed across the concrete pad that stuck out into the elements. Another problem emerged. One particular stain had struck the door as if travelling upwards from the floor at a high angle, but when he traced its path he found it ran straight into the metal frame that held the garage door wheel tracks. It didn’t make sense.
Chafe pulled the garage door open. He noticed that the door had to be raised about 80 centimetres, or 32 inches, for the spatter stains on the outside of the garage to match the ones inside. The one confusing stain could also be explained away when the door was raised. By doing so, the wheel movement exposed a hole in the frame, which matched the trajectory of the stain that had struck the door. It must have splashed in through the hole in the frame while the door was open.
Chafe ran calculations for several days before he began making conclusions. The blood-spatter pattern could be traced back to more than one originating impact site. He thought there were at least four, perhaps more. For such a pattern to occur, there had to be some event that caused blood to exit the body and multiple impacts to cause that blood to spray out and onto the bay door. That’s as far as Chafe could take the math.
Clark and Link, however, were able to fit Chafe’s physics into their investigative theory: Twitchell had likely swung the metal pipe at Johnny repeatedly, striking him at least four times. It explained the bloody pipe; it explained the blood spatter. Clark figured Twitchell had likely struck Johnny moments after he ducked his head under the opened garage door. Twitchell probably closed the door after the attack, not knowing or caring that some of his victim’s blood had already sprayed outside.
IN THE WEEK SINCE becoming a suspect, Twitchell’s life had descended into the meaningless. The surveillance team had been on him for days, and their notes made clear he was a man with nothing to do. Twitchell had been staying with his parents, in the house where he had grown up, but he tended not to stir before the early afternoon. Even then, he rarely left the house. Detectives were relieved that at least he wasn’t hunting for more victims.
He took a bus and a train to his downtown lawyer’s office one day, walked to a 7-Eleven on another, checked the mail. Once the search warrant on his house expired, Twitchell’s parents drove him back to St. Albert to pick up some clothes and, later, to deposit a cheque before taking him back to their home.
On Tuesday, October 28, as the evening settled in after 7:00 p.m., Twitchell received his first visitor. His sister, Susan, had stopped by for the first time since he took up residence with their parents. She drove Twitchell to a coffee shop in the city’s northwest.
Sitting inside the café, the s
iblings, separated by only a few years, talked for more than an hour. No one else joined them. They returned to their parents’ place. For fifteen minutes, brother, sister, mother, and father sat talking in the living room until Susan rose to her feet, walked out of the house, and drove away. The home plunged into darkness about an hour later.
The surveillance team had been watching in silence from outside, having followed Twitchell all day and documenting his every move in their notes.
What Susan discussed with her brother was not known, nor was the conclusion the family reached. Had Clark been successful in convincing them to confront Twitchell? He wasn’t sure. All that became clear with the passage of time was this evening visit and coffee shop conversation would be the last time Susan saw her brother before the police dragnet would finally close in.
THE SCIENCE OF WAITING
AS THE INVESTIGATION STRETCHED into its second week, Anstey sat at his desk and looked over the case notes, now spilling out of more than a dozen thick binders. There were more facts and evidence gathered for a single homicide file than most cops had seen in their entire careers. Despite this rare thrill, it was quickly pointed out they had nothing to celebrate. They still didn’t have enough evidence to lay criminal charges.
Anstey had several conversations with the prosecutor’s office as he was preparing for Twitchell’s arrest. He was told the same concerns each time: “How do you know that it’s Johnny’s blood? What happens if it’s not a DNA match or it comes up as someone else’s blood? Then where are you at?” The prosecutor’s office was right. Without DNA, the case became an elaborate trail of circumstantial evidence that led to nowhere. It didn’t help matters either that Anstey’s relationship with the head of homicide was worsening. Things with his boss had been tense for some time, but their disagreements were becoming more frequent.
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