The Devil's Cinema

by Steve Lillebuen

  He began his testimony haltingly, stumbling over his words. Standing a few steps up from the floor beside Justice Clackson, peering over the tops of the heads of observers seated in the packed gallery, he appeared nervous. Today, he was the main attraction. Guards once again were having to turn away people at the door.

  Davison stood in the centre of the court at the main podium, asking Twitchell basic questions about his filmmaking career until he had settled in and was more comfortable, ready to tell his side of the story. He would remain standing throughout his testimony.

  Twitchell turned to face the jury. He began speaking slowly, projecting his voice. Oddly, he referred to himself as “we” several times until he was warned to stop. He knew this was the critical moment that would decide his fate and freedom. But even now, in his tiredness, Twitchell didn’t know how best to explain himself.

  He liked comparing himself to Dr. Frankenstein, but he didn’t dare broach this subject in front of the jury. Just like the infamous doctor, he had considered the possibility that he, too, had created a monster that had gotten out of hand. The difference was Twitchell honestly believed his own monstrous creation had surpassed even the worst nightmares of Frankenstein. His creation had resulted in his arrest, a murder charge, the end of his future as a filmmaker, and it had sucked countless innocent people into its massive jaws.

  Twitchell’s monster was called MAPLE.

  It was an acronym, he explained: Multi-Angle Psychosis Layering Entertainment.

  The prosecution and the detectives watching him in court shared a collective look of surprise. It was the first anyone had heard of it.

  Davison gave Twitchell plenty of time to elaborate. On the witness stand, his client soon became animated and looked confident, moving full-on into a mini sales pitch.

  Twitchell described in excitement how early on in the development of House of Cards it had become clear the project had the potential to go beyond being just a simple short film. There was promise of so much more. He had envisioned a feature film, a novel, and an online marketing campaign working together to sell the same product through his new concept, MAPLE. The point was to keep the audience believing fiction was reality long after they had seen the film or read the novel. Twitchell brought up Alice in Wonderland and how he loved the idea of keeping everyone “down the rabbit hole” or in a fantasy world for as long as possible.

  The movie, he said, would follow the story of a man’s progression into becoming a serial killer. The man would use a suburban garage as a kill room. This horror film would detail how there are dangerous people everywhere: at the bank, the bakery, perhaps even in the movie theatre. The novel, to be released shortly after the movie, would be a first-person account written from the perspective of the producer who made the film. But the book would also reveal that the producer is actually a serial killer who had made the film to hide the evidence of his real-life slayings. The novel would include plenty of detail from the producer’s own life, Twitchell explained, to fool readers into believing the novel was the true story of a serial killer, blurring the line between fiction and reality so thoroughly that there would be controversy and debate over what was real and what was fake. Is the producer really a serial killer? Is the movie a true account of a murderer’s method? Is the book a confession or a work of fiction?

  The jewel in MAPLE’s crown would be a final ploy to use the Internet to spread the story virally, so it would become an online urban legend. Twitchell imagined his audience would immediately search online for any evidence of fakery, and such online buzz could go a long way in keeping the mystery alive. A plan developed. Twitchell wanted to locate “recruits” to support the MAPLE concept by luring them off dating websites, just like in the plot of the movie and novel. When these recruits arrived, he would pitch them the idea of supporting the MAPLE concept by having them “pretend” to be survivors of real-life attacks when the movie and novel were released. But Twitchell testified he changed his mind at the last minute and decided to scare the arriving recruits into thinking they were actually under attack. These so-called victims would be so terrified, he said, they would flood online message boards, the film’s website, and social-networking sites such as Facebook with comments. “I was there. I saw the room,” they’d say. Their belief that they had survived a real attack would support the reality/fiction structure of MAPLE even more and keep the audience guessing. Twitchell testified that he had come up with this concept following the House of Cards wrap party. After dinner, he had stayed up late, his Internal Creative Genius striking him again.

  Twitchell testified that his interest in such horror-themed material led him to borrow ideas from multiple sources, including writers Stephen King, Thomas Harris, and Jeff Lindsay. But he explained away his Dexter Morgan profile on Facebook as just a way to interact with fans of the show. His message on October 14, 2008, that he had “crossed the line on Friday … and I liked it” was a reference to falling in love with Traci at the movies all over again, not killing someone.

  His testimony was a virtual admission to all of the evidence against him, but he contended that essentially everyone had been fooled by what it meant: the homicide cops who arrested him, the Crown prosecutors who pursued him, and now the court for denying his bail and pressing forward with a first-degree murder charge. All of them had been pulled down the rabbit hole, he said. It was all fantasy. Twitchell was the puppetmaster, but his puppet had turned on him and implicated him in a real-life murder when it was all a work of fiction. Those murder weapons? All movie props. The table and chair? Props too. The garage? A movie set. And S. K. Confessions? That was the first draft of the novel portion of MAPLE. Of course the writings are brash and insensitive. And for good reason: it is the fictionalized diary of an evil serial killer! The reason why it had so many elements of Twitchell’s own life within it was all due to MAPLE. The novel could only work if reality and fiction blended and merged so thoroughly that nobody could tell the difference.

  The jury hung on to every word of Twitchell’s explanation. But did they buy it?

  One problem was how closely the testimony of Gilles Tetreault had matched the account of the first attack in S. K. Confessions, right down to the most minute detail. But Twitchell explained away the incident as a plan that went horribly awry. He testified that he had only wanted to fool Gilles into thinking he was under attack as his first MAPLE recruit. He had no intention of actually hurting him – just a plan to scare him, let him escape, and spread the word online about his own terrifying experience with a masked man in a garage once the movie and novel were released.

  A second problem was obvious: Johnny’s skeletal remains.

  Twitchell, on the witness stand, then made a startling admission: he killed Johnny Altinger. But it wasn’t what the prosecution thought, he testified. It wasn’t murder. Not even close.

  Davison stepped in at this point and began guiding Twitchell through his testimony point by point. He asked his client to explain what happened when Johnny arrived at the garage, having been lured there off the Internet by Twitchell pretending to be a woman named Jen.

  Twitchell said he had learned from his mistakes with Gilles. So when Johnny showed up he wasn’t pretending to be the masked killer anymore. He identified himself as a filmmaker. But he also wanted to draw this experience out as long as possible so he’d have more material for his novel. He started toying with Johnny, making him come back and forth, thinking Jen was just late and still on her way. When Johnny returned for the third time and said, “I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment,” Twitchell testified he decided to finally spill the story about Multi-Angle Psychosis Layering Entertainment. He explained to Johnny that Jen did not exist because it was all just a hoax that he had cooked up, but that he wanted Johnny to be part of the MAPLE concept to help promote the film in the future.

  Twitchell said Johnny “didn’t seem too humoured by it” and appeared indignant and angry. “He was telling me, ‘This is what you do? You’re luri
ng people over here and then, what, springing this on them?’ I don’t remember his exact words or phrasing,” Twitchell told the jury. “And then at the end he just goes, ‘Well, that’s pathetic.’ And then of course I’m gonna react so, in not the kindest way, I tell him, ‘Pathetic? Hey, look who’s talking?’ “

  “What were the words you used, the best you remember them?” Davison asked.

  Twitchell licked his dry and cracking lips. He had been on the witness stand for more than two hours by this point. He grabbed the plastic water cup beside him, took a tiny sip, paused, and then exhaled. “I turned my back on him and then I told him that he should probably just crawl back to whatever little hole he crawled out of.” Twitchell hesitated and rolled his hand out in the air like it was something he didn’t want to say. “Because he could probably never get a woman that good-looking in his life anyway.” He said he then turned away and thought Johnny was walking out the door.

  “What happened next?”

  “The next thing I remember was an impact in my lower back, which I assumed to be a kick, that he tried to kick me. And I turned around and I push him back.… And then again we come to a place where it’s a matter of not being able to read each other or mixed signals because we’re right there next to the wooden table with my laptop on it. And I get this idea in my head like, ‘What if he retaliates and he tries to smash up the laptop?’ He must have seen me looking toward it and I’m starting to make a little bit of a move to block it. The pipes are also right there too. So, to counter, or to beat me to it, he grabs one.… Swung it a couple times.… I dodge the first couple and then I put my arm up to block one. Took it right here, across my forearm on the bottom.” He raised his arm and pointed to his elbow. “It’s like a stinging, so I recoil and then snap back and then I grab the pipe, sort of a miniature half-second tug of war, until I twist it out of his grasp. And then I swung. Seems to me that he saw that portion or at least reacted in some way because he flinched back and the edge of the pipe caught him on the top of the head.”

  “Carry on,” Davison urged.

  “We proceed to get into a pretty intense altercation.… We grab each other’s arms. Trying to get an advantage over each other. It’s basically just turning and side-stepping.” Twitchell curled up his fists and squeezed them tight. “I’m trying to get him off of me. Of course, I’m not thinking very rationally at this so I’m using the pipe again.” He raised his one hand like he was swinging the pipe up and down. “I’m trying to hit him, I’m …” Twitchell paused, took his gaze off of Davison for a second, and stared at the floor. “There’s this physical, if I can call it an aversion to hitting people? But I’m feeling it pull back?”

  Davison looked annoyed. He raised his voice. “Just focus on what you did or he did and what things that you said, okay? What did you do with the pipe?”

  “I’m swinging at him, he had a grip on my arm and I was sort of grabbing at his sleeve at the same time. And it’s a matter of, like, pulling and pushing on each other. And so I’m swinging the pipe trying to hit him off of me.” Twitchell’s voice started wavering. “I keep hitting him on the head because he’s pulling on me. He’s moving forward. He’s a little taller than me. Maybe an inch? … He’s swinging back at me. He swung for the body, mostly. I took a few shots to the stomach area, maybe the chest. Nothing like super hard, but it seemed like he was trying to protect himself while still fighting back.”

  “And what was he striking you with?”

  “Would have been his left fist?” Twitchell raised up his hand.

  “Okay. Carry on.”

  “Now we’re struggling some more and I keep increasing the power each time, with each hit, with the pipe, to try to separate us. And toward the end of it he’s, he just switches.” Twitchell shook his head and frowned. “It’s like a switch of pressure from pushing back to a sudden pull, and he pulls me in toward him and he’s bent over and the pipe connects with him again, it’s just a lot of mangled mess of swings.” He gave Davison a look of disgust.

  “Do you have any idea how many times you struck him with the pipe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “He finally got mad enough to rear up and grab the pipe. This time he let go of my right arm, grabbed it with both hands and twisted it out of my grasp.” Twitchell started speeding up his words. “In that moment, that’s a panic moment for me, I just back off and I try to step back as far as I can.… Then I realize, you know, he’s standing there. He. Has. The. Pipe. And he’s bleeding, a lot.” Twitchell’s eyes flared. “I really don’t know what to do. I’m far enough away from the other pipe where I can’t really make a move for that without him charging me immediately. I don’t really want to provoke it any further. So I reach for … the knife.”

  Twitchell told the jury he was wearing a KA-BAR knife on his belt. He motioned to his hip and showed how he undid the button on the sheath and wrapped his fingers around the handle. “I thought that would send a clear enough message, saying we’re pretty much equal, but again, there’s no real rational thought in it. I’m just thinking to balance the situation out. Here I am, I’m going to go hold on to the handle of this thing. So I have a pretty tight grip on that and I’m watching John touch his head.” Twitchell motioned again to his own head. “And notice the blood all over his hands.” He brought his hand down to his eyes, staring at his palms like they had blood on them. “And he says something to the effect of, ‘My head, my head, you fuck!’ … He comes after me swinging.” Twitchell’s voice quickened. “It’s just an instant knee-jerk reaction. The pipe is in the air, I just, both hands come out. One’s got the knife in it. I put the other hand up to block the pipe and then …” He breathed in and closed his eyes. “Sickest. Feeling. Ever.”

  “What did you do?”

  “It all happened so fast.… I just started to feel this wet sensation around the hand that was still holding the handle and I let go instinctively … and then I saw it sticking out of him.”

  Twitchell’s face flushed as he described his panic. He testified that he froze as Johnny looked down, staggered back, and fell to the floor, blood pouring out of him in a flood of dark red.

  “It’s one of those things where I’m just stuck there and can’t decide what to do, just frozen by inaction.” Twitchell composed himself and raised his voice. “There is this war going on between … screaming out in my head, ‘Call 9-1-1!’ but at the same time, ‘How bad does this look? Take a look around. Look at what this place looks like!’ “ He paused for a moment as he stood in the witness box, looking down and running out of words.

  Then, he said it was five or ten minutes before he could move again, watching Johnny bleed out all over the floor, doing nothing to help him. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,’ and then a series of ‘No, no, no, no.’ “ His voice lowered into a whimper.

  Twitchell paused, lip quivering, eyes squinted. Tears flowed down his cheeks. “Sorry,” he said. He shook his head and grabbed a tissue.

  There wasn’t a sound in the courtroom as he dabbed his tears away.

  “When I could finally move,” he continued, voice crackling, “I walked over to him … Not even a pulse. Nothing was even moving.” He started to cry. “It took me a really long time to figure out what the hell I was gonna do.” He began blubbering. “I just started thinking about … how I could have been so fucking stupid!?” He stopped to wipe away more tears. “Even all the precautions I took. You can’t just think you can predict human behaviour.… I could have avoided that whole thing.” He started mumbling. “No way to see how it was gonna unfold.”

  “What did you do?” Davison asked softly.

  Twitchell clenched the tissue tight in his hand and composed himself. “I started just to try to buy myself some time and I figured out first before I could actually act that, uhhhhh,” he groaned. “I was gonna start using my set for things it had never been designed to do. I couldn’t touch �
�em or move ’em until … I tried to set my mind to the task and the only way I could do that was to block out what I was feeling.”

  Twitchell likened it to putting up super-strong Plexiglas walls to separate himself from his emotions. “I tried to keep telling myself, it’s not him anymore. The man’s not there. It’s just a shell.”

  Davison asked what he did next.

  “I tried to lift him up. I can’t remember how many attempts I made at actually standing up. I lifted him and carried him over, part dragging, part lifting to the table. And then set him on it.”

  “Did you get him on the table?”

  “I did.”

  Twitchell testified that he then proceeded to dismember Johnny’s body. He returned to the garage a few days later to finish the job.

  Davison asked him to compare the description of the dismemberment in S. K. Confessions with what he actually did. Was the document accurate?

  “In general terms, for the most part,” Twitchell said, “yes.”

  “MONSTERS DO LIVE AMONG US”

  THE ALTINGER FAMILY BOARDED a flight from the West Coast, touching down in Edmonton in time to attend Twitchell’s cross-examination. Gary Altinger was fuming. He knew in his heart his brother would never hurt anyone, let alone fly into a furious rage and repeatedly charge at a man who had his hand wrapped around the handle of a deadly military blade.

  Gary was the first person to enter the courtroom once the doors were unlocked. He hurried to the front row and saved a seat for his mother, Elfriede. Detectives Clark, Johnson, and Mandrusiak arrived, sitting near the back. Actor and comedian Chris Heward had shown up too, hoping to see Twitchell squirm under pressure now that Chris had testified and was allowed to sit in the public gallery. The courtroom filled to capacity a half-hour before the jury was allowed in.