The Devil's Cinema

by Steve Lillebuen

  Twitchell blew right past him.

  The Altinger family saw the back of Twitchell’s head as he stormed out and they couldn’t resist having the last word.

  “See ya!” one man said, giving Twitchell a sarcastic wave.

  “Bye!” another chimed in as the cell door was about to close.

  “Have fun!”

  A DARK SIDE

  THERE WAS A SENSE of elation as Clark, Mandrusiak, and Johnson walked together out of the courthouse with the verdict they had wanted for years. Both prosecutors were already standing outside and being interviewed by reporters, stuck in a scrum of television cameras and microphones packed together a few steps from the west doors. The three detectives watched Van Dyke and Inglis give their answers for a few minutes. Twitchell’s defence lawyer snuck out undetected. The media pack then turned and surrounded the three officers, eager for a quote.

  Clark was asked where he would place Twitchell on the long list of criminals he had dealt with over his thirty-year career. He did not hesitate to place him at the very top. “He’s a psychopathic killer,” Clark announced to the gathering. “And we’ve taken him off the streets of this city.”

  It was a blunt assessment. But there was a reason why he was so confident in airing his armchair diagnosis. For there existed another interesting document in the case, one so prejudicial that the jury had been prevented from hearing its contents or even knowing of its very existence. The document was made public upon the trial’s conclusion. It appeared to have been written in the weeks before Johnny’s murder, and just days before the filming of House of Cards. And Mark Andrew Twitchell – alias Dark Jedi, Logan, Twitch, Achilles of Edmonton, Tyler Durden’s Hero, and Dexter Morgan – was most certainly the author. It was seven pages long and began with a description of a deeply personal struggle:

  I go by so many names so I will leave tags out of it. I am simply me. I am different from most people. I suppose I’ve always been different for as long as I can remember but didn’t truly understand the true depths of it until recently. Not until an inadvertent intervention by a family member woke me up to the truth – the truth that I am a psychopath.

  The document, titled “Profile of a Psychopath,” focused on elements of Twitchell’s life story and how he studied personality disorders to come up with a self-diagnosis of psychopathy. He fit most of the criteria, he wrote, but not all. The profile had been found on his laptop after his arrest, another echo of a document still existing on a temporary file his computer had not yet discarded. Within the document, Twitchell based his assessment on an honest reflection of his own failings throughout life:

  For example, I am a pathological liar. I’ve habitually lied my entire life and despite my incredibly well-adjusted and healthy family life and upbringing, it never stopped. I’ve always apologized but never meant it and never corrected the behaviour. I lie to my wife and to my family on a practically constant basis. Sometimes I do this to protect them, to shield them from knowing the truth about what I really am and sometimes I do it for my own gratification and there’s no reason to it all.…

  My whole life I’ve always just done whatever the hell I wanted without any consideration for anyone else and it’s never bothered me. I don’t experience things like remorse or guilt. Occasionally I mentally kick myself for making an idiot move or decision but it’s not the same thing.… My wife only has a very small picture of what goes through my head. She still thinks I have remnants of compassion or honesty when none of these things remain. I put on a show for her benefit.…

  I’ve always had a dark side I’ve had to sugar coat for the world. I’ve always had to pretend to be more social than I want to be and it’s worked out well for me. Despite the disorder, I’m still a somewhat upbeat outgoing person. Until lately I used to think my laid back approach and total lack of fear of the unknown future was due to my disposition and outlook on life. This may still be partially true but I cannot deny a major part of it is also the fact I just don’t feel what others feel. I’m not quite sure I’m capable of love.

  There was a tinge of sorrow in the prose as Twitchell described his life and how he was heading toward a seemingly inevitable conclusion. He wrote of the decision to incorporate his real-life dark side into his movie script as a way of satisfying his violent fantasies, but “lawfully and without harming anyone.” If he produced a violent film and someone else happened to be “inspired” by his work and committed a real-life version of his fiction, he wrote that he may “feel flattered, a little honoured.” He would get the thrill from experiencing violence by acting it out but with none of the responsibility of actually committing a crime. He was worried about getting caught. His tone was often callous, writing of animals having no more value than the human race, which he held in contempt anyway, especially “trash” like killers and rapists. But despite his compromise to fulfil a fantasy with fiction, he wrote of still finding himself standing at a crossroads. He felt he had to make a decision on how he wanted the rest of his life to pan out.

  Twitchell gave himself two options. Option A: “Come clean” about his lies and what he really felt deep inside. Option B: “Live out the charade” of his normal life, suppressing the real him from public view. Less than a month later, it appeared as if Twitchell tried to have it both ways: exploring his dark side in reality while still trying to convince Jess, and himself, that nothing was wrong. He knew he had a deep desire that he could not easily shake, a desire to experience every act imaginable, whatever that may be:

  Life is far too short to not partake of every single experience you can before you kick the bucket and I want to experience it all. We only get one shot and that’s why I’ve lived my life with a policy of total lack of inhibition.… I don’t want to miss out on anything, not any one experience left to try before I get snuffed out forever and this tends to be the driving force behind how I engineer my life. It is what it is I suppose.

  The document offered investigators a solid theory into how and why the script for House of Cards became the foundation for a real-life murder. A snuff film had never been found, leading detectives to believe his motives were of a different persuasion. Detectives wondered if the document could therefore prove that Twitchell had crossed that boundary between make-believe and reality in his mind, that he had stopped fantasizing to really become the strange beast he had only imagined he could be. It was a possibility Twitchell’s acquaintances were willing to accept. “He’s always been lost in fantasy,” his high-school friend and pen pal explained, “but this is the first time where he actualized a fantasy.”

  MARK TWITCHELL’S POTENTIAL NEXT moves if he hadn’t been caught so quickly were a source of constant speculation – until an answer was revealed after the trial because it, too, had been written down. Such intentions had been scrubbed clean from S. K. Confessions before the jury had a chance to read it, along with any reference to “psychopath,” of which there were many. With the full diary exposed upon Twitchell’s conviction, however, passages that detoured deep into Twitchell’s psyche were illuminated: he had chosen at least two more victims for a visit to his kill room.

  One of Twitchell’s old employers was supposed to be next. He hated the man in part because he had fired him. “I owed it to the world to remove him from its glorious surface and would take my chance when I was ready,” Twitchell wrote, explaining that most people can’t stomach going all the way with their dark urges, but he could.

  His second victim was meant to be Traci’s ex-boyfriend. He had chosen him as a way “to pay homage” to Dexter because he knew the man was a fan of the show too. “I thought he’d be honoured to find himself duct-taped and cling-wrapped to the kill table, stripped of all clothing, scalpel scar on his right cheek,” he wrote, describing some of the hallmarks of Dexter’s method.

  It appeared as though Twitchell wanted to choose his future victims because they meant something to him. All were men he despised. And he had quickly outgrown the rigid code Dexter Morgan had lived by.
“By the third season of that show he was taking his own liberties with it anyway,” he justified.

  When detectives read these passages they were certain Twitchell was serious. It was no different than when he reasoned in his movie script: “write what you know.”

  Clark was thrilled the investigation had stopped Twitchell in his tracks. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he would have kept on killing,” he theorized. “We caught him on his first one, so he’s a very poor serial killer. And thankfully, he will never become a serial killer.”

  But to each detective’s dismay, a full copy of S. K. Confessions was never found. Twitchell would not reveal to police if one still existed in some corner of cyberspace, or how many pages the detectives were missing, how many more dark revelations he had made that were forever lost in the ether of the digital world.

  Twitchell, of course, saw things differently. As a way of explanation, he later described “Profile of a Psychopath” in his prison writings as a “literary social experiment,” where he was trying on the psychopathic personality “like a tailored suit” for the sole purpose of making his fictional writing better. It was not reality. “I did all I could to set the stage for the world to believe I was a psychotic killer and now … they’re buying it. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.”

  He wrote of the criminal case against him: “What I’ve done is disgusting but I am not a disgusting person – I just play one from time to time.… You can’t get a garden to flourish without getting your hands dirty, but elbow deep in blood was not what I had in mind.”

  And yet, in prison writings he penned after the trial, Twitchell revealed unspoken desires to kill another two “worthy victims,” taking his future target list to a total of four. He made sure the entire passage detailing these wishes, however, was written as a hypothetical, beginning with a description of his disgust with another friend’s ex-boyfriend. “I don’t mind admitting this too,” he explained. “If I really were capable of premeditated murder, he would have been my first target.”

  Twitchell also thought an in-law’s former husband deserved to be killed, describing the man as “the kind of guy the House of Cards killer would have loved to have gotten his gleefully maniacal hands on.” But Twitchell was speaking hypothetically here. Only if he was a murderer, he had stressed in these writings. If.

  SENSATIONAL

  ON MAY 9, 2011, a three-page form filled out in pen arrived in the mail room of the city’s law courts. Mark Twitchell had come up with more reasons for why he wasn’t guilty and taken the time to file this new list of grievances in a notice of appeal. “The media attention surrounding my case was so extensive, so blatant and so overly sensationalized that it is unreasonable to expect any unsequestered jury to have remained uninfluenced by it,” he wrote in his application.

  He argued there was “sufficient evidence” to raise reasonable doubt, noting his “advanced knowledge of computers” that, if examined properly at trial, would have proven suggestions he’d use a computer to carry out a crime were ludicrous. Twitchell was now insisting that he knew all along that S. K. Confessions was still a recoverable file, demonstrating how deleting the document on his laptop had never been an attempt at destroying crucial evidence.

  Twitchell was also representing himself. The decision was not surprising because he was also blaming his lawyer, in part, for the guilty verdict. Interestingly, he now wanted his character to be put into play if a new trial were heard – a contention Davison had avoided at all costs since it would also make “Profile of a Psychopath” admissible evidence, a document he told court was “destructive of character in the most extreme way possible.” Twitchell, however, didn’t like how the jury had been left with the impression that he was a “lifetime liar.” He believed his case could be assisted if he spoke more frankly about his life.

  His biggest enemy, however, remained the prosecution: “The Crown’s theory leans on too many fallacies of logic and contradictions in reasoning to make any sense. This must be corrected.”

  Twitchell’s appeal, regardless of sufficient legal grounds raised or not, could take years to work its way through the judicial system. In the meantime, the prosecution decided to stay the attempted murder charge for the attack on Gilles Tetreault. The decision came after years of vigorously pursuing the allegations, but a disappointing court ruling forced the criminal charge to be heard separately from the murder trial. Gilles had only been allowed to testify to help prove the truthfulness of S. K. Confessions, not to prove if the attack itself was an act of attempted murder. And the guilty verdict of first-degree murder handed down in April 2011 meant Twitchell had already received Canada’s maximum prison term – life with a minimum of twenty-five years. This made a second court case a moot point, especially since victims would have to relive their trauma once again on the witness stand for a best result of no additional prison time.

  Twitchell will therefore be fifty-four years old before he can apply for parole for the first time in 2033. When he’ll actually be released from prison is unknown. If he continues being a model prisoner, he may be shown leniency. But there is also a community expectation in such high-profile cases for the parole board to deny such freedoms multiple times. And in cases featuring the most heinous of criminals, those inmates with no remorse and a demonstrated risk to the public, parole can be denied for years – potentially forever.

  Despite these possibilities, Twitchell would not be silenced. Shortly after his appeal was filed, he turned his attention to William Strong, his prison pen pal, for assistance. At Twitchell’s request, his pen pal finally created a website Twitchell had dreamed about in remand that would feature excerpts from his prison writings. His celebrity sketches were also listed for sale. Such acts drew intense controversy and national outrage in the media, which was perhaps one of Twitchell’s objectives. The website was pulled off the Internet within a day of being discovered by the press, the community backlash cited as one of the main reasons why.

  The thing the public could not understand was why the media kept publishing anything that Twitchell did or said. “I am really hoping this is the last we hear of Mark Twitchell,” read one exasperated letter to the Edmonton Journal. Editors themselves seemed willing to put the entire ordeal behind them, writing how the guilty verdict brought “an end to one of the darkest chapters” in city history. “The efficient work of 112 police officers investigating Altinger’s disappearance stopped what might have been a series of murders,” stated the Journal’s main editorial.

  Others were left puzzled by unsolved elements in the criminal case. Twitchell had seemingly come out of nowhere, a rare self-professed psychopath whose first criminal conviction didn’t arrive until the age of thirty-one. There was no warning. The crime had also been entirely random, terrifying a community that demanded explanations for such seemingly unpredictable behaviour.

  For Mark Twitchell was a product of a simple life, of a family that did nothing wrong and tried their best to raise him, but he had somehow changed, become a chameleon, a man of many faces. He was a pretender and a trickster, the so-called committed husband and father who was hiding a sinister plan and a girl on the side.

  But Twitchell believed this innate desire to understand people like him was pointless. In fact, he treated the continued search for clues into his background and motives to be like stumbling alone in a smoke-filled labyrinth. “It would appear that I’m unique in the world,” he declared in his writings. “There is no key. No root cause.… There’s no school bully, or impressionably gory movies, or video game violence, or Showtime television series to point the finger at. It is what it is and I am what I am.”

  As the years passed by, it was as close as he would ever get to making a full confession.

  EPILOGUE

  A RETURN

  FEELING REAL

  THE TWITCHELL CASE HAD a prevailing impact on both the city of Edmonton and how the media would cover future murder trials, whether they drew an international audien
ce again or not. Before the jury was called in for the first time, Justice Clackson made it clear his starting position was one of openness. “Whatever I see, the media is entitled to see,” he told the court.

  But in a measured ruling issued minutes later, he granted access to all exhibits while banning the use of electronic devices. “My preference is not to risk the fairness of this trial.” Essentially, he was striking a balance with transparency, seeing a potential distraction brewing in his courtroom if two dozen reporters were bashing away on their laptops or smartphones. It was a wise move. One juror proved to be easily bothered by even the slightest of whispers. At one point the juror even requested that a journalist stop writing in his notepad. His pencil was making too much noise.

  But Justice Clackson also appreciated the huge public interest in the case and the media’s goal of providing coverage on a timely basis. He decided to set up a secondary courtroom two floors below that would receive an audio feed from the trial. Down the hall from the courthouse library, Room 211 became a hub for city journalists filing minute-by-minute updates on blogs, Twitter feeds, and online news sites while traditional newspaper, television, and radio reporters remained upstairs. By the end of the trial, thousands of people were reading near-live coverage online. Whether city councillors, police officers, or some of Johnny’s out-of-town friends – all received news of the verdict nearly simultaneously with Mark Twitchell.

  Justice Clackson’s ruling was a development in how court cases could be run smoothly in Alberta, despite a massive media presence. No doubt the case will be used as a benchmark by media lawyers to achieve similar levels of open access for high-profile cases down the road.