The Devil's Cinema (45 page)

Not that he'd get very far before the sheer magnitude of the situation would be rubbed in his face. Twitchell turned away from his lawyer to be led out of court by a sheriff for the last time. And standing tall beside the cell door to remand was his nemesis, Detective Bill Clark.

Clark had wanted his face to be the last Twitchell would ever see on the outside. He had taken a seat in the bench as close to the door as possible, and he had a smile of sweet satisfaction underneath his neatly trimmed
moustache. It was a moment few detectives will ever experience in their careers. He had told Twitchell all those years ago that he was coming to get him. And he did. He got him.

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!”

T
HERE 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:

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:

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:

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.”

M
ARK
T
WITCHELL'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
.

O
N
M
AY
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.