The Devil's Cinema (7 page)

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.

I
N 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.

D
ETECTIVES 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 entire 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.”

T
WITCHELL'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:

And another note:

Ending with the cops' favourites:

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.