The Devil's Cinema (34 page)

He could hear inmates being led to their booths, the sounds of clanging metal and creaking hinges. Guards shouted and doors slammed shut.

Mark Twitchell appeared. He was wearing navy blue overalls with a black collar. He looked tired. Twitchell collapsed into his seat and punched in his prison access code. He picked up the receiver and his eyes met those of his dear friend through the glass.

They talked for thirty minutes.

Twitchell complained about being in twenty-three-hour lock down with nothing to do. He was bored. There was no Internet access. No one to talk with. Seeing Mike again was a huge relief. Mike was relieved too. And he couldn't wait to share his experience with the rest of the group. “He sends
his best and is again very sorry at how this has affected everyone's lives,” Mike wrote on the “Friends of Twitch” Facebook group page. “He's in for the long haul in there until the trial starts, but he's refusing to plead to a lesser charge and will defend his innocence to the last.”

Scott was next to visit. He cracked jokes with Twitchell, they made movie references, complained about the media coverage. The last topic made Twitchell furious. He told Scott the cops were using “dirty tactics” and were lying to his family and friends to discredit him. What Twitchell was saying bothered his friend a great deal. On his way out, Scott dropped forty dollars in a remand account for him to spend at the prison canteen. “I'm really starting to doubt the police can make this stick,” he wrote.

Jason visited two days later and was happy to see his old roommate was in good spirits. “He's already getting the movie ideas in his head,” Jason wrote. “So if this goes well for him, he might just get his big film.… He said he's sorry this crap has happened and appreciates what we're trying to do.”

When all three asked him about the police allegations, however, Twitchell was pointedly silent. He explained to them in his usual eloquence that he couldn't discuss the case since it was now before the courts. His lawyer had told him repeatedly to keep quiet. Twitchell kept referring to a “missing piece of the puzzle” that would soon reveal all. But he would not elaborate.

His friends trusted him. They knew him as an honest man, a committed husband, and a loving father. In their eyes, he was a man to look up to and admire, considering all he'd done for them.

Mike was upset at the thought of dirty cops and liars twisting words to suit their needs. The police had even been telling some of Twitchell's friends that
Day Players
was a big scam. He thought it unbelievable. “The cops are full of shit,” Mike announced after a meeting with Twitchell's lawyer. “Their ‘mountain of evidence' so far has been six pages. Of theories.”

Twitchell gave Mike his online passwords so he could shut down his Myspace and Facebook profiles. The media wouldn't be able to get access to them anymore. And Twitchell asked him for help. He needed someone on the outside who could control his affairs, a partner, a man who would manage everything for him.

He needed a power of attorney.

Mike agreed to do it. He became the sole controller of Xpress Entertainment and Twitchell's personal finances. Mike looked forward to taking a look inside those bank accounts and showing the cops just how stupid their allegations really were. “I'll be going through his paperwork and his bank accounts shortly, so we'll know for sure.”

He was so confident about what he would find, he concluded his message with a smiley face.

J
ESS DID NOT VISIT
her husband in remand or let him see their daughter. Twitchell's friends couldn't understand it, but then again, they had no idea.

She was swift in executing a plan to remove herself from anything to do with her husband as smoothly as possible. She hired two lawyers to defend her rights. The first was her shield against the police. Detectives were no longer allowed to talk with her; everything had to go through her lawyer. The second dealt with far more personal matters. Jess must have been devastated and confused by what had happened, but she was seeking no direct explanation from her husband.

She filed for divorce in mid-November and cited October 20, 2008, as the last day of their marriage – the day their house was seized and Twitchell had finally confessed to his infidelity and constant lying. She demanded full custody of Chloe and wanted a restraining order against him. A legal aid was ushered off to remand to serve Twitchell the papers in person. He used one of the couple's wedding photos as a means of identifying him.

And just like that, their marriage was over.

As the dust settled from her legal filings, a letter was sent to remand addressed to Mark Twitchell. When he opened it, he saw the contents were deeply personal. Jess had poured her emotions out on paper and it came as such a shock that Twitchell refused to speak of it with anyone he knew.

Her brother had his own strong opinions. And he used far less tact than Jess when he launched a legal battle against Twitchell to get his money back from his failed film investment. “I believe he is capable of anything,” he declared.

M
ARK
T
WITCHELL'S NAME WAS
spreading across the world by media and social-networking sites. But under the hills of Hollywood, one of the driving forces behind the television show
Dexter
was still blissfully unaware of what horror had been transpiring farther north.

Melissa Rosenberg, in her forties with strawberry-blond hair, sat down for a series of pre-planned interviews in Beverly Hills to promote
Twilight
, her movie adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's novel about vampires and high school lust. It was opening the following week with a Los Angeles red carpet premiere. But one Canadian reporter working for a national news wire service had come armed with a few questions about her past work on
Dexter
. The journalist explained that an avid fan of the show had been charged with a murder and accused of re-enacting elements of Dexter Morgan's modus operandi. In short, he appeared to have been “inspired” by the television program. Rosenberg blinked and became visibly upset.

“Oh Jesus!” she erupted. “This is a tragic and horrible thing to hear.”

It was a “worst fears” scenario for Rosenberg, who had already worked on
Dexter
for more than forty episodes as a producer and writer. She said the production team had never wanted to “glorify” Dexter and his killings in the series. “And we've been very careful not to. Every time you think you're identifying with Dexter and rooting for him, for us it's about turning that back on you and saying, ‘You may think that he's doing good, but he's a monster. He's killing people because he's a monster.' “

The reporter asked if the show's creators had been worried about criticism when the show was launched.

“The executive producers were expecting it,” she said. “They were ready for it. They thought we were going to get slams.”

But to her surprise, it didn't happen.

Until now.

It was the kind of honest response that journalists loved but made spin doctors cringe. At the time, no one realized how important Rosenberg's comments were: it was the last time anyone from the television show ever spoke publicly about Mark Twitchell. Every interview request, no matter who was asking, was denied for years.

The media attempted to contact
Dexter's
creator, author Jeff Lindsay, but he didn't answer requests either and had others screen his calls. Eventually, ABC's
20/20
persuaded him to speak about the Twitchell case, but then Lindsay abruptly cancelled. The program reported that he had called fifteen minutes before the scheduled interview and explained that “he couldn't talk about
Dexter
and he couldn't tell us why.”

Fans of the show wanted to know more about Mark Twitchell and what links detectives had made between his case and the motives and method of the fictional Dexter Morgan. “How could this be a Dexter-style murder if the victim was innocent?” a fan asked on an online message board. But the police weren't willing to release that information just yet, especially how Twitchell had created a plastic-wrapped kill room with a metal table, just like Dexter in the television show.

A few fans clicked through news articles featuring photos of Twitchell dressed as Bumblebee, Wolverine, and in various other Halloween outfits. “Say what you will about this evil bastard,” one wrote. “But those costumes are pretty decent.”

A
FTER A FEW WEEKS
of panic,
Star Wars
fans had calmed enough to change their approach. A few decided it was much better to distance themselves from Twitchell rather than to cower in the dark. “Frankly, us worrying about how it reflects on us is pretty myopic; it reflects far worse on Edmonton, for instance,” wrote one fan, who retracted his earlier messages of alarm.

Insults then took over the online dialogue. “He always struck me as being a little nuts,” the conversation continued. “Had a real sense of entitlement when he posted.”

D
ETECTIVE
A
NSTEY ROCKED ON
his feet, staring into the beams of television camera lights in the front lobby of police headquarters. Two weeks had passed since his first press conference. Anstey needed the public's help again, and he had just the thing to attract media attention. He had called in the cameras and newspapers to say he wanted witnesses to come forward. Had anyone seen Twitchell's Pontiac Grand Am on the road between October 14 and October 19? It would've been fairly noticeable because the licence plate was D
RKJEDI
.

“We're interested in speaking with anybody who may have seen that vehicle, say in a farm area or in any secluded area, and it might have been acting suspiciously,” he announced to the gaggle of media encircling him.

Questions erupted. One reporter cut above the shouting with an obvious one: “Are you looking for a body?”

“We believe there is some evidence that he may have tried to get rid of some evidence … and that could include the body, yes.”

“Is this a whole body,” a scribe with a pen and notepad clarified, “or a body that's cut in pieces?”

“I'm not going to –” Anstey stopped himself. “I can't say for sure.”

He hustled up to the third floor to homicide. Damn it, he thought. His boss was going to be on him again about that one. Anstey was still keeping S. K. Confessions and all the blood evidence a secret, but he knew the head of homicide would still think he was saying too much, even though he hadn't mentioned the key phrase about the police search: the sewer.

Anstey expected another verbal tussle with his superior was on the horizon. His boss had already been yelling at him about his investigative summary, a police document that the primary investigator writes to explain all the evidence and the progression of the case from beginning to end. He usually demanded such summaries on certain schedules and written in a certain way, but detectives felt their boss was beginning to micro-manage
this particular file, and Anstey didn't play by those rules. For one, he liked to use Post-It notes. The team bugged Anstey about it, joking how he was just like Twitchell for leaving sticky notes everywhere, but for their boss, it was a serious issue. “Sticky notes can go missing,” he used to tell Anstey. “Just write everything directly in your notes.”

Despite the butting heads within the homicide unit, the case had progressed. The first victim, Gilles Tetreault, had been interviewed by Clark. The entire team was amazed at how closely his survival story mirrored Twitchell's version in S. K. Confessions. He had also luckily printed off photos of “Sheena” and her driving directions prior to his date. The details within Twitchell's document were slowly being proven true, one witness at a time.

But to the surprise of the investigators, the real-life victim was not married. While S. K. Confessions clearly stated that the killer was hunting single men, detectives had remained open to the possibility that the victim hadn't called the police in order to keep an attempted affair a secret. Gilles didn't report the attack, however, simply because he was embarrassed. He also didn't realize his experience had been a prelude to a suspected brutal murder seven days later.

A woman in Ohio had also called police a few days after hearing of the murder charge on the news. Renee Waring confessed to having participated in some very strange conversations with Mark Twitchell. She thought her Facebook record of thousands of words written by him as Dexter Morgan was going to be incredibly valuable to the case. Detectives agreed. And they were grateful that, just like Gilles, she had come forward despite the potential embarrassment since Twitchell's correspondence with her seemed to detail his step-by-step plan and changing methods for committing the perfect murder.