The Devil's Cinema (35 page)

Anstey had backed down on his search for a possible snuff film. With the diary in hand and Twitchell's convincing denial, it seemed to be less of a priority. And tech crimes had found seventeen hours of video footage stored on Twitchell's home computer, laptop, and external hard drives. It could take weeks to squeeze in time for viewing every last second of it. But unbeknownst to Anstey, the public would actually see some of Twitchell's video before his own detectives.

M
IKE FOUGHT FOR DAYS
to stop it, but he was powerless, even while acting as Twitchell's power of attorney. National broadcaster Global TV had obtained footage from the
House of Cards
shoot and planned to air it on a new current events program called
16×9: The Bigger Picture
. Mike tried to claim their broadcast would be a copyright infringement of their work, but his argument crumbled under a “fair dealing” defence that allowed such material to be used for news reporting purposes. Twitchell's film crew was mortified. “If that footage airs, everyone at that garage is exposed,” a worried Scott pointed out online. Some of them considered the possibility that a crooked cop could have leaked the footage, but the source was far closer than they realized.

Television editor Spencer Copeland had rented his digital camera to Twitchell, but the filmmaker had never paid him upon its return. Spencer was out a few hundred dollars. He was being hounded by the media for footage of the movie that had inspired a real-life murder. He only had a few minutes of video that Twitchell had left stored on the camera, including the special effects shot of the torso stabbing and the last scenes filmed. News anchors regularly stopped by the post-production company where he worked, hoping to charm him into releasing the footage. As the weeks passed, Spencer became so sick of the media asking for the video that he decided to give it away to the next person who walked in the door. Five minutes later, someone from Global TV arrived. He handed the camera over for no money, signed an exclusivity agreement to not give the footage to anyone else, and wiped the camera hard drive clean upon its return. “I wanted it away from me,” he recalled. “It seemed to bring so much grief. It was stressing me out so I was happy when it was gone.” Global had an exclusive due to pure luck and without spending a dime.

Tense and nervous, most of Twitchell's film crew watched the Global TV program when it aired on the evening of Sunday, November 30. To their relief, none of the broadcast footage revealed any of their faces. “We heard Dave's voice, saw part of my arm and torso, but no faces,” Scott wrote.

The program played up the
Dexter
connection, stating that “eerily, Twitchell even looks like the character.” Some members of his crew thought
Twitchell had a very slight resemblance to Michael C. Hall, the actor who played the fictional serial killer. Twitchell had taken a self-portrait during his prep work for his
Star Wars
film that was framed in a similar fashion to
Dexter's
main promotional pose: the wry grin, cold stare, a maroon dress shirt. Dexter had reddish hair, as Twitchell did as a child, and both had a deep voice, a tomboy sister, a wife and young family. But those were all passing similarities. The comparison in the program made the film crew angry.

The six-and-a-half-minute segment then ended on the possibility that the entire case could be an elaborate hoax. “It's possible for him to have done something like that,” one of Twitchell's old college buddies told the program, “to have flipped it, to basically have used the media as a tool.”

Twitchell's friends looked at the calendar and started counting the days to December 10, the day Johnny's email stated he'd be back from Costa Rica.

They hoped and they prayed.

T
HE AIR OUTSIDE HUNG
heavy with frost as Acting Detective Dale Johnson peered down a sewer grate and took a long look below. He adjusted his glasses. He could see the murky water at the bottom, hear his breath echo into the depths of the city's underbelly. But he couldn't see a body. He had already checked every manhole and sewer grate surrounding Twitchell's St. Albert home and the Greenview garage film set. Now he was outside the home of Mark Twitchell's parents and he had brought along reinforcements.

A huge city drainage truck was parked nearby. Public works employees carried pick axes and camera equipment. Every manhole in front of the house and along the entire length of the street was popped open. The crew snaked a camera scope inside the sewer and drove it up and down the pipes, searching all the storm drains. It took an entire day. The crew returned the next morning to search the back alley. The camera traced the old and cracked network of metal and concrete pipes beneath the aging north-side neighbourhood.

Nothing could be found.

Snowflakes were falling and the ground was starting to freeze.

Then another promising lead. Constable Michael Roszko from the tech crimes unit had found another page of the diary on Twitchell's laptop:

The team shared a collective thought: Sherwood Park. It was a community east of the city and a known criminal dumping site, where, in recent years, the bodies of prostitutes had been found. Johnson drove off to the public works department and studied their sewer maps for any location that could resemble the description in the diary.

And he found one. It was a near-perfect match. When he drove to the site and took a look for himself, he knew they had found it. The manhole was located off to the side and beside a power pole in the eastern suburb, just as Twitchell had written. Johnson called in the drainage trucks. He stood nearby, waiting. The crew took their time but returned with bad news.

“Are you kidding me?” he said in frustration. “No, this
has
to be it.”

Two workers descended into the sewer and searched again. Same result. Johnson couldn't believe the body wasn't there.

The sewer search was rapidly expanded. The rest of Sherwood Park was examined, then the team moved northeast to the city of Fort Saskatchewan, to the surrounding villages of Ardrossan, Lamont, Gibbons, farther southeast to the town of Beaumont and the growing city of Leduc.

All negative.

Anstey's plea to the public to find witnesses who had seen Twitchell's car with its DRKJEDI licence plate proved fruitless too. While the car had been spotted plenty of times, none of the sightings had led to any potential sewer sites.

A thought occurred that Twitchell could have flipped the directions in the diary and had meant to say “western” suburb. Johnson searched the
western bedroom communities of Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, the tiny town of Onoway. St. Albert was searched again.

Nothing.

The diary was read over once more. Maybe Twitchell was calling Edmonton an eastern suburb of St. Albert? The eastern half of the city was searched extensively. Everything east of 75th Street was included in a wide swath of searching, a section stretching north and south more than forty blocks. But the team was also open to considering tiny villages or towns. The forensics team was called in to help. Constable Gary Short and Sergeant Randy Topp drove as far away as Bawlf, a village two hours southeast of the city.

Sites were found that closely matched Twitchell's description. Sewer grates were popped open. Drainage trucks were called in with vacuum pumps. But they found nothing.

It was now early December and winter's claws were digging deep into the Alberta soil. Temperatures plunged to double digits below zero. The storm sewers were freezing up and the search had to be called off.

The team was frustrated. They believed somewhere in that web of pipes and drains was the body of an innocent man, his skeleton slowly becoming wrapped in a thick blanket of ice. And they were powerless to stop it from happening.

T
HE 10TH DAY OF
December passed by with little fanfare. Johnny's personal Facebook profile remained inactive. On “Find Johnny Altinger” there was silence as well.

Everyone who had been in denial about Johnny's fate had their last desperate hope taken away as 2008 neared its end. There had never been a Costa Rica vacation, and it was clear Johnny was never coming back.

T
HE SPRING MELT ARRIVED
as Anstey made a decision about his future: he was done with homicide. The endless hours, the death and blood, the battles with his boss, which had escalated to shouting matches. He just knew it was time.

Anstey had been dedicated to solving this last case of his career. He didn't want to take a chance that Twitchell could get off on a technicality or be provided the luxury of some kind of defence. He believed the man guilty and a danger to society. He wanted him behind bars for the rest of his life. To do that, Anstey had to prove Johnny was dead. The sewer search had failed, so he focused on eliminating the possibility that Johnny was still alive. Anstey checked hospitals, the morgue, the medical examiner's office for unidentified remains; crisis units were called to rule out mental health issues. The team had flagged Johnny's bank accounts, credit cards, mortgage payments, bills. They contacted Johnny's doctor, his dentist, a pharmacist for ongoing prescriptions. His name was flagged with every airline, with immigration in the Caribbean, and across America. The missing persons unit rechecked everything on a three-month rotation.

But there was no sign of him anywhere. Johnny had fallen off the grid.

Anstey figured about 90 per cent of the file was complete when he handed in his resignation in March 2009. The remaining work dealt primarily with finding Johnny's body, a task he feared may never be completed.

On his last day, he packed up his belongings and cleared out his desk, shaking hands with his colleagues, saying goodbye to Clark. He was leaving on a high, at least. A career case. Anstey turned in his handgun, his badge, number 1098, and was given a retired member's badge in return. He picked up a cardboard box full of his personal things and took the elevator out of headquarters. “I'm retired,” his out-of-office work email message stated. “Yahoo.”

T
WITCHELL SETTLED IN TO
prison life at the Edmonton Remand Centre. After being shipped around from floor to floor, he finally resided in Room 11 on cell block 3D, a floor designed for long-term inmates. He wasn't too distressed by his incarceration, although he grew increasingly impatient with the people with whom he had to associate. “I have nothing in common with dope dealers, robbers and crack heads,” he wrote later, describing the place as a “low-brow sensory deprivation tank.” He felt he had to make the best of it, however, and find a way to thrive among what he considered to be a pile of garbage.