The Devil's Cinema (36 page)

As inmate 236702, he spent most of his time in his cell, scribbling in his notepad, creating stories, and avoiding contact with the other inmates around him. The cell was tiny, with two hard plastic bed bunks stacked on one side and a metal desk screwed into the tower's cement blocks. One fluorescent bulb provided enough light to read under its harsh greenish glow. Natural light streamed in through long and narrow window slits no wider than a person's wrist. One window slit was horizontal, the other vertical. The view looked out into the Brownlee Building next door, where Crown prosecutors were working to prepare the court case against him. The cell block had three television sets in a common room, but one was frequently broken. He rarely got to see what he wanted anyway; he liked tennis while everyone else wanted to watch hockey.

The remand interior walls were painted white, but Twitchell had thought of a way to decorate. Using toothpaste, he tacked up a
Dexter
poster, featuring actor Michael C. Hall posed with a half-smile and giving a probing stare. He told inmates the poster was just a conversation piece. “I don't hero-worship him,” he insisted. He kept his cell clean and demanded roommates with a shared obsession for cleanliness.

Twitchell became a model prisoner. He would often gloat that he was the only man in remand to never have been in a fight on the inside. He
would use his charm to win favours rather than his fists. And he worked hard at finding ways to make the place more refreshing. Above all, he wanted to read. His mother helped as much as she could. Between his parents' regular visits – they came at least once a month, while Susan visited less frequently – his mother would research topics on the Internet for her son, find titles that would stimulate the mind, and pass on the book suggestions. Sometimes Twitchell would have to write an essay to prison management to explain why he wanted a certain book imported into the remand library. After a prolonged battle, he was granted access to several of his requested texts.

He tried to maintain a busy routine to keep himself occupied. He had always been a night owl, but he would jolt himself awake in remand so he wouldn't miss breakfast. He would then crawl back into bed and rest his eyes for several hours. The late morning would be burned away by writing. He began reading philosophy. But soon he spread his interests to topics as varied as quantum mechanics and Egyptian history. He would sit back and read his imported books well into the afternoon. He would also grab a copy of both city newspapers and scoff at the media coverage of his case, believing it was biased and too sensational. At night, he would listen to the radio until drifting to sleep around 2:00 a.m. He tried to keep to an exercise regime by occasionally filling garbage bags with water and stuffing them in pillowcases as makeshift free weights. He was slowly losing his fast-food belly. He began to hate the meal plan, which was on a three-week rotation heavy in mashed potatoes and enriched pasta. And despite his efforts to stay active, the days started to drag, the evenings became longer, the lack of activities became quite draining.

Life was a bore.

One day, the monotony was broken up when Twitchell strolled into the remand interview rooms. “Talk about the last person I expected to see!” he blurted, taken aback. Staring at him through the prison glass was a tiny woman with long black hair – the girl who had sat near him in high school and been handed his two-hundred-page
Star Wars
report. It had been a long time. They had never been really close friends. Back in school, they had often talked, but they lost touch, as people do. She was now married, had her own children, her own life. She had been told that
Twitchell's face had been broadcast across the national news. The situation confused her, so she booked a personal visit. “I was positive he had been falsely accused,” she would recall later.

Twitchell had a big grin on his face as he sat down and began talking excitedly with his old high-school classmate. She asked how he was doing, they discussed his dissolving marriage, movies, life on the outside.

As she continued contact with him, she saw how his spirits rose with every passing week. They started writing each other letters. She quickly became one of his two prison pen pals. While she was fine with this level of contact, she was also insistent that it remain her big secret.

Twitchell's second unexpected visitor was an artist and filmmaker who had been travelling through Africa during his arrest. While he used the stage name William Strong and, later, Chapel Perilous, Twitchell would remember the Calgary-based artist and actor as Stakk Wezzer, a
Star Wars
character he had portrayed on the set of his fan film.

William had spent a great deal of time in southern Ethiopia and grew horrified at the sight of children with machine guns. He was experiencing a world totally removed from what he knew. “I felt an incredible sense of isolation,” he recalled. “Every day I felt like I was in a cage.” The encounter likely gave him post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. But a side benefit of the ordeal was that he developed a great deal of empathy for others. Such a perspective, he said, was his sole reason for contacting Twitchell upon his return to Canada. He wrote him a letter believing he could relate to the feeling of being an artist trapped in an unfamiliar environment.

Their relationship flourished. Through regular letters, the two filmmakers would talk philosophy, writing, and the creative process. It was a window into a unique mind. William never asked Twitchell about the criminal case against him and Twitchell never volunteered information. “I'm not here to judge him,” said William. “Whether he's innocent or guilty or whatever the situation is, he's still just a person.”

Having two pen pals to write to on a regular basis was a thrill for Twitchell. It fulfilled his need for attention and gave him a sense of purpose, knowing that people actually cared about him. Twitchell began calling them his two “best friends.” But both of them classified their relationship in quite a different way, though they had trouble defining what it was, what it meant.

Twitchell would write pages and pages to himself, his pen pals, and others, often surprising the recipients with the length and level of detail. His various letters and writings in prison provided him a forum to vent his frustrations at how the world had got it wrong. In some of his writings, he expressed deep regret, but was it bona fide? He resorted to defining the disappearance and presumed murder of Johnny Altinger as “the fiasco that was October 10, 2008.” While many of his dates were correct, details embedded within his writings tended to take on an alternate form of reality. In one entry, composed in late January 2011, he wrote:

In other entries he told pure lies, declaring that he was the one who had filed for divorce, not Jess. “Breaking up our blissful family trio was destroying my heart.”

His writing continued to be both a source of entertainment and release. It was his only solace within the prison. He put pen to paper and scribbled wildly for days on end. Sometimes he had to be stirred from his cell so as to not miss supper. In his own words, it was like he was “possessed.” Within two months of his arrest, he had crafted a thousand-page autobiography. He handed the heavy stack of double-sided paper to his lawyer, believing it would be of some use to his criminal defence.

He wrote of his imprisonment as if he was the king of remand, and on this point, he was telling the truth. In a cell block with more than a dozen killers, he basked in his notoriety and used it to instill fear in others. Prisoners would often talk about Twitchell behind his back, but when he entered the room, their gossip hushed. Guards soon noticed Twitchell was being treated differently within the criminal community. “There was almost a reverence toward him, a creepy level of respect,” one correctional officer recalled. “Nobody knew just quite how to take him.” Long-timers joined in, playing on Twitchell's high profile when the third floor became
a temporary overflow unit for new arrivals. Rookie inmates were warned their lives would be in danger if they were assigned the empty bunk in Twitchell's cell. And the scare tactics worked. At least three men demanded to be moved after spending a single night with Twitchell, saying they were deeply terrified of the man. Twitchell wrote with glee how this alarming new criminal persona had been developing behind bars:

Twitchell eventually found one roommate suitable to his needs. The man had similar interests and for six months they considered themselves the “wordsmiths” of remand. The pair would play Scrabble for hours each day or work on story ideas together. The man was soon sentenced and sent to prison and Twitchell was forced to return to a life of solitude, disdain for most of his fellow inmates, and long hours of introspective writing.

He became a target for a “shit bomb” only once. A new arrival not accustomed to the established routine emptied a Cheetos bag and filled it with water, his own urine and feces, twirled the end shut, and stuck it under Twitchell's cell door. He stomped hard. But instead of spraying all over Twitchell, it backfired and shot out the other end of the bag. All Twitchell could do was mock the man's failure as he returned to his bed to continue his writing.

In his prison letters, Twitchell started describing his life story as if it was a dramatic narrative, filled with cliffhangers and even dialogue, a novelization of real events. For weeks, he wrote a running dialogue between himself, God, and Satan. “Only I used the pseudonyms Alpha and Memnoch,” he
explained. “It evolved into this deep, rich and engaging discussion.… I'm quite proud of how it turned out.” Sometimes he'd run ideas off himself and made-up people. In one case, it was a conversation with a “composite we'll name Aaron for the sake of simplicity. I notice when I write philosophy it works best in dialogues.” And he compared his situation often to Hollywood movies, especially
The Shawshank Redemption
, about a wrongfully convicted man who, like Twitchell, had expanded the prison library. “Nobody could guess the truth in a case like this,” he wrote in one cliff-hanger passage. “What brought us here is unlike anything that's ever been seen before.”

D
EVELOPING A BUSINESS PLAN
took over Twitchell's schedule as he schemed of ways to keep busy. He imagined drawing celebrity sketches in prison and selling them for “absurdly high price tags.” He'd mail the pencil drawings to his mother, who would scan them into her computer and then email them to his pen pal, William Strong, to sell later online. Twitchell went to work. He drew sketches of actress Natalie Portman, a shot from the movie
Avatar
, a close-up of singer Fergie. He found a magazine advertisement that featured a woman morphed into a flower, so he drew that too. And he couldn't resist drawing
Dexter
's Michael C. Hall. It was a portrait he insisted was made “out of pure spite,” but he was still thrilled with the realism he had captured.

The image he created
was
striking. What was most amazing about the portrait was how perfectly Twitchell had captured the likeness of the actor. In fact, when the sketch was overlapped with the publicity still from
Dexter
that was the inspiration for the drawing, the pencil lines appeared to match the photo's contours: the dimensions of the actor's face, the distance between the ears, the eyes, his nose – Twitchell's pencil lines almost appeared to be a perfect replica of the photograph.

Many of his other drawings also looked to be nearly identical to the source images he had pulled from newspapers and magazines.

It was extraordinary.

T
WITCHELL CONTINUED TO READ
the papers diligently as his incarceration approached a year. He would have seen Bill Clark's name pop up in
city newspaper articles over the months as the detective commented on other homicide cases he was working on. The thought of Clark and seeing his name in print made Twitchell tighten his hands into white-knuckled fists. He loathed the detective, describing him in his writings as an “over-zealous pig of a man” and a “cliché.” He had no respect for the officer. “I find Bill Clark to be a self-righteous, know-it-all weasel with no actual personality of his own,” Twitchell concluded.

As Twitchell read the papers, he found it interesting that there was never any announcement that the police had recovered Johnny's remains. Twitchell didn't realize that the hunt would soon be leading right back to him. Despite his protests, his hatred of Clark and the search for Johnny Altinger's body were soon going to collide.

D
ETECTIVES
B
ILL
C
LARK AND
Brad Mandrusiak sat waiting, talking shop, in a stuffy interview room on the main floor of remand. Clark had a rolled-up copy of the newspaper and it didn't take long until their guest had arrived. Twitchell walked in wearing his blue inmate overalls, and after one look at Clark he scowled and rolled his eyes. “You gotta be kidding me, right?”