The Devil's Cinema (4 page)

“Give me about forty-five minutes.”

“Oh. Where are you?”

“I'm in St. Albert.”

Clark realized it was a big ask. The man was in a bedroom community near the far northwestern outskirts of the city. “Why don't you just give us the keys? I can send someone out to meet you.”

“Tell you what, I'm actually going to my parents' place anyway so we could meet around there?”

“All we need is your consent, there'd be a form for you to sign. We just want to have our guys go in and have a quick look.”

“That will be fine.”

Clark arranged for the filmmaker to meet an officer at a convenience store not far from where he was heading in northern Edmonton. He hung up the phone, picked it back up, and dialled the southwest station. This Twitchell guy sounded easy to talk to, and Clark figured he could just grab someone in the office to drive down and pick up a key. After all, what could possibly happen on such a straightforward mission?

D
ETECTIVE
B
RIAN
M
URPHY KEPT
the engine running in his unmarked police car as he waited in a 7-Eleven parking lot, scanning vehicles under the glow of streetlights. He spotted a man sitting in a maroon Pontiac Grand Am and figured it must be the guy he was supposed to meet: Mark Twitchell.

Although drowsy from a fifteen-hour-long Sunday shift, he dialled Twitchell's number and the man in the car answered. “I'm sitting right here,” Murphy said. “Look behind you.” He gave a little wave.

The man crawled out of his car and jumped into Murphy's. He shook the cop's hand as he settled into the passenger seat. Murphy, who had a soft and polite voice he had trouble raising under his black moustache, found the man friendly, perhaps boisterous. The two of them talked for a few minutes.

Twitchell's face had relaxed. “Listen,” he said, looking at Murphy in the car. “I have some things that have been happening to me recently that I want to make you aware of.”

“Okay.”

He told Murphy that his car had been broken into about eleven days ago, back on October 8. Two rental receipts for the garage in Mill Woods, a cheque, sunglasses, and some change had all been taken. A few days later, on October 12, he discovered his front door was unlocked when he came home. And his wife, who was “like OCD, like Jack Nicholson,” would never have forgotten to lock it. It worried him, but there didn't appear to be anything amiss.

Murphy pulled out his notepad. He had spent most of the day phoning Johnny's friends and really knew nothing about the file. “This is all new information so I should be writing it all down.”

“Okay,” Twitchell continued. “On October 15, I went to Home Depot to pick up some cleaning supplies to take down to the garage.” He paused as if he was remembering details. “But as I was driving, I decided I wanted to pull into the side and get some gas. In the parking lot, a man came up to the passenger side of my car. He knocked on the window. I looked over.” Twitchell said the man was making circles in the air with his finger, telling him to roll down the window. “I rolled it down and the fellow leaned in.”

Murphy was taking it all down.

“He said he had just met this girl. She's very wealthy and she's going to take him away on a vacation for three months. She told him that he should get rid of his car because when they get back from vacation she was going to buy him a new car. So he asks me: ‘Do you wanna buy my car?' “ Twitchell seemed to enjoy telling the story. “I told him, ‘I don't have enough money to buy a car.' The guy looks at me and points and says,
‘Well, how much money do you have in your wallet?' So I pulled out my wallet and I say, ‘I've got forty dollars.' “ Twitchell turned to Murphy and exclaimed, “The guy said, ‘Sold!' “ It was a done deal.

Twitchell said the man drove the car to his rented garage a couple of blocks away. They talked about the car, Twitchell expressed some concerns about the registration and insurance but coughed up the forty dollars and was handed the keys. By coincidence, the man told him his name was also Mark. He said he didn't get a last name.

Twitchell said he could tell the guy was agitated and apprehensive. “The last I saw of the guy, he was walking down the alley.”

Murphy jumped in after a moment, his pen a few steps behind Twitchell's telling of the story. “Well, can you give me a description of this fellow?”

Twitchell offered a very detailed answer: male, Caucasian, six-foot-two, medium build, late twenties or early thirties, black hair, and he had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on the right side of his neck.

“What's a Celtic knot?”

Twitchell tried to describe it. Murphy handed him his notepad and Twitchell scribbled down a drawing of the tattoo. “He had a green wind-breaker, jeans, black runners, and a white T-shirt.”

The car was a 2005 red Mazda hatchback.

“So I was walking around the vehicle,” Twitchell said. “And I noticed that it has a stick. And I can't drive a stick.” But his friend Joss Hnatiuk could drive one, he explained. Joss came down and parked it at his parents' house a few blocks away. Twitchell didn't explain why he wanted the car moved.

Murphy thought it bizarre. “Listen, the other investigators will have to know about this.”

Twitchell nodded.

“We're probably going to want you to give a statement in relation to this new information and possibly do a photo lineup to try to identity this fellow. I'm going to phone the detectives, fill them in on the information, and see what they want to do.”

Murphy checked the clock. It was 10:33 p.m.

B
ILL
C
LARK WAS SITTING
at his desk when the flow of information stalled. The forensics team had moved on from Johnny's place, having found
nothing, and were waiting at the garage for the key. Both of Twitchell's film production assistants, Mike and Jay, had called Clark back and agreed to give a statement the next evening.

As he sat there, hands clasped behind his head, Clark heard Mark Anstey raise his voice from his desk across the room. He looked over and saw Anstey was on the phone with a strange expression on his face. He put the phone to his chest and turned to Clark with disbelief in his voice. “Twitchell just told Murphy that he bought a red car off a guy on October 15 for forty dollars.”

Clark stopped. “What?” His mouth hung open. This was no longer a standard missing persons case. He blurted out his thoughts in an unedited stream as they came to him. “Holy fuck! He killed the guy!” He spun around in his chair. “Okay, okay, maybe he didn't kill him.” He shot a confused look at Anstey. “But who the fuck buys a car off a guy for forty dollars? … How much is this car worth?”

“I dunno,” said Anstey. By one early estimate, it was probably worth at least $6,000, maybe $10,000, certainly not $40.

“Oh man, this guy is involved.” Clark rubbed his head, his eyes wide in disbelief. “He's involved in something.”

The case had gone from first to top gear in an instant, but Anstey and Clark had only seconds to decide on their next move.

Clark talked fast. “Mark, we gotta bring him in. We gotta.… But we've got nothing on him. So what do we do?”

B
RIAN
M
URPHY HELD HIS
cell phone close to his ear as the detectives at the other end of the line tossed around ideas. Twitchell sat beside him, oblivious to the chaos his little story had created. The decision was made to send a patrol car to take Twitchell to headquarters voluntarily. “Okay,” Murphy said, turning to Twitchell to ask if he was willing to give a second statement, which he was. “Why don't you lock your car?” Murphy pointed at the maroon Grand Am parked on the south side of the 7-Eleven. “If you've gotta go to headquarters, you better lock your car.”

Twitchell jumped out, locked his car, and returned to wait with Murphy for the patrol car to show up. When it arrived, he climbed in the back.

Murphy stayed on the phone in his car and heard a buzzing in his ear again. He rolled down his window and shouted out at the patrol car. “Mark,
they've changed their minds. They'd like you to drive your own car down to headquarters.”

Twitchell nodded from the backseat. “But I don't know where headquarters is.”

“Well, you can follow me,” Murphy offered in a chuckle.

The two cars made their way downtown.

Murphy knew Twitchell was key to the investigation, but it also meant his fifteen-hour shift was going to get a lot longer. And the police would also soon discover how incredibly fortunate they were to have Twitchell's car parked at headquarters. It would change everything.

I
N THE SOUTHEASTERN SUBURBS
, on a quaint corner lot surrounded by spruce and cedar, stood a tall white house with emerald green trim. To anyone driving by it was just another suburban address, but for Joss Hnatiuk, it was home. At twenty-five, Joss, a big, tall man who sported a head full of short and curly brown hair, had a quiet disposition and still lived with his parents. He was trying to get a multimedia company off the ground as he installed security systems to pay the bills. Twitchell was helping him, and they envisioned a rich future together.

But tonight, in the stillness of the late Sunday evening, an unexpected ring of the doorbell broke the silence as midnight neared. Joss had just returned from a premiere screening of a feature film in which a friend had been cast in a small role. He opened the door, and to his surprise, he found a gathering of police officers.

Outside on the driveway, boxed in on two sides, was a red Mazda 3. The licence plate had been removed.

Joss looked at the detective standing in front of him. Another officer was busy writing down the vehicle's identification number. Joss reached his own conclusions. “I take it that the car is stolen?”

M
ARK
T
WITCHELL SAT IN
police headquarters, his arm draped across the back of a little couch in a tiny room on the third floor. Late Sunday night was slowly turning over into Monday. A copy of the Bible lay on a coffee table nearby.

Detectives Bill Clark and Brian Murphy were chatting in the monitor room three doors down. They could see Twitchell through a bank of televisions and cameras hooked up to each room. Clark had left Twitchell alone in one of the “soft” rooms, designed to make someone feel comfortable. The one where Twitchell was cooling his heels featured an oil painting of a barn in a snowstorm.

Clark's head was spinning. The last thing he wanted was the guy to call a lawyer. At the same time, Clark wanted to keep an open mind. Twitchell's story was certainly bizarre, but it didn't mean he was guilty of anything. Not yet. For all he knew this guy could turn out to be just a weird filmmaker who really did get lucky and buy a car for forty dollars.

T
HE FORENSICS TEAM ARRIVED
at Joss Hnatiuk's house, having been pulled off the garage to focus on the recovered Mazda. Constable Gary Short grabbed his camera and started taking pictures just as Joss and a detective drove off to the southwest division station.

The remaining constable ran the Mazda's serial number, and sure enough, it was Johnny's missing vehicle. A tow truck was called. The vehicle was headed for the police lot for a detailed examination.

E
YES DRY AND FEELING
tired, Clark looked over Twitchell's new statement, scanning the eight pages it had taken him more than two hours to write. Two o'clock in the morning approached. The statement included the October 15 car sale story and new information. There were more names listed for the crew behind Twitchell's films – David Puff, Scott Cooke,
actors Chris Heward and Robert Barnsley – and a revelation that he had sent an email a few hours ago to the southwest detective who had interviewed him the previous night, which would detail the car story too. Clark kept reading. Twitchell claimed he noticed the padlock on the back door to his garage had been changed when he met a constable there hours before his first police interview. Inside, Twitchell said his duct tape, garbage bags, and paper towels had been used while it looked like something had been burned in an oil drum. Twitchell's statement continued:

Clark flipped through the pages a few more times. He yawned. The story sounded like bullshit. In policing circles, Twitchell was offering what's known as an “alternative suspect” theory. Clearly the guy was worried they were on to him so he was already shifting the blame. In his statement, Twitchell had added a new detail: he now described a phone call as the motivation for pulling over, which led to the meeting with the mystery car seller. Perhaps he realized after telling the story to Murphy that there wasn't actually a gas station in the area where he had claimed to meet the man.