At trial, Twitchell plays a surprising card. Will he walk, or will everything come tumbling down? This episode originally published on October 31, 2024.
Chapter 1: What shocking discovery do detectives make about Mark Twitchell?
Winter was coming to Edmonton. They were running out of time. What had begun as a simple missing persons investigation seemed to have uncovered something unthinkable. Like a real-life version of that TV show, Dexter. And now, a race against Winter as the detectives search for a body. All because they believed the bizarre stories they'd unearthed from Mark Twitchell's computer. SK Confessions.
Chapter 2: How does Mark Twitchell's computer play a role in the investigation?
You got to realize the computer guys, when they went through the computer, it was a deleted file. He tried to get rid of the file. He tried to get rid of it.
Trouble was, Detective Bill Clark and the others knew they were missing something, and it might be the most important bit of the awful story. They still didn't know how it ended. That bit was gone, cut off, buried even deeper in Twitchell's computer. Maybe irretrievable.
We're going to computer guys. Come on, you got to pull up more. We're right to the point of where he dumped the body and we don't know the location.
So one more time, as each day grew a little colder, frost in the morning, flurries in the afternoon, the computer people dug through the entrails of Mark Twitchell's laptop. And then, a week or two later, finally, there it was. There was more. It was the ghoulish end of a very strange story. Here is how it began. The beginning of the end.
I grabbed a banana nut muffin, a double chocolate donut, and a cafe mocha on the way to my destination.
But then, but now, the horrid, the tone changed. I drove back to the kill room to finish destroying evidence. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is The Man in the Black Mask, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 6. House of Cards The sewer, of course. How obvious. Six simple words from the erased files on Mark Twitchell's laptop.
Words that told Detective Bill Clark that he must surely have been right all along. Mark Twitchell's scary story wasn't fiction. He must have murdered the missing Johnny Altinger and must have dumped his body in an Edmonton sewer. Everything's turned out to be true. So we got no reason to disbelieve this. And here, as read by the voice actor, the recovered lines of SK Confessions.
I chose the eastern suburb of the city to dump my waste. The housing in this part of my world was also older, done back in the 60s and 70s when there were back alleys to be had. Within moments, I found exactly what I was looking for. A manhole cover placed off to the side behind a power pole. I parked in an empty driveway and popped the trunk.
And just like that, Bill Clark knew. He could picture the neighborhood. He knew it well. He'd been there many times. It was where Mark Twitchell's parents lived.
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Chapter 3: What unexpected information does Mark Twitchell provide to the detectives?
But why? Why, after keeping his awful secret for twenty months, why did Mark Twitchell suddenly decide to give up Johnny Altinger's body and thus implicate himself in the man's death? Well, there was a reason. Of course there was. And therefore, another secret to keep. Mark Twitchell's secret. which he would not reveal until he, the would-be famous film director, went on trial for murder.
It was March, two and a half years since Johnny Altinger was first reported missing, and ice was beginning to give up its grip on the North Saskatchewan River as it made its eternal way past the very human drama about to begin at the Edmonton courthouse. Inside, all had assembled in the courtroom. Defendant, lawyers, judge and jury.
And a gallery made up almost entirely of people who had been kept, entirely, in the dark. Remember the judge's gag order? It had worked. Which meant that now, the public was in for a whole cascade of surprises. Beginning even as Mark Twitchell stood at the defense table, his face an impassive mask, and his trial was gaveled into session.
Reporter Steve Lillebuen. Court clerk asks you, how do you plead to the charge of first degree murder? Mark Twitchell says, not guilty. Then his lawyer stands up and surprises everyone. And he says, now my lord, you'd like to plead guilty to the charge of interfering with human remains. And this catches everyone totally by surprise, including the prosecution. They were stunned.
And one of the things that did is this removed this myth that, well, if you're going to plead guilty to doing something with a dead body, clearly this is not a hoax. There's something very serious that happened here, and you're admitting some level of involvement.
Surprise number two was courtesy of the prosecutor. The discovery of Johnny's body had never been made public, nor the fact that it was Twitchell himself who told police where to look.
So the police... The prosecution, his defense lawyer, everyone had kept the secret for ten months. But it was the next revelation that made jaws hang open. They had a diary documenting how Twitchell did it. It doesn't get more explosive than that.
But, and on this question, the trial would turn. Was Johnny Altinger murdered? While Mark Twitchell certainly admitted to dumping Johnny's remains down a sewer drain, he never admitted that he killed anybody. Never even admitted that he was the author of SK Confessions. The prosecutors knew they would need more than that document to get a conviction.
So they had diligently built a case on CSI basics. going back to all the evidence they'd uncovered when Twitchell was first being investigated, but which was never made public. Their presentation began with the discovery in Twitchell's car.
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Chapter 4: How does the courtroom drama unfold during Twitchell's trial?
It was terrifying. When I got up there, I wanted him to look at me. I needed to look at him. I don't know, maybe it was just something inside me that said I need to face this guy because...
Because you were still pretty scared inside.
Yeah, I mean, I'm scared of everything now. But I don't know, I wanted to face him and he just sat there and doodled on his paper and that was it. Didn't look up, nothing.
Reporter Steve Littlebuin said Twitchell remained stone-faced even when his own ex-wife took the stand.
She's crying through all of this. Mark Twitchell's reaction was nearly blank.
There was perhaps one exception. One witness Mark Twitchell seemed to pay attention to. It was when Jill's tetro took the stand to tell his tale.
It felt like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, and it was finally done. It was like, wow, it felt so good. And you looked at him. Yeah, well, he wouldn't look at me in the courtroom while the crown was asking me the questions. But when his lower cross examined me, he looked at me the whole time, and I looked back at him.
And I wasn't scared of him anymore. And then something very strange happened. They played the video of Mark Twitchell's first encounter with Detective Bill Clark.
Did you not think that kind of strange? I mean, I have to ask this. You're paying $40 for a car. How much did you think the car was worth? I thought it was worth somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000. Which you're paying $40 for? Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What evidence links Mark Twitchell to the murder of Johnny Altinger?
Chapter 6: What surprising admission does Mark Twitchell make during the trial?
And he starts to cry, and the tears are just streaming down his face. And he's getting hysterical. His chest is heaving.
The judge actually recognized that they took a break, and he couldn't get out of the room fast enough.
When he comes back after the break, Mark Twitchell is no better. He's still very upset. And he's crying, but he turns around and actually faces Detective Clark. And he starts talking to him and said, I'm sorry for lying to you.
Turned around and apologized for lying. For lying to me. I thought it was an act. But looking back on it, I think there's some validity to the fact that he'd probably never been confronted by anyone before in his life.
Once Twitchell took his seat, prosecutors resumed playing the tape.
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that you're involved in the disappearance of John Altinger. No doubt in my mind at all. Why? I have no idea what the hell is going on.
Though few in court were actually watching the screen, instead, their eyes were on Twitchell.
Mark Twitchell does no better. He's crying throughout it. And actually, by the end of the day, he's actually collapsed and he's fallen over top of the table in front of him and is just sobbing into his notes. And in that moment, he's looking at himself and he's looking at his own destruction.
He's looking at Detective Clark, likely the first man who's ever stood up to him and called him out and said, you've been lying to me for hours and I'm not putting it up with anymore.
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Chapter 7: How does Twitchell's demeanor in court affect those present?
Chapter 8: What revelations come to light about the investigation's challenges?
And in that garage, that makeshift movie studio... We found blood splatter all along the walls, the garage doors, hundreds of spots of splatter where an obvious beating had taken place.
Also in the garage, CSI investigators found... A big game processing kit.
Kits hunters would take out in the bush to cut up a moose or whatever they've killed to bring them out. This is what he used. And every single tool in that kit had our victim's DNA on it.
And when investigators sprayed that iridescent chemical luminol on the garage floor... They found big pools of blood that lit up under the dark lights.
The garage is pretty neat. If you didn't take a good look, you wouldn't notice it. When the constables initially saw it the first night, they never were looking for blood spatter. And he explained that stuff away, don't forget. He was telling us he was filming a movie about a serial killer killing people on the act.
Chopping up bodies, yeah. Right. After the presentation of the hard evidence, Mark Twitchell's friends and co-workers were called to testify. One of the first was Twitchell's Facebook friend, Renee Waring.
He was sitting there, calm and cocky, and wanting all of this big circus show to be about him.
Johnny Altinger's friend, Deborah Peckrod, got the same impression.
When I saw him in court, he seemed so calm. He sat there and just made his notes. And I'm like, wow, like he has children and a wife. And he just seemed so normal. He seemed like a normal person, average person off the street. And that's what disturbed me.
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