EDMONTON — Mark Twitchell is accused of dismembering a total stranger to ape TV serial killer Dexter, but his trial so far reads more like Edgar Allan Poe — a story riding on rivulets, streams and eddies of telltale blood.
The blood was everywhere, according to evidence entered at Twitchell’s jury trial, which began last week and is to resume today in Court of Queen’s Bench.
It stained the cement of the alleged kill floor in large, ugly patches, defying ammonia and other chemical cleaners.
It seeped into the teeth and joints of his knives, saws and other butcher tools.
It was on his pants, in the stitching of his hoodie, in his car, on his computer keyboard, on rolls of paper towel, on scissors, on a meat cleaver, on a hockey mask, on a tiny tooth fragment.
It was on the walls and on the cleaning supplies.
There was blood on the makeshift metal top of his alleged kill table. It was on a heavy duty carving kit, typically used by hunters to chop up moose and deer.
There was blood on the caper knife, the skinner knife, the fillet knife, the butcher knife, the shears, the saw and on a hefty, two-pronged carving fork.
Blood saturated the end of a copper pipe prosecutors say Twitchell used to club his victim, Johnny Altinger.
Altinger was a 38-year-old pipeline inspector who lived alone in a ground floor apartment. He was entering middle age, lived in a tiny space with a tiny kitchen, a TV and video games and nothing on the walls. He was looking to connect with someone.
In the fall of 2008, he was on an Internet dating site and it was there, say prosecutors, he thought he found a woman named Jen, but in fact had found Twitchell.
Twitchell, suggests the evidence, was at the time a man-boy in his late 20s, obsessed by comic books and Star Wars, making low-budget movies and reading and watching TV shows about Dexter, a fictive vigilante serial killer.
He was married with an infant daughter, living in a tiny house in the suburbs.
By the fall of 2008, Twitchell began buying items on the Internet — a meat cleaver, handcuffs, a steel barrel, a stun baton. He popped over to Canadian Tire and Home Depot to buy numerous rolls of duct tape, plastic gloves and drop cloths.
He rented a garage for $170 a month behind a house on the city’s southside in a quiet neighbourhood of lazy, curving streets and keyhole crescents.
In late September, say prosecutors, Twitchell posed as a woman on an Internet dating site to lure a man to the garage on a Friday night. But the victim fought back and escaped.
That man didn’t go to police.
A week later on Oct. 10, prosecutors say, Twitchell lured Altinger in the same way and this time was successful.
The telltale smoking gun document, say prosecutors, will be a computer document written by Twitchell that chronicles in his words, “my progression into becoming a serial killer.”
Crown prosecutor Lawrence Van Dyke has told the jury he suspects the defence will claim the kill diary is in fact a lurid, but harmless work of fiction.
Twitchell pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, but offered to plead guilty to a reduced charge of interfering with a dead body. The Crown rejected it.