EDMONTON — Filmmaker Mark Twitchell looked straight ahead and swallowed hard Tuesday as a jury convicted him of killing and dismembering a stranger to match a movie script in what the Crown called a grand plan to become a serial killer.
The family of the victim, Johnny Altinger, sighed with relief as the jury foreman, when asked for the verdict, stood and announced, “Guilty of first-degree murder.”
Seconds later, Altinger’s mother, Elfriede Altinger, began to cry.
“I can’t imagine the fear, desperation and pain that Johnny must have endured,” she said in a victim impact statement read aloud by a Crown prosecutor.
“As a mother, I feel I can’t think about it without going over the edge.
“My wish is for the perpetrator of this unforgivable and horrific act to reflect on his actions and die a slow death every day of his life.”
The jury deliberated for five hours after a month of testimony and evidence.
First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance at parole for a minimum of 25 years.
Twitchell’s family was not in court.
As Twitchell left court he walked right past Edmonton police Det. Bill Clark in the front row.
Clark was the lead investigator and, as court saw, first broke Twitchell’s resolve in a police interrogation video played in court.
“I wanted me to be the last face he actually saw before he walked out of there,” Clark later told reporters.
Clark said he knew Twitchell was guilty on the first day he was picked up by police when he told Clark he was in possession of Altinger’s car because a stranger sold it to him for $40.
“I figured he killed him and when I let him go that morning, I told him I was coming back to get him because I knew he killed Johnny,” said Clark.
“To me he’s a psychopathic killer that we’ve taken off the streets of this city. There’s no doubt in my mind or in the minds of anyone on the investigative team he would have kept on killing.”
The verdict wrapped up a trial that made international headlines and attracted the attention of U.S.-based true-crime TV shows.
Twitchell was convicted of luring Altinger to a residential garage he had rented on a quiet southside street on Oct. 10, 2008, with a promise of meeting a woman from an online dating service.
But instead the 38-year-old pipeline inspector and motorcycle enthusiast was ambushed by Twitchell, who clobbered him on the skull with a metal pipe, knifed him in the chest and throat, watched him bleed out on the floor, then dismembered him.
Twitchell tried to burn the remains, but when they wouldn’t disintegrate he dumped them down a sewer.
The details were contained in a document written by Twitchell and found by police on his laptop computer.
The 42-page document, titled “SKConfessions,” began with the line: “This is the story of my progression into becoming a serial killer.”
The document uses false names, but even Twitchell admitted it reflected the events in his life during the frenzied weeks surrounding the murder.
Twitchell actually lured two men to the garage in the course of a week. He tried to subdue the first man, Gilles Tetreault, but Tetreault managed to fight back and flee.
Tetreault’s testimony was one of the emotionally gripping days of the trial.
He recounted for jurors the debilitating fear when he escaped the garage only to be dragged backed in by his feet and on his stomach caveman-style.
He said he started to cry, thinking he would never see loved ones again.
“I decided I’d better fight back,” he told court. “I’d rather die my way than his way.”
Tetreault didn’t go to police. Twitchell later admitted he threatened online to kill him if he did.
“SKConfessions” described the attacks on Tetreault in a way that matched Tetreault’s memory of it and the physical evidence presented in court.
But Twitchell insisted the murder of a man named “Jim” — a pseudonym for Altinger — did not happen as described in the document.
He said “SKConfessions” was not a diary but a work of fiction, based loosely on some of the events in his life.
He admitted last week that he did lure Tetreault and Altinger but insisted he did not intend to hurt them.
Rather, he said he wanted to get them to participate in a publicity hoax to help them get an online buzz going about a short slasher movie he had shot in the garage just days earlier.
That movie, titled House of Cards, is about a man abducted by a masked killer, taken to a remote location, knifed to death and dismembered.
Altinger, however, had told a friend where he was going that fateful night.
That led police to the garage and ultimately to Twitchell.
Twitchell said the plan was to lure the men to the garage, explain the movie, then ask them to write about it online as if it actually happened to them.
To that end, he said, he had dressed up the garage as a “kill room” to match the dismemberment room used by his fictional hero Dexter Morgan.
Dexter, the central character in a string of novels and a television series, works for the police by day but by night is a vigilante serial killer.
Twitchell’s kill room had a heavy metal table the size of a billiards table, covered and surrounded by plastic sheets to catch blood spatters.
He also had a multiple knives, saws and a cleaver that he said were props for his films but court heard were stained with Altinger’s blood.
He said he never explained the hoax idea to Tetreault, because he decided to “scare” him instead by pretending he was actually being attacked.
He said he did explain the prank to Altinger, but said that just made Altinger mad. They fought, he said, and in self-defence he knifed Altinger in the heart.
He also admitted that he broke into Altinger’s condo and, under his name, sent emails to friends saying he was quitting his job and running off to Costa Rica with a woman.
Twitchell said he did it out of panic to buy time and figure out how to explain away the death.
Altinger, however, had told a friend where he was going that fateful night. That led police to the garage and ultimately to Twitchell.