The Man in the Black Mask - Ep. 5: Trick or Treat
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Who is Mark Twitchell and why is he significant?
Ask his movie friends. They would have told you. It was all made up. Of course it was. Just a clever bit of spooky nonsense conjured up in the most unusual mind of Mark Twitchell. Man's whole life was devoted to make-believe, scary stories. He was a strange fellow in his way, if also harmless. Even his friends and colleagues would tell you that. Them and the curious reporter who checked him out.
He was in that kind of clique of people that would go to, you know, Star Wars conventions or they would dress up for the premiere of a movie. You know, everyone's got someone like that in their family who's just, you know, a big sci-fi nut or whatever.
But does that make you a nut? Or just a person who enjoys pure, clean fun? The point was, Mark Twitchell loved it all. Loved writing the stories, loved making the movies, loved dreaming up a universe of dark and dangerous characters. A would-be master of misdirection is what he was. Mind you, it was true that some guy named Johnny Altinger was missing and possibly dead, and police thought it was curious that he, Twitchell, had bought the man's car. But that was about it. Nobody else had come forward to complain about him. Anyway, when the events of this tale occurred, it just happened to be Halloween, Mark Twitchell's favorite day of the year. For months, in between filming this and that, he'd been hard at work creating what might have been his best Halloween costume ever – A very respectable Iron Man get-up. Sadly, he was forced to put on the finishing touches at his parents' place after his wife discovered he'd been having an affair and kicked him out. But for now, for one grand night, all that could be forgotten.
In a few hours, he'd make his big entrance to a huge Halloween party where he would surely wow them all. But first, that afternoon, there was business to attend to. A meeting with a group of potential investors at a nearby coffee house. Investors? So hard to come by. These seemed to drop down like manna from heaven. So Mark Twitchell had been led to believe, by the friendly and persuasive man who'd called him, But of course, investor was not quite the right word for that caller. More like investigator.
Our guy pretended he was going to invest in his movie-making business. Somebody wants to give you $30,000, $35,000, come and meet me. Yeah, come and meet me.
And so, with a light heart and a jacket to ward off the autumn chill, Mark Twitchell sauntered down the sidewalk toward the coffee shop.
And in swoops the tactical team and takes him down by surprise.
Thrown to the ground by members of Edmonton Police Service's SWAT team, who slapped a pair of handcuffs on Mark Twitchell and drove him downtown and charged him with the murder of the still very missing Johnny Altinger. No Halloween party for Mark Twitchell. Instead, there was a press conference at which a senior police officer announced Twitchell's arrest, but never said why. Only that investigators believed Altinger had been murdered. And that Twitchell had... Put a lot of thought into it, a lot of work into it. A press conference thin on detail. Except for one. Oddly, about Mark Twitchell's TV viewing habits.
We have a lot of information that suggests he definitely idolizes Dexter.
What did that mean? I'm Keith Morrison, and this is The Man in the Black Mask, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 5, Trick or Treat.
It really just... Exploded on Halloween.
That's the voice of Steve Lillibuen. Steve covered the police beat back then for the big paper in town, the Edmonton Journal. But he'd never encountered a story like this before. The arrest of the local filmmaker and the suggestion that he idolizes Dexter? On Halloween, no less. Crazy. Assignments were handed out.
There was work to be done. One of the first things we did in the newsroom is we just went to Mark Twitchell's Facebook page. And we saw a person who was incredibly driven, a person who had a lot of charisma and was really into this, I guess you would call like a geek culture. You know, he was into Star Wars. He was into sci-fi stuff. He was into making costumes, but nothing sinister.
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