The Man in the Black Mask - Ep. 6: House of Cards
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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.
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.
This block area matches the diary, the SK Confessions, with the telephone poles, the sewers.
But the author of SK Confessions didn't say which sewer drain he used, and there were many, of course. So many that police had to bring in city maintenance workers to help them search.
City crews actually pulled all these sewers, all these... All the covers. All the covers, pulled them off. They had crews go down, search each one, and they sent cameras down the lines where they actually go down the lines and they snake them down and having a look, they found nothing.
But on went Bill Clark like a pit bull in search of a bone.
I'd be out with a flashlight looking down and now I can't see nothing. If it was really dicey, you couldn't see down, we'd call the city crews in.
But the whole notion that Altinger's body was dumped down a sewer drain in some back alley was, in the end, information that was just enough, yet not enough. Winter descended, back alleys filled with snow. The search for Johnny Altinger petered out, and by spring was over for good.
After the snow melted, I thought, geez, if he's in the sewer, he's going to wash away. You know, the amount of snow we get here and the spring runoff, we thought there was little hope now.
Had they been, those detectives, like Don Quixote, been tilting at windmills? So much fruitless work for so long. And in secret, since a judge had slapped a gag order on the whole case, none of them could say anything to anybody.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What shocking discovery do detectives make about Mark Twitchell?
0:06–0:35
2
How does Mark Twitchell's computer play a role in the investigation?
0:35–10:07
3
What unexpected information does Mark Twitchell provide to the detectives?
10:07–15:57
4
How does the courtroom drama unfold during Twitchell's trial?
15:57–19:23
5
What evidence links Mark Twitchell to the murder of Johnny Altinger?
19:23
6
What surprising admission does Mark Twitchell make during the trial?
17:41–22:21
7
How does Twitchell's demeanor in court affect those present?
22:21
8
What revelations come to light about the investigation's challenges?
14:01–29:22