Clark stood up from the desk to address him. “No, not at all. We’re here to talk.”
“About what?” He was mad. “Seriously.“
“We wanted to show you this newspaper article about your preliminary hearing being surpassed, which is basically unheard-of.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I’m not interested, guys.”
Twitchell stormed out of the room.
Clark shot a look at Mandrusiak. He had been the officer to arrest Twitchell and read him his rights – appropriately so because Mandrusiak was one of the few detectives with a law degree.
They both followed.
It was early September 2009, and a few weeks had passed since a judge denied Twitchell’s bail and a court order cancelled his preliminary hearing – the procedure usually held to determine if there is enough evidence to proceed to a criminal trial. Justice Michelle Crighton, who heard the bail application, had concerns about public safety and undermining the public’s confidence in the justice system if Twitchell was released. While the evidence was circumstantial, the judge ruled it also strongly supported the prosecution’s theory that Twitchell engaged in a “macabre hobby” of luring strangers to his kill room. It was too great a risk to let him leave custody until his trial with such an “overwhelming inference” connecting him to Johnny’s disappearance. A rare direct indictment, forcing Twitchell straight to trial, was issued shortly after the bail decision. The move would also prevent American media from sitting in and broadcasting evidence from the hearing on U.S. airwaves out of the domain of the Canadian courts. While Canadian media would have been forced to obey a publication ban if a preliminary hearing had gone ahead, the Americans could have flouted the law.
All of this was happening behind the scenes. Both the prosecution and defence had been worried the massive media interest in Twitchell’s case would prevent him from receiving a fair trial. When the prosecution decided there was enough evidence to also proceed with an attempted murder charge for the attack against Gilles Tetreault, it did so without notifying the public – and the move wasn’t noticed by the media until the direct indictment was issued. Everything about the case was being handled by both sides of the courtroom as quietly as possible. Prosecutors and Twitchell’s defence team spent months placing publication bans and sealing orders on most of the evidence, and all these pre-trial motions and legal movements. By the time their work was done, the media could legally report that Mark Twitchell was charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, and little else. His name quickly disappeared from newsprint and the American media all flew home, waiting for a future trial. Even film director Errol Morris had changed his mind about featuring the Twitchell case on Tabloid and instead turned his planned documentary project into a feature-length film on an American criminal.
And now, with the cops at his heels, Twitchell had retreated to a holding tank behind the bank of interview rooms. He had nowhere to go. The two detectives closed in on him as he sat on a metal bench in the tank.
Clark tried a more diplomatic approach this time. “Mark, we’re not trying to give you a hard time, buddy.” He put his hand to his chest. “You know why we’re here. We’re trying to find the body.”
But Twitchell wasn’t going to play. “You just don’t get it. You just don’t get it,” he fumed, his voice rising. “It’s been this long. All of the hype has had a chance to wear down a bit. And you still haven’t put it together, have you? You still haven’t got it!” He aimed a curled finger at Clark. “You’re wrong about this.”
Clark gave him a doubting glance. “So you’re saying you didn’t do it?”
“Yeah.”
“Yet the judge denied you bail. You heard the judge.”
“I knew that bail was going to be denied.” Twitchell brushed it aside. “I wasn’t about to give away everything.”
Clark stood there, stunned, as Mandrusiak jumped in. “Mark, just listen for a second. The judge is a neutral arbitrator. She’s the first person that’s heard the evidence, and heard the majority of the evidence. She’s neutral. She’s not partisan on the part of the police or anything of that nature and you heard what her decision was. We’re just here to –”
But Twitchell cut him off. “I don’t blame you, okay? I understand that my case is very unique. This is a very unusual situation, and given what you guys have, I can understand how you’ve arrived at the conclusions that you have. Okay? I’m not going to blame you for that.” He straightened his back and blinked. “But you’re wrong.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Mandrusiak.
But Twitchell was sick of the cops and in no mood to explain. “All you guys have ever said to me has been a lie or deception of some kind.”
Clark stepped in again. “What have we lied to you about, Mark? You saw me go over that PowerPoint. We knew that you weren’t what we call an emotional offender. We gave you the facts.”
Twitchell put his hand on his hip and began speaking rapidly. “Oh, listen to you flip flop. One minute I’m a normal, healthy, religious person, the next minute I’m a sociopath. Maybe you should make your mind up. You’re even dumber than you look, Bill.”
“That was just part of the deception used in the interview,” Clark replied. “I agree with you there. But let’s go to the PowerPoint, Mark, go to the PowerPoint, where I showed you all the evidence. And now that DNA’s come back and matched up that guy’s blood in your car … I mean, those are no-brainers. Even the judge said that.”
“You guys don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Actually, I do. The only thing we don’t have is the body, so we thought we’d give you another chance on how you’d want to be remembered.”
Mandrusiak gave Twitchell a moment to take it all in, then continued on from Clark’s prodding. “Let’s face it. There’s been serious changes in circumstance here. Your bail was denied. It was denied in a very strong fashion. There’s been a direct indictment that’s been issued. So these are all things that I thought would weigh on somebody as bright as yourself, and so we came back. We just came back to see if you had a change of heart.… We’re not here to berate you or anything like that, Mark. That’s not what we’re all about.”
Clark chimed in. “What’s done is done, Mark. It’s how you want to be remembered. We can at least get you outta here for a day, go for lunch, you can show us where the body is.”
But Twitchell stuck to his story. “It’s the things you choose to ignore. It’s absolutely hilarious.“ He laughed. “Well, it’s going to come out in court. That’s all I can tell you.”
“What have we ignored?” inquired Mandrusiak.
Twitchell laughed even louder, but he didn’t answer the question. “I have no reason to believe anything you say, so just take off.” His laugh faded to a snicker.
Clark returned to his first tactic and pulled out his copy of the Edmonton Journal. “Do you wanna read the newspaper article? Right here. It says –”
“Nah, not interested.”
Clark opened it and began reading out loud: “ ‘Yet in a rare move the Attorney General’s Office has signed off on a direct indictment of the case of Mark Twitchell.’ That’s unheard-of! I’ve never seen that before in thirty years of police work where we didn’t go to a prelim and the reason why is that the evidence is simply overwhelming. That’s why you’re still in jail.”
Twitchell smiled. “You’ve been so sold on this idea, you just made it happen for yourselves.”
Clark had enough. “You know what, Mark? If you didn’t do this, and had evidence, I would gladly investigate that for you. Right now. That’s our job. We’re not here to put innocent people in jail.”
Mandrusiak agreed, telling Twitchell he would be happy to chase up any new leads he could provide. He tried to talk some sense into him. “Most people that we interview, Mark, if they are truly innocent, they tell us right outta the gate. We go off, we investigate their alibi, and we clear them! It’s as simple as
that.”
Twitchell didn’t respond.
The two cops shook their heads in dismay, trying for another ten minutes to get Twitchell to talk about the location of the body, but he just brushed them off like he was dusting his shoulders. “I know the truth,” Twitchell finally piped up, “and it adds up a helluva lot more than this bullshit that you’re spinning.”
“How are you going to explain things then?” Clark asked. “How are you going to explain the DNA evidence?”
“I’m not going to hand this to you on a silver platter,” said Twitchell. He sighed. “Unbelievable.”
The three of them stood there in silence. Their allotted time was almost up. The cops told Twitchell one more time that if he wanted to give up the body they could come back with a judge’s order allowing them to talk properly and they could organize for the media to be there, if he wanted them. But Twitchell just stared at the ceiling.
Minutes passed.
When the guard came in to take Twitchell to his cell, both detectives raised their voices to deliver parting words to their suspect.
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” Clark said. “I just want the answers.”
Mandrusiak waited until Twitchell was walking out of the holding tank before he raised his own voice. “Give it some serious thought, Mark. Some serious thought.”
The clang of metal bars brought an end to their effort.
They walked back to headquarters.
Along the way, Clark went over the failed meeting in his head. He remembered seeing something during their exchanges that had caught him off guard. But when he mentioned it to Mandrusiak on the walk back to the office, he said he had seen it too.
When they had first started talking about Johnny’s remains, Clark happened to look down and notice a bulge in Twitchell’s pants. At first he thought it was just how Twitchell’s clothes were bunched up, but then it got bigger. It was obviously an erection. The guy was aroused by this?
Clark spent a day researching criminal behaviour to find out what it could mean. But after a bit of reading on the subject, he thought it best not to ask.
In the end, he really didn’t want to know.
A TEASE, A TASTE
BACK IN THE COMFORT of his remand cell block, Twitchell brushed off his police interrogations and struck up conversations he could control. Only those who humoured his interests would become close to him. And his favourite conversationalist turned out to be not among inmates but correctional officers.
She liked to call him “Twitchy.” In return, Twitchell became intrigued with the woman in uniform and they developed a rapport. She’d tease him about Dexter’s Michael C. Hall and he loved it. When the actor was diagnosed with cancer she stopped by his cell and poked her head in. “Hey, I heard you’ve got cancer. How ya feeling?” Twitchell found the comment delightful. When news spread of the actor’s changed health a few months later, she couldn’t resist teasing Twitchell again. “You’re in remission? Yay for you!” For the remand guard, it was nothing more than a little game to break up the work routine, but Twitchell soon treated the woman as a friend. “We always find something to discuss,” he wrote of their affinity. “She’s a firecracker.”
The experienced guard, however, knew exactly who she was dealing with. Twitchell loved to talk, but she knew it was mostly about himself. And he liked to subtly manipulate those around him to gain access to all the details he craved, including her full name and most of her backstory, gleaned from other guards and inmates. “He’s incredible at grooming people and appealing to your ego,” she explained. “He’s very savvy. But it’s all for his gain. He wants to see how he can use that information or engage you in more dialogue. It’s all about him.”
Twitchell despised only one officer in remand: a guard who was frequently mean to him and showed no interest in his outlandish conversations. In contrast, Twitchell would sometimes disclose tidbits of his life to his favourite guard. She once convinced him to reveal the results of an IQ test he had taken – 142, or in a genius category, he claimed – which prompted her to ask even more personal questions.
Standing near another correctional officer in the cell block, she decided her rapport with Twitchell had reached such a stage that she could finally ask the question on many minds. “I’m going to ask you something,” she told Twitchell, “and it’s probably going to piss you off.”
“Yes, ask away,” he replied.
“Did you eat him?”
Twitchell’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Well, you can’t blame me for asking,” she chuckled.
Her armed partner worried they would have to pepper-spray an enraged Twitchell or subdue him to stop a prison riot.
“Did you eat him?” she probed further. “Did you nibble on him? Did you have a snack?”
Twitchell turned expressionless. “I can’t believe you asked me that.”
“Well, if the situation was reversed,” she clarified, “you absolutely would take this opportunity to ask.”
Her comment made him chuckle. Twitchell wasn’t bothered by the question per se, just surprised at the gall she had to ask it. “Why does this fascinate you so much?”
She told him he was one of a kind. Throughout her entire career as a correctional officer, she was likely never to meet an inmate quite like him again.
Twitchell nodded and smiled at her explanation. He then walked back to his cell and didn’t answer her question.
As the months rolled by, he never did.
PERSPECTIVES
DOUBT HAD EMERGED. IT crept slowly, its tentacles tugging at the minds of Twitchell’s friends. Jason in particular became more dubious as Twitchell’s incarceration stretched on. He desperately wanted to believe his friend and former roommate was innocent, but he also feared there was far more to the story. Either his friend was a liar and a killer or the police were liars who detained innocent people for two years. He didn’t know which was worse.
Their conversations remained jovial when he did take time to visit Twitchell in remand. But one meeting before the trial changed everything. Jason had stared a bit longer through the prison glass this time, watching Twitchell’s eyes as he talked. And something clicked; something was different, unsettling. “He gave me this look and I just suddenly went, ‘Jesus!’ “ he recalled later. “There was just something in the expression, something there I had never seen before. It was just a creepy look.” Jason didn’t go back.
Rebecca found her suspicions were also being raised as time passed. A few members of Twitchell’s film crew wanted to discuss the case, which made her uncomfortable. “I was thinking if he didn’t do it, then it had to be one of these other guys who had access to the garage,” she said later. “There was no way I was going to meet up with any of them.”
Twitchell’s sister, Susan, had visited him a few times during his incarceration, but by the time the trial neared she had stopped and only Twitchell’s parents remained in regular contact. They usually booked an appointment to see their son once a month, depositing cash in his remand account to buy better food at the prison canteen, more pens, more notebooks.
The approaching trial made Johnny’s closest friends incredibly nervous. They feared the police didn’t have enough to secure a conviction, considering there was an information blackout. The continuing sealing orders and publication bans prevented all of the evidence from being made public until the trial began. One of his friends’ greatest concerns was the inability to find Johnny’s remains. Without a body, could the case collapse? How could it be a proven that Twitchell committed a murder with no human remains? “Admit to your crime and start to serve your time like a man,” one of Johnny’s Vancouver friends begged online.
Even if Twitchell could have heard the message, he wouldn’t have listened. He had something going on behind the scenes. He had a plan he had been sitting on for years, hinting at it repeatedly with detectives and his friends. He believed he was still holding the cards.
When
the trial began, he was going to offer a paradigm shift he was certain would change everything. “They are convinced they see a train,” Twitchell wrote of the prosecution shortly before his trial. “From their perspective, they can clearly identify the tracks, the wheels, the grill and even the window with an engineer in it. But back up a little and soon we see that the reality is not a train at all but a painting of a train, sitting on an easel in the middle of a studio.”
While many friends had abandoned Twitchell, such cryptic cloak-and-dagger assertions encouraged a select few to remain loyal. Mike did not waver in his support through the years from arrest to trial. In one of his only media statements issued after his letter in defence of Twitchell was published, Mike still publicly defended his friend. “The evidence will speak for itself, and I hope and believe that it will find Mark innocent,” he stated. Scott stayed committed to his beliefs as well. “I don’t believe Mark did it,” he told a friend over the phone. “He’s going to be proven innocent. You just wait and see what happens at the trial. Just wait.”
Scott repeated such strong opinions online. In one of his last posts on “Friends of Twitch,” he wrote how he had received a court summons in the mail and he was going to testify in a few days. “Make no mistake,” he told the group. “I’m still on his side.”
It was the kind of talk that made Twitchell very pleased.
CRUELTY EXPOSED
THE FOG HAD ROLLED in. As the sun crested the horizon, Twitchell slid his feet out from his prison bed and peered out the tiny rectangular window. Outside, a thick blanket of grey and white drifted low among downtown office towers and skimmed the top of the six-storey courthouse. The building stood across the street and one block south from Twitchell’s cell. One wing of the courthouse heard provincial matters and had a main-floor counter where drivers paid speeding tickets; the taller wing housed the Court of Queen’s Bench, which was reserved for the most serious of crimes. The square-shaped building looked like an upside-down pyramid with the top floor much wider than the bottom. Its concrete walls tended to glow white in the summer heat, but on an overcast day like today they turned a shade darker, to a soft light brown. Twitchell had worked his way to trial from the provincial side, starting in a massive docket court. He then was transferred to the Queen’s Bench – Alberta’s Superior Court – and moved slowly up the tower, floor by floor. By the time a trial began, most facing a murder charge would end up on the fourth floor. The fifth was reserved for appeals; the top floor held the offices of the chief justice.
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