The Devil's Cinema (2 page)

Truth be told, the city is isolated. A road trip to Jasper and its world-class skiing resorts in the heart of the Rockies is a four-hour drive straight west. A visit to the southern big-sister city of Calgary takes more than three
hours, even when speeding past the late-summer burst of yellow canola on a near-straight-shot highway. And the money pump of modern oil revenue linked to the city's prosperity is a gruelling, six-hour drive up north to Fort McMurray along a road dubbed “Death Highway” for its staggering fatality rate. Young oil workers are killed every year, flipping their pickup trucks into ditches, striking others head on, causing crushing, gruesome injuries. They are often speeding, drinking and driving recklessly in some cases, trying to cut that long, boring drive into something more manageable. Instead, their blood is spilled over a highway they thought was paved with gold.

B
Y
2005,
THE OIL
money was flowing again and so were the drugs. Crime levels reached new heights as old records were broken, one by one. People were killed in homes, outside bars, and at parties. The bodies of prostitutes were being strewn like garbage on the city's eastern outskirts. Three people were stabbed at a wedding, and two pregnant women were slain. A girl's eighteenth birthday party was shattered when a passing driver pulled out a gun and began firing from his car. The mall proved dangerous too. A thirteen-year-old girl who liked to hang out in the food court was lured from West Edmonton Mall and found on the fourth fairway of an out-of-town golf course. She had been raped and beaten to death so viciously it took days to identify her body. Even those in custody and watched by prison guards weren't safe. An inmate awaiting his dangerous driving trial was beaten to death over a minor debt. His bruises looked like footprints. It was the first homicide at the city's remand centre, and while the police had every suspect behind bars, they could never prove which one did it.

Edmonton was in the middle of a crime wave. Many were terrified. Politicians were asked repeatedly how crime rates could be brought back under control. Detectives were working double shifts to keep up with the rising body count and even then they fell behind.

The year ended with a record thirty-nine homicides. There were eleven more murders than the previous year, which had set its own record. While some North American cities routinely witness far more murders each year, Edmonton's small population meant the prairie community had been elevated to an unwanted status: the most violent city across the nation. On a
per capita basis, no other city in the country had suffered more homicides. At least seventeen gangs were active, with roughly eight hundred members. Drugs were everywhere.

“Deadmonton” had become a startling reality.

Few outside the city knew or cared that this sordid tale was unfolding. In fact, few even thought of Edmonton at all. For these ill fortunes were not unlike those of any other major city, and life moved on. But what no one noticed at the time, especially those who were closely watching the city's highs and lows, was that something strange, an oddity, had taken root in the shadows of this bloodbath.

A young salesman who had spent years living in the American Midwest ultimately decided this was the year to do the opposite of what so many of his Edmonton-born peers had been doing: he was moving back to the city, by choice, to launch his new career.

He was going to become a film director. Charismatic and cheerful, he believed his birthplace was well suited to help him begin this astonishing journey. While he didn't fit in with the masses – he hated hockey, didn't drink beer – he envisioned likeminded sci-fi geeks and film fans would come out of the woodwork and help him craft his grand plans until they came to fruition.

So he packed up his vehicle that summer of 2005 and hit the highway, driving northwest across America as he headed back to the Canadian prairie city he had once called home.

He would find friends quickly, get married for a second time, and cherish this new life. And in just over three years, by the later months of 2008, he would finally achieve the recognition he was so desperately seeking, but perhaps not in the way he had first intended: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN – even Hollywood. They all wanted a piece of him.

Before he was finished, everyone would know his face, everyone would know his car, the world would know of his work.

He believed his ideas were some of the greatest of all time.

R
EMOTE IN HAND
, B
ILL
Clark turned up the volume on his television as the NFL pre-game show rolled on. It was nearing two o'clock on a Sunday in October and while the sun had chewed away the morning chill, it was still slightly below freezing. Clark was happy to be inside and sitting on his couch, heat drifting out of the furnace, as he settled in for the afternoon game.

Veteran homicide detectives like Clark were well into the home stretch of the year. There were twenty-two homicides so far in 2008, and while it wasn't looking like another record-breaking year, many of the cases remained unsolved. It was the same old story: lack of evidence, uncooperative witnesses, guys who didn't see nothin' or hear nothin', and triggermen who lied or blamed others. All too often murder victims were about to pull themselves up and out of a “high-risk lifestyle” when multiple gunshots rang out in the night. Edmonton's homicide cops treated the trend like a sick joke. When the body of another gangbanger was found dumped in a park, someone in the office would inevitably ask, “Hey, was he turning his life around? Don't ever turn your life around or you'll end up dead.” Laughter would ensue. It was a way of dealing with the relentless trauma of a high-stress job few people outside of the police force would ever understand. But on this Sunday, in front of the TV, Clark could hopefully put all of that job stress behind him. His biggest problem at the moment was deciding what type of snacks to eat while his wife left him alone with his beloved NFL season.

The first play was about to begin when Clark's cell phone started vibrating. He cringed. He was on call and it didn't look good. On the line was his buddy Mark Anstey, another homicide detective working in their office at downtown police headquarters.

“Sorry, Bill. We gotta go out,” Anstey said. He was on call too, having just been pulled away from a Sunday buffet with his family. He had got a call from their boss, who relayed how officers at southwest division station
had a file, but they wanted it escalated to the homicide unit. “It's a missing person and they suspect foul play.”

Clark rolled his eyes and threw his head back in the air. “And
why
do they suspect foul play?” He thought the officers who were trying to pass on the file better have something more than just a missing person. It wasn't the homicide unit's mandate to take on such cases.

The city had been divided like a grid into five police divisions, with each division station given its own batch of criminal detectives. But whenever a case appeared to be more serious, something that might involve a possible suspicious death, the files were often handed to homicide cops at downtown headquarters. Clark and Anstey were detectives in the unit on a rotation of more than a dozen other veterans of the same rank. Each had competed for years to earn a coveted spot on the roster and a desk in the unit's third-floor office. Seemingly pointless cases were now supposed to be behind them.

Clark knew there were thousands of these types of files every year. He had to screen these calls or they'd be bombarded with investigations. In his experience, nearly all missing persons were found quickly, with nothing criminal to blame anyway. They were sometimes runaways or suicides, their bodies found floating down the city's river, another jumper off the High Level Bridge. Clark pleaded with Anstey on the phone: “Tell me something more.”

“There's some funny stuff,” Anstey explained. The missing man's friends had been looking for him for a week. They had emails from him saying he was away, but they didn't believe it. Their boss wanted the two of them to go out, just take a look and decide whether homicide even had to be involved. If they did, they'd call in the whole team.

Clark sighed. He shut off his television, put on a coat, jumped in his car, and was down on the south side within forty-five minutes. Football would have to wait.

In the station, Clark spotted Anstey. Both were seasoned cops, bald, and sporting police moustaches dusted with grey. Clark was heavy-set while Anstey was tall and thin. They were fathers with teenaged sons and daughters. Clark was known as the bulldog in the office, sounding bad-tempered when needed, his piercing blue eyes dissecting his suspects. But
he had a soft side too. He had saved an infant during Edmonton's 1987 “Black Friday” tornado that killed twenty-seven people and taken the time to reconnect at the twentieth anniversary of the disaster with the “miracle baby,” now a young woman, who was eager to thank him. Anstey was far more restrained than Clark. He was a cop who loved to chase leads, not interrogate suspects. His reading glasses dangled on the tip of his nose as he scanned police reports and evidence. He had even won a policing award for solving the slaying of an elderly woman in her own home; the killer, a prostitute on the run from the botched robbery, was tracked down far away on the West Coast.

The two of them had yet to discuss who would be the lead detective, or primary investigator, as everyone gathered in one central room. Clark recognized a southwest division detective as someone he was in police training with decades ago. There was another detective and a group of young constables and other officers he didn't know.

A staff sergeant chaired the briefing as they were brought up to speed on police file 08-137180. The missing man was Johnny Brian Altinger. He was thirty-eight and single, lived alone in a condo on the south side, and worked as an oilfield pipe inspector at Argus Machine, just outside city limits. He had gone on a date on the night of Friday, October 10, 2008, with a woman he had met on the online dating website
plentyoffish.com
. They must have hit it off like fireworks since Johnny had started writing emails and updates on his Facebook page about the amazing catch he had hooked. She was filthy rich and willing to share. In one email sent out to many of his friends, he bragged about finally finding romance and being out of the country for a couple of months. His friends passed that email on to police:

The email had been sent on Monday morning – October 13, 2008 – three days after Johnny's date. Most of Johnny's friends saw it as a bit impulsive but didn't think too much about it. But his closest friend, Dale Smith, was worried. It didn't seem like something Johnny would do, no matter how beautiful or wealthy this girl could be. Dale couldn't get his friend on the phone, and when he went to his condo, he noticed that Johnny's car, a sporty cherry-red Mazda 3 hatchback that was only three years old, was missing from his parking spot. Johnny hadn't covered his two motorcycles with a tarp either, which he always did when he left for a vacation. Even if he had left in a rush, it still would have been out of character. Dale spent days calling the police before officers finally took the disappearance seriously, realizing a few things weren't adding up. On the late evening of Friday, October 17, a week after Johnny's date, police finally became involved and agreed to take on the missing persons report. Clark and Anstey had been called in two days later as the search so far had failed to locate him.

Clark was listening in to this briefing, seeing that things were a little odd, but he wasn't writing down a lot of notes in his binder. His pen dangled above his page and skipped over a lot of the detail. He wasn't really feeling this one just yet. He looked over and saw Anstey was scribbling quite a bit, taking extensive notes.

They were told that patrol officers had already visited Johnny's condo and taken his desktop computer. A quick peek around on the hard drive revealed a phone list with a whole pile of names.

Clark and Anstey wanted to cover off each angle. After all, if the missing man really was dead, it would end up on their desk anyway. It was better if such legwork was done at this stage than days later, when the homicide team would be forced to play catch-up on simple tasks.

“We need to call everyone on this phone list,” Clark announced to the room of officers. “What if he's just at someone's house?” He turned to Anstey. “If he is, Mark and I can go home. That will be end of it.”

Officers started divvying up the phone list in the room as the formal briefing ended.

Clark elbowed Anstey. “Listen, do you want me to take this? We need to figure this out right now.” Someone had to be the primary. “If I'm taking it, I gotta be writing a lot more than I'm writing now. I'm just listening.”

In a normal police investigation, becoming the primary investigator on a case is a mountain of paperwork. Everything has to be written down. Every detail. Every decision. If the investigation proceeds to a court case, detectives have to take the witness stand and explain the entire direction of their case under harsh cross-examination. It results in binders of information, hundreds of pages for even a simple and small file. The primary is the boss man, directing the speed and flow of information, making the major decisions, delegating tasks to other officers. It is endless work at the best of times.

But Anstey reassured him. “No, no, I'll take it.” Anstey didn't mind the job at all. He found it was “tailor made” for his skills and interest in investigative work. He had been a primary with Clark, helping him a few times before, and knew they worked together well. But he didn't realize at the time that by volunteering for such a task, he had just agreed to be responsible for the biggest homicide file he had ever seen. His investigation would soon be winding through a strange avenue of characters and motives he never imagined possible. And this police chase would see him unexpectedly choose to retire from the force early, making it his last.