The Devil's Cinema (22 page)

M
IKE
Y
OUNG TWIRLED THE
dial on the padlock on the back of the garage. It clicked open and he swung through the door. Inside, the garage was fairly clean. A few pop bottles and discarded coffee cups were littered about, the only signs of the weekend film shoot. Of course, he could not know how crucial this observation would soon prove to be for the police. At the time, he was solely focused on using the space as a workshop. Jay and Scott were coming over later. Together, they were about to build a tank for a pet snake.

T
WITCHELL AND
J
ESS CONTINUED
to fight, the distance growing between them, but a conversation one day pushed them even farther apart. Jess was still worried that his editor, Phil Porter, was a lie and her husband was cheating on her. And then he shocked her further with a startling admission that came with no warning.

“I'm not sure I can feel empathy like other people,” he said.

Jess stopped what she was doing. Shaken by what her husband had just revealed, Jess tried to engage him in a long conversation about empathy. He was acting like it was a foreign concept to him, and she had to define what
it meant. She thought back to an episode of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, when a woman had revealed how she had forgotten her baby in a car, only to have the child die of heat exhaustion. As a new mother, Jess felt a great deal of empathy for the woman's tragedy. “That's the kind of situation,” she said, “where I felt like, ‘Oh my God, what if that happened to me?' “

“Yeah, that's sad that happened,” he replied, “but that doesn't have anything to do with me.”

Jess looked at her husband in confusion. She was amazed that something so serious was only bubbling to the surface at this stage of their relationship. Gone was his usual charm, replaced with a cold distance she did not understand. They had a daughter nearing eight months of age and just now she was being told her husband felt nothing?

“That's not normal,” she said in sadness. If he couldn't feel empathy, she knew she couldn't stay in this marriage. “You need help.”

He agreed it would be for the best. A marriage counsellor was called and another to address his personal issues.

Not long after the conversation, he told Jess he had a confirmed schedule with a therapist. He would be seeing a psychiatrist every Friday evening. In fact, he had wasted no time about it. He already had an appointment lined up for the upcoming Friday. A session was scheduled for October 3, 2008. He'd drive there straight after work.

W
HAT A CATCH
. S
HEENA
had straight blond hair, a curled cute smile, and her sparkling eyes flickered in a digital snapshot on Gilles Tetreault's computer screen like a flirty text message.

Online dating had made single life so much easier. And Sheena was a forward girl too. Here it was four days since their first connection on
plentyoffish.com
and she was already finalizing plans for their first date that weekend. Gilles didn't even have her phone number yet, but he was set to pick her up at seven o'clock on Friday for a dinner and a movie.

At thirty-three, Gilles was a new arrival to the city from a francophone prairie town so small it only had five streets, seven avenues, and one thousand residents. He had black, neatly trimmed hair and spoke in a country accent. He was quite short and terribly thin. Working at a casino, he was enjoying life during the latest oil boom, living alone and in search of city romance.

Gilles was thrilled that Sheena seemed to be so interested in him. The only thing that bothered him were the confusing directions she had given. He had told her online where he lived, but her directions seemed to assume he was coming from the other side of town. And she wanted him to drive down a back alley and park outside her detached double-door garage. She would leave one of the garage doors open a touch so he could enter through the garage and cross the yard to the back door of the house.

She then explained how there was no parking in front because of a bus stop, and the landlord padlocked the back gate. “Pull in to the only driveway on your left that isn't paved,” Sheena had written in her directions, explaining the mess he'd soon see piled up near her fence. “Seriously, who ever heard of a driveway that looks like the Amazon? It won't swallow your car, I promise.”

She didn't provide a street address.

Gilles could understand the girl not wanting to give out her phone number just yet – there were stalkers on the Internet, after all – but these directions struck him as a bit odd.

Having experienced little luck with online dating thus far, however, Gilles brushed it off and looked forward to his date, a bit tickled that he had charmed such a beautiful blonde so very quickly.

T
WITCHELL FOUND HAVING ACCESS
to Renee's dark mind was impossibly riveting. Never before had he shared such thoughts with such vigor, as if gorging himself on the darkest of chocolates. As the first few days of October passed by, he could barely resist spilling his own gruesome fantasies in return, but he maintained composure, at least for now, as if afraid of frightening his newest admirer.

Twitchell thought it best to begin with a
Dexter
analogy, a passion he knew she already shared, and then blend the words with his life experience. Messaging Renee through his Dexter Morgan Facebook account, he went back to his rejection at the U.S. border and told her of his reaction when the customs officer delivered the bad news. “I fantasized about wrapping her to the table, collecting the blood slide and then dismembering her so vigorously,” he wrote, before adding an “lol” or “laughing out loud” as a light punctuation at the very thought of what he had just stated.

Renee bathed in this dark passage, soaking in each sinister word as she contemplated what she should share to top it. She didn't hold back. She unveiled one of her most violent fantasies, one that was deeply personal, full of visceral venom and rage:

The vivid imagery of her story struck deeply. Twitchell viewed her prose as smooth and romantic, like a piece of Gothic literature – full of torment, lost love, and gore. He sat on her story for five hours. Then, late in the evening of Thursday, October 2, thoughts turning to the day ahead, he finally touched his keyboard. Swept up in the moment, he descended into darker territory, exposing his elaborate insights on how to commit the perfect murder. He warned Renee that she was “too close” to her victim and could easily be caught. She needed a far stronger plan to dispose of her ex-husband's new wife.

Finished with passing on his detailed suggestions, he called it a night and settled into bed.

G
ILLES
T
ETREAULT HAD BUTTERFLIES
in his stomach as his first date with Sheena drew nearer. He still wasn't entirely sure how to get there and had to ask Sheena for clarification. Her response, however, made it all quite clear: “There's certainly no other driveways along our alley like this one, and the half-open car door is a dead giveaway.”

He printed off her directions in case he needed them. After work on Friday, he knew he would have to rush home to slip on his best shirt and a jacket, a thin black one from Old Navy, in order to make it to her house on time.

He didn't want to be late.

A
CROSS TOWN
, T
WITCHELL WAS
preparing. He was spending Friday morning buying more duct tape, a new padlock, and two disposable coveralls. The possibilities that the evening would bring seemed impossibly appealing. The afternoon passed quickly. He stopped to pay the rent on his garage film studio, a courtesy he did not extend to his own home loan holder. The mortgage on his St. Albert bungalow had gone unpaid since the signing of the deed.

L
YNDA
W
ARREN HAD A
curiosity about her next-door neighbour. On the weekend, she had spotted a crew making a movie in the garage. Several men she had never seen before had been joined by a man in a maroon car who had stopped by more frequently.

Their activities were unusual but explainable. Her suspicions had only been raised earlier, when a large table was dragged out of the garage and into the sunlight. The metal surface had been polished vigorously. She had seen such a table only once before, deep inside a medical examiner's office, where autopsies were performed.

T
WITCHELL SLIPPED INTO THE
garage undetected.

The walls deadened the sounds of his labourious work, his Friday preparations stretching on for hours with a staple gun and scissors in hand.

Tape was ripped. Plastic sheeting laid out. Inch by inch, the ceiling was covered, staples holding the sheeting in place. Walls were draped. The cement floor blanketed. Even the table was prepared, sheeting falling overtop. A thin green bed sheet was tacked up too, separating the two sides of the garage. He had made a dark sanctuary of which even Dexter would be proud.

The painted hockey mask sat nearby, close to the stun gun baton. A pair of handcuffs was at the ready. Joining the armoury was a firearm. Twitchell tucked the handgun in close, making sure it was never far from his reach.

With time to spare, he flipped open his laptop and checked his Dexter Morgan profile. His fans had no idea what he was really up to, which likely heightened the thrill of it all. A status update was entered: “Dexter is patiently waiting for his next victi … uh, play date buddy.”

His message triggered a response. “Do this well, Dex,” one fan wrote, “and it could be really really cool.”

Twitchell closed the laptop, slipped on his hoodie, and lay in wait.

Time passed in silence.

A breeze rattled the partially opened bay door, but soon settled. The sky bruised purple. He finally heard a vehicle rumble down the alley, then the sharp sounds of wheels on gravel. Headlights beamed onto the garage bay doors, vanished, and the engine shuddered cold.

Fingers were clenched tight, gripping the stun gun baton.

Outside, shoes pressed into soil. A man was entering the property.

A pause, as if to enjoy this brief moment of calm, and then Twitchell rushed forward, racing across the kill room under a cloak of darkness. He approached his foolish arrival in full flight, drifting ever closer like the harbinger of terror.

G
ILLES HAD BEEN DRIVING
fast, but when he pulled into the alley, parked his truck, and checked the time – fifteen minutes after 7:00 p.m. – he knew rushing hadn't helped enough. Sheena had told him not to be late and he already was, losing that good first impression.

Yellow leaves crunched beneath his shoes as he jumped out of his truck and ducked under one of the garage bay doors, left open a bit just like she said. His tardiness on his mind, Gilles tried to hurry through the darkened garage as he headed straight toward the faint outline of the back door ahead of him.

As he reached for the door handle, Gilles was suddenly embraced from behind. He thought Sheena was playing a joke on him. But then something caught his eye.

He saw an arm reach around with what looked like a cattle prod. An arc of electricity crackled and echoed against his chest. Again and again.

“What the hell is going on?” Gilles called out in pain. “What the fuck?” He spun around.

He was terrified to see a tall man standing behind him, his face obscured by a black and gold hockey mask. The jaw had been cut away, revealing the stranger's mouth and tightened lips.

This was no date. The masked attacker was holding the glowing shock device in his right hand. The blue arc of his weapon glowed in the darkness.

But the electrical pulse was more annoying than crippling. It felt like an electronic bug zapper. Gilles finally grabbed the man's arm and pushed it to the side, away from his own body, until the stranger stopped pressing the trigger and holstered the weapon.