The Devil's Cinema (43 page)

“What happened next?”

“The next thing I remember was an impact in my lower back, which I assumed to be a kick, that he tried to kick me. And I turned around and I push him back.… And then again we come to a place where it's a matter of not being able to read each other or mixed signals because we're right there next to the wooden table with my laptop on it. And I get this idea in my head like, ‘What if he retaliates and he tries to smash up the laptop?' He must have seen me looking toward it and I'm starting to make a little bit of a move to block it. The pipes are also right there too. So, to counter, or to beat me to it, he grabs one.… Swung it a couple times.… I dodge the first couple and then I put my arm up to block one. Took it right here, across my forearm on the bottom.” He raised his arm and pointed to his elbow.
“It's like a stinging, so I recoil and then snap back and then
I
grab the pipe, sort of a miniature half-second tug of war, until I twist it out of his grasp. And then
I
swung. Seems to me that he saw that portion or at least reacted in some way because he flinched back and the edge of the pipe caught him on the top of the head.”

“Carry on,” Davison urged.

“We proceed to get into a pretty intense altercation.… We grab each other's arms. Trying to get an advantage over each other. It's basically just turning and side-stepping.” Twitchell curled up his fists and squeezed them tight. “I'm trying to get him off of me. Of course, I'm not thinking very rationally at this so I'm using the pipe again.” He raised his one hand like he was swinging the pipe up and down. “I'm trying to hit him, I'm …” Twitchell paused, took his gaze off of Davison for a second, and stared at the floor. “There's this physical, if I can call it an aversion to hitting people? But I'm feeling it pull back?”

Davison looked annoyed. He raised his voice. “Just focus on what
you
did or
he
did and what things that you said, okay? What did you do with the pipe?”

“I'm swinging at him, he had a grip on my arm and I was sort of grabbing at his sleeve at the same time. And it's a matter of, like, pulling and pushing on each other. And so I'm swinging the pipe trying to hit him off of me.” Twitchell's voice started wavering. “I keep hitting him on the head because he's pulling on me. He's moving forward. He's a little taller than me. Maybe an inch? … He's swinging back at me. He swung for the body, mostly. I took a few shots to the stomach area, maybe the chest. Nothing like super hard, but it seemed like he was trying to protect himself while still fighting back.”

“And what was he striking you with?”

“Would have been his left fist?” Twitchell raised up his hand.

“Okay. Carry on.”

“Now we're struggling some more and I keep increasing the power each time, with each hit, with the pipe, to try to separate us. And toward the end of it he's, he just switches.” Twitchell shook his head and frowned. “It's like a switch of pressure from pushing back to a sudden pull, and he pulls me in toward him and he's bent over and the pipe connects with him
again, it's just a lot of mangled mess of swings.” He gave Davison a look of disgust.

“Do you have any idea how many times you struck him with the pipe?”

“I don't know.”

“What happened after that?”

“He finally got mad enough to rear up and grab the pipe. This time he let go of my right arm, grabbed it with both hands and twisted it out of
my
grasp.” Twitchell started speeding up his words. “In that moment, that's a panic moment for me, I just back off and I try to step back as far as I can.… Then I realize, you know, he's standing there. He. Has. The. Pipe. And he's bleeding, a lot.” Twitchell's eyes flared. “I really don't know what to do. I'm far enough away from the other pipe where I can't really make a move for that without him charging me immediately. I don't really want to provoke it any further. So I reach for … the knife.”

Twitchell told the jury he was wearing a KA-BAR knife on his belt. He motioned to his hip and showed how he undid the button on the sheath and wrapped his fingers around the handle. “I thought that would send a clear enough message, saying we're pretty much equal, but again, there's no real rational thought in it. I'm just thinking to balance the situation out. Here I am, I'm going to go hold on to the handle of this thing. So I have a pretty tight grip on that and I'm watching John touch his head.” Twitchell motioned again to his own head. “And notice the blood all over his hands.” He brought his hand down to his eyes, staring at his palms like they had blood on them. “And he says something to the effect of, ‘My head, my head, you fuck!' … He comes after me swinging.” Twitchell's voice quickened. “It's just an instant knee-jerk reaction. The pipe is in the air, I just, both hands come out. One's got the knife in it. I put the other hand up to block the pipe and then …” He breathed in and closed his eyes. “Sickest. Feeling. Ever.”

“What did you do?”

“It all happened so fast.… I just started to feel this wet sensation around the hand that was still holding the handle and I let go instinctively … and then I saw it sticking out of him.”

Twitchell's face flushed as he described his panic. He testified that he froze as Johnny looked down, staggered back, and fell to the floor, blood pouring out of him in a flood of dark red.

“It's one of those things where I'm just stuck there and can't decide what to do, just frozen by inaction.” Twitchell composed himself and raised his voice. “There is this war going on between … screaming out in my head, ‘Call 9-1-1!' but at the same time, ‘How bad does this look? Take a look around. Look at what this place looks like!' “ He paused for a moment as he stood in the witness box, looking down and running out of words.

Then, he said it was five or ten minutes before he could move again, watching Johnny bleed out all over the floor, doing nothing to help him. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,' and then a series of ‘No, no, no, no.' “ His voice lowered into a whimper.

Twitchell paused, lip quivering, eyes squinted. Tears flowed down his cheeks. “Sorry,” he said. He shook his head and grabbed a tissue.

There wasn't a sound in the courtroom as he dabbed his tears away.

“When I could finally move,” he continued, voice crackling, “I walked over to him … Not even a pulse. Nothing was even moving.” He started to cry. “It took me a really long time to figure out what the hell I was gonna do.” He began blubbering. “I just started thinking about … how I could have been so fucking stupid!?” He stopped to wipe away more tears. “Even all the precautions I took. You can't just think you can predict human behaviour.… I could have avoided that whole thing.” He started mumbling. “No way to see how it was gonna unfold.”

“What did you do?” Davison asked softly.

Twitchell clenched the tissue tight in his hand and composed himself. “I started just to try to buy myself some time and I figured out first before I could actually act that, uhhhhh,” he groaned. “I was gonna start using my set for things it had never been designed to do. I couldn't touch 'em or move 'em until … I tried to set my mind to the task and the only way I could do that was to block out what I was feeling.”

Twitchell likened it to putting up super-strong Plexiglas walls to separate himself from his emotions. “I tried to keep telling myself, it's not him anymore. The man's not there. It's just a shell.”

Davison asked what he did next.

“I tried to lift him up. I can't remember how many attempts I made at actually standing up. I lifted him and carried him over, part dragging, part lifting to the table. And then set him on it.”

“Did you get him on the table?”

“I did.”

Twitchell testified that he then proceeded to dismember Johnny's body. He returned to the garage a few days later to finish the job.

Davison asked him to compare the description of the dismemberment in S. K. Confessions with what he actually did. Was the document accurate?

“In general terms, for the most part,” Twitchell said, “yes.”

T
HE
A
LTINGER FAMILY BOARDED
a flight from the West Coast, touching down in Edmonton in time to attend Twitchell's cross-examination. Gary Altinger was fuming. He knew in his heart his brother would never hurt anyone, let alone fly into a furious rage and repeatedly charge at a man who had his hand wrapped around the handle of a deadly military blade.

Gary was the first person to enter the courtroom once the doors were unlocked. He hurried to the front row and saved a seat for his mother, Elfriede. Detectives Clark, Johnson, and Mandrusiak arrived, sitting near the back. Actor and comedian Chris Heward had shown up too, hoping to see Twitchell squirm under pressure now that Chris had testified and was allowed to sit in the public gallery. The courtroom filled to capacity a half-hour before the jury was allowed in.

Crown prosecutor Avril Inglis placed a binder full of typed questions on a podium atop her desk so she could check each one off as they were answered. Inglis had gone head to head with some of the city's toughest criminals and made a name for herself by winning a high-profile rape case. Twitchell, with no prior criminal convictions, would be a pussycat compared to some of her previous cross-examinations. As a bonus, she had no shortage of material to draw from. She planned to force Twitchell into an uncomfortable paradox: to have his own testimony believed meant also having to admit to every lie he had ever told. There were so many that by the end of her questioning his credibility would most certainly be destroyed.

“Good morning, Mr. Twitchell,” she began.

Twitchell offered no greeting in return. He was about to be interrogated for nearly four hours until he was weak, tired, and out of breath. As he stood, he kept his elbows locked, hands clasped tight on the wooden edges of the witness box, and his body leaned backwards, as if bracing himself against a hurricane-force headwind. And then the storm blew in.

On the witness stand, Twitchell admitted to breaking into Johnny's condo by using his key and stealing his printer and laptop. Johnny had left himself signed into all of his personal accounts on his computer, giving Twitchell the ability to send messages as the dead man for days before he finally threw out the equipment in a random city dumpster. Johnny's friends, family, employer, and acquaintances had therefore all been lied to through these impersonated emails and MSN Messenger and Facebook messages.

These acts were not the extent of his lying. Both victims, Gilles and Johnny, had also been lied to repeatedly, whether part of a hoax or intentional luring – that much Twitchell had already admitted during his earlier testimony. But when asked by Inglis in cross-examination, he confirmed he had also lied to his friends and loved ones too. Repeatedly. Joss had been thrown unwittingly into a murder investigation because of Twitchell's dishonesty. Nearly every single police officer Twitchell had come into contact with had heard lies, even a traffic cop who caught him speeding. Traci was told lies for years, as was Jess, who thought for months Twitchell was going to work when he had no job. And later, he had lied to her about attending Friday-night therapy appointments. Finally, he had lied to Jess about being at the gym when in fact he was standing in the garage with Johnny's blood soaking into his clothes, the man's lifeless body lying before him.

Inglis focused on this last point for several minutes as she summed up a half-hour of exposing Twitchell's constant and elaborate deceptions.

“Right after Mr. Altinger died you were still able to smooth that one over with some lying to your wife, right?”

But Twitchell had some fight in him. “You have to remember, again, how those events took place and what happened in that timeline,” he said with confidence. “Before I could even go anywhere near John's body, I had to emotionally separate myself from that situation in order to even handle it.”

“And you did it so successfully that you were able to carry on a perfectly normal conversation with your wife that required you to come up with a snap-decision lie.”

“Definitely not nearly as easy as you make it sound.”

“But you were able to do exactly what I just described.”

“Sounds like it.” He shrugged.

In the back row, all three detectives sat with arms crossed, shooting crooked glances at him. Twitchell saw their doubting faces as he stood in the witness box and it annoyed him. In the front row, Gary Altinger was getting angry. He couldn't stand the litany of pathetic lies and the hideous things Twitchell had admitted doing to his brother.

Inglis raised her voice. “Well, you wrote it
down
that you were able to do exactly what I described, and your wife, Jess,
told us
you did exactly what I described. So does it sound like it or is that actually
it?
“

“I guess I'm just trying to reconcile what other people are perceiving versus what was going on inside of me. So if I had to, if you're asking me based on what's in the document and what Jess heard, then yes.”

“That's true?”

“Right.”

Inglis circled back to her main point: “Moments. After. Mr. Altinger bled to death, in your garage, in front of your eyes, you had a perfectly normal conversation with her and were able to come up with a quick lie. That's correct, isn't it?”

“Yeah.” Twitchell sighed. He had admitted to a lot of damning evidence. He tried to compose himself, but it was clear he had already been made a fool. During the cross-examination, he started rocking on the balls of his feet. He furrowed his brow, started to blush, and at points he curled up his fists like an angry baby. He drained a cup of water in one big gulp.