The Devil's Cinema Read online

  “That will be fine.”

  Clark arranged for the filmmaker to meet an officer at a convenience store not far from where he was heading in northern Edmonton. He hung up the phone, picked it back up, and dialled the southwest station. This Twitchell guy sounded easy to talk to, and Clark figured he could just grab someone in the office to drive down and pick up a key. After all, what could possibly happen on such a straightforward mission?

  DETECTIVE BRIAN MURPHY KEPT the engine running in his unmarked police car as he waited in a 7-Eleven parking lot, scanning vehicles under the glow of streetlights. He spotted a man sitting in a maroon Pontiac Grand Am and figured it must be the guy he was supposed to meet: Mark Twitchell.

  Although drowsy from a fifteen-hour-long Sunday shift, he dialled Twitchell’s number and the man in the car answered. “I’m sitting right here,” Murphy said. “Look behind you.” He gave a little wave.

  The man crawled out of his car and jumped into Murphy’s. He shook the cop’s hand as he settled into the passenger seat. Murphy, who had a soft and polite voice he had trouble raising under his black moustache, found the man friendly, perhaps boisterous. The two of them talked for a few minutes.

  Twitchell’s face had relaxed. “Listen,” he said, looking at Murphy in the car. “I have some things that have been happening to me recently that I want to make you aware of.”

  “Okay.”

  He told Murphy that his car had been broken into about eleven days ago, back on October 8. Two rental receipts for the garage in Mill Woods, a cheque, sunglasses, and some change had all been taken. A few days later, on October 12, he discovered his front door was unlocked when he came home. And his wife, who was “like OCD, like Jack Nicholson,” would never have forgotten to lock it. It worried him, but there didn’t appear to be anything amiss.

  Murphy pulled out his notepad. He had spent most of the day phoning Johnny’s friends and really knew nothing about the file. “This is all new information so I should be writing it all down.”

  “Okay,” Twitchell continued. “On October 15, I went to Home Depot to pick up some cleaning supplies to take down to the garage.” He paused as if he was remembering details. “But as I was driving, I decided I wanted to pull into the side and get some gas. In the parking lot, a man came up to the passenger side of my car. He knocked on the window. I looked over.” Twitchell said the man was making circles in the air with his finger, telling him to roll down the window. “I rolled it down and the fellow leaned in.”

  Murphy was taking it all down.

  “He said he had just met this girl. She’s very wealthy and she’s going to take him away on a vacation for three months. She told him that he should get rid of his car because when they get back from vacation she was going to buy him a new car. So he asks me: ‘Do you wanna buy my car?’ “ Twitchell seemed to enjoy telling the story. “I told him, ‘I don’t have enough money to buy a car.’ The guy looks at me and points and says, ‘Well, how much money do you have in your wallet?’ So I pulled out my wallet and I say, ‘I’ve got forty dollars.’ “ Twitchell turned to Murphy and exclaimed, “The guy said, ‘Sold!’ “ It was a done deal.

  Twitchell said the man drove the car to his rented garage a couple of blocks away. They talked about the car, Twitchell expressed some concerns about the registration and insurance but coughed up the forty dollars and was handed the keys. By coincidence, the man told him his name was also Mark. He said he didn’t get a last name.

  Twitchell said he could tell the guy was agitated and apprehensive. “The last I saw of the guy, he was walking down the alley.”

  Murphy jumped in after a moment, his pen a few steps behind Twitchell’s telling of the story. “Well, can you give me a description of this fellow?”

  Twitchell offered a very detailed answer: male, Caucasian, six-foot-two, medium build, late twenties or early thirties, black hair, and he had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on the right side of his neck.

  “What’s a Celtic knot?”

  Twitchell tried to describe it. Murphy handed him his notepad and Twitchell scribbled down a drawing of the tattoo. “He had a green wind-breaker, jeans, black runners, and a white T-shirt.”

  The car was a 2005 red Mazda hatchback.

  “So I was walking around the vehicle,” Twitchell said. “And I noticed that it has a stick. And I can’t drive a stick.” But his friend Joss Hnatiuk could drive one, he explained. Joss came down and parked it at his parents’ house a few blocks away. Twitchell didn’t explain why he wanted the car moved.

  Murphy thought it bizarre. “Listen, the other investigators will have to know about this.”

  Twitchell nodded.

  “We’re probably going to want you to give a statement in relation to this new information and possibly do a photo lineup to try to identity this fellow. I’m going to phone the detectives, fill them in on the information, and see what they want to do.”

  Murphy checked the clock. It was 10:33 p.m.

  BILL CLARK WAS SITTING at his desk when the flow of information stalled. The forensics team had moved on from Johnny’s place, having found nothing, and were waiting at the garage for the key. Both of Twitchell’s film production assistants, Mike and Jay, had called Clark back and agreed to give a statement the next evening.

  As he sat there, hands clasped behind his head, Clark heard Mark Anstey raise his voice from his desk across the room. He looked over and saw Anstey was on the phone with a strange expression on his face. He put the phone to his chest and turned to Clark with disbelief in his voice. “Twitchell just told Murphy that he bought a red car off a guy on October 15 for forty dollars.”

  Clark stopped. “What?” His mouth hung open. This was no longer a standard missing persons case. He blurted out his thoughts in an unedited stream as they came to him. “Holy fuck! He killed the guy!” He spun around in his chair. “Okay, okay, maybe he didn’t kill him.” He shot a confused look at Anstey. “But who the fuck buys a car off a guy for forty dollars? … How much is this car worth?”

  “I dunno,” said Anstey. By one early estimate, it was probably worth at least $6,000, maybe $10,000, certainly not $40.

  “Oh man, this guy is involved.” Clark rubbed his head, his eyes wide in disbelief. “He’s involved in something.”

  The case had gone from first to top gear in an instant, but Anstey and Clark had only seconds to decide on their next move.

  Clark talked fast. “Mark, we gotta bring him in. We gotta.… But we’ve got nothing on him. So what do we do?”

  BRIAN MURPHY HELD HIS cell phone close to his ear as the detectives at the other end of the line tossed around ideas. Twitchell sat beside him, oblivious to the chaos his little story had created. The decision was made to send a patrol car to take Twitchell to headquarters voluntarily. “Okay,” Murphy said, turning to Twitchell to ask if he was willing to give a second statement, which he was. “Why don’t you lock your car?” Murphy pointed at the maroon Grand Am parked on the south side of the 7-Eleven. “If you’ve gotta go to headquarters, you better lock your car.”

  Twitchell jumped out, locked his car, and returned to wait with Murphy for the patrol car to show up. When it arrived, he climbed in the back.

  Murphy stayed on the phone in his car and heard a buzzing in his ear again. He rolled down his window and shouted out at the patrol car. “Mark, they’ve changed their minds. They’d like you to drive your own car down to headquarters.”

  Twitchell nodded from the backseat. “But I don’t know where headquarters is.”

  “Well, you can follow me,” Murphy offered in a chuckle.

  The two cars made their way downtown.

  Murphy knew Twitchell was key to the investigation, but it also meant his fifteen-hour shift was going to get a lot longer. And the police would also soon discover how incredibly fortunate they were to have Twitchell’s car parked at headquarters. It would change everything.

  IN THE SOUTHEASTERN SUBURBS, on a quaint corner lot surrounded by spruce
and cedar, stood a tall white house with emerald green trim. To anyone driving by it was just another suburban address, but for Joss Hnatiuk, it was home. At twenty-five, Joss, a big, tall man who sported a head full of short and curly brown hair, had a quiet disposition and still lived with his parents. He was trying to get a multimedia company off the ground as he installed security systems to pay the bills. Twitchell was helping him, and they envisioned a rich future together.

  But tonight, in the stillness of the late Sunday evening, an unexpected ring of the doorbell broke the silence as midnight neared. Joss had just returned from a premiere screening of a feature film in which a friend had been cast in a small role. He opened the door, and to his surprise, he found a gathering of police officers.

  Outside on the driveway, boxed in on two sides, was a red Mazda 3. The licence plate had been removed.

  Joss looked at the detective standing in front of him. Another officer was busy writing down the vehicle’s identification number. Joss reached his own conclusions. “I take it that the car is stolen?”

  FACING FACTS

  MARK TWITCHELL SAT IN police headquarters, his arm draped across the back of a little couch in a tiny room on the third floor. Late Sunday night was slowly turning over into Monday. A copy of the Bible lay on a coffee table nearby.

  Detectives Bill Clark and Brian Murphy were chatting in the monitor room three doors down. They could see Twitchell through a bank of televisions and cameras hooked up to each room. Clark had left Twitchell alone in one of the “soft” rooms, designed to make someone feel comfortable. The one where Twitchell was cooling his heels featured an oil painting of a barn in a snowstorm.

  Clark’s head was spinning. The last thing he wanted was the guy to call a lawyer. At the same time, Clark wanted to keep an open mind. Twitchell’s story was certainly bizarre, but it didn’t mean he was guilty of anything. Not yet. For all he knew this guy could turn out to be just a weird filmmaker who really did get lucky and buy a car for forty dollars.

  THE FORENSICS TEAM ARRIVED at Joss Hnatiuk’s house, having been pulled off the garage to focus on the recovered Mazda. Constable Gary Short grabbed his camera and started taking pictures just as Joss and a detective drove off to the southwest division station.

  The remaining constable ran the Mazda’s serial number, and sure enough, it was Johnny’s missing vehicle. A tow truck was called. The vehicle was headed for the police lot for a detailed examination.

  EYES DRY AND FEELING tired, Clark looked over Twitchell’s new statement, scanning the eight pages it had taken him more than two hours to write. Two o’clock in the morning approached. The statement included the October 15 car sale story and new information. There were more names listed for the crew behind Twitchell’s films – David Puff, Scott Cooke, actors Chris Heward and Robert Barnsley – and a revelation that he had sent an email a few hours ago to the southwest detective who had interviewed him the previous night, which would detail the car story too. Clark kept reading. Twitchell claimed he noticed the padlock on the back door to his garage had been changed when he met a constable there hours before his first police interview. Inside, Twitchell said his duct tape, garbage bags, and paper towels had been used while it looked like something had been burned in an oil drum. Twitchell’s statement continued:

  It seems that whoever broke into my car on the 8th used all of the information they stole to use my location and personal property for who knows what.… I am alarmed that unknown persons know where I live and may be entering premises I’m supposed to be in control of. I don’t know if the person who sold me the car is involved but looking back it certainly feels that way and I have to wonder if I’m being targeted or if it’s a nasty coincidence.

  Clark flipped through the pages a few more times. He yawned. The story sounded like bullshit. In policing circles, Twitchell was offering what’s known as an “alternative suspect” theory. Clearly the guy was worried they were on to him so he was already shifting the blame. In his statement, Twitchell had added a new detail: he now described a phone call as the motivation for pulling over, which led to the meeting with the mystery car seller. Perhaps he realized after telling the story to Murphy that there wasn’t actually a gas station in the area where he had claimed to meet the man.

  IN A POLICE INTERVIEW room on the other side of town, Joss was hesitant to open up about his dealings with Twitchell. Sitting beside a detective at southwest division, Joss slowly revealed that he had helped the filmmaker, a good friend, with a short film production in the garage at the end of September.

  Twitchell’s script had featured a serial killer who was targeting unfaithful husbands. These men were tortured and then stabbed. Joss remembered how the death scene used “lots of blood.” In the corner of the garage they also had an oil drum. While it wasn’t used during the film shoot, Joss understood it was a “burn barrel” that the killer would use to dispose of the remains of his victims.

  CLARK KNEW THE GAME was about to begin, but the problem was he had very little evidence. If the case was going to move ahead tonight he would likely need Twitchell to confess – but to what? Clark talked it over with Anstey, and they figured he needed to start positive. If Twitchell began saying anything that implicated him further, Clark would have to stop the interview and read him his rights. Until then, he’d play the role of bumbling idiot cop. Big smiles, lots of nodding.

  Clark strolled into the interview room and Twitchell stirred awake. “Hey, Mark, thanks for waiting.” Clark took a seat in a chair across from him.

  The two of them talked for an hour and a half.

  Twitchell needed little prodding. He was soon telling Clark all about his life and the strange things that had transpired in the past few weeks: Twitchell was a married man and a young father. His wife, Jess, was on maternity leave from the Workers’ Compensation Board. Their baby, Chloe, was now eight months old, and she had been sleeping through the night after the first few weeks.

  Twitchell loved Star Wars and had directed a fan film based on the sci-fi series. That’s where he had met Joss and became friends with Mike and Jay, his current production assistants. He said one of his email addresses had the name “Kit Fisto” within it, a reference to a Jedi knight in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Clark shrugged it off, having no idea what Twitchell was talking about when he described the “green dude who smiles a lot” with a lightsaber.

  Twitchell said his film career had been developed with a laptop while sitting in coffee shops. His income came from a combination of money raised from film investors and revenue from selling handmade Star Wars props on eBay. He had just shipped a codpiece, which covers the crotch, for a Darth Vader costume, the day he dropped off the cleaning supplies at his garage.

  He had two cell phones. The call he had taken before buying the forty-dollar car was from a Los Angeles producer who was helping Twitchell find investors for a planned comedy feature called Day Players. Twitchell could go on for hours, even though it was the middle of the night.

  Clark made notes, slowly directing Twitchell to topics relevant to the investigation. Murphy listened in the monitor room, taking his own.

  The oil drum in the garage had been purchased online, like most of Twitchell’s possessions. He had filmed his horror movie at the end of September and then gone back to the garage in the late afternoon of October 10, the day of Johnny’s disappearance. He was cleaning up the film set between 3:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Twitchell said he was concerned about the fake blood mix they had used – a mixture of corn syrup and red food colouring – because it could start “attracting bugs.”

  Clark had Twitchell tell the car story twice, then he had him tell it backwards. The same odd details emerged: a mystery man with a Celtic knot tattoo and a sugar momma who was taking him on a vacation. His willingness to unload the car for forty dollars, no bill of sale. Twitchell taking the licence plate, keys, and leaving them in his own car. The basic story, however, had changed multiple times, sometimes with added detail, other ti
mes with the order of events changed around. In the version told to Clark, Twitchell had gone to the gas station to fill up a jerry can in his trunk – good for emergencies, he said, and for a lawn mower he was going to buy some day. “I think I might’ve forgotten to put that in the eight-page version of the statement,” said Twitchell. “But anyway …”

  By the time Clark left the room, it was nearly 4:00 a.m.

  IN THE DARKNESS, NEIGHBOURS living near the garage had been awakened by police knocking on their front doors. Officers were asking questions. Next door to the garage, and nearing retirement age, Mike and Lynda Warren clearly remembered seeing a group of young men making a movie. They had placed black plastic over all the windows. One man they saw often. He drove a Pontiac Grand Am and had short black hair. The last time they saw him was on the weekend. Peering through their fence, as neighbours sometimes do, they spotted him changing the padlock on the garage door.

  Farther down the road, another couple was startled awake by police officers. They remembered seeing a red car, definitely something sporty like a Mazda, parked outside that same garage on October 14. It was the day of the federal election and they had walked right past it on their way to the polls.

  “BOY, IS THAT GUY lying!” Clark exhaled a long sigh as he staggered into the monitor room, rubbing his bald head and giving Murphy a look through his fatigue.

  “Oh, yeah!” Murphy nodded.

  “Is there anything more, anything I can go over with this guy?” Anstey walked in and the three of them talked, realizing there was nothing else.

  Clark had heard enough. He was exhausted. He had been up for twenty hours. It was time to press the issue. “I’m going to confront him. If we don’t get a confession he’s walking out of here anyway, so let’s see what he says.”

  Anstey and Murphy agreed.

  Clark tried to find the energy. He didn’t drink coffee so it was proving difficult to stay sharp. At least he knew Twitchell’s reaction would tell him everything. When confronted, an innocent man always loses his composure and denies everything. Clark would know something terrible had happened to Johnny if Twitchell’s reaction was anything different.