Dateline Originals - The Man in the Black Mask - Ep. 2: The Twilight Zone

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

A horror film director and a seasoned homicide detective match wits in a high stakes game of cat and mouse. This episode originally published on October 15, 2024.

Is any place, anywhere, as stressful, as confining, as exhausting, as a police interview room at four o'clock in the morning? Filmmaker Mark Twitchell had been in that little room for five hours, patiently answering Detective Bill Clark's questions about this guy, Johnny Altinger, who'd been missing for more than a week. And now during a break, a decidedly drooping twitchill pulled out a cell phone and punched in his wife's phone number. My problem is that I'm so tired and it's so hard to remember things. Of course, he wasn't exactly alone. At that moment, he shared the space with a microphone and a camera

so that outside the room, Detective Bill Clark could watch and listen. But all Mark Twitchell did was complain to his wife. It's so hard to remember, like, these minute specific details about these days that I just didn't ever bother to think about or remember because who the hell does that, you know? Detective Clark was asking so many detailed questions because... I know I'm not getting the truth. I know he's lying to me. No doubt in my mind. I know he's involved up to his neck. I still don't know what he's done.

If anything, that is, because really all Clark had was just a feeling that Mark Twitchell had been handing him a whole load of nonsense, fully expecting Clark to believe it. He didn't, but he'd been letting things develop, organic-like, if you will, patiently, like he bought it all. I agreed with everything he said. Like I didn't, this wasn't the time of the interview to start pushing him on it. It wasn't the time to start confronting him. That would come later on.

So the 4 a.m. intermission in this cat and mouse play was a time for Clark to dream up an act too. Almost like he and Twitchell were going through some weird inverse improv routine. Each one in that little room, acting a role without a script, trying to outperform the other. Did you not think that kind of strange? I mean, I have to ask, is this you paying $40 for a car? How much did you think the car was worth? I thought it was worth somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000.

That's what you're paying $40 for? Yeah. $40 for a used car? That couldn't possibly be true. But why admit that you had the missing man's car and then lie about the price you paid for it? It made no sense. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is The Man in the Black Mask,

a podcast from Dateline. Episode 2, The Twilight Zone. This is The Man in the Black Mask, a podcast from Dateline. Episode two, The Twilight Zone. I mean, a lot of what I did in the first part, it's just, I was just acting. I'm doing, you know, playing the role. Let him believe I believe in every word he's saying. Well, you're reading him during that interview he had been reading you and

No doubt made some probably had made some judgments about your ability as an interviewer About I don't know your intellect. What did he think of you? Do you think during that? I don't think he I think he didn't think I was that smart. I think he thought he was smarter me I don't think he, I think he didn't think I was that smart. I think he thought he was smarter than me. But just as Detective Clark was getting set to rejoin Mark Twitchell for the start of in fact two of their little drama, a patrol officer reported in. The one who'd been set out to look for that missing red Mazda, the red Mazda that belonged to the also missing Johnny Altinger.

He had found it, and it was right where Mark Twitchell said it would be. The patrolman searched it, of course, but... Nothing untowards about the car. Johnny's not in the car. The guy who got the car has given a statement, and it's basically what Mark told me in the interview that... He bought it for 40 bucks. He bought it for 40 bucks, and that's what what Mark told me in the interview that... He bought it for 40 bucks. He bought it for 40 bucks and that's what he told his friend and he had his friend drive

it over to his house. So what, suddenly your big down arrow is starting to turn up again? Well, I mean, no, I wouldn't say it's turning up, but at least I know he hasn't lied about how the car got to his friend's house. So we discussed strategy at that point and then I know, I says, you've got nothing else, I says, I'm going to have to go in and confront him. And the whole idea of that confrontation is to see his reaction. And see what his answer is.

Because an innocent man, we expect you to say this, look, I didn't do it. You got the wrong guy. We've done the good cop routine. Now my forte, the bad cop's coming out. This is your forte. This is what you like. This is what I like. This is what I relish. Now I'm going to start with the hammering with what I know.

Problem is, I know very little. And I know I know very little. And he must know. By the way I talk, I don't know much. But Detective Clark acted like he knew everything. From the moment he opened the door and re-entered the room. It was a bluster, of course. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that you're involved in the disappearance of John Altinger. No doubt in my mind at all. Why? I have no idea what the hell is going on.

I have no idea what the hell is going on. And then his response is like it's, he goes, well, well, well, what do you mean? Or something like that. He goes, it's like, I can't believe this. Yeah, I'm going like, holy, this is our guy. Now we need to know what he did. I know then I got him. Like, I know he's done it. He's done something to him.

I don't know what I don't know how. Just based on his reaction to your accusation? Absolutely. I don't understand. But you do understand, because you know what I'm talking about. You're involved in this. I just don't understand. Now that it was clear to Mr. Twitchell that he was being questioned not as a witness, but as some sort of suspect.

He dropped the Chumayak like a bad script. You can see a whole change in demeanor. Sure. Certainly he shut down. He shut down. And, you know, I'm looking in his eyes, I'm watching him, he's leaning back at times, he's tightening up a little bit. All signs of, you know, he's uncomfortable.

I got him uncomfortable. But I don't have any evidence to confront him with, to really push him on the points and get him to make any confessions or any admissions about anything. Why can't you give me your version of events at me? So scared. Once, around the time dawn was contemplating a start

on the day, Mark Twitchell mumbled something about reality seeming more like some sort of fantasy. I just feel like I'm in the f***ing toilet zone right now. But in the face of Detective Clark's best portrayal of a bad cop, Mark Twitchell never wavered. The whole long prairie night, he was unfailingly polite, helpful, seemed to have no interest in calling a lawyer. So by the end of the night...

I got nothing. I got no evidence. My gut instinct at that time is this guy's involved. He's involved up to his neck in this. What exactly he's done to him, I don't know yet, but I'm going to find out. Or maybe Clark was just too suspicious and the guy was not up to his neck in anything. Anyway, about the time the sun was rising out there in the real world, Mark Twitchell let Clark know

he'd had enough. Am I being charged? Not yet. Am I free to go? Yep. Then I will. Yep. And Twitchell simply walked out of the interrogation room,

leaving Bill Clark standing alone on his empty stage. And none the wiser. Twilight Zone indeed. There's no knowing what Mark Twitchell said to his wife after his long, strange night in the bowels of the Edmonton Police Department. No telling if he knew that bullheaded detective was still somehow fixated on him. Oh, but he was. So now, Detective Clark and colleagues began poking about in the story of Mark Twitchell, as in, who is this guy, really?

And it didn't take long. Twitchell was a hard-working local boy. No criminal history, never been arrested. Good parents, nice young wife, sweet little daughter. And he was on his way to becoming an Edmonton celebrity. His movie production company, called Express Entertainment, detectives discovered, was not some sham front, but a perfectly legitimate, licensed business. More than that, actually. His was a promising effort to help Edmonton, often northern Alberta, get some national attention as a potential center of moviemaking, like what had happened in Toronto and Vancouver.

And Mark Twitchell was very good at drumming up attention and money from local investors like John Pinsent. He was a very sharp, bright, young, articulate entrepreneur, exactly the kind of individual that most of us are looking for. So he came to our group. He sold the group really, I think, on the enthusiasm. He was dropping Alec Baldwin, for example, as being someone who had a committee that he had a commitment from.

Basically, what he was looking for was 10 individuals to put forward $35,000. Detectives even got a look at the teaser film for Twitch's next project, the $3.5 million buddy comedy, Day Players, in which Mark played the role of director, even as he was the director. Sort of a Hall of Mirrors type story. A movie about a movie about making a movie or something? Amy is my girl! You broke up with her jackass! So? That doesn't give you the right take! Cut! Guys, can you keep it down back there? We're trying to keep the audio clean for the take. I don't want to have to do this 16 times. Sorry. Sorry.

Fantasy and reality all mixed up somehow. Just to cover the bases, the police interviewed Mark Twitchell's crew members. They vouched for him completely and revealed they all shared a passion for Star Wars. They loved the whole tale about the Force and the dark side. Loved it so much that their first project together was a Star Wars fan film called Secrets of the Rebellion. Mark was wildly successful that time at drumming up local media coverage, which is when he started becoming kind of a big deal in Edmonton.

He was even interviewed by the CBC. We keep pretty good pace with Lucasfilm, actually, when it comes to producing the films. His was, no bones about it, a low-budget production. But even so, Twitchell was able to land one of the original Star Wars actors, Jeremy Bullock, who played the bounty hunter Boba Fett. That was enticement enough to get Toronto-based actor Sean Storer to sign on for a part.

As soon as I found out that I would be playing alongside him, I was like, great, why not? It's a named actor. Sci-fi is not Storer's thing, though. And once he got to Edmonton, he found the atmosphere on Mark Twitchell's set a little too... playful, unserious? At least for him. One cringeworthy moment happened when Twitchell paraded around the set with a pillow stuffed under his shirt. And he said he looked like Alfred Hitchcock, and then he wore that for the rest of the day.

I thought that was ridiculous but everybody else thought it was great, laughed and they played it because this is him and if you don't laugh at his joke, you know what I mean? Where there's the alpha in the room and everybody flocks to them and wants to be there. He was the alpha in the room. But well, that's what everybody had him as which certainly fit Mark's reputation Which was that he was a prankster? No, maybe you have to be if you're trying to start a movie business Anyway, Mark Twitchell came off squeaky clean. His film company was respected as was he and Bill Clark and the Edmonton police

Back at square one by the look of things. What do we got? We got nothing. Edmonton homicide detective Bill Clark, along with other members of the Edmonton police service, felt a little like Alice in the rabbit hole. Their missing man, Johnny Altinger, had vanished without a trace.

The only person of any interest at all was a wholesome, aspiring movie producer who was once known to love pranks and publicity stunts, and who stood up to a Bill Clark grilling with his manners intact. At which point, they might have left the poor guy alone. But not quite. Richel had implicated himself in Altinger's disappearance by admitting he had the man's car. So police were able to get a warrant now to search Twitchell's garage slash soundstage and his car and his home. And knock on the door. His wife answers and I tell her who I am and she goes, yeah, she was not happy I was there.

And she tells me that, yeah, my husband called me. He's at his lawyer's office and he told me not to talk to you guys. So I'm trying to schmooze her because I want to talk to her a bit and find out anything I can and how much he's been around the house and that type of thing. What were your impressions of his wife? Besides the fact that she was agitated and upset?

Seemed like a nice person? Yeah, she seemed really nice. I mean, she's got a little baby. I think it was the child was six months old, little daughter, and I'm feeling bad for her now. How did she react to this? Uh, mad. Mad at me. Didn't like the police come. Of course, I expected it, right? And so police looked through Twitchell's home and found very little, at least on the face of it. They seized his computers, which is pretty standard. And when they searched those

computers they uncovered, well, it wasn't a fair. Twitchell had a girlfriend. So inevitably, then his wife found out and she kicked him out. And in a matter of days, Mark Twitchell went from happily married indie filmmaker to just another twenty-something guy living in his parents' basement. And so Detective Clark paid Twitchell's dad and mom a visit. That is, a little bit of dad, a lot of mom. She just struck me as a parent that her son does nothing wrong.

Whereas the father wanted to listen to me. He wanted to hear what I had to say and he listened, but he got overridden. They set up a surveillance team, 24-hour watch to keep an eye on the house, and Twitchell. But his behavior was anything but suspicious. He went on about his business, took meetings with investors about his day players movie project, even picked up a $35,000 check from financial biker John Vincent. The Mark Twitchell that I was dealing with was articulate, in control, running his project the way that you would expect any entrepreneur to be running their project.

And in Detective Clark's world of up arrows and down arrows, there was one other huge up arrow in Twitchell's favor. Motive, or that is to say the lack of one. Twitchell had nothing at all to gain by killing Altinger. There was no love triangle, there was no rivalry, no robbery. And to put it simply, Twitchell was not a criminal, didn't have a record, hadn't ever been arrested even. So why would a cop, bullheaded or not, remain so determined that this young married father had somehow made a perfect stranger vanish with the aid of a search warrant.

One of the items seized from movie maker Mark Twitchell, as mentioned earlier, was his office computer. And on the computer's hard drive, they found the actual raw footage of Twitchell's horror movie, filmed right in that dank little two-car garage searched earlier by the police, the movie Twitchell told the detective about the first time he was questioned. It's a suspense thriller. Actually, we do it. It's a short film. The total run time is only going to be about eight or nine minutes. House of Cards is what Trichell was calling it.

A promotional film. Get enough people talking about this and he might persuade some investor to ante up the money for a feature length movie. We're rolling. Action. In House of Cards, a male killer poses online as a flirtatious woman to entrap his victim, a philandering husband,

who tells his wife he's heading off to the gym. I'm off. Shouldn't be too long, it's a couple of hours. But once he arrives at the rendezvous site, the victim is dropped with a stun baton by an assailant wearing a hockey mask. Okay we're ready for the killer stuff. We are rolling.

Killers take a slight step to the right there. There you go. And action. Frame. Zap. Cut. Okay that was terrible. Action. Frame. Zap. Okay, that was terrible. The victim is then duct taped to a chair and stabbed with a samurai sword of all things.

Murdered. Cut up into little bits. Imagine a cross between Friday the 13th and that Showtime series Dexter, but on a much lower budget. We're rolling. In five, four, three, two, thrust! In one take of that scene, as the killer thrusts the sword into a dummy, a wad of white stuffing comes poking out the other end, in a snap a tense drama is transformed into a comedic farce and that delighted the crew. The victim in this teaser version was played by Edmonton comedian Chris Hayward.

You guys have been a great audience. Thank you very much for letting me come. So the police decided to have a little chat with Mr. Hayward. But Hayward, no slouch when it came to the entertainment business, thought the visit from the police must be a prank of some sort. I worked on reality television. That was one of the first things I got into television on. And yeah, they throw you curve balls and they have writers.

And I didn't know. I thought somebody's making this up. This can't be true. This is not a real story. Police also tracked down Toronto actor Robert Barnsley, who played the starring role in House of Cards. That is the deranged mask mask-wearing murderer. Actor, you ready?

Ready. When I saw it on there, I was thinking, great short film. I like the idea of this. It sounds interesting. And of course, I want to try to be the killer. I want to be the bad guy. And Mark Twitchell? Seemed like a very normal guy trying to do a film.

Nice guy. Yeah, very nice. Very pleasant. Playing as serial killer was almost too much fun, said Barnsley. It got kind of scary where I enjoyed it too much. Well, you got to be the sadist big time, huh? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It was very fun for me to play, actually. I really rather enjoyed doing it. I was thinking to myself, oh, God, did I just think that I could do this and make it believable? Which, said Robert Barnsley, was exactly what director Mark Twitchell seemed to want.

I mean, there was a point where I had to stab the dummy through the chest with the samurai sword. And he'd be sitting behind the chair, and he'd be leaning in and say, okay, listen, when you're turning the blade, grit your teeth and really show that you're enjoying it. Well, one set of detectives was questioning people who knew or worked with Mark Twitchell. Another group surfed around Twitchell's computers,

looking for anyone who may have had contact with him online. And that's when they discovered that right about the time Mark Twitchell was filming House of Cards, he had friended a 30-something animal trainer and aspiring filmmaker in rural Ohio. A woman named Renee Waring. So an Edmonton detective flew all the way to Cleveland just to question her, where she, quite upfront about it, told him and later us about clicking on an intriguing Facebook profile.

Dexter Morgan, the murderous main character in that Showtime series, Dexter. There was a picture of Michael C. Hall, and he is the actor that portrays Dexter Morgan on Showtime. What attracted you to Dexter? You know, what I love about the show and the books is how he was able to explore that dark side, rationalize that it's OK to kill somebody, because this person deserved it in a way.

Yeah. Dangerous territory. Yeah, but entertaining. That's not real. And particularly fascinating. Very fascinating, yeah. So when Waring saw that Michael C. Hall Facebook profile, well, she fired off her friend request. Did you think you were friending the actor himself? Sure you know. You thought it was the actual guy? Sure yeah but I also thought that you know an actor in Hollywood has more things and better things to do than to play around with people on Facebook you

know. Except she actually got a response. I asked him within the second or third email, I said, are you the Michael C. Hall? And he was honest and he said, no, he was not. Still the whole thing was kind of exciting to find a fellow Dexter devotee. So she continued to exchange messages with this imposter. He had expressed interest in you, this guy. Just in a friendly kind of way, yeah. You know, flirting.

Yeah. So was this flirtatious tone something that kept going back and forth? Yeah. Yeah, it did. I'm a flirt. I don't have a problem admitting that. But yeah, we did.

We flirted back and forth. And I kept asking him, you know, who are you? Who are you really? Tell me who you are, because I want to see the man behind the mask. Finally, Renee's Facebook friend relented. His name, he said, was Mark Twitchell. Once he told me who he was, I checked him out and found out that he was an independent filmmaker.

Now that is interesting. That's very interesting. It was almost like a dream come true. Because Renee Waring's lifelong dream was to be a movie maker herself. And now, out of the blue, here was this guy who had the skills and connections to make that happen. He expressed interest in me and my writing styles and said, I just think that we have chemistry together and how we'd be able to work very well together. We thought a lot alike. This had to be pretty exciting. Yeah. Yeah. I get to break out from being a dog trainer and go, you know, work on a

movie and finally have a movie made that people will see and enjoy. Sure. You offered some ideas. Yeah. What ideas did you have in mind? You know, I asked him what he was working on. And then he told me that he was working on and just finished his House of Cards, which was about a serial killer, but he wanted to pursue more of that and he wanted to really, you know, maybe do something. And I said, well, why not a female serial killer? Why has it got to be a guy? You know?

And are we a product of our environment or are we Born that way are we as you know a psychopath or a serial killer and What brings us to that point to do that and I said, you know, let's explore that In the story sure in a story and we had talked about our ideas our Hypotheticals of how would you kill somebody and get away with it? dark, oh, yes, but all in fun, of course, and entertaining. And so they pass story ideas back and forth almost every day. It was later when Edmonton detectives dug out the content on Mark Twitchell's computer and found that very kind of thing. Here's the opening paragraph, as read by a voice actor. This is a story of my progression into becoming a serial killer.

There was something about urgently exploring my dark side that greatly appealed to me. There's a magic in stories, the alchemy that brings imagination, fantasy to life. The cop's job was to figure out, was this fiction or was it real? We had huge discussions in the office about this. There were guys that were, after reading it, going, oh, I'm 50-50, you know? went on 50-50 you know. I don't know you know I don't get television that

sure I don't get there's another explanation here you know is it false is it true? Coming up next on the man in the black mask. As soon as all this happened I thought you know what this is a as all this happened, I thought, you know what? This is a publicity stunt gone bad. I thought he was just trying to hype this new movie that he's going to do, and at the end of the day, he has all this publicity around him, and what better way to start a movie off than to have your name on the tip of everybody's tongue? The Man in the Black Mask is a production of Dateline and NBC News.

Vince Sterla is the producer. Brian Drew, Deb Brown, and Marshall Hausfeld are audio editors. Justin Ratchford is fuel producer. Leslie Grossman is program coordinator. Adam Gorfain is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is executive producer. And Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Katie Lau.

Bryson Barnes is head of audio production.