Dateline Originals - The Man in the Black Mask - Ep. 3: Catfishing

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Police recover a deleted document from Mark Twitchell’s computer that reads like a script for a horror film. But was it more than just fiction? This episode originally published on October 22, 2024.

What a curious species we have become. Willing, no no eager, partners of devices that somehow control us as we scroll. Devices that spit out bits and bites of the world. Cute puppies, intimations of Armageddon, swirling conspiracies. Some bits true, some not, some fact, some fantasy. And the bright, easy separating line of truth once merely blurred slips away. Mark Twitchell made his living in that fuzzy space

where fantasy seems very real and reality? Well, who knows? But of course he did. He was a movie-maker, the storyteller, someone who imagined he could turn his make-believe into film and do it for a living. Well, at least he hoped to make a living at it. As he rather excitedly told Detective Mike Tabler that first time the police came to call when they asked if he knew anything at all that might help them find the vanished Johnny Altinger. Not a thing said Mark Twitchell but if the detective wanted to talk movies well Mark was all in. I love what I do from the first day that I stepped on a set that was what I knew. And that I just like, kind of like there's no going back.

Anything else is crap. Nothing else would make me feel fulfilled in what I was doing and really love what I do. So I just chased it with everything I had. A true definition of passion. And it was a passion he happily shared in online chats with Renee Waring, that would- be filmmaker way off in Ohio. It was, wow, I could be a real writer this time, you know. I could really help somebody develop a character and stories and entertainment.

And by this time you were embracing, entertaining the idea that you might actually be able to work with this director. Yeah. He said something about setting up a dedicated server. I wouldn't have to go to Canada. We'd be able to pass ideas and script ideas back and forth like that. Never have to meet each other, you know? But it could be a paid job. Yeah. That had to be pretty darned exciting.

You got it. Yeah. Mark and Renee spent hours and hours together online, dreaming up some crazy dark stuff. It was a bit like a fan fiction writer's room in a way. Both loved the TV show Dexter. Both were fascinated by serial killers, everything about them. Renee never did write any of it down. She just reveled in the online creativity in the company of a like-minded soul. It was Mark who went about trying to turn it into something, writing furiously, tap, tap, tapping on his computer.

Then he turned out a collection of, well, what were they? Episodes? Plot points for a horror movie? But nothing worth hanging on to, apparently, because at some point Mark simply killed it all, consigned it to the discard file. But as we know, nothing on a computer has ever really gone forever. Fiction, fact, even those cute little puppy dogs live on as so many fragmented little ones and zeros, possibly to be found and reassembled someday by

someone, whether you want them to or not. I'm Keith Morrison and this is the Man in the Black Mask, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 3 – Catfishing What a disruption it was. What a surprise. It was as if a giant vacuum cleaner suddenly and without any warning started sucking up Mark Twitchell's treasured stuff. Edmonton police, convinced Mark knew more than he was saying about the disappearance of one Johnny Altinger, burst through the front door and went rummaging around in Mark's house and his car, garage.

They took clothing, costumes, computers, and they sent a whole lot of it off to the lab, where who knew what might appear? DNA? Suspicious fingerprints? But no, there was nothing like that to tie Mark Twitchell to Johnny Altinger. Instead, hidden among discarded bits of stuff on Mark's laptop, a diligent computer tech spotted and managed to resurrect that deleted document. The one with all those horror movie ideas.

The whole thing was quite a surprise to Detective Bill Clark. I mean, the big thing came, I don't even remember the day, but our computer guy called up late in the afternoon and two of the detectives went upstairs and they come out, I believe it was at that time, with a 32 page diary called the SK Confessions. A big thing? Well, it certainly seemed like it once Clark had a chance to dive in. I remember reading this the first day when they brought it down. Once Clark had a chance to dive in, Clark called it a diary because SKA Confessions seemed to lurch along from one scene to another without any particular structure or story

arc or conclusion. In fact, it couldn't really be called a story at all. There was no beginning, no middle, no end. Some of the vignettes were extremely creepy, and some less so, but all with a dark, gothic take on the question of nature versus nurture. Here's that voice actor again,

reading from SK Confessions. I feel no such emotions as empathy or sympathy towards others. I watched an episode of Dexter where the flashback showed his father showing Dexter cat scans of a human brain. He identified the difference between a serial killer's brain and a normal person's brain. Up until I saw that, I was convinced that what I was was my own decision, my own path, but now I truly wonder if I had little choice at all

and if genetics play a bigger role than I thought. This SK character dips into all the usual tropes of horror fiction. There's nothing really new in it. But two scenes left right out at Detective Bill Clark. The scenes portrayed an online dating service used to catfish victims who were met not by the woman they expected to see but by the killer. Which was intriguing given Johnny Altinger was last heard from as he was heading off to see a woman he had met on a dating website.

Here's that catfishing excerpt from SK Confessions. As soon as the profiles go up within 24 hours the responses come in like a flood. I review the messages sent and choose my victims based on age, body type, profession, status, and living situation. Obviously, I'm not going to pursue a 6'4 athletic martial art instructor who's married with four kids. That's just got trouble written all over it. I mean, I'm ruthless, but I'm not an idiot. I have my own fight training background, but I don't have delusions of grandeur.

When I come across a single man in his late 30s, two early 40s who is self-employed, lives alone, and stands between 5'7 and 5'11 with an average body type, weighing in between 150, 180 pounds, I know I've found my ideal target. Well, that, thought Bill Clark, that target just had to be the real-life Johnny Altinger. Obviously, the physical description was all over the place, but wasn't it possible Altinger was catfish too?

Just like the guys in SK Confessions? I go, holy mackerel, this tells us everything. Except the guy is a professional storyteller who tells, you know, movies. They're not real. Weren't you a little bit afraid that you might be about to be drawn into a kind of a rabbit hole here that you're dealing with something that might be true or might not be true, it might be a fantasy? The little bit I knew at that time, I thought it was true. Except Mark Twitchell wrote and filmed a movie script, remember, called House of Cards.

And in that movie, a work of pure fiction, one scene after another, read just like it came straight out of SK Confessions. Well, I'm off. Shouldn't be too long, just a couple of hours. That's the actor who's being catfished in a scene from House of Cards. So maybe SK Confessions wasn't a diary at all, and wasn't abandoned either, but was cannibalized for story points in that scary movie. In House of Cards, the killer uses a stun gun. Okay, we're ready for the killer stuff.

Okay, we are rolling. Killers, take a slight step to the right there. There you go. And... Action. Frame. Zap. Ah! Ah!

Cut. So did Twitchell lift that directly from this in SK Confessions? I prepared to strike with my stun baton fully extended in the safety off. In House of Cards, the killer uses a sword. Are you rolling? We're rolling. In five, four, he uses a knife.. So what was true? What was fake?

Detectives went round and round on that. Some convinced Twitchell was a very bad guy. Others that he was playing some sort of prankish game. So now Bill Clark and the other detectives dug deeper into that netherworld where fact and fiction and truth and fantasy are all mixed up together. Did the incidents and SK confessions actually happen or were they just scenes from a movie? And as we started to tear apart and every day and we're working long hours we're

working 12 to 16 hours a day going home for six eight hours sleep and we're back at work. I think our total investigation we had 112 officers involved in this thing at one time. The group looking at SK Confessions went at it like a clutch of textual scholars, word by word, line by line, and it seemed like they were actually getting somewhere. And guys were coming in going, well, we proved this part of the diary is true. Give me an example of proving something in the diary was true. One of the big things that came out was he had mentioned in his diary about getting a speeding ticket.

The fictional serial killer, that is. But then so did Mark Twitchell, just about the time Johnny Altinger disappeared. So we tracked that cop down and that cop remembered it. And it came right back to me, he knew the conversation he had with him. And it was basically word for word what that diary told us was exactly what the sheriff told us. Also, the killer in SK Confessions complains that after a murder he was unable to drive

the victim's car because it had a stick shift. I took the keys and got in. A f***ing manual transmission. I never learned how to drive them. I probably stalled the damn thing a good 10 times. It's like he doesn't know what to do. And he struggles driving the stick shift of this car to try park it in the garage.

And realize after 10 tries, he's just no good at it. And if you recall, Mark Twitchell told Detective Clark he was unable to drive the car he got from Johnny Altinger because it had a stick shift. Except that car was apparently a roadside purchase, no murder involved. But detectives picked out bits of SK confessions and saw them as proof. So far, every day, I say we're proving different things are true, you know? We're going on and on, everything's turning out to be true.

So we've got no reason to disbelieve this. Did you feel sometimes like you were in the middle of, you know, Alice in Wonderland or The Matrix or something? My feeling was like, I can't believe the evidence we're getting. I always believed that story to be true right from the start. I was thinking he had filmed whatever he had done to Johnny. Mark Twichell was enough of a somebody around Edmonton that when word got out that the cops had searched his home and makeshift studio in connection to this missing alter-your-guy, it became a thing and just about every one of those creative types who'd worked with Mark on his

movies had an idea as to where this story was going it was a MacGuffin do something crazy like get yourself arrested and And what happens? You get buzz. People talk about you. Any publicity is good publicity, right? And pretty soon the funding will follow. The crazy's not yes and irresponsible and without a doubt decidedly risky, but it might work. Mark Twitchell might actually fool everybody, including those clever cops.

Get them all thinking he, Twitchell might actually fool everybody, including those clever cops. Get them all thinking he, Twitchell, was an actual serial killer. After which, in some big reveal of his own invention, he would in effect yell, Surprise! That's what the actor thought. Actor Sean Storer, that is. As soon as all this happened, I thought, you know what? This is a publicity stunt gone bad. Sean Storer, you'll recall, got to know Mark Twitchell when he took a role in Twitchell's Star Wars knockoff. And when he heard Twitchell was suspected of doing something terrible to a total stranger, and that total stranger was missing?

Well, he just knew, did Sean. Twitchell wanted to get arrested and why would he want a thing like that? Well, that was simple. To get his name in the papers and his face on TV to have everyone in Edmonton talking about his new film project, House of Cards. I thought he was just trying to hype this new movie that he's going to do, and he'll be found not guilty, and at the end of the day he walks away, not guilty, but 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. John Pinsett, the businessman who put money into Mark Twitchell's comedy, Day Players, said a publicity stunt was the only explanation that made any sense to him. That was a sentiment that was tossed around a lot here in this community, is that, you know, is this guy so bright that he's going to have himself arrested and do all of this. That it had to be a master plan from a very bright guy to create this great amount of hype for his movie project. Johnny Altinger's friend Deborah Teichra was hearing the same stories.

That it was just a big conspiracy that Mark had paid John to go hide and come out. Just part of this loopy nutty plan to make a splash that Edmonton would not forget. The other idea, Detective Bill Clark's suspicion, that Mark Twitchell, mild-mannered prankster, was secretly a killer. Well maybe that was a stretch. Still, Clark seemed to have made up his mind. I'm thinking this guy's involved in this guy's disappearance, wherever he may be, somehow. I know that. But there was no love triangle,

no financial gain to be had from killing Johnny Altinger. Twitchell didn't even know the guy. When cyber detectives searched Twitchell's computers and phone, they found no mention of anybody named Johnny Altinger anywhere. No emails, no texts, no phone calls. Nada. There was nothing whatever connecting Mark Twitchell to Johnny Altinger. So why in the world would Mark Twitchell kill...

well, anybody, really, but... why a total stranger? The film was released in film. Detective Bill Clark also thought Johnny Altier's disappearance was connected to Twitchell's movie making business, but certainly not as a promotion. I'm thinking he killed him and he had filmed the murder. But if he did film the murder, where was the video? And if Twitchell did murder Johnny Altier on camera, to what end? He could never insert an actual murder into a feature film without incriminating himself and everybody else involved, crew and actors, and people who would doubtless talk. And as for SK Confessions, they couldn't even be sure who wrote all that.

But it could have been Mark Twitchell. Probably was. But just as easily it could have been some random dark soul on the internet. But it did seem to be a match for the facts of the real life Johnny Altinger case, and that is what certainly got the detective's attention. But then they encountered stories that did not match any reality, like the one about the intended victim who got away. A tale full of wild details the police would surely have heard about, if it had happened at all.

And, you know, that's a big part to prove is this true or not. It was a huge part of it. And surely if somebody had been attacked that way, you would have heard about it. Well, exactly. I mean, we would have expected someone to come forward, but we got nothing. Yeah. No call, no nothing that even matches similarity. So this seemed to be one part of that story that just didn't... Didn't make sense.

Well, one team of detectives poured over every line of SK confessions. Another walked the sidewalks and bounded on the doors in that quiet suburban neighborhood where House of Garage was filmed. The same neighborhood where Johnny Altinger may have gone to see a woman he'd met online. Everybody who answered the door was shown a picture. Had anyone seen Johnny Altinger or his red Mazda or anything suspicious.

And at one house, the answer to that last question was yes. The police had stumbled on Marissa and Trevor, the couple who went out for a stroll and encountered that man who collapsed right in front of them. A man either terribly frightened or just acting. Anyway, the couple repeated the weird story to these investigators. He was on the ground and it was just an instant bad feeling. He looked at me and said, I'm being robbed, can you help me?

And then as I looked up, the attacker almost actually ran into me. And that certainly rang a bell. The investigators found the passage in SK Confessions. actually ran into me. And that certainly rang a bell. The investigators found the passage in SK Confessions. Marissa and Trevor's story fit exactly. A couple on an evening stroll saw me coming after him, sporting a deer in the headlight look that can only be described as a total lack of comprehension. I stared back at them through my mask for half

a moment and then headed back for the cover of my lair. Marissa and Trevor told the investigators now at their door that this was the second time they had talked to police about this incident, the first time being when it originally happened. Was it possible, The cops wondered if the man who was being chased was, in fact, Johnny Altinger. A detective pulled up their report to police. And, well, it turned out their incident or whatever it was, it happened exactly one week before Johnny Altinger disappeared. Then, Marissa and Trevor told the police about the mask the alleged assailant was wearing. I still have nightmares about that mask. A hockey mask, black with gold claw-like slashes across the right side, which is exactly how

it was described in SK Confessions. A hockey mask that I would cut the mouth out of and paint gold streaks into for dramatic effects. But who was that man? That is, the apparent victim of the man in the hockey goalie mask. Was it an actor? A real person? Eh, no idea. And no way to find out, really. Except by going public. And the very next morning, the police arrived at the scene. They had a very, very long shot. They had a very long shot. And they put it out there and waited. And the very next morning... In comes a guy, off the streets.

He says, I think it's one of my employees. The guy said his employee showed up for work with a bruised and battered face one Monday morning and told him a truly crazy story about being assaulted by a man in a goalie mask. I called really and I'm going like, I got to speak to this guy. Got to find this guy. Got to find this young fella.

So he gives me his name and all that. I said, I'll tell you what, you're going back to work, ask him to call me. Let's keep it low key. I won't approach him. I'll give you time to talk to him first while it worked." By that afternoon, Clark got a call from a man who said he was the one Trevor and Marisa saw that evening. He said his name was Gilles Tetro. And yes, he was a little nervous, but he'd tell a story.

And so he went down to the station and settled himself into one of those cramped interview rooms. And with Detective Clark hanging on every word, he began. Okay, beginning, I'm on the Plenty of Fish website, Plentyoffish.com. In my career, it was probably the most spellbinding interview I've ever had with a witness. I was sitting there listening to Gilles Tetreault telling me his story, and I had chills going up my spine as he's telling it to me. In the next episode of The Man in the Black Mask, you will hear the story first hand, straight from the victim himself. And so I tried to make a run for it.

And that's when he actually pulled out a gun. The Man in the Black Mask is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Vince Sterle is the producer. Brian Drew, Deb Brown, and Marshall Hausfeld are audio editors. Justin Ratchford is field 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.