The Man in the Black Mask - Where’s Johnny?

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

In a quiet neighborhood, a frightening figure in a hockey mask appears. Then another man disappears.

It was a happy habit, the evening walk. A summer habit, of course. Too soon now that crisp bite in the air would turn bitter cold. But not yet. That day, Friday, October 3rd, had been uncommonly warm for Edmonton, and twilight seemed to linger as they ambled along the path that wound its way through their neighborhood. It was a good neighborhood. Safe, established, not quite grand, but not modest either.

So they wandered, the two of them, and listened to parents calling in kids from the park. Almost dark now. There. Out of nowhere, there it was. Sudden. Shocking. Terrifying. I have never in my life felt fear like that. That is Marissa Grahine, remembering the young man who stumbled out of an alley and collapsed at their feet. Came right across our path, just kind of fell in front of us.

So stumbling along. Yes. Marissa's partner, Trevor Hossinger, was alarmed too, but something about it seemed off somehow. And to me, that didn't look real. It looked like it was staged. And what was he doing or saying, or how was he behaving? He looked at me and said,

I'm being robbed, can you help me? And it was just an instant bad feeling. It was like everything in my body just tensed up. I felt bad. This is a bad situation. I knew right away something was wrong. And then, as if on cue, another man appeared, seemingly in pursuit.

And then as I looked up, the attacker almost actually ran into me. Attacker? Looked that way, at least. Whoever it was was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and a hockey mask. Just like the serial killer Jason in all those Friday the 13th movies. It's like every nightmare you had as a child after watching a scary movie, every nightmare you've ever had, all of a sudden it's right here, like this masked guy is standing there. And then, said Marissa, the masked man did something quite unexpected. Well, he, the guy in the mask, was pretending that they were friends.

That those two were friends. Pretending? Maybe they really were friends. Because the way that he fell, to me, looked staged. To get us to stop so that they could rob us. Yeah, we thought it was a setup for us. Now convinced this was some sort of choreographed mugging, Marissa took off running.

I was like, I'm getting out of here right now. I was so scared. I was so scared, and I just, I needed to get out of here. But not Trevor. He stayed behind, still not quite sure if the man lying at his feet begging for help was in need of saving or out to do him harm. So you didn't know whether he was going to assault you.

Exactly. Or whether he was running from that guy for real. Exactly. My response was to run and get the hell out of here. His response was, what's going on here? I need to figure out what's going on. She was down the block. I was freaking out of here. His response was, what's going on here? I need to figure out what's going on. She was down the block. I was freaking out on him.

I was yelling at him. I was screaming at him. And I was so mad at him. And I was screaming like high pitched, Trevor, Trevor. Like, cause he kept trying to figure out what was going on. She was Trevor. What were you trying to do? Why are you trying to be a hero?

You're trying to be a hero. And I was like, I just wanted to go. Trevor said the man in the hockey mask then calmly walked away and disappeared back into the alley from which he came. But not the man lying on the path. He stayed right where he was. What in the world was going on? Trevor was done trying to solve this mystery

and ran after Marissa, leaving the man on the path behind, still pleading for help. Rather like a seasoned method actor, like it was an episode of the Twilight Zone. Trevor and Marissa got home quick as they could and called the police, telling them about the man in the mask and the guy begging for help. We said, well, we think we're getting robbed. Like, that's how we had described it, was we thought we were going to be robbed. So where could they go from that? It was a weird situation. A report was taken. Squad cars prowled the streets and alleys nearby.

Though by then it was too dark to see much of anything. And then they sniffed around and that was that. Didn't find anything? Didn't find anything. And no victim ever came forward. No one ever reported to police that they had been assaulted in a quiet neighborhood by a man in a hockey mask. I still have nightmares about that mask.

So was this some sort of staged robbery attempt? Or someone's idea of a sick prank? I really thought that at the end of this thing, he just laughs his way all the way to the bank on it. At the end of the day, it's a big publicity thing for him. Or was it something else altogether? Did you feel sometimes like you were in the middle of, you know, Alice in Wonderland or The Matrix or something? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Dateline's newest podcast, The Man in the Black Mask. Episode 1, Where's Johnny? Where's Johnny? Edmonton, Alberta doesn't always get quite the attention it probably deserves. That generally goes to its flashier sibling, Calgary, a three-hour drive south. Edmonton, on the other hand, is the provincial capital, home to a million people, birthplace of all kinds of famous types like Michael J. Fox, K.D. Lange, Tommy Chong, and booming on and off, courtesy of the massive oil sands a hundred or so miles to the north.

Edmontonians are used to the roughnecks and roustabouts who blow through town on their way to and from the oil patch. Which is perhaps why a particular sort of case often sucks up the time of the Edmonton Police Service. Missing persons. Though typically such cases tend to solve themselves once the victim sobers up. So when veteran homicide detective Bill Clark got a missing person case dumped on his desk...

I'm not thinking much is going to come of this. Yeah, that is Bill Clark. Shaved head, thick mustache, built like a cannonball. And in that moment, Bill Clark was not happy. To call out a veteran homicide cop like him on a missing person case? Well, that just wasn't done. We don't usually go to missing persons. We're very picky on what we go to.

Like, basically, unfortunately, for us to come out, you've got to be dead, and it better be criminal. Like, we don't even want to come out if you're just dead. We've got enough to work on. If the patrolman doesn't know it's criminal, don't bother calling us. Do we have a murder? Because if we don't, this isn't our file.

I mean, we have no indication of file play, nothing, right? The missing person in this case was a guy who, no surprise, worked in the oil fields. Johnny Altinger was his name. The friends who called it in said he was 39 years old, tall, lanky with short brown hair, a friendly open face, and a lopsided grin. They said they hadn't seen him in a couple of weeks. Wasn't like him, they said. So, with a grumble from Clark, they opened a file on Johnny Altinger. No idea, back at the beginning, how important that name was going to be. Anyway, Clark and the other investigators

put together a list of Altinger's known friends and family members and started making calls to see if the guy really was missing or just out on a bender. One of those friends was a woman named Deborah Tykrobe. John was a very good friend. He was very warm and loving and kind.

We talked to Deborah, too, and she told us she met Johnny Altinger on a dating website. On plentyoffish.com. Plentyoffish.com. Yes. Deborah looked to be in her early 30s, petite with bobbed brown hair. She said nurses training had kept her far too busy to even think about dating. But now she was done and maybe ready for a man in her life. And I thought, okay, I'm going to get out there.

Because they certainly were not falling through my roof. So I thought I better get out there. And I also was like oh you know you have to be careful I think when you put yourself out there you have to have some sort of air of caution about yourself. Deborah has well will it be fair to call it a nurse's personality smart hard-working and quite obviously compassionate and she was looking for those same characteristics maybe unrealistically in a guy but the ones she was meeting just weren't cutting it and then she saw johnny altinger's upbeat dating profile and agreed to meet him for coffee i was there early and then john came in after and John's quite tall and so he came in and he was his bubbly self. He was just like. Did he look like what you expected he'd

look like? Yeah he did yeah because I'd seen pictures too of him and we chatted about the same stuff we talked about on the phone. Of course we were both nervous and so it was a really nice visit. There was a but however. While Johnny certainly saw sparks. Deborah said she did not. I didn't feel that romantic chemistry with John. But you liked him. Yeah, but he was... You liked him more like you like a brother. Like a buddy. Yeah, like a friend. And as friends do, they began to pal around together. I would say we spoke almost daily, go for coffee or lunch. I enjoyed spending time with him. And so their friendship grew.

In his emails, he never just emailed me, Hi, Deborah. It was always, Hi, sunshine girl. Everything had a... Hi, sunshine girl? Yeah, hi, sunshine. And I used to think, oh my gosh. But it's not so bad.

But it made me feel special. So I was like, oh, that's really sweet. And I think that's part oh my gosh, but it made me feel special. So I was like, oh, that's really sweet. And I think, you know, that's part of what built our friendship. You know, we lifted each other up as friends. And he was perfectly happy to keep it going as a friendship. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. A friendship so close that the two were comfortable talking about all the different women Johnny was meeting up with on that Plenty of Fish website. When he dated for about a month and then it didn't work out and then there was one other

girl he was somewhat interested in. And I thought, okay, then that's great. And when he told you about these women, he told you about them? Yeah, he did. Then around the middle of October, Deborah got an email from Johnny saying, Hi there. I've met a wonderful girl named Jen. I'm going to Costa Rica and I will keep in touch and call you when I get back after the holidays. Johnny. What did you think about that? My first thought was like, oh, he's really trying to get me to see he's moved on. But I was concerned for him and I felt like, be careful. You know,

you don't just get on a plane and go meet a girl in Costa Rica. You have to be careful. And then I think it was the following day, I was on MSN Messenger, and Johnny popped on line, and in quotations beside his name, it said, I've got a one-way ticket to heaven, and I'm never coming back. Mind you, Johnny sent a message to a male friend or two as well. Detective Clark got hold of that one. It didn't mention heaven.

He says, if anything happens to me, you know where I'm at. And, you know, laugh out loud. To be continued... hadn't seen him around since early October, and yet those same friends were getting email messages from him saying he was on vacation in Costa Rica with a new love in his life. One email seemed to explain everything. It said, I've met an extraordinary woman named Jen who was offered to take me

on a nice long tropical vacation. We'll be staying in her winter home in Costa Rica. A phone number to follow soon. I won't be back in town until December 10th, but I'll be checking my email periodically. See you around the holidays. Johnny. Which, to homicide detective Bill Clark, seemed perfectly reasonable. Not hard to imagine that a love-struck man might want to leave the snow and ice of Edmonton behind and skip off to the tropics. Who knows, maybe he did go to Costa Rica.

I mean, stranger things have happened, right? You don't know. Still, just to be thorough, investigators did a little tour of Altinger's condominium, and it was messy for sure. Dishes in the sink, clothes strewn about. But it certainly did not look like a crime scene. Our crime scenes guys, they've reported back from Johnny's house that there's nothing here. There's no blood, no signs of a struggle. Yeah, the place is a little bit dirty. It's a bachelor pad. You know, he didn't clean his dishes. So that's where we're at.

Oh, and his car was gone. His red Mazda coupe. So let's find the car. Find the car. Hopefully we find him or have an idea where he is. Since Johnny Altinger's email said he'd taken off for Costa Rica, officers went to the airport, of course, and looked for that red Mazda of his. They searched in every parking lot. But it wasn't there. They combed through airline passenger lists. He wasn't on any of them. And just as the police were contemplating that puzzle,

one of Altinger's friends surfaced with yet another intriguing email. This email was sent to Johnny while he was still in Edmonton, and it was from Jen, that woman he'd apparently accompanied to Costa Rica. It was sent to him the evening of their first date, October 10th. It was driving directions to her home, and Johnny hadn't met her yet after all, so he forwarded the email to a friend just in case. I can't remember the last word of the email, but he says if anything happens to me, you know where I'm at. There wasn't a phone number, not even an address, but there were detailed directions to her place. So two patrol officers drove the very route. And the directions led them to a quiet residential neighborhood

and along a back alley to a detached two-car garage. What an odd place to meet. The officers did some checking and found out the garage had been rented to a local celebrity of sorts, a guy named Mark Twitchell, who was making a name for himself as a scrappy young independent filmmaker. So they called him, and this Twitchell character readily agreed to leave his wife and daughter at bedtime and drive all the way across town and open up the garage. But when he got there, he took one look at the padlock on the door

and realized somebody had changed it. He couldn't get in. So, with Twitchell's permission, the cops broke in, had a quick look around and found nothing. Except for an empty work table, few tools, and a trash drum. The place was empty. Just the same, why would someone change the lock?

And why did that woman, Jen, direct Johnny Altinger to that backyard garage the very day he disappeared? Don't know, said Mark Twitchell, but he'd be happy to tag along to the police station and help out any way he could. The first thing that I noticed, the padlock didn't look familiar to me. In fact, this is Mark Twitchell explaining to a detective named Mike Tabler that he'd been using the rented garage as a poor man's soundstage to shoot a short film. It was designed to drum up publicity, buzz if you will, and with any luck, invest your money,

to allow him to produce a full-length feature movie. It's a suspense thriller, actually. It's a short film. The total runtime is only going to be about eight or nine minutes. You're good. So, yeah. Suspense thriller? Right. Of course, he had a crew in and out of the place during filming, said Mark, and several actors.

Maybe one of them was up to something? Well, it seemed unlikely, and none of them had ever asked to borrow the set for anything so if there was anything like that if somebody needed to borrow the place or whatever then they would let me know i'll let you know um they or they'd ask or something like that so yeah no i don't know anything about that. Anyway, he said he didn't need the garage anymore. He'd removed all his camera gear and props and this and that and moved on to a real film project he was shooting elsewhere. I'm working on a comedy right now, which is a,

it's actually a full-blown feature that's actually going to have a decent budget in the neighborhood of about $3.5 million. Which mattered not at all to Detective Tabler. Point was, where was Johnny Altinger? And who was that woman he'd been flirting with online? The one who gave him directions to the garage, told him she'd meet him there and spirit him off to Costa Rica. The woman who'd signed her emails, Jen.

Does the name Jen mean anything to you? No. That's what I was thinking about that too. Yeah, something out of 10 or anything like that. So the name Jen doesn't mean anything to you. You don't know a Jen. You don't have an actress named Jen. Mystifying, said Mark Twitchell.

He had a bad feeling about this. A man disappears after telling his friends he was going to the very place Mark's movie had been shooting to meet some actress Mark had never heard of. And now police were involved. As soon as they called me on the phone, I got this weird chill. Police were involved. As soon as they called me on the phone, I got this weird chill. And on top of that, now he'd just discovered somebody changed the lock on his garage studio.

That was all Mark Twitchell had to say. He didn't know a darn thing. Had nothing else to add. Unless this actress, Jen, was some sort of phantom, and the garden-variety backyard garage was like a magic portal, like in some sci-fi movie. Well, Detective Clark's thoughts were more practical at that moment, and maybe urgent. So we're thinking our next step, logically, is the garage. We've got to check inside and have a close look. What a strange coincidence it was. The rented backyard garage an independent Edmonton film crew was using as a studio

was the very place the missing man, Johnny Altinger, was supposed to meet his mysterious blind date, Jen. Odd. Especially since the movie's producer-director, Mark Twitchell, expressed exactly the same confusion as the police did. He didn't get it either. The dots didn't get it either. The dots didn't connect. Mark Twitchell said he didn't know Johnny from Adam, didn't know this Jen woman either,

and besides, there was no evidence Johnny ever made it to the garage at all. The close friends were the ones that had come to the police, and they basically had nothing other than these emails. Detective Bill Clark wasn't in on the Mark Twitchell meeting, but he was curious. Was the guy truly on the up and up like it seemed he was? So Clark pulled up the video recording of Twitchell's chat with Officer Tabler. You know, when I watch an interview, I listen to what the guy says, but I'm looking at body language. I'm looking for signs of deceit.

And I remember coming out of the interview going, well, this Mark Twitchell guy interviewed really well. There were no signs of deception. He's free-flowing with the information. He's answering the questions logically. I don't see any looking away. I don't see any of the nervousness. Nothing. Oh, but now this case was under his skin.

Bill Clark is, he doesn't mind admitting, an old school detective, the sort that seems to exist mostly in the movies these days, kind of like a 50s film noir. I'm a pit bull. I consider myself a pit bull. You get a case and you get your teeth into it, it's, we're those A-type personalities.

We want to get the guy, you know. We want to get this guy and put him away. But what guy or woman, who was the bad guy to get in the Johnny Altinger case? Was there a bad guy? Was there even a crime? Well, who knew, really? So Clark kept himself on a tight leash. He had yet to smell anything like blood.

You must have come to some point where you thought, oh, this is definitely foul play. No, not yet. Not at all. All the cops had, after all, was a missing man who might just have run off somewhere with or without some mysterious woman named Jen, which would certainly account for the fact that his red Mazda coupe was gone, too. But really, aside from a few curious emails that might or might not make any sense, There wasn't much for investigators to go on. So, being cops, Clark and his colleagues employed standard procedure. They doubled back for a second look at things.

Like that garage Johnny was apparently headed for when he vanished. The first time the cops went there, it was very once-over. So we're thinking our next step, logically, is the garage. We've got to check inside and have a close look. And so they applied for a search warrant to look more thoroughly, give the place a real forensic going over. And it gets turned down because we're told we don't have a crime.

We haven't proven there's a crime committed. And we're going, oh, man. This is no good. It's like, now what? I said, well, we might as well phone Twitchell. He was cooperative with Mike Tabler. Let's phone him up. Yeah. It's like, now what? I said, well, we might as well phone Twitchell. He was cooperative with Mike Tabler. Let's phone him up. Maybe he'll come down, or we'll just get the key from him.

So I just phone him up. And he's all good. No problem. And then he says, well, I'm going to my mom's house. And I said, well, you know what? Why don't we meet you there, and you give us the key, and then we'll go in? He goes, yeah.

I says, I'll need you to sign a consent form for us to search the garage. Yeah, no problem. Mr. Cooperative. Just like he was in the interview the night before. Doesn't raise any red flags with me at all. So we send a detective out to meet up with Mark Twitchell. Clark expected the detective to return in an hour or so with the key and consent form.

But no, the detective called Clark instead with news that just couldn't wait about a story Mark Twitchell had just told him. The detective says to me, he says, I bought a red Mazda off a guy. And he didn't mention it at all? Never mentioned it before. But had somebody asked him about such a car before? He'd been asked several times about the car.

During that first interview? Yeah, and by the patrolman who first met him the first night at the garage. Not a mention. Now all of a sudden he tells Murphy, yeah, I bought a red car off a guy for, slipped my mind. Forgot to tell you about it. Slipped my mind. Right away I thought, there's something fishy going on. So Clark invited

Twitchell to come back down to the station for a meeting at 10.30 on a Sunday night. And Twitchell agreed. Everything you do now, we're analyzing. We call it the up arrow, down arrow scenario. This is an up arrow. Mr. Cooperative will come down,

will talk to us at 10.30 on a Sunday night. That's an up arrow for Mark, right? Right. He's being cooperative. It's all good. Red car, Mazda hasn't mentioned it. Big down arrow. Big down arrow.

Big down arrow. But two arrows? If that's all you had, it wouldn't buy you a cup of coffee in a weird investigation like this one. You know, we were flying by the seat of your pants. We don't know anything about Twitchell. We don't know anything about this guy. Our plan was, if he's going to tell us about the red car, he's going to have to tell us where it is. So our plan was as soon as he tells us where it is, get someone in that room to go out and find a car. Maybe something comes up in the car. Let's get the trunk. We're thinking there's a body in it maybe, right? We don't know. So Twitchell comes in. I shake his hand, you know, hey Mark, thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. He's going, yeah, sorry all about that red car.

And I'm going, you know, Mark, anybody could forget that. You know, there's a lot going on. The police are involved. And the whole time I'm thinking, who would forget this red car? Like, you're an idiot, buddy. Like, something's going on. But, as the interview proceeded, the young filmmaker was the very picture of cooperation.

So I get this call from my co-producer on the phone, this guy from LA that's helping me put together my big feature, the Day Players comedy. He volunteered information. He answered questions without hesitation or any apparent guile. Clark watched his body language, and it was open, comfortable.

So they got to the story about the red Mazda. And what a story that was, said Mark. He was sitting in his own car. He'd stopped, for some reason, just a few blocks from his rented garage. Then this guy taps on my window. And his knee-jerk reaction was? And at first I'm thinking, okay, he's going to ask me for loose change or, you know, something like that. As can happen anywhere, Edmonton included.

But he didn't look like a transient. He seemed to be, you know, dressed like a normal person. Except what he wanted to do was not even close to normal, said Mark. The man was desperate to get rid of his car. Offered to sell it, right then and there to Mark for practically nothing. And the reason is crazy. He goes, well, I have shacked up with this really rich lady. It's like a sugar mama kind of situation. And she's going to take care of me and she's going to buy me a new car when we get back from a vacation that we're going to take.

So I'm just looking to unload buying and don't really care that much how much I get for it. How much do you have on you? And so I say, well, 40 bucks. And with that tone and everything, I'm not expecting anything here. And he's like, yeah, sure, fair enough. I'm thinking, okay, what, is there like, you know, two tons of cocaine in the trunk? Like, I'm trying to figure out what the catch is here. Apparently, said Mark, there was no catch and nothing wrong with the car.

Except it had a standard transmission, which he didn't know how to drive. So he left it parked in a friend's driveway. Does he live close by or what? Yeah. He lives just there a couple of blocks away. A detective listening in from another room sent someone out to look for the red car. And meanwhile, Bill Clark left the interview room, partly to regroup, but also to see how Mark would act when they left him alone. And if he was rattled, he certainly didn't show it. Instead, he calmly placed a call to his wife.

Hey. So, uh, what? Well, I, uh, tried to answer some more of their questions and fill them in and everything like that. And it turns out that the car is, in fact, belonging to this missing guy. And it's a huge deal. So, that's what this whole thing is about. What in heaven's name was going on? Bill Clark didn't have a clue. beyond his suspicions, that is.

There's something about this guy. He was just too, too something. So Bill Clark, good cop, decided to become Bill Clark, bad cop. Right or wrong, he was about to lean in on Mark Twitchell. The game's on. It's me against him, I know it. Coming up in future episodes of The Man in the Black Mask. He told me that he just finished his House of Cards,

which was about a serial killer, but he wanted to pursue more of that. And I said, well, why not a female serial killer? Why has it got to be a guy? And I said, let's explore that. In a story? Sure, in a story. And then I turn around finally, and I see this guy,

and he's wearing this mask. He's hitting me all over with this sun gun. It was probably the most spellbinding interview I've ever had with a witness. Vince Sterla 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.