True Crime Campfire - A Catfish, a Kill Room, & a House of Cards: "Dexter" Killer Mark Twitchell Pt 1

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

The builders of the Titanic were so sure they’d crafted an unsinkable ship that—in addition to bragging about it all over the media, they opted not to include enough lifeboats to rescue all the passengers in the event of a problem. We all know how that worked out. In Greek mythology, Icarus needed to get off the island of Crete—so he crafted wings out of feathers and wax so he could fly himself on out of there. His dad tried to tell him—Icarus, don’t try to fly too high with those things. You’re not a god—you’ll fall flat on your face. But Icarus didn’t want to hear that, and when he flew a scoach too close to the sun, the wax melted and…well, we know the rest of the story. We could give you lots of other examples from history and literature: Dr. Frankenstein, who was so proud of himself that he’d figured out how to reanimate human tissue that he never stopped to think about whether this was a good idea in the first place. General Custer, and his unwinnable fight at Little Big Horn. What do all these folks have in common? HUBRIS. That tempting little tendency to feel like we’re better than everybody else and the rules don’t apply to us. For some people, hubris just pops up in an occasional moment of weakness. But for others, this kind of arrogance is the organizing principle of their lives. We’re about to learn the story of one of these people.Sources:The Devil's Cinema by Steve Lillibuenhttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/twitchell-found-guilty-of-1st-degree-murder-1.998969CBS's, "48 Hours Mystery," Episode "Screenplay for Murder"NBC's "Dateline," Episode "Deadly House of Cards""SK Confessions" manuscript: https://www.scribd.com/doc/202712564/51755869-WARNING-GRAPHIC-Alleged-Diary-From-Twitchell-s-Computerhttp://www.stevelillebuen.com/crime-and-justice/the-question-of-mark-twitchell-dexter-killer/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free and at least a day early, an extra episode a month, a free sticker and more!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. The builders of the Titanic were so sure they'd crafted an unsinkable ship that in addition to bragging about it all over the media, they opted not to include enough lifeboats to rescue all the passengers in the event of a problem. We all know how that worked out. In Greek mythology, Icarus needed to get off the island of Crete, so he crafted wings out of feathers and wax so he could fly himself on out of there. His dad tried to tell him, Icarus, don't try to fly too high with those things. You're not a god, you'll fall flat on your face. But Icarus didn't want to hear that, and when he flew a scotch too close to the sun, the wax melted, and, well, we know the rest of that story. We could give you lots of other examples from history and literature.

There's Dr. Frankenstein, who was so proud of himself that he'd figured out how to reanimate human tissue that he never stopped to think about whether this was a good idea in the first place. General Custer, in his unwinnable fight at Little Big Horn, what do all these folks have in common? Hubris. That tempting little tendency to feel like we're better than everybody else and the rules don't apply to us. For some people, hubris just pops up in an occasional moment of weakness. but for others this kind of arrogance is the organizing principle of their lives.

We're about to learn the story of one of those people. This is a catfish, a killroom, and a house of cards, the story of Mark Twitchell. were in Edmonton, Canada, October 3, 2008. A couple on a sunset walk were suddenly startled by a frantic man stumbling onto the sidewalk and collapsing at their feet. He said, help me, I'm being robbed. And he gestured toward a detached garage. And when the couple looked where he was pointing,

they saw a man standing next to the garage door, just kind of looking at them, which is creepy as hell. The guy was dressed in dark clothing and wearing what looked like a hockey mask painted in a zigzagging pattern of black and gold, like something out of a flipping horror movie. Oh, my God. Yeah, seriously. And the man just stood there for a few moments

and kind of watched them, and then he started walking towards them. And he was kind of waving his hands and saying, hey, Frank, quit joking around. Come on, Frank. Like, acting like he and the man on the ground were good buddies. But the man kept pleading for help. No, no, I've been attacked.

I'm being robbed. That's the man who attacked me. And after a few more moments, the guy with the hockey mask just turned around and went back into the garage. Now, you can judge these people for what happened next or you cannot. It's up to you. But as soon as the hockey mask guy went back into the garage, they just took off running. And they said later they were scared.

They thought, you know, maybe it was a setup, that they were getting ready to get jumped or robbed by both of these guys. Like maybe they were working together. So as the man on the ground lay there and pleaded for help, they just buggered right off and ran home. and when they got there they did call the cops and the cops came out and looked around the neighborhood a bit but they didn't find anything and you know the pleading man was gone there was no sign of hockey mask guy and nothing had really happened i mean it was just a weird encounter so nothing came of it now campers i want you to remember that that was october 3rd on october 17th so a couple of weeks later a guy named dale contacted the edmonton police to report that his friend

38-year-old Johnny Altinger had gone missing under strange circumstances. A week earlier, Johnny had called to let him know that he was going on a blind date with a woman named Jen, who he'd met on the dating site Plenty of Fish. And Johnny had done a lot of online dating, sometimes successful, sometimes not, but there was something a little weird about this situation, so he wanted to kind of let his friend know what he was doing and where he was going. Jen had given him an address that wasn't a house. It was a detached garage. and she told him to come into the garage instead of going to the house.

She said it was her way of staying safe. She didn't feel comfortable letting him know which house was her, so she felt safer sending him to this detached garage instead so she could look at her window and kind of size him up, make sure he was who he said he was before she came out to meet him. Hmm. So he's like, okay, it's a little weird, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Johnny thought so too, and he definitely felt like there was something hinky about it, but Jen was a gorgeous woman her profile said she wanted no string sex it was really just too good to pass up and Johnny was determined to go on the date despite his

friend Dale telling him dude you need to cancel like you're getting it robbed or something bad is going to happen and before we judge him y'all remember we all do shit like this sometimes we really do we're all pretty good at talking ourselves out of our gut feelings when we're motivated enough to do so

when there's something really tempting on the other side right so the next time dale heard from johnny was in an odd email on october thirteenth and here's the email hey there i've met an extraordinary woman named jenn who has offered to take me on a nice long tropical vacation we'll be staying in her winter home in costa rica phone number to follow soon i won't be back in town until december 10th but i will be checking my email periodically see you around the holidays johnny This should surprise no one. Cops were uninterested.

They were basically like, are you kidding me? This guy's away with a girlfriend. Lucky him. Leave him alone. He's an adult. He's allowed to disappear if he wants to. And, okay, y'all, I have opinions. And I brainstormed, and I have this quick idea for a rule change for cops. How about people aren't allowed to disappear without you looking into it, huh?

Just like say, hey, I know you're with this hot check. Just send a photo with you holding up a sign with a passphrase or something. And, you know, if they don't want to talk to their friends, fine. But just like, check. Just check on them. Check on them. Right.

So despite the fact that Johnny was refusing to call any of his friends, he kept saying in emails, like, oh, I can't. The call reception is terrible here. Despite the fact that he was ignoring their requests. to see his vacation picks, despite the fact that he'd ignored an email from his boss asking where to send his final paycheck, cops refused to launch an investigation at first. Then, one afternoon, a few of Johnny's friends went to his apartment. They found a window ajar, which was very weird for the chilly fall weather. For the most part, Johnny's place looked like he just stepped out to run an errand. There were dirty

dishes in the sink. But his laptop and printer were missing. And worst of all, they found his passport. So no way had this dude gone to Costa Rica with Jen or anybody else. Not without his passport. Nope. So now the police were interested. And one of Johnny's friends told the detective that on October 10th, the last day anyone had seen Johnny or received a phone call from him, Johnny had called with an odd story. He told his friend about arriving at the garage to meet Jen and finding a dude there. The guy told him he was a local filmmaker and he was using the garage as a set. He showed him a prop gun he was using for the movie. And he said, Don't worry, man. Jen wanted me to tell you she's running a little late, but she'll be back soon.

The guy offered to let him wait for her, but Johnny felt awkward about it. So he said he'd leave and come back. Johnny said he'd driven home feeling a little weirded out by finding this guy there and Jen being late. He said he was sort of tempted to just forget the whole thing. But then, Jen had messaged him to let him know she was home, and she was sorry she was late.

So he told his friend he was heading back now. And before Johnny hung up with his buddy, he gave him the address of the garage. And campers, I want to point out that if Johnny Altinger had not done that, if he hadn't taken the precaution by letting his friend know where he was going,

we most likely would not be sitting here talking about this case today. And a very scary dude would have gotten away with murder and probably gone on to kill again. Just always tell someone where you're going and who you're meeting. Yes, absolutely. I'm positive. I drive my friends and family up the wall anytime I get in an Uber because I'm constantly sending them updates. Actual Angel Whitney once woke up ultra early, like 3 a.m. or something. something when I had a red eye and needed to let someone know where I was. But I always try to

keep in mind that I always feel better once I've heard that a friend has gotten to their destination save. Yeah, I was already up anyway. I wasn't even close to go in a bed yet. It was fine. So Johnny's friend gave the cops the address of this garage. And when they looked up the ownership of the garage, they found it was being rented by a young man, a local filmmaker named Mark Twitchell. So who was Mark Twitchell? Well, unfortunately for all of us, Mark Andrew Twitchell was born in 1979 to a nice middle-class Edmonton family. His parents were Norm, a city maintenance worker, and Mary, a graphic artist. He had a younger sister named Susan. They had a dog, you know, typical middle-class family. They used to watch Star Trek the next generation together

after dinner. And that sound nice? Mark was a bright kid, imaginative, much a classic nerd, just like I was. He was into sci-fi and fantasy, especially Star Wars. He liked comic books and dressing up in costumes. He wasn't into sports. He was friends with other similar nerds, and they all like making amateur movies, especially thrillers and horror flicks. More than anything else, Twitchell craved attention,

and he didn't seem to care much if he got it for good or bad reasons. Our cats are like that too. It's like as long as they don't care if we're yelling at them or playing with them. They just want our focus on them. That was Twitchell. In middle school, Twitchell told a friend that he had a hit list of people he wanted to torture and kill.

These were mostly people who had teased him. He got bullied a bit because, A, nerd, obviously, and B, he had big ears that stuck out kind of a mile in glasses, and middle school kids aren't exactly known for their tact and sensitivity, so Mark caught some shit about that and the bullies gave him the nickname Twitch Hell,

which I find pretty pathetic. actually. I mean, kids, Schichel was right there. Just hanging in the air. Bichel, right there. Or my personal favorite, Twatchel. Perfect. Yeah. Such a wide world of possibilities with the name Twitchell, and the best they could

come up with was Twitch Hell. It's just sad, in my opinion. Never send a child to do a grown-ups job. That's all I'm saying, right? But for some reason, Twitchell really chapped Twitchell's ass, and the bullies were all on his hit list, which, you know, I bring this up now because I think this was one of

the ways in which he was getting bad attention, was sharing this hit list far and wide, and his friend remembered how disturbingly graphic Twitchell was in his descriptions of what he would like to do to these guys. Like, it made his friend literally sick to his stomach, and that ain't easy to do with an eighth-grade boy. They are not easily nauseated. So this must have been some gnarly stuff on this hit list. Now, between middle school and high school, Mark got surgery to pin his ears back, and he got contacts, and lo and behold, he started getting some attention from girls.

So apparently, according to them anyway, he was kind of okay-looking, good-looking, even. And, okay, by good-looking, we mean that he was an average-looking tall white guy. Yeah, exactly. He looks like every third-string quarterback that I went to high school with. He looks like if the Pillsbury doughboy copulated with a blank sheet of paper, he looks like the concept of beige. I have Twitchel-centered agnosia. I've watched so many shows about this loser, and I could not pull him out of the lineup. He is a very standard issue, like white guy.

You're absolutely right. But this, you know, newfound attention from girls and improvement in his physical appearance, in his opinion anyway, seemed to give him some added confidence and energy. And seemingly as a result, the plots of his home movies started getting more and more violent. He kicked it up a notch. His best friend Kirk started to worry a little bit about Twitchell. He thought maybe he was getting too caught up in his hobbies and interests, especially Star Wars. His hobbies, his fandoms seemed to consume him more than was normal and more than was healthy, almost to the point where Kirk wondered sometimes if Twitchell had trouble finding the line between fantasy and reality.

Twitchell started talking about a force he called his ICG internal creative genius I remember that later that flooded him with ideas and made him pursue them obsessively and he wrote lots and lots of stories including a lot and I mean a lot of Star Wars fan fiction yeah in fact in the eighth grade he wrote a 200 page piece of Star Wars fanfic and presented it to a girl he had a crush on, because what girl could resist that?

Be still my beating heart. Just saying he may have wanted to keep the internal creative genius on the inside, in this case. Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall when he gave it to or two? Like, did he just walk into the classroom and just thump this thing down on her desk? Like, for you, my lady. Yes, he absolutely did. I wonder, okay, I need to get my hands on this fan fiction. because I need to know if he, like, put in himself and this girl as, like, original characters.

Oh, God. And you know he must have done. He must have. He had to. Finley veiled. Yeah. It was probably like a character called Hark Fitchell. And he's the hero. And people started to notice that Mark lied a lot. Like, he lied about big stuff, small stuff, stupid stuff, unnecessary stuff, outlandish stories. People knew. couldn't be true. He started stealing money from his mom's purse. He got arrested for shoplifting a couple of times, but unfortunately no criminal charges resulted, which sucks because you have got to let people like this experience consequences early on, or they're just going to run amok, but, you know, he was a kid, so it didn't happen. And he became obsessed with Anakin Skywalker and his transformation into Darth Vader, which is just so on brand for this jack wagon like

that of all the characters in the entire Star Wars universe, and there are many of them, Twatchell would become obsessed with Anakin Skywalker. And he seemed to actually admire Anakin. Like, on a fan forum website, he wrote of a scene where Anakin killed a bunch of innocent kids in a fit of rage. I'm sure those of you who've seen the movies remember this. And he wrote, isn't it sweet, the pure calculated precision of it all? It's admirable how he manages to have the stomach for it. I wonder what was going through his mind.

Wow. And on one forum, he took the name Psycho Jedi. And we'll get to this later, but I have to tell you now because I feel a little bit of a rant coming on. Later, when he's an adult, he has a car with a vanity plate that says dark Jedi. Dark Jedi. Okay. So, oh. All right.

Twatchel. Honey. Baby doll. There are no dark Jedi. The Jedi are the light side of the force, okay? You're thinking of the Sith, asshole, and they are the bad guys. It's very clear cut. There are no Dark Jedi.

There are no Psycho Jedi. You clearly do not understand the story that you claim to love so much. You absolute shit show of a human being. Just no. No, Mark. Damn it. You okay, Beebe? Dark Jedi, Katie.

There aren't any Dark Jedi. I know. I will be okay. Just give me a minute. I have a lot of feelings about Twatchel and about Star Wars. and just about this whole, it's hard for me. Yeah, I know. Just, okay, take a minute. I'll take over.

So, Twitchell went to college after high school and got himself a degree in radio and television production. While he was there, he met a woman called Tracy and fell in love. And we say love in scare quotes, because obviously, this punk wouldn't know love if it took a poop in his hair. Exactly, right. They had a hot and heavy relationship for a while, but eventually, Tracy shut it down.

Why? Because she kept catching him in lies. Stuff about his family, what his parents did for a living, and how much money they had, stuff about his accomplishments and his grades, mostly stuff that made him seem more impressive than he really was. Pathetic. And also it reminds me of Chris Porco and Seth Gonzalez from the Killer Kids, right? Yeah. I mean, it's such a theme. And Tracy couldn't handle being lied to, so she dumped him. And this broke his heart. And by heart, of course, I mean the tiny, shriveled little abomination that resides in the center of Mark Twitchell's chest. He'd carry a torch for Tracy for years afterward.

I suspect that it's because he couldn't have her. Oh, 100%. But in 2001, shortly after he graduated from college, Mark met an American woman in a chat room and married her real fast. He moved to the States to be with her. It was a short-lived marriage for one main. reason. Twitchell was getting obsessed with making fake online profiles. He had one for Satan, one for Jesus, one as a woman, and it freaked his new wife out, especially when she realized that his favorite game was to pretend to be a woman and catfish men. He thought it was hilarious. He

liked manipulating these men, getting them all excited about the possibility of sex or romance and laughing at them behind their backs. But to his wife, who was like, you know, not a narcissist piece of shit? It was disturbing. So they grew apart really quickly. And in 2005, he moved back to Edmonton. Mark was charming, and he quickly made a whole slew of new friends. And he threw himself into a film project,

a Star Wars fan films called Secrets of the Rebellion. He actually managed to get $60,000 worth of funding for it. Wow. Even better, he landed Jeremy Bullock, the actor who played Boba Fett in the original Star Wars. Damn. He was featured on the local news for it. Everything seemed to be coming up Twitchell.

Around this time, he met a woman named Jess. Jess was smart. She was beautiful. In fact, Twitchell liked that she was the first woman he'd met who seemed to be his intellectual equal. Oh, my God. I'm literally going to bar. Bitch, please.

I guarantee you she's five times smarter than he was. Yeah. A little ridiculous man. Man-lit intellectual evil. Okay, men who talk like that, trash. Trash. If you ever have a man that tells you, A, that he's surprised you're so smart because you're so beautiful, or that you're the first woman he's ever met, who's his intellectual

evil. Seriously, run. Run away. It's a deal breaker. Now, any time a man tries to set you up as being better than other women, it's a red flag. Like the other girls. Ugh, heck off. But Jess didn't see that.

Bless her heart. He married Jess. Poor, poor Jess in 2007. Yeah, and in addition to his film work, Twitchell had a good job in sales. He was a natural salesman because of his charisma, and by now he'd grown into a pretty decent-looking guy, although it makes me a little bit nauseated to have to admit that. I would rather have a root canal with no anesthesia, and I mean this literally, like, try me. then let this man kiss me on the cheek so it's well i would have invasive surgery with no anesthesia if like before being in the same room as this guy so i don't know you're gonna one up yeah right

yeah we're not excited about the idea of being anywhere near this man but you know objectively i guess he's like inoffensive looking so any who campers as of 2007 mark was married to a beautiful intelligent woman who loved him he was making good money and safe He was involved in creative projects, Star Wars film, and a comedy he was planning with his friends called Day Players. This was basically a rip-off of the series extras with Ricky Jervais. You'll notice a theme in Twatchell's work, which is that he apparently has no original ideas, so he's always piggybacking off of Star Wars or ripping off somebody else's far more successful ideas. His creative genius is apparently a plagiarist.

Yes, absolutely. and by the end of 2007 Jess was pregnant with their first child a little girl they named Chloe so the guy should be on top of the world wife new baby good job a passion project to work on but for twatchell nothing's ever that simple

so instead of going to work every day and being good to his wife and being a dad to his daughter and working hard on his creative projects Twitchell bless his heart just could not seem to open his mouth without a bunch of big ass lies spilling out this dude would not know the truth if he fell over it sometimes he lied for no reason at all

and he acknowledges this himself by the way that sometimes he just lies to lie like even when the truth would work better and be less destructive and sometimes the lies were pretty innocuous but then there were the huge lies he told potential investors for day players the movie that he was working on

he claimed he had big Hollywood stars and producers lined up like Jeff Goldblum and Alec Baldwin all complete bullshit it. He claimed that he had half a million dollars in investor capital already, when in reality he had about seven grand in the bank. So he was just the consummate con man. And he also lied to his wife, Jess, just left and right. For one thing, he liked hiring sex workers. So, for example, one time he went on a trip to Calgary, pretty much solely to check into a hotel and hire a bunch

of sex workers. Jess thought he was on a sales trip. so this is the kind of shit he was as a husband and he had also recently rekindled his relationship with his college girlfriend Tracy Chattner up on social media so Twitchell and his friends were pouring all their energy into this day players movie they wanted to make and by the way I've seen the script it was a turkey

it was never going to take off anyway but they were all super excited about it and Twitchell's friend Joss actually managed to convince his parents to invest 30 grand in the project which damn you know Twitchell's brother-in-law kicked in another 30 grand with the stipulation that the money be held in trust for the movie. So that was a good get. That's $60,000. And because of that, Twitchell got it into his head that he was so great at fundraising

that he could make a go of it as a full-time filmmaker if he could just quit his sales job. I guess he forgot that, like, so far you really haven't raised anything, like people from your immediate family and your partner's immediate family have kicked in money, but whatever. So he ran this idea by Jess, and unsurprisingly, she was less than enthused at the idea. I mean, here she is. She's just had a baby.

She's on maternity leave. And she was excited for Mark, and she wanted him to succeed as a filmmaker. But she just didn't think that now was the best time for him to quit his day job. And this, of course, made Twatchell Furious, because we do not cross the great creative genius, right? So they had a big rip-roaring argument about it. And finally he told her, fine, I'll keep my damn job. And then the next day, he went right out and quit without telling her. Holy crick, can you even imagine?

I'm angry just thinking about it. And he's not even my husband, thank God. Yeah, campers. Every day, this sad sack of phlegm left the house as if he was going to work. And instead, he'd drive around, hang out at coffee shops, on his laptop. he sent out lots of emails trying to solicit more investor money for the movie. But like you said, when he was throwing himself a ticker tape parade about what a super duper fundraiser he was, he forgot that he personally knew all of his donors.

And there were like two or three of them. Like it really was not a lot of people. And after he acquired that initial 60K, the money dried up. He couldn't find any more investors. And now he had no income because he'd quit his job, like a dumbass. On top of that, Jess wanted to buy a new house, a nicer, bigger, more expensive one. So what did Twitchell do? He started dipping into his business account to pay his bills.

The 60K that was supposed to be used strictly for day players. Oh my God. And remember, this isn't. his project. No. This is his and his friend's project. Thirty grand of that were from his friend's parents. Like, the nerve. He and Jess were fighting a lot around this time. And the word divorce had been coming up. I don't think Twitchell cared anything about Jess, but it would have been an inconvenient time to end the marriage. A divorce would uncover a lot of his little white lies. You know, like the one where he told Jess he was still employed, little stuff like

that. So they moved forward with plans to buy a house. Because I guess mortgage and a loveless marriage over alimony and child support. I guess. Jess was on maternity leave, so she couldn't get a mortgage on her own. And of course, Twitchell wasn't working, so he couldn't get financing either. But of course, he didn't want to tell just that. So, he bought a second cell phone. And he called up the mortgage broker, and in a fake voice, he pretended to be his own employer. Oh, my God. And he'd already transferred money from his film company, Express Entertainment, to his personal bank account for the down payment, to the tune of about $22,000. Oh, my God. Then he forged bank statements.

to hide where the down payment funds came from. Mm-hmm, of course. And because there is no justice in this world, it worked. Yep. Twatchell was just tickled pink at his own cleverness, and he and Jess moved into their new house. It was right around this time that Twitchell discovered a new obsession, the Showtime series, Dexter.

So if you're not familiar, Dexter is about a serial killer slash blood spatter analyst who only kills people who deserve it. So killers and rapists and other such baddies. The premise of the show is that Dexter's father was a cop and when he realized that his son was developing into a psychopath, he decided to teach Dexter a code

to sort of create some kind of morality around killing, as bizarre and ideas that is. So the notion was you're going to have these urges to kill and there's nothing you can do about that, but we're going to channel it so that you only kill people who need killing, basically, and who somehow managed to escape justice. And it's an interesting premise, but it's also a complete fairy tale.

It's totally unrealistic that a true psychopath would ever operate this way, but it's also a great show. I mean, I'm a big fan myself, at least of the first few seasons. And Twitchell loved it, like, completely became obsessed with it, just like he had been about Star Wars when he was younger, raved nonstop to his friends about it, wrote about it, talked about it constantly. On his Facebook wall one night, he wrote, Mark Twitchell has way too much in common with Dexter Morgan.

Rout row. And by now, he had dwindled his investment fund for day players down to less than $7,000, which means that he had used more than $53,000 for his own personal bills, part of which was a down payment on a house. So he realized there was no way they could make this movie now. He'd have to put it on the shelf until he could raise some more money, which was, you know, going so great so far, so good plan. So he started thinking about doing a smaller, low-budget project,

something that might get some attention and attract more investors for the big movie. So he wrote a script for an eight-minute psychological thriller, which, if you ask me, is a bit of a grandiose description for this thing, but okay, that he called House of Cards. It was about a serial killer who catfish cheating husbands on dating sites, lured them to a garage, balked them on the head to knock them out, tied him to a chair, tortured their bank details out of them, and killed them,

all while taunting them and wearing a scary mask. Any of this sounding a little familiar? Hmm. Yeah. The killer then dismembered the bodies, and at the end of the film, the killer turns out to be the writer of the story. A twist that Twatchell thought was Hitchcockian, and which I think is cliche and derivative.

Cockian, maybe. but not Hitchcockian. This guy, you're going to see more in part two where we start reading some of his writings, but this guy is so far up his own ass. He reminds me actually a lot of Sienki Lolliman, just in his own sense of self-importance,

his own extremely undeserved sense of self-importance. He is the worst. So while he was writing House of Cards, Twitchell did some research on serial killers and psychopaths, and he quickly recognized himself in the research. He realized that he had a lot of the personality traits of a psychopath. Lack of empathy, pathological lying, superficial charm. He was unsettled enough by this that he actually went to see a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist.

And this is so unfortunate. According to Twitchell, both of them told him that he probably had nothing to worry about, that a psychopath wouldn't seek out a medical professional out of concern that he might be a psychopath. that. Unbelievable. That strikes me as absolute horseshit. It is 100% absolute horseshit. And of course, it's possible that they really didn't

say that at all, and Twitchell's just making it up. Yeah. But if this story is true, then shame on those doctors. Absolutely. Because according to him, after this, he just figured, okay, I guess I'm good, and stopped going. Twitchell's personal writings around

this time detail all this. and his philosophical musings about himself and his worldview. Yeah, it's riveting reading if you can stomach it. And if you can stomach it, you can read some of this in Steve Lillibuyn's book, The Devil Cinema, about the case, which is one of our main sources for this episode. But I got to warn you, you literally might barf. Like, Twitchell's writing is insufferable on a level that I would have previously thought impossible, and I am a writing teacher.

I used to teach first-year comp, so you know that is saying something coming for me. because I've seen some shit, okay? Yeah. But he wrote about how he didn't feel any remorse for lying and cheating on Jess. He said, I guess I feel entitled. And she had caught him one day looking at that gross website Ashley Madison, which is a site for married people looking to have affairs, charming. And when she confronted him, he told her he was researching an article

that he'd been hired to write about online dating. Now, Jess wasn't stupid, and she was very suspicious. us about this, of course. She asked for the editor's name, and Twitchell rattled one off without batten an eye, but she was still suspic, because, you know, he'd never written any articles before. This was not something he was known to do. So, Twitchell

told her, look, the editor's supposed to be calling in a few days to talk about the article. You can talk to him then, if you want. And lo and behold, a few days later, the call came in, and Mark let Jess listen in. Campers, this buffoon hired an actor

to play the editor on the own to lie to his wife. This man doesn't have a job. I know, right? And he's hiring some guy? What a great use of funds, Mark. I don't know how much he paid him. God almighty.

So in his journal, he wrote, quote, I often find myself justifying my actions based on overarching loose philosophy like, life is too short, or what she doesn't know won't hurt her. I've set up an intricate and elaborate web of lies around my entire relationship that I would claim is to protect her from stress, but all I seem to be doing is protecting her from knowing who I am. He said, I feel like I have to fake it the whole time. If my family and friends ever knew the real me, it would damage many of them, some irreparably. I think I would rather continue faking it for their own benefit, rather than watch several people's worlds, including my own, unravel completely. Oh, what a fucking martyr. I know.

Throw yourself on the pyre more, Mark. I know. He's really taken one for the team. What I find interesting about that passage is that he seems to be lying not only to his wife and his family and his business partners and his friends. He's also lying to himself. He's not hiding his true self to protect them. He is lying to protect Mark Andrew Twitchell

so he can run around and do whatever he feels like doing and not have to be held to account for it, obviously. But he's convinced himself, you know, that he is sort of falling on his own sword. I will just fake it and no one will ever know the true me so that I can protect these people that I care about. Yeah. And that kind of self-delusion continues in another section.

Twatchell apparently really liked the idea of fate. He wrote, quote, not only does fate exist, but I am very important to this fate machine. and it has gone out of its way to teach me a valuable lesson so that I may continue carrying out its inevitabilities. Convenient, isn't it? Because if you believe in fate, then everything is already predetermined.

If you believe in fate, then you don't have to take responsibility for your own choices because they're not choices, are they? So why would you ever have to feel guilty about anything? So how nice for him to believe he's the hand of fate or whatever it is? so anywho he wrote up this little turd of a screenplay on the fly gathered some of the day players and Star Wars crew that he'd worked with before and found a couple local actors to be in it for free now how did he do that well he spun him all this big webel eyes about having

Alec Baldwin and Jeff Goldblum all lined up for day players and said that if they would just do this short film for him he'd make sure they got parts in the big movie later on it was all total bullshit it was a typical twatch old con man tactic and this is creepy, he got a few of the prop guys to build him some custom set pieces. The main thing he wanted was a big, sturdy metal table, kind of like a mortician's table. Not just a prop, he said he wanted it built strong. He wanted it to be able to take a lot of punishment. And campers, if you've ever watched Dexter, you know that Dexter's MO is to knock his victims out with the tranquilizer,

then lay them out on a big table and wrap them all around with plastic wrap and duct tape so they can't move. That's where he kills them. This guy is such a plagiarist piece of shit. God, get your own idea, Schichel. He also wanted a sturdy metal chair built. He soon found the perfect place to shoot the film. A detached garage in a quiet neighborhood, somewhat shielded from neighboring buildings by fencing and trees.

The garage had a creepy feel about it. It was exactly the kind of place he probably thought Dexter would bring his victims. The actor who played. played the victim was a local comedian named Chris Hayward. And this is so interesting. He later said that he felt really uneasy during the shooting of House of Cards. And on the day of the shoot, they were all in this kind of creepy garage, and Chris Hayward was trussed up on this big metal chair, duct tape around his mouth, unable to move. And he looked over at that big metal table. And he saw that the props they were using for the movie, a stun baton, a knife, a samurai sword, were real.

Yikes. And there was something about the director, Twitchell, that gave him the creeps. He couldn't put his finger on it, but the guy made his skin crawl. And Hayward started to realize he barely knew this guy. He didn't know any of the crew. Here he was tied to a chair in this grubby garage. He hadn't told anybody what he was doing that day or where he was going. And he started to feel seriously uneasy, scared even.

He found himself trying to loosen the bonds around his wrists just in case he needed to run. Wow. And he started to think, am I about to be murdered here? Is this a snuff film? Why didn't I tell my agent where I was going? Yeah. And he was pretty freaked out, but as we tend to do, he talked himself down. I'm being silly.

I'm sure it's fine. These people are amateurs, sure, but I'm sure they're not killers. Chill, Chris, right? And I find this so fascinating because as we have talked about so many times before, so often people do know exactly what's going on in these situations, but they talk themselves out of their gut feelings. They logic themselves out of it. Chris Hayward took one look at Twitchell, and in his gut he knew what he was, but he talked himself out of it. It's just so interesting to me. Twitchell was uncharacteristically quiet during the filming of House of Cards.

Everybody noticed it. He seemed kind of thoughtful. Kept glancing over at that big metal table they'd built for him. So criminal profilers talk about precipitating stressors that can tip a would-be killer over the edge into murder. And if we look at Twitchell's life at the time he was working on House of Cards, we see several big stressors. So he and Jess were fighting. She had talked about divorce. He had a new baby. He was in serious financial trouble.

and at some point his frauds and lies were likely to be exposed. So House of Cards rap, and Chris Hayward was glad to get out of there alive, bless his heart. And shortly after filming was done, Twitchell had what he later called an epiphany. He realized he wanted to explore this dark side that he'd been getting in touch with more and more lately. He'd been thinking a lot about becoming a serial killer, and he realized now that this was a fantasy that he wasn't willing to keep in the realm of fantasy, anymore. He was actually going to do it. He was going to be like his hero, Dexter. Except he really wasn't, but we'll get to that in a bit. Because Dexter's good at it. So also around this time,

like while he was writing, researching, and filming House of Cards, Twatchell befriended a woman on Facebook. He had a habit of creating all kinds of fake profiles, and this one was Dexter Morgan with a shot of Dexter as his profile pick. And one of the friends he picked up was an American dog trainer named Renee. Renee initially thought this was the actual profile of actor Michael C. Hall who plays Dexter, and she messaged him with a flirty little message. And obviously, she quickly realized that this wasn't actually Michael C. Hall. It was this guy named Mark. Mark is part of the reason celebrities get that blue little checkmark on their social media these days. That's probably true. And soon, Renee and Mark found they had a lot in common. Renee shared his

passion for Dexter and his obsession with the darker side of humanity. And Twitchell told her a bunch of great big, sparkly bedazzled lies with bells hanging off him. He said he was in an open marriage and his wife was cool with him screwing around, complete bullshit. He said he was an up-and-coming filmmaker working on a big project with Jeff Goldblum, because apparently he was a big fan of Jeff Goldblum. Like, he just thought Jeff Goldblum was his ticket to paradise because every single time he brought up Jeff Goldblum. I mean, he's cool, but damn, dude. Like, if you're going to lie, why not say you got Brad Pitt or, like, Chris Hemsworth,

or, well, Chris Hemsworth wasn't famous yet, but you'd get my drift, right? Like, somebody was, like, really super famous. But Renee was impressed. And when he found out she was an aspiring writer and promised her creative partnership, Renee was thrilled because, you know, she had no idea what a bunch of bullhockey all this was, yeah. Soon, their conversations got both flirty and really personal, as online communications tend to do. It was while talking about their failed relationships that the talk started to turn very dark. Renee confessed that she was having some dark fantasies, relating a little too much to the character of Dexter.

Twitchell told her that he had thoughts like that too, and he urged her to elaborate. He said, there's nothing you could tell me that would make me cease communicating with you. It sometimes scares me how much I relate to Dexter. So Renee said, okay, well, I fantasized about killing my ex-husband's new wife, who she described, by the way, as a skinny skank. Okay, well, Twitchell was just delighted about this. He joined in enthusiastically, and soon they were exchanging graphic ideas for how to dispose of people they didn't like. Oh, and by the way, he was also trawling plenty of fish and communicating with his ex-girls. friend Tracy at the same time. After she caught him on Ashley Madison, Jess demanded all his social media passwords. So, Puchel said, sure. And then he just used his Dexter profile to pick up

ladies. Just didn't know about that one. Oh, he's such a piece of shit. I hate him. Shortly after filming House of Cards, he had a come to Jesus talk with Jess. They were having an argument one night, and in the middle of it, he just blurted out, I'm not so sure I can feel empathy like other people. And this knocks Jess sideways. I don't like that. She'd been married to this man for a year and a half. She had a child with him. And now he was telling her he didn't think he was capable of caring about other people. So unsurprisingly, this completely derails the argument. She said, so you don't feel anything for anybody? Okay, okay. So, for example, I just saw this episode of Oprah where,

a woman accidentally left her baby in a hot car and the baby died, and I just felt so much sadness for this woman. I can't even imagine what I would feel like if that happened to me. You don't feel anything about that? And Mark was just like, I mean, yeah, I guess that's sad, but it doesn't have anything to do with me. Yikes. And Jess was just blown away. She said, Mark, that's not normal. You need help. If I'm going to stay in this marriage with you, you need to see a therapist immediately, and we're going to marriage counseling. Yeah, and, I mean, of course, Jess didn't know that Mark had already gone to a therapist on his own and decided he didn't need to go back. He didn't tell her any of that. He just said, sure, I'll make an appointment.

This was always Schichel's M.O. until he was ready to pull the trigger on a divorce from Jess, he just told her whatever she wanted to hear. And liars do this, especially habitual liars. They'll use lying like a band-aid until they have to lie again. So soon after that argument, he told her that he'd scheduled a regular recurring appointment with a therapist every Friday night after work because she still thinks he has a job. It's just incredible. His first appointment was supposedly set for Friday, October 3rd, right after work. Now, does anybody happen to remember what date it was when that couple on a walk had that scary encounter on the sidewalk at the very beginning of the episode? Was that, by any chance, October 3rd? Mm-hmm. Why, yes. Yes, it was.

And soon after that fight with Jess, Twitchell began writing a new story. He called it S.K. Confessions. It began, This is the story of my progression into becoming a serial killer. Within a day of writing that, he started another fake profile on plenty of fish.

This one was of a beautiful blonde woman named Sheena. She was looking for an intimate encounter. We'll leave it there for part one, But because we release both halves of an episode on the same day, you can go right ahead and listen to Part 2 now if you want. Or save it for later, whatever Alfred's your Hitchcock. That one's for you, twatchell. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. You can follow us on Twitter at T.C. Campfire.

Instagram at True Crime Campfire. And be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at Patreon. dot com slash true crime campfire