On October 3, 2008, Gilles Tetreault, a computer contractor, drove to a rented garage in the Mill Woods district of southeast Edmonton expecting to meet a woman he had been talking to on a dating website. Instead he was attacked. He fought his way free and escaped, and he did not go to the police. A week later, on October 10, Johnny Altinger, a thirty-eight-year-old pipeline worker, went to the same garage for the same reason. He was bludgeoned, stabbed and dismembered. The man waiting for both of them was Mark Twitchell, a would-be filmmaker, and the woman they thought they were meeting did not exist.
Mark Andrew Twitchell was born in Edmonton on July 4, 1979. He made short science fiction films, ran a small production company, and was married twice, to Megan Casterella from 2001 to 2005 and to Jess Twitchell from 2007; he had one child. He was fascinated by the television series Dexter, about a forensic technician who is secretly a serial killer, and kept a Facebook profile under the name of its hero, Dexter Morgan. Two weeks before the first attack he had shot a short film in the same garage, House of Cards, about a Dexter-like killer who lures his victims through the internet.
After Altinger vanished, messages went out from his accounts saying he had left for Costa Rica with a woman he had met. His friends did not believe it and went to the police, and when news of the investigation reached Tetreault he came forward. On Twitchell's laptop investigators recovered a document he had tried to delete, which the Crown called SK Confessions: a first-person account of luring men to a kill room, of the attack on a man who got away and of the killing of a second. Another document, "A Profile of a Psychopath," believed to be his, was a detailed analysis of his own personality. He was arrested on October 31, 2008.
At his trial in Edmonton in 2011 Twitchell admitted that he had killed Altinger and written the document, but said the killing was self-defense or an accident: Altinger, he testified, became enraged on discovering there was no date, only a publicity stunt for the film, and attacked him. The document, he said, was fiction based on fact. Crown prosecutors called witnesses to show it was essentially a diary, and others, among them a former girlfriend and his ex-wife, who testified that he had lied to them repeatedly. On April 12, 2011, after about five hours of deliberation, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder, and he received the mandatory sentence of life with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years.
The Crown had also charged him with the attempted murder of Tetreault, who testified at the murder trial; since the conviction already carried the maximum sentence, that charge was stayed later in 2011. In May 2011 Twitchell filed a handwritten appeal from the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert, arguing that coverage of the case had been so sensational that no unsequestered jury could have been fair. On February 15, 2012, he abandoned it. He was later reported held at the Bowden Institution in Alberta.