Mark Twitchell grilled by Prosecutor over pattern of lies

During a morning of cross-examination Thursday, accused killer Mark Twitchell faced dozens of questions about his lies — lies he told to his wife, to his friends, to the police, and to the two men he lured to a rented garage in Mill Woods in Edmonton.

Crown prosecutor Avril Inglis grilled the once aspiring filmmaker, who stood with his hands gripping the ledge of the witness stand in front of a packed Edmonton courtroom. The family of Johnny Altinger, who Twitchell is accused of killing, sat in the front row.

Twitchell occasionally offered explanations for the lies but, mostly, he simply acknowledged he had told them.

At one point, Inglis asked Twitchell to consider a lie he had told to his wife, Jess Twitchell, to convince her he wasn’t cheating on her.

Court has previously heard that Jess Twitchell found her husband looking at a website used by married people to arrange affairs. Her husband told her he was working on a freelance article about the topic, and later hired an actor to play his editor during a phone conversation that his wife listened to.

“This is elaborate stuff, don’t you agree?” Inglis asked.

Twitchell paused.

“Sir, you hired an actor to lie to your wife to keep up with some fakery. You don’t think that’s elaborate?”

“I suppose it could be. I never really looked at it like that.”

On the night Johnny Altinger died, Jess Twitchell called her husband around 9 p.m. to ask where he was. He told her he was at the gym.

“Moments after Mr. Altinger bled to death in your garage, in front of your eyes, you were able to talk to her and come up with a quick lie, is that correct?” Inglis asked, her voice raised.

“Yes.”

Twitchell has admitted he concocted an elaborate scheme to lure single men to a residential garage, tricking them into thinking they’d meet an attractive woman for a date. He said it was part of a hoax for a movie project.

He is accused of killing Altinger on Oct. 10, 2008 in a planned and deliberate attack that prosecutors say is detailed in a document found on his laptop computer.

Twitchell has testified that Altinger attacked him with a pipe after learning he wasn’t going to meet a woman. He said Altinger was stabbed in the altercation.

Twitchell admitted he then dismembered Altinger’s body — twice — and dumped his partial remains down a sewer. He admitted he went to Altinger’s apartment and used the dead man’s computer equipment to send messages to his friends, indicating he had gone on a tropical holiday with a new girlfriend.

The e-mails confounded Altinger’s friends and family, who couldn’t believe that Altinger, a shy, level-headed man, would have taken an unplanned vacation with a strange woman. They contacted police, triggering an investigation that eventually led officers to Twitchell, who had rented the garage in Mill Woods as a set for a short horror movie.

During cross-examination, Inglis played a portion of Twitchell’s first videotaped interview with police. In the interview, Twitchell tells a detective he knows nothing about a man named Johnny Altinger and suggests that someone had broken into his rented garage and switched the padlocks on the door.

When asked to comment on the video and the lies he told, Twitchell appeared astonished at how badly he lied.

“Looking back, frankly, I’m surprised anyone would buy that,” he said on the witness stand.

Inglis then steered Twitchell toward the movie project that ultimately set the stage for Altinger’s death.

Twitchell has previously told court he lured Altinger and another man, Gilles Tetreault, to the garage as part of a hoax for a multimedia entertainment project. The idea was to develop a film, book, and online project based on a serial killer character.

It is a “fairly provocative” project that would keep “the fantasy going” for audiences, even after they had left the movie theatre, he said.

When talking about his entertainment scheme, Twitchell gave long, detailed, and confident answers, occasionally interrupting Inglis to provide more details. At one point, he smiled when discussing a possible direction for the online reaction.

He claimed the idea for the project had struck him two weeks before Altinger was killed. He dubbed his creative engine, his “little internal creative genius” and said it took him mere hours to come up with ideas that other movie makers would have taken months to develop.

“It’s something like a subconscious, innate savant power,” he told court.

“Your savant power,” Inglis replied. “Could it also be called inspiration?”

“In a way,” Twitchell said. “But it’s not something that I can manually control or manipulate. It’s like if you had a faucet but the dials didn’t work and it just ran water when it felt like it and you had to get in there with a pitcher.”

Twitchell said his idea was to lure men to the garage, explain the hoax, and get them “on board” for the project. The men, according to Twitchell, would agreed to write about fake experiences at the garage in online forums, which would create more interest in the associated books and films.

Twitchell is on trial for first-degree murder in connection with Altinger’s death.

The cross-examination continues.