Is any place, anywhere as stressful, as confining, as exhausting as a police interview room? At 04:00 in the morning, filmmaker Mark Twitchell had been in that little room for 5 hours, patiently answering Detective Bill Clark's questions about this guy, Johnny Altinger, who'd been missing for more than a week. Now, during a break, a decidedly drooping Twichell pulled out a cell phone and punched in his wife's phone number.

My problem is that I'm so tired and it's so hard to remember things.

Of course, he wasn't exactly alone at that moment. He shared the space with a microphone and a camera so that outside the room, Detective Bill Clark could watch and listen. But all Mark Twitchell did was complain to his wife.

It's so hard to remember, like these minute, specific details about these days that I just didn't ever bother to think about or remember. Because who the hell did? Does that?

You know, Detective Clark was asking so many detailed questions because I know I'm.

Not getting the truth. I know he's lying to me. No doubt in my mind. I know he's involved up to his neck. I still don't know what he's done.

If anything, that is because really, all Clark had was just a feeling that Mark Twitchell had been handing him a whole load of nonsense, fully expecting Clark to believe it. He didn't. But he'd been letting things develop organic, like, if you will, patiently, like, he bought it all.

I agreed with everything he said. Like, I didn't. This wasn't the time of the interview to start pushing him on it. It wasn't the time to start confronting him. That would come later on.

So the 04:00 a.m. intermission in this cat and mouse play was a time for Clark to dream up an act two. Almost like he and Twichell were going through some weird inverse improv routine, each one in that little room, acting a role without a script, trying to outperform the other.

Did you not think that kind of strange? I mean, I have to ask, is you paying $40 for a car? How much did you think the car was worth?

Uh, I thought it was worth somewhere between three and 4000.

That you're paying $40 for it?

Yeah.

$40 for a used car. That couldn't possibly be true. But why admit that you had the misconception and then lie about the price you paid for it? It made no sense. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is the man in the Black Mask, a podcast from Dateline, episode two, the Twilight Zone.

I mean, a lot of what I did in the first part is just act. I was just acting. I'm doing, you know, of course, playing the role, letting them believe I'm believing every word he's saying.

Well, you're reading him. During that interview, he had been reading you, and no doubt he made some. Probably had made some judgments about your ability as an interviewer about, I don't know, your intellect. What did he think of you, do you think, during that interview?

I don't think he. I think he didn't think I was that smart. I think he thought he was smarter than me.

But just as Detective Clark was getting set to rejoin Mark Twitchell for the start of act two of their little drama, a patrol officer reported in, the one who'd been sent out to look for that missing red Mazda, the red Mazda that belonged to the also missing Johnny Altinger. He had found it, and it was right where Mark Twitchell said it would be. The patrolman searched it, of course, but.

Nothing untowards about the car. Johnny's not in the car. The guy who got the car has given a statement, and it's basically what Mark told me in the interview, that.

He bought it for $40.

He bought it for $40, and that's what he told his friend, and he had his friend drive it over to his house.

So, what? You're suddenly your big down arrow starting to turn up again?

Well, I mean, no, I wouldn't say it's turning up, but I. At least I know he hasn't lied about how the car got to his friend's house. So we discussed strategy at that point. And then I know, I says, have you got nothing else? I said, I'm going to have to go in and confront him. And the whole idea of that confrontation is to see his reaction, right? And see what his answer is. Because an innocent man. We expect you to say this. Look, I didn't do it. You got the wrong guy. We've done the good cop routine. Now my forte. The bad cop's coming out.

Your forte. This is what you like?

This is what I like. This is what I relish. Now, I'm going to start with the hammer him with what I know. Problem is, I know very little. And I know. I know very little. And he must know by the way I talk, I don't know much, but.

Detective Clark acted like he knew everything from the moment he opened the door and re entered the room. It was all bluster, of course.

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that you're involved in the disappearance of John Altinger. No doubt in my mind at all.

Why? I have no idea what the hell is going on.

And then his response is like, it's. He goes, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean? Or something like that. He goes, it's like, I can't believe this. Yeah. I'm going like, holy. This is our guy now. We need to know what he did. I know. Then I got him. Like, I know he's. He's done it. He's done something to him. I don't know what. I don't know how.

Just based on his reaction to your accusation, absolutely.

I don't understand.

But you do understand, because you know what I'm talking about. You're involved in this.

I just don't understand.

Now that it was clear to Mister Twitchell that he was being questioned not as a witness, but as some sort of suspect. He dropped the chummy act like a bad script.

You can see a whole change in demeanor.

Sure, certainly, he shut down.

He shut down. And, you know, I'm looking in his eyes, I'm watching him. He's leaning back. At times, he's tightening up a little bit. All signs, you know, he's uncomfortable. I got him uncomfortable. But I don't have any evidence to confront him with to really push him on the points and get him to make any confessions or any admissions about anything. Why can't you give me your version of events that night?

I'm so scared.

Once, around the time dawn was contemplating a start on the day, Mark Twitchell mumbled something about reality seeming more like some sort of fantasy.

I just feel like I'm in the Twilight zone right now.

But in the face of Detective Clark's best portrayal of a bad cop, Mark Twitchell never wavered the whole long prairie night. He was unfailingly polite, helpful, seemed to have no interest in calling a lawyer. So by the end of the night, I got nothing.

I got no evidence. My gut instinct at that time is this guy's involved. He's involved up to his neck in this. What exactly he's done to him, I don't know yet, but I'm going to find out.

Or maybe Clark was just too suspicious and the guy was not up to his neck in anything anyway. About the time the sun was rising out there in the real world, Mark Twitchell let Clark know he'd had enough.

Am I being charged? Not yet. Am I free to go?

Yep.

Then I will.

Yeah.

And Twichell simply walked out of the interrogation room, leaving Bill Clark standing alone on his empty stage and none the wiser. Twilight zone indeed. I.

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You ready for what's coming?

Hey guys, it's Hoda Kotmi from the Today show reminding you to check out my podcast making space. So in each episode, I get to have a real, in depth conversation with some of the most inspiring individuals. And this week's episode is with best selling author and acclaimed public speaker Arthur C. Brooks. We talk about the science of getting happier and how to build the life you really want. You can listen to our full conversation right now by searching, making space wherever you get your podcasts.

Robert there's no knowing what Mark Twitchell said to his wife after his long, strange night in the bows of the Edmonton police Department. No telling if he knew that bull headed detective was still somehow fixated on him. Oh, but he was. So now Detective Clark and colleagues began poking about in the story of Mark Twitchell, as in, who is this guy, really? And it didn't take long. Twichell was a hard working local boy, no criminal history, never been arrested, good parents, nice young wife, sweet little daughter, and he was on his way to becoming an Edmonton celebrity. His movie production company, called Express Entertainment detectives discovered was not some sham front, but a perfectly legitimate, licensed business. More than that, actually, his was a promising effort to help Edmonton, often northern Alberta, get some national attention as a potential center of moviemaking, like what had happened in Toronto and Vancouver. And Mark Twitchell was very good at drumming up attention and money from local investors like John Pinsent.

He was a very sharp, bright, young, articulate entrepreneur, exactly the kind of individual that most of us are looking for. So he came to our group. He sold the group, really, I think, on the enthusiasm he was dropping Alec Baldwin, for example, as being someone who had that he had a commitment from basically what he was looking for was ten individuals to put forward $35,000.

Detectives even got a look at the teaser film for Twitchell's next project, the $3.5 million buddy comedy Day Players, in which Mark played the role of director even as he was the director. Sort of a hall of mirrors type story. A movie about a movie, about making a movie or something.

Amy is my girl.

You broke up with her, jackass, so.

That doesn't give you the right to.

Guys, can you keep it down back there? We're trying to keep the audio clean for the take. I don't want to have to do this 16 times.

Sorry, sorry.

Fantasy and reality all mixed up somehow. Just to cover the basis, the police interviewed Mark Twichell's crew members and they vouched for him completely and revealed they all shared a passion for Star wars. They loved the whole tale about the Force and the dark side, loved it so much that their first project together was a Star wars fan film called Secrets of the Rebellion. Mark was wildly successful that time at drumming up local media coverage, which is when he started becoming kind of a big deal in Edmonton. He was even interviewed by the CBC.

We keep pretty good pace with Lucasfilm, actually, when it comes to producing the films.

His Washinghouse. No bones about it. A low budget production. But even so, Twichell was able to land one of the original Star wars actors, Jeremy Bullock, who played the bounty hunter Boba Fett. That was enticement enough to get Toronto based actor Sean storer to sign on for a part.

As soon as I found out that I would be playing alongside him, I was like, great, why not? It's a named actor.

Sci-Fi is not storer's thing, though. And once he got to Edmonton, he found the atmosphere on Mark Twichell's set a little too playful, unserious, at least for him. One cringe worthy moment happened when Twichell paraded around the set with a pillow stuffed under his shirt and he said.

He looked like Alfred Hitchcock. And then he wore that for the rest of the day. I thought that was ridiculous. But everybody else thought it was great, laughed and they played it because this is him, and if you don't laugh at his joke, you know what I mean, where there's the alpha in the room and everybody flocks to them. And he was, well, that's what everybody.

Had him as, which certainly fit Mark's reputation, which was that he was a prankster. Well, maybe you have to be if you're trying to start a movie business. Anyway, Mark Twitchell came off squeaky clean. His film company was respected, as was he and Bill Clark and the Edmonton police. Back at square one by the look of things.

What do we got? We got nothing.

Edmonton homicide detective Bill Clark, along with other members of the Edmonton Police Service, felt a little like Alice in the rabbit hole. Their missing man, Johnny Altinger, had vanished without a trace. The only person of any interest at all was a wholesome aspiring movie producer who was once known to love pranks and publicity stunts and who stood up to a Bill Clark grilling with his manners intact. At which point they might have left the poor guy alone, but not quite. Twichell had implicated himself in Altinger's disappearance by admitting he had the man's car. So police were able to get a warrant now to search Twichell's garage, soundstage and his car and his home.

Knock on the door, his wife answers and I tell her who I am and she goes, yeah, she was not happy I was there. And she tells me that, yeah, my husband called me. He's at his lawyer's office and he told me not to talk to you guys. So I'm trying to schmooze her because I want to talk to her a bit and find out anything I can and how much he's been around the house and that type of thing.

What were your impressions of his wife besides the fact that she was agitated and upset? I seemed like a nice person.

Yeah, she seemed really nice. I mean, she's got a little baby. I think it was the child was six months old, little daughter. And I'm feeling bad for her now.

How did she react to this?

Mad. Mad at me. Didn't like the police come, of course. I expected it. Right.

And so police looked through Twichell's home and found very little, at least on the face of it. They seized his computers, which is pretty standard. And when they searched those computers, they uncovered, well, it was an affair. Twitchell had a girlfriend. So inevitably then his wife found out and she kicked him out. And in a matter of days, Mark Twitchell went from happily married indie filmmaker to just another 20 something guy living in his parents basement. And so Detective Clark paid Twitchell's dad and mom a visit. That is a little bit of dad, a lot of mom.

She just struck me as a parent that her son does nothing wrong. Whereas the father wanted to listen to me, he wanted to hear what I had to say. And he listened, but he got overridden.

They set up a surveillance team, 24 hours watch to keep an eye on the house and Twitchell. But his behavior was anything but suspicious. He went on about his business, took meetings with investors about his day Players movie project even picked up a $35,000 check from financial backer John Pinsent.

The Mark Twitchell that I was dealing with was articulate, in control, you know, running his project the way that you would expect any entrepreneur to be running their project.

And in Detective Clark's world, up arrows and down arrows, there was one other huge up arrow in Twichell's favor motive. Or that is to say, the lack of one. Twichell had nothing at all to gain by killing Altinger. There was no love triangle. There was no rivalry, no robbery. And to put it simply, Twichell was not a criminal, didn't have a record, hadn't ever been arrested. So why would a cop, bullheaded or not, remain so determined that this young, married father had somehow made a perfect stranger vanish from the face of the earth? Strange things come to light under the northern sun, especially with the of a search warrant. One of the items seized from moviemaker Mark Twitchell, as mentioned earlier, was his office computer. And on the computer's hard drive, they found the actual raw footage of Twichell's horror movie, filmed right in that dank little two car garage searched earlier by the police. The movie Twichell told the detective about the first time he was questioned.

It's a suspense thriller. Actually, it's a short film. The total runtime's only going to be.

About eight or nine minutes.

House of Cards is what Tritul was calling it, a promotional film. Get enough people talking about this, and he might persuade some investor to anti up the money for a feature length movie.

Action.

In House of Guards, a male killer poses online as a flirtatious woman to entrap his victim, a philandering husband who tells his wife he's heading off to the gym.

I'm off.

Shouldn't be too long.

Just a couple of hours.

But once he arrives at the rendezvous site, the victim is dropped with a stun baton by an assailant wearing a hockey mask. Okay, we're ready for the killer stuff. We are rolling. Killers, take a slight step to the right there. There you go. And action. Frame. Zap. Okay, that was terrible. The victim is then duct taped to a chair and stabbed with a samurai sword, of all things. Murdered, cut up into little bits. Imagine a cross between Friday the 13th in that showtime series Dexter, but on a much lower budget.

Are you rolling?

We're rolling in 5432. Thrust. In one take of that scene, as the killer thrusts the sword into a dummy, a wad of white stuffing comes poking out the other end. And in a snap. A tense drama is transformed into a comedic farce. And that delighted the crew.

Oh, my God.

The victim in this teaser version was played by Edmonton comedian Chris Hayward.

You guys have been a great audience.

Thank you very much for letting me come. So the police decided to have a little chat with Mister Hayward. But Hayward no slouch when it came to the entertainment business, thought the visit from the police must be a prank of some sort.

I worked on reality television. It was one of the first things I got into television on. And, yeah, they throw you curveballs and they have, they have writers and they. I didn't know. I thought, somebody's making this up. This can't be true. This is not a real story.

Police also tracked down Toronto actor Robert Barnsley, who played the starring role in House of Cards. That is the deranged, mask wearing murderer actor. You ready? Ready.

When I saw it on there, I was thinking, great short film. I like the idea of this. It sounds interesting, you know, and of course I want to try to be the killer. I want to be the bad guy.

And Mark Twitchell seemed like a very.

Normal guy trying to do a film.

Nice guy.

Yeah, very nice. Very pleasant.

Playing a serial killer. It was almost too much fun, said Barnsley.

It got kind of scary where I enjoyed it too much.

Well, you got to be the sadist big time, huh?

Absolutely. Yeah. It was very fun for me to play, actually. I really rather enjoyed doing it. I was thinking to myself, oh, God, did I just think that I could do this and make it believable?

Which, said Robert Barnsley, was exactly what director Mark Twitchell seemed to want.

I mean, there was a point where I had to stab the dummy through the chest with a samurai sword and he'd be sitting behind the chair and he'd be leaning in and say, okay, listen, when you're turning the blade, grit your teeth and really show that you're enjoying it.

Well, one set of detectives was questioning people who knew or worked with Mark Twitchell. Another group surfed around Twichell's computers looking for anyone who may have had contact with him online. And that's when they discovered that right about the time Mark Twitchell was filming house of cards, he had friended a 30 something animal trainer and aspiring filmmaker in rural Ohio, a woman named Renee Waring. So an Edmonton detective flew all the way to Cleveland just to question her, where she, quite upfront about it, told him, and later us, about clicking on an intriguing Facebook profile. Dexter Morgan, the murderous main character in that Showtime series Dexter.

There was a picture of Michael C. Hall, and he is the actor that portrays Dexter Morgan on Showtime.

What attracted you to Dexter?

You know, what I love about the show and the books is how he was able to explore that dark side, rationalize that it's okay to kill somebody because this person deserved it in a way.

Yeah. Dangerous territory.

Yeah. But entertaining, and that's not real and particularly fascinating. Very fascinating. Yeah.

So when Waring saw that Michael C. Hall Facebook profile, well, she fired off her friend request. Did you think you were friending the actor himself?

Sure.

You know, you thought it was the actual guy?

Sure. Yeah. But I also thought that, you know, an actor in Hollywood has more things than better things to do than to play around with people on Facebook, you.

Know, except she actually got a response.

I asked him within the second or third email. I said, are you the Michael C. Hall? And he was honest. And he said, no, he was not.

Still, the whole thing was kind of exciting to find a fellow Dexter devotee. So she continued to exchange messages with this imposter. He had expressed interest in you, this.

Guy, just as a friend, in a friendly kind of way. Yeah. You know, flirting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So was this flirtatious tone something that kept going back and forth?

Yeah. Yeah, it did. I'm a flirtat, you know, I don't have a problem admitting that. But, yeah, we did. We flirted back and forth. And I kept asking him, you know, who are you? Who are you, really? Tell me who you are, because I want to see the man behind the mask.

Finally, Renee's Facebook friend relented. His name, he said, was Mark Twitchell.

Once he told me who he was, I checked him out and found out that he was an independent filmmaker.

Now that is interesting.

That's very interesting. It was almost like a dream come.

True because Renee Waring's lifelong dream was to be a movie maker herself. And now, out of the blue, here was this guy who had the skills and connections to make that happen.

He expressed interest in me and my writing styles and said, I just think that we have, you know, like, chemistry together and how we'd be able to work very well together. And we thought a lot alike.

This had to be pretty exciting.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I get to break out from being a dog trainer and go, you know, work on a movie and finally have a movie made that people will see and enjoy. Sure.

You offered some ideas.

Yeah.

What. What ideas did you have in mind?

You know, I asked him what he was working on, and then he told me that he was working on and just finished his house. Of cards, which was about a serial killer. But he wanted to pursue more of that, and he wanted to really, you know, maybe do something. And I said, well, why not a female serial killer? Why does it gotta be a guy, you know? And are we a product of our environment or are we born that way? Are we a, you know, a psychopath or a serial killer? And what brings us to that point to do that? And I said, you know, let's explore.

That in a story.

Sure, in a story. And we had talked about our ideas, our hypotheticals of how would you kill somebody and get away with it?

Dark. Oh, yes. But all in fun, of course, and entertaining. And so they passed story ideas back and forth almost every day. It was later when Edmonton detectives dug out the content on Mark Twitchell's computer and found that very kind of thing. Here's the opening paragraph as read by a voice actor. This is a story of my progression into becoming a serial killer. There was something about urgently exploring my dark side that greatly appealed to me. There's a magic in stories, the alchemy that brings imagination, fantasy to life. The cops job was to figure out, was this fiction or was it real?

We had huge discussions in the office about this. There were guys that were, after reading it went on, I'm 50 50, you know, I don't know. You know, I don't get tunnel vision. Guys don't get. There's another explanation here, you know, is it false? Is it true?

Coming up next on the man in the black mask.

As soon as all this happened, I thought, you know what? This is a publicity stunt gone bad. I thought he was just trying to hype this new movie that he's gonna do. And at the end of the day, 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?

The man in the black mask is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Vince Serla is the producer. Brian Drew, Deb Brown and Marshall Hausfeld are audio editors. Justin Ratchford as fuel producer. Leslie Grossman is program coordinator, Adam Gorefane 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.