Accused Edmonton killer admits sharing homicide hints posing as Dexter on web

Accused murderer Mark Twitchell admits he shared tips about how to kill someone and cut up a body with a friend he met on Facebook while using the name of a TV serial killer.

The friend, Renee Waring, told Twitchell’s first-degree murder trial on Wednesday that the two exchanged messages and emails in the fall of 2008 that included “dark thoughts” and “dark fantasies.”

Twitchell, 31, is accused of killing Johnny Altinger, who was 38, on Oct. 10, 2008, in an Edmonton garage, chopping up the body, burning it and disposing of the remains in a sewer.

Waring testified that she told Twitchell she wanted to kill her former husband’s new wife, chop her into pieces and draw little circles with her blood.

Twitchell, using the pseudonym of TV serial killer Dexter Morgan, replied with gruesome advice on how to kill and dispose of a corpse without leaving a lot of blood.

“Although I appreciate your dark fantasy about skeletor, it is impractical,” he wrote on Oct. 3, 2008. “It leaves behind way too much forensic evidence and you are too close to the situation with motive creeping out of your pores.

“If you really want to make this happen and get away with it, prepare a kill room, the same way Dex does. Wall-to-wall plastic sheeting.”

Twitchell told court through his lawyer that he wrote the messages.

The Crown has already entered into evidence Twitchell’s books and DVDs about Dexter, a fictional character, who works as a Miami police blood spatter expert and moonlights as a vigilante serial killer.

Twitchell went on to advise Waring, who was also a fan of the “Dexter” TV show, to get a stun gun to immobilize her victim, get plenty of hefty garbage bags for the body parts, remove the teeth to make it difficult to identify the corpse and then burn the remains, she said.

“Ideally you would want to incinerate the entire body, but this requires exhaustive location planning and a suitable container as well as fuel. Otherwise, you can just dump the bags loaded with rocks Dexter-style into a large body of water.”

Twitchell’s homicide hints closely mirror a diary Edmonton police forensic experts found in deleted files on Twitchell’s laptop computer. While Twitchell’s name isn’t mentioned, the Crown contends that he wrote the diary and that it chronicles the killing of Altinger.

Waring testified that when she first started corresponding with the person using the name “Dexter Morgan” on Facebook, she wasn’t sure who she was communicating with. She thought it might be the show’s star, Michael C. Hall.

“Dexter Morgan” replied that he wasn’t the star, but a filmmaker named Mark who was working on a psychological thriller about a serial killer who kidnaps men.

Waring, who testified by closed-circuit television from Ohio, said she replied to Twitchell’s advice by saying she would need a male accomplice to pull off such a crime.

“Getting her would be easy, yes,” Waring wrote. “A stun gun, that’s a good idea, but I think when it came to cutting her up into little pieces, I would choke.

“But I think I could watch it happen and possibly assist. I don’t think I could do it all by myself. I would need a male counterpart, someone with a bit more strength to get things done faster. Don’t you need a good bit of heft to pull bones apart? Plus that is a lot of cleanup.”

Prosecutors have said Twitchell posed as a woman on an Internet dating site to lure Altinger to the garage with promises of an intimate encounter. The diary calls the garage a “kill room” where the writer says he will enjoy his “play time.”

He has pleaded not guilty to murder, but told court at the beginning of the trial that he would admit to interfering with human remains. The offer was not accepted.