Convicted killer Mark Twitchell played with victim’s skull, says court document

Some of the description in convicted murderer Mark Twitchell’s alleged diary was so lurid that the Crown, defence and judge decided it was too inflammatory to be presented to the jury.

Twitchell, 31, was convicted of first-degree murder Tuesday for killing a stranger, Johnny Altinger, at a southside garage on Oct. 10, 2008.

The evidence the jury didn’t hear was at times as disturbing as the facts they did hear.

WARNING: Graphic content may disturb some readers.

Twitchell, if one passage on the document found on his laptop is true, cut the head off his victim and played with it like a hand puppet.

“I grabbed his jaw with my gloved hand and moved it while making a funny voice to make it look like it was talking, and chuckled to myself at the total silliness of it all,” it read.

The passage was among many that were under a publication ban until the jury was sequestered Tuesday afternoon to reach a verdict.

Although the names and places were fictionalized, the Crown suggested the document described real events in Twitchell’s life surrounding the death of Altinger.

Twitchell admitted authoring the document, which was written in the first person and titled “SKConfessions.”

Twitchell said SK stood for his writing hero Stephen King but said it also meant “serial killer.”

The opening line was, “This is the story of my progression into becoming a serial killer.”

However, he insisted it was a work of fiction based loosely on the events of his life.

He admitted he lured Altinger, and another stranger a week earlier, to the garage — but said it was not to harm them.

He did it as a prank, he said, to encourage them to help hype a slasher-movie project of his.

The first man, Gilles Tetreault, managed to fight back and flee the garage, just as described in the document.

But Twitchell testified that Altinger got angry when he learned of the prank and attacked him. In self defence, Twitchell said, he knifed him in the heart, then panicked and cut up the body and dumped it down a sewer.

The “SKConfessions” document described the death of the Altinger character, named Jim, as a cold-blooded attack with a pipe, followed by graphic details of the dismemberment, including the line about working the jaw of the skull.

Twitchell was not asked by either Crown or defence to affirm or refute specific aspects of the actual dismemberment, but did not take issue in court with what was written about the dismemberment in the document.

That information and similar notes were not presented to the jury because the judge agreed with Crown prosecutors and the defence that the inflammatory nature of the material outweighed its value as evidence.

Among the other information not shown to the jury were the author’s thoughts on organized religion and on murdering human beings.

Religion, he wrote, is for suckers.

“There are no deities or religious undertones in my life at all,” he wrote.

“I have no place for them and I find the whole concept of religion detestable. It’s all a big, corrupt power grab designed to take advantage of simple-minded common folk.”

He talked about cutting open the torso of the victim and watching the organs slowly collapse. “If I had a sense of smell this might be disgusting for me. But I only find it fascinating.”

The author talked about killing. “Most people fantasize and it only ever stays a fantasy. They don’t have the disposition or the stomach to go all the way with their dark urges. But I do.”

Later he went on: “I do not have any reservations about disposing of the negative people in this world who deserve a one-way ticket to the afterlife, if such a thing exits.”

He said one person he really wanted to dispatch was an ex-boss.

The man, he wrote, was “a twisted old fart who hated life and everything in it. I owed it to the world to remove him from its glorious surface and would take my chance when I was ready.”

The author also self-diagnosed himself as mentally unstable, but Justice Terry Clackson ruled the jury should not hear it because the terminology was emotionally loaded and that Twitchell, if he was writing it as the truth, would not be in a position to properly diagnose himself.

“I had found out through introspection and discussions with therapists that I am in fact a psychopath in almost every clinically defined sense,” he wrote.

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