Edmonton’s Twitchell case gets two-hour Dateline special

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This article was published 16/09/2011 (5443 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The sordid tale of Mark Twitchell, the amateur filmmaker who killed an Edmonton man, will be the subject of a U.S. investigative television program tonight.

The convicted murderer is the focus of a two-hour instalment of NBC’s Dateline (8 p.m.), hosted by reporter Keith Morrison.

Morrison told Postmedia News the Twitchell case was too strange to stay away from.

“You know, we’re in this line of work at Dateline, most of the time, telling true crime stories these days and the Mark Twitchell story was just so extremely unusual and odd in almost every way that it deserved following,” Morrison said.

Twitchell was convicted earlier this year of first-degree murder for killing Johnny Altinger. Twitchell lured Altinger to a rented garage by posing as a woman online looking for a date.

Morrison, a former CTV news anchor, said reading Twitchell’s diary, which formed the bulk of the evidence against the convicted murderer, really surprised him. In the diary, Twitchell says he related to the television character Dexter — who, in the Showtime series, roams Miami murdering people for the greater good of society.

“He felt an affinity to that person because he recognized that he was a psychopath,” Morrison said. “Not a sociopath, he said he had fine parents, he didn’t behave like a sociopath. He had a good upbringing and his behaviour was much more in line with that psychopathic behaviour that the Dexter character exhibited in his television show.

“The only difference, of course, was Mark Twitchell picked victims at random,” Morrison said. “He wasn’t trying to rid the world of evil, he simply wanted to know what it was like to kill somebody and dismember them.”

According to the veteran journalist, Twitchell’s two-hour special was given the extra length because it was “particularly complex and interesting.”

— Postmedia News