Canada: Your Friendly, ‘Dexter’-Obsessed, Decapitating Psychopaths To The North!

You’ll have to forgive us for being a little too preoccupied with events going on in our own backyards and stateside to notice what’s been going on lately up in Canada. Let’s see: last we checked in, a Chinese immigrant on a Greyhound bus that boarded in Edmonton had decapitated and cannibalised another passenger on a desolate stretch of highway—definitely one of those instances where all the universal health care in the world isn’t really going to do much good. Now comes news of a Dexter-obsessed, suspected serial killer living in the same bloodcicle wasteland, named Mark Andrew Twitchell.

Some background: An Edmonton local named Johnny Brian Altinger went mysteriously missing early in October after setting up an internet date with a woman he had never met. Cops seized a screenplay by filmmaker Twitchell in which a male killer who works in a forensics unit (just like Dex) lures “a cheating husband to his death through an Internet dating scam in which he pretends to be a woman.” In the story, the husband is decapitated with a power saw.

Twitchell was arrested on Halloween night, on suspicion of having enacted out his murderous fantasies on Altinger in his garage (pictured). Told of the development, Dexter EP Melissa Rosenberg admitted the gruesome crime confirmed her worst, “our lovable leading serial killer has finally reaped what he’s sown!” fears:

Melissa Rosenberg, the show’s executive producer, was visibly shocked on the weekend when she learned about the first-degree murder charges laid against Edmonton filmmaker Peter Twitchell, an avid Dexter fan.

“Oh Jesus!” she exclaimed. She saw this as a “worst fears” situation — something which had worried the show’s creators from the beginning.

“This is a tragic and horrible thing to hear.”

“Every time you think you’re identifying with Dexter and rooting for him, for us it’s about turning that back on you and saying: ‘You may think that he’s doing good, but he’s a monster. He’s killing because he’s a monster.’”

We suppose this will reignite the TV-violence-begetting-violence debate that has raged since the dawn of Quincy. But really, now— if a deranged murderer is going to lure an innocent to their death, you can’t really blame their favourite serial-killer-glorifying show that just happens to fetishise the finer points of blood-spatter physics and scalpel-technique every week. Can you?

• Alleged copycat killing is nightmare come true for Dexter producer [Vancouver Sun]
• ‘Killer’ garage lures curious [TheStar.com]