Filmmaker charged in killing was 'off-centre': former colleague
Last Updated: Thursday, November 6, 2008 | 11:36 AM ET
CBC News
Jim Siokos, shown being interviewed in Davenport, Iowa, says he first met Twitchell in 2004. (CBC)A former colleague of an Edmonton filmmaker accused in a killing that mirrored his movie plot says the man seemed to have lost his sense of reality years ago, but didn't seem capable of murder.
Jim Siokos met accused killer Mark Twitchell in 2004 and later worked with him on a Star Wars fan film, a production inspired by the space fantasy.
Police allege Twitchell, 29, lured John Brian Altinger to a garage in south Edmonton through a dating website with the promise of meeting a beautiful woman and then killed him in a sequence eerily similar to a film Twitchell was making.
In the film, the victim is lured to a garage through the internet, duct-taped to a chair, tortured and cut into pieces, police said.
"Did I ever think he had something like that in him? No, I didn't. Did I think he was a little bit off-centre? Yeah," Siokos told CBC News in an interview from Davenport, Iowa, on Thursday.
When the two met, Twitchell was a filmmaker working at a furniture store in Davenport and Siokos was a schoolteacher and part-time actor. They connected over their shared passion for Star Wars.
"When Mark started to bring up the idea of potentially doing a fan film, I jumped right in and said, 'Hey, I've got a great idea for the Han Solo storyline," said Siokos.
Siokos wrote the screenplay and played Han Solo, while Twitchell directed and produced the film, titledStar Wars: Secrets of the Rebellion, in the summer of 2006.
Unrealistic ambitions
He said Twitchell spent tens of thousands of dollars on the set and flying actors in from around the world, with the lofty goal of creating something on par with the Star Wars films, which were each multimillion-dollar productions.
Mark Andrew Twitchell, shown here during a CBC-TV interview in May 2007 about his filmmaking, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of John Brian Altinger. But after 10 days of shooting, Twitchell's funds ran dry, said Siokos, and that's when the filmmaker's downturn began.
"He made a lot of promises to people. He felt a lot of pressure for making those promises and that might have been something that set him on the path."
Siokos said Twitchell appeared to become a "little bit delusional."
"I think Mark may have lost track of what film was all about. It's for enjoyment. It is for artful purposes and it's not a template to create your person, your character, your actions."
Other details have surfaced about Twitchell in the past days. CBC News learned that he graduated from the radio and television arts program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in 2000. Months later, he married an American woman and moved to Illinois.
Four years later, court documents show the couple divorced after the woman claimed "extreme and repeated mental cruelty." The documents reveal the couple had more than $40,000 in debts.
Twitchell is in custody and charged with first-degree murder in Altinger's death. He is scheduled to appear in court to enter a plea on Nov. 26.
Altinger, 38, was originally from White Rock, B.C., but had been living in Edmonton for the past decade. He was last seen on Oct. 10.
