For years, Mark Twitchell stuck to a single story. The aspiring Edmonton filmmaker – better known as the “Dexter Killer” – always insisted that the 2008 death of Johnny Altinger had been self-defense, a movie stunt that spiraled out of control inside his rented garage. In March 2026, sitting before the Parole Board of Canada, he finally let that story go.

I covered Twitchell’s case in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 2: the fake dating profiles, the hockey mask and stun baton, the “kill room” modeled on his favorite TV show, and the deleted laptop file in which he described becoming a serial killer. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 25 years.

This spring, Twitchell applied for a series of escorted absences from prison – short, supervised visits to see his parents in Edmonton. The proposed outings would have kept him under the constant watch of two armed correctional officers, with no contact with the public. On March 12, the board turned him down.

Its reasoning had less to do with Twitchell than with the people he left behind. While the board agreed he had made genuine behavioural progress and would be a “manageable risk,” it said it also had to weigh “the possible psychological impacts on the victims from you visiting the city in which they reside.”

What stood out most, though, was what Twitchell admitted along the way. He told the board he had begun to wonder “about the mysteries of what the experience of killing would be like” – that curiosity, not self-defense, had planted the seed. It was about as close as he has ever come to confirming what investigators argued at trial all along: that Johnny Altinger was lured into that garage to die.

Now 46, Twitchell is serving his sentence at the medium-security Bowden Institution in central Alberta, having started out in a maximum-security prison in Saskatchewan. He has married for a third time behind bars and says therapy has made him “an entirely different person.” He will not be eligible to apply for full parole until 2033.

He may well be a changed man. But at the hearing he also said, “I don’t deserve to be forgiven. But I would really like a shot at redeeming myself.” For now, the board has decided that shot will not include a trip back to the city where Johnny Altinger’s family still lives.