Travis Vader back in court in Edmonton

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/decision-travis-vader-case-could-120000104.html

Travis Vader murder convictions vacated, guilty of manslaughter instead
https://t.co/Z76TnYvpVG

— National Newswatch (@natnewswatch) October 31, 2016

Mark Twitchell the stupidest murderer in a long time

STUPID AND GUILTY, or guilty and guilty of being stupid.

He's the stupidest murderer in recent Canadian history, stupid as alleged by me, murderer as found by Alberta Justice (and Edmonton Police Service no doubt had their own opinion of Mark Twitchell).

The account was this: 
 

I've been following the news reports of the trial that began in middle of March 2011, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I don`t think it should be such a long trial, since it is set for four weeks, the trial of Mark Twitchell. It is underway for the alleged murder of Johnny Atlinger. In fact, considering the accused made a late-stage admission of interfering with a corpse, it appears it should hardly be a trial at all, except I allege that he is far too stupid to confess.
 

It is only my opinion, that I am surprised the killer was smart enough to pull it off. He seems to be one of the stupidest killers we have seen in Canada in a long time. Apparently he aspires to being a serial killer, according to something he wrote on his laptop. The laptop contains a short 'script' for a 'short' movie. Upon closer reading, it is little more than a set of crib-notes for Twitchell to follow in case he forgets what he has to do next. He'll never make it as a script writer. I have a question: If this guy Mark Twitchell is that stupid, exactly how gullible did Johnny Atlinger have to be?
 

Online there is an Edmonton Police Service detective interview of 2:00 A.M. Oct 19 2008. This interview occurred a few hours after Twitchell had been interviewed at the garage on the city's south side. 

Twitchell lived in St. Albert, Alberta, north of Edmonton, and he was sort of unemployable by his own admission. "I like to work where I can make a difference. I worked at Telus," he says on tape. Only an eternal optimist or a borderline psychopath would think he's making a difference by working at a large multi-national telecom conglomeration.

The video tape interview with Detective Tabler begins delving into the 'disappearance' of Johnny Atlinger. This interview in fact took place several hours after a previous interview done at 6:00 P.M., the evening before, by a couple of police constables who entered the garage. They saw there a scorched steel barrel and smelled something pungent. Twitchell admitted to renting the garage, he told Det. Tabler, in September for $175 a month.
 

He explained the windows were all covered because the dingy garage was a movie-set/studio/storage place. Mark Twitchell was an aspiring filmmaker, he explains on the police interrogation video tape, and he launches into a ten minute soliloquy on why its the only life for him, making films, being a film maker, selling tickets. He claims to have memory problems during the interview after Detective Mike Tabler drags a dissembling Twitchell back to the crime scene, inquiring about Twitchell`s visitations to the garage during the disappearance of Atlinger, Oct 10, 2008.

This particular account by Twitchell is telling, as he describes the business of returning to the garage after a film shoot of late September, and a clean-up is underway, to which Twitchell brings his cleaning equipment, because in the film industry they use a lot of corn syrup and red food dye to simulate blood. If Twitchell is following the script he wrote (or consulting crib notes in the murder he committed) he had a lot of cleaning to do in that garage, or movie s set, or crime scene.

In the heart of the interview with Det. Tabler, Twitchell describes a film shooting in the garage that occurred in late September, and during the sword stabbing scene they got corn syrup all over the chair, and the floor. The stuff was everywhere, he said, without a hint of disgust. And he had to dissemble even more about the effort he would make to clean it up, and the story is haunting, surreal, hard to distinguish a sense of reality in it. At this point during the interview, Det. Tabler, not facing the camera, seems to sit uncomfortably still, listening. This is only ten days after the police received reports that Johnny Atlinger was missing, and at the same time, Atlinger-originating messages were circulating on the internet and through emails.

 The court heard testimony about a ham-handed attempt to 'cover-up' the disappearance of Johnny Atlinger, 38. Twitchell had Atlinger's 2005 Mazda, fer instance, 'cause, duh, he bought it from a guy at a gas station in south Edmonton for $40. (I lived in Edmonton. They don't sell five-year-old Japanese imports at gas stations for $40, so don't start flocking to Edmonton for great deals on cars. Twitchell is lying.)

 Then emails and internet postings alluded to Atlinger's sudden departure to a place called heaven, which was being described as Costa Rica, with a woman that Johnny Atlinger had recently befriended (possibly post-mortem, making it thus a truly ethereal romance. A fact we shall probably learn much later is that Twitchell possibly revived Atlinger and extracted personal information like identification, passwords, etcetera, then proceeded with the plan to become a serial killer. It was in the crib-notes (okay, effen script). Or is he a serial killer already? 

Is Atlinger the first, or the last, and given Twitchell's penchant for crib notes, is there a old list somewhere (or another list of instructions to idiot rather undisguised as a lousy movie script?

Dziekanski inquiry on hold, taser-related dying continues

Since the Taser won't go away as a source of controversy, Crime Watch Canada like all rest will continue to report on it. But in so many incident reports one thing seems to be apparent. A lot of those controversial deaths are going to happen to these people from the start. The storyline almost always gives these persons a one-way ticket to die. Tasers don't kill these people, it seems; but Tasers don't prevent the outcome and then Tasers get a bad rap for being engaged in the mortifying event.

A possible example of how this might occur went down twice in the same week, first in Edmonton, then in Calgary in the same recent week. The events occurred in a mirror because of the strange calamity that shepherded each of the dying on their one-way ride. Within the same frame-of-time, the same frame-of-mind probably, Trevor Grimolfson died Oct. 29, 2008, at age 38, in Edmonton. And Gordon Bowes died Nov. 1, 2008, at age 31, in Calgary. Both men were tasered in the moments before death.

Trevor Grimolfson died after police deployed a Taser to stop his wrecking spree of pawn shop on the low-track street in Edmonton called Stony Plain Road. Police fired two Taser shots but Grimolfson continued to resist until he was handcuffed and unconscious. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

His terrible last run was staged in the city's rough and getting rougher west end. The report begins with the deceased in a wild-eyed craze confronting a private contractor in a tattoo parlour, whereupon Grimolfson tumbled onto the commercial street and went next-door. He entered into a pawn shop on the corner of Stony Plain Road and 153rd Street, and this all happened before noon. During the unfolding event a close witness said Grimolfson "appeared to be agitated and sweating profusely." A few minutes later he was dead.

Gordon Walker Bowe, 30, of Castlegar, B.C., was caught in a remarkably similar condition, Nov. 1, 2008, in the act of committing a break and enter. First he was tilting and careening down a residential street and harassing people on their property. He appeared drugged and sorely agitated, and finally a concerned community member phoned police when Bowe zeroed in on her property.

Apparently he dove through a window and skittered around the basement of a vacant duplex next to her, and he wouldn't come out when the police found him. They tasered him when he refused to comply with the command to surrender. His medical distress ensued after Bowes was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed. EMS assessed and transported him to hospital where he died. Police said the Taser failed or appeared to fail to stop Bowes, who was clearly drug impaired when he fell head-first "through a plate glass window."

It may be accurate to say the suspects brought death upon themselves. In reality autopsy will clear up any mystery about the toxicology in their makeup. Regarding the case of Bowes, to say the least, "It wasn't a successful deployment of the taser for this individual," said John Dooks of the Calgary Police Association to the media, "I would say regardless of whether the taser worked or not, this individual died as a result of his own actions." The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) is investigating both the Calgary and the Edmonton incidents. "ASIRT is an independent agency of the Solicitor General and Public Security department that investigates incidents involving police that result in death or serious injury." (Source: Alberta Solictor General)

It was a year ago in October that Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, 40, died after being tasered by a squad of four RCMP police officers, about 25 seconds into the interview at the Vancouver airport (YVR) customs lounge. He was electro-shocked before any threats had been uttered, but video from a cell phone or digital camera shows Dziekanski not a well man in the minutes leading up to death. These were recorded on camera and watched on Youtube a few million times. Dziekanski was tossing around furniture and didn't seem to know which way to turn. Suddenly he was buried under a pile of officers and equally fast he was dead.

In the face of a massive public outcry against tasering the nation's visitors at the gates, the province of B.C. announced a public inquiry into the Dziekanski incident. It was recently put on hold until January while the Crown decides whether to press charges against the acting officers. Meanwhile, other inquiries are questioning what happened in the Dziekanski death, and what is happening with Tasers.

There is no doubt Taser use is a serious issue, but just how serious comes into question after reading about the odd flick of the Taser switch that occurred earlier this year. It was reported in all the nation's media on May 9, 2008, that an 82-year-old patient was tasered in his hospital bed in Kamloops, B.C.. The RCMP had responded to a call from a nurses station about a cantankerous 82 year old man raising hell in his hospital room.

Nurses phoned police when he pulled a knife out of his hospital gown pocket. When police came in his room, he refused to relinquish the knife, and, "And then, bang, bang, bang, three times with the laser, and I tell you, I never want that again," said Frank Lasser. The former prison guard learned a snappy lesson about taking a knife into the hospital.