Convicted murderer Mark Twitchell, who made international headlines for mirroring his crimes to that of the serial killer TV show Dexter, has been denied temporary leave from prison to visit his parents.

The Parole Board of Canada, in a decision Thursday, said Twitchell is making behavioural progress in prison and would be a manageable risk if given leave.

But the parole panel denied his application, noting, “We must also remain cognizant of the possible psychological impacts on the victims from you visiting the city in which they reside.”

Twitchell is now incarcerated at the medium-security Bowden Institution in central Alberta, serving a life sentence for first-degree murder in the death of Johnny Altinger in 2008.

During his 2011 murder trial in Edmonton, court heard Altinger thought he was going to meet a woman he met online when he showed up at a garage rented by Twitchell in southeast Edmonton’s Mill Woods area.

Twitchell, an amateur filmmaker, clobbered Altinger and stabbed him in the chest before dismembering his body and dumping it in the sewer.

He was convicted in 2011 after his trial heard that investigators found a document on his laptop that detailed the murder in graphic detail and spoke of his desire to become a serial killer like the fictional character Dexter Morgan.

The garage Twitchell rented was also dressed up as the plastic-wrapped “kill room” to match the one on Dexter.

At the parole board hearing, Twitchell continued to downplay the TV show’s inspiration for his crimes, saying that he became detached from reality when writing a script for a psychological thriller he was working on.

“I tried so hard to craft a convincing character who saw murder as a vocation,” he told the board. “I thought I needed motives and ideas for this figure to sell the audience fully that the fiction was, in fact, based on reality.”

He said he then started going down a “rabbit hole” and began to wonder about the experience of what killing would be like.

However, he said the Dexter influence was “massively overstated” during his trial and outside influences didn’t play a big role in the lead-up to his crimes.

Twitchell said he did not do any research or watch videos online on how to kill someone. He admitted during the hearing that he did not know the definition of a snuff film — a film depicting an actual killing — until someone brought it up during the police investigation.

He said that several months before killing Altinger, he started living a double life, lying to his then-wife that he was holding a steady job instead of pursuing the film career she did not support.

He was also having an extramarital affair.

Twitchell described himself as going through an existential crisis that brought with it a deteriorating self-worth and an “erosion of my moral compass.” He said he began compartmentalizing and escaping into fantasies that involved his film work.

He acknowledged that he had always been a selfish person, but said violence is naturally not part of his character.

During his trial, court heard that Twitchell lured another man to the garage before killing Altinger. He tried to subdue the first man, Gilles Tetreault, but Tetreault managed to fight back and flee.

Twitchell has said he did not intend to hurt the men, but wanted them to participate in a publicity hoax to help them get an online buzz going about a movie he shot.

He told his trial that he never explained the hoax idea to Tetreault, because he decided to scare him instead by pretending he was actually being attacked. He said he did explain the prank to Altinger, but it made him mad. Twitchell said he stabbed Altinger in self-defence.

“When it came to my hoax project, it was not so much about informing anybody about it and that was a giant red flag,” Twitchell told the parole board Thursday.

“(It was) a delusion I needed to hang on to in order to continue my crime process.”

The parole board noted that Twitchell displayed narcissistic tendencies when he was first incarcerated and writings were found that were violent in nature.

Twitchell described the writings as “toxic emotional soup” and was unable to process what was going on at the time.

He said he then started therapy and continues sessions with the same psychologist. He said therapy has given him a more realistic understanding of his actions and the effect they have on other people.

“I’m an entirely different person,” he told the parole board.

The parole board said denying Twitchell leave would not affect his ability to foster the positive relationship he has with his parents. It noted that he has only asked for private visits with his wife in prison, not his parents.

Twitchell said that if the temporary leave were granted, it would also help him in his effort to go from a medium-risk assessment in prison to a minimum one.

In turn, that would allow him to pursue a carpentry program in minimum security.

“I don’t deserve to be forgiven,” Twitchell said. “But I would really like a shot at redeeming myself.”

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