Couple Found Slain

Critically acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman offers literary true–crime writing at its best, taking us into the life of a murderer after his conviction—when most stories end but the defendant’s life goes on.

On February 21, 1992, twenty-two-year-old Brian Bechtold walked into a police station in Port St. Joe, Florida, and confessed that he’d shot and killed his parents in their family home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said he’d been possessed by the devil. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ruled “not criminally responsible” for the murders on grounds of insanity.

But after the trial, where do the “criminally insane” go? Mikita Brottman reveals Brian”s inner life leading up to the murder, as well as his strange afterlife in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital, neither in prison nor free, where he remains incarcerated to this day. Her spare, fluid writing illuminates the underworld of forensic psych wards in America and the motivations and aspirations of those held there, often indefinitely.

Brottman has known Brian for years, and she weaves his story, her own history of depression and hospitalization, and those of other incarcerated people she has worked with into a fascinating, deeply intimate narrative about what it means to be innocent, guilty, or insane. In the tradition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Couple Found Slain takes us into underworld of forensic psych wards in America and the forgotten lives of those held there, often indefinitely.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company