Introduction
Through our many conversations, through his own written recollections, and by providing me with his psychiatric and police records, Brian Bechtold has helped me write this book. I’ve also relied on other primary documents: court audio and transcripts, police logs, diagrams, photographs, incident reports, and in-person interviews. This is a work of nonfiction; however, some of the dialogue has been re-created based on information from various sources and some of the names and identifying details have been changed.
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Most true crime stories focus on the buildup to the crime, the incident itself, and the quest for justice. They’re propelled by the need to solve a mystery or find resolution. They end, inevitably, with the arrest and confinement of the perpetrator. The prosaic life, lit up for a moment by the thrill of the crime, returns to obscurity. The curtain comes down. But the end of one story is the beginning of another. Most murders are committed by young men under thirty. These men disappear from public view, but they’re still here. Their lives go on: in maximum-security prisons, in forensic hospitals, and even on death row. They change and grow. They develop new interests, form new friendships, work at different jobs. People no longer recognize their names. Eventually, they become middle-aged or elderly, long-timers going about their daily routines: washing floors, cleaning bathrooms, serving food. Sometimes they even return to live quietly among us. One famous example: Nathan Leopold (of the Leopold and Loeb case) was released from prison at age fifty-four, married a widowed florist, and moved to Puerto Rico, where he wrote a well-received book on the island’s bird life.
True crime deals with the victim’s before and after, the community’s suffering, the hunt, the cops, the capture, the trial, the verdict. This book is about another part of the story, the part that begins when the verdict is announced, the sentence handed down. “Couple Found Slain” is a compelling headline. The scene it conjures up is lurid and frightening. It shuts out further thought. It’s like a burst of gunfire, explosive and short-lived.
The rest of the story, dense and messy, lies beneath.
1
Still Life
PORT ST. JOE, FLORIDA
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1992, 1:30 P.M.
Officer Timothy Hightower was finishing up some paperwork at the front desk of police headquarters. It had been a quiet week. The district, whose population was small and mostly rural, had seen its usual share of petty thefts and burglaries, but nothing more serious. Tourists were scarce in February. Scallop season was over. Other than the mosquitoes, the biggest problem was hurricanes, which could move in unpredictably from the Gulf of Mexico to make landfall on Cape San Blas. But it wasn’t the season for storms.
The front door opened. Hightower looked up and saw a young man walking toward the desk. He was thin, pale, and jittery.
“What can I help you with, sir?” the officer asked, suddenly feeling uneasy.
The young man held his gaze. “Something bad happened,” he said.
HILLANDALE, MARYLAND
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 3:15 P.M.
Jim Drewry, a homicide detective in the Montgomery County Police Department, was driving home from work when he picked up a dispatch call on the radio asking for officers to respond to a residence in Hillandale, a suburb of Washington, DC, just north of Silver Spring, to check on the welfare of the occupants.
Because Drewry wasn’t far from the address given by the dispatcher, he decided to drop by and see if he could help out. He arrived at around 3:30 p.m.
The house on Green Forest Drive was a split-level brick home set back about two hundred feet from the road on a slight incline. There were signs of neglect: two empty trash cans sat out in front of the house, the mailbox was full, and a package sat unclaimed on the front porch. The responding officers told Drewry that the house was locked. They’d rung the bell and hammered on the front door, but no one had replied. If the residents were out, Drewry reasoned, they couldn’t have been gone long, because they’d left the television on; he could hear it playing somewhere inside the house. Yet, according to its postmark, the package on the front porch had arrived almost a week ago, and there was a note on the door from someone named Theresa expressing her concern about the residents and asking the police to get in touch.
Drewry went around the back of the house, crossed a small patio, and approached a sliding glass door. Pressing his face against the glass, he could make out what appeared to be a woman sitting in a chair in the living room. Her body was covered by a multicolored quilt; only her head was visible. It was obvious to Drewry that she was dead. He also saw the feet and lower legs of a man lying facedown on the kitchen floor. The detective pulled out his radio and called headquarters. They had a double homicide on their hands.
The sliding doors at the back were locked, and so were the windows. Not wanting to break the glass, Drewry decided to call the Fire and Rescue team and get them to force the doors open. He also placed a call to John Tauber, the Maryland deputy medical examiner. By the time Fire and Rescue had arrived, the crime scene technicians were on the scene, along with four more detectives from the Homicide/Sex division of the Montgomery County Police Department. They entered the house at around 4:40 p.m.
The odor was almost unbearable. The rear door led into an open-plan dining room, which was separated from the kitchen area by a stone-and-wood counter. The chandelier in the dining room was on; so were the overhead lights in the kitchen. A man’s body lay on the kitchen floor. He appeared to have been killed while preparing a meal. On the kitchen table was a bowl containing the remains of what looked like breakfast cereal, and on a plate beside the stove were some bits of fish; fish bones lay on a sheet of aluminum foil. The body was fully clothed, the skin bloated and bluish green. From the state of decomposition, Drewry estimated that the man had been dead for at least ten days. There was a shotgun wound to the back of his right shoulder and some blood splatter on the front of the dishwasher, to the left of his head. On the floor near the body, the red linoleum was black with dried blood, which made Drewry suspect the man may have been moved or rolled over. Both pockets of his pants were empty.
Inside, the place was a mess. The trash hadn’t been taken out for weeks, and the water had been cut off. Dirty dishes and utensils were stacked on the counter and the kitchen table, along with cans of food; a box of Rice Krispies; a spray can of insect repellent; a box of tea bags; bottles of cooking oil, Gatorade, condiments, and medicine; a bag of oranges; an open container of milk; empty takeaway cartons; and a half-eaten baguette.
The woman’s body lay on a recliner beside the living room fireplace, in front of the still-playing television. This body, too, was dark and bloated by decomposition. The skin was coming loose, and the flesh swarmed with maggots. A tube sticking out from under the quilt was connected to an oxygen cylinder on the floor. When police uncovered the woman’s body, they found two shotgun wounds, one to her right breast and the other to the front of her throat. (A gold crucifix around her neck had been damaged by the bullet.) Shotgun pellet holes were also found in the back of the recliner. Police found a spent twelve-gauge shotgun shell on the couch and another on the living room floor by the entryway to the kitchen.
At 5:10 p.m., the medical examiner arrived. Detective Drewry told the responding officers to secure the house, then called the police photographer, Joseph Niebauer, to take shots of the scene. He also placed a call to the State’s Attorney’s Office, informing them of the crime, and another to Bell Funeral Home, asking the mortician to transport the bodies to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore in preparation for autopsy.
Like the rest of the house, the living room looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned for months. The surfaces were dusty, and the floor was ankle-deep in trash: newspapers, telephone directories, candy wrappers, empty boxes of Oreos and breakfast cereal, videocassettes, towels, drinking glasses, dirty utensils, medicine and pill bottles, an electric blanket, a heating pad, wadded-up tissues, various items of clothing, a teddy bear, a walker, pillows, blankets, paper towels, two cans of talcum powder, the leg of a plastic doll, a hairbrush, a Bible, an emesis basin, and an oxygen tank. There was also a TV Guide open to a page on which the phrase “Go to Hell” had been smeared, apparently in blood.
Walking down the hall to the front of the house, Detective Drewry came to a foyer from which a short flight of stairs led down to a basement den. This was just as messy as the living room, only here, all the trash had been pushed to the sides of the room, uncovering a large circle of empty carpet. In the middle of the circle was a black stain, as if something had been spilled or burned there. A blanket had been hung over the window. Near the left wall of the den was a stained couch, an armchair with its stuffing coming out, a table, and a dusty stereo system with two large speakers. The piles of trash contained a pair of jeans, candy wrappers, blankets, plastic bags, more empty Oreo boxes, towels, tissues, magazines, athletic clothing, two tennis rackets, a pair of shorts, peanuts, coins, potato chips, packaging, cassette tapes, an ironing board, a briefcase, and twenty-three empty Coke and Pepsi cans, many of them crushed or flattened. On a side table was the cutoff portion of a shotgun barrel and an empty Styrofoam box that had once contained a shotgun. One of the police officers found the primer end of a twelve-gauge shotgun shell on the bookcase.
Upstairs, in the four bedrooms, things were a little more orderly. The first room Drewry entered appeared to have been unused: the bed was neatly made and the walls bare, apart from a large wooden crucifix. On the dresser lay a pile of blankets, a letter opener, and a Panama hat. The second bedroom he investigated overlooked the backyard and contained a king-size four-poster bed. This bed, too, was neatly made. A bedside tray contained a jumble of pill bottles, medicines, droppers, and tissues. The room was cluttered with cardboard boxes, an inflatable mattress, laundry hampers, and piles of clothes. The two other bedrooms were even more cluttered. The first contained piles of papers, an unmade queen-size bed, and mounds of sheets, pillows, and dirty laundry.
The fourth bedroom was small and narrow. There were four indentations in the door that looked as though they had been made by someone punching the wood with a fist. On the floor around the unmade bed were magazines and piles of dirty laundry. A large television set faced the bed. On top of the television set was a bare lamp with no shade, nine empty Pepsi cans, two half-empty two-liter soda bottles, a glass serving bowl full of quarters, a dish of dried-up used tea bags, an empty bottle of soy sauce, a hairbrush, a stereo, two electric heaters, a nasal spray, and a pile of wadded-up tissues. On top of a chest of drawers were fourteen martial arts trophies. A shelf on the opposite wall held another twelve. To the right of the headboard, on the floor, police found a spent twelve-gauge shotgun shell.
Whatever had happened to this family, Drewry realized, had taken place some time ago; the detritus had been accumulating for years. At the same time, the house still contained recognizable signs of ordinary domestic life: framed baby pictures on the living room wall, dried flower arrangements, Catholic prayer cards attached with magnets to the doors of the fridge. The garage contained a lawn mower, garden tools, and bags of mulch. The valance and tiered curtains in the living room window looked homemade. On a side table in the foyer, clay pots held peace lilies, maidenhair ferns, and fiddle-leaf figs that were growing healthily, oblivious to the surrounding decay.
The call for officers to check on the occupants of the house on Green Forest Drive had come from Detective Joseph Mudano at Montgomery County Police Department headquarters. About an hour before the bodies were discovered, Mudano had received a telephone call from an officer who identified himself as Timothy Hightower of the Port St. Joe Police Department in Florida. Hightower told Mudano that a young man had just come into the station and confessed to shooting his parents in Maryland some time ago—perhaps two weeks or ten days; the young man wasn’t exactly sure.
Hightower told Mudano that the man had given his name as Brian Anthony Bechtold; his parents were George and Dorothy. Mudano had checked the files. There’d been no murders reported in Hillandale during the last two weeks, and no one had reported a retired couple missing. Still, Mudano had put in the call to dispatch, just to be sure.
Now Mudano gave Detective Drewry information about the decedents for the medical examiner’s report. The male victim was George Bechtold, sixty-five, a white male six feet tall and weighing 215 pounds. The female was Dorothy Bechtold, sixty-two, a white female five feet six inches tall and weighing 160 pounds. The suspect in custody in Port St. Joe was their son, Brian Anthony Bechtold, twenty-two, a white male five feet nine inches tall and weighing 150 pounds.
At 7:20 that evening, Drewry obtained a warrant for the arrest of Brian Bechtold on two counts of murder and called Hightower in Port St. Joe with the warrant number. Hightower said he’d secured the car Bechtold had been driving. The suspect had a dog with him, Hightower added, which had been sent to the city pound.
By 8:30 p.m., Detective Drewry had tracked down two of the deceased couple’s daughters and called them to break the news. Cathy Bechtold, thirty-six, lived with her family in Pasadena, Maryland, about half an hour from Hillandale, and Carole Prentiss, thirty-four, lived in Emmitsburg, about an hour away. Once the immediate shock was over, the sisters provided Drewry with some basic information about the suspect. Cathy told the detective that her younger brother was “a loner who did not talk much to anyone,” had spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and had “never been right in the head.” She said she was unsure if he’d ever been diagnosed with any particular condition, but she believed that whatever had been done in terms of mental health treatment was “too little, too late.”
Drewry also tracked down the author of the note left on the Bechtolds’ front door. Theresa Rizak, fifty-five, lived in Hyattsville, a nearby suburb, and identified herself as Dorothy’s closest friend. Mrs. Rizak told the police that eleven days earlier, on Monday, February 10, George Bechtold had dropped by to give her an update on Dorothy’s health. During the visit, he’d mentioned that the couple was planning a trip to Florida, where they owned a vacation home, but Mrs. Rizak didn’t get the impression they were leaving immediately. Over the next few days, she called the Bechtold residence, but got no response. On February 13 or 14, she stopped by the house and left a note on the front door.
“She was always upset over Brian,” said Mrs. Rizak of her friend Dorothy Bechtold. She didn’t know the specifics, she admitted, but she knew he had a history of mental problems. “We had prayer groups for him,” she said. She added that, according to Dorothy, Brian had recently purchased a gun.
Although the Bechtolds had lived on Green Forest Drive for almost twenty years, apparently they kept to themselves. None of the street’s residents knew them well. They described Dorothy Bechtold as an invalid who used an oxygen tank and had a nurse come by to visit her every week. George Bechtold was more elusive. There was a rumor that he was some kind of government scientist. Some thought he was a retired engineer; others said he worked at the U.S. Navy’s nearby Naval Surface Warfare Center.
The neighbors didn’t have much to say about Brian Bechtold, either. They described him as a shy, clean-cut young man who, until recently, had spent most of his time alone with his two Rottweilers. A few months ago, one of the dogs had died. Brian had been seen burying its body in his backyard. A high school student who lived across the street said Brian used to play basketball with the other boys on the block, but he’d stopped a few years ago, becoming quiet and withdrawn. Another neighbor recalled that Brian had gone away to college, but only for a semester, and since then, he’d worked delivering pizza. Everyone agreed that while he had never caused any problems in the neighborhood, he seemed troubled, sullen, and withdrawn.
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The autopsy showed that George Bechtold was shot from behind while sitting at the dinner table eating a bowl of breakfast cereal. Dorothy Bechtold, who was suffering from advanced heart disease, had been shot once from the front and once from the back.
Copyright © 2021 by Mikita Brottman
