Review: Couple Found Slain by Mikita Brottman

 TW/CW: Parricide, Mental Illness, Medical Abuse, Imprisonment

I am huge fan of true crime-tv shows, books, documentaries; you name it and I’ve probably watched it or read about it. So, when I was looking for an audiobook to review on NetGalley and saw that a true crime audiobook was available, I jumped all over it. It didn’t take very long for me to realize that Couple Found Slain wasn’t your average true crime book.

Couple Found Slain by author Mikita Brottman chronicles the story of Brian Bechtold, a patient at the Clifford T. Perkins Center, a forensic psychiatric facility. Right off the bat, this story is different because it begins with 22-year-old Brian Bechtold entering a Florida police station and telling the police there that he murdered both of his parents. Found incompetent to stand trial, Brian is sentenced to a psychiatric facility with no determined date of release.

This story is more than the story of a man who killed his parents brutally. It is the story of how the mentally ill can be sent to facilities such as Perkins without a clear treatment plan and no plan for rehabilitation. And as you will read in the book, often they cannot even keep the patients safe from each other.

Brian was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic but later feels that he is cured and should be on the path to be released back into society. Doctors and other medical professionals feel that he is hiding his symptoms and needs to be on psychiatric medication. The medication makes him feel worse. The notes the doctors make on Brian get passed from doctor-to-doctor treating Brian over the years, each adding their own differentiating diagnoses. It becomes difficult to tell what the doctors are seeing in Brian and what they are being told by other professionals and accepting as truth.

This story is well researched and presented well, beginning with Brian’s family history of abuse, the murders of his parents, and moving on to his incarceration in Perkins, and how the desperation to be treated fairly and justly leads to desperation and reckless choices. The writer’s empathy for Brian is evident, but it doesn’t affect their ability to tell his story objectively.

Brian Bechtold entered Clifford T. Perkins in 1992 and remains there until this very day.

4/5 Stars

Thank you to #NetGalley and #MacMillanAudio for providing me with an audiobook version of this book for my review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.