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Read the Bible, then confessed
The confession
His name was Brian Bechtold, and he was 23. He described a 12-gauge shotgun, his father eating breakfast, and his mother in a recliner at their home in Maryland. But he called the whole thing unreal, like something on TV, like he wasn't there. When an officer suggested his parents might simply be at their mobile home in DeLand, Florida, he insisted it had happened. When the officer asked whether he might have dreamed it, he allowed that he might have.
Three days with a Bible
After the shooting he had driven south in his father's car, barely eating or sleeping, hallucinating dead animals all over the highway, and certain the police were following him. At a campsite in Port St. Joe he found a King James Bible in the office and read it all day and all night for three days, stopping only to walk his dog. As he read, he felt his sanity returning. He decided the devil had held him, God was saving him, and Jesus wanted him to turn himself in.
The house in Maryland
The Port St. Joe police contacted Maryland, and officers went to the house. They found a woman dead in a chair in the living room and a man dead face down on the kitchen floor, both killed by a shotgun about ten days earlier. Newspapers, candy wrappers, and cereal boxes had piled up, along with a walking frame, an oxygen tank, and pill bottles.
Why can a killing feel dreamlike afterward?
Doctors describe derealization, a state in which the world feels unreal or dreamlike, as a recognized dissociative response to overwhelming stress. In dissociation, attention and memory split, so events can be stored in fragments or seem to have happened to someone else. Reviews of the research on amnesia for crimes, including work by the psychiatrist Michael Kopelman, found that a substantial minority of people charged with homicide report no memory or only patchy memory of the act.
How does sleep loss cause hallucinations?
Going without sleep for two or three days commonly produces visual distortions and, eventually, hallucinations, because the brain regions that filter and interpret perception stop working reliably. In 1964 a high school student named Randy Gardner stayed awake for about 11 days as a science project while the Stanford sleep researcher William Dement monitored him. Gardner developed trouble concentrating, hallucinations, and paranoid thoughts along the way. He then slept for roughly 14 hours and woke largely recovered.
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