Dennis McDougal

(Warner Books, 1994)

They were a California success story, with ties that reached all the way to Ronald Reagan. But when police were called to the neat, expensive Miller home they found a monstrous death scene. Within hours they knew the couple’s son Michael had killed and raped his own mother.

The Millers had coddled him and cajoled him. They had tried hypnotherapy and health food. The one thing they never did was confront Michael’s raging schizophrenia, even though the disease had already claimed their older son.

The true story of a hellish crime, a dark family drama, and the wall of secrecy around them both, this is also an important study of how untreated mental illness can explode into depraved violence–even in the best of families.