The Fregoli Delusion Read Online Free PDF Page A

lunch wagon down at the corner. At the moment, however, he
looked to Hank more like a father struggling to protect his son.
    “Brett has a condition,” he said
finally. “We don’t normally talk about it to other people because we want Brett
to have as normal a life as possible. He started having difficulties as a
junior in high school. He attended Jesper Logan–”
    “The private school?” Karen
interrupted.
    “Yes, Detective. The expensive
one. He wasn’t athletic at all and his grades were mediocre at best and he’s
very introverted so he wasn’t very popular. He kept to himself. He endured
hazing and bullying, and we had to talk to the headmaster about it several
times. Brett was very depressed that year, but we told ourselves it was just
adolescence, something we all go through.
    “After graduation he enrolled at
the University of Baltimore to do a program in communications. He lived in
residence on campus. His first year went okay but he ran into a lot of problems
as a sophomore. Behavioral issues, mood problems, paranoia. He was drinking a
lot, getting into trouble that way. We brought him home, and the doctors
diagnosed him as schizophrenic. We were devastated. He went on medication for
it, and his psychiatrist at the time suggested he go back to school, that it
would be good for him to pick up where he’d left off. We compromised by getting
him transferred to State so he could live at home and continue his degree here
in Glendale. It went all right for a few months, then he started drinking
again, skipped his medication, and went off the rails. The paranoia escalated.
We were very upset and took him to a different psychiatrist. She worked with
him for a year and then told us he had something called Fregoli syndrome in
addition to the schizophrenia.”
    “Jesus Christ on a stick. What the
hell’s that?” Karen asked.
    Walter spread his hands. “I was
just as skeptical as you, Detective. But believe me, after ten years of living
with this I understand it almost as well as Dr. Caldwell.”
    “Dr. Sally Caldwell?” Hank asked.
“That’s his psychiatrist?”
    “Yes.”
    Karen rolled her eyes. Hank shook
his head microscopically at her. Dr. Sally Caldwell was a celebrity
psychiatrist who’d published several books and regularly appeared on television
as a popular guest on talk shows and news programs. He’d actually read one of
her books, on body language, and thought it was good, although it didn’t really
have anything new to say on the subject. Just the same, he understood Karen’s
reaction. A problem witness with a celebrity psychiatrist at the center of a
murder investigation in which the victim was the fifth-richest man in the state
was not a situation that would make any detective feel particularly
comfortable.
    “What did she say about this
condition of Brett’s?”
    “It’s a disorder in which the
person believes they’re being stalked by a particular individual who’s disguised
as various other people,” Walter said. “It’s apparently a rare form of what
they call delusional misidentification syndrome, DMS, where the person has what
she calls a disturbed familiarity with people. The area of the brain that
handles facial recognition doesn’t function properly all the time. There are
different forms of it, I guess, but Brett has what they call Fregoli syndrome.
He has a paranoid belief that a specific person is persecuting him. At first
they thought it was just the schizophrenia, but Dr. Caldwell recognized a very
specific pattern and realized it was this other syndrome on top of it.”
    “Specific pattern,” Hank prompted.
    “When he was in high school,”
Walter said, with obvious reluctance, “there was one boy in particular who
picked on him. It was hard to get Brett to talk about it, but when he did it
was always this same boy who was beating him up and tormenting him. We went to
the headmaster a number of times, and he spoke to the boy. Several times he
admitted to