A Double Life

In June 2015, Teresa Sievers, a physician in Bonita Springs, Florida, was found beaten to death in her own kitchen. She ran a successful practice focused on anti-aging and holistic medicine, and colleagues and patients thought so highly of her that she was nicknamed a "modern-day Mother Teresa." Her husband, Mark, a former nurse, handled the business side of the clinic and home-schooled their two daughters. From the outside, the family looked like the picture of a good life.

Mark could not have been the killer, at least not by his own hand: he and the girls were on a family holiday in New York when it happened. Early signs suggested a burglary that had turned violent, but investigators soon saw that Teresa had been singled out. Friends and relatives were stunned that anyone could hate a woman so admired badly enough to kill her.

Beneath the polished surface, though, there were fractures. Teresa's hunger for fame had pushed her toward some dubious choices. The marriage was passionate but stormy. And then there was Mark's closest friend since childhood, a man who resembled him so strongly that people took them for twins, and whose bond with Mark was unusually deep and intimate.

Mikita Brottman, a psychoanalyst and the author of Guilty Creatures, approaches the case from a psychological angle rather than following the usual true crime formula. Her account explores how obsessive love and bitter hatred can feed on each other, and how corrosive, even deadly, both can become.