The Strange Case of Dr. Kappler; The Doctor Who Became a Killer

The Strange Case of Dr. Kappler is Keith Ablow's 1994 true-crime nonfiction account of John Kappler, a Massachusetts psychiatrist who murdered his wife in 1989. Ablow is a working forensic psychiatrist (his subsequent career included television commentary work for Fox News), and the book pulls heavily on his own analytical framework as well as on the legal record of the Kappler case.

Ablow is at his strongest analyzing Kappler's professional reputation and the institutional dynamics that allowed warning signs to be overlooked at the hospitals where he worked. The forensic-psychiatric framing is the book's distinctive contribution to the true-crime literature. The book is at its weakest in its narrative pacing, with the early biographical chapters reading more like a clinical case report than like longform journalism.

Recommended for true-crime readers interested in books like The Strange Case of Dr. Kappler in the doctor-as-murderer subgenre (Joan Barthel's A Death in Canaan, Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision), and for readers curious about forensic-psychiatric analysis applied to true-crime narrative. Three stars, with the analytical chapters earning the extra half.