Renee Polreis says her son was fatefully scarred by his infancy in a Russian orphanage. Prosecutors say she killed him.

Northern Colorado is the nation's center for the treatment of attachment disorder. Norton himself trained with Dr. Foster Cline of the Attachment Center at Evergreen, the most well-known purveyor of attachment disorder diagnoses and therapies. According to statements given to police by Polreis's friends, Norton told her that David's chances of developing a happy bond with the family were slight and that he might well be dangerous and grow up to be a criminal like serial killer Ted Bundy.

In the attachment disorder support group Polreis joined, she heard parents tell how they locked their bedroom doors each night, fearing for their lives. Polreis talked of being so afraid of her son, friends reported to police investigators, that she feared that "if she ever started hitting David, she would not stop."

The brutal nature of holding therapy was tragically proved last January, when Donald Lee Tibbets, 37, a nurse from Midvale, Utah, was sentenced to up to five years in prison for the July 1996 murder of his 3-year-old adopted daughter, Krystal. He killed her using the therapy to cure her attachment disorder, said to have been caused by abuse in her biological home and frequent moves to different foster homes. The therapy, he testified, involved pinning the 35-pound girl to the ground with his body and pressing his fist into her abdomen to evoke and release her pent-up rage. Even when another foster child told Tibbets that Krystal was turning blue and "looked dead," he continued.

Defense Attorney Ed Brass told the court that Tibbets had been taught that the child's loss of consciousness was normal "dissociation" and that she would revive; she died "because Tibbets loved her so much and believed so much in the therapy." He also noted that holding therapy had been recommended by the Utah Division of Family Services when Krystal was adopted.