Welcome back to postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today we are discussing the case of 17-year-old Connor Hilton, who shot two of his friends, Ethan Riley and Benjamin Bleak, after they arrived at his home in Texas for scheduled hangout on December 23rd, 2023.

Ben miraculously survived. But when Ethan died in the hospital, Connor was charged with murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

And his defense that he was on a prescription acne medication called Accutane that completely altered his thoughts and behavior.

So joining me today to talk about this fascinating case at CBS News correspondent Tracy Smith.

Tracy, thank you so much for joining us.

Hi, Edmarie. Thanks for having me.

I want to remind the listeners, if you haven't listened to this 48 hours episode, the audio version, head on over to your podcast feed.

You can find the full audio version just below this episode in the feed.

Go take a listen and then come on back for this conversation.

All right, Tracy, let us get into this very unique defense strategy.

Connor's defense team found an expert in Isot Retinoid, which is the generic version of Accutane. And through this expert, Conner's

defense team argued that Connor was driven to kill due to the side effects of Accutane, which the

expert says caused Connor to have a recurrent homicidal ideation that he simply wasn't able to control.

Now, I know that Accutane comes with side effects, and sometimes those side effects can be, you know, quite powerful, but I'd

never heard of anyone being driven to kill because of it. Yeah, I hadn't heard of it either.

If you look at the label, the label does warn of risk of depression, psychosis, suicide, and aggressive or violent behaviors.

And there have been other homicide cases that people have tried to use acutane as a defense, but none of those have been successful.

As a mom, I know kids who've been on acutane, and it's a wonder drug for a lot of teenagers who struggle with acne, and a lot of people are on this drug and don't suffer any severe adverse reactions.

And we did reach out to JG. Pharma about this case, and they did not respond to our requests for

comment. They are the folks who distribute the acutane that Connor Hilton was on at the time of

the shooting. So then let's talk about the science that the defense's expert presented. What do we

know about it? The defense's expert is Dr. Doug Bremner, and he's a professor of psychiatry and radiology at

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