Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan (2021) s01e03 Episode Script

To me, I guess, sleep was like death,
because it was an escape.
And when Dr. Wilbur woke me up,
or forced the other
personalities to wake me up,
it scared me to death,
because I had no idea
where I was, what was going on
and I just seen
all these people around me.
In the state that I was in, I thought
I felt everyone in the world was like me.
In the dark side, I am waiting ♪
Even sane, I am waiting ♪
As a child, I remember ♪
Daddy, daddy, all alone ♪
Whoever they are, their aim
is the destruction of Egypt's
Camp David Accord with Israel,
and President Mubarak's moderation
John Travolta
and Olivia Newton John explode in Grease.
William Milligan had been
charged with rape, kidnapping and robbery.
Today, he was found not guilty
for reasons of insanity.
After the hearing,
Billy was sent to
the Athens Mental Health Center
in Athens, Ohio.
The Athens Mental Institution
was a minimum-security facility.
There were no bars
on the windows down there.
There were locked doors,
but it was easy to get in and out
of the Athens Mental Institution.
The reaction of the community
when Billy was sent there
was a strange mixture of pride and fear.
They were proud
because it meant that our place
was respected to take care of a diagnosis
that's very exotic and rare at the time.
On the other hand,
given his history of assault,
people were slightly afraid
that if they let him out too soon,
there could be trouble
with local young women.
I was sent to Athens on a court order
because Athens is considered
not only a think tank
and a learning center,
but they had a specialist down there
named Dr. David Caul
who is renowned in treating people
with my kind of illness.
Our job is to take as intelligent a guess
Make no mistake about it,
that's what we do.
Hopefully, it's a guess
born of knowledge, experience, background,
including some hunches,
intuition, a lot of hard work,
and you make the best guess
you possibly can make.
His job was to restore me
to a reality sense
and to integrate me
back into the community.
A working, productive citizen
and a taxpayer.
Dr. Caul seemed to want to
treat him the same way Harding did,
do art therapy and maybe
finally take some classes
and be able to
integrate back into society,
or at least to integrate into society,
because he never really was.
When Billy first got there,
he was easy to get along with
and he was quite likable.
His relationship with the staff
was interesting,
because half of them
believed in the multiple personality thing
and went along with that diagnosis,
half of them didn't.
He was not very interested
in what was happening with other people.
He was only interested in him and his
whatever his 'want' was of the day.
He would become, you know,
pretty irritable when he was told no.
Uh
Yeah, he could be a
He was never an easy person to deal with.
Dr. Caul wasn't a whole
100% board-certified psychiatrist.
This is an individual who was
learning psychiatry in the hospital.
He was not
formally trained as a psychiatrist,
but it was like, "Okay,
people can take me seriously."
"I have skills.
I have interest. I have whatever."
And this was a platform for him.
So, he had to be
supervised by someone who was,
and this medical television system
connected with Columbus
He could get Dr. Walter Knopp
to sit in the background as it were
and watch the conversation.
I would be behind the camera
tweaking the waveform monitor
and making sure everything was okay,
then Dr. Caul would bring in the patients.
And Billy was usually
a special consultation all by himself.
They would sit down at a table
in front of the camera
and he would hypnotize Billy.
And they'd say,
"We're going to do this or that today."
"We're going to bring out
some personality."
"We're going to talk about an incident."
And then Dr. Caul would say words
that would put Billy in a trance
and when he came out of the trance,
he was a different personality.
My first impression was
that of a frightened young fellow.
Seemed to be ill at ease,
didn't seem to be
very much aware of surroundings.
He was involved with direct communication
at a very simple level,
and it turned out that it was
one of his younger alter-personalities
that was speaking to me
when I first met him.
My first contact with Billy Milligan
was being called to a press conference
that was being held by Dr. Caul
to introduce him to the community.
He wanted me to meet Billy
because he thought
his life story might be important
and they were talking about
collaborating on a book.
Some people, on various occasions,
had come
and wanted to explore Billy's case.
All of a sudden, to me, there was,
"Oh, we're thinking about writing
a book about your brother's life."
Because that's what was hot at the time.
We'd had, Three Faces of Eve,
we'd had Sybil.
Caul mentioned that Daniel Keyes
had written a book
called Flowers for Algernon,
which sort of established his bona fides
in terms of psychodrama in a novel.
So, it was quite a catch
to get someone like Daniel Keyes
to write this book.
About a week later,
I got a phone call from Dr. Caul,
that said, "There's a meeting here,
and Billy's attorneys are here,
and his sister and brother-in-law
and they like you to come down."
We're sitting around the table
and Billy turned to Gary Schweickart,
his public defender who had
come down to Athens to see him,
and he said to me,
"I want you to write my life story."
So, that became kind of a quest for me
to tell this incredible, complex story
of this incredible, complex human being.
That's how the book started
and we said, you know, "Okay."
Because we were under the assumption
that once the book was published
half the proceeds would go to Billy
and half would go to Dr. Keyes.
Daniel Keyes
was there all the time.
Dr. Caul, I think, notified him
when the therapy sessions were scheduled
and he would come up just for that.
Well, Billy had to make himself available
to Daniel Keyes for interviews.
He was expected to cooperate with him
in providing material,
for instance, even giving releases
to see films that had been taken,
let's say, at Harding Hospital.
He didn't know
he was a multiple personality
till he was being observed
for seven months at Harding Hospital.
Does he speak only with the accent,
or does he actually speak the language?
Ragen has written to me in Serbo-Croatian
and I've had to send those letters out
to get them translated
at different universities.
- And they're accurate?
- Accurate. Yes.
In addition to writing in Serbo-Croatian,
which is not easy to do,
except if you're
a Serbo-Croatian, of course,
what other kinds of intelligence
has he demonstrated
in these other personalities
that holds up?
Well, Arthur, the Englishman,
is a brilliant student
of medicine and chemistry.
Does really he know
what he's talking about?
Or does he just use the language
of a scientist or of a medical doctor?
I think he's studied.
Of course, it's difficult for me to tell
because I don't know the stuff myself.
He has the electronics ability,
I've seen what he's constructed.
He has the ability to write Arabic.
I've had them translate it.
I think he knows what he's doing.
I arrived one morning
at the university in Columbus, Ohio,
where Keyes tells me,
"In order for you
to understand straight away,
I'll show you the tapes."
The major question was,
"Is he using manipulation or not?"
If he had played
insanity or schizophrenia,
that would have been it.
I then ask to see Caul.
He says he has treated several cases
and is currently working with Billy.
He filmed Billy
and then showed him all the recordings
in order to show
those alters who weren't aware,
which in Milligan's topology,
if it exists,
some of them aren't aware
of the others' existence.
He tells him that he will
film them all and unify them.
The therapy strategy of Wilbur
was adopted by
the majority of Milligan's therapists.
But there were also other strategies.
Those would be exorcism or adorcism,
which is welcoming the spirits
or personalities that possess you.
I hear a name. I hear a name "Mark."
Uh, a "Shawn."
A "Robert."
Um
Just a few others.
I You know,
I've heard those names before.
That that ring out
in my head when I hear them.
What do you think they mean, Billy?
I don't know.
When Billy got to Athens,
there were a group of other personalities
that allegedly came forward
who were "Undesirables,"
meaning they were not good people,
and that they were kept in the background.
The Undesirables are the people who was
silenced by Arthur.
I control the spot completely.
I say who is on and who is off.
I'd heard that because
of some of the other crimes
that he had been involved in
that didn't seem to fit any
of the original ten personalities,
um, that there was a possibility
that once they get into full treatment,
that is not just about fusing him
to get him through the court hearing,
it it could go very deep.
How many personalities
does this person have?
In the beginning, the world
knew there were ten personalities.
In fact, they were articles:
"The Ten Faces of Billy,"
but after he was sent to the hospital
and I began to work on the book with him,
we discovered that others had been hidden,
and called the "Undesirables,"
and the total now is 24.
This is a painting composed
of seven of Billy's alter personalities
as he envisioned them
at the time that he painted them.
I had originally asked him
to try to paint
all 24 of the personalities,
as an adjunct to therapy.
I thought it might help in his treatment.
There was substantial division
among the staff about,
if not the validity of the diagnosis,
then the extent of having 24 personalities
and a visiting author
who had taken a sabbatical
to come to Athens and write "the book."
People knew that that was happening.
And what sells a book more?
Three personalities or 24?
During that period of time, Daniel,
did it ever occur to you
that one of these guys
is the real Billy Milligan?
I was about to give up
all hope of doing a book.
How do you write about someone
who has amnesia for most of his life?
That's fragmented.
But then, about six weeks into the book,
as I was ready to kick it over,
he fused into the "Teacher."
I don't want
to spend my life in institutions.
I don't want to even
I don't want to spend
any part of my life in institutions.
There's too much world out there.
- Let me ask you something.
- If I don't know everything I feel stupid.
I was dealing with
the most articulate, the most intelligent,
fascinating human being I've ever met.
I never met that person,
I never interacted with that person,
and it was difficult for me to
make that fit in
with what I did know of Billy
and how he functioned.
I kind of struggled to try
to figure out the logic of the Teacher.
How could a person
have the capacity to create that,
um, to create all of the others
and to teach them the things
without having the cognitive experiences?
I don't want to convince anyone
that doesn't believe it exists.
I don't see that as a task.
I can't deal with someone
who knows nothing about this disorder
who tells me, "I don't believe it."
Dr. Caul's involvement with this
was, I think, opportunistic
and sort of fun for him.
Uh, he enjoyed working
with the multiple personalities.
He enjoyed the professional attention
and acclaim that he was getting.
So, he was positively reinforced
throughout this process,
and he knew that
he would be featured in "the book."
My opinion as a clinician is
that that's an extraordinarily bad idea,
because you then have dual relationship.
That shapes what you're doing
and how you report your findings
and all kinds of things,
the interactions with the patient.
The fact that Caul was
particularly concerned with Billy Milligan
is totally normal.
Cornelia Wilbur
had made a fortune with Sybil.
Caul had found his Sybil.
I got on to the story
after two legislators that I knew
from covering the legislature
became concerned about Billy Milligan.
Stinziano was a liberal Democrat,
Ball was a conservative Republican,
and they started tipping me off
about negative things
involving Billy Milligan.
One of them was this report
that was written
by state police authorities,
which severely criticized Dr. Caul
as having a potential
conflict of interest.
Caul was paid $3,000
as a consultant on the book
and Caul also sought permission
from the Ohio Parole Authority
to allow Billy
to go out of state to New York
to appear on television stations
and possibly to go to Hollywood
for a movie that might be made on him.
I feel like after
all of those were revealed
and the books started being written
and all of this discussion,
I felt like we were
starting to lose the goal
of getting him well.
The media was going back and forth,
one way or the other.
They didn't give him a moment's rest.
I can't say it was the healthiest
environment there either,
under all of the spotlight
of the notoriety.
There were a lot of controversies
about Daniel Keyes writing the book.
I think because everyone thought Billy
was going to get rich off of his crimes
That didn't sit well with anyone.
And that's when I think
the politicians really jumped on board
and said, here's my opportunity
to actually use this case
to pass a bill, get publicity
Claire Ball and Mike Stinziano
were co-sponsors of the bill,
um, called
I think it was called the "Milligan Law."
Any money he made from the sale
of a book about him or movie rights
or his paintings or anything else,
would have to go to the state.
If he had a contract already,
if he had a work underway already,
how could you pass a law
that would confiscate any profits
that might come from that?
His, what they called, "treatment team"
would weekly check on his status,
and they ultimately decided
that they were going to allow him to have
what they called "off-campus furloughs."
As a patient gets better,
you allow them more and more freedom.
The people of Athens
were intelligent
and compassionate towards my case.
I have never encountered anyone
to come up on the street
and say anything bad to me.
I think that if the so-called experts
are saying he's safe to be out there
and needs a chance,
I think we ought to try to help them.
I'm definitely against rape,
it's a frightening thing,
but in his case, I didn't feel that way,
I felt he was reaching out
and he needed help.
Billy developed a painting practice.
I mean,
his various characters created artwork
that, because of his notoriety,
people were interested in buying.
He sold paintings
for sometimes thousands of dollars.
He ended up having an art show
in what was then called
the Athens National Bank.
If they do come to see my artwork, um,
I hope it's not because
they're thrill-seeking,
it's because they're interested in art.
I don't want to be analyzed
by my artwork, you see.
I have enough
of that done as it is now, so
I think that the fact
that he was making money
and, you know,
there was a book in progress,
uh, there was some resentment
about that among the staff.
Because it all goes back
to rapes and that sort of thing,
and then this guy
making more money than we are.
You know, that sort of thing.
The question is:
Did he have more privileges?
Was he treated differently?
And certainly yes to both of those.
No other patient
was ever treated the way Billy was.
He took money
from the sale of his paintings
and went out and bought a car,
and it was left on-ground
and he had access to it
during some of his leaves.
So, yeah, he was treated very differently.
Claire Ball and Mike Stinziano
were the politicians
who were trying to get
Billy moved to a more secure facility.
They didn't like the idea
that his treatment included some freedoms.
When Mr. Milligan was at the hospitals,
the psychiatrist
in charge of the hospitals
were able to decide whether or not
he should be granted a leave.
It raised issues with people
who felt that if he was still mentally ill
to the point that he couldn't be released,
he hadn't been restored to health.
So, the legislature did change the law,
then decided that if the person
was going to be given freedom
or some type of leave,
that the hospital would then
have to go back to the court
and request that
permission to do so from the court.
There were a number of incidents
that Billy got into significant problems.
One of them was that
he provided alcohol and drugs
to a number
of young ladies at the hospital,
and went off to one of our orchards,
drinking and having sex,
and doing any number of things
that he was clearly
not supposed to be doing.
This was viewed as, you know,
we're getting perilously close
to what he got convicted of.
We're talking about rapes,
we're talking about people who,
you can make a case, were incompetent.
They were patients
in a psychiatric facility,
and so their abilities to give consent
were certainly compromised
and may have been absent.
So, he was right on the edge
of being involved in another rape again.
And so, people took that pretty seriously.
I first went in to meet him,
he was just coming out of a ward
and there was a nurse there
who said, "You can't talk him,"
and kept trying to interrupt him.
He still told me that he wasn't
getting treatment, he needed help,
and asked me to come back
the following day
and he would make sure there were
arrangements made that we could talk.
When I went back the next day,
I was told by a guard
who blocked me from entering,
that I wasn't permitted on the property
and that, uh, Milligan
was no longer there anyway.
Billy was moved from Athens to Lima
in the middle of the night,
right before I was, um
my wedding.
His transfer to Lima was abrupt.
It was without notice to anyone.
It was felt that it would be accomplished
before anybody could do anything.
Um, but he was moved by court order
and he didn't show up at the wedding,
and that's how we knew
something was wrong.
He was taken there
and put in a maximum-security unit.
What had happened in Athens
turned out to be not as serious
as they initially thought it had been.
And after they realized nobody got harmed
as a result of the being drunk,
it seemed to me
that they should reconsider.
But it was not
the political thing to argue at that time.
Lima State Hospital
was a terrible place.
It was never thought of as a place
where anyone went to get treatment.
It was a place where psychiatric patients
were sent to be warehoused.
When I got in there,
it was like a cafeteria-type room
with folding chairs and tables,
almost like a high school cafeteria.
And he was, at the time, frightened
acting frightened,
and he was pointing
to other people in this visiting room.
"There's the 22-Caliber Killer
over there."
"And that guy over there
killed his wife and children."
He suddenly said, "I'm scared."
He was probably the least harmful
of the people that were there.
He was taken off all the medications
that Dr. Caul and Dr. Harding
had originally prescribed,
and was re-prescribed
new medications by Dr. Lewis Lindner.
He was the attending physician
who was supposed to be
in charge of Billy's case,
but he didn't believe in the diagnosis
and he was not going to have
any nonsense from people like Billy.
They wanted me to go to assess him
for the purposes of a second opinion,
and reading between the lines,
I think they were hoping
I would contradict the diagnosis.
I really didn't try to prove anything,
because I was trusting
Dr. Harding and Dr. Wilbur.
Well, what happens in these situations
is that the conflict becomes intolerable
and then a new personality emerges
that deals with that particular conflict.
At the time I went to Lima,
I was not familiar with the treatment
that might have been offered there.
But, for the most part,
the only treatment
available in the prison hospital
and in most of those facilities was drugs,
which may have been helpful
for people with schizophrenia,
but not for people with
what's called hysterical diagnoses,
people who need
counseling more than medication.
He said that they were
treating him as if he had schizophrenia
and that's a totally
different treatment than DID.
All it was doing
was making him fracture more.
He would go to bed one day
and wake up the next day
and find out
that it was actually a month later.
He had no idea what had happened
or if any of his alters had been out,
and if they were what they had done.
Dr. Box was treating Billy
as a multiple personality disorder,
and Dr. Lindner
said he didn't believe in that,
so they had a conflict of, um
therapies.
He felt that Dr. Lindner
was one of those doctors
that believed there is no such
thing as multiple personality.
That there is no condition,
that it shouldn't be in
the diagnostic treatment manual,
that it is a fraud.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
is a kind of guidebook
to psychiatric diagnosis
that's used by clinicians
and educators and researchers
and in the courts all around the world,
especially in the United States.
Billy was manipulative in the sense
that he'd learned
how to get his needs met,
and patients who have
been severely traumatized
learn to really
manipulate their environment.
I wasn't skeptical of his condition,
but I was aware of his manipulations.
And he would do what he needed to do
to get what he wanted.
When he was faced with Caul or Wilbur,
he adopted the multiple
personality disorder strategy.
He is then placed in other institutions
where one does not adopt this strategy
and where he is considered
a manipulator, a sociopath, etc.
That's when he develops other strategies.
He goes on hunger strikes,
he tries to manipulate
the system of the asylum.
I was always working
to try to get him out.
I thought he was being warehoused.
My Athens attorney, Allan Goldsberry,
filed a lawsuit
against Dr. Lindner in 1979.
Doctors, uh, Harding and Dr. Wilbur
feel that I should live
a normal and productive life
outside of an institution
under the right treatment program.
Dr. Lindner is engineering a disaster
by taking away my medication
and taking away my treatment
and everything else that is now
being issued to me by a specialist.
But again, the politicians were like,
"Nope. This is where he needs to be."
"You can tell he can't handle himself,"
and all of this.
The state decided
to close Lima State Hospital
and they planned to open
what they called "forensic units."
There was a time period
it seemed like he moved often.
Billy was still going through
some difficult times getting treatment.
He never felt he had anyone to talk to
or anyone who would listen
or anyone who'd believe him.
He was losing time.
I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear
that I will faithfully
execute the Office of President.
They were driven from
St. Paul's Cathedral to Buckingham Palace
Our next guest is Daniel Keyes
who has written a book called
The Minds of Billy Milligan.
It is a remarkable case
and it is all documented
in a remarkable book
called The Minds of Billy Milligan.
How much time did you spend with him,
would you figure? Hours?
Over a period of a year and a half,
something like 20 hours a week.
The book is essentially his memories,
his dialogue, nothing invented.
Dr. Keyes spent a lot of time
interviewing the family,
interviewing people that were
involved with Billy and Billy's case,
uh, trying to get the story.
Um, I do know
that parts of the book is fictionalized,
but he wanted to believe
everything that Billy said at all times,
and that bothered me a little bit,
because you're
interviewing a mentally ill patient,
someone that is easily manipulated
or can manipulate others.
So, that leaves the reader
to have to wonder what is real
and what is not.
How do we know he's not faking?
Well, first of all, he was
examined for a seven-month period.
The first multiple to be
examined for seven months
in that fishbowl at Harding Hospital.
Secondly, when he was sent to Athens,
you saw Dr. David Caul talking to him.
Dr. Caul uses the sodium amytal interview,
which is closely
It's a truth serum in a sense,
and he wouldn't be able
to fake this for an expert.
Amytal was used very often
as a kind of truth serum.
It was a way of inducing,
in some people, a hypnotic state
if they were resistant the way I was
to the usual induction techniques.
The person just becomes
even more suggestible
and it's very easy to implant ideas
in someone who's either medicated
or under the suggestive power
of hypnosis to accept those ideas.
In this instance too,
one can see how
you might obtain a state of trance,
a state of irresponsibility,
a state of absence induced by medication.
I never saw Billy in any other personality
unless he was being
hypnotized by Dr. Caul.
When I would run into him in the hallway,
um, he was always the same old Billy.
I know there's an explanation for that.
He's not subject to the stress
that would trigger
the coming out of another personality,
but when you never
see the other personalities,
you begin to wonder.
There are people
who work there that I won't talk to
for the simple reason
as they wouldn't understand.
They're not very open minded at all.
I think that his physician encouraged him
to come up with more personalities
and everybody
wants to please their doctor,
especially when that man is
keeping you out of prison.
The people who are most hypnotizable
are also the people who are best able
to create multiple personalities.
Usually they're suggestible,
they're imaginative,
uh, they aim to please,
and they're good at role-play.
Many of these patients are interested
in pleasing their therapist.
They want their therapist's attention,
and if they think their therapist
is interested in
the number of personalities they have,
they'll have more personalities.
The only limit to the number
and the colorfulness of the personalities
is the imagination of the individual
and of the therapist.
Unfortunately, I've seen therapists who
lose their objectivity with these cases
and get too involved in the person
and accept everything
that they say as reality.
Shortly after Billy Milligan,
there's an explosion
of multiple personality disorder
in America.
And all of a sudden
it becomes a wild hysteria
where multiple personality disorder
becomes the most popular diagnosis
and the number of multiples expand.
So that in Three Faces of Eve
there's just three.
In Sybil, she introduces 16.
I saw a patient who had
162 different defined personalities.
We had a workshop done by David Caul,
and he believed that you
had to identify all the alters
and catalog them
and figure out what their roles were.
At that time, I started doing that,
and I quickly figured out
that the more you do that,
the more alters you get.
Most of us
stopped doing that pretty quickly.
Dr. Caul was really interested
in not just overseeing this case,
but managing the case
and controlling the case,
almost all aspects of it.
I would describe this as a double madness.
You have the patient and the therapist
and they ping-pong off of each other
as both individuals
need to "crystallize" the concept
of multiple personality disorder.
Didn't you doubt?
Every Monday morning I'd wake up saying,
"Oh my God, I don't believe it."
It's incredible.
But in the ten months
I interviewed him on audiotape,
as I say,
some hundreds and hundreds of hours,
I discovered I never got an inconsistency.
I was not skeptical originally.
I became more skeptical as time went by.
A few things happened,
I suppose, to cause that,
and I can remember one conspicuous moment
when he was talking to Dr. Knopp.
He was a native of the Czech Republic.
He had been drafted
into the German workforce
during World War II,
sent to the Russian front,
and while he was there, he learned
several Eastern-European languages,
one of which was Serbo-Croatian,
and Dr. Knopp tried
to talk to Ragen in Serbo-Croatian.
Ragen immediately
flipped back out of that personality.
Dr. Knopp tried this several times,
and every time Ragen
could not cough up any Serbo-Croatian.
So, you know
It's not a miracle condition.
It's whatever.
Whatever gifts
And again, he was bright.
This was a much brighter
than average individual.
were those that were
inherent in who Billy was.
It wasn't just my experiences with him.
I had hundreds
of conversations with staff,
many of whom
would share their experiences,
what they had seen and heard,
and the reasons why they doubted
that it was all it was cracked up to be.
Billy claimed when he was an inmate
down here at the hospital
for the criminally insane,
that he could write Arabic.
Dan Keyes,
who wrote the book about you,
received a letter in Arabic.
That was from Arthur.
Does this mean that Arthur wrote it?
Yeah.
Are you sure?
Arthur wrote it. Yeah.
It turned out that
those letters were not written by Billy,
but by a fellow inmate who was an Arab.
Ayad Kalini, an Egyptian, a murderer,
was being treated there for schizophrenia.
He used to ask me to help him
to learn some Arabic-Egyptian language,
and also he used to ask me
if I can help him translate, uh
some English letter to Egyptian.
Let me suggest to you that maybe Arthur
was cunning and clever enough
to find somebody
to write the letter in Arabic for him.
In that dungeon, in Lima?
No, uh, Arabs in Lima.
Every multiple personality case
is an imitation, a reproduction,
a copy of an earlier case.
And we could go back
to the time of Janet and Charcot,
where there were
multiple personalities of all kinds,
created, built under hypnosis.
That is to say, a trance phenomenon.
Since the beginning of time,
you have had people who
put themselves into states of trance
during which you are no longer yourself
and thus, you are not responsible.
We were hopeful
that things would calm down a bit.
Dr. Caul became his doctor again,
and we tried to get him
back on a good protocol,
because he had been
so messed up by the drug and everything.
I would have to say
I don't think that he was
dangerous when he was in Athens.
Um, he was too widely recognized
and he had
too much on the line at that point.
But, um, as a general rule,
he behaved himself
and conducted himself in a way
that would get him out of confinement
as quickly as possible.
While he was with us, he became, uh
He was quite sexually
exploitive of other patients.
He managed to become
sexually involved with one of our staff.
He was particularly notorious
for the young women
that came through the hospital
in various ways,
but it was not uncommon
for volunteers and students,
"Is this Billy Milligan's room?
Wow, cool!"
When Billy was
at the Dayton Forensic Center,
one of the inmates or patients
was a gentleman named Don Bartley,
and he and Billy
became friends or co-patients
and Tanda, Don's sister,
would come to visit,
and so that's how she met Billy.
The wedding took place at one o'clock
in the visitors' room
at the Forensic Center,
and only a handful of guests attended.
One of them was Dr. Daniel Keyes,
author of a book
on Milligan's multiple personalities,
who said this wedding had
nothing to do with a quest for publicity.
I didn't know about this love affair
or the marriage until a few months ago.
- You think it's for real?
- I think they're in love.
I believe in love, don't you?
Well, the media from the very get go,
from the idea that he wanted
to be married, was all over that,
because this was this mental patient
going to marry somebody.
If I base Billy
on everything that I had read,
I would have never married him.
I got to know him, and I put aside
all the myths and rumors
and things like that.
I put all that aside and I got to know him
and I think I've dealt with Billy
in different situations,
different personalities,
and it's acceptable to me
and I realize my responsibility in it.
Um, and then it wasn't shortly thereafter
that, um, she decided that
maybe she had made a mistake.
She wrote him a nice goodbye letter,
"I can't do this,"
took the money that he got
from some of the book royalty and left.
Dr. Caul began to work with him again
and wanted to treat him again
with outpatient treatments
and eventually go back into
the community and live a normal life,
and that's what he was
kept trying to get to.
It's been a long five years
and I just want to be normal
and like anybody else
and live a normal life,
but I've got a lot more to prove
than the average person now.
The entire time that he's been in Athens
it's been extremely controversial,
because he has been
allowed out into the community
and many people have worried about that.
I think he's a threat
to a certain part of the community.
Mainly the women.
I don't feel personally threatened by him,
but, I guess,
for the safety of the community
I wonder whether he should be free or not.
Anybody who's been convicted of rape,
um, should not
be allowed to be free, that's all.
When Billy had the freedom
to come and go from the hospital
and still get his treatment,
he decided to rent a farm,
got some cattle and decided that
he wanted to just be left alone.
Get her.
Bring her in.
Take her in, Caesar!
So, here's a guy
who's been through Lima State Hospital
and incarcerated a lot of his life,
or his adult life,
and he's able to have
this beautiful Ohio University student
who's on the tennis team, Becky Burkhart.
He's painting,
he's founded
a foundation for battered children.
So he I met him
during the best time of his life.
In 1984, I was producing
a 15-part soap opera
and we invited the mayor and judges
and the police chief
and all kinds of celebrities
to be in the soap opera
as cameos, to play themselves.
And about the same time,
Billy was well enough
that he was being released
back out into the community.
My feeling was that most people
didn't know who Billy Milligan was
except through the headlines
as the rapist,
and so maybe if I invited him
to be in the soap opera,
people could see a different side of him.
You're Billy Milligan, aren't you?
- Yeah, you're Adam Star, aren't you?
- Yeah!
I recognized you from
the, uh, soap opera, 45701.
Oh
Jim Murray, the producer,
played a multiple personality
and Billy was the normal one.
So, he had an amazing sense of humor
for what he'd been through.
It'd been planned that we would
just do one scene and that would be it,
but more and more
we became closer friends.
I spent hundreds and hundreds
of hours with Billy Milligan.
I never felt endangered,
except once we were hiking.
He wanted to show me
a particular place he used to hang out
when he was in high school
and suddenly a chill
went across my entire body,
because it was only Billy and I,
and we had not seen anybody
for 40 minutes of hiking, you know?
And I don't know
if he had switched personalities
and I had become
subconsciously aware of it, and
Or if it was just that
I suddenly realized how vulnerable I was.
I didn't say anything about it
and it went away and
But I never went hiking
with him again in a lonely place.
As a reporter with the local paper,
part of my duties were to go
and do the "cop shop," as we would say.
First thing in the morning,
stop by the sheriff's department,
go in, the big glass,
and they'd give me the reports.
And there would be Sheriff Bob Allen,
"I'm going to put that Billy Milligan
back behind bars, Woodward!"
Early on when Billy came to Athens,
Sheriff Allen just seemed
to have something with him.
He did not like this guy.
But he publicly said, or is quoted
in the newspapers regularly as saying,
he was going to put this guy
back behind bars where he belonged.
As far as I'm concerned,
I don't even want him in my county.
If Judge Flowers wants him loose,
let him turn him loose in his backyard.
Not mine.
But they had adjoining properties,
and so that led
to confrontations and conflicts.
Billy accused Scott Allen,
Sheriff Allen's son, Scott,
of shooting at his dogs.
Just a few months
after I got out of the hospital,
his son shot at my dog, Caesar,
who's a German shepherd.
He accused my dog of chasing his horses,
but my dog didn't chase his horses.
That was just not a good mix.
That was not good for Sheriff Allen
to drive by Billy's house
every single day on the way home.
There had been reports that Sheriff Allen
was basically out to get Billy.
I called Sheriff Allen and asked him
and he said he would have no problem
hiring two guys to go out and kill him.
I've finally found a place that I fit in.
And Bob's trying to take that away from me
and I just don't want it to happen.
There was a lot of people who
did feel he was a con man somehow,
but he was on the streets.
He was, you know, part of the community.
And then came the barn incident.
The worst episodes
of behavioral problems with Billy,
and it reinforced the community's fear,
was when he was riding around
in a car with a hospital staffer,
shot a gun through the trailer
of that staffer's supervisor.
They all got caught, basically.
Billy would have been
put on severe restrictions at that point
pending the investigation.
It was ongoing news. It was
Mostly it would just rehash the same story
and Billy would deny that it had happened.
I admit I have been
with Mr. Russell before,
but when he shot this guy's barn,
I was nowhere around him.
I was in town
and I was in different places
and I was at home.
I couldn't I don't even know
what time it happened.
So, his sort of
great little world that he'd established
was just shattered.
I heard a rumor that two inmates at Athens
had claimed to have been
hired by Allen to kill Milligan.
That Bob Allen had paid,
or was going to pay, two inmates to
to kill Billy,
murder him and make it
look like a suicide.
I don't know that anyone
actually believed them, to be honest.
I don't know that Sheriff Allen would
have done that, but he might have,
or it could be just another story
that Billy came up with,
or that Billy paid the inmates to lie.
It's one of those stories
we may never know the end of.
I have no idea.
Bob Allen, he just had this anger.
He wanted to be
judge, jury, and executioner.
I'll deny it till the day I die.
Congratulations, Back to the Future
is still number one at the box office.
What are you going
to say to Mr. Gorbachev, sir,
to try to convince him
that you want peace?
Milligan will go
on trial at the Athens County Courthouse,
charged with perjury, vandalism,
and intimidation of a witness.
I stopped representing Billy Milligan
because he was not accepting my advice,
and that went on and on,
finally culminating
in going to the Grand Jury to testify,
after I had told him,
"You do not have to go there.
It will not end well for you."
Despite the objections of the prosecutor
and disregarding his lawyers' advices,
Billy Milligan asked the Court
to let him be his own attorney.
We had had earlier testimony
presented by Sheriff Allen,
where he had presented evidence
that he had
been threatened by Billy Milligan,
and Mr. Allen pulled out
a tape recorder that he had in his pocket
when he had
had a conversation with Mr. Milligan.
Billy said in very clear terms,
"Bob, I'm going to kill you."
"I'm going after your family, too."
It was frightening.
So, we asked questions along the lines,
"Well, did you ever threaten the sheriff?"
And the answer was,
"Oh, no. Oh, no. Of course not."
"Why would I do that?"
He was a very persuasive person.
I actually thought
he would make a great lawyer.
He has a great ability to persuade.
The strange thing was
the charges against Billy Milligan
never came to trial.
Mr. Allen, the sheriff,
had recorded a conversation
and that's illegal.
So, the judge had no choice
but to dismiss the charges.
Then he was
moved back to the Columbus area,
to the Timothy Moritz Center.
When Billy was transferred
to the Timothy Moritz Center,
Dr. Lindner from Lima was the doctor,
was the treating physician there.
I don't think anybody
really understands what punishment is
until they've been through therapy,
until they've been worked with
by a psychiatrist.
Why do you keep doing this to me?
He had been in the psychiatric system,
now going on five or six years.
Um, well, even
prior to that as a teenager,
and had really not gotten
any of the significant help
that he really needed.
He became depressed and despondent.
So, he was clearly not as well there
as when I had
spent time with him in Athens,
because he was switching more regularly
right in front of me.
Um, six months ago, when I went to court
for my probate hearing,
Dr. Lindner made a point of
to the court and opposed
my leaving the institution
on the grounds that he could
not be sure that I was complying
with taking a medication
that I so desperately needed.
Um
Now, he has done a complete turnaround,
saying that he wants me
back in the institution
because he no longer
wants me to take this medication
which has been so helpful to me.
Uh, it does leave me quite confused.
On the Fourth of July weekend in 1986,
according to Billy, Dr. Lindner told him
that his treatment team would not
be around to protect him,
and Dr. Lindner
was in charge of the hospital.
They had a confrontation
and Billy was, um,
afraid of Dr. Lindner,
because Dr. Lindner, as I understand,
had, even at Lima, had wanted
to perform shock treatment on him.
Billy saw this as a threat.
I mean,
and he's under Dr. Lindner again,
the person responsible for the Thorazine
and everything that happened in Lima.
He felt that his life was in danger.
And so Billy, at that time,
walked away from COPH Hospital.
Milligan ran away on Friday.
He is now searched all over the state.
For Milligan, this change
in his treatment at the hospital
is a ploy to keep him institutionalized.
The FBI got involved,
then that became a national issue.
He would do some crazy thing
that would put him in the headlines again.
Who wouldn't try to escape that?
I left the hospital
as an issue of self-defense.
I am not a danger
to myself or anyone else.
And when that medication runs out,
he could fragment
and become very dangerous.
In my gut, ever since
the beginning of time with this case
I've sensed a tragic ending.
I hope my gut feelings are wrong.
My face through the light of the fire ♪
It's shining bright
Am I looking at you? ♪
I spread my wings
And you feel my desire ♪
I feel dreams coming true ♪
But it's an illusion, an illusion
An illusion, an illusion ♪
An illusion, it is ♪
It's an illusion, an illusion
An illusion, an illusion ♪
An illusion, it is ♪
Please tell me why
Are you staring at the dancer? ♪