Billy Milligan Has Paintings For Sale

By Jeb Phillips

The Columbus Dispatch Sunday October 28, 2007 2:50 PM

View Slideshow

After raping three women, Billy Milligan was diagnosed with multiple personalities.

No one seems to know Billy Milligan these days, not that anyone ever did.

He was a criminal or a victim; an expert actor or so disturbed that his mind fractured into at least 24 personalities. He kidnapped three women from the Ohio State University campus area, raped them and said that part of him did it for affection.

One of the women told an investigator that the rapist had a German accent, though Milligan was born in Florida and raised in Circleville and Lancaster. Another said the rapist had been nice enough that, in different circumstances, she might have considered dating him.

Milligan's birth name was William, but he was also Ragen, Arthur, Adalana, Christene and 19 others. He was the first person in American history to successfully use multiple-personality disorder as a defense for a violent crime.

The people once closest to him haven't heard from him in at least 10 years -- not the doctor who treated him, not the bestselling author who wrote two books about him, not his mother. A man in California has several thousand dollars to give him if he could just find him.

But it's never been easy to get close to Billy Milligan.

The first rape was on Oct. 14, 1977.

Milligan pointed a gun at an OSU optometry student and took her from a campus parking lot to a wooded area. When it was over, he made her write a check and cash it for him.

The second was on Oct. 22. The third was on Oct. 26. And on Oct. 27, 1977, 30 years ago yesterday, one of the victims picked Milligan's face out of a group of mug shots. Milligan, 22, had been convicted of rape before and had been in prison that year for robbery. One of his fingerprints on file matched a print found on one of the victim's cars. Columbus and OSU police arrested him at his home in Reynoldsburg.

Elliot Boxerbaum, then the OSU police investigations supervisor, read Milligan his rights and rode with him to Columbus police headquarters.

"I couldn't tell you what was going on, but it was like I was talking to different people at different times," he said.

Doctors examined Milligan, and even the skeptical ones saw what Boxerbaum described. Milligan's public defenders, Judy Stevenson and Gary Schweickart, told the prosecution what they intended to argue in court.

"Gary Schweickart came to me with this cockamamie story," said Terry Sherman, a Columbus lawyer who was one of the assistant Franklin County prosecutors on the case.

A subsequent psychiatric report spelled it out: A 23-year-old Yugoslavian named Ragen had taken over Milligan's consciousness and decided to rob some people. But before Ragen could rob anyone, a 19-year-old lesbian named Adalana took over Milligan's body and raped the women because she wanted to feel close to someone. The other personalities, including "Billy," had no memory of that.

"A ludicrous story," Sherman said.

Then he sat in an interview with Milligan and watched him turn into different people. Bernard Yavitch, the other prosecutor, watched it, too.

"I saw multiple personalities," said Yavitch, who is now a defense attorney in Columbus. "His speech pattern was different, his accents were different. He sat different ways in the chair."

Dr. George Harding, the widely respected medical director of Harding Hospital in Worthington, spent months with Milligan and diagnosed multiple-personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder). With everyone in basic agreement --- the evidence showed that Milligan committed the crimes but also that he wasn't responsible for them --- Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jay Flowers found him not guilty by reason of insanity and sent him to the Athens Mental Health Center in the southeastern Ohio college town.

The strange story of Billy Milligan could have ended there. It didn't.

Milligan was born William Stanley Morrison in 1955 in Miami, the son of a singer, Dorothy Sands, and a comedian, John Morrison. Morrison and Sands already had a son together and would have a daughter later, but Morrison remained married to another woman.

Morrison suffered from depression and alcoholism and killed himself when Milligan was 4 years old. Milligan's mother moved the family back home to Circleville in 1960, where she married her ex-husband, then divorced him again.

In 1963, she married Chalmer Milligan, and they moved the family to Lancaster. According to psychiatric reports based on Billy Milligan's memory, his new stepfather repeatedly sodomized him and otherwise tortured him by burying him alive and hanging him by his toes and fingers. Chalmer Milligan denied all of those allegations, and he was never charged.

The abuse caused Milligan's personality to splinter, psychiatrists said, and from that point on, he ran into trouble almost everywhere. Milligan was suspended from junior high school because he went into trances and wandered around Lancaster. His parents committed him to a state mental hospital on the Hilltop in Columbus where hysterical neurosis was diagnosed.

The hospital kicked him out three months later because his behavior was too disruptive. Lancaster High School expelled him in 1972, and he joined the Navy. The Navy discharged him a month later because he couldn't adapt to Navy life.

Milligan and a friend picked up some women that same year, and a few days later, the women accused them of rape. Milligan and his friend said the women were prostitutes and that, when Milligan couldn't perform sexually, they weren't paid. A judge found Milligan and his friend guilty, and Milligan served six months in a Zanesville youth camp.

After Milligan's release, according to a book about him, his personalities began working as a security guard for a drug and gun dealer. In late 1974, two cross-dressing men approached Milligan at a rest stop. He beat them up and took their purses.

He helped plan a Lancaster drugstore robbery in early 1975. Not much later, Lancaster police arrested him, and he pleaded guilty to robbing the men and the store.

He was sentenced to at least two years in prison and paroled in April 1977. Six months later, the campus-area rapes started.

Dr. David Caul at the Athens Mental Health Center wanted to treat Milligan by "fusing" him --- combining all of his personalities into one. But it turned out Milligan was already fused in a personality called "The Teacher."

The Teacher helped the other personalities learn their special talents, but he didn't hold Milligan's consciousness. The others did. Caul learned of The Teacher in a conversation with Ragen, the personality who decided to commit the campus-area robberies.

Caul played a recording of Ragen for "Billy," the core personality. Billy knew that he had other personalities, but that was the first time he had seen proof. In that way, Caul drew The Teacher into consciousness in December 1978. It was the first time Milligan had felt like one person since he was little.

The account of that treatment is told in The Minds of Billy Milligan, by Daniel Keyes, bestselling author of Flowers for Algernon and an Ohio University English professor at the time. Keyes began interviewing Milligan around the same time The Teacher emerged. The book, published in 1981, gave details of Milligan's life that hadn't been made public before.

Not long after The Teacher emerged, Caul began giving Milligan unsupervised furloughs from the hospital. The Dispatch reported that fact in March 1979, stirring criticism from state legislators and Athens residents. The Teacher receded during the publicity that followed, and Milligan's multiple personalities reappeared.

The Dispatch followed with other reports, which Keyes and others still describe as biased and unfair, of Milligan faking an overdose, of Milligan selling his artwork and buying a car, of a party at the hospital. An Athens County Common Pleas judge, after hearing testimony that Milligan was a security risk, transferred him to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Keyes reported in his book that Milligan thought that was a "chamber of horrors." When the hospital began its transition to a prison in 1980, Milligan was transferred to the Dayton Forensic Center and then the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital; and, eventually, after more treatment and expert opinion that he was no longer a danger, he was transferred back to Athens.

But there's more.

Milligan drove a truck in Athens from which shots were fired. He was confined to stricter hospitals. He escaped from the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital in 1986, then left videotapes for local media outlets at the Columbus Greyhound Bus station complaining of his hospital treatment. At one point while he was on the run, he worked at a hot-tub business in Washington state. He was arrested in Miami several months later.

In 1988, experts agreed that Milligan had fused, and he was released from Ohio mental hospitals after 11 years. He was released from all supervision three years later, in 1991. And only then did he begin to fade from the public eye.

He sprang up on occasion. He moved to California to work on a movie about his life. James Cameron, who later directed Titanic; Joel Schumacher, who directed Batman Forever; and actors John Cusack, Leonardo DiCaprio and Colin Farrell were all reported to be involved at various points, but the movie still hasn't been made.

News came that a California judge had found Milligan incapable of handling his own affairs in 1996. Ohio took him to court for royalties on The Minds of Billy Milligan and recovered $120,000 of the $450,000 spent on his treatment.

He declared bankruptcy in San Diego. He came out of it in 2000. And that's about all anyone will say of Billy Milligan now.

A database search for Milligan came back with more than a dozen addresses: Encinitas, Calif.; San Diego; Las Vegas. One was in Beverly Hills. Letters sent by The Dispatch searching for him came back undeliverable.

Keyes, 80, who wrote a follow-up book about Milligan published only in Japan, said from his home in southern Florida that he hasn't talked to his subject in more than a decade. He was sure that Milligan wouldn't talk for this story because he perceived The Dispatch as "anti-Billy" in the past.

Harding, 78, the psychiatrist who first worked with Milligan's multiple personalities, said he also hasn't spoken to Milligan in many years. He said that, looking back, he wished he had been more aggressive in his treatment, and that the case could have been given more study without so much controversy.

Caul, the doctor who worked with Milligan most closely, died in 1988. Milligan's defense attorneys also have passed away.

Richard Kipperman, the trustee who handled Milligan's estate in California between 1996 and 2000, said he lost contact with him before he came out of bankruptcy. After Milligan's creditors were paid, there was money left, but Kipperman hasn't been able to find Milligan to give it to him.

"Do you know where he is?" he asked.

Milligan's last stepfather, Del Moore, said he doesn't know where his stepson is and otherwise didn't want to comment.

After a couple of weeks of searching for Milligan and his friends and family, The Dispatch received a letter from his sister, Kathy. Her mother has had no contact with Milligan in 15 years, she wrote.

She wrote of the poor treatment her brother received in hospitals, of the way he became a political pawn and of the unfair way she believes The Dispatch covered the story.

"People are not as caring and compassionate as we would like to believe," she wrote.

She gave no hint about how to find her brother.

The life of Billy Milligan

Wednesday October 31, 2007 11:51 AM

· Comments: 0

·

·

Enlarge Image

Feb. 14: William Stanley Morrison is born in Miami.

Jan. 18: Billy's father, John Morrison, kills himself. Within a few months, his mother, Dorothy Sands, moves back home to Circleville and remarries her ex-husband, Dick Jonas.

Sands leaves Jonas.

Oct. 27: Sands marries Chalmer Milligan. They move to Lancaster.

April: Psychiatrists say Chalmer Milligan first sodomizes Billy, 9, on a family farm, causing Billy's personality to splinter.

March: Billy is suspended from Stanberry Junior High School and referred to Fairfield County Clinic for Guidance and Mental Health.

March 23: Chalmer and Dorothy commit Billy to the children's unit of Columbus State Hospital.

June 19: Billy is discharged from the hospital and urged to seek outpatient treatment.

Fall: Billy enters Lancaster High School and takes a series of short-lived jobs, including delivering groceries and arranging flowers.

March: Billy, 17, enlists in the Navy after being expelled from high school.

May 1: Billy is discharged.

July 8: Billy and a friend are arrested in Circleville on charges of kidnapping, rape and assault. (The kidnapping charges were later dropped.)

March: After being found guilty, Billy begins serving time at an Ohio Youth Commission facility in Zanesville. His mother divorces Chalmer Milligan.

Billy is arrested for two robberies. He pleads guilty and is sentenced to at least two years in prison.

Nov. 14: The TV movie Sybil, about a woman with multiple-personality disorder, premiers.

April: Billy is paroled.

Oct. 14: An optometry student is kidnapped from an Ohio State University parking lot, raped and robbed.

Oct. 22: A nurse is kidnapped from campus, raped and robbed.

Oct. 26: An OSU undergraduate is kidnapped, raped and robbed.

Oct. 27: Billy is arrested for the crimes.

Jan. 31: A psychologist from Southwest Community Mental Health Center in Columbus first meets Billy's other personalities.

Dec. 4: Billy is found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the Athens Mental Health Center.

December: People Magazine and Newsweek, among other national media outlets, publish stories about Billy. Daniel Keyes begins interviewing him for a book.

Oct. 4: After reports of unsupervised furloughs, a party and an escape attempt, Billy is transferred to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

October: Daniel Keyes publishes The Minds of Billy Milligan.

April: Billy is transferred back to Athens.

Nov. 21: Billy faces several charges after being accused of driving a truck when a passenger shot at an Athens barn. After a court battle, he pleads no contest in 1989 to two misdemeanors and is sentenced to time served.

July 4: Billy escapes from the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital.

Nov. 20: Billy is arrested in Miami after more than four months on the run and sent back to Ohio.

May 30: Billy is released from state custody but remains under supervision.

July: Billy begins a job as a computer operator with the Ohio Department of Mental Health.

Oct. 27: A controversial show of Billy's artwork opens at the Brenda Kroos Gallery in Columbus.

March 6: Billy pleads guilty to a misdemeanor count of theft in Columbus.

James Cameron, future director of Titanic, begins work on The Crowded Room, a film based on Billy's life.

Aug. 1: A Franklin County Common Pleas judge frees Billy from all state oversight.

January: A California judge declares Billy incapable of handling his personal and financial affairs.

February: Ohio Attorney General Betty D. Montgomery files a motion in a California court to take $150,000 Billy earned in royalties from The Lives of Billy Milligan.

Nov. 26: Billy files for bankruptcy in San Diego.

July 7: The state of Ohio settles with Billy and receives $120,000.

March 7: Billy comes out of bankruptcy. It's the last record The Dispatch could find linked to Billy Milligan.

Sources: Dispatch archives, The Minds of Billy Milligan, California court records

A Statement from Billy Milligan

"To the psychiatric community, MPD/DID is a marketable commodity."

In December 1997, Danny DeVito arranged with Todd Graff to write a screenplay for a film called The Crowded Room, based on the life of Billy Milligan and reportedly starring Leonardo DiCaprio. As Billy Milligan did train DiCaprio among others in the proper enactment of classical, Wilburian multiple-personality behavior (as he describes below) the idea that DiCaprio might play Billy is not as farfetched as it first appeared to us. This is the latest information we have on Billy Milligan at this time. Daniel Keyes has some more up-to-date information on Billy Milligan. You can buy "The Minds of Billy Milligan" Right Now through amazon.com

Billy Milligan gave this statement in a telephone interview with Astraea household in the fall of 1996. We have not heard from him since then, and invite him to contact us for updates any time. Here is what he said:

*** I just did a thing for the Japanese and I read something and I can't remember, but I probably ordered one of my guides to put it on the net. We have a super computer. We flag important things, such as "MPD, DID," we flag "government agencies," and that's how I found your booklist.

Nippon Television considered me one of the most informed experts because I've lived with MP with 40 years; also the doctor who did the biofeedback tests; Dr. Tomin, she's in Los Angeles somewhere. She and her husband developed a machine that is the most amazing mind reader you've ever seen.

Basically I've been approached. But I don't do talk shows, I've been asked to be on Donahue and everything else. My books are "Minds of Billy Milligan" and "The Milligan Wars." This was published in Japan. Both sold 3 million copies each.

This was twenty years ago for me. This is, I see this crap come on tv all the time. These doctors are making it happen, or creating these people. I'm not saying I was anything special, but there's millions less people than we are told. There's probably two or three hundred in the whole US. I see these people switch back and forth on TV like there's nothing to it. And that just isn't possible. Why would anyone want to go on TV and lose control?

I've read all these books, and doctors saying they're treating hundreds of MP cases, and they're MAKING them, because they don't have anything else to do with their time, and you know psychiatrists have the highest suicide rate among professionals.

Imagine yourself standing in front of a sink. You're getting a glass of water. And the whole world around you instantaneously changes, and now you're in a park acting like you're getting a glass of water. Out of thin air. And you just lost that time. That's what it's really like. And basically to me, I'm sick and tired of the phonies, the freak shows and the phonies, because what they're doing is not only damaging the people that they're making role play these games, they're damaging the people who are desperate for help.

That is what I will go on. That's what I told the Japanese. 30 million people watch Sunday Plus 30 and I've been getting an enormous response.

I haven't published "The Milligan Wars" in the US because I'm being sued over the information that is in it. The state of Ohio Dept. of Mental Health makes too much money over MP. I've caught them, graft, everything. They're taking DID patients and give them shock treatment and everything, and they get paid for that.

When I downloaded the Ohio State Dept. of Mental Health computers, and checked their personnel and hospital records, and forensic center records, I'd find things like that they charged $11.80 for a hard boiled egg and cup of milk.

In my book, 90% of all psychiatrists are phoneys. They're just snake oil salesmen. They just bill Medicare and Medicaid an enormous amount of money and then talk you into coming in and crying on their shoulder. And then drug you up.

I'm trying to make a film based on The Milligan Wars. Minds of Billy Milligan explained what it was. The Milligan Wars is the fighting of these doctors over the situation. They'll keep you as long as they can. They convince your children that they have it.

To the psychiatric community, MPD/DID is a marketable commodity.

They've actually opened hospitals entirely devoted to it. They keep their game going until their insurance runs out. There's one called Del Almo, up here in Los Angeles, and it's one of the worst. I was in Del Almo myself for about a day and a half, until the federal marshals came and dragged me out.

My thing is educating people. I just did this thing for Nippon TV that if you want to you can contact 3.1 Productions in Hollywood, and Warner Brothers. Ask them "What's going on with the "Milligan Story," Because they've actually tried to quash this, because the doctors and hospitals don't want this shit out in the open, cause it'll ruin a lot of their freak shows. They didn't put it in the DSM-III until I came along, 20 years ago. Now, I'm being sued for trying to stop them. Everybody's suing everyone, trying to stop it, cause they don't want anyone stopping their freak show.

I've trained actors to play this role; Johnny Depp, Christian Slater, John Cusack, and Leonardo diCaprio, to enact MP as it really is and not as it is popularly seen. The people that go on those shows are merely conditioned actors. It's like Chris Sizemore. It's what she is now, is a trained actor. It's really depressing.

I own a production company now, called Stormy Life Productions. We're going to make a short film. We're more than willing to work with groups who want to put something up on the air. We're ready to go on television with facts and figures.

I actually talked to a young lady who recanted her statement. The social workers actually talked her into saying her father molested her. They took her out of her home. She went to school and talked another girl into saying the same thing, because they'll buy you jeans and sneakers and all kinds of stuff! And in six months she's really missing her family. Her father was in jail and everything, and then she came forward. This is what our psychiatric social workers and psychiatric community will actually do. They are dangerous to the mental health and well-being of our entire society.

Basically I hope that people who are humane and caring people will help us join this resistance. I want a movement started. I want the freak show stopped. It's doing more damage than it is good.

Billy Milligan
21 October 1996

---

This is the only other information we have on Bill Milligan's activities for the last several years. According to Bill's conversation with us, his household did NOT permanently integrate, as reported in this article. They are capable of integrating at will, but find this reduces their mental and physical capacities: "the whole is less than the sum of the parts."

Multiple-Personality Figure Allegedly Threatens Judge in San Diego

June 25, 1996

SAN DIEGO (AP) - An Ohio man found innocent of rape in 1978 after claiming he had multiple personalities has been jailed in California for allegedly threatening a judge.

Billy Milligan, who is awaiting a psychiatric evaluation, also has been found incompetent to manage his own affairs, The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reported today.

Milligan, who moved to California from Columbus several years ago, was being held without bail in the federal Metropolitan Corrections Center on criminal contempt charges.

Milligan's court-appointed attorney, Gretchen von Helms, said Milligan allegedly referred to strapping explosives to his chest to get attention. He also allegedly talked about banging on a judge's door and robbing a bank, the newspaper said.

Ohio officials remain interested in Milligan because they want to tap into royalties from a book deal to help pay part of the $453,000 bill for his 11-year stay in state mental hospitals.

Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery, acting through special counsel Larry Branch, a San Diego attorney, is seeking $150,000 from the proceeds of foreign sales of "The Minds of Billy Milligan," a book Milligan wrote with Daniel Keyes. The book did not sell well in the United States but did well in Japan, The Dispatch said.

A movie about Milligan's case also is in the works.

Once Ohio officials tried to claim his assets, his troubles returned, Milligan told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

"Everybody's gotten a piece of me, but I didn't get anything," Milligan told the newspaper. "Now they're all trying to make me sick again so they can take away my money."

Milligan was found innocent by reason of insanity on charges that he kidnapped, raped and robbed three women in the Ohio State University area.

He was released in 1988 after spending a decade in mental hospitals. Psychiatrists said Milligan's 24 personalities had merged into one and that he no longer posed a threat to himself or the community.

The state says Milligan owes $303,000 for hospital stays and $150,000 in interest on the debt, bringing the total to $453,000. He has paid $9,000 of that amount.

Billy Milligan Has Paintings For Sale

Billy Milligan's Paintings Online Exhibition

Self-portrait of Milligan^Ragen

Click here to buy copies of "Minds of Billy Milligan"

As of April 13, 2010: Billy (himself) says he is arranging to self-publish The Milligan Wars (link to Japanese edition) in English online as a free e-book. When it goes up we'll let you know.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-24