01x03 - The Golden Age

[bunniefuu]

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 r*pe, 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 as*ault,

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 r*pe,

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 r*pes 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 r*pes,

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 r*pe 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 k*ller

over there."

"And that guy over there

k*lled 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 expl*si*n

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 w*r 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 m*rder*r,

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 r*pe,

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 r*pist,

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 sh**ting 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 k*ll 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 g*n 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 k*ll Milligan.

That Bob Allen had paid,

or was going to pay, two inmates to

to k*ll Billy,

m*rder 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 k*ll 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 ill*gal.

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? ♪