The True Story of Billy Milligan, the First Ever Defendant Found Not Guilty Due to Multiple Personalities

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In 1977, 22-year-old Billy Milligan was arrested for the kidnapping, robbery, and rape of three women around the Ohio State campus area. He was imprisoned for the crimes and assigned public defenders to work on his case. But during a psychiatric evaluation, Milligan revealed that he hadn’t committed any crimes at all—it was Ragen that had stolen the money and Adalana who had raped the women. Continued evaluation revealed eight additional alternate personalities, and on December 4, 1978, Milligan was found not guilty by reason of insanity on nine criminal charges. In 2021, a Netflix docuseries called Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan documented his highly publicized, turbulent life, and now, Tom Holland is portraying Milligan in a new Apple TV+ series called The Crowded Room. Below is the true story of his life.

Milligan’s trial was the first in which a defendant was found not guilty by reason of insanity on the basis of multiple personality disorder, which today is called dissociative identity disorder. According to his doctors, severe physical and sexual abuse inflicted on Billy in childhood by his stepfather Chalmer Milligan caused his personality to splinter into 10 (and later, as many as 24) separate personalities that had little knowledge of the others' actions. At trial and in the docuseries, Milligan’s mother, sister, and brother all attest to the brutal, abusive nature of Chalmer Milligan, who always denied the allegations against him. Chalmer Milligan died in 1988, at the age of 61.

Netflix's documentary traces the eight tumultuous years of institutionalization in jails and psychiatric hospitals that followed Billy Milligan’s trial up until his escape from Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital on July 4, 1986. During that time, according to Netflix’s docuseries, Milligan obtained fake documents under the name Christopher Carr and settled in Bellingham, Washington. When Milligan’s roommate Michael Madden went missing in September 1986, Milligan left the state, and was soon after captured by police in Florida. No one has ever been convicted in the disappearance of Michael Madden, but many of his possessions were found in Milligan’s apartment, and Milligan had been cashing Madden’s disability checks in a shared bank account. After his arrest, Milligan was taken back to Ohio and institutionalized again. In 1988, after an assessment by an independent psychiatrist concluded that Milligan was not a danger to society, he was released. After several years in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Milligan eventually moved back to Columbus, Ohio, where his sister purchased a mobile home for him. He spent the remainder of his life painting there until he died of cancer in 2014, at the age of 59.

Billy Milligan spent the majority of his life at the center of a highly publicized and scrutinized case—one that, for the most part, sidelined and disregarded the lives of his victims and survivors at the expense of the public interest in Milligan’s mind. Daniel Keyes, author of “Flowers for Algernon,” wrote a book called “The Minds of Billy Milligan” in 1981 after hours of interviews with Billy, and James Cameron even spent time with Billy when he lived in California, developing a movie which was ultimately scrapped.

Today, dissociative identity disorder remains a controversial diagnosis among psychiatrists. In November 2020, Esquire spoke to Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist who specializes in the study of individuals with DID, who over the course of her career has assessed violent criminals and serial killers including Ted Bundy and Arthur Shawcross. Dr. Lewis explained that even in court today, more than 40 years after Milligan’s trial, using DID as a defense requires very solid evidence, as there is still no MRI or other technology that can prove its existence. “Some of the best evidence of its existence would be writing or drawing or artwork done by the person that you're examining long before you ever set eyes on them,” Dr. Lewis said. “For example, with children, we have gotten hold of their schoolwork, and any letters, any drawings, anything they have done. And very often what you will find in someone who really dissociates significantly, you'll find is that the handwriting is different. Very often, the names are different. I've seen work pages from kids where they've signed a different name.”

Throughout Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan, dozens of doctors express conflicting opinions on multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder. Some believe Milligan was an impressive conman, and others a troubled product of severe child abuse. Regardless, Milligan’s violence impacted several innocent lives. In Dr. Lewis’ opinion, the best way to prevent the kind of violent crime that is seen in Milligan's case is to prevent child abuse. “To produce the repeatedly aggressive individual, usually there's a history of early, ongoing, intolerable abuse of one sort or another, and also some quirkiness about his or her brain.”

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