Original subtitles

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? ♪