Billy Milligan, The Serial Rapist Who Claimed That His ‘Other Personalities’ Committed His Crimes
Billy Milligan, The Serial Rapist Who Claimed That His ‘Other Personalities’ Committed His Crimes
In 1978, Billy Milligan became the first person to successfully use multiple personality disorder as a legal defense, though the debate surrounding his condition turned the case into a hotly-debated spectacle.
Both the 2016 film "Split" and 2023's "The Crowded Room" tackle the same disturbing subject, a chilling criminal with many personalities, each more twisted than the last. And both were inspired by the same real-life predator: Billy Milligan.
Known as the "Campus Rapist," Milligan raped three young women at Ohio State in 1977 before police caught him. Psychiatric evaluations then suggested that Milligan had multiple personalities and that two of them had committed the crimes without the others knowing. Milligan claimed to be totally unaware of what his other personalities were doing, at one point saying: "Every time I come to, I'm in some kind of trouble."
Though some psychiatrists had doubts about Milligan's condition, he became the first person to use a dissociative identity disorder defense to be acquitted of a crime. He avoided prison entirely and served several years in state hospitals before walking free in 1991.
Click the link in our bio to go inside the story of Billy Milligan, the "Monster With 24 Faces."
In October 1977, 22-year-old Billy Milligan was arrested for kidnapping, robbing, and raping three female Ohio State students. But what should have been a relatively straightforward conviction instead became a shocking acquittal. Milligan was found not guilty — because psychiatrists believed that two of his “other personalities” had committed the crimes.
During psychiatric evaluations, doctors found that “Billy” was just one of 24 personalities living in Milligan’s mind. Two of the others, Ragen and Adalana, they believed, had been the ones to kidnap and rape the women. Because of this, his lawyers argued that he was innocent by reason of insanity.
At the end of his trial, Milligan became the first person to be found not guilty by reason of insanity on the basis of multiple personality disorder (called dissociative identity disorder today). This condition is thought to come from extreme trauma and abuse early in life, which Milligan allegedly suffered.
So, was Billy Milligan a criminal or a victim? Could he have been both? The complicated nature of his case has been a point of fascination for nearly 50 years, but these questions are no less difficult to answer.
Billy Milligan’s Crimes As The ‘Campus Rapist’
On Oct. 14, 1977, Billy Milligan approached a young woman, an optometry student, in a parking lot on Ohio State University’s campus. He aimed a gun at her, then led her to a secluded area in the woods. Milligan raped her, then made her write and cash a check for him.
Eight days later, he raped a second victim. Then a third. And on Oct. 27, the day after Milligan’s third attack, one of his victims was able to identify him from a collection of mug shots.
It wasn’t the first time Milligan had been arrested — in 1975, Milligan was arrested for rape and armed robbery. His fingerprints on file matched a set found on one of the victim’s cars, and Milligan was arrested once again.
Then, investigators started to notice some odd things about Milligan. According The Columbus Dispatch, OSU police investigations supervisor Elliot Boxerbaum recalled, “I couldn’t tell you what was going on, but it felt like I was talking to different people at different times.”
Milligan’s victims also described how Milligan seemed to embody multiple personalities. He called himself Phil, claimed to be Jewish, and told one victim that he was a member of the Weathermen — later known as the Weather Underground, a far-left militant organization that claimed credit for 25 bombings in the 1970s. He also sometimes spoke with an accent.
Before long, a psychiatric evaluation would provide a surprising explanation for Billy Milligan’s odd behavior.
How Psychiatrists Determined Billy Milligan Had Multiple Personality Disorder
Psychiatrists first got a hint of Billy Milligan’s multiple personality disorder during his psychiatric examinations. As Time reports, a psychiatrist spoke with Milligan while he was in custody and called him “Billy.” Milligan, in response, said, “Billy’s asleep. I’m David.”
With this first piece of evidence, psychiatrist George T. Harding and psychoanalyst Cornelia Wilbur were called in to speak with Milligan. Wilbur was especially notable for her work with a woman named Sybil, another dissociative identity disorder (DID) patient with 16 personalities. In working with Sybil, Wilbur was able to successfully meld her personalities and their story was later turned into a book and a TV movie. (Though as A&E notes, Sybil later confessed that she’d made up her personalities.)
Harding and Wilbur determined that Milligan’s psyche had fractured into at least 10 different personalities, eight male and two female. They ranged from Christene, a three-year-old girl, to Arthur, a 22-year-old Brit, whose main task was cleaning up the other personalities’ messes.
But the two personalities that mattered most to Milligan’s case were Ragen, a 23-year-old with a Slavic accent who lacked empathy, and Adalana, a 19-year-old “curious lesbian.” According to Harding and Wilbur, it was Ragen who robbed the women and Adalana who raped them.
“Billy,” the psychiatrists found, was the core personality. He was suicidal and had strong feelings of guilt — and, they claimed, had been “asleep” for the last seven years. When Wilbur first met the “Billy” personality he told her, “Every time I come to, I’m in some kind of trouble. I wish I were dead.”
He and the other personalities allegedly had no memory of what Ragen and Adalana had done.
But not everyone bought Milligan’s multiple personality defense. In fact, even some in the medical field denounced the idea of “multiple personalities” outright, claiming, at best, that the term misrepresented the condition — this was actually part of the reason the condition was renamed to DID in 1994 — while others called it a fraud.
“Multiple personality is just a figure of speech. It’s nothing but a hoax,” said Thomas Szasz, a professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York in a 1979 interview with Columbus Monthly. “How many faces does Laurence Olivier or Elizabeth Taylor have? We are all actors. But there is only one person.”
Others saw the label, and the defense’s use of it to plead innocence by reason of insanity, as an affront to the legal system. The case had, by and large, become more about Milligan’s psyche than it was about the women who had been raped. It also raised concerns about setting a legal precedent if Milligan were found not guilty, and psychiatrists additionally expressed concern about the public perception of DID.
Ultimately, a judge ruled that Milligan was “not guilty by reason of insanity” and had him committed to the Athens Mental Health Center. There, Milligan met psychiatrist David Caul, who wanted to “fuse” Milligan’s personalities.
Then, Caul found even more.
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