Monsters Inside: did Billy Milligan use his 24 personalities to get away with murder?
In the autumn of 1977, Ohio State University was in a state of fear. In the space of 10 days, three women had been attacked, robbed at gunpoint, and raped. The student union organised volunteers to walk women back across the sprawling campus; febrile university politics, after buzzing with anti-Vietnam War sentiment, now turned to female safety. Angry protests erupted. The press dubbed the attacker ‘The Campus Rapist’.
A few weeks later, the police had a breakthrough. The man had left fingerprints on the windscreen of a victim’s car. They matched a known suspect in the database. Another victim was able to identify him in a line-up. They had their man – Billy Milligan, a 23-year-old registered sex offender who had already served time in Ohio State Prison, and juvenile correction facilities, for robbery and sexual assault.
The opening scenes of Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan, a four-part Netflix docuseries which tells Milligan’s story, play out like any other true-crime drama. There’s spiky music and doomy chimes; shots skitter between scene-setting archive newsreels and footage of Milligan in court. He certainly looks the part: a wash of shaggy hair hooding his eyes, he glowers and mumbles, bowed into himself.
Yet his case would prove unsettlingly strange. Its legacy would test the US legal system, push the limits of criminal psychiatry – and probe the unfathomable capacity of the human mind.
Made by French-born filmmaker Olivier Megaton – who directed Taken 2 and 3, and Transporter 3 – Monsters Inside is a serviceable documentary. Admittedly, Megaton’s zeal for hackneyed true-crime tropes, such as interviewing his subjects in dilapidated sets, wobbles the seriousness of his findings. While the sketchy camerawork suggests he has been mainlining David Fincher’s Mindhunter and a few too many energy drinks. But the fascination of Milligan’s case is enough to carry you through.
Police arrested Milligan soon after he was identified. He was meek and unspeaking. The walls of his apartment were plastered with artwork of extraordinary quality, leading the arresting officers to question whether he had painted them himself or stolen them. He also claimed to have planted a bomb. It turned out to be a fake – a shoebox snared with wires. No explosives were found.
Before his trial, he appeared lost and scared. “I don’t know why they’re saying I’ve done these things,” he told his sister when she visited him. “He was like a little boy,” she recalls in the documentary. He drew incessantly, the art veering wildly in subject and quality, as though it were done by different people. A common image emerged though: a rag doll hanging from its neck, dead. After a few nights, Milligan tried to commit suicide. He tore the urinal off his wall and tried to slash his wrists with its porcelain shards.
The prison authorities subjected him to a barrage of IQ and ECG (electrocardiogram) tests. They showed odd divergences, too. Sometimes, Milligan’s IQ registered as low-functioning; other times, it appeared borderline genius. ECGs, meanwhile, suggested his brain waves fluctuated in age: from that of a small child to the grown man he was.
These intriguing results drew the attention of Dr George Harding, who ran the nearby Harding Hospital, one of America’s foremost psychiatric institutions. Unusually, the presiding judge gave Harding three months to get to the bottom of Milligan’s mental state and transferred him to Harding Hospital.
Dr Harding examined him alongside another psychiatrist, Dr Cornelia Wilbur. Wilbur had shot to fame five years earlier when a novel based on her patient, Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil, became a bestseller. Written in collaboration with Wilbur and her patient, Sybil dramatised the experiences of a woman who claimed to have 16 different personalities living inside her. It became a TV show starring Sally Field, and brought the idea of multiple personality disorder – since 1994, referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – into the public eye. Under examination, Milligan switched between accents, voices and mannerisms; these changes were often accompanied by medium-like theatrics: long periods of silence, eye rolls and eyelid fluttering. Harding and Wilbur were soon convinced Milligan had DID.
DID has a long literary pedigree, from Renwick in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It has also proved a popular theme in film and TV since Sybil – M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 thriller Split featured an unhinged James McAvoy as a sufferer who has 23 personalities, and kidnaps children. Yet as a mental illness its study emerged from a murky area of psychiatry in Freud and Jung’s psychoanalytical theories of the Id, Ego and Super-Ego – and is still contentious.
“There’s been discussion of [DID] for several hundred years,” explains Nancy Borrett, Consultant Psychotherapist at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies. “But it’s still really poorly misunderstood in the mental health field. It’s a very confused picture, and almost nothing is taught about it in core mental health training.”
According to international statistics, around 1.5 per cent of the global population suffers from DID, a similar portion to those with other psychological disorders like schizophrenia. Sufferers report periods of amnesia, instability of identity and the trauma of living with many other personalities – or “alters” – within their minds. Milligan, for instance, claimed to have 10 alters, including Arthur, a well spoken Englishman; Tommy, an escape artist who slipped, Houdini-like, out of straitjackets and locked rooms; Ragen, a thuggish Yugoslavian who spoke with a heavy accent; Charlene, a frightened young girl; and Adalana, a shy 19-year-old lesbian who, he claimed, craved affection and had committed the rapes.
This cacophony of voices is common in those with DID, reports Borrett. “Sometimes the switching between personalities is dramatic, and I have seen patients whose eyes roll. But more commonly, it’s very subtle and you might not notice it unless you know the patient very well. [But] it’s the norm for people to have a variety of personalities of different ages. Some will have different genders. There might even be parts that experience themselves as an animal.”
Milligan’s radical shifts in personality were enough to convince the court that he could not understand right and wrong or cooperate fully with his attorney. His defendants pleaded guilty on reason of insanity. And in October 1978, he was exculpated of his criminal charges and committed to mental institutions “until such time as he regained his sanity,” according to court documents. He was the first defendant to successfully use DID to evade a criminal charge. But Monsters Inside asks: had he hoodwinked the court?
Dr Park Dietz, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine who has consulted on Law and Order and The Bodyguard, tells me over email he thinks Milligan was lying. “Only if you believe in angels can you argue about how many can dance on the head of a pin. At least since the 1970s, a handful of people in the US charged with crimes as varied as drink driving, rape, and murder have sought to evade responsibility by blaming their conduct on (DID). It is an unusual defense that has spurred more speculation, theorizing, and debate than actual courtroom use.
“[But] all of this presupposes that a person can harbor multiple personalities. I think it fair to say that the Billy Milligan case was viewed by the public as an example of how lawyers and mental health professionals can pervert the course of justice.”
Dr Dietz argues that psychiatrists like Harding and Wilbur were attracted to the glamour of Milligan’s case. They “coached” him towards exaggerating his various alters, he contends.
“I’ve never seen a criminal case in which I thought a DID defense was remotely plausible, and I’ve examined at least four serial killers who tried to see if I would bite on their hints of having alters. I think some criminals who don’t have better options can be persuaded to pretend to have DID in a bid to evade responsibility for their crimes. I’ve seen at least one otherwise able prosecutor bamboozled by a defendant pretending to have DID.”
Yet as Monsters Inside reveals, at least one aspect of Milligan’s DID diagnoses rang true. Like most other sufferers, he claimed to have experienced horrendous abuse as a young child at the hands of his step father, Chalmer Milligan. Billy Milligan had grown up in a chaotic, itinerant family and his mother had multiple partners. Milligan explained his DID was as a result of Chalmer’s abuse; the splintering of his self was an attempt to hide from a trauma he couldn’t process or understand.
“There is a relationship between criminality and DID,” argues Borrett. “But what doesn’t get spoken about as much is that every person with DID will have been criminally abused. Yet the way they are presented is as abusers – I suspect there probably are quite a few people in prison with DID, but what we tend not to think about is that they have been horrifically victimised as children.”
In fact, this sense of processing a looming childhood trauma is perhaps what attracted Olivier Megaton, the series’ director, to Milligan’s story. He revealed he grew up in fear of nuclear annihilation – and selected his surname to take ownership of that terror.
“I remember having nightmares where I would wake up in a world devastated by the A bomb,” he said in an interview published on his website. “Nuclear threat became a regular subject for me. I didn’t know how to exorcise this fear, but I decided to face it and chose a name.”
For his part, Milligan said that his core personality – Billy – was buried after a suicide attempt aged 16. His mind fragmented, and his alters took ownership as a means of self-preservation: if they maintained control, he wouldn’t try to blot out his traumatic memories by taking his life.
After his internment in 1978, Milligan spent more than a decade in and out of state mental hospitals. Yet his celebrity attracted favourable treatment. As Monsters Inside records, psychiatrists took up his cause, securing easier living conditions, and allowing him to come and go as he pleased, with one hospital giving him unsupervised furloughs just two years after the rapes. He was even able to own a car and a farm.
He proved to be a security risk. He escaped from Ohio State Psychiatric Hospital in 1986 with the help of his friend, Jim (who is interviewed in the series), recording video testimonies for a local news channel to complain about his treatment inside. While on the run, he worked for a hot-tub business in Washington state. Monsters Inside also explores the possibility that he killed someone while living under an assumed name in Bellingham, Washington. Milligan was the last person to see his neighbour, Michael Madden, alive. Madden vanished in 1986 after an argument with Milligan over disability checks. According to Milligan’s sister, Milligan confessed Madden’s murder to her.
Milligan was an energetic self-promoter. As well as frequent complaints about his living conditions inside mental hospitals, he sold his paintings for thousands of dollars. Most notably though, he collaborated with the science fiction writer Daniel Keyes – known for the short story and novel, Flowers for Algernon, about a man who undergoes surgery to enhance his intelligence – on a fictionalised memoir. Published in 1986 as The Minds of Billy Milligan, it scooped a clutch of awards.
Milligan wrote a sequel, The Milligan Wars, but due to a conflict over film rights it has only ever been released in translation. Nonetheless, Milligan continued to see the filmic possibilities in his story. He was released from psychiatric wards in 1988 after it was determined his personalities had fused, and he was back to his core self. Shortly after, he moved to California and tried to interest Hollywood in an adaptation of The Minds of Billy Milligan. James Cameron was teed up to direct; Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe were among the starry actors in contention for the role of Milligan. But while Milligan reportedly met Cameron face-to-face, the money couldn’t be found to make The Crowded Room – as the project was to be called – and it never got off the ground. Nonetheless, Deadline reported in April that Spiderman star Tom Holland would play Milligan in a new adaptation, released soon in 10 parts on Apple TV, and produced by A Beautiful Mind’s Akiva Goldsman.
“Milligan’s attempt to publicize his case is consistent with the attention-seeking motive common to many of those who purportedly have DID,” says Dr Dietz. “I think efforts to publicize any DID defense to crime amounts to a disinformation campaign. The legacy of the Billy Milligan case is to increase skepticism toward mental health professionals and the criminal justice system.”
But there is evidence that Milligan wearied of the furore that built up around his case. In 1996, a judge in California found him incapable of handling his own affairs. He was sued for $120,000 in royalties earned by The Minds of Billy Milligan to recover the nearly half million dollars spent on his treatment. From 2000, he lived as a virtual recluse – and grew sick of discussing DID.
“I see this crap come on TV all the time,” he told an interviewer in 1996. “These doctors are making it happen, or creating these people. There’s probably two or three hundred [DID sufferers] in the whole US. I’m sick and tired of the phonies, the freak shows and the phonies. 90 per cent of psychiatrists are phoneys. They’re just snake oil salesmen. To the psychiatric community, DID is a marketable commodity.”
Milligan died of cancer in 2014, aged 59. For those who believed he was a manipulative sociopath, his death punctuated a tawdry saga in which the suffering of his victims had long been forgotten. To others, Milligan was a misunderstood victim himself: someone who had experienced terrible abuse and was forced to relive it under the harsh scrutiny of the press and the legal system.
Megaton reportedly tried to contact Milligan’s victims to be interviewed for Monsters Inside. But he could only find contact details for two – and both declined to talk. “The thing is that it’s very hard to try to reach people with that kind of experience 20 or 40 years after,” Megaton said. “I couldn’t imagine saying on the phone, ‘Are you the woman that was raped by Billy Milligan forty years ago?'”
Billy Milligan’s story has had one clear legacy, though: it helped spark debate about the limits of free will, mental illness and criminal culpability. In the last two decades, many more US states have abolished the death penalty for those judged to mentally incapable of responsibilty; in one study of 14 juveniles on death row, researchers found all had suffered head trauma, and 12 had experienced brutal physical abuse. Was Milligan among their number?
“There is a dark underbelly to life,” says Borrett. “Just because something seems shocking, it doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan is streaming on Netflix now
