Sabre Thompson
PSY-100
May 31, 2009
Mr. Caruso
Taking Sides Paper
Who is Billy Milligan? No one seems to know Billy Milligan these days, not that anyone ever did. Born in Miami Florida in 1955 as William Stanley Milligan, he was a criminal or a victim; an expert actor or so disturbed that his mind fractured into at least 24 personalities. Shortly after moving to Circleville, Ohio in 1960 with his mother, Dorothy, he helped plan a Lancaster drugstore robbery in early 1975. Not much later, Lancaster police arrested him, and he pleaded guilty to robbing the store. He was sentenced to at least two years in prison and paroled in April 1977. Six months later, the OSU campus-area rapes started where he kidnapped three women from the Ohio State University campus area in 1977, raped them and said that part of him did it for affection.
The first rape was on October 14, 1977. Milligan pointed a gun at an OSU optometry student and took her from a campus parking lot to a wooded area. When it was over, he made her write a check and cash it for him. The second was on October 22. The third was on October 26 and on October 27, 1977 one of the victims picked Milligan's face out of a group of mug shots. Milligan was 22 at the time. One of his fingerprints on file matched a print found on one of the victim's cars. Columbus and OSU police arrested him at his home in Reynoldsburg. Elliot Boxerbaum, then the OSU police investigations supervisor said "I couldn't tell you what was going on, but it was like I was talking to different people at different times”. Doctors examined Milligan, and even the skeptical ones saw what Boxerbaum had described (Phillips, 1988). In the course of preparing his defense, he underwent a psychological examination by Dr. Willis C. Driscoll, who diagnosed Milligan with schizophrenia. He was then examined by psychologist Dorothy Turner of Southwest Community Mental Health Center in Columbus, Ohio. During this examination, Turner concluded that...
