Four people were present at the line-up to make identification. Donna West, the nurse who had identified his mug shot, had been told she wasn’t needed and had gone off to Cleveland with her fiance. Cynthia Mendoza, a Kroger store clerk who cashed one of the checks, did not identify Milligan. She picked number 3 instead. A woman who had been sexually assaulted in August under very different circumstances said she thought it might be number 2 but she wasn’t positive. Carrie Dryer said without the mustache she couldn’t be sure, but number 2 did look familiar. Polly Newton made positive identification.

On November 3, the grand jury handed down an indictment on three counts of kidnapping, three counts of aggravated robbery and four counts of rape. All were first-degree felony charges, punishable by prison terms of four to twenty-five years on each count.

The prosecutor’s office rarely got involved in assigning attorneys—even in major murder cases. The normal procedure was for the head of the Felony Division to assign one of the senior prosecutors two or three weeks in advance, by random selection. But County Prosecutor George Smith called in two of his top senior prosecutors and told them that the publicity surrounding the Campus Rapist case had stirred public outrage. He wanted them to handle the case and to prosecute vigorously.

Terry Sherman, thirty-two, with curly black hair and a fierce, guardman’s mustache, had a reputation for coming down hard on sex offenders and boasted that he had never lost a rape case before a jury. When he looked at the file, he laughed. “It’s a locked case. The warrants were good. We’ve got this guy. The public defenders have nothing.”

Bernard Zalig Yavitch, a thirty-five-year-old member of the prosecutors criminal-trial staff, had been two years ahead of Judy Stevenson and Gary Schweickart in law school and knew them well. Gary had been his law clerk. Yavitch had practiced law for four years as a public defender before coming to the prosecutor’s office. He agreed with Sherman that it was as good a case for the prosecution as he had ever seen.

“As good?” said Sherman. “With all the physical evidence, the fingerprints, the identification, we’ve got it all. I tell you, they’ve got nothing.”

Sherman talked to Judy a few days later and decided to set her straight. “There won’t be any plea-bargaining on the Milligan case. We’ve got the guy and we’re going for a conviction and the maximum sentence. You don’t have anything.”

But Bemie Yavitch was thoughtful. As a former public defender, he knew what he would do if he were in Judy and Gary’s position. “There’s still one thing they’ve got left—an insanity plea.”

Sherman laughed.

The following day William Milligan tried to kill himself by smashing his head into his cell wall.

“He’s not going to live long enough to stand trial,” Gary Schweickart said to Judy Stevenson when he got the news.

“I don’t think he’s competent to stand trial,” she said. “I think we should tell the judge we feel he is incapable of assisting in his own defense.”