Chalmer Milligan, Williams adoptive father (identified at the trial and by the media as his “stepfather”) refused to discuss the allegations against him, and refused my offer to tell his side of the story. In statements he sent to newspapers and magazines and in publicized interviews, he denied Williams accusations of “threatening, abusing and sodomizing him.” Chalmer Milligan s alleged actions are, therefore, derived from trial transcripts, which were supported by depositions from relatives and neighbors and corroborated in my taped interviews with his daughter, Challa; his adopted daughter, Kathy; his adopted son, Jim; his former wife, Dorothy; and, of course, William Milligan.

I would like to give special recognition and express my appreciation to my daughters, Hillary and Leslie, for their help and understanding during the difficult days of researching this material, and to my wife, Aurea, who in addition to making her usual helpful editorial suggestions listened to hundreds of hours of interview tapes and logged them into a retrieval system so that I could find and cross-check conversations and information. Without her encouragement and help, this book would have taken many more years to write.

Preface

This book is the factual account of the life, up to now, of William Stanley Milligan, the first person in U.S. history to be found not guilty of major crimes, by reason of insanity, because he possessed multiple personalities.

Unlike other multiple personalities in psychiatric and popular literature who were kept anonymous at the outset by the use of fictional names, Milligan became a controversial public figure from the moment he was arrested and indicted. His face appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on the covers of magazines. Results of his mental examinations made evening television news programs and newspaper headlines around the world. He is also the first multiple personality patient to have been carefully examined around the clock as an inpatient in a hospital setting, with findings of multiplicity attested to in sworn testimony by four psychiatrists and a psychologist.

I first met the twenty-three-year-old man at the Athens Mental Health Center in Athens, Ohio, shortly after he had been sent there by the courts. When he asked me to write his story, I told him it would depend on whether or not there was more to it than had been reported extensively in the media. He assured me that the deeper secrets of his inner people had never been revealed to anyone, including his attorneys and the psychiatrists who had examined him. Now he wanted the world to understand his mental illness. I was skeptical but interested.

Several days after I met him, my curiosity was further aroused by the last paragraph of a Newsweek article entitled “The Ten Faces of Billy”:

There remain, however, unanswered questions: How did Milligan learn the Houdini-like escape skill demonstrated by Tommy [one of his personalities]? What about his conversations with his rape victims in which he claimed to be a “guerrilla” and a “hit man”? Doctors think that Milligan may have personalities yet unfathomed—and that some of them may have committed undiscovered crimes.