Billy nodded. “That’s what I want now,” he said. “For the world to know.”

As therapy went forward, outside pressure on the hospital administration continued. Billy’s two-week contract with the staff was renewed. Privileges were slowly restored. The Columbus Dispatch continued to run hostile Milligan stories.

The state legislators, in response to the newspaper reports, pressed on with hearings. When Stinziano and Ball learned :hat a book on Milligan was being written, they introduced House Bill 557 to prevent offenders—including those found lot guilty by reason of insanity—from keeping any of the noney they might make from the stories of their lives or from •evelations about the crimes they commited. The hearings on his bill before the state Judiciary Committee were to begin in wo months.

(4)

3rd June, despite the ongoing newspaper attacks and upheavals hey caused in his living conditions and treatment, Billy renamed stable. He was once again allowed to sign himself out o exercise on the hospital grounds (but not to go to town inattended). His therapy sessions with Dr. Caul continued, ie started painting again. But now both the writer and Dr. Haul agreed that there was a noticeable change in the Teacher, his memory was less accurate. He was becoming as manipulate as Allen and as antisocial as Tommy, Kevin and Phillip.

The Teacher told the writer that one day, when he’d been vorking with Tommy’s CB equipment, he’d heard himself say loud, “Hey, what am I doing? Broadcasting without a license s illegal.” Then without switching to Tommy, he said, “What he hell do I care?”

He was shocked and worried at his otvn attitude. He had ome to believe that these personalities—as the Teacher he iow accepted the term “personalities” rather than “people”— lad been part of him. Suddenly, for the first time, without witching, he felt like them. This, then, was the real fusion.

He was becoming the common denominator of all twenty-four personalities, and that made him not a Robin Hood or a Superman, but a very ordinary, antisocial, impatient, manipulative, bright, talented young man.

As Dr. George Harding had earlier suggested, the fused Billy Milligan would probably be less than the sum of his parts.

At about this time Norma Dishong, his morning case manager, felt she no longer wanted to handle Billy’s case. The pressure had gotten to her. None of the other mental health technicians wanted the case, either. Finally, Dishong s “case buddy,” Wanda Pancake, new to the AIT unit, although she had been at the hospital for ten years, agreed to be his case manager.

A young divorcee, with a square-shaped face and a short, stocky figure, Wanda Pancake approached her new patient with trepidation. “When I first heard he was coming here,” she later admitted, “I thought to myself: That’s all we need. I was scared to death of him because of what I’d read in the papers. I mean, he was a rapist. And he’d been violent.”

She recalled the first time she saw him, a few days after he’d been admitted to AIT the previous December. He was in the recreation room, painting. She went in to talk to him, and found herself trembling so hard that she could see a lock of her hair that had fallen across her forehead was vibrating.