Milligan, he said, was prevented from entering the car, and Milligan and Holston then ran over the hill. Three men were able to subdue Milligan and take him back to Ward 5.

After hearing Chief Cremeans’ evidence, Judge Jones granted the motion of the attorney general’s office that Milligan be sent to Lima.

At two o’clock, on October 4, 1979, Billy was handcuffed and belt-shackled, and with no time to say good-by to anyone but Dr. Caul, he was driven 180 miles away to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Chapter Twenty-Three

(1)

Columbus Dispatch, October 5, 1979:

Top Officials Seen Spurring Milligan Transfer By Robert Ruth

Direct intervention by top state mental health officials prompted the transfer Thursday of multi-personality rapist William S. Milligan to Lima State Hospital, a maximum security facility, a reliable source reports.

The transfer order came after top officials in the Ohio Mental Health and Mental Retardation s Columbus headquarters made several phone calls Wednesday to the Athens Mental Health Center where Milligan had been confined for 10 months, the source said.

Mental Health Director Timothy Moritz made at least one of the calls, the source added…. Two state legislators—Reps. Mike Stinziano D-Columbus, and Claire Mr. Ball, Jr., R-Athens—repeatedly have complained about what they charged was lenient treatment given the rapist.

Thursday both Stinziano and Ball praised the decision to transfer Milligan to the Lima facility, but Ball added, “I only wonder what took so long?”

Stinziano said he will continue to keep a close watch on Milligans case to ensure Milligan is not released from a maximum security facility until he is no longer a threat to society.

The day after Milligans transfer, Judge S. Farrell Jackson of the common pleas court in Lancaster filed his ruling on Milligans motion to vacate his guilty plea for the Gray Drug Store robbery:

This court is of the opinion that the burden of proof as to the matter of the insanity of William S. Milligan on March 27, 1975, is upon the defendant, William S. Milligan …After a careful , analysis of all the evidence, this court is not convinced by a preponderance of the evidence that on March 27, 1975 that William Stanley Milligan was insane, was unable to counsel in his own defense or was unable to understanding^ enter a plea of guilty to the charges and, therefore, there has been no showing of a manifest injustice arid the motion of William Stanley Milligan to withdraw his pleas of guilty is denied.

Goldsberry filed an appeal with the Ohio Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on the grounds that Judge Jackson had improperly considered the weight of the evidence—balancing the opinions of four eminently qualified psychiatrists and a psychologist against the solitary opinion of Dr. Brown.

He also filed a motion in the city of Lima, Ohio, at the Allen County Courthouse, charging that his client had not been given an opportunity to confer with his attorney and that he had been transferred to a more restrictive facility without due process.