During this period at the hospital, according to Billy, there was much harassment and beatings of patients by attendants, but besides Ragen, only Kevin, of all the personalities, stood up to the attendants. In recognition of this, Arthur removed him from the list of undesirables.

Kevin wrote to me on March 28, 1980:

Something very bad has happened but I don’t know what. I did know it would be only a matter of time before total unfusion and Billy would go to sleep for good. Arthur said Billy had only a small taste of conscious life but unfortunately the taste was a bitter one. Day by day he grew weaker in this place. He could not understand the hate and jealousy displayed by the authority figures of this institution. They also provoked the patients to hurt him and make Ragen fight, but Billy could hold Ragen back …but not anymore. The doctors say bad things about us, and what hurts the most is they are right.

We, I, am a freak, a misfit, a biological error. We all hate this place but it is where we belong. We weren’t accepted very well, were we?

Ragen is stopping everything for good. He has to. He said if you do not speak, you do no damage to anyone on the outside or inside. No one can blame us for anything. Ragen stopped the hearing. The span of attention will be turned inward and it will enforce the total block.

By shutting out the real world we can live peacefully in ours.

We know that a world without pain is a world without feeling …but a world without feeling is a world without pain.

Kevin

In October 1980, the State Department of Mental Health released the news that Lima was to be phased out as a state hospital for the criminally insane and would become a prison under the Department of Correction.

Once again the issue of where Milligan might be transferred made headlines. The possibility that he might be sent back to Athens or to another minimum-security hospital led Prosecutor Jim O’Grady to demand that under the new law, Billy be sent back to Columbus for his sanity review hearing. Judge I Flowers agreed to hear his case.

Originally scheduled to take place on October 31, 1980, the hearing was postponed by mutual agreement to November 7, after election day. To avoid having the politicians and the press make the Milligan hearing a political issue, a delay was desirable.

But officials of the state Department of Mental Health used this delay to take action on their own. They informed Prosecutor O’Grady that the decision had been made to send Milligan to the new Dayton Forensic Center, which had opened in April. This new maximum-security facility was surrounded by double fences, topped by rolls of razor-ribbon concertina wire wrapped around barbed wire, and had a security system more stringent than most prisons. The prosecutors office dropped its demand for a hearing.

On November 19, 1980, Billy Milligan was moved to the Dayton Forensic Center. Arthur and Ragen, sensing Billy-U’s despair and afraid he might try to kill himself, put him to sleep again.