“The patient reports,” he wrote, “that the mother and children were subject to physical abuse and that he suffered sadistic and sexual abuse including anal intercourse from Mr. Milligan. According to the patient this occurred when he was eight or nine over the course of a year, generally on a farm where he would be alone with the stepfather. He indicates that he was afraid that the stepfather would kill him insomuch as he threatened to ‘bury him in the barn and tell the mother that he had run away.’”

In analyzing the psychodynamics of the case, Harding pointed out that Milligans natural fathers suicide had deprived him of a fathers involvement and attention, and left him with “a feeling of irrational power and overwhelming guilt leading to anxiety, conflict and increased fantasy formulation.” He was thus “vulnerable to exploitation by the stepfather Chalmer Milligan, who preyed upon his needs for closeness and caring to satisfy his own frustrations through sexual and sadistic exploitation …”

Since young Milligan identified with his mother, when she was beaten by her husband, it caused young Milligan to “experience her terror and pain ...” It also led to a “kind of separation anxiety which left him in an unstable fantasy world with all the unpredictable and unintelligible characteristics of a dream. This along with the stepfathers put-downs, sadistic abuses and sexual exploitation led to recurrent dissociations …”

Dr. George Harding concluded: “It is now my opinion that the patient is competent to stand trial having accomplished a fusion of his multiple personalities … it is also my opinion that the patient is mentally ill and that as a result of his mental illness he was not responsible for his criminal conduct at the time the criminal conduct did occur in the last half of October 1977.”

On September 19, Judy Stevenson filed a motion to amend the defendants plea to “not guilty, and not guilty by reason of insanity.”

(8)

Up to this point in Milligans case, the multiple personality diagnosis had not been made public. It was known only to those treating him, the prosecutors and the judge. The public defenders continued to insist that the diagnosis be kept secret, since it would be difficult to treat him and then try his case if it exploded into a media event.

Bemie Yavitch agreed, feeling it was well within his ethics as prosecutor not to reveal what was going on with the suspect, since there had been no testimony in court about it.

But on the morning of September 27, the Columbus Cit-izen-Joumal broke the story with banner headlines:

PERSONALITIES “FUSED” FOR COURT TRIAL

10 People “Exist” in Rape Suspect

When the word got out at Harding Hospital about the morning paper, the staff encouraged Billy to tell the other patients about it before they learned of it from outside sources. He told the mini-group that he had been charged with these crimes but he wasn’t sure he had done them, since he was defused at the time.