Billy Milligan was transferred from the Franklin County Jail to Harding Hospital two days ahead of schedule, on the morning of March 16. Dr. George Harding had assembled and briefed a therapy team for Milligan, but when he arrived unexpectedly, Dr. Harding was away at a psychiatric meeting in Chicago.
Judy Stevenson and Dorothy Turner, who had followed the police car to Harding Hospital, knew what a terrible blow it would be to Danny to be taken back to jail. Dr. Shoemaker, a staff physician, agreed to take personal charge of the patient until Dr. Harding returned, and the sheriff’s deputy signed his prisoner over.
Judy and Dorothy walked with Danny to Wakefield Cottage, a locked psychiatric unit with facilities for fourteen difficult patients requiring constant observation and personal attention. A bed was found and prepared, and Danny was assigned to one of two “special care” rooms whose heavy
oak doors had peepholes for around-the-clock observation. A psychiatric aide (called "psych-tech”
at Harding Hospital) brought him a lunch tray, and both women stayed with him while he ate.
After lunch, Dr. Shoemaker and three nurses joined them. Turner—feeling it was important for the staff to see the multiple personality syndrome for themselves—suggested to Danny that Arthur come out and meet some of the people who would be working with him.
Nurse .Adrienne McCann, the unit coordinator, had been briefed as part of the therapy team, but the other two nurses were taken completely by surprise.
Donna Egar, mother of five daughters, found it difficult to sort out her emotions at meeting the Campus Rapist. The nurse watched closely as first the little boy talked and then his eyes became fixed in a trance, lips moving silently, conducting an inner conversation. When he looked up, his expression was austere and haughty, and he spoke in a British accent.
She had to keep from laughing, not convinced by Danny or Arthur of either s existence—it could be an act by a brilliant actor to avoid prison, she thought. But she was curious about what Billy Milligan was like; she wanted to know what kind of person would do the things he had done.
Dorothy and Judy spoke to Arthur, reassuring him that he was in a safe place. Dorothy told him she would be coming by in a few days to do some psychological testing. Judy said she and Gary would visit from time to time to work with him on the case.
Psych-tech Tim Sheppard observed the new patient every fifteen minutes through the peephole and made entries on the special-procedures record for that first day:
5:00 sitting cross-legged on bed, quiet 5:15 sitting cross-legged on bed, staring 5:32 standing, looking out window 5:45 dinner served
6:02 sitting on edge of bed, staring 6:07 tray removed, ate well.
At seven-fifteen, Milligan began pacing.
At eight o’clock, Nurse Helen Yaeger went into his room and stayed with him for forty minutes. Her first entry in the nurses’ notes was brief:
3/16/78 Mr. Milligan remains in special care—observed closely for special precautions.
Spoke of his multiple personalities. “Arthur” did most of the talking—he has an English accent.
Stated that one of the persons—namely Billy—is suicidal and he has been asleep since 16 years of age in order to protect the others from harm. Eating well. Voiding well. Taking foods well. Pleasant and cooperative.
After Nurse Yaeger left, Arthur silently informed the others that Harding Hospital was a safe and supportive environment. Since it would take insight and logic to assist the physicians in therapy, he, Arthur, would henceforth assume complete domination of the spot.
At two twenty-five that morning, Psych-tech Chris Cann heard a loud noise from the room.
When he went to check, he saw the patient sitting on the floor.
Tommy was upset at having fallen out of bed. Seconds later, he heard the footsteps and saw the eye at the peephole. As soon as the footsteps faded away, Tommy pulled the taped razor blade from the sole of his foot and carefully hid it, retaping it to the underside of one of the bed slats. He would know where to find it when the time came.
(2)
On his return from Chicago on March 19, Dr. George Harding, Jr., was annoyed that his careful arrangements had been upset by the early transfer. He had planned to greet Milligan in person. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to assemble a therapy team: psychologist, art therapist, adjunctive therapist, psychiatric social worker, doctors, nurses, psych-techs and the Wakefield unit coordinator. He had discussed with them the complexities of multiple personality.
When some of the staff admitted openly that they didn't believe in the diagnosis, he listened to them
patiently, spoke of his own skepticism and asked them to assist him in fulfilling the charge of the court. They would all have to keep open minds and work together to get an insight into William Stanley Milligan.
Dr. Perry Ayres gave Milligan a physical examination the day after Dr. Harding returned.
Ayres wrote in the medical history that frequently Milligans lips moved and his eyes were diverted to the right, usually before responding to a question. Ayres noted that when he asked the patient why he did that, he responded that he was talking to some of the others, especially Arthur, to get the answers to the questions.
“But you're supposed to call us Billy,” Milligan said, “so no one will think we’re crazy. I’m Danny. It was Allen that filled out that form. But I’m not supposed to talk about the others.” Dr.
Ayres quoted this in his report and added:
We agreed early that we would try to talk only about Billy, with the understanding that Danny would give us the health information related to all of them. It was his inability to stick to this agreement that led to the disclosure of the other names. The only ailment he recalls is the hernia repair when Billy was 9— “Davids always been 9,” and it was David who had the hernia repair.
Allen has tunnel vision, but everyone" else has normal vision . . .
Note: Before going into the examining room, I discussed with him the nature of the
examination contemplated, describing it in detail. I emphasized that it would be important to check his hernia repair and his prostate by rectal examination, the latter because of the urinary abnormality [pyuria]. He became very anxious and his lips and eyes moved rapidly as he apparently held a conversation with the others. He nervously but politely told me “that might mess up Billy and David because that’s where Chalmers raped each of them 4 times when we lived on the farm. Chalmers was our stepfather.” He also added at about this point that the mother described in the family history is Billy’s mother, “but she’s not my mother—I don’t know my mother.”
Rosalie Drake and Nick Cicco, co-therapists in Wakefield Cottage’s “mini-group” program, became most closely involved with Milligan on a day-to-day basis. At ten each morning and three each afternoon, seven or eight of the Wakefield patients would be brought together to work on projects and activities as a group.
On March 21, Nick brought Milligan from the special-care room, now locked only at night, to the activities room. The slender twenty-seven-year-old psych-tech, who sported a full beard and wore two earrings—a delicate gold loop and a jade stone—in his left ear lobe, had heard of
Milligans hostility toward males because of the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child. He was curious about multiple personality, though he was skeptical about the whole idea.
Rosalie, a blond, blue-eyed occupational therapist in her late twenties, had never dealt with a multiple personality before. But after the briefing by Dr. Harding, she became aware that the staff had quickly divided into two camps: those who believed Milligan was a multiple and those who believed he was a con man—faking this exotic illness to gain attention and to avoid going to prison for rape. Rosalie was struggling hard to keep an open mind.
When Milligan seated himself at the end of the table; apart from the others, Rosalie Drake told him that the mini-group patients had decided the day before to make collages that would say something about themselves to someone they loved. “I don’t have anyone I love to make one for,”
he said. “Then do it for us,” Rosalie said. “Everyone is doing it.” She held up a sheet of construction paper she was working on. “Nick and I are doing them too.”
Rosalie watched from a distance as Milligan took a sheet of eight-by-eleven construction paper and started cutting photographs from magazines. She had heard of Milligans artistic ability, and now, looking at the shy, quiet patient, she was curious to see what he would do. He worked silently, calmly. When he was done, she walked over and looked at it.
His collage startled her. It showed a frightened, tearful child looking out of the center of the
page, and beneath him the name morrison. Looming over him was an angry man and, in red, the word danger. In the lower right comer was a skull.
She was touched by its simplicity of statement, the depth of emotion. She hadn’t asked for anything like this, and it wasn’t what she’d expected. It revealed, she felt, a painful history. She shivered when she looked at it, and right then and there she knew she was hooked. No matter what doubts the others in the hospital might have about him, this, she knew, was not the product of an unfeeling sociopath. Nick Cicco agreed.
Dr. George (so called by staff and patients to distinguish him from his father, Dr. George Harding, Sr.) began to read the relevant psychiatric journals and discovered that the disease known as multiple personality seemed to be on the increase. The doctor made calls to various psychiatrists, and all of them said much the same thing: “We’ll share with you the little we know, but this is an area we don’t understand. You’ll have to blaze your own trail.”
It was going to take much more time and effort than Dr. George had first imagined, and he wondered if he had done the right thing accepting this patient in the middle of a fundraising campaign and expansion program for the hospital. He reassured himself that it was important to Billy Milligan, and important to the profession, to help psychiatry probe the limits of knowledge about the human mind.
Before he could provide the court with an evaluation, he would have to learn Billy Milligans history. Considering the massive amnesia, that posed a serious problem.
On Thursday, March 23, Gary Schweickart and Judy Stevenson visited their client for an hour, going over his vague memory of events, comparing his story with those of the three victims, planning alternative legal strategies, depending on Dr. Hardings report to the court.
Both attorneys found Milligan more at ease, though he complained about being locked up in special care and having to wear “special precaution” clothes. “Dr. George says I can be treated just like the other patients here, but nobody here trusts me. The other patients are allowed to go off the grounds in the van on excursions, but not me. I have to stay here. And I just get furious when they insist on calling me Billy.”
They tried to calm him, to explain that Dr. George had gone out on a limb for him, and that he had to be careful not to try the doctors patience. Judy sensed he was Allen, but she didn’t ask, always afraid he might be insulted that she didn’t know him.
Gary said, “I think you should try to cooperate with the staff here. It’s your only chance to stay out of jail.”
As they left, both agreed that they were relieved he was safe and that the day-to-day responsibility and worry were off their backs for a while.
Later that day the first therapy session was a strained fifty-minute hour for Dr. Harding.
Milligan sat on the chair facing the window in the interview room at Wakefield, but he would not, at first, make eye contact. He seemed to remember very little of his past, although he talked freely of the abuse by his adoptive father.
Dr. Harding knew he was being overcautious in his approach. Dr. Wilbur had told him to find out as soon as possible how many personalities there were, to establish their identities. The alternates needed to be encouraged to tell why they existed and to be permitted to relive the specific situations that had caused their creation.
Then all of the alternates had to be encouraged to know one another, to communicate and to help one another with their different problems, sharing things instead of being separated. The strategy, Wilbur had said, was to bring.the others together and eventually introduce Billy—the core personality—to the memories of those incidents. Then, finally, fusion might be attempted. Though the temptation was great to try her approach, the way she had skillfully brought the personalities out in the jail, George Harding had long ago learned his lesson. What worked for someone else didn’t always work for him. He considered himself a very conservative man, and he would have to learn in
his own way, and in his own good time, who and what he had here.
As the days went by, Nurse Donna Egar discovered that she was pretty much on a one-to-one basis with Milligan. He slept very little, far less than most of the other patients, and waked early, so she got to talk to him a great deal. He spoke about the other people who lived with him inside his body.
One day he handed her a sheet of paper with writing all over it and signed “Arthur. ” He seemed quite frightened, saying, “I don’t know anybody named Arthur, and I don’t understand what’s written on the paper.”
Soon the staff was complaining to Dr. George that they found it increasingly difficult to deal with someone who constantly said, “I didn’t do that, someone else did,” when they had seen it happen with their own eyes. Milligan, they said, was undermining the treatment of other patients, manipulating the staff by going from one to the other to get what he wanted. He constantly hinted that Ragen might come out and handle matters, and the staff saw this as a veiled threat.
Dr. George suggested that he be the one to deal with Milligan’s alter personalities, and then only in therapy sessions. The staff should not mention or discuss the other names on the unit, especially not in front of the other patients.
Helen Yaeger, the nurse who had spoken to Arthur on the first day, now entered this treatment plan on the nursing-goal sheet dated March 28:
Within one month Mr. Milligan will accept responsibility for acts which he denies as evidenced by no statements of denial of these behaviors.
Plan:
(1) When denies ability to play piano—staff replies they saw or heard him play—maintain a matter of fact attitude.(2) When observed writing notes that he denies knowledge of—staff should tell him he was seen writing notes.(3) When patient refers to himself as another personality—staff should remind him his name is Billy. Dr. George explained his approach to Allen during the therapy session by pointing out that the other patients on the unit became confused when they heard the various names of the personalities.
“Some people call themselves Napoleon or Jesus Christ,” Allen said.
“But its different if I and the staff do it—call you Danny one day and Arthur or Ragen or Tommy or Allen another time. I suggest that to the staff and to the patients, all your personalities answer to the name of Billy, while in—”
“They’re not ‘personalities,’ Dr. George. They’re people.” “Why do you make the distinction?”
“When you call them personalities, it’s as if you don’t think they’re real.”
(3)
On April 8, several days after Dorothy Turner had begun a program of psychological testing, Donna Egar saw Milligan walking back and forth in his room angrily. When she asked him what was wrong, he answered in his British accent, “No ope understands.”
Then she saw his face change again and then his whole posture, walk and speech, and she knew it was Danny. At that point, seeing how consistent he was, how real these different
personalities were, she no longer assumed he was faking. She had to admit that she, alone of the nursing staff, had come around to being a believer.
A few days later, he came to her, very upset. She could tell quickly that it was Danny. He stared at her and said pathetically, “Why am I here?”
“Where do you mean?” she asked. “Here in this room, or in this building?”
He shook his head. “Some of the other patients asked me why I’m in this hospital.”
“Maybe Dorothy Turner can explain it to you when she comes to do your testing,” she said.
That evening, after his testing session with Dorothy Turner was over, he wouldn’t talk to anyone. He ran into his room and went to the bathroom to wash his face. A few seconds later,
Danny heard his front door open and close. He looked out and saw a young woman patient named Dorine. Though he often listened to her problems sympathetically and talked about his own, he had no other interest in her.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I wanted to talk to you. Why did you get so upset tonight?” “You know you can’t come in here. Its against the rules.” “But you look so depressed.”
“I found out what someone did. Its terrible. I’m not fit to live. ” Just then footsteps
approached, followed by a knock on the door. Dorine jumped into the bathroom with him and closed the door behind her.
“What’d you do that for?” he whispered harshly. “I’ll get into worse trouble. Now it’ll be a mess. ’
She giggled.
“All right, Billy and Dorine!” Nurse Jaeger called. “You two can come out whenever you’re ready.”
In the nurses’ notes for April 9, 1979, Nurse Yaeger wrote:
In the nurses’ notes for April 9, 1979, Nurse Yaeger wrote: