The True Story of Billy Milligan, the First Ever Defendant Found Not Guilty Due to Multiple Personalities

In Apple TV+'s new series The Crowded Room, Tom Holland portrays his highly publicized, turbulent life.

By Lauren KrancPUBLISHED: JUN 09, 2023 3:40 PM EST

In 1977, 22-year-old Billy Milligan was arrested for the kidnapping, robbery, and rape of three women around the Ohio State campus area. He was imprisoned for the crimes and assigned public defenders to work on his case. But during a psychiatric evaluation, Milligan revealed that he hadn’t committed any crimes at all—it was Ragen(one of Billy’s personalities) that had stolen the money and Adalana(one of his FEMALE personalities) who had raped the women.

小注释：psychiatric [ˌsaɪkiˈætrɪk] adj.精神病学的

Continued evaluation revealed eight additional alternate personalities, and on December 4, 1978, Milligan was found not guilty by reason of insanity on nine criminal charges. Just as an OSU police officer who rode with Milligan to the Columbus Dispatch in a 2007 interview, “I couldn’t tell you what was going on, but it was like I was talking to different people at different times.”

Joni Johnston, a forensic psychologist and private investigator, has researched and written extensively on the Billy Milligan case. A&E True Crime spoke with Johnston to learn more about Milligan’s controversial diagnosis, the acquittal and whether the verdict would hold up in a courtroom.

小注释：forensic [fəˈrensɪk] adj. 法庭的                                  acquittal [ə'kwitl] n.宣告无罪

During the trial, Milligan was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder or MPD. He was evaluated by nine different mental health professionals. His most famous evaluator was a woman named Cornelia Wilbur, a psychiatrist best known for the book ‘Sybil’, which recounted a groundbreaking examination of someone who had these multiple personalities with different behaviors and mannerisms.

Psychoanalyst Cornelia B. Wilbur, who courted fame and controversy over her “fusing” of Sybil’s personalities.

Wilbur determined that Milligan’s psyche had fractured into at least 10 different personalities, eight male and two female. They ranged from Christene, a three-year-old girl, to Arthur, a 22-year-old Brit, whose main task was cleaning up the other personalities’ messes. But the two personalities that mattered most to Milligan’s case were Ragen, a 23-year-old with a Slavic accent who lacked empathy, and Adalana, a 19-year-old “curious lesbian.” According to Wilbur, it was Ragen who robbed the women and Adalana who raped them.