Local voices used to tell Milligan story
Four-part documentary being shown on Netflix
Four decades after the trial of Billy Milligan, Greater Columbus residents are being reminded of the case thanks to a recently released documentary on Netflix.
Responsible for the renewal of interest is a team of filmmakers who hail far from Columbus — from France, in fact.
In 2017, Brice Lambert, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker in Paris, read an article on dissociative
identity disorder that mentioned Milligan, a Columbus man who, in 1977, was charged with kidnapping, robbing and raping three women.
Multiple personality disorder, as the condition was then known, was given as a defense; after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, Milligan was
shuffled between hospitals throughout Ohio for a decade, a period that climaxed with his escape from one such institution in 1986. He died in 2014.
“In the field of dissociative identity disorder, Billy’s case is very famous,” said Lambert, 34, who read other articles and a book about Milligan’s case.
When he went looking for a documentary on the subject, though, he found none.
“There was coverage, from news channels, but never a documentary — at least not a recent one or a featurelength documentary,” he said.
After persuading a producer of the viability of such a project, Lambert began work on what became the new Netflix documentary, “Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan,” which was released last week. Lambert, who cowrote the documentary with director Olivier Megaton, spoke with The Dispatch this week from Paris; most of the project’s key creative personnel are
French.
The four-part series, which, as of Tuesday night, was Netflix’s ninth-most popular program, is part of an apparent revival of interest in Milligan’s case: “Spider-man” star Tom Holland will portray Milligan in a forthcoming Apple TV+ series, “The Crowded Room,” the first season of which will draw on author Daniel Keyes’ book “The Minds of Billy Milligan.” No release date for the Apple series has been announced.
The success of the documentary, though, wasn’t a foregone conclusion.
“At the beginning, I didn’t know if people were alive, if people were still around, if I could find them,” Lambert said. “You bet on something, and then you work hard and hopefully it will work.”
Among those first contacted by Lambert was Milligan’s sister, Dublin resident Kathy Preston.
“I decided, finally, after my brother’s death that I would be willing to talk about it so long as we could use it for educational purposes,” said Preston, 64, a middle-school teacher in Upper Arlington Schools. “He was treated so poorly by our mental health system, and it wasn’t what he really, really needed.”
As Lambert saw it, Preston was waiting for an opportunity to offer a morecomplete picture of her brother’s story.
“Kathy was kind of expecting someone to call her one day to do this,” Lambert said. “That’s how it started.”
During his first trip to Columbus, Lambert also secured permission from Preston and psychiatrist George Harding to use excerpts from videotaped recordings of sessions with Milligan at Harding Hospital.
“We have access to material that captures a very key moment in the story and was not intended to be aired,” Lambert said. “It was not intended to be broadcasted; it was intended to document the case.”
Among those interviewed in the final documentary are Milligan’s brother, Jim Morrison; prosecutors Ron O’brien and Terry Sherman; assorted psychiatrists, including Harding; and friends of Milligan from childhood and later.
“Some people were very difficult to convince (to be interviewed),” Lambert said. “I had very early contact with people that only accepted to participate three years after the first contact.”
Others declined to participate altogether, including the women Milligan was charged with attacking in 1977; each either said no or never replied to inquiries, Lambert said.
“We hired a local researcher who was able to visit places, physically, to try to find those persons, and not approach them by phone,” Lambert said. “We didn’t want to push. If we had a no, we had a no, and we respected the decision.”
Also declining to participate was the family of a deceased Washington State man whom Milligan is suspected by some of killing.
To capture a sense of the coverage of the case at the time, the filmmakers turned to several former Dispatch reporters, including veteran journalist Bob Ruth.
“For two or three weeks, (Milligan) terrified the community, especially the OSU campus,” said Ruth, 78, who spent 36 years at The Dispatch. “This case would have been a big case anyway, but it would have been a local case. The thing that made it the national news that it was, was the multiple personalities.”
Yet, when Lambert contacted him while he and his wife were vacationing in Arizona, Ruth had not given much thought to Milligan in decades.
“This guy calls me up. It’s Brice Lambert, with a heavy French accent,” Ruth said. “I pulled off to the side of the road, and he told me what it was about.”
In November 2019 and February 2020, the filmmakers traveled to Ohio to film segments with local interviewees.
“They were doing a tremendous amount of research and contacting people and digging up people,” said Mark Ellis, 70, a former reporter and editor at The Dispatch who was on the scene the night of Milligan’s arrest.
“It was a case that had some novelty to it,” Ellis said. “As soon as they (police) talked to (Milligan), they realized that there was some mental disturbance there.”
Over the years, Ellis said, he has heard from other producers pursuing documentaries about Milligan, but none that seemed as serious as the French team.
Preston said she didn’t mind revisiting the details of the case.
“If people knew, and came to understand, how horribly (Milligan) was treated at the state hospital, then they would have a better idea, perhaps, of why he actually walked away from the hospital and then got into the rest of the troubles,” she said.
Upon viewing the documentary, though, Preston regretted the inclusion of interviewees who opine on Milligan’s condition without having met him; she also laments some omissions, including details about what she describes as a confirmation of Milligan’s diagnosis in 2009.
“I would say that it is adequate,” Preston said of the documentary. “It could have been so much more powerful.”
At the same time, she hopes the series will facilitate discussions of mental illness.
“There’s such a horrendous stigma when it comes to mental illness,” she said.
As for the Dispatch reporters whose memories were tapped for the film, both praise the project for its scope and thoroughness.
“I think some of it is dramatized — there are some obvious actors involved,” Ellis said, referring to segments in which events were reenacted. “But I think, by and large, it was well-researched and it certainly seems accurate.”
Ruth describes Lambert as “a hell of a journalist. I was shocked that he was able to get as many people, and also all the recordings, all the documentation.”
But when asked for his own opinion of Milligan — and whether the diagnosis of multiple personalities was legitimate or overstated — Lambert declined to influence viewers, who can reach their own conclusions.
“I think my personal opinion is quite irrelevant,” he said. “I’m not here to give my opinion; I’m here to try to present a story and try to remain as objective as possible in an investigation.”
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“If people knew, and came to understand, how horribly (Milligan) was treated at the state hospital, then they would have a better idea, perhaps, of why he actually walked away from the hospital and then got into the rest of the troubles.” Kathy Preston