TRACING THE TRAGEDIES
Netflix recounts Billy Milligan’s crimes, defense
One of the most infamous and idiosyncratic cases in the annals of Columbus crime is given an exhaustive treatment in a new documentary currently streaming on Netflix. h “Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan,” a four-episode documentary that debuted on the streaming service on Wednesday, takes as its subject Billy Milligan, a Columbus man who in 1977 was accused of kidnapping, robbing and raping three women close to the campus of Ohio State University. The crimes rattled Greater Columbus at the time, but it was Milligan’s defense that gave the case lasting interest — enough to warrant a high-profile documentary some 44 years after the events took place.
When confronted with the charges, Milligan's defense team asserted that his crimes were committed while he inhabited several alternate personalities between which he switched — in this case, Ragen, a 23-year-old Yugoslavian man whom Milligan said did the robberies; and Adalana, a 19-year-old women whom Milligan said was responsible for the sexual crimes.
Bolstered by psychiatrists who attested to Milligan suffering from multiple-personality disorder, and aided by public defenders Gary Schweickart and Judy Stevenson, Milligan's argument was persuasive enough to convince Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jay C. Flowers to issue a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
The ins and outs of the court case are compelling enough, but director Olivier Megaton's documentary is far moreambitious than a garden-variety account of legal proceedings.
Megaton, a French filmmaker whose previous credits include the big-budget action films “Taken 2,” “Taken 3” and “Colombiana,” uses a full complement of cinematic techniques to evoke the context of Milligan's case, including old newscasts, footage of psychiatric sessions with Milligan (during which he shifts his accent depending on which personality he is inhabiting), archival photographs and new interviews with major players.
Among those interviewed on-camera are Milligan's brother, Jim Morrison, and sister, Kathy Preston; prosecutors Ron O'brien and Terry Sherman; psychiatrist George Harding, of Harding Hospital; and former Dispatch reporters Mark Ellis and Bob Ruth, whose coverage of the case helped make it a cause celebre in the late 1970s and into the '80s.
Following the first episode, which gives an overall account of the crimes, defense strategy and disposition of the case, Megaton backtracks in the second episode to explore the origins of Milligan's psychological problems; whether or not one believes his multiple-personality defense — the film presents evidence for and against such a diagnosis — it's clear that Milligan was deeply disturbed.
The documentary describes a troubled childhood for Milligan and his siblings, whose mother, Dorothy, a native of the Fairfield County village of Amanda who moved to Miami to pursue what proved to be a failed career as a nightclub singer. Two failed relationships, including with Billy and his siblings' father, Johnny Morrison, preceded her return to Ohio and marriage to Chalmer Milligan, who adopted Dorothy's children.
By the accounts of those interviewed, Chalmer Milligan was a violent, mercurial man who took out his aggression on passive, inward-looking Billy — a plausible explanation for the fragmentation of Billy's personality.
When Billy begins committing petty crimes as an adolescent and is said to have difficulty remembering them, the stage is set for his subsequent defense. To the documentary's credit, though, the core issue in Milligan's case — did he legitimately possess as many as 24 multiple personalities and is the claim that he lapsed into them while doing bad deeds a plausible defense? — is treated even-handedly.
The leading proponents of the defense theory are given a hearing, including, in archival footage, late psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur (already a household name for her involvement in another multiple-personality disorder case that became the basis of the Sally Field TV movie “Sybil”). Modern psychiatric voices interviewed here raise doubts about the pervasiveness of multiplepersonality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, as it was understood in Milligan's day.
The documentary is at its most-compelling when portraying Milligan as a criminal who becomes something of a victim — a rather hapless figure who, during a 10-year stretch in state hospitals, bounces between assorted doctors and receives conflicting diagnoses and medications.
The subject of a book by “Flowers of Algernon” author Daniel Keyes, Milligan is presented as a cash cow for some involved in his case, though he is unrepentant in his own efforts to monetize his notoriety: he becomes well-known as a painter and sells his canvases at high prices.
Milligan reaches a breaking point in 1986, when he vanishes from a Columbus hospital and, using an assumed name, relocates to the Pacific Northwest.
He is credibly linked in the documentary to two unsolved murders, one in Ohio, the other during his time on the lam in Bellingham, Washington, though he was a free man from 1988 onward.
Before his death in 2014, Milligan made contact with “Titanic” director James Cameron and hoped a movie would be made of his life — surely a disquieting prospect for his victims and their families.
Milligan's tale takes so many twists and turns that this documentary never flags despite a total running time north of four hours. True-crime aficionados will relish rehashing a case that remains colorful, confounding and, for all involved parties, deeply sad.
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