William Stanley Milligan (February 14, 1955 – December 12, 2014), also known as The Campus Rapist, was an American man who was the subject of a highly publicized court case in Ohio in the late 1970s.
After having committed several felonies including armed robbery, he was arrested for three rapes on the campus of Ohio State University.
He was the first person diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder to raise such a defense,[1] and the first acquitted of a major crime for this reason, instead spending a decade in psychiatric hospitals.
Keyes claimed that Billy had multiple personalities from a much earlier age, however, with his first three (no-name boy, Christene, and Shawn) appearing by the time he was five years old.
He was then examined by psychologist Dorothy Turner of Southwest Community Mental Health Center in Columbus, Ohio.
Milligan's public defenders, Gary Schweickart and Judy Stevenson, pleaded an insanity defense, and he was committed "until such time as he regains sanity".
Among the first ten were Arthur, a prim and proper Englishman who was an expert in science, medicine and hematology; Allen, a manipulator; Tommy, an escape artist and technophile; Ragen Vadascovinich, a Yugoslav communist who Milligan claimed had committed the robberies in a kind of Robin Hood spirit; and Adalana, a 19-year-old lesbian (shy, lonely and introverted) who cooked for all the personalities and craved affection, and who had allegedly committed the rapes.
In 1996, he lived in California where he owned Stormy Life Productions and was going to make a short film (which apparently was never made).
His follow-up book, The Milligan Wars, was published in Japan in 1994, in Taiwan in 2000, in France in 2009, in Ukraine in 2018, but not in the United States, first owing to Milligan's ongoing lawsuit against the State of Ohio for the allegedly inadequate treatment he received in Ohio facilities, then to the desire to tie its release to an in-development film.
In the early 1990s, James Cameron co-wrote a screenplay with Todd Graff for a film version he was to direct then-titled A Crowded Room.
[13] After Cameron left the project, Warner Bros. continued to develop the now slightly retitled The Crowded Room, with directors Joel Schumacher, David Fincher, Nick Cassavetes, F. Gary Gray, and Gus Van Sant attached at various points.
Actors courted for the role of Milligan included Matthew McConaughey, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Billy Crudup, Sean Penn and John Cusack.
The film follows a man named Kevin Crumb, played by James McAvoy, who struggles with dissociative identity disorder (DID).
In 2021, it was announced that The Crowded Room would instead be adapted as a ten-episode television series on Apple TV+, starring Tom Holland, rather than the unrealized DiCaprio project.