The Circleville charges and the Zanesville juvenile-camp ruling mark a sharp turn in Milligan’s adolescence: an outing arranged by Sam Garrison ended in arrests, and a juvenile-court verdict led to an indefinite commitment to an Ohio Youth Commission facility. The sequence also altered the family’s living arrangements. While Allen was away in Florida and then held in jail, Dorothy Milligan agreed to divorce Chalmer Milligan; on the day Allen was taken to the Zanesville Youth Camp, the divorce became final.

The Circleville encounter and arrest

In the account of the events leading to the charges, Garrison came to Allen’s home at the appointed time and drove him into town. They stopped outside the Hot Spot on Broad Street. Garrison told Allen to wait in the car and returned a few minutes later with two young women. One got into the front seat with Garrison; the other sat in the back with Allen. The group then drove out into the country.

The narration records that, after the group had been out for a time, Garrison called for Trina and Dolly came over to Allen. She asked whether he could do it again. The passage establishes the circumstances immediately preceding the case without settling, in that moment, how the women understood or experienced the encounter. Four days later, on July 8, 1972, Garrison and Allen went to the sheriff’s office in Circleville to answer questions. Both were arrested for kidnapping, rape, and assault with a deadly weapon.

Pretrial decisions and a divided household

At the pretrial hearing in Pickaway County, the judge dismissed the kidnapping charge and set bond at two thousand dollars. Dorothy raised two hundred dollars for the bondsman’s fee and took her son home. Chalmer argued that Allen should be returned to jail, but Dorothy arranged for her sister to take him to Miami, Florida, until his October hearing before the Pickaway County Juvenile Court. The disagreement over custody thus became part of a larger conflict over whether Allen could safely return to the home he shared with Chalmer.

With Allen and Jim away, Kathy and Challa gave Dorothy an ultimatum: unless she began divorce proceedings against Chalmer, they would leave home. Dorothy finally agreed that Chalmer had to go. The family decision unfolded alongside the criminal case, rather than after it had been resolved. Allen’s temporary move to Florida protected him from an immediate return to the household, while his sisters’ demand pressed Dorothy to make a lasting break with her husband.

In Florida, Allen attended school and did well. He also found work at a paint supply store, where the owner was impressed by his organizational ability. Samuel, the religious Jewish personality, learned that Billy’s father had been Jewish. After the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Village, Samuel joined other Jewish residents in Miami in mourning; he attended Friday-night services and prayed for the athletes and Billy’s father. He also prayed that the court would find Allen innocent. This period therefore combined ordinary schooling and employment with the uncertainty of a pending hearing and Samuel’s religious response to both personal and public loss.

Juvenile-court verdict and commitment

Allen returned to Pickaway County on October 20 and was turned over to the Ohio Youth Commission for evaluation. He was held at the Pickaway County Jail from November 1972 until February 16, 1973, two days after his eighteenth birthday. Although he had reached eighteen while in custody, the judge agreed that the case should be tried in juvenile court. Dorothy’s attorney, George Kellner, argued that whatever the court decided, Allen should not be sent back to the destructive home environment.

The judge found Milligan guilty and ordered him sent to an Ohio Youth Commission facility for an indefinite period. The sequence brought together two different judgments: the pretrial dismissal of the kidnapping charge and the later guilty verdict in juvenile court. The supplied account does not specify the count on which the verdict rested, so the outcome is best understood here as the court’s juvenile disposition, not as a detailed account of the charges resolved by the verdict.

On March 12, Allen was transported to the Zanesville Youth Camp. That same day, Dorothy’s divorce from Chalmer became final. The coincidence joins the legal and family consequences without making them identical: Allen entered a youth facility under an indefinite order as his mother’s marriage to Chalmer formally ended. Ragen mocked Samuel and told him there was no God, a stark counterpoint to Samuel’s prayers during the preceding period of uncertainty.

The camp and the later dispute over the allegations

The camp was presented as a setting where the younger personalities might have experiences ordinarily associated with childhood. Arthur decided they should be on the spot there so they could hike, swim, ride horses, camp, and take part in sports. He approved of the recreation director, Dean Hughes, whom he considered sympathetic and trustworthy, and saw no apparent danger in the arrangement. Ragen agreed. This account gives the camp a double place in the episode: it was the destination specified by the court, and it was also imagined internally as a chance for the younger ones to have a fuller range of childhood activities.

The book later returns to the disputed allegations while discussing trial strategy. Arthur said that the group wanted to change its plea: Ragen was willing to plead guilty to three robberies but would not plead guilty to rape, although four counts in the ten-count indictment included rape. Arthur invoked Adalana’s story to claim that the three women had cooperated, had not been injured, could have run away, and had received part of the money back so that insurance payments would leave them ahead. Judy rejected that account, and both she and Gary understood that Arthur was reporting Adalana’s perceptions rather than establishing what the women had experienced. When Gary asked whether they could speak with Adalana, Arthur said that she had been banished from the spot for what she had done and that no further exceptions would be made.

That later exchange does not resolve the disagreement in the women’s favor or in Adalana’s; it shows how sharply the internal account and the objections of Judy and Gary diverged. The legal episode consequently reaches beyond the arrest and juvenile ruling. It places a contested account beside concrete procedural outcomes, while the move to Florida, the jail detention, the indefinite commitment, and Dorothy’s divorce each changed the circumstances in which Allen and his family would face what followed.