County Prosecutor's Office

The County Prosecutor's Office took an unusually direct role in the prosecution of William Stanley Milligan. After the Campus Rapist case provoked public outrage, County Prosecutor George Smith bypassed the office's ordinary random assignment procedure and selected two senior prosecutors to handle it. Their confidence in the case—and their collision with the defense over psychiatric evidence—made the office a central institutional force in a prosecution that ultimately turned on mental illness and criminal responsibility.

Assignment and Public Pressure

The office's normal practice was to leave assignments to the head of the Felony Division, who would choose a senior prosecutor at random, usually two or three weeks before trial. Even major murder cases were rarely assigned directly by the prosecutor's office leadership. George Smith's intervention therefore marked a notable exception: he called in two senior prosecutors and instructed them to prosecute vigorously because publicity surrounding the case had stirred public anger.

The indictment, returned on November 3, charged William Stanley Milligan with three counts of kidnapping, three counts of aggravated robbery, and four counts of rape. Each was a first-degree felony carrying a potential prison term of four to twenty-five years. The scale of the charges, combined with the public attention, helps explain why the case was not treated as routine business within the office.

The Prosecutors' Strategy

The assigned prosecutors were Terry Sherman and Bernard Zalig Yavitch. Sherman, thirty-two, was known for taking a hard line on sex offenses and said he had never lost a rape case before a jury. After reviewing the file, he judged it an exceptionally strong prosecution, citing the warrants, physical evidence, fingerprints, and identifications. Yavitch, thirty-five, had spent four years as a public defender before joining the prosecutor's office. He also initially considered the case unusually favorable to the prosecution.

Sherman's certainty shaped the office's stated approach to the defense. When he spoke with Judy Stevenson, he said there would be no plea bargaining and that the prosecution would seek a conviction and the maximum sentence. But Yavitch's experience on the other side of criminal cases led him to identify a vulnerability Sherman dismissed: the defense might plead insanity. The contrast between the two men was not simply a difference in temperament. It exposed a strategic blind spot in the prosecution's confidence that the physical case alone would settle the matter.

Psychiatric Evidence and the Privilege Dispute

The defense's concern about William Stanley Milligan's mental state became more concrete after Dr. Willis C. Driscoll examined him on January 8 and 13, 1978. Driscoll reported a diagnosis of acute schizophrenia and concluded that Milligan was then unable to understand the proceedings or assist adequately in his defense. On January 19, Judy Stevenson and Gary Schweickart presented that report to Judge Jay Flowers in support of their claim that their client could not help prepare his case. The judge ordered an examination by the forensic psychiatry unit of Southwest Community Mental Health Center.

The examination raised a dispute over whether statements Milligan made to court-appointed clinicians could later be used against him. Gary Schweickart insisted that the information remain privileged; Sherman and Yavitch opposed that restriction. The public defenders threatened to advise Milligan not to speak with the examiners, and Judge Jay Flowers came close to holding them in contempt. The parties eventually reached a compromise: the prosecutors could question Milligan about incriminating statements from the examination only if he took the stand in his own defense. The defense accepted those terms and allowed the interview to proceed. For the office, the compromise preserved a limited avenue for using the material without securing the broader access the prosecutors had sought.

Confidentiality and the Case's Outcome

The office's role also involved keeping the diagnosis from public view while the case developed. Until September 1978, the multiple-personality diagnosis was known to those treating Milligan, the prosecutors, and the judge. The public defenders argued that disclosure would turn the case into a media event and make treatment harder. Yavitch agreed that, because the diagnosis had not been aired in court, withholding it was consistent with his ethical responsibilities as a prosecutor. The diagnosis became public when the Columbus Citizen-Journal broke the story on September 27.

The eventual ruling showed how far the case had moved from Sherman's initial picture of a locked prosecution. Judge Jay Flowers dismissed the first rape count for lack of corroborating evidence and lack of a similar modus operandi. On the remaining counts, the court considered stipulated medical evidence: the doctors agreed that Milligan had been mentally ill at the time of the offenses, unable to distinguish right from wrong, and unable to refrain from the acts. The judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity on counts two through ten. The decision did not erase the office's early confidence or its efforts to prosecute vigorously; it established that the case's decisive question was not only whether the charged acts could be proved, but whether Milligan could be held criminally responsible for them.