October 1977 Columbus Attack Period

October 1977 Columbus Attack Period is the stretch in which William Stanley Milligan’s inner conflicts became a series of real-world crimes, followed by an arrest and years of dispute over responsibility, treatment, and public safety. Ragen Vadascovinich’s stated aim of obtaining money for children and Adalana’s actions during two attacks expose a central tension: the personalities did not share a single account or purpose, yet the consequences fell on the people confronted by the person occupying Milligan’s body.

Background and shifting control

Before the attacks, the personalities were already being discussed in treatment, though the diagnosis was not public. In a conversation with Dorothy Turner, Allen explained that the others generally knew Milligan only by his name and that the group answered to Billy to keep the secret from getting out. He added that Billy had been asleep for a long time. This account frames the period’s switching not as a matter of public knowledge, but as a concealed condition understood by a small circle around Milligan.

Later, when Gary Schweickart asked whether he was speaking to Tommy, the answer made clear that Gary was dealing with someone who did not accept him as a lawyer. Gary’s response was that he intended to help Judy Stevenson keep the body out of jail, whoever was present. The exchange captures the legal problem that would run through the case: a lawyer might address the person at the front, while the charges and their consequences attached to Milligan as a whole.

The pressures leading into the October attacks were material as well as psychological. Ragen saw bills on a table and recognized that there was no money coming in from work. He concluded that he would rob someone so the children could have food and clothes for the coming winter. Before dawn on Friday, October 14, he put a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol in a shoulder holster, dressed in layers, took three Biphetamine 20s, drank vodka, and left for the Ohio State University campus. The stated purpose was provision for the children; the means he chose put strangers at risk.

The October attacks

After jogging eleven miles across Columbus, Ragen reached the Ohio State University East Belmont parking lot at about 7:30 in the morning. He had no specific target in mind and was looking for someone to rob. When he saw a young woman get out of a gold Toyota, he turned away: he did not intend to rob a woman. Adalana had been watching from inside and took control. As the woman leaned into the passenger side to retrieve books and papers, Adalana removed Ragen’s gun from its holster and pressed it against her arm. The sequence makes the change in agency concrete: Ragen had arrived intending to rob, but the encounter unfolded through Adalana’s intervention.

A later attack began in the early hours of Wednesday, October 26, when Ragen again crossed Columbus toward the campus because he needed money. At an intersection he considered approaching a police cruiser, but the light changed and the officers drove away. He then followed a woman driving a blue Corvette into the rear parking area of an apartment building. He had not previously considered robbing a woman, but desperation over money for the children had narrowed his choices. The account then records a demand that she get into the car; the episode continued beyond the initial encounter, with Adalana later taking the woman to a deserted rural area.

There, Adalana told the woman, Polly Newton, that she wanted to have sex with her. Polly began to cry. Adalana also said she would not hurt her and distinguished herself from people who beat women or threw them around. These statements describe Adalana’s own attempt to define what she intended, but they do not turn the situation into a willing encounter: Polly’s distress and the circumstances of the abduction remain part of the account. The episode also differs from Ragen’s stated purpose. A robbery undertaken in the name of providing for children had become, under Adalana’s control, a sexual threat.

Another account centers on Donna West sitting in a car in a deserted area. She understood that the abduction was not political and feared that she would be raped, shot, or both. When the man said he needed a moment to get his head together, Donna remained at the wheel, thinking of Sidney and her life and wondering what would happen. Her tears and fear convey the uncertainty imposed on her, rather than establishing anything about consent or cooperation.

Conflicting accounts and criminal responsibility

In a discussion of trial strategy, Arthur argued that, according to Adalana’s account, the three women had cooperated, none had been injured, each could have run away, and money had been returned so that they would benefit from insurance payments. Judy Stevenson rejected that version as inconsistent with what the women said. Gary Schweickart and Judy did not accept the claim of cooperation; they understood Arthur to be describing Adalana’s perception of what had happened. The distinction is consequential: the account attributed to an inner personality was not treated by the lawyers as a reliable substitute for the victims’ accounts.

Arthur said the only person who could explain her own understanding was Adalana, but he also said she had been permanently banished from the spot for what she had done. Her absence meant that the trial team could not simply question her to resolve the contradiction. The narrative therefore preserves competing descriptions without presenting Arthur’s assertions as established facts. The gap between the personalities’ explanations and the women’s reports became part of the problem of assigning responsibility, not a basis for minimizing the reported offenses.

Arrest, treatment, and public aftermath

The arrest reached Danny while he was in the living room watching television. A man arrived with a Domino’s pizza box and said he was looking for Billy. As Danny tried to help him, the man slammed him against a wall and held a gun to his head; police then entered with guns. Danny was told of his right to remain silent, placed in a car, and taken through thick fog to the police station. He did not understand why he had been arrested and believed that Arthur, Ragen, or Allen would soon come to get him. His confusion sets the arrest beside the crimes without allowing the reader to mistake Danny’s limited understanding for the position of the police or prosecutors.

In a later hospital setting, staff struggled with Milligan’s denials of actions they said they had witnessed and with the effect of the different personality names on other patients. A nursing plan dated March 28 called for staff to remind him that his name was Billy when he referred to himself as another personality, and to respond matter-of-factly when he denied playing piano or writing notes. The plan shows how an institutional response could acknowledge observed behavior while declining to recognize the separate names as identities in everyday ward life. It contrasts with Judy Stevenson and Dorothy Turner’s earlier effort to have staff see the personalities directly.

The diagnosis also became a public issue after the case had initially been kept from the press. The public defenders and prosecutor had agreed that disclosure could make treatment and trial more difficult; on September 27, the Columbus Citizen-Journal broke the story. After Milligan was sent to Athens Mental Health Center, newspaper coverage criticized his unsupervised leave. Athens Police Chief Ted Jones reported community concern, and Judge Jay Flowers objected to Milligan being free to roam at will. The coverage joined the memory of the attacks to a new question: whether treatment arrangements provided adequate safeguards.

The legal aftermath gave the diagnosis formal force. In December 1979, an Allen County court found Milligan mentally ill, identifying a substantial disorder of thought, mood, perception, orientation, and memory that impaired judgment, behavior, and the capacity to recognize reality. The court cited threats of suicide and recent violent behavior in finding risk to himself and others, ordered commitment to Lima State Hospital, and directed that treatment be consistent with the diagnosis of Multiple personality. The October attacks thus remained more than a closed sequence of offenses: they helped shape the argument over who had acted, how the condition should be treated, and what degree of confinement the state considered necessary.