Ohio State University Police Department

The Ohio State University Police Department appears in the account as the campus law-enforcement agency confronting a rapidly escalating threat: two women had been kidnapped at gunpoint from the university area within eight days, driven into the countryside, sexually assaulted, and robbed. Its response moved on two tracks. Chief John Kleberg imposed conspicuous security around the medical school while assigning the search for the assailant to a young investigations supervisor, Eliot Boxerbaum. The department’s early work joined public reassurance to the slower task of establishing whether the victims’ descriptions and physical evidence identified the same man.

Emergency Security on Campus

On Saturday, October 22, 1977, Kleberg placed the area around Ohio State University’s medical school under heavy police security. Armed officers patrolled in cruisers, and armed observers watched from rooftops. Women were warned against walking alone and urged to be cautious when entering their cars. These measures answered a specific pattern of danger: a young woman had been abducted from campus between seven and eight in the morning for the second time in eight days. The threat was not confined to the point of abduction; both victims had been taken out into the countryside, assaulted, compelled to cash checks, and robbed.

The department’s visible precautions unfolded amid an investigation with few reliable leads. Police photographic composites were published in newspapers, and hundreds of people responded with names and descriptions, but the calls produced no significant lead or suspect. As unease grew in the university community, student organizations and community groups pressed for the assailant’s capture. News outlets had begun calling him the Campus Rapist, a label that gave the still-unidentified offender a public identity while increasing pressure on the police to produce a result.

The Manhunt and Its Investigators

Kleberg placed Eliot Boxerbaum, the department’s investigations supervisor, in charge of the manhunt. The book presents Boxerbaum as a young officer whose route into police work had begun at Ohio State University during the student disturbances that closed the campus in 1970. After graduating that year, he was offered a university police job on the condition that he cut his long hair and shave his mustache. He cut his hair but refused to shave; the department hired him anyway. The detail gives the investigation’s senior operational figure a personal history tied to the same campus where the crimes had triggered the emergency response.

In examining the victims’ information and the photographic composites, Boxerbaum and Kleberg found a description that appeared to point to one assailant. The victims described a white American man between twenty-three and twenty-seven, weighing between 175 and 185 pounds, with brown or reddish-brown hair. On both occasions, he had worn a brown jogging top, jeans, and white sneakers. The shared clothing and physical description offered investigators a pattern to test, but they did not by themselves establish the identity of the attacker.

Identification and Physical Evidence

The identification process remained uncertain even after Billy Milligan became a suspect. Donna West had made a positive identification, but Boxerbaum hesitated to seek an arrest warrant because the photograph used was three years old. He wanted the fingerprint check before proceeding. This hesitation set the department’s response apart from the public pressure surrounding the case: even with a positive identification and a mounting demand for action, the investigators sought corroboration rather than treating the photograph as conclusive.

Polly Newton’s identification was less definite. During a photographic selection, she stopped at Milligan’s picture, passed it, and then turned back to examine it again. She said that he looked like the man but that she could not be certain. Because Newton had not made a positive identification, Nikki Miller, the investigator associated with her case, had to wait while the fingerprint evidence was checked. Prints recovered from Newton’s Corvette supplied a more concrete link: the right index finger from the outside of the passenger door’s glass, together with the right ring finger and right palm, matched Milligan. The prints were assessed as fair-value prints, and the comparison produced a ten-point match considered sufficient to take to court.

Even then, Kleberg and Boxerbaum did not immediately move to arrest Milligan. They asked for an expert to evaluate the prints, seeking greater certainty before acting against a suspect. The sequence—an uncertain photographic identification, a positive identification from another victim, a fingerprint match, and a further request for expert assessment—shows the investigation developing through checks rather than a single decisive recognition.

Institutional Role and Limits of the Record

The department’s documented role is concentrated in the opening manhunt: securing the medical-school area, responding to community alarm, directing the search, and assessing identification evidence. The account also acknowledges the cooperation of Ohio State University Police Department staff in the author’s research. That acknowledgment places the department among the institutional sources that helped the book reconstruct the case, though it does not specify what records or assistance individual staff members provided.

The narrative distinguishes campus police from other agencies and institutions involved later. The subsequent press controversy over Milligan’s treatment, for example, included remarks by the Athens police chief and concerned the Athens Mental Health Center; it was not an action by the Ohio State University Police Department. The campus agency’s significance instead lies in its first response to the attacks and in the careful, evidence-driven investigation that began while the public was already demanding an arrest. Its account ends before the case’s later clinical, judicial, and legislative consequences, leaving the department chiefly as the institution that transformed a campus emergency into a structured search for a suspect.