Columbus, Ohio, is more than a backdrop in the book: its university district, police facilities, economic contrasts, and psychiatric institutions organize several decisive turns in William Stanley Milligan’s story. The city is both a place where women are targeted and where law enforcement responds, and later a center of institutional care whose decisions affect Milligan’s prospects for treatment and release.

City and Narrative Geography

The narrative moves between downtown Columbus and the area around Ohio State University, with the countryside beyond the city forming a contrasting destination in the Polly Newton case. That geography matters practically: Newton was taken from near her apartment by the university campus, driven to an isolated rural area, and then brought back to Columbus. The events thus crossed boundaries between campus, city, and county, complicating which agency could handle which part of the investigation.

The university district also appears as a set of recognizable places rather than a single undifferentiated campus. Ragen Vadascovinich reaches the Ohio State University East Belmont parking lot after jogging across the city, and later the Ohio State University Wiseman parking lot is located by the distant, horseshoe-shaped football stadium and the sign for Upham Hall. These landmarks fix the action in the built environment and make the campus’s parking lots, roads, and nearby buildings part of the story’s practical geography.

The Campus-Area Investigation

On Wednesday, October 26, Detective Nikki Miller returned from vacation and reported for the second shift at the Central Police Station in downtown Columbus. She was assigned to the Sexual Assault Squad. A first-shift detective told her that a young woman was being taken to University Hospital and that Miller would handle the case. The handoff places the investigation inside the city’s police routine: a shift change, an initial report, and a detective receiving incomplete information before the victim’s account could be developed.

Newton, a twenty-one-year-old student at Ohio State University, had been abducted behind her apartment near campus at about eight that morning after parking her boyfriend’s blue Corvette. Her assailant forced her to drive to an isolated area, sexually assaulted her, and then made her return to Columbus to cash two checks before taking her back toward the campus area. He also suggested that she cash another check, stop payment, and keep the money. The sequence links the campus neighborhood to the countryside and back again, while showing how the assault was accompanied by financial coercion.

Jurisdiction shaped the next steps. Eliot Boxerbaum explained that the campus kidnapping was the crime within the officers’ jurisdiction, while the sexual assault had occurred elsewhere. Information from the Bureau of Criminal Identification identified William Stanley Milligan as a twenty-two-year-old former convict, paroled six months earlier from the Lebanon Correctional Institution, with a last-known address in Lancaster. The distinction between where the abduction began and where the assault occurred did not end the investigation, but it determined how officers described the campus offense and proceeded within their authority.

At nine that evening, Boxerbaum, John Kleberg, Miller, and other officers set out in three cars with the Columbus SWAT team. Dense fog reduced the visibility on the freeway, and the cars traveled at twenty miles an hour. After the arrest, officers brought their prisoner through the back entrance of the Central Police Station to the third-floor processing room. Boxerbaum and Kleberg then helped Miller prepare affidavits for search warrants. Milligan was later transferred from the station to the Franklin County Jail, while the public defender’s office was only a block away; the closeness of these buildings gives the account a compact civic geography of arrest, processing, detention, and legal representation.

A City of Unequal Landscapes

Columbus also appears through Ragen’s response to its social landscape. As he saw more of the working-class east side, he grew angrier at the struggle of residents to survive in the shadow of office buildings associated with wealthy corporations. The contrast is presented as part of his perception of the city: working-class neighborhoods and corporate wealth occupy the same urban field, but represent sharply different conditions. This account does not make the city itself a cause of his actions; it shows the disparity through which Ragen interprets his surroundings.

The campus routes recur in the October incidents. Before dawn on October 14, Ragen left for the Ohio State University campus and jogged eleven miles across Columbus, reaching the East Belmont parking lot at about seven-thirty in the morning. He was looking for someone to rob. When he saw a young woman leave a gold Toyota, he turned away because he did not intend to rob a woman. The scene sets his stated constraint against his search for a victim, and locates that decision in an ordinary campus parking area rather than in an anonymous criminal space.

On October 26, Ragen again made his way across Columbus toward Ohio State University, this time with the intention of obtaining money by robbery. At an intersection around seven-thirty in the morning, he saw a police cruiser and considered approaching the officers, but the light changed and the cruiser drove away. The small interruption alters the immediate course of his attempt without resolving the larger pattern of repeated trips toward the campus. Read alongside the earlier crossing of the city, these journeys make distance and direction recurring elements of the narrative: Ragen travels from one part of Columbus to the university district, and the city’s roads determine whom he encounters and when.

Psychiatric Institutions and Later Decisions

Columbus returns in the later account as a site of psychiatric care and dispute. The newly opened Central Ohio Regional Forensic Unit, part of the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital, was located in the city. Dr. Judyth Box had recently become its clinical director. Because she had treated other patients with multiple personalities and knew Dr. David Caul, the prospect of a transfer offered a possible alternative to continued confinement at the Dayton Forensic Center. Milligan initially resisted moving from one maximum-security hospital to another, especially because the Columbus hospital was associated with an earlier period of his life, but he eventually agreed to the transfer.

On September 22, 1981, Milligan was transferred to the Central Ohio Regional Forensic Unit in a wheelchair. As part of the treatment plan, Dr. Box placed him on a new ward with three other patients whom she had tentatively diagnosed as having multiple personalities. Her decision to group them was based on the expectation that they would need specialized treatment and attention. It also brought political criticism from Columbus politicians two weeks before election day, making the ward’s clinical organization a public issue as well as a treatment decision.

At a later hearing, Dr. Mijo Zakman, clinical director of the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital, testified that he and two other psychiatrists had examined Milligan for about two hours and had not observed separate personalities. Zakman characterized Milligan as not mentally ill and as having an antisocial personality. That conclusion stood in tension with the treatment framework advanced by Dr. Box and with Milligan’s earlier care under Caul. Columbus therefore becomes a place where competing professional assessments of Milligan are formally presented, with consequences for where he may be treated and what activities he may undertake.

On April 8, 1982, Judge Jay Flowers ordered the Department of Mental Health to transfer Milligan back to the Athens Mental Health Center. The order also allowed him to paint and do woodworking, while requiring close supervision when he was off the ward and court notification before he could leave the hospital grounds. The decision did not make Columbus his lasting destination, but it gave the city’s psychiatric and legal institutions a decisive role in determining the limits of his freedom and the conditions under which his treatment would continue. Across the book, Columbus thus joins street-level events to institutional consequences: its campus is a recurring site of risk, its police and jail process an arrest, and its forensic hospital becomes a contested stage in the question of care and control.