With tousled hair, tired eyes and a haunted persona, Tom Holland is hardly recognizable in Apple TV+’s latest series, ‘The Crowded Room’. The limited thriller series premiered on the platform on June 9 and stars Holland as David Sullivan, a man involved in a shooting in New York City in 1979. After his arrest, interrogator Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried) tries to understand his involvement in the crime and convinces David to slowly reveal the details of his past that led to the accident.
“The Crowded Room” isn’t for the faint of heart, and it even took its toll on Holland, who recently revealed to Extra that the nature of the show wasn’t easy to deal with. “It was a tough time, for sure,” she explained. “Now I’m taking a year off, and that’s a result of how difficult this show has been.”
The show’s time period and crime themes certainly make it seem like it could be from real life, but is ‘The Crowded Room’ actually based on a true story? Although the story didn’t happen in real life, it is based on the 1981 non-fiction novel “The Minds of Billy Milligan” about a real man named Billy Milligan, the first person in the United States to be acquitted of a felony on a plea of insanity .
Read on to learn more about the story that inspired the chilling series.
Who was Billy Milligan?
William “Billy” Morrison was born in Miami in 1955 to parents Dorothy Sands and John Morrison, as reported by The Columbus Dispatch. Milligan had a traumatic childhood from a young age and when he was four his father died by suicide. After her father’s traumatic death, Milligan, along with her mother and two brothers, moved to Circleville, Ohio in 1960 and later moved to Lancaster, Ohio in 1963. That year, Dorothy married Chalmer Milligan, who, according to psychiatric reports in Milligan’s trial years later, she brutally physically and sexually abused him, which caused his core personality to fragment into at least 10 but up to 24 distinct and separate personalities, according to Esquire.
As a result of the abuse, Milligan often got into trouble. When he was a teenager, he was hospitalized for various psychiatric problems and diagnosed with a dissociative type of hysterical neurosis, which “involved alterations in the patient’s state of consciousness or identity to produce symptoms such as amnesia, sleepwalking [a form of sleepwalking]leak [a loss of awareness of one’s identity] and multiple personalities,” A&E reported. The hospital eventually kicked Milligan out, and he was later kicked out of high school in 1972. He joined the Navy that year, but was discharged after just a month because he couldn’t to adapt.
This volatile and rocky period created a foundation for Milligan to commit his heinous crimes later on.
What did Billy Milligan do?
Shortly after his time with the Navy, Milligan was charged with and convicted of rape and served six months in youth camp in 1972. In 1975, he robbed a pharmacy and was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. Then, six months after he was paroled in April 1977, Milligan’s brutal crime spree began.
In October of the same year, he was arrested for the kidnapping, robbery and rape of three Ohio State University students. One of his victims identified him from a series of sex offender mugshots and put a quick end to his terrorizing crimes, according to Oxygen.
What happened during Billy Milligan’s trial?
Following Milligan’s arrest, he underwent a psychiatric evaluation, claiming he was not the person who committed the crimes and had no memory of the events. Rather, he claimed a Yugoslav man named Ragen committed the robberies and a 19-year-old woman named Adalana was responsible for the kidnapping and assaults, according to The Columbus Dispatch. An extensive evaluation revealed more about Milligan’s state of mind and determined that he had eight other personalities in addition to the two who allegedly influenced the crimes.
During the trial, Milligan was evaluated by nine mental health professionals and officially diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, now classified as dissociative identity disorder. His defense argued that the abuse he experienced as a child and young adult inflicted severe trauma and multiple personalities were forged as a result. Considering his mental health, his traumatic history, and police and attorney testimony, Milligan was found not guilty by reason of insanity on December 4, 1978. He was committed to the Athens Mental Health Center and spent the next eight years in various psychiatric hospitals.
What happened after Billy Milligan’s trial?
In 1986, Milligan escaped from Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital and was arrested months later in Miami. Two years later, a psychiatrist determined that he was no longer a threat to society and he was eventually released from the mental hospital. Upon his release, Milligan moved to the United States, with records indicating that he had lived in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and San Diego. In his later years, he moved back to Ohio and lived in a mobile home his sister bought for him until his death from cancer in 2014, Esquire reported.
New episodes of “The Crowded Room” arrive on Apple TV+ on Fridays, so be sure to tune in. In the meantime, check out the trailer below.
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