A Man Without Love
Song by Engelbert Humperdinck
I can remember when we walked together
Sharing a love I thought would last forever
Moonlight to show the way so we can follow
Waiting inside her eyes was my tomorrow
Then something changed her mind, her kisses told me
I had no loving arms to hold me
Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Knowing that it’s cloudy above
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love
I cannot face this world that’s fallen down on me
So if you see my girl, please send her home to me
Tell her about my heart that’s slowly dying
Say I can’t stop myself from crying
Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Knowing that it’s cloudy above
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Daniele Pace / Mario Panzeri / Roberto Livraghi
A Man Without Love lyrics © Sugarmusic s.p.a.
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The True Dark Story of the Murder in ‘I Just Killed My Dad’, and Anthony Templet’s Involvement
A new three-part Netflix documentary series covers a complicated case of abuse and justice
By The Esquire Editors And Laura Martin – UPDATED: 16 AUGUST 2022
In 2019, local news reports in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, broke the story that 17-year-old Anthony Templet had shot and killed his father, Burt, at their home.
It was a shocking event that would only grow more depressing and complicated as details unfurled in the weeks that came after it. Now a new Netflix documentary, I Just Killed My Dad, examines this difficult case and reveals the complex and extremely dark series of events that built up to the homicide.
The Full Picture
On 3 June, Anthony Templet was arrested and charged with the murder of his dad, after shooting him three times. Unusually, Templet called the police on himself and confessed to the killing straight away, saying that after an early morning altercation with his father, Burt had been drunk and aggressive, and Anthony had shot him to defend himself.
But when the media began reporting the crime, somebody unexpectedly got in contact; Anthony’s long-lost half-sister, Natasha, who revealed that Anthony had been abducted by Burt 11 years earlier, making him a missing person for more than the past decade.
Speaking with Wafb.com, Natasha explained that Anthony had been stolen away from the family home in Texas by Burt in 2008, when he was just five years old: “After 11 years of waiting to hear if my brother was still alive, he is found. He has been secluded and abused all these years by his own father. My brave brother had to defend himself for the last time against that evil man.”
She explained just what their home life was like before Burt stole Anthony away: “Burt and my mum were together for about ten years and it was extremely violent. I can only imagine what Anthony’s been through. When he was a baby, Burt would hold him in his arms while abusing my mother.”
Anthony’s mother, Teresa, and his sister had posted missing child posters when Burt took him, but there were never any leads.
Once Burt had stolen Anthony away, he had isolated him and failed to send him to school, so he had little contact with the outside world. According to The Advocate, Anthony’s lawyer, Jarrett Ambeau, said his client had been “isolated and regularly abused by his father.” He added: “There was definitely regular abuse going on: physical, mental, emotional.”
Where is Anthony Templet now?
Anthony was initially charged with second-degree murder, but that charge was later reduced to manslaughter, after the prosecutor confirmed that he had been acting in self-defence after years of abuse.
In 2021, he pleaded no contest to negligible homicide and will serve five years of supervised probation with credit for time served. As a condition, he must earn his GED, agree to counselling, and hold either a full-time job or be enrolled in school full-time. If he meets all requirements, then he will be eligible to have his record expunged.
His lawyer added after the court ruling: “When I saw this injustice, I said, ‘Absolutely, no way should this kid be in jail’. Well, that’s the outcome we have. It may not be the thing we have hoped but this is an imperfect system. We try to find the best possible justice and I think we got that today.”
“I have a strong want and desire for Anthony to be successful in life, he left an incredibly hopeless life and no-one got involved to help him until he shot his father.”
Following his release, Anthony has been trying to rebuild the relationship he lost with his mum and grandmother in Texas, which has proved trickier than they’d all hoped. “This is harder than losing him,” Teresa says in the documentary. “I want to be his friend, because I know it’ll never be a mother/son relationship. That was the past.”
For Anthony, one ambition rises above all others: to break the cycle of abuse within his family and avoid becoming anything like his late father. He’s finally surrounded by the love and support he needs to do just that.
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The True Story of Billy Milligan, the First Ever Defendant Found Not Guilty Due to Multiple Personalities
In Apple TV+’s new series The Crowded Room, Tom Holland portrays his highly publicized, turbulent life.
By Lauren Kranc PUBLISHED: JUN 09, 2023 3:40 PM EST
Source: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a37693537/billy-milligan-true-story-netflix-24-faces/
In 1977, 22-year-old Billy Milligan was arrested for the kidnapping, robbery, and rape of three women around the Ohio State campus area. He was imprisoned for the crimes and assigned public defenders to work on his case. But during a psychiatric evaluation, Milligan revealed that he hadn’t committed any crimes at all—it was Ragen that had stolen the money and Adalana who had raped the women. Continued evaluation revealed eight additional alternate personalities, and on December 4, 1978, Milligan was found not guilty by reason of insanity on nine criminal charges. In 2021, a Netflix docuseries called Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan documented his highly publicized, turbulent life, and now, Tom Holland is portraying Milligan in a new Apple TV+ series called The Crowded Room. Below is the true story of his life.
Milligan’s trial was the first in which a defendant was found not guilty by reason of insanity on the basis of multiple personality disorder, which today is called dissociative identity disorder. According to his doctors, severe physical and sexual abuse inflicted on Billy in childhood by his stepfather Chalmer Milligan caused his personality to splinter into 10 (and later, as many as 24) separate personalities that had little knowledge of the others’ actions. At trial and in the docuseries, Milligan’s mother, sister, and brother all attest to the brutal, abusive nature of Chalmer Milligan, who always denied the allegations against him. Chalmer Milligan died in 1988, at the age of 61.
Netflix’s documentary traces the eight tumultuous years of institutionalization in jails and psychiatric hospitals that followed Billy Milligan’s trial up until his escape from Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital on July 4, 1986. During that time, according to Netflix’s docuseries, Milligan obtained fake documents under the name Christopher Carr and settled in Bellingham, Washington. When Milligan’s roommate Michael Madden went missing in September 1986, Milligan left the state, and was soon after captured by police in Florida. No one has ever been convicted in the disappearance of Michael Madden, but many of his possessions were found in Milligan’s apartment, and Milligan had been cashing Madden’s disability checks in a shared bank account. After his arrest, Milligan was taken back to Ohio and institutionalized again. In 1988, after an assessment by an independent psychiatrist concluded that Milligan was not a danger to society, he was released. After several years in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Milligan eventually moved back to Columbus, Ohio, where his sister purchased a mobile home for him. He spent the remainder of his life painting there until he died of cancer in 2014, at the age of 59.
Billy Milligan spent the majority of his life at the centre of a highly publicized and scrutinized case—one that, for the most part, sidelined and disregarded the lives of his victims and survivors at the expense of the public interest in Milligan’s mind. Daniel Keyes, author of “Flowers for Algernon,” wrote a book called “The Minds of Billy Milligan” in 1981 after hours of interviews with Billy, and James Cameron even spent time with Billy when he lived in California, developing a movie which was ultimately scrapped.
The Minds of Billy Milligan
Today, dissociative identity disorder remains a controversial diagnosis among psychiatrists. In November 2020, Esquire spoke to Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist who specializes in the study of individuals with DID, who over the course of her career has assessed violent criminals and serial killers including Ted Bundy and Arthur Shawcross. Dr. Lewis explained that even in court today, more than 40 years after Milligan’s trial, using DID as a defence requires very solid evidence, as there is still no MRI or other technology that can prove its existence. “Some of the best evidence of its existence would be writing or drawing or artwork done by the person that you’re examining long before you ever set eyes on them,” Dr. Lewis said. “For example, with children, we have gotten hold of their schoolwork, and any letters, any drawings, anything they have done. And very often what you will find in someone who really dissociates significantly, you’ll find is that the handwriting is different. Very often, the names are different. I’ve seen work pages from kids where they’ve signed a different name.”
Throughout Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan, dozens of doctors express conflicting opinions on multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder. Some believe Milligan was an impressive conman, and others a troubled product of severe child abuse. Regardless, Milligan’s violence impacted several innocent lives. In Dr. Lewis’ opinion, the best way to prevent the kind of violent crime that is seen in Milligan’s case is to prevent child abuse. “To produce the repeatedly aggressive individual, usually there’s a history of early, ongoing, intolerable abuse of one sort or another, and also some quirkiness about his or her brain.”
LAUREN KRANC – ASSISTANT CONTENT STRATEGY EDITOR
Lauren Kranc is the assistant content strategy editor at Esquire, where she runs the brand’s social media accounts and covers pop culture and television, with entirely too narrow an expertise on true crime shows.
Now, a note from this author:
What is Love? We all claim to know what it means and implies – but do we really know? It is questionable and doubtful, to say the least.
Love is defined as an intense feeling of deep affection, fondness, tenderness, warmth (coupled with attachment/bonding) that one evinces toward another person, animal or living thing. It is the absolute mainstay for the development and consistent maintenance of a healthy relationship. Love, as an emotion, indicates the presence of kindness, care, concern, empathy, and compassion, all-rolled-into-one – it is all-encompassing and embraces the best virtues that life has to offer. Love that is physical or sexual involves a deep sense of intimacy that fills one’s soul with warmth and light. This sort of true love is selfless. It is attuned to the other partner’s needs and desires – it is not to be confused with wanton lust that only looks towards a thoroughly selfish satiation of one’s needs; lust lacks gentleness and understanding of the other person.
Love is the greatest gift that one can give another, or accept – it is as important to love, as it is to be loved. Love is to be shared generously, unconditionally, selflessly, and wholeheartedly with others. People who have been blessed with love, find it easier to share the same with others. Those people who have been deprived of love are totally devoid of any emotion or feelings – they feel nothing because there is a deep void of emptiness in their soul. This empty void is like an abyss of hollow nothingness. Can you imagine living that way? Yet, there are thousands of people in this world who have been deprived of this most basic of emotions – love.
It is this deprivation or total lack of any demonstration of warmth and compassion that has caused the steep rise of sociopathic/psychopathic/criminal behaviour. If someone has never felt love, is it so surprising then that they are unable to return it? Of course not. When there was not even the nuance of love in the first place, where does the question of returning it ever arise?
Just as a barren, infertile, parched desert thirsts continually for the healing comfort of a downpour of rain, to alleviate the burning, scorching heat, in the same way, a person who has never experienced love of any sort, endlessly craves for it. The lack/deprivation of love has the propensity to affect one’s mind and basic functioning adversely in various ways. It causes a feeling of immense loneliness – a hollow emptiness that deepens into total withdrawal. This deprived person purposefully isolated himself from everyone in general, and in particular, from the source of the torturous abuse, as a means of coping and self-protection, in overwhelming circumstances of negativity. This love deprivation goes on toward the occurrence of rising defiance, aggression, festering hatred and overt rebellion that can quickly disseminate into darker realities – clinical depression, schizophrenia, hallucinations, and ultimately to a mental breakdown.
When the abuse reaches unbearable heights, it becomes a question of survival of the fittest – either one chooses to live to tell the horrific tale, or one chooses to die a brutal, gruesome death at the hands of the non-repentant abuser. That is the moment when Violence, in all its possible forms, rears its ugly head – the sad part is that this is just the beginning in a series of crimes – each escalating to being more and more heinous. Once it starts, there is no end to this string of extreme violence and brutality. It is scary and horrifying, to say the least. A criminal is born each day into our world – it is a combination of nature, nurture, circumstances, social, economic and environmental factors that cause the birth and perpetuation of such abhorrent behaviours.
In the true-life, tragic stories of Anthony Templet and Billy Milligan, it is my opinion that some semblance of justice has indeed prevailed, in the end. These men, as young boys have suffered chronic, acute and ongoing abuse, amounting to torture, for years together. They dealt with their personal terror and with the severe, ensuing trauma with the only solution left to them – violence. Even though they are both the perpetrators of criminal behaviour, a deep insight into their dysfunctional family backgrounds, leads us to understand that, in all actuality, they are really the victims. Their lives have been fraught with extreme fear, terror, despair, dread and trepidation – there is no sense in further punishing such delinquent behaviour with incarceration and the extreme violence of high security prisons – these people have suffered grave harm and have been punished enough. Why prolong the agony? What real purpose will further punishment serve? Nothing whatsoever. Such people need rehabilitation – intensive psychiatric help and medication, psychotherapy, and extensive counselling. Such people need our help and understanding – not punishment. Treating violence with violence only extends the vicious cycle further. That is not the solution here. We must understand this fact. It has to end somewhere.
Please do not misunderstand what this author is trying to state here – she is not saying that violence and vicious crime is acceptable, tolerable, justifiable, or excusable in any way. It is always deeply traumatic, immensely disturbing, and horrific for any victim of any crime – my heart goes out to all victims, all over the world. Criminal behaviour starts from minor misdemeanours, that go on to become more serious felonies and much later become a case of full- blown crime. The latter is not something that is ever to be taken lightly- what I AM saying though, is that while taking a serious and grave view of such deviant behaviour, we can still try to understand how and why it happened and be more humane, compassionate, and empathetic in our approach toward it. Hasn’t the person already been punished enough? The person’s suffering and misery have been endless and extreme – why make a dreadful situation worse? It has to stop somewhere, otherwise the vicious cycle of violence begetting violence will continue ceaselessly and to no avail. It can serve no good purpose.
In the case of Billy Milligan, it was found that his body and mind had suffered such prolonged, extensive, and severe abuse that he could no longer cope with the severe trauma, like a normal person would. His mind used a strange defence mechanism to cope with this endless harm and injury – his mind fractured into several, separate entities – “alter personalities” – each ‘alter’ being totally unaware of the existence of the others. Chronic and severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse made his mind splinter and fragment figuratively into a thousand little pieces – manifested as diverse personalities, each formed unconsciously by his traumatised mind to cope with his unimaginable pain, misery, suffering, trauma and stress. Each alter personality had his/her own characteristics, deviancies, and a different speech accent too. Billy began to hallucinate and he began hearing voices in his head that asked him to “do criminal stuff.”
Billy stated that he was terrified of his father and his cruelty – he had been told by his father to tell absolutely no one about the abuse for fear of further, worse injuries to him. Billy was ridden with a feeling of helplessness, despair, desperation, immense guilt and he even went so far as to attempt suicide. He isolated himself further from other people and became more and more withdrawn. He stated that he could not recall any of the crimes that he had committed because his mind had automatically blocked it out of his conscious memory. He said that each time a traumatic event occurred, he was ‘asleep’ because that meant he could keep himself safe from wilful harm and injury.
His alter personality raped women because his own mother had stayed silent to the ongoing abuse – this betrayal of silence in the face of his horror made him view women, in general, as unreliable, treacherous and faithless – he wished harm on women, just as harm had been visited upon him. This is how his festering sense of hatred, bitterness, anger and resentment towards his own mother translated into the violent sexual assault and rape of innocent women.
Billy stated feeling an overwhelming sense of loneliness, overpowering emptiness and felt terribly misunderstood. He stated that he just wanted someone to love him and to hug him so that he could feel loved, wanted and safe.
Dissociative identity disorder – as experienced by Billy – is rare but it is still prevalent – we must accept this fact. It is an extremely drastic defence mechanism used unconsciously by one’s mind in an attempt to cope in extreme circumstances of horrific abuse and chronic deprivation.
To deprive a person of the gift of love consciously or unconsciously, is nothing short of a grievous sin. Love is the cornerstone and the mainstay of a healthy, fruitful, and fulfilling life. It is synonymous to a parched, dry desert craving to quench its insatiable thirst for water with heavy downpours of cooling rain. Love is the cornerstone of forgiveness – it has the immense quality of enduring self-healing. It frees one’s mind from the prison of all negativity and negative emotions. Love heals like nothing else can.
Not everyone is born evil and criminal-minded – some people become that way because of their unendurable life circumstances and dysfunctional family environment.
Critics and psychologists have divergent viewpoints as to Billy’s state of mind. While some of them veer towards a more humane outcome, most people just say that he was a skilled conman who created an elaborate con of the manifestation of a multiple personality disorder in order to gain a verdict of “not guilty by reason of criminal insanity.” I feel that something as fantastic as this is very difficult to fake in a believable fashion – though, it has been known that some people have managed to fabricate a totally convincing and elaborate con, as a perverse way to gain and retain society’s attention and even worse, a few individuals have been able to fake multiple personalities, in order to, literally, get away scot-free with murder.
Personally, I doubt very much if Billy was indeed a conman. His sad, dreadful true-life story and lonely death is tragic – nothing less. Do not condemn another person without having walked, at least a mile, in their shoes – it is only the wearer of the shoe that knows where it pinches.
It is as important to love another, as it is to be loved.
It is better to have loved and lost, rather than not to have loved at all.
I think I’ve made my point abundantly clear – what else is left to say? Nothing except that it’s a sad but true fact of life. When will it change – if ever?
“Hooked on Inspiration’s Blog” by Sherna Bhumgara 