A mental disorder that was once referred to as “Multiple Personality Disorder” is now rapidly growing precedence in the world of court cases. Now named “Dissociative Identity Disorder” (DID), this disorder was virtually uncharted territory in the eyes of the law before 1980 and still relatively is. Few cases arose where the defense used the excuse of DID, and even fewer were found to be legitimate. However, the amount of people in the United States that were diagnosed with DID exploded from 200 to 6,000 between the years 1980 and 1989. This led to more court claims of DID, both legitimate and fraudulent. But still, even though it is recognized in the psychiatric community as an actual disorder and with the few successful cases that there are …show more content…
One such case was the case of Kenneth Bianchi, also known as “The Hillside Strangler.” Between October 1977 and January 1978, Bianchi and his cousin raped and killed 15 women, leaving them on the hillsides of Glendale-Park area. Bianchi was arrested in October of 1979. During his trial, he attempted an insanity defense, insisting that an “alter” named Steve had done the killing, however, his argument didn’t stand up to experts and Bianchi later changed his plea to guilty to avoid the death penalty. Another case in which the argument has flopped was in the case of Ricardo Caputo. Caputo was committed to a psychiatric hospital after being found incompetent to stand trial after committing the murder of a woman in Long Island. He escaped from that hospital and killed a psychologists who had treated him in the hospital in her apartment in Yonkers. He then proceeded to kill two more women before turning himself in in 1994. He claims to have started experiencing “flashbacks” of the murders and wanted to turn himself in “to prevent any more murders.” He insisted that he had multiple personalities but many experts thought his symptoms were closer to schizophrenia, not Dissociative Identity Disorder. However, Caputo was incarcerated and later died of a heart attack in