Dream Leads to a Prison Term Until DNA Evidence Frees Him : Slaying: Police called Steven Linscott’s account a confession, not a vision. Now, 12 years later, he examines lessons painfully learned.

Fourteen years ago, Steven Linscott told police a shocking story: He saw a man attack and kill someone. His account of the crime had one very unusual aspect--he said it was just a dream.

A dream, though, that occurred the same night a neighbor was murdered.

Some details he recounted were similar to the woman’s death; others were not. The discrepancies didn’t dissuade police. To them, this was no vision, no coincidence--this was a confession.

So began a long, bizarre odyssey that sounds like a Kafka tale: A Bible student and young father whose dream of a crime turns into a 12-year nightmare as he repeatedly proclaims his innocence--from the police station to court to prison--until new DNA tests finally free him.

Two years have passed since charges were dropped against Steve Linscott. Now, as he rebuilds his life, he has begun talking openly for the first time, promoting a book that examines lessons painfully learned.

“You have to be careful where you place your faith,” said Linscott, now a 40-year-old family therapist and the father of four. “We had a naive trust in the legal system. That was definitely a mistake.”

“You have to force the system to do its job,” he added. “You need to kick it in the rear end. Even then, innocent people get harmed.”

The state never declared him innocent. When abandoning its case, it said scientific evidence raised sufficient doubts about retrying Linscott, who served 3 1/2 years in prison before his guilty verdict was overturned.

Linscott isn’t surprised. “When this crowd drops a case, that’s better than a jury decision that says you’re not guilty . . .,” he said. “That’s the best exoneration possible.”

Linscott said he hopes his book, “Maximum Security,” co-authored by journalist Randall Frame and published by Crossway Books, will help other victims through their ordeals. “There are injustices all the time. . . . We’ve learned a lot about that.” It’s available mostly in Christian bookstores.

But the mild-mannered man with a penchant for religious parables and homespun phrases--in talking about prison violence, for example, he says one inmate “beat the tar” out of another--is not at ease playing the promotion game.

He asked that the central Illinois town where he lives remain secret. And though he has conducted numerous interviews, he also rejected an appearance on a big-time TV talk show--one that would likely mean big book sales--because it wanted to explore the psychic angle.

“I’m not going to rush out and say this power exists,” he said.

In October, 1980, police came to the door of the Christian halfway house where Linscott and his wife, Lois, had just begun working as house parents.

Karen Ann Phillips, 24, a nurse’s aide, had been raped and bludgeoned to death down the block in Oak Park, on the edge of Chicago’s West Side, a high-crime area. Had the Linscotts heard or seen anything?

At first, Linscott, then a Bible college student, said he was reluctant to reveal his dream. But he did after mentioning it to his wife and a friend.

Though he says he couldn’t determine whether a man or woman was killed in his dream, he identified the victim as female in a written account police requested after they told him of Phillips’ murder.

In his book, he describes that dream: A blond man, about 5-foot-5 to 5-foot-7--Linscott stands over 6 feet--is talking to a second person. At first, he is calm. Then his demeanor changes, he takes out an object and begins striking the victim, until blood is flying everywhere.

“It wasn’t an unusual dream under the circumstances,” Linscott said, noting that he was tense living with former inmates in a halfway house in a new neighborhood plagued by drugs, prostitution and violence.

“I believed that God maybe would use it (the dream) in some way,” he said. “I did not ever suspect that it would be used by the cops against me. . . . If I have a sin, it was being naive.”

Though there were some similarities between the dream and the crime, Linscott says there were dozens of differences, including a notable one: He thought the victim was black. Phillips was white.

Authorities later said the discrepancies were his way of distancing himself from the slaying.

Linscott said he had never been in trouble before; his most serious brush with crime was a $50 speeding ticket in his native Maine.

He said police repeatedly assured him he was not a suspect. But they took blood, saliva and hair samples.

Steven Linscott soon found his words used against him. He was convicted, sentenced to 40 years in prison and given what inmates jokingly call a Buck Rogers release date: 2002.

Linscott was transferred to the Centralia Correctional Center in southern Illinois; Lois moved down there so they could visit weekly. She worked as a nurse and found herself a single mother of three.

“For the longest time when the kids were little, I would tell them the police made a big mistake . . . and they thought Daddy did something to hurt someone,” she said. “I tried not to ever make it sound like the police were bad people.”

Those first months of separation were trying. His wife struggled with her new responsibilities; Linscott bristled with his new confinement.

“The bitterness was tearing me apart,” he said. “I realized I can’t keep going on like this or I’m going to go in a black fugue. I’m not going to be able to handle life at all. I decided that as much as I hate it, I’m going to have to forgive these people (the authorities). . . . Once I did, life got much better.”

So did his luck.

In 1985, the Illinois Appellate Court overturned his guilty verdict, paving the way for his release on bond.

Still, there were adjustments when he left prison.

“It certainly makes you paranoid,” he said. “You learn you can’t trust anybody. You have to be on guard all the time. . . . When I came out, I basically kept everybody at arm’s length.”

“We had our struggles,” his wife said. “I thought he should be closer to God when he got out because I thought God had gotten us through this.”

There was tension, too, not knowing how long he would remain free.

But in a series of appeals, prosecutors were criticized for misrepresenting key physical evidence against Linscott by suggesting it was conclusive when, in fact, it only showed he could not be eliminated as a suspect.

One appellate judge wrote that in the Linscott case, “the American ideals of fairness were not just ignored, they were trampled upon.”

His biggest break came as the state, in preparing for a second trial in 1992, decided to use new, more sophisticated DNA techniques to determine if old semen samples could be linked to Linscott.

The results eliminated Linscott as the attacker if he acted alone. His attorney notes there has never been any suggestion of multiple assailants.

Linscott says he still dreams, but never talks to anyone about it.

“I still wake up and am shocked by the realization that it’s really over,” he said. “It’s taken at least two years to get some semblance of normalcy back into my life. . . . I just take stock every once in a while and think, ‘Boy, the tension just keeps seeping away and I feel great.’ ”