On October 3, 1980, 24-year-old Karen Phillips had attended nursing school in Chicago and then went to Kriya Yoga Temple in Chicago, where she was studying to become a swami. She returned to her apartment around 10: 30 p.m. and had a phone conversation with a friend to arrange a shopping trip for Saturday, the following morning.
When she failed to show up for the shopping trip, her friend went to the apartment. Getting no response, the friend called the Oak Park Fire Department. Phillips’s body, clad in a nightgown, was found face down. Her fingers were pressed together to form a hand signal, which in some forms of Kriya Yoga practice is used to signify that a person has accepted death and is seeking peace.
An autopsy showed Phillips had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death. A tire iron, encrusted with blood and hair, was found in bushes outside the apartment and was believed to have been the murder weapon.
Phillips’s next door neighbor, Mohammed Azedejn, told police he heard pounding noises coming from her apartment at about 1 a.m. He said he knocked on her door and the noise stopped, although no one responded. He said that after he returned to his apartment, the pounding noise resumed and then stopped.
The police found foreign hairs in the victim’s hands, pubic region and on the carpet. Hair strands, blood samples, and vaginal, rectal and oral swabs were taken from the body. There was no evidence of a forcible entry into the apartment.
Coincidentally, 26-year-old Steven Linscott, a Bible study student at Emmaus Bible College in Oak Park and a neighbor of Phillips, had a dream that same night in which he saw a woman beaten to death. Friends and family—he and his wife had two children—suggested that Linscott share details of his dream with local authorities.
Two days after the murder, Linscott contacted the Oak Park police in the hope that his dream might help them identify the killer. Although there were relatively few similarities and several striking dissimilarities between the dream and the crime, police interpreted his dream as a “confession” and Linscott became the sole suspect in the murder.
On Oct. 10,1980, Linscott returned to the police station for another interview. This time an assistant Cook County State's Attorney was present. Linscott again recounted his dream, and agreed to give the police blood, saliva, and head and pubic hair samples. The samples were sent to the IIllinois Department of Law Enforcement Crime Laboratory for analysis.
Based on the analysis, Linscott was arrested on November 25, 1980. He was charged with murder, rape, and armed violence. The armed violence charge was dismissed by the prosecution prior to trial.
Linscott went to trial in Cook County Circuit Court In June 1982 on charges of first-degree murder and rape.
Mohammed Tahir, an analyst at the crime laboratory, testified that several hairs found on the victim’s body, bed, and carpet were consistent with Linscott’s hair and that a hair found on the murder weapon, a tire iron, was consistent with Phillips’s hair.
Tahir admitted that he performed a test which destroyed the only vaginal swab that was taken from the victim. The destructive test was done after Linscott had been indicted for rape and murder, and after his defense attorney had moved for discovery of all physical evidence.
Tahir testified that the no-longer-existent vaginal swab had a mixture of secretions that included vaginal and seminal material, and that he tested the mixed secretions for a blood type. Tahir testified that his tests revealed there was type O blood in the mixed secretions. Tahir explained that 20 percent of the population are considered non-secretors, people whose ABO blood type cannot be detected in their body fluids, such as saliva, semen or vaginal fluids.
He said that secretors, 80 percent of the population, disclose their blood groupings in body fluids. The victim was a secretor, with type O blood. He noted that nearly half of the population had type O blood, including secretors and non-secretors. Tahir said Mr. Linscott was a non-secretor with type AB blood.
The defense argued that the seminal material that was part of the mixed secretions on the vaginal swab could have come from a secretor with the same type O blood as the victim. As a result, the defense contended that the seminal material that was part of the mixed secretions on the vaginal swab could have come from any male with type O blood (secretor or non-secretor), or from any male who was a non-secretor, regardless of blood type. These two groups comprised a substantial percentage of the population, including males in an indeterminate mixture of nearly half the population (type O blood) and 20 percent of the population (non-secretors). This substantial percentage of the population did include Mr. Linscott, a non-secretor with type AB blood.
Tahir did not testify that the victim was sexually abused. Tahir testified that “you cannot tell” when the seminal material was left there. He also said he could not tell “whether or not this girl had sexual intercourse within 24-hours of the time” that she was murdered.
The defense argued that the dream that Linscott recounted was either vague or inconsistent with the facts. He had indicated when the attack in his dream occurred. During police interrogations, when he was asked to give more details, he was unable to do so. Moreover, Phillips was white, whereas Linscott said the victim in his dream was Black.
In addition, in his dream, the murder occurred in a living room that was as large as a four-room apartment, but the murder actually took place in a 10 feet-by-12 feet living area of a studio apartment. In Linscott’s dream, there was a couch in the murder scene, but Phillips did not have a couch.
Moreover, while Linscott denied seeing any religious objects in his dream, Phillips had a table that displayed religious objects.
The defense called an expert witness, Kenneth Siegesmund, an associate professor of anatomy at Medical College in Milwaukee with expertise in “microevidence,” including hair. In addition to the microscopic observations used in conventional hair analysis, Siegesmund did higher-tech analyses using a scanning electron microscope and X-ray elemental micro-analysis. Based on all three analyses, he excluded Linscott as the source of the hair.
During closing argument, the prosecutor told the jury: “Karen was raped by a non-secretor and the defendant is a non-secretor….Seminal material…It came from a non-secretor. Mr. Linscott is a non-secretor.”
On June 16, 1982, the jury found Linscott not guilty of rape, but guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison by Cook County Circuit Court Judge Adam N. Stillo.
On August 7, 1985, the First District Illinois Appellate Court reversed Linscott’s conviction based on insufficient evidence.
“We conclude that the circumstantial evidence produced by the State merely raises a possibility or suspicion that defendant is guilty,” the court ruled. “The evidence is plainly not sufficient to exclude every reasonable theory of innocence, which includes the possibility that defendant simply had a dream similar to the occurrence and that he acquired knowledge of additional facts through the news media or from neighborhood talk about the crime after a police canvass of the neighborhood. “
Linscott was released on bond on November 1, 1985.
The prosecution appealed, and in October 1986, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Appellate Court and remanded the case to that court for review of issues that were not decided on appeal.
On July 29, 1987, the First District Illinois Appellate Court again reversed Linscott’s conviction, based on prosecutorial misconduct. The court ruled that the prosecution’s closing argument as it related to the blood comparisons was “false and a stark distortion of the possibility that the defendant was the assailant.”
The court declared: “No one testified that ‘Karen was raped by a non-secretor’ or that the seminal material ‘came from a non-secretor.’ The prosecutor simply made-up that piece of ‘evidence.’” The court added, “The made-up evidence was doubly devastating because not only was it false, but it reduced the pool of possible assailants from a substantial percentage of the male population, or even from the entire population, to just the males in twenty percent of the population.”
The prosecution sought another appeal.
While that was pending, Linscott’s lawyers, Thomas Decker and Richard McLeese, filed a motion for a new trial contending that a re-examination of the evidence showed that what had been identified as abrasions on Phillips’s body were actually bitemarks. At a hearing, the defense lawyers presented evidence that an odontologist believed that the marks could not have been made by Linscott’s teeth. The motion was denied in 1990.
On January 31, 1991, the Supreme Court affirmed the Appellate Court’s decision, setting the stage for a retrial.
In preparation for the new trial, the prosecution conducted DNA tests on the crime-scene evidence. The testing revealed that the semen found in the victim was not from Mr. Linscott.
As a result, on July 16, 1992, the state dismissed the charges against Linscott. A decade later, in December 2002, Illinois Governor George Ryan granted Linscott a pardon based on innocence, which entitled him to $60,150 in compensation from the state.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 02-23-2026
