Town note
The area was originally part of the town of Cicero.
about 0:06:22The story
In October 1980 Karen Ann Phillips was 24 and living alone in a studio apartment at 324 North Austin in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb on Chicago's western edge. She worked part-time at the University of Illinois Medical Center, was studying nursing at Rush Presbyterian St Luke's Hospital in Chicago, and was also a follower of Kriya Yoga, studying to become a swami at a temple in the city. On Friday 3 October she attended nursing school and a classmate drove her home. That evening she went to the Kriya Yoga Temple, returned to her apartment at about 10.30, and took a call from her friend Helen arranging a shopping trip the next day. A neighbour, Mohammed Azajin, a student in the adjoining apartment, heard voices and pounding from her flat between about 12.45 and one o'clock in the morning; it sounded like an argument. He knocked on her door, got no answer, went back to his own apartment, and heard the argument again in lower voices and more pounding. On Saturday afternoon she did not appear for the shopping trip. Helen sent her husband to the apartment; he knocked, got no reply, and called the fire department, and firemen broke the door in. They found Phillips face down on the floor, naked except for a nightgown pulled tight around her neck, her head covered in blood and with numerous wounds and abrasions on her face, head and back. Her fingers were pressed together thumb to index in a circle. Helen told police the gesture was a mudra used in the Hindu denomination they both belonged to, signifying the search for peace and the passive acceptance of death. Hairs that were not hers were found in her hand, in her pubic region, and on the carpet and bed sheet. Swabs and blood samples were taken. There was no sign of forced entry, so she had let her attacker in. An autopsy found death from a combination of beating and strangulation, and a vaginal smear showed seminal material. In bushes outside the apartment police found a tyre iron encrusted with hair and blood. A man who lived in the house next to the apartment building came forward. He had moved to Chicago in the autumn of 1979, spent the following summer in Maine, and had come to Oak Park about a month before the murder to study at Emmaus Bible College. He lived with his wife Lois, the daughter of missionaries to the Bahamas, and their two children, Catherine, two and a half, and Paul, nine months. His only criminal record was a 1972 speeding ticket in Maine. When police canvassed the street he and Lois said they had heard nothing. A day or two later he told Lois he had dreamed about a man beating someone to death on the night of the murder, and he mentioned it to staff at the building, who told him to call the police. After a newspaper report on the Monday he called the station at about 9.30 p.m. and spoke for half an hour. A detective collected a written account the following day. That evening two officers read it back to him and asked why he had not described the murder weapon. He said he had told the officer on the phone that it looked like a tyre iron. On 8 October he gave a taped interview at the police station. He described a dream in two stages: a friendly, fair-haired man of about five foot five to five foot seven, in a light terry-cloth shirt with stripes and burnt-red trousers, talking easily with a woman in a living-room setting; then the man producing a dark, rounded, tapered metal object from behind his back, smiling, and beating her about the head and shoulders while she stayed on her hands and knees and did not resist, blood flying everywhere. He said he woke at two, looked at his watch, went back to sleep, and the dream continued. He said he had had premonitions since his teens and that his mother had the same ability. On 10 October, at 10 p.m., he came back for a second interview, wearing a light terry-cloth shirt with a stripe on the sleeve. An assistant state's attorney joined. The questioning turned on whether he was describing his own actions; he asked for counsel and for Chaplain Strauss, and agreed to give blood, saliva and hair samples. Bail was set at $450,000; a church where the family had worshipped in Maine wrote to 12,000 independent churches in the United States and Canada asking for prayers and support, and about $50,000 in donations and loans was raised for his defence. The scientific evidence was weak. Hairs found at the scene were consistent with his, with a study putting the odds at one in 4,500 for head hairs and one in 800 for pubic hairs, but the state's hair expert never said they matched. A vaginal swab was sent, without notice to the defence, to Scotland Yard for a destructive test; the gamma markers found were ones the victim also had, so the result proved little. The court also found he had misrepresented the hair evidence as a match. A dissent said the remarks were separated by 63 pages of transcript and that there was ample evidence. He wrote a book, Maximum Security, with Randall Frame, published in 1994.