William Dillon's redemption song

offhegoes32

"William Dillon's redemption song- Wrongfully imprisoned 27 years for murder, a Florida man has a story to tell in song. An Evanston-based producer is helping him tell it."

I found this article today and thought it was pretty interesting, had never heard of him before. I can't believe what this guy went through, but it's pretty inspiring to remember how healing music can be.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-live-1007-william-dillon-20101007,0,3113488,full.story

I'll try to paste the full story below for those who prefer to just read in the forum.

offhegoes32

Part 1 of story:

William Dillon was a good kind of jumpy as he prepared to take the stage. He had performed live, but this crowd, unlike prior audiences, wasn't made up of criminals doing time.

In those earlier performances, Dillon was one of them, and yet he wasn't. He'd been convicted of murder without having committed the crime. He made this point from behind bars repeatedly. For years.

"I'm ready to get it on, no doubt," said Dillon, 51, who at 6-foot-4 resembles a strapping, more chiseled version of the late comedian Phil Hartman. He wore a black T-shirt with the words "NOT GUILTY" emblazoned on the front. "I mean, I've done this in front of hundreds of 'hardheads.' If you can put on a show for them guys and they cheer for you, then you can make it happen."

At Dillon's side was Jim Tullio, the man who brought him from Florida to Evanston and who would accompany him on acoustic guitar that late-summer night opening for folk singer Tom Paxton at the Evanston nightclub Space. A veteran music producer who has recorded Mavis Staples, Steve Goodman, members of the Band and many others, Tullio, 57, owns a studio in a converted Evanston butcher shop. In a back room above a doorway is mounted a TV screen that Tullio keeps tuned to the Investigation Discovery cable channel.

Taking a break in late May, Tullio glanced up to catch an "On the Case With Paula Zahn" report. Typically Tullio would watch for a couple of minutes before returning to his mixing board, but this story hooked him. It was outrageous, heartbreaking, inspiring — certainly to Tullio, who called the show's producers to try to contact the subject of the report, William Dillon.

What Tullio saw was the story of a 22-year-old man convicted of first-degree murder under bizarre circumstances: He was tied to the crime by an eventually discredited evidence-sniffing dog, a witness who recanted her testimony after admitting she was sleeping with the case's lead detective, and a jailhouse snitch who later admitted he'd fabricated his account of Dillon's confession in exchange for a dropped sexual-battery charge.

Dillon was sentenced to life and moved to Florida State Prison, which houses many of the state's most violent criminals, and within an hour of entering his cell he was sexually assaulted by several inmates.

Twenty-seven years passed, years during which Dillon said he seriously considered suicide. Then DNA evidence finally confirmed what he'd known all along: He had nothing to do with the slaying. In at 22, out at 49. Have a nice life.

Oh, and because at age 19 Dillon had been arrested for having a Quaalude in his pocket — a felony, though he later said he didn't knowingly plead guilty to that offense — Florida declared him ineligible to receive any financial compensation for those lost years.

One way he survived, Dillon had told Zahn, was by writing songs, and now he wanted to record them, perhaps to launch a music career at his relatively advanced age. A light bulb flashed in Tullio's mind.

"I thought if anybody needs a break in this world, this is the guy."

My name is William Michael Dillon. I was arrested for murder on August 26th, 1981, for a crime I didn't commit. I was released on November 18th, 2008. Thank you for the keepers of justice."

The crowd at Space was hushed as Dillon delivered the spoken-word introduction to the first song of the night, "Black Robes and Lawyers," also the first song he began writing in prison. Dillon's voice is deep, rich, with a slight burr, a touch of the South and some of that "voice of God" quality for which another Southern singer is known.

"It's like he went into prison as the Dude from 'The Big Lebowski' and he came out sounding like Johnny Cash," said lawyer Barry Scheck, who directs the Innocence Project in New York and is exploring a civil suit against Florida on Dillon's behalf.

After calling Zahn's producers, Tullio was referred to the Innocence Project of Florida, which had helped secure Dillon's release, and, eventually, Ellen Moscovitz, Dillon's girlfriend since the pair met at a conference for people who have been exonerated; she had been running a DNA-testing lab, though not the one that cleared him.

When Moscovitz called Tullio, he made his offer: He would fly Dillon and her to Chicago and record Dillon's album free of charge. They could stay in his home above the studio.

Moscovitz said she was less concerned with Tullio's credentials than "his sincerity and his heart. I really picked up a very sincere vibe from him, and I immediately felt we could trust him."

Dillon was enthusiastic but skeptical, telling Tullio, "Well, you haven't heard my music."

"I said, 'Bill, it doesn't really matter,'" Tullio recounted. "'All that matters is someone helps you do that. You deserve everything there is for what you went through.' This was his dream, you know?"

Dillon marveled that fate had dealt him a timely good hand. He'd been asking around about how to put an album together but had made little progress when Tullio's call came.

"I was ready," Dillon said. "I knew it was my answer."

offhegoes32

Part 2 of story:

•••

Five days from his 22nd birthday, William Dillon and his younger brother Joe were smoking pot in a parked car on Canova Beach, just down Florida's east coast from their Satellite Beach home, when two police officers approached. Because, Dillon said, he was nine days from the end of his probation period following a marijuana-possession arrest two years earlier (which also turned up the Quaalude), he snuffed out the joint in his palm and hoped the cops wouldn't comment on the smoke wafting from the car.

Instead, they asked him about the beating death of James Dvorak four days earlier in a wooded area nearby. Dillon said he knew nothing except that "it happened over there," and he gestured to the spot. Police asked how he knew that, and he said he read it in the paper. They noted that this detail hadn't been reported.

Recounting the story while seated on a couch in Tullio's studio in late summer, Dillon said he was so nervous about the marijuana that it didn't occur to him that he actually knew the crime scene location because he'd driven past the yellow tape. The police asked him to come in for questioning the next day. Dillon partied that night and blew off the appointment, only calling the police two days later after being told that officers had been asking about him.

At the police interview, Dillon recalled, he reiterated he knew nothing about the slaying, and at some point he was asked to crumple up a piece of paper and toss it into the garbage. This wad would become part of a so-called paper lineup, as a dog handler named John Preston directed his investigative dog, Harass II, to identify which paper matched the scent on a bloody T-shirt presumably worn by the killer. The dog fingered Dillon, who was arrested.

Preston, who died in 2008, was discredited a few years later after the dog failed a simple sniff test and the pair fled Brevard County, where Dillon was tried. The Innocence Project of Florida reported that Preston's testimony was used in 60 cases in Brevard County, including two others in which the prisoners were exonerated..

Also, as Dillon, the Innocence Project of Florida and news outlets have recounted, a truck driver who was legally blind in one eye testified that he picked up (and had a sexual encounter with) the presumed killer, who left the bloody T-shirt in the cabin. Although the driver initially told police the hitchhiker was of medium height with short hair and a mustache, in the courtroom he picked out Dillon, who stood well over 6 feet, was clean-shaven and had shoulder-length hair.

Dillon also was placed at the crime scene by a woman whom Dillon said he'd casually dated for a few weeks; she recanted her testimony days after the trial, saying she'd been prompted by an investigator with whom she'd become sexually involved. Then there was the jailhouse snitch, Roger Dale Chapman, who testified that Dillon had re-enacted the crime for him. At a legislative hearing last November, Florida Today reported, Chapman apologized to Dillon, saying he'd been coached by a detective. Dillon forgave him.

But forgiveness was far from Dillon's mind when he was found guilty and sent to Florida State Prison, a maximum-security "last stop" facility. The abuse didn't end on the first day; nor did his despair. "I was seriously angry for 12 years," Dillon recalled. "I experienced a lot of serious torment for five years, and then the rest of it was the torment of nothing's happening.

"Eventually I hated myself with a passion just for who I had become in the system and what they were doing to me and how I was living my life because of them. I really thought about taking my life because I didn't like who I was, and I contemplated it real heavy."

His corrections officer eventually got him moved to a lower-security facility, but the real turning point came when Dillon saw a TV report about a country singer visiting kids in a hospital's cancer ward.

"More than anything it told me that I didn't have any real reason to cry about anything," Dillon said. "I was still healthy. These kids were going to die within a year or so, and they were happy and smiling. From that moment on, I started changing my life and thinking in a more positive way."

He got a job helping to create a prison music room. He ordered instruments and equipment, and, with the help of fellow inmates, Dillon learned to play guitar. Primarily, though, he sang country and rock tunes with other players. He also started writing songs — on the backs of official notices, on money receipts, on loose sheets of paper he'd pick up from the library.

"I've used everything, I think," he said. I've written a song on toilet paper."

Eventually a fellow inmate asked him if he'd ever been DNA tested. He had not, and he took a week writing his own motion for post-conviction DNA testing, making his request in June 2006 and winning the right to DNA testing in July 2007 but not getting tested until July 2008.

The results that cleared him came back July 25, 2008 — still, the prosecution fought his release. It wasn't until Nov. 18 that the judge dropped the charges and Dillon walked out a free man.

At a family gathering that night at his brother's Florida home, Dillon strummed his nephew's guitar and sang Montgomery Gentry's country song "Lucky Man."

Recalled his stepfather, Joe Dillon: "Everybody was just in tears."

Dvorak's killer remains at large.

•••

"Ellen had said something to me in the first e-mail: 'He can be the next Johnny Cash,'" Tullio said. "And my first thought was, Yeah, right. Everybody thinks that."

Dillon sent Tullio demos of him singing a few of his songs accompanied by acoustic guitar and an electronic keyboard. They went on and on, verse after verse, detailing Dillon's experiences in prison and probing his feelings of longing, sadness, hope.

Tullio said that although the music was rough, "I knew there was something there." He started putting together basic tracks, clipping a verse here, moving a chorus there, laying down drums, bass, guitar, all while consulting with Dillon via e-mail. "I knew they were going to be good, but I didn't know how good until he actually came and sang. And I thought, wow."

Dillon performed and wrote with Tullio in the studio during a two-week visit in June and July and an August return. Some songs address the prison experience directly, such as the jagged midtempo attack of "Black Robes and Lawyers" and the acoustic lament of "Chasing a Dream" (with former Bob Dylan sideman Larry Campbell playing fiddle), in which Dillon asks, "Won't somebody please hear my plea? Won't somebody please set me free?" Others, such as "Feel You Breathe," capture his yearning for simple outside-world pleasures.

Dillon's parents, now in their 70s and still living in Satellite Beach, said the songs fill them with pride and sadness. "' Black Robes and Lawyers,' every time I hear it, it brings a tear to (my) eye," Joe Dillon said. "I just feel so sorry for what he went through."

"These songs are all coming from his heart, and you can hear the loneliness in some of them," mother Amy Dillon said. "They're all telling us how he felt. When I first heard them, it was hard listening to (them)."

Innocence Project of Florida executive director Seth Miller said he is impressed not just by Dillon ("he's incredibly charismatic") or the music itself ("it's quite good"), but also that Dillon has chosen such a constructive way to process his ordeal.

"A lot of guys hold their feelings in, and it eats away at them," Miller said. "For him to be able to channel his feelings and his energy through his music is just a wonderful opportunity for him."

Dillon, who splits his time between Florida and his home with Moscovitz in North Carolina, plans to return to Evanston this month to finish work on his album. Although it has a prison theme, the concluding ballad, "Brand New Start," points toward a future in which he transcends that association.

"Ultimately what he wants is to be recognized as an artist, like anybody, not just a guy that spent 27 years in prison," Tullio said. "I want a fan out there to go, 'Wow, I can't wait to hear William Dillon's next record,' like they would say about Van Morrison or anyone. I never want Bill to lose the fact that this is really quality stuff. It's not pity coming from anybody."

Said Dillon: "I wanted to write those beautiful songs. I wanted to tell the stories, not necessarily of my life but of everything, the world that we live in. I really would like to change the world with a song."

Launching his brand new start on the Space stage, he concluded his five-song set singing of "walking my freedom … any road I choose." The audience gave him a standing ovation. Backstage afterward, the adrenaline was pumping even harder than before.

"I felt like I was supposed to be there, man," he said. "I really did."