Tiffany Williams wasn’t prepared for what she saw on pushing open the door of her friend’s South Side studio apartment in 1991.
As she called out her friend’s name, Tiffany Lindsey’s 1-year-old son crawled over from his mother’s badly beaten, bloodied body. Williams screamed out and called Chicago police.
On Thursday, Williams said she knew on that day 23 years ago who was responsible for her friend’s brutal slaying: a 16-year-old troublemaker who had spent the previous night with Lindsey, also 16, at her home. But authorities didn’t charge Steven Dixon until 2011, when prosecutors said advances in DNA testing finally caught up to him.
Deliberating into Thursday evening, a Cook County jury at the Leighton Criminal Court Building found Dixon guilty of first-degree murder.
Taking the witness stand in his own defense earlier this week, Dixon, now 40, gave his first detailed account of what he says happened that night.
“He waited 23 years to concoct this story that catches up with the science he didn’t know about,” Assistant State’s Attorney Ethan Holland told jurors Thursday in his closing argument. “(But) this DNA evidence buries him, it buries him.”
After detectives sent evidence for DNA testing in 2009, Dixon’s blood was found under Lindsey’s fingernails and her blood was found on the shoe and pants he was wearing that night, prosecutors said.
A blood-spatter expert testified that the bloodstains on Dixon’s clothes indicated he was nearby when Lindsey was attacked.
But Dixon’s attorney told jurors his client was himself a victim — attacked by an unknown assailant, perhaps someone who didn’t like that Lindsey, a former ward of the state new to the neighborhood, was selling drugs out of her apartment.
Pat Benesh, an assistant public defender, accused the prosecution of using “junk science” to try to convict Dixon.
“This is not a case where science caught up with the crime,” Benesh told jurors. “It’s a case where money has outrun the science.”
On the witness stand, Dixon told jurors he had sex with Lindsey that night, woke up late to use the bathroom and then heard screams before finding himself in a struggle with an unknown assailant who knocked him out with a blow to his head.
He said he awoke the next morning to find Lindsey, a longtime family friend he said he’d secretly had a relationship with for two years, lying dead on the floor of her apartment in the 4700 block of South Drexel Boulevard. She had been fatally stabbed, and her skull was fractured.
Dixon testified that he tried to remove a knife still embedded in her neck but that the handle broke off. Prosecutors called that a convenient detail intended to explain away why his DNA was found on the handle.
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The trial “brought back a lot of terrible memories I’d tried to forget about,” Williams said as jurors deliberated. She denied her friend had a romantic relationship with Dixon. Her family and prosecutors also denied that Lindsey sold drugs.
Lindsey’s son was raised by her aunt, Detrice Shelton, who said he is now 24 and living in Ohio, but a new job prevented him from attending the trial. Shelton said the boy had nightmares for years and that she had to fight for years for him to be given counseling for the trauma.
Lindsey’s family said they rejoiced when a cold case detective told them in 2011 that charges had finally been filed against Dixon.
“It was relief,” said Danielle Dennis, 34, who is now the oldest of six siblings after Lindsey and another sister died.
But some of the pain of Lindsey’s killing will never go away. Her youngest sister Martisha Mack, 20, was born three years after her death and never knew her.
“It was just like an empty feeling — everybody else around me had memories with her,” Mack said. “It’s like you love this person, they’re your big sister, but you never met them. You have nothing, nothing at all.”
Twitter @SteveSchmadeke