Bill Dillon releases an album chronicling his wrongful conviction next Tuesday in Durham.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Four Walls of Raiford” tells the story of an innocent man charged with armed robbery escaping from the miserable Florida State Prison.

“Now they say I’m guilty, when they find me I must die / Only me and Jesus know that I never stole a dime,” Skynyrd’s vocalist Ronnie Van Zant sings on the track.

The prisoner in Zant’s song gave up on his five-year sentence after just two, and traded a life of hard labor for one on the run.
It took William Michael Dillon 27 years to escape his life sentence from the four walls in Raiford, Fla., and when he did, he was proven innocent.

“I didn’t think I was going to survive,” Dillon said. “I honestly didn’t think I was going to get out of there alive. My first five years, it was horrific. It was really bad. For me, I had never been in prison before, and they were killing and stabbing.”

When someone was murdered at a tourist beach Dillon frequented, he said his long hair and an outstanding drug possession charge made him a convenient suspect. With the aid of a police dog, a conspiracy mounted to pin him with the crime and clean the beach’s
reputation, he said.

“I was angry for years,” Dillon said. “Years. That first weekend in county jail, it was just an experience. Just something I was going to go through, and they were going to find out that I hadn’t committed any crime, and I was going to be released. They were going to pay me for my time and trouble. That was my young mind speaking.”

DNA profiling gave Dillon another shot at a trial, and when other evidence came forward ­— like the fact that a witness slept with a lead officer and that key statements were coerced with cue cards ­— he was exonerated.

DNA evidence may have freed him, but Dillon said that it was music that saved his life. Trapped in a dehumanized existence where sexual assault, stabbings and fights were common, Dillon turned to learning guitar as a creative outlet to document his experience.

“It was in my mind to write something to help soothe my soul,” he said. “If nothing else, if something happened to me ­— if I died in here — then maybe the message would get out, someway, somehow.”
The hard part was finding a guitar. Dillon’s prison had six acoustics that could be checked out from the band room at inconsistent intervals, so Dillon hatched a plan.

“I worked my way to try and get a job in there. I had to pick up paper for days and days and days. The recreation officer was in charge of the band room and picking up the trash around the compound. So, I started picking up trash.”

Dillon cut his teeth with classic rock and country covers for what he describes as, “the hardest group you’ll ever play in front of.” Three years into his sentence, he wrote his first song.

“I originally wrote ‘Black Robes and Lawyers’ on a toilet paper roll,” Dillon said. “Back at that time, I had nothing. The only paper was paper that they issued out to us. I used that as letters to send to my family and my lawyer.”

Dillon moved to Carrboro in June 2009, to escape the possibility of getting trapped back in the Florida legal system.

Seth Miller, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida, championed Dillon’s case after seeing news of his DNA trial in an area newspaper.

“For him, I have to imagine it was sort of an oasis in a desert,” Miller said. “He’s in this horrible place, but yet he gets to filter all of his emotions into something that’s positive and productive­­.”

Miller thinks the album has the potential to have a profound effect on listeners.

“Here’s someone that had his life taken away from him for no other reason than that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Miller said. “The struggle that he went through ­— both to survive in prison and to get out — I think people will begin to understand that he’s a special person. There’s not a lot of people that can speak to the experience he’s had.”

Contact the Diversions Editor at diversions@dailytarheel.com