URBANA — A Florida man charged with three rapes that happened in Champaign County in the 1990s is in the Champaign County Jail now awaiting trial after having spent the last three years in a Florida jail.

Steven Feagin, 41, was a University of Illinois student from 1989 to 1994, and later a local resident, when women were sexually assaulted in their homes in Urbana on Nov. 20, 1993, and July 13, 1995, and in Champaign on Feb. 9, 1995.

The three cases went unsolved for many years before the former UI football player was linked to them by a combination of modern technology — DNA — and an old-fashioned investigative tool — a phone book.

In June 2008, authorities in Broward County, Fla., learned that DNA from a rape committed in Pompano Beach a year earlier matched DNA from the 1993 and 1995 rapes in Champaign County.

Retired Urbana police investigator John Lockard had a hunch that the suspect would have been a UI student, since the victims were UI students who lived near campus. And because of the DNA hit in the Florida case, he believed the suspect may have been a student from Florida. Lockard had worked one of the two Urbana rape cases when it happened.

Lockard, who is still employed at the Urbana Police Department as its evidence technician, spent his own time at nights and on weekends for about two weeks in the summer of 2008 combing through UI student-staff directories from the early 1990s looking for students from Florida.

(Had the crimes happened more recently, Lockard couldn't have done that since, in 2009, the UI discontinued the practice of listing home addresses for its students.)

Out of 37,665 students in the 1993-94 directory, the first one he combed, he found 73 from Florida. And after eliminating Asian males and women, he was left with 54 males. Running those names through a database available to local police, he came up with Feagin's name, which he passed on to fellow investigator Dan Morgan, who had also worked the 1990s cases.

They found that Feagin lived near two of the three local victims when the assaults occurred. He would have been 23 at the time of the first assault, and 25 at the time of the other two. Additionally, the investigators found that all the victims had similar characteristics of blonde hair and light-colored eyes.

Morgan relayed the information to Florida authorities, who found that Feagin lived two doors away from the woman in Pompano Beach who was assaulted in 2007. Based on all that information, they got a search warrant for a tissue sample from Feagin, which later matched DNA police had obtained from the assault victim.

Feagin was arrested in Florida in September 2008 and charged with burglary and sexual battery. He was also charged with the Champaign and Urbana crimes.

Assistant Champaign County State's Attorney Troy Lozar said he was in touch intermittently with the Florida prosecutors, whose case against Feagin was to go first.

"They said their case would be done in under a year," Lozar said.

But the case didn't get completed and, in fact, was dismissed on Aug. 29, according to the Broward County state attorney's office.

In a 10-page memo filed Wednesday in Broward County Circuit Court documenting why the case was dismissed, Assistant State Attorney Nicole Alvarez synopsized the working relationship she had with the victim since the beginning of the case. Alvarez said the victim thought all along that an ex-boyfriend was responsible for her assault in spite of DNA evidence linking Feagin to the crime and no physical evidence linking the ex-boyfriend.

Alvarez wrote that the victim also felt that the state attorney's office was "protecting him (the ex-boyfriend) and pinning it on the defendant." Alvarez explained that she had met several times with the victim and explained to her how DNA evidence works. Alvarez also outlined other unusual behavior by the victim, including her repeated attempts to reach Feagin's ex-wife and an Urbana police officer involved in the Feagin investigation.

"The victim's credibility as to date has been so tainted by her various assertions and allegations that we cannot be sure that whatever might have occurred to her was nonconsensual as she has alleged. It was with a heavy heart that I dismissed the charges. I understand that (the victim) has gone through a very traumatic experience, which has affected her in all aspects of her life," Alvarez wrote.

In light of the dismissal, Feagin was sent back to Illinois.

A Texas-based extradition service used by the Champaign County sheriff's office picked Feagin up at a Fort Lauderdale jail on Monday, a trip that cost $1,079. He was booked into the jail in Urbana about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday and made his first court appearance Wednesday. His case has been set for the Nov. 15 pretrial call of Judge Heidi Ladd. He's being held in lieu of $10 million bond.

He is charged with six counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, a Class X felony with penalties ranging from six to 30 years in prison upon conviction, meaning a sentence of up to 90 years for Feagin if convicted of all three attacks.