Hyde pleads guilty, quits preschool program
Sharon Hyde, wife of former Island Lake Mayor Thomas Hyde, was convicted of a felony Monday after she admitted she tried to deceive prosecutors by altering documents intended to be used as evidence against her.
In a hearing before Circuit Judge Fred Foreman, Hyde, 60, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for falsifying time records for the number of hours she worked as director of the village-run Creative Playtime preschool.
By doing so, she ended more than two years of criminal proceedings and avoided a trial that could have sent her to prison for a minimum of six years had she been convicted.
In keeping with her negotiation with prosecutors, Hyde was not sentenced to jail time or probation as a result of her plea. She was ordered to pay $629 in court costs.
Hyde was forced to resign her position with the preschool. She did that Friday in a face-to-face conversation with Mayor Debbie Herrmann and then in a more formal letter, a copy of which has been acquired by the Daily Herald under the Freedom of Information Act.
In exchange for Hyde’s plea, charges of theft of government property and official misconduct were dropped.
Hyde and her attorneys left the courtroom without comment, and Assistant State’s Attorneys Jason Grindell and Christen Bishop also declined to comment
During the hearing, Grindell said Hyde had “provided personally created time records that were falsified to inflate the numbers of hours worked,” during the investigation of her activities that began in early 2008.
Hyde and her husband were charged June 10, 2009, in what authorities called a ghost payrolling scheme that netted them $114,000 from January 1999 through January 2009.
Sharon Hyde was accused of collecting pay for hours she did not work as director of Creative Playtime, and Thomas Hyde was accused of facilitating the payments through his votes on the village board.
But in May of last year, Foreman threw out the charges against Thomas Hyde, saying prosecutors had not established he directly benefited from his wife’s alleged misconduct.
It was the second victory in as many cases for Thomas Hyde, who in 2009 was found not guilty of forgery and official misconduct in connection with the transfer of a village-issued liquor license.
The case against Sharon Hyde proceeded. Days after Foreman declined to dismiss the charges against her, the village board took a stand against the prosecution.
Sharon Hyde had already received permission to stay on the job while the charges were pending, and on March 11, 2010, the board passed a resolution declaring she was a salaried village employee not required to account for her hours worked.
Hyde’s defense team seized the resolution as evidence the victim in the case — the village — was flatly declaring no crime had been committed.
Prosecutors denounced the move as an attempt to inject partisan politics into a criminal prosecution and sought to bar any reference to the resolution during Hyde’s trial.
Foreman later ruled the defense could present the resolution as evidence but said he would give prosecutors the opportunity to question village officials extensively on their motivation in passing the resolution.
The tipping point came earlier this year when prosecutors announced they had discovered time sheets reportedly accounting for Hyde’s time on the job had been altered.
Bishop and Grindell said they were given copies of the documents by Hyde’s lawyers in March 2008, more than a year before she was charged, and finally secured the originals in late April of this year.
Bishop said investigators had compared the two sets of documents and discovered “changes, alterations and deletions” had been made to the original time sheets.
She said information appeared to have been added to the originals in some places and deleted in others, and a large number of the sheets appeared to have been altered.
The documents were examined by a handwriting analyst in southern Illinois who concluded the changes on the original documents had been made by Hyde.
Thomas Hyde still faces a misdemeanor battery charge based on claims he grabbed and insulted a man who had been subpoenaed by prosecutors in the forgery case but was never called to testify against him. He is scheduled to appear Nov. 14 in court on that case.