RICHLAND CO. – The indictment of an Illinois State Police special agent in Richland County has set many entities throughout the state back on their heels, and has caused a chill of apprehension amongst others who have been accused of the same infraction Agent Rick White has: Perjury.
White, 49, has been one of the most questionable of many strange hires at ISP in the past decade or so, since a decided shift of the agency saw the retirement of decades-long, respectable investigators and the sudden presence of bizarre, somewhat disturbing individuals the likes of White.
The agency seemed, at that time, to be adopting the same attitude of hiring that local police departments and county sheriff’s departments were, specializing in either punks, or in the “fat/weird kids who were bullied in school,” then grew up to be terrorizing bullies in their own right.
Somewhere in there were the weirdoes like White, and those, unfortunately, were assigned to the realm of the weird: sex crimes.
It was into this realm that White, whose entire career pretty much has been chronicled here in Disclosure over the past decade, was sent…and it was the “investigation” of a false claim of a sex crime against a prominent person that started his descent to the grand jury indictment on January 27 at the courthouse in Olney.
Wayne County bogus sex crime case
White was the ISP agent to whom a DCFS call was referred regarding a case of alleged sex abuse against a then-15-year-old girl in Wayne County in the summer of 2010.
The alleged abuser was Jim Hinkle, a retired ISP investigator and instructor of Constitutional law at Olney Central College…and the sheriff of Wayne County at the time; a lame duck, as he had been defeated in the Primary that year by current sheriff Mike Everett.
One of Hinkle’s stepdaughters, a girl who had had emotional problems and had made false claims in the past about others, had wanted to go live with her father in Charleston, Illinois, and so had concocted a story about Hinkle abusing her by touching her inappropriately when he was applying some chigger medicine to her.
White, apparently believing he was riding high on the investigation trail (he had worked the official misconduct case against former Wayne sheriff Sonny McCulley, an investigation that resulted in charges against former Marion County sheriff Brad Wolenhaupt, and had a brief part in the federal case against former sheriff of Gallatin County Raymond Martin), was nearly gleeful to take the case against Hinkle, who, many said, White viewed as a rival.
When White and his partner, Tom Oliverio, arrived to talk to Hinkle and Hinkle’s wife Tammy (the girl’s mother), White was verbally disgusting and completely inappropriate when speaking to both of them, using vulgar 
terminology about Tammy’s daughter and the girl’s private parts, and what it was the girl “said” happened to her…so disgusting were his terms and accusations, that Hinkle literally threw them off his property.
Hinkle contacted a former co-worker and longtime friend, Kelly Henby, who was working as an apprentice with an area private investigator and asked Henby to interview the girl on video, to see what kind of statements she’d make about the incident.
Henby told Hinkle he would, but “If that girl tells me you did it, I’m going to nail you,” Henby said to Hinkle.
Had already recanted in Charleston
But when Henby interviewed the girl on video, she recanted everything, telling the truth: She’d made up the story to get away from her mother and go live with her father in Charleston, since he was more permissive (the Hinkles wouldn’t let the girl go out with an older guy she was wanting to see, and this angered her).
As it turned out, even before Henby interviewed her, the girl had been interviewed by Charleston police, taken to them by her father. She had already recanted to an investigator there.
When White learned that his whole case against Hinkle had been messed up by Henby – White’s former boss – he was livid.
He then began not only telling anyone who would listen about the incident with Hinkle (which is against Illinois juvenile laws) but also picking at Henby.
He finally managed to get a Coles County prosecutor to listen to him about Henby “falsely representing himself as a private detective when he was not one.”
Henby was charged in Coles with Practicing as a Detective Without a License in early 2011, on the heels of the Hinkle case being determined to be what it was: Bogus.
White loses it
When Henby’s Coles County charge was dismissed on December 5, 2012, White was more than livid.
Things got worse for him when Hinkle filed a civil suit against White and Oliverio for federal civil rights violation.
Shortly thereafter, Henby’s grandmother-in-law died.
White, who had been following Henby, his wife, or other relatives around at least a couple of counties (Wayne and Richland), and whose boss, Jay Hall, Henby had had to call in order to ask White to stop bothering his relatives (one of them at a nursing home in Fairfield), showed up at the funeral.
As Henby was a witness in Hinkle’s federal civil suit, Henby believed White was, quite simply, stalking him. So Henby filed for an emergency order of protection based on Illinois’ Stalking/No-Contact laws.
The matter came before the court in Richland County on February 5, 2013…about two months after White had been deposed for the federal case Jim Hinkle had filed against him.
In the OP hearing, White was asked almost immediately into it whether or not the girl had recanted her allegations of sexual misconduct against her step-father, Jim Hinkle.
White answered, “Not that I recall.”
However, on November 16, 2012, during the deposition for Hinkle’s case, when White was asked whether the minor girl had recanted her allegation, at that time, White truthfully answered that she had recanted.
Lying under oath
This disparity in answering, both answers given under oath, was what constituted the perjury – White gave an alleged untruthful answer in Richland County on Feb. 5 – and this was what was presented to the grand jury, which met in a day long session in the courthouse in Olney on Jan. 27.
At the end of the session, which is conducted out of the public’s eye, the grand jury returned a true bill of indictment:
That on or about the 16th of November, 2012, in sworn deposition testimony in a civil action involving James Hinkle as Plaintiff, when asked whether a minor, E.M. had recanted her allegation of sexual misconduct against her step-father, Rick White testified that E.M. had recanted such allegations; in or about February 5, 2013, in sworn testimony in the Circuit Court of Richland County, in Olney, Richland County, Illinois, Rick White, when asked whether E.M. had recanted her allegations of sexual misconduct against her step-father, answered “Not that I recall.” Such is perjury, a falsehood uttered (under oath as to a material fact in a proceeding).
Judge Larry Dunn signed the warrant for White on Jan. 28. White, it’s been reported to Disclosure, knew the warrant was coming and spent the day puttering around District 19 headquarters in Carmi until the warrant was ready to be presented. He turned himself in at the White County Sheriff’s Office, was booked, and posted bond - $1,000 cash on the $10,000 bail.
No booking mug was taken of the errant little agent.
Pressure
The man doing the honors of conducting the grand jury was recently-appointed prosecutor, Brad Vaughn, who is running unopposed in the upcoming election for the position in Richland County.
Vaughn, it’s being reported, came to be under the same kind of pressure to not follow through on the ISP agent’s charge as his predecessor, David Hyde, was.
Hyde took the case as far as actually speaking with Hall about his ‘special agent,’ asking for an investigation by the Division of Internal Investigations, the arm of ISP that, effectively, investigates itself.
Hyde, it was reported, was completely stonewalled by ISP/DII.
It’s unknown whether an investigation was conducted into White’s behavior by DII upon Henby’s initial complaint or not; nor what the outcome of that investigation was if indeed there was one.
Hyde resigned in July of 2015. It’s unknown whether or not the pressure from ISP, which has grown to phenomenal proportions when it comes to “pull” in the state of Illinois, had anything to do with the resignation.
One thing is known, however: Vaughn was up against a two-year statute on the charge against White, and was working to within days of the expiration of that statutory time limit when the grand jury met.
It appears the pressure to do right was greater on Vaughn than any pressure from ISP might have been, on his predecessor, to just let the whole thing go.
Too powerful, too arbitrary
The incident is indicative of the power ISP has gained in the state, as well as the aforementioned bizarre personnel peopling the entity nowadays.
ISP, it seems, has turned into a DCFS on steroids: They’re all over something when there’s not really anything going on, yet when there are serious crimes happening, they turn and look the other way, influenced by “who the crime happened to” or “who the alleged perpetrator is” as to whether they will bother assisting a police agency with an investigation.
Then, as in the case of White, if there’s a personal bend involved, it seems they do everything they can to perpetuate that bend, up to and including defending the wrongdoer to the point of intimidation of the one who reported the wrongdoing.
The public is fortunate that this time, ISP came up against two of its own – Henby and Hinkle – as well as a prosecutor, Vaughn, who remembers what ISP used to be and what services they’re supposed to provide…as well as what they’re NOT supposed to be doing.
Whether or not White is the first of the dominoes to fall remains to be seen; Disclosure was advised on deadline that the pissy little man has been ordered by the director’s office in Springfield to “continue working,” as he has his hand in so many sex cases in Zone 7 investigations that to lose his testimony might actually mean that those cases will be lost.
This, Disclosure has also been told, is completely against ISP protocol, as White, being charged with a felony, cannot carry a weapon nor a FOID card, and so cannot act in the capacity of a sworn law enforcement officer.
Rick White is set to make a first appearance in Richland County court on the Perjury charge Feb. 23 at 9:30 a.m.