Shelby County – Where Records Disappear And No One Seems To Care

Shelby Co. (ECWd) –

For reasons we can’t explain and by all indications no one cares, Shelby County has a record retention issue like we have never seen.

A past forensic audit of the Sheriff’s office, audit at this link, that includes officials lying about key records being destroyed rather than allowing them to be used in a forensic audit is just one of those “missing records” issues in Shelby County.  We covered that in this article.  To date, not a single step has been taken to address the “missing records” lie to the auditor.

In February of 2022, a formal consumer complaint was filed with the Illinois Attorney General alleging billing malfeasance by the city of Shelbyville, Illinois.

That complaint was acknowledged and forwarded to the appropriate agency with the authority to deal with such a complaint, which, according to the letter from the Attorney General, was the Shelby County State’s Attorney.  At the time of this complaint, that would have been Nichole Kronke.

The AG assigned a file number of 2022-CO-SC-00147403 to the complaint that was forwarded to the Shelby County State’s Attorney.

A request to the State’s Attorney for all correspondence provided by the AG in 2022 pertaining to that file number resulted in the following response from Shelby County State’s Attorney Ruth Woolery.

“Mr. Allen, this office could not locate any documents responsive to your request below.”

How special is that?  A formal correspondence dealing with a consumer complaint against the city of Shelbyville gets sent to the State’s Attorney by the Attorney General, and it can’t be located in the Shelby County State’s Attorney office.

That sounds similar to the findings by the appointed Moultrie County State’s Attorney and Assistant State’s Attorney in Shelby County when Nichole Kroncke resigned, and all her employees quit back in 2023. Records were missing, according to those attorneys as covered in this article.

The criminal investigation by the Illinois State Police resulted in a very strange line of questioning, as Kronke was not asked one question about the missing files, only missing emails.  Why would the ISP not question anyone about missing files when their own forensic lab confirmed records were deleted as late as January 26, 2023?  We must note that no one else in the State’s Attorney office was ever questioned regarding the confirmed missing files.

“The purpose of the analysis was to determine which files were deleted or “possibly deleted” from the four computers for the time period of March 17th, 2020 to January 31st, 2023. None of the documents were able to be opened and its content viewed.” (ISP Forensic Report)

The current State’s Attorney, Ruth Woolery, chose not to pursue the case based on the ISP’s communication, alleging, “Throughout the course of my investigation, there was no criminal nexus found reference the allegations made.”  Considering the prior State’s Attorney recused himself from that case, we find it questionable that Woolery would make any such decision. To avoid the appearance of impropriety, one would think she would have had the AG make such a determination, but we digress; this is Shelby County.

If, throughout the course of the investigation, there was no criminal nexus found, how on earth were several fact-based affidavits used to establish probable cause search warrant submissions to the court that were signed by judges and issued?

Most would agree that if a proper investigation is going to be done, it would include questioning each of the four people in the very office where their own ISP report confirmed there were deleted files. Why was Kronke not asked about missing files? Why was no one else in the office questioned regarding missing files?

While we would like to believe public officials are not stupid enough to commit a crime knowingly, the fact remains that records were deleted, and no one cares.  That should concern every taxpayer.