In LaSalle County’s stately courthouse in central Illinois, a powerful law enforcement official fought a bitter legal feud with an unflappable young lawyer, charging her with felony perjury for statements she made in a court affidavit.
Some two years later and 250 miles south in St. Clair County, a similar legal grudge match washed through the glass and concrete courthouse when a local news researcher was charged with harassing a public official for alleged statements he made outside a local diner.
In both cases, the accusations were leveled by members of Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit — the elite squad of state lawyers who typically handle cases when local prosecutors have conflicts.
In their separate corners of the state, attorney Julie Ajster, 50, and newswire court researcher Bradley VanHoose, 59, were acquitted of the felony charges.
They then used their legal research skills to gather boxes of records on the special prosecutors who attacked them in court.
“I didn’t know what the Special Prosecution Unit was until I was charged,” VanHoose told Injustice Watch. “That’s when I made it my life’s mission to find out everything I could about this agency.”
Injustice Watch independently verified these records and Ajster’s and VanHoose’s accounts, which reveal previously unreported misconduct and conflicts of interest by the Special Prosecution Unit.
An Aug. 14 Injustice Watch investigation showed the unit has faced allegations of ethical breaches, including withholding evidence and favoring political insiders, while operating with little public oversight.
The two veteran special prosecutors who indicted Ajster and VanHoose — Brian Towne in LaSalle County and David Rands in St. Clair County — to this day shoulder some of the unit’s heaviest caseloads. Both also played leading roles in the unit’s problematic history.
VanHoose and Ajster, meanwhile, had never met nor even heard about one another until Injustice Watch shared their stories in recent interviews. They had independently reached out to Injustice Watch after it published its investigation last month.
“I’m glad I have another kindred spirit out there,” VanHoose said. “I know what the Special Prosecution Unit did to me was wrong. The charges against me were a politically based vendetta. Now here’s another person who recognized this is wrong, and stood up like I did.”
Towne and Rands did not respond to detailed written questions about Injustice Watch’s findings. Patrick Delfino, who heads the agency that houses the unit — the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor, or ILSAAP — also did not respond to written questions.
The small-town attorney
Perhaps this all started because Julie Ajster fell in love with a warehouse worker and stuck with him when he was badly injured working on the loading dock.
A lawyer from Peru, Illinois, she handled compensation cases for injured workers, crusaded against the area’s illegal puppy mills, and was named one of Illinois Valley’s “40 Under 40” young business leaders.
In 2014, Towne charged Ajster’s fiancé, Danny French, with felony harassment by telephone for allegedly threatening an attorney who was a contributor to Towne’s political funds.
Those political connections bothered Ajster. “I didn’t know anything about Towne, but the case kind of pissed me off,” she said.
Towne, it turns out, wore many hats.
While serving as LaSalle County state’s attorney in 2011, he created an unorthodox team of highway patrol officers who pulled over interstate motorists suspected of drug trafficking and confiscated whatever cash they were carrying. He called it the SAFE Team, short for State’s Attorney’s Felony Enforcement, and it grew as it confiscated more than a million dollars from drivers during the five or so years it operated.
Ajster was recruited to represent drivers whose cash was seized by Towne’s team. Starting as early as 2012, lawyers alleged in court that Towne’s overlapping law enforcement roles created an obvious, disqualifying conflict: He was acting as both police and prosecutor, which is not permitted under Illinois law.
To resolve the issue, Towne began asking the court to bring in the Illinois Special Prosecution Unit to try SAFE Team cases in his stead. LaSalle County judges granted his requests.
But that only deepened Towne’s conflicts, Ajster later alleged in court. Towne in 2012 had become chairman of the Board of Governors that oversaw ILSAAP, the state agency that housed the Special Prosecution Unit. He was effectively in charge of the special prosecutors who were called in to replace him in the name of independence.
Ajster also discovered new details about financial ties between Towne’s SAFE Team and ILSAAP.
Starting in 2013, she found, ILSAAP paid the SAFE Team up to $40,000 per year to hire additional police officers. She also documented SAFE Team expenditures on a softball team sponsorship and a school trip that boosted Towne’s visibility as an elected state’s attorney; generous per diems for Towne’s junkets to Las Vegas law enforcement seminars; and his SUV, cellphone, team workout equipment, and television monitors, according to receipts she filed in St. Clair County Circuit Court.
Meanwhile, as part of his prosecution of Ajster’s fiancé, French, Towne took the unusual step of eavesdropping on Ajster.
One of French’s own friends was a key witness against him. The friend alleged French had bragged during a card game about threatening the lawyer. French’s friend then moved to Florida — in court papers, Ajster said this was an attempt to avoid testifying.
In 2015, Towne brought two Peru police officers to Tampa to eavesdrop on calls the friend placed with French and Ajster. Towne received LaSalle County court authorization for the surveillance.
According to Towne’s police report on one of the recorded calls, Ajster told her fiancé’s friend she was not going to tamper with the case, and that it was his choice whether to retract his previous statements.
“Several minutes into the conversation Danny French could be heard telling [the friend] to throw the statement away in the trash,” the police report said.
Towne secured a LaSalle County court order giving him 90 days to listen in on more phone calls if needed. Ajster only learned she had been secretly recorded months later, when French and his lawyers received notice of the surveillance as part of discovery in his case.
Ajster rushed to the courthouse to find the orders authorizing the surveillance, but the clerk’s office said it had no such records.
“They didn’t even have a file on it, because the orders were secret,” she recalled. “I thought I was living in the twilight zone. Like, this is America! This isn’t how the court system should operate. It’s what happens when people have unchecked control.”
Towne separately used a recorded call to disqualify Ajster from being French’s attorney — because she had now become a potential witness in his case.
To top it all off, Towne charged Ajster with two felony counts of perjury, alleging a statement she made in a recorded call contradicted an affidavit she filed to reduce French’s bond.
The perjury charges against Ajster were ultimately dropped, but Towne filed a complaint with the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which later found Ajster misrepresented French’s income to the court and suspended her license for 30 days — a conclusion Ajster calls unfair.
As the 2016 St. Clair County state’s attorney election approached, Ajster — and the revelations in her court records — fueled a “Dump Towne” campaign. Challenger Karen Donnelly unseated Towne with 54% of the vote.
Weeks later, Towne was hired as a member of the Special Prosecution Unit.
Ajster said she was disappointed, but not at all surprised, to learn of Towne’s new law enforcement title.
“I no longer refer to it as the justice system. I refer to it as the legal system, because there’s little to no justice in it.”
Julie Ajster
But in early 2017, LaSalle County news outlets reported that Towne was himself the subject of a grand jury investigation, spurred by Ajster’s court filings about SAFE Team spending.
Then, in a separate case, the Illinois Supreme Court issued a biting decision: Towne had acted outside his legal authority in creating and leading the SAFE Team.
Donnelly indicted Towne for official misconduct and misapplication of funds pertaining to SAFE Team expenses, most of which were first exposed by Ajster.
But Towne successfully petitioned the court to have a special prosecutor brought in to replace Donnelly, since she had been his political opponent.
That courtroom tactic derailed the charges against Towne: When Donnelly appealed her disqualification, Towne’s lawyers filed a demand for speedy trial — which meant the LaSalle County court had only 160 days to try him.
The newly appointed special prosecutor — retired Warren County judge Gregory McClintock — told Injustice Watch he was forced to abandon the prosecution as the clock ran out.
Asked whether Towne should have been charged, McClintock said: “I would not proceed with a case where I didn’t think I had the evidence to prove somebody guilty.”
Ajster made one final attempt to hold Towne accountable. In 2018, she filed a federal malicious prosecution lawsuit against local police, and won a $75,000 settlement. State’s attorneys such as Towne are generally immune from civil liability, but the judge ordered Towne to pay Ajster a symbolic $1.
“I settled with Ajster for one American dollar,” Towne said in a statement to a local news outlet at the time. “In my mind, it was worth a buck to have Ajster out of my life.”
Ajster said she had the $1 bill framed and hung on the wall of her law office. But the episode rattled her faith in the law.
“I no longer refer to it as the justice system,” she said. “I refer to it as the legal system, because there’s little to no justice in it.”
The court researcher
Bradley VanHoose was a Belleville high school jock who cut grass for a lawn service before he discovered his calling in court research.
He learned his craft tracking the torrent of asbestos lawsuits sluicing through Madison County, a national clearinghouse for plaintiffs’ claims. Colleagues described him as a hard-charging, meticulous researcher.
“I’m a good digger, and I’ll be honest with you — it’s what I should have been doing my whole life,” he told Injustice Watch.
VanHoose is also well known around town as a lightning rod who maintains a frequent — sometimes vitriolic — presence on social media, posting about local and national politics.
In 2016, special prosecutor David Rands charged VanHoose with threatening a former mayor of Caseyville, Illinois, during a profanity-laced confrontation outside a local diner. VanHoose and the former mayor were related by marriage, and they had argued publicly in the past. VanHoose was exonerated by an appellate court following a four-year legal battle.
VanHoose applied his research skills to Rands, sketching out a rough spreadsheet of Rands’ cases in St. Clair County. Then he queried ILSAAP and the local state’s attorney for details on Rands’ assignments, digitized the data, and compiled a cache of documents.
Rands consistently downgraded charges of drunken driving and sexual abuse against the relatives of politically powerful people, Injustice Watch found in an analysis of VanHoose’s court records.
In the courthouses of St. Clair and other counties, Rands had garnered a nickname.
“They called him ‘Rollover Rands,’” VanHoose said. “If your mommy and daddy are somebody important down here, or you get the right attorney, get it into the appellate prosecutor’s hands. Rands would just basically roll over and let the case go. Like magic, the charges will be gone.”
Among those well-connected defendants were the son of a Fifth District Illinois appellate judge who had faced alcohol-related driving charges in St. Clair County, as well as in Missouri and Tennessee.
After Rands reduced their charges to minor infractions like improper lane use, many of those defendants had their cases expunged, eliminating any public record of what Rands had done.
In cases that stretch from 2001 to today, it is often impossible to tell why Rands was appointed as special prosecutor in the first place — in documents referring cases to his office, the rationale was often left blank.
In one quarterly report, Rands wrote he was assigned to handle ordinance violations involving a strip club because it was a “high profile matter for State’s Attorney; causing a lot of upset on County Board.” Special prosecutors are supposed to be called in only when the local prosecutor has a real or perceived conflict of interest.
A similarly baffling assignment came in 2015, when then-33-year-old Blaine Zdybel was arrested at Belleville’s Skyview Drive-In movie theater for allegedly exposing himself and propositioning two boys in the restroom. Rands was appointed special prosecutor but never brought Zdybel to trial; the case is still listed as open on the official docket of the St. Clair County Circuit Court Clerk.
While the case dragged on unresolved, Zdybel was charged five times with child sex crimes in Horry County, South Carolina, with one conviction, two dismissals, and two recent cases pending. He also pleaded guilty to indecent liberties with a minor in Pender County, North Carolina. He is a registered sex offender in both states.
Rands’ inactivity in the Belleville arrest meant Zdybel faced no justice or accountability in St. Clair County, no chance at court-mandated treatment, and no registration on Illinois’ sex offender registry.
One of Rands’ duties in St. Clair County was to review police-involved fatal shootings and make an independent determination of whether charges against the officer were appropriate.
ILSAAP plays a similar function in Cook County, where it has conducted 73 such reviews from 2016 to last year, never once overruling the Cook County state’s attorney’s decision not to charge, Injustice Watch found.
Among the cases Rands cleared in St. Clair County was the 2016 shooting of 35-year-old Jason Stringer, an unarmed Black man, by an off-duty police officer in a suburban Wal-Mart parking lot.
According to a police report, officer Christopher Heatherly, along with two other local officers and a police dog, approached Stringer as he and his girlfriend walked out of the Wal-Mart. As Stringer ran to his car, Heatherly pinned Stringer’s girlfriend to the pavement then shot into Stringer’s car, later saying he thought Stringer was trying to ram into them.
Rands cleared Heatherly in a two-page letter to St. Clair County’s chief judge: “It is this office’s opinion that no criminal charges should be filed against the officer in this matter.”
But Rands’ letter omitted key information about Heatherly’s credibility found in other public records, Injustice Watch found.
Heatherly “knew Mr. Stringer was considered to be armed and dangerous,” Rands wrote. But Stringer was not armed, and no weapon was retrieved at the scene, according to a 157-page Illinois State Police report. In a local news interview, Stringer’s girlfriend later disputed the police’s account and denied that Stringer was trying to ram them with his car.
Before the Stringer shooting, Heatherly had worked at seven southern Illinois police departments in 15 years. He lost one job at the East St. Louis Police Department after a shooting the police chief there said was reckless and endangered the life of another officer.
After Rands cleared him, Heatherly would go on to be convicted of misuse of official information by a public official for disclosing personal information from police files, court records show.
Heatherly, now retired, told Injustice Watch the Stringer shooting was justified; he is appealing his 2024 conviction. He said of his career, “I got on some bad departments. When you are a good police officer who wants to work hard, sometimes when you come to a department that is not used to working hard, it ruffles feathers.”
Today, VanHoose and Ajster still reckon with the fallout from the special prosecutors’ failed attempts to put them in prison. Both say they tapped their savings to clear their names in court, and lost friends and even family amid the prosecutors’ attacks.
VanHoose says his 74-year-old father died in 2017 believing VanHoose had committed a felony.
“I didn’t even get to talk to my dad at the end of his life,” VanHoose said. “That’s what hardened my heart, and got me in the courthouse digging.”
Rands and Towne remain mainstays of the Special Prosecution Unit.
Between them they handled 177 cases in 20 counties during 2024, the most recent year for which complete records were available.
