LIFE SENTENCE HANDED DOWN FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT
Monday, October 19, 2009 — A Des Plaines man who sexually assaulted a woman just three days after he was released from prison was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Sheriff Tom Dart announced.
Scott Hildreth, 51, was convicted after an investigation by the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department. He was found guilty of two counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and one count of aggravated kidnapping after a four-day trial last month in Skokie.
Hildreth had been released from the Illinois Department of Corrections on April 13, 2007 and on April 16, 2007, hid behind a tree in the Iroquois Woods Forest Preserve, waiting for another victim.
Wearing a nylon mask, Hildreth used a screwdriver to threaten a 41-year-old woman who was jogging in the woods. He dragged her off the trail, then bound and sexually assaulted her.
A break in the case came when a Des Plaines officer remembered similar circumstances in a rape more than 20 years before in Mount Prospect. Hildreth was convicted in that sexual assault. Investigators learned Hildreth had been in and out of state prisons multiple times since his earlier conviction, but had been recently paroled and was living in a house near the jogging trail.
Sheriff Dart praised both Cook County Sheriff’s Police investigators, as well as the Des Plaines Police Department, for their work on the case.
