By Tommy Witherspoon

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Margaret Mills, whom many credit with doing more than anyone in the past two decades to help improve downtown Waco, will go to prison for stealing money from the agency with which she was so readily identified.

Announcement of the plea deal came as 54th State District Judge Matt Johnson spoke sharply with attorneys from both sides about their handling of the charges against Mills.

After half a day of jury selection and a day and a half of testimony in Mills’ felony theft trial, she agreed Wednesday to serve a nine-year prison term and to repay $307,968.99 in restitution to Downtown Waco Inc., the development agency she headed for 18 years.

The sentencing agreement was reached after Johnson announced about noon that he would reconsider a punishment agreement that included nine years in prison and full restitution.

The judge set formal sentencing for 10 a.m. Monday. At that time, Mills, who made $70,000 in restitution when the accusations surfaced, is expected to pay an additional $100,000 in restitution before going to prison.

Mills likely would have to serve slightly more than two years in prison before becoming eligible for parole, a prison spokesman said Wednesday.

Johnson, seething at the parties in the case, snapped off each word sharply as he spoke. He told special prosecutors that their efforts for months to have a plea agreement and then their abandonment of half the accusations to reduce the charges after initially indicting Mills on first-degree felony theft charges were “clearly taken to circumvent the court’s insistence on a minimum of 15 years” in prison for Mills.

Your turn

Comment on this story

Slide show

Slide show from the proceedings

» Complete coverage from the scandal to the trial

Video

The judge’s angry statement, which caused the 67-year-old Mills to sob, was in partial response to comments before the jury was selected, made by Assistant State Attorney General David S. Glickler, the lead prosecutor. After Johnson said he would reject any agreement that gave Mills less than 15 years in prison, Glickler insisted that it be entered into the court record that an earlier attempted agreement would have given Mills a 9-year sentence and had her pay $147,000 restitution on top of the $70,000 she had already paid back to Downtown Waco Inc.

Mills, her attorneys, Rick Bostwick and Pat Beard, and her husband, Coke Mills, considered the offer over the lunch hour Wednesday and then worked out an agreed restitution amount with Glickler and his team from the attorney general’s office. They presented the restitution amount to the judge, who agreed to accept it while the jury was waiting in a room down the hall.

Jurors, who had puzzled looks on their faces as the judge explained the settlement agreement, declined comment as they filed from the courthouse.

Before Glickler decided to abandon the first 63 accusations of the 116-paragraph indictment, Mills faced up to life in prison. The amended indictment left her facing a maximum of 10 years in prison, but she was prepared to ask the jury for probation.

“We strived to do the best we could to try to address multiple issues,” Glickler said after trial. “There was somewhat of a rift in the community. Some people wanted to see her go to prison, some people wanted her to pay the money back, and we addressed both of those.”

The first plea bargain attempt in June or July that Johnson rejected, according to the judge’s statement, would have called for Mills to go to prison for 120 days and then be “shocked” back, placed on probation for five years and ordered to make $216,000 in restitution.

A subsequent offer increased her prison time to 180 days before placing her on shock probation for seven years. The restitution offer stayed the same. Johnson rejected this offer also because he would not consider probation and because it limited the restitution instead of the full amount, which Glickler last year had said was alleged to be about $500,000.

The judge told the parties at least three times that 15 years in prison was the minimum offer he would accept. The last time, the attorney general abandoned the first half of the indictment, reducing the punishment range, which the judge had no control over.

Former Downtown Waco Inc. board officer Mark Boyd, who has been a downtown banker for 37 years, continued his testimony Wednesday morning, explaining how the other members of the board came to learn of financial irregularities within the agency. He said he was shown at least two checks that appeared to be signed by him but that clearly were not his signature. Both checks were deposited into Mills’ personal bank account, evidence showed.

The judge asked Glickler whether the attorney general’s office was going to pursue possible forgery charges against Mills, since the evidence appeared to support them. Glickler said no.

Glickler said after trial that it makes no sense to charge Mills with crimes at the lower end of the punishment scale once she has agreed to go to prison.

Mills politely declined comment as she left the courthouse. Bostwick said the past two years of intense public scrutiny had taken its toll on Mills and her family.

“This has been as public as an event can be, certainly, in this county,” Bostwick said. “She has been embarrassed for that period of time. I don’t think the analogy is far off that she effectively has been in public stocks for that period of time, and that is wearisome. She has gone through a lot of pain, a lot of suffering and she wanted an end to it.”

He said Mills will spend the next few days with her family before she is sentenced Monday and reports to prison. He said she likely would have testified if the trial had continued.

“She looked forward to it to explain what happened. Not excuse it, explain it,” Bostwick said. “She is sorry. She has admitted that she violated the trust of her board and the public generally. She has taken responsibility and she can’t do any more than what she has done.”

When asked why she took the money, Bostwick said, “To live,” acknowledging that she spent part of the money she stole to pay a student debt for her 37-year-old son, Richard Coke Mills III.

Boyd, who acknowledged good things that Mills did for the city, told the jury early Wednesday that the agency’s accounting firm first alerted him to suspicious check activity in early 2005, including apparent forged signatures, checks with only one signature when two were required, checks written to Mills and checks written on what board members believed was a dormant account.

He said he met privately with Mills, who had “very ready, confident and competent” answers for each of his queries. He said he walked away satisfied and never mentioned the suspicious activity to anyone else.

In February 2006, “like déjà vu,” Glickler said, Boyd said the accounting firm brought him another batch of suspicious checks and suggested he might want to get to the bottom of them.

Not long after that, it was discovered that Mills also was misusing agency credit and debit cards, depositing checks from members’ dues into her personal accounts and writing checks to herself from Downtown Waco Inc.

The board’s executive committee, still in “stunned disbelief,” Boyd said, eventually asked Mills to leave, allowing her termination, at least at first, to look like a retirement. Because of the circumstances of her departure, the board canceled a big party to celebrate her accomplishments, he said.

Boyd and Scott Felton, another longtime Waco banker and a former Downtown Waco Inc. board officer, declined comment after trial.

twitherspoon@wacotrib.com

757-5737