Mission Viejo Tax Evader Gets Jail, Home Detention

A Mission Viejo man, acquitted in 1992 of hiring hit men in an attempt to kill his secretary’s fiance, has been sentenced in a separate case to five months in jail and five months of home detention for filing a false income tax return.

Julius F. Schill, 63, also must pay $88,920 in back taxes and penalties as part of his sentence, which was handed down late Monday by U.S. District Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. in Los Angeles.

Schill had pleaded guilty last May to failing to report $230,000 in income on his 1990 tax return. He admitted using money from his former business, Auto Photo Systems Inc. in Tustin, to fix up his home while reporting only $93,139 as income that year.

Schill, who will serve his home detention as part of a one-year supervised release term, also must file returns and pay taxes for every year since 1992, when his lawyer advised him to stop filing returns while he was under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service.

Schill remains free on bail until Jan. 5, when he reports for prison.

In the earlier murder-for-hire case, Schill was accused of trying to get rid of his secretary’s fiance so he could pursue her romantically. The fiance was beaten with a baseball bat and shot in the head, but survived.

Three men were convicted, but Schill was acquitted. His attorney suggested that the secretary had a bigger motive to kill her fiance: She was the beneficiary of his $180,000 life insurance policy.