A Chicago-area school cafeteria director will spend nearly a decade in jail for stealing chicken wings.

It happened during the COVID-19 pandemic and was only discovered when a routine audit found that the school was $300,000 over budget halfway through the following year.

She’d stolen $1.5 million worth of chicken wings, but made a critical mistake that led to her capture.

• Vera Liddell was food service director at Harvey School District 152 near Chicago.
• Per CBS, she pled guilty to operating a criminal enterprise on Aug. 9.
• It’s not clear what she did with the chicken wings.

Related: Arby’s Employees Arrested for Stealing the Meats

Like many school districts, Harvey 152 continued to serve meals to kids during the COVID-19 pandemic even though schools were shut down. It was Liddell’s job to order food from Gordon Food Services, and starting in July 2020, she began to buy chicken wings.

ABC News shares that she’d handle billing, but keep the meat. She’d even pick cases of wings (11,000 of them between Aug. and Nov. 2021) up in a district cargo van.

In 2023, an auditor discovered the food service department was $300,000 over budget, so the business manager began to look through receipts. The chicken wing purchases really stood out because that’s a food they won’t serve to kids because of the bones.

Liddell was a 10-year employee with the district. She’s listed as being 66 or 68 years old in separate news articles.

Billy Dukes is a Senior Editor and Executive Producer of Video Content at Taste of Country. He specializes in country music interviews, trend analysis and the Secret History of Country Music. Additionally, Billy covers Yellowstone, 1923 and related television shows through the Dutton Rules podcast. To date, he’s written more than 13,000 articles for Taste of Country and produced over 3,000 videos for the Taste of Country YouTube channel.