[citation needed] The United States Department of Justice recruited Lilly as a part of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) to travel to war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina to assist with the investigation as well as give lectures on modern democratic policing.
[5] In 2009 Lilly was selected by the United States Department of Justice to be commissioned as a Special Deputy United States Marshal where he was assigned to assist with the safety and security of the January 2009 U.S. Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C.[citation needed] Later in 2009, Lilly retired from full-time law enforcement service, accepting a position as an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Howard Payne University.
While a professor at HPU Lilly served simultaneously as the universoty's first Chief of Police and Director of Public Safety.
In 1994, Lilly was elected the Chief of Police for the Dallas area suburb of Kaufman, the youngest officer ever In this position.
[citation needed] Lilly received a Medal of Valor from the city of Caldwell, Texas for his "...courage and decisiveness under fire..."[5] To honor his more than twenty-five years of public safety service to the State of Texas and the United States of America, Lilly was awarded the J. Edgar Hoover Gold Medal for Distinguished Public Service by the National Association of Chiefs of Police in September 2015.