Legal woes beset 66-year-old serial stowaway
CHICAGO» What to do with Marilyn Hartman?
That’s the question at a hearing Thursday for a 66-year-old woman dubbed the “serial stowaway” for a history of trying to sneak onto commercial jets without a ticket. She’s behind bars, not because she faces charges that she slipped onto a jet from Chicago to London, but because of what the judge who set her free told her not to do: She returned to the airport.
Now, two months after a judge ordered Hartman held without bail — a move typically reserved for dangerous offenders such as murder suspects — her attorney is expected to seek her release from jail.
Parle Roe-Taylor won’t say whether mental health professionals have concluded Hartman is legally sane as they have before. Nor will she say if she’s found a mental health facility or another place to stay for Hartman.
But she says Hartman doesn’t belong in jail.
“She is not violent. She’s not demonstrated to be a harm to herself. There is no reason to take her out of society,” said Roe-Taylor, a Cook County public defender.
But that might happen. After years of arrests followed by brief stays in jails and mental health facilities, Hartman is in big legal trouble. Because she allegedly remained in the airport intending to commit theft — a flight she didn’t pay for — and boarded the jet for the same reason, she faces felony burglary charges that carry a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. She’s also charged with felony criminal trespassing.
The hearing is the latest chapter in a story that’s played out the past decade in Chicago, Hawaii, San Francisco, Florida and elsewhere. It will again display the case of a woman who frustrates the legal system — voiced by a judge in 2016 when Hartman was arrested at O’Hare International Airport after being placed on mental health probation and released to a nursing home.
“We can’t keep doing this over and over and over again,” Cook County Circuit Judge William Raines said.
Hartman has been nabbed in and near airports dozens of times and made it onto planes maybe half-dozen times. Recently, she made it into the air on a flight from Chicago to London.
Why she does it is unclear. Although she refused to be interviewed for this story, she has tried to explain. “I feel the need to get on a plane to go away,” she told Joe Eskenazi for a 2015 San Francisco Magazine story.
Her life explains little. Hartman’s legal run-ins didn’t begin until she was into middle age. A letter in a court file in Chicago says Hartman for decades was stable — high school in Chicago, then courses at the Chicago College of Commerce followed by decades as a legal secretary and work in legal research and tele- marketing before she retired in 2003. She never married and has no children. It’s unclear why in the 1980s she changed her last name from Stall to Hartman. She has at least two brothers in the Chicago area, but calls to them weren’t returned.
She was found mentally fit, although troubled, by Cook County mental health professionals in 2015. The psychiatric summary include a diagnosis of “Major Depressive Disorder in full remission, and Unspecified Personality disorder with Anti-Social Traits” along with “Adjustment Disorder,” according to a probation department letter that also noted she was taking an anti-depressant.
Those who’ve talked to her say she can be pleasant. Eskenazi said she sounds almost reasonable when she recites names of people she says are out to get her, from jailhouse snitches to former President Barack Obama.
Her personality can win people over, including officers who over the years have given her a train ticket and rides to a hotel and bus station.