Possibly clinically depressed, possibly otherwise mentally ill, but seemingly always on the move with the cunning and quickness of a fox, Marilyn Hartman has been arrested yet again, this time at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, as KRON 4 reports. Hartman last turned up in Jacksonville, Florida back in February, where she conned her way into a resort and managed to get at least one free night's stay before authorities caught on. This time, it's unclear how long she's been in Chicago or where she was headed next, but she was arrested for misdemeanor trespassing on April 24 after she was found "loitering in a restricted area near the ticketing counter" without a valid ticket. Was she trying to slyly steal a boarding pass?
Hartman, while seemingly kind of a sad case, is remarkably consistent and determined in her stowaway travel spree. As SFist noted last summer, Hartman had a blog at one point where she talked about her stowaway habit, and she seems to have bounced, virtually homeless, between Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, and Maui over the last few years. She got apparently stuck in the Bay Area last year, attempting to escape multiple times via SFO and claiming she had cancer and wanted to get to Hawaii. She ultimately succeeded in boarding a plane at San Jose International airport, and got nabbed after arriving in LA.
She then made it to Phoenix where she was arrested again just weeks later, and where she tearfully admitted to having a seemingly made-up mental illness that she called "whistleblower trauma syndrome."
What is clear, however, is that Hartman is both intelligent and highly skilled at this stowaway thing! And being a seemingly benign, kindly, white-haired lady, she's managed to blend in well enough to get herself on planes all over the country it was pretty clear that she had no income stream or means of purchasing tickets, but somewhere between Phoenix and Jacksonville she was in Minneapolis this year too, and who knows where else.
Expect her to pop up in a town near you any day now.
