Marilyn Hartman, called the Serial Stowaway for repeatedly boarding planes without a ticket, has been arrested again. Just after 12:00 a.m. Sunday, police received a call about a woman refusing to leave a state-owned piece of land designated for private airplanes at O’Hare International Airport.
When cops arrived on the scene, Hartman was gone but she was found around 1:30 a.m. in Terminal 3. The Serial Stowaway was charged with criminal trespassing which is a misdemeanor and violating her bond.
A judge had ordered the 66 year-old woman to stay away from O’Hare and Midway after she snuck past security and boarded a plane headed to London a few weeks ago.
Released on bond just last week
Thursday, Hartman was ordered to get a mental health evaluation and a judge reduced her bond since she had not been arrested at an airport in over two years. That all changed Sunday. She is now being held without bail at the Cook County Jail and is on the court docket for Wednesday.
Marilyn Hartman has a long history of trying to stow away. In 2016, she was placed on two years of mental health probation and sentenced to six years of house arrest in Chicago for attempting to board planes without a ticket.
In 2014, she successfully boarded a flight from San Jose to Los Angeles by slipping by an agent at Mineta San Jose International Airport. Somehow she got through electronic security screening, went unnoticed by a gate agent and was not discovered until the plane landed at LAX.
After that incident, she was given two years of probation which she violated by reappearing at the Los Angeles airport a few days later. Hartman received a jail sentence but overcrowding at the facility led to her early release.
Prior to that, in February 2014, she again duped airport personnel and boarded a plane bound for Hawaii. The Serial Stowaway was only discovered when the passenger that held a ticket for the seat showed up. She was removed from the plane prior to take-off.
She has also been taken into police custody for loitering in airport terminals without a boarding pass. In August 2014, she was arrested in Phoenix. She told news reporters she had been diagnosed with depression and believed authorities were letting her board the planes so they could subsequently arrest her.
Hartman entered mental health treatment in May 2014 but after a few months, stopped going. She says that homelessness and mental illness has led to her behavior and that she feels safer in airports than she does on the street.