Elusive Woman Caught After Years Of Sneaking On To Planes

A 70-year-old woman who spent years evading airport security was sentenced to three years in prison Thursday for trespassing at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2019.

Marilyn Hartman, aka the “Serial Stowaway,” has a long history of sneaking past airport security and boarding flights without a boarding pass, plead guilty to felony counts of criminal trespassing and escaping from electronic monitoring.

Cook County Judge Peggy Chiampas sentenced Hartman to 18 months for the criminal trespass charge and two years for the electronic monitor escape charge, which she will have to serve consecutively. Hartman was credited for the time she was held in custody, nearly two years and five months.

Hartman is known to have been eluding airport security since 2014. The first trespassing on record occurred in February 2014 at San Francisco’s International Airport.

Hartman has been stopped by police a dozen times in four different states. In addition to facing a number of felony and misdemeanor charges over the years, she was ordered by judges in two separate states to undergo psychiatric evaluations and was banned from multiple airports, including St. Paul International Airport in Minneapolis and O’Hare.

In 2016, Chicago Judge William B. Raines ordered Hartman to stay away from all airports. “If you violate that, I’m going to lock you up,” Raines warned her. But Hartman continued to trespass at Chicago’s Midway and O’Hare airports until March 2021 when she was arrested and held without bond.

“I’ve struggled with depression and medication management my whole life,” Hartman said Thursday.

In her written statement, she said she was “happy to move on with my life.” Judge Chiampas acknowledged and sympathized with Hartman’s mental health struggles, but told the defendant she hopes to never see her in her courtroom again.