Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 16, 1990 TAG: 9004160190
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Hobbs, who has been a fugitive since he failed to show up for his bigamy trial in 1984, was being held late Sunday in the Houston City Jail.
A spokesman for the Wythe County Sheriff's Department said Hobbs had been living in Houston and had been using the alias "Hamilton Van Hobbs."
In Wythe County he faces a charge of being married to three women at one time. Authorities say Hobbs married Roanoke women in 1974 and 1977 and then was married again in Wythe County in 1983.
Hobbs, who has worked in advertising and as a radio disc jockey, has been caught several times since skipping out on his trial six years ago. But each time, he has managed to escape.
In 1984, his scheduled trial in Wythe County was postponed several times because of plea bargain negotiations. That fall he said he had changed his mind about pleading guilty. He asked for a trial by jury.
Hobbs, who had remained free on his own recognizance, did not show up for his jury trial that December. A judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
He and his young son were not seen again by authorities until 1987, when he was spotted in Tennessee.
Police there were alerted to be on the lookout for him, and an officer pulled him over as he was driving through a town between Chattanooga and Nashville. Hobbs persuaded the officer to let him follow the police car to jail in his private car.
Hobbs double-crossed the officer and disappeared again. Police traced him to a house in the area but he slipped away - apparently on foot - before they could search it. Officers found his son in the house. They said the boy apparently had not been enrolled in school since his dad took him out of Wythe County three years before.
Police spotted Hobbs again several days later in a Chattanooga shopping center. Hobbs ran to his car and dragged a policeman several feet when the officer tried to hang onto the car door.
Then Hobbs rammed a motorcycle policeman with his car, running the motorcycle into a concrete abutment. Hobbs got away again, and the officer was hospitalized with 20 stitches in his leg.
He was recaptured at a Roanoke Valley shopping mall and sent back to Tennessee to be tried on an attempted murder charge for hitting the policeman. There he cut his wrists and was transferred from the Chattanooga jail to a mental hospital, where he escaped by jumping out a restroom window.
Hobbs was not heard from again until 1988, when he was located in in Mississippi. Two detectives were on the way to pick him up when they saw him driving a stolen Cadillac. They chased him until he wrecked the car, breaking his nose and cutting his head.
He was shipped back to Tennessee to face the attempted-murder charge. He pleaded guilty last September to reduced charges of aggravated assault and escape and was given a suspended sentence.
A judge then freed him on a $1,000 bond until his scheduled appearance at a December hearing on whether he should be extradited to Virginia. Once again, he never showed.
He was on the loose until he was arrested in Houston after a tip from a viewer of the Fox network television program.
The Wythe Sheriff's spokesman said Hobbs remarried two weeks ago.
by CNB