Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 17, 1990 TAG: 9004170369
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: By MIKE HUDSON and MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Roanoke secretary's husband, a reputed bigamist, walked off seven years ago when she was eight months pregnant with their fourth child.
Sunday night, Frank Van Dyke Hobbs, 53, was arrested in Texas on a fugitive warrant from Wythe County, about two hours after his case was featured on the television program "America's Most Wanted."
"This is great. I love it," Susan Hobbs, 34, said after her husband's arrest. She appeared on the taped Fox network show.
She and her four children have been forced to take food stamps and squeeze into a two-bedroom house with her parents since Hobbs left her, she said.
Hobbs is charged in Wythe County with being married to three women at once. Wythe Sheriff G. Wayne Pike believes the former Roanoke and Wytheville radio disc jockey has had at least eight wives - in Virginia, Tennessee and Texas.
Lena Garcia was watching "America's Most Wanted" at her home in Houston Sunday when she recognized Hobbs as the man who had married her sister just two weeks before. "That picture was still on the screen by the time we dialed," Garcia said.
She called the television show's 800 number, then waited for Hobbs and his new wife, Maria Salazar, to return from a trip to the beach at Galveston, Texas.
As soon as the couple returned to her house, Garcia picked up the phone and dialed 911. Houston police officers arrived within two minutes and took Hobbs away.
Garcia said she did not trust Hobbs. He had been living at a shelter for the homeless where her sister, a nurse, worked. Within a few weeks, Garcia said, he was sleeping on the sofa at Garcia's home, where Salazar also lived.
"Suddenly there was this total stranger who just moved in and helped himself," Garcia said.
Then, earlier this month, they were married by a justice of the peace, Garcia said.
Hobbs, a fugitive since he failed to show up for a Wythe County trial in 1984, had been using the alias "Hamilton Van Hobbs." He was being held Monday night in a Houston jail. He declined a request for a telephone interview.
Authorities say Hobbs married Roanoke women in 1974 and 1977 and then was married again in Wythe County in 1983.
He has been caught several times since skipping out on his trial in December 1984, six years ago. Each time, he managed to escape.
After Hobbs did not show up for the trial, he and his young son were not seen again by authorities until 1987. That summer, a police officer in the central Tennessee city of McMinnville got a tip that Hobbs was wanted in Virginia.
Detective John Morgan said he tried to pick up Hobbs, but Hobbs persuaded the police officer to let him first drop off his son at his home. When Morgan agreed, Hobbs "went in the front door and out the back door," leaving his son and escaping on foot, Morgan said.
Hobbs was seen again several days later at a Chattanooga, Tenn., shopping center. When an officer tried to arrest him, Hobbs sprinted for his car, dragging the officer 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 wall. Hobbs got away again, and the officer was hospitalized with 20 stitches in his leg.
Hobbs 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. He cut his wrists and was moved from the Chattanooga jail to a mental hospital. There he escaped again through a restroom window.
Hobbs disappeared until March 1988, when he turned up in Houston. Police there arrested him after firing several shots into a truck he was driving. Later, he was allowed to post bail, and fled.
Shortly after that, police in Jackson, Miss., were notified that he might be in their area. 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.
Hobbs was shipped back to Tennessee to face the charge of attempted murder. 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 hearing last December on whether he should be extradited to Virginia. Once again, he never showed.
Pike, the Wythe County sheriff, said Monday he will promptly try to extradite Hobbs to Wythe County. Until then, Pike hopes Texas officials hold onto him.
"The only problem is I hope the court out there does not vacillate and let him post bond," the sheriff said.
Susan Hobbs and others that have known Hobbs described him as a smooth-voiced man with a flair for the romantic. At radio stations in Tennessee and Virginia, he played love songs that appealed to female listeners.
"He would read poetry on the air and dedicate it to women," she said. "It was disgusting."
Susan Hobbs was about 20 and working in classified advertising at the Roanoke Times & World-News when she answered an ad that Van Hobbs, as she still calls him, had run to sell a horse. She said he was then doing radio commercials in Roanoke.
She remembered his smooth voice. "It was just something about him," she said. "With his way and his voice, . . . he acted to be so intelligent. He's very convincing."
Hobbs worked in advertising and at radio stations WDBJ and WLRG in Roanoke and WYVE in Wytheville, as well as a Lynchburg station, Susan Hobbs said.
They married in Roanoke, she said, but Frank Hobbs traveled often and she lived with her parents most of their five years together.
He disappeared around Thanksgiving 1982. Later, she heard he had married a teen-age girl in Wythe County and had put $30,000 down on a house for her. "And I couldn't even buy diapers," Susan Hobbs said. She went on welfare.
Susan Hobbs, now a secretary at AAA Realty in Roanoke, said her husband called her a few times and complained of hard times. Their children are now 12, 11, 9 and 7.
"He's never even seen the youngest," she said.
Susan Hobbs is not sure how many children Frank Hobbs has. "I hear he has as many as 14 . . .. It's hard to tell." He owes her about $40,000 in child support, she said.
Her children have endured gossip about their father's exploits over the years, she said.
Lena Garcia, the sister-in-law who turned Hobbs in Sunday night, said the experience has been horrible for her family.
She said her sister, Salazar, took the news hard at first and felt sorry for Hobbs. But she had recovered enough Monday to go to work at her job at the shelter for the homeless. A co-worker at the shelter said Salazar fled Monday afternoon when reporters showed up to try to interview her.
"Give her two or three weeks, and that is going to turn to hate," Garcia said. "He was just taking her to the cleaners."
Staff writer Paul Dellinger contributed to this story.
by CNB