Ex-Judge Escapes From Prison in Florida

Paul Ottinger has vanished for the second time in three years. And again no one has a clue where he is.

Once a respected lawyer and judge in Hagerstown, Md., Ottinger, 74, escaped Nov. 3 from the minimum-security federal prison at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He walked away from the prison, which has no walls, two hours before he was to be paroled from federal custody.

The U.S. Marshals Service, which is in charge of the search, is baffled.

Ottinger was in prison for stealing thousands of dollars from clients, lying on financial statements to banks, and forging checks and insurance papers. He was to be transported back to Hagerstown over the weekend, and then turned over to state prison officials.

What makes his disappearance so perplexing is that he might have been paroled from state custody-- his last hurdle to freedom--in the next month or two. And he knew it.

Ottinger now faces an extra five years in federal prison for escape.

In a telephone interview with the Baltimore Evening Sun last Monday, he talked about what he might do as a free man.

He also railed against a system that, in his mind, had kept him in jail too long and had not kept him informed about his transfer back to Maryland.

“The real key to this is that nobody cares,” he said. “I’m just another statistic lost in the backwoods of Florida.”

Ottinger had one compelling reason for disappearing: He did not want to serve time in state prison, even a short time. He once said that sentencing him to state prison would be tantamount to signing his death warrant; he feared that prisoners, especially those he had sentenced to life terms, would try to kill him.

He was a Circuit Court judge in Washington County, Md., from 1971 to 1977.

Ottinger vanished, for the first time, in January, 1987. For years he had been stealing money from the estates of Hagerstown residents, lying to banks about his assets and borrowing money illegally, and settling lawsuits without his clients’ knowledge and then forging their names on the settlement checks.

He methodically planned his disappearance. He rented an old farmhouse in Gettysburg, Pa., where he initially hid out for two weeks. The 5-foot-10-inch judge dyed his white hair brown and lost nearly 40 pounds, dropping from 295 to 257.

And he assumed another name.

Three months after Ottinger fled Maryland, FBI agents arrested him in a small apartment in York, Pa., where he was studying for a real estate exam.

He later pleaded guilty in federal court to mail fraud and defrauding a bank, and was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in federal prison. Then he pleaded guilty in state court to forgery and was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in state prison. The sentences were to run concurrently.

In state and federal courts he was ordered to pay a total of nearly $320,000 restitution.

Ottinger told the Evening Sun last year that he had fled after his life fell apart, that he had been drinking and gambling heavily, and that he had fallen hopelessly in debt.

Ottinger was serving his federal sentence impeccably until two hours before his scheduled parole. Fellow prisoners last saw him at 6 a.m. Friday when they were called to breakfast. But at 8 a.m., when Ottinger was summoned to the administration building, he was nowhere to be found.

He would have been driven by van to the Washington County jail in Hagerstown, where officials would have turned him over to the Maryland Department of Correction.

Ottinger would have been admitted to the state’s reception-diagnostic-classification center in Baltimore. According to Greg Shipley, spokesman for the Department of Correction, Ottinger might have remained at the center until his parole hearing.

Paul J. Davis, chairman of the Maryland Parole Commission, said last week that a hearing for Ottinger would have been scheduled in December or January. Davis would not speculate on Ottinger’s chances of being paroled.