Law&Crime Sidebar - Child Rapist Who Escaped Prison with Jet Ski Captured Alongside Family at Hotel

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

A convicted child rapist was captured by U.S. Marshals in West Virginia one year after he escaped from an Arkansas prison with the help of his family. Authorities said 39-year-old Samuel Hartman, who was serving life in prison, escaped during work detail and fled in a pickup truck occupied by his wife and mother, who shot at pursuing officers, before jumping on jet skis to complete their getaway. The Law&Crime Network’s Jesse Weber breaks down how authorities tracked down Hartman and his family with U.S. Marshals Service senior inspector Robert Dickerson.LAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergWriting & Video Editing - Michael DeiningerGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa Bein & Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieThey Walk Among AmericaDevil In The DormThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. It would have been 2.5 miles from where they abandoned the vehicle that was located in Arkansas, that they are believed to have traveled 2.5 miles on the river to where we located the jet ski. A convicted child rapist who escaped prison on a jet ski is finally captured. And we sit down with U.S. Marshal Robert Dickerson, who helped catch the fugitive. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime.

I'm Jesse Weber. All right, everybody, you're going to need to buckle up. You're going to need to buckle up because this story, it feels straight out of a movie, maybe even a video game, except this time you're not really rooting for the escapee. This is a real criminal on the run. But we need to start back in 2013. And that is when Samuel Paul Hartman,

who was 29 years old at the time, he was sentenced to life in prison for raping his 14-year-old stepdaughter. And he was serving his time at East Arkansas Regional Unit Prison. And by way of geography, it's about 96 miles east of Little Rock. Well, now fast forward to August 12, 2022, just a little over a year ago. And Hartman is out on a work detail in a field near the detention facility. And while he's out there, his wife, Misty Hartman, and mother Linda Annette White, they allegedly drive a pickup truck to the field, gunshots are fired, potentially at or near the corrections officers, and during all this, Hartman is able to get inside the pickup truck and drive away.

Then Hartman, his mother and wife, allegedly drive the truck to the nearby Mississippi River where they planted two jet skis for them to hop on and escape with. Yes, jet skis. Now, the jet skis were later found abandoned on the other side of the river. In fact, a witness allegedly saw a man and two women riding jet skis. So now Hartman was on the run for like a little over a year. But on this Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Marshals were able to locate and capture him at a quality inn in Louisburg, West Virginia. They also apprehended his wife, his mother, as well as his mother's boyfriend, Rodney Trent.

Trent is facing felony charges of harboring a sex offender and assisting the trio while on the run. So clearly a crazy story from a jet ski escape. to being on the run for over a year, but in the end, the good guys got him, right? And speaking of the good guys to help shed some light on this wild case, I want to bring in one of the good guys, Robert Dickerson, senior inspector from the U.S. Marshal Service, who helped capture Hartman and his cohorts. Welcome to Sidebar, Robert.

Thank you so much for taking the time. We really do appreciate it. Yes, sir. Thanks for having us. I am made of questions, but I want to start off. How did you get involved in the case, if you can briefly tell us? After the escape, our office over in Arkansas asked for some help. We have a cold and complex case group based out of our headquarters,

and Arkansas asks that we get involved and try to help them a little bit, work the case jointly with him. Hearing how they escape, hearing how he escaped. So there's gunfire that's opened on the correction officers, jump in a car, they take jet skis. Have you ever seen anything like that before? Yeah, so it was a little Miami-Vice-ish, if you were, We know at the initial point of the escape that there was gunfire involved.

I don't know that they shot directly at the correctional officers. Shots were fired. From there, they went down to the Mississippi River, which was several miles away, where they had two jets pre-staged, and they got on those jets skis and utilized them to cross the Mississippi River. It's unbelievable. I said it before. It feels like a video game. It feels like a movie.

How were you able to track them down? Well, it was a culmination of different methods that we use. I mean, we have tradecraft, just like criminals have tradecraft to avoid being captured, some of which I can go into, some of which I can't. But a lot of what we did was just old-fashioned police work, talking to people, utilizing the public tips, interviewing people associated with the case, and watching doing surveillance. What was the main difficulty in tracking them because he was on the run for a while?

Sure. Yeah, I think the Hartman, well, Mr. Hartman, as well as his mother, Linda, and Misty, we knew beforehand that they had a large sum of cash with them. We knew that they had a weapons and transportation. So when a person has the access to that amount of owning, obviously it helps them to stay on the run longer. Plus, the area that they were in in West Virginia is a very rural area. It's not very heavily populated with law enforcement officers in, you know, up in the mountains, up in the actual Appalachia, what you would think of as the backwoods of West Virginia. So there's not a whole lot of people or cops that would have run into them. And a lot of times when we were working these cases, it's not surveillance is a lot easier, whether it be in New York City or metropolitan areas where there's surveillance cameras and ring door bill cam. cameras everywhere. You don't have that in the backwoods of West Virginia, which made it difficult. Also, everybody in that area knows everybody else. So if there's somebody new, say, if one of us goes in there, somebody's going to be alerted that there's, there's an outsider within this area. Like you said, all the fashion police work. So you track them down to this hotel. You go in,

what was that like? I mean, apprehending them, their reaction, walk us through that if you can. So we knew that this group had made statements that they, Sam wasn't going to go back to jail and they might shoot it out or, you know, make law enforcement use force against them. So we, we always do or try to. We had watched the surveillance for a long time the night before, as well as all that morning. We'd watched them come and go from the hotel room and knew that they were all four in there. They actually called, called the hotel several times and we believe that they might have been. fishing, thinking, you know, that something was going on because it was, if you would have been there, it's kind of eerie, quiet. All the kids are out of the pool now. There's nobody walking around.

There's no cleaning people or maintenance people. So we think that they might have got a little hinked up, but it worked out just fine. We were able to surround the hotel and cover all the exits. Of course, the type of hotel room that they were in, there was only one way in and one way out unless you were to go through the ceiling or the wall in which they didn't. So we were able to call them out of that hotel room and they entered without instant. Well, so there's no meaning they didn't they didn't resist at all. They basically complied. I mean, did they seem like shocked? Would they say, no, that's not us? Or did they know like, hey, the jig is up? No, they didn't have a chance. I believe that they're smart enough

people to know that we knew who they were when we were calling them out of the room, which we did not make entry into the room. We simply got on a PA system surrounded. the room and started calling them out saying, you know, Sam Hartman, U.S. Marshals come out. It took a little while for him to come out, but they eventually did with their hands up and got down the ground. I was hoping you could explain something. There's this picture that's circulating of Hartman with blood all over his face.

He's with handcuffs on after he was apprehended. What's that about? There was glass. So we did. Some units actually deployed some gas into that room. some like tear OC gas in case they wouldn't come out you know that that kind of burns your eyes and makes you it's just a compliance tool that is this used by law enforcement but there was there was a lot of glass in that area I myself was not up there actually putting handcuffs on

them at the time so I did see that picture I'm not sure what calls the cut on his face it could have been glass it could have been concrete I can't answer that and if it was even his mud, you know, that's a separate issue. Any idea what they have been up to since this escape for the past year? Some people that we've talked to in the area of West Virginia that they were in said that they had been up there for a while, just kind of live in life. Sam actually had a vehicle that he utilized pretty frequently. They would ride ATVs.

Sam would walk a lot. They would ride foilers. They would, I mean, they were just kind of hanging out as far. as we know, the other guy who we believe to be Linda White's boyfriend, he was kind of there, I don't know if we call it Go Boy. We don't believe that they were going to town or out in the open as much, but Rodney Trent would go run most of the arians, at least for the time that we were watching them. We were able to watch him do most of the running around, if you will. Any idea if they were committing crimes during this or involved in any crimes during

this time? We're able to get some fake IDs out of the room that we arrested them in. I say fake IDs. They're either fake IDs or stolen identities. We haven't been able to that yet. That's still ongoing. We also seized two firearms, which Sam is a felon. So possibility of prosecution for felon in possession of the firearm is there as well as some other possibilities for prosecution for those helping us a firearm as far as any reports of other crimes we haven't heard of any well that brings me to the next part robert what happens to each of them now what is the next step in this process what are they facing so they'll all three rodney trent i believe is already bonded out he only faces charges in west virginia as of now there is a possibility of

that he'll be charged in Arkansas, depending on some stuff that we're working on now. But all three, Sam, Linda, and Misty will all be extradited back to the state of Arkansas, where they will undergo judicial proceedings, Sam, for escape, and Linda and Misty for aiding in that escape. Of course, Sam's serving life anyway, so on the escape charge, it isn't going to affect his sentence much. As for where he will go, I'm not sure that's going to be up to the Arkansas Department of Corrections. sure they'll put him in some type of higher security prison, possibly.

Misty and Linda, they'll go through the court proceedings and they will get a bond. So I'm sure they'll be out of jail on bond pretty soon, to be honest with you. Robert Dickerson, my goodness, hero. Thank you to you and the team for doing this. And just an incredible story. Really appreciate the work that you do for us. and this is, you know, great work, great work, putting a criminal back behind bars and apprehending the people who helped escape or allegedly help the escape.

But Robert Dickerson, really thank you so much and appreciate you coming on here on Sidebar. Yeah, I appreciate y'all having us. And, I mean, I just want to, you know, let it be known that our work wouldn't be able to happen. The things that we do wouldn't be able to happen without a plethora of other people. Our agency has the luxury of working with that with these state and local agencies. and having these violent crime task forces where we can reach out, say, from Arkansas or Mississippi to West Virginia and make stuff happen very quickly. And we're just thankful that we're able to work across state lines with our state and local

partners as well as our other offices in other areas. And everybody has a good working relationship. That's the only way this kind of stuff happens. Yeah, that's a really good point. An interstate interagency group effort that definitely makes this happen. Robert Dickerson, though, thank you so much. I really appreciate it and great work. Yep.

Thanks for having us. All right, everybody. That's all we have for you here on Sidebar. Thank you so much for joining us. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jesse Weber. Speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this Law and Crime series.

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