Madonna Stalker Escapes Mental Health Facility

Robert Dewey Hoskins listens as he is sentenced to 10 years in prison for stalking Madonna in 1996.

POOL/AFP/Getty Images

A man who was convicted of stalking Madonna in the Nineties has escaped a mental health facility in California. According to Los Angeles police, Robert Dewey Hoskins walked away from the facility unnoticed and remains at large. Police have described him as highly psychotic and violent when not taking his medication.

Hoskins, 54, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1996 after being arrested for scaling a wall around the pop icon's home in Hollywood and threatening to slit her throat. Hoskins had told the singer's bodyguard that she was meant to be his wife and that if could not have her, he would kill her. After he was released from prison, he was arrested again in July of last year and was sent to another mental health facility in Norwalk, California.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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