Madonna Stalker in Police Custody

Robert Dewey Hoskins is wheeled into the courtroom for his initial arraignment in June 1995.

DAN GROSHONG/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Dewey Hoskins, a man who was convicted of stalking Madonna in the Nineties, is back in police custody after having escaped from a mental health facility in California on February 3rd. CNN reports that Hoskins was caught in Long Beach, California. Police have described him as highly psychotic and potentially violent when off 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. 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. He escaped by simply walking out of the facility undetected.

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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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