Posted inJournal Tribune

Convicted bigamist who avoided jail time is back on the run

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Officials in New Hampshire issued an arrest warrant Wednesday for Michael Middleton, 43, after he left a transitional housing program this week without notifying his probation officer.

A clerk at the Strafford County Superior Court confirmed the warrant Thursday afternoon but did not have any details other than that Middleton had not been arrested yet.

Assistant County Attorney David Rotman did not immediately return a reporter’s call.

Middleton, who most recently lived in Old Orchard Beach, was sentenced in Strafford County Court on April 29 to 12 months in prison, but the sentence was suspended under an agreement with prosecutors, provided he meet certain conditions. One of those condition was that he live in structured housing and alert officials if he went anywhere else. He also was required to undergo evaluations and possibly counseling related to domestic violence, substance use and mental health.

Court documents allege that Middleton was married to at least two other women — Katherine Langley in Georgia in 2006 and Cassandra Shipley in Alabama in 2011 — when he married Alicia Grant in Dover, New Hampshire, in 2013. He would later marry yet another woman, Ashley Climer, in Kentucky in 2016, without divorcing his other wives.

Grant did not attend Middleton’s sentence hearing last month, but Rotman read a written statement from her in court.

“When we got married six years ago, what I thought I had found in him was a life partner, someone that I could face life’s ups and downs with, someone my children could look up to,” Grant wrote. “Instead I got six years of pain and misery as I tried to free myself from the prison of his lies and manipulations.”

Middleton, who has a lengthy criminal history that includes convictions in at least nine states, faced a maximum sentence of 3½ to 7 years on the bigamy charge out of New Hampshire. Among his prior convictions was one for domestic violence assault in York County in 2014.

This is not the first time Middelton had disappeared. In February, he failed to appear in court after a grand jury indicted him on the bigamy charge. An arrest was issued and Middelton was later arrested in Ohio after a tipster alerted police to his whereabouts.

At his court appearance last month, Middleton declined to speak in detail to reporters but said he felt the sentence was “a good outcome.”

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