Well, to be fair he wasn’t in the institution at the time. He was where you take any 220 lb killer who murdered a woman because voices told him she was a witch.

The state fair:

SPOKANE — A man court-ordered to Eastern State Hospital after being judged criminally insane walked away from a day trip to the Spokane County Fair shortly after noon Thursday.

Sources at the hospital located in Medical Lake said that Phillip Arnold Paul, 47, had been held at the facility after being arrested for a homicide. Spokane County criminal records show only that he has a history of escape and assault

Spokane Valley Police and members of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Property Crimes Task Force flooded the fairgrounds around 2 p.m., looking for the suspect who reportedly was wearing a red windbreaker over a blue T-shirt and blue jeans.

Paul is a 5-foot-8, white male who weighs about 220 pounds. He has brown hair and blue eyes, and sports a goatee.

Needless to say, be on the lookout if you’re in the area. But how did this criminally insane killer escape? He just walked away from staff according to some reports. Worse there seems to be at least an hour when staff knew the dangerous patient was missing, but didn’t report it even though the man had a history of escape and assaulting people who tried to bring him in:

SPOKANE — A criminally insane killer who strangled a woman because voices told him she was a witch has walked away from an Eastern State Hospital field trip to the Spokane Interstate Fair and may be trying to hitchhike home to Sunnyside.

Deputies have been combing the fairgrounds and the area within several blocks of the sprawling complex in search of Phillip Paul, 47, a man with a history of escape and assault in Spokane County in addition to being found criminally insane in the wake of the 1987 strangulation killing of an elderly Granger woman.

Paul was on a field trip to the fair with a group of Eastern State Hospital  patients Thursday morning when he disappeared from the rest of his group. The rest of the patients from the group from Eastern State Hospital have been accounted for and taken from the fairgrounds.

The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office acknowledges they are “dismayed” with Eastern State’s Hospital reporting of Paul’s disappearance. While he was reported missing at 1:14 PM apparently Eastern may have known Paul was missing as early as 11:30 AM, more than an hour and a half before they notified authorities about his disappearance.

“It appears now there was a two hour lapse from the point he disappeared from his attendant to the sheriff’s office was notified of his escape and obviously that’s a concern to us,” Sgt. Reagan said. “We’re concerned that we were not aware that people of his criminal history were being brought to the fair for day trips. As a courtesy we would have liked to have been notified ahead of time.”

“Certainly as a matter of professional courtesy once he disappeared we feel the responsible thing would have been to have been immediately notified,” Reagan continued. “As soon as we were notified within 30 minutes we had saturated the fairgrounds with security people and Spokane Valley police officers.”

Indeed. All you Wiccans in Washington better hide your pentagrams.

With his history of escape, why was he at a state fair in the first place?