‘You just can’t admit that you screwed up,’ Judge John Roemer told man who police say later shot him dead

“You have a great deal to offer,” Roemer told Douglas K. Uhde at a Nov. 10, 2005, sentencing hearing. “Your personality is strong because you’re gregarious, you’re outgoing, but there’s something about your character where you just can’t admit that you screwed up, and that might be the rest of your life that you’ll never be able to admit that you just made a mistake.”

There was little in the 58-page transcript of the hearing that would point to any specific reason Uhde, 56, would allegedly later target Roemer before turning the gun on himself. Investigators have said he planned to target other government officials as well. A list found in his vehicle Friday included Roemer, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, an official who was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation told The Associated Press.

But it seems from court and Department of Corrections records that Roemer’s words were prophetic. In the years to come, Uhde would escape from the medium-security prison where he was serving his sentence and file appeals and court challenges disputing some of the charges for which he was convicted after he was caught.

That echoed the approach he took in Roemer’s courtroom that November day, when, acting as his own attorney, he simultaneously pleaded guilty to a 2001 armed burglary and suggested he didn’t do it, while arguing that evidence in his case had been destroyed by investigators, preventing him from mounting a good defense.

“Yes, I did plead guilty to the charge, but did I actually commit this crime, just as I stated to the Court, because a person went to the crime, is that actually a crime committed? That answer has to be ‘no,’” he told Roemer.

Roemer sentenced him to six years in prison and nine years of extended supervision, or more than the five years in prison and seven and a half years of supervision Uhde and prosecutors had settled on as part of the plea agreement.

The state Department of Justice, which is investigating the shooting at the 68-year-old Roemer’s home at W6128 Woodland Hills Road in the town of Lisbon, did not respond to requests for comment Monday on the investigation into Uhde, who most recently lived in Michigan and as of Saturday was in a hospital in critical condition.

In the Adams County case, Uhde was charged with armed burglary, carrying a concealed weapon, possession of a short-barreled shotgun and possession of a firearm by a felon for burglarizing a vacant vacation home in the town of Quincy on the night of Aug. 20, 2001, according to a criminal complaint.

Uhde was already a convicted felon in Texas, where he had a 1986 case for forgery and a 1996 case for escaping from custody. He also has a juvenile record and a 1986 attempted burglary conviction from Michigan, according to the transcripts of his sentencing hearing before Roemer.

He pleaded no contest in the Adams County burglary case in January of 2002, online court records show. But he had his conviction vacated in October 2004 after an appeals court found — and prosecutors ultimately admitted — that the trial court had misstated elements of the burglary charge. The next year he pleaded guilty again before the new judge in the case, Roemer.

DOC and court records show Uhde was in jail or prison in Wisconsin roughly from August 2001 to March 27, 2006, when he walked away from an inmate work assignment at Circus World in Baraboo that was being conducted through the Fox Lake Correctional Institution, where he was incarcerated.

A report by the Adams County Sheriff’s Office alleges he turned up a little more than two weeks later in the Friendship and Wisconsin Rapids area, where he broke into a car and stole a wallet, stole license plates off another car and tried to break into his former girlfriend’s home.

Police caught him on April 17, 2006, after a chase that ended when he crashed his stolen pickup truck, according to a criminal complaint in Adams County. Another filed around the same time in Dodge County, where the prison is, says that “when asked why he decided to escape, the defendant replied that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing.

“He just couldn’t go back to the institution,” the complaint says. “The defendant also described how he walked away, saying he left about 1:00 pm, walked down a sidewalk, crossed over train tracks, entered a Walmart, called a friend … and she came and picked him up.”

Attempts to reach victims named in the police reports and Uhde’s former girlfriend were not successful. A man who answered the door at the Friendship home where the girlfriend used to live said she hadn’t lived there for years.

Uhde pleaded no contest to the escape charge in Dodge County in January 2007 and was found guilty by a jury of fleeing police and other charges in Adams County in 2008.

Appeals courts in 2009 and again in 2011 rejected Uhde’s petitions for a new trial in the Adams County case, saying he’d not proven that the state had denied him access to relevant evidence or that prosecutors had engaged in misconduct.

At the 2005 sentencing hearing, Roemer said Uhde was bright and articulate but had largely “squandered” his talents.

“What have you done really?” he said. “Nothing. You’re 40 years old and what do you have? Well, you have a GED. You’ve got a year of post-automotive, but you have nothing to your name. … If you are Catholic faith, or whatever faith your are, you have squandered your talents, and that’s a sin because God has given you so much, and to be quite frank, you’ve done so little with your talents.”

Juneau County Star-Times reporter John Gittings and The Associated Press contributed to this report.