HILLSBOROUGH - There were two John McCormicks: the trusted lawyer who counseled the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools for decades, and the alcohol- and cocaine-abuser who shuffled clients' money from account to account trying to keep ahead of the game.

The dark side won out two summers ago when McCormick fled his home and family, accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients.

On Thursday, that fall from respectability culminated in a guilty plea in Orange County Superior Court to five counts of embezzlement -- crimes that will keep the the 60-year-old disbarred lawyer behind prison bars for 10 years.

"You have been described by folks as a kind and gentle and helpful person," Judge Allen Baddour told McCormick. "I have no doubt that those are true statements. ... There were two lives of John McCormick. There was a public life in which you did many admirable things for people. ... There are other ways in which your actions did the opposite."

Baddour sentenced McCormick to less time than District Attorney Jim Woodall sought, and to more than defense lawyers Bill Cotter, Bill Massengale and Marilyn Ozer had hoped.

McCormick broke down in tears several times during the 2 1/2-hour hearing. He dabbed his eyes with tissue when a law school friend described his struggles with alcohol and the tortured family relationships that haunted him from childhood.

He was overcome again as he apologized to his clients, to the community that had trusted him, and to the wife, children and siblings he left behind.

"I should have never left," McCormick sobbed. "I don't know what I was thinking; my family has stood behind me. I guess I didn't have enough faith in them."

Out the back door

McCormick's worlds collided in 2006 when national homebuilder D.R. Horton Inc. came looking for money from five home sales the lawyer had handled.

Gil Whitford, the State Bureau of Investigation's financial crimes investigator, testified Thursday that McCormick had failed to disburse $802,185 from his real estate trust account for the sales.

A representative from D.R. Horton had noticed problems with other McCormick sales and the company had decided to stop using him as a lawyer.

"He was using D.R. Horton's money almost as his personal bank to shift money around," Woodall said. "There was going to be no more money. Now all these shortages were going to come home to roost."

On July 10, 2006, Woodall said, a D.R. Horton representative was waiting in the lobby of McCormick's Chapel Hill office when the lawyer slipped out the back door.

Whitford said McCormick stopped at the State Employees Credit Union and made two deposits: $25,000 in an account for one of his children, and $10,000 in an account for another.

Then he drove his Subaru to Duke Forest, just north of Chapel Hill, parked the car and set off for a life unknown.

"He left just with the shirt and clothes on his back," Whitford testified.

McCormick was not seen again until Aug. 30, 2007, when law officers stopped him in a Phoenix park with little more than change in his pocket.

No hidden millions

His arrest ended a manhunt that had state and federal investigators chasing reported sightings around the globe and tales of millions hidden in foreign accounts.

The reality was very different.

When booked into the Maricopa County jail in Arizona, McCormick had fingernail clippers, a book, lip balm, a handkerchief, a silver-colored pen, sunglasses, a watch, "miscellaneous papers," a North Carolina driver's license and 6 cents, law enforcement reported.

Little came out about McCormick's 13 months on the lam other than that he was in the New Orleans area at one point -- he never was in Spain, despite reports to that effect -- and that he was living in a Phoenix homeless shelter before his arrest.

He couldn't stop

Stan Davis, a former U.S. attorney and law professor, visited McCormick in the Arizona jail, hoping to get answers in the 45 minutes he was allowed to spend with the man he had met during a criminal law class in Chapel Hill in the 1970s.

Davis wanted to know "why somebody so good could do something so bad."

McCormick, Davis testified, was the hard-drinking son of an alcoholic father who abandoned his family and emotionally scarred his son.

"John's drinking was like this," Davis recalled. "There were times when he could drink with us and things would be fun. But there were other times, and with some regularity -- and it was almost like a switch would be turned on -- he would not and could not stop."

Davis also talked about McCormick's emotional breakdowns over his father's illness, his physically and emotionally abusive stepfather, and the death of his older brother in the Vietnam War.

McCormick suffered further, Davis testified, when, after his mother died peacefully in her Greensboro home with hospice workers at her side, his stepfather took a gun into a nearby room and killed himself.

'Betrayal of trust'

Cotter, Massengale and Ozer, the attorneys representing McCormick, described their client as struggling with depression since childhood, a mentally troubled lawyer who did not ask for help.

Woodall, though, described McCormick as "arrogant" and "selfish," and in court Thursday only because he got caught.

Woodall said McCormick had been found in his office with cocaine on his nose, according to one witness not called to testify,

"He is not a trustworthy lawyer; he is not an ethical lawyer," Woodall said.

While McCormick was missing, the State Bar stripped him of his license.

"What makes this case so troubling is the fact that you had a law license," Baddour told McCormick. "The mistakes that lawyers make when they have been trusted and held with esteem that comes with that law license, these mistakes affect clients, they affect the community, they concern the public's trust. ...

"This is a culmination of a long history of a betrayal of trust."