Meet 48 y/o Karen Marx. Yes, that’s her below:
Karen is, by all accounts, a loving mom, a caring daughter and an overly dedicated wife. If she has a failing then it’s her piss poor choice in a husband, well that and her failure to recognize that tigers do not change their stripes.
Karen met her hubby Adam Marx while she was at a local Wisconsin fair with her 3 young kids and it was love at first sight. They spoke and arranged to meet and dated and then Karen (f/k/a Karen Shepard) found out that Adam was married. But, as will happen with “true love”, Adam vowed to leave his wife for Karen, and he did just that, and they married, and then they lived happily ever, er, well, not so much…
When they married Adam quit his job as a “carnie” (when they met at the Outagamie Wisconsin County Fair, Adam was operating Karen’s favorite ride, “the zipper”) while Karen continued to work as a “machine operator”. One day, about a year after their courthouse wedding and supper club dinner, Karen came home from work to find a note which indicated that Adam had left her because he could no longer handle her children.
A few months later, just before Christmas, Adam returned to Karen, re-vowing to love and cherish and respect and stand-by her and her kids. With her heartache gone and her true love restored Karen got her Christmas bonus, cashed in her 401K, loaded up and moved 1,200 miles away from her extended family, with Adam and her kids, to a small town in Montana, so as to restart their happy life together.
Now living in Montana Adam got a job, helped Karen’s kids to find work and afforded Karen the time to plan to live her dream of opening her own cleaning business. But, soon enough, Adam stopped coming home at night, Karen started hearing rumors of Adam fooling around with other women and she discovered that he had been taking advances from work and racking up debt as well.
So, once more, true love for Karen faltered, Adam moved out and, for a while he continued to work at the timber factory, but then, like Casper of cartoon fame, one day he simply vanished, leaving Karen and her kids once again, although this time with no note or forwarding address, but instead with a bunch of bills and a whole world of stress.
That was in 2005, and so it went, year after year. Karen never got to open her cleaning business as she had dreamed, but she did work her butt off, crying at night over failed love and at her own poor choice in having ever taken Adam back, and somehow managing to find the strength to care for herself and her kids.
At one point she moved to another Montana city where she bumped into her estranged husband in a K-Mart parking lot. Among other things Karen told him that she wanted a divorce and Adam told her that he’s call… but that was another unfulfilled promise as he never did. In 2012 Karen’s own father got sick and so, good daughter that she is, she packed up and returned to Wisconsin, this time as a caretaker
When she moved back to Wisconsin Karen started to search for Adam. While she didn’t find him she did find his mother, and her mother-in-law told her about Adam’s new wife and his new life. Unfortunately for Adam, A) unlike when he left the first wife for Karen, when he hitched up with the post-Karen wife he was not first divorced and B) Karen found some inner strength and decided to “get up, stand up, stand up for {her} rights” (not to fail to mention get a little poetic justice / revenge on her douche of a still lawful husband).
Karen reported the matter to Wisconsin police who, to their credit, ran with the ball. Investigation revealed that Adam had filled-out and signed his (3rd) marriage application claiming under oath that that was his 1st marriage. The Clerk who processed the application did not check Vital Statistics, rubber stamped the document and permitted the lawful union. The cops questioned Adam who stated that he believed that Karen had formally divorced him in Montana and that he claimed the latest marriage as a 1st so as to expedite the process. Adam was arrested for bigamy (representing the first bigamy charge in Wisconsin in more than 20 years), fraud and making a false statement on a marriage license, and he faces more than 10 years in prison.
Memo to Adam: Not funny. You are lucky that Karen didn’t stab or shoot your ass, and, without commenting on your choices and that harm you caused a good and decent woman (and, no douibt her kids), your statements to the cops are the proverbial nails in your coffin (note that A) there is no “parallel world” defense to any of your charges and B) you definitely are no Superman…).
It is a statistical and practical fact that many marriages fail. This is sad but it is not a crime (not one enforced by man anyhow). However, lying on a sworn application is a crime. In fact, as as you now know Adam, it is its own independent crime, as well as constituting the predicate for a fraud charge (which, in WI subjects you to 6 years in prison) and in your case also bigamy (carrying another potential 3.5 year sentence).
I don’t begrudge you for leaving Karen. She may present great in the news but also have been utterly impossible to live with. Or maybe you were just “born a ramblin’ man”, or “to be free”. Or perhaps you are an opportunist, or were “lucky”, having found yourself a “better” situation. Or maybe you are just a piece of crap scumbag. I don’t know and I don’t care.
What I do know is that when you signed that piece of paper you shot your own goose, and when you spoke to the cops (instead of shutting up and invoking your rights) you cooked it. And the other thing that I know is that there is a lesson in this for the folks.
Memo to the Folks: Be careful what you sign. Many government documents (marriage licenses being only one of untold numbers of them) and even private ones (loan or academic or licensing applications and things like pawnbroker forms – that’s a biggie in FL, FS 539.001(8)(b)(8) makes it a felony to provide false information on a pawn form), subject you to criminal prosecution and carry criminal penalties for knowingly providing false statements.
For more than 23 years Michael A. Haber, P.A. has been providing creative, effective and zealous advocacy and counsel in cases ranging from DUI to drug trafficking and from misdemeanors to first degree murder.
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