On Tuesday, Sept. 5, Marty King pulled around back of a nondescript strip mall in Bradenton and parked his silver Hyundai next to the Department of Corrections office. Wearing a striped button-down shirt and sporting a new haircut, King was headed for a meeting with his probation officer.
A faded picture of Jeb Bush hung on one wall of the cramped waiting room; a printout tacked on another reminded folks that October is "Domestic Violence Awareness Month." King, 38, sat down in a worn red chair to fill out a form. Who was currently living in his house? Had he consumed any alcoholic beverages? Broken the law?
Today's appointment included a drug test. "Because that's how adulterers get down, I guess," he joked before stepping into the bathroom where a probation officer was waiting to watch him pee in a cup. "What am I gonna be taking — Viagra?"
Yes, Marty King is a convicted adulterer, judged guilty of something most Floridians — even most lawyers — don't know is illegal. King's public defender, Lori Husskison, became a minor celebrity around her office after she discovered it on the books. "Everybody was shocked," she says. "Nobody even knew it was a crime."
Few people openly favor cheating on the spouse, but many would disagree with the need for a law against adultery. The government shouldn't be in the bedroom, the thinking goes, no matter whose bedroom you're in. And legal decisions both nationally and in Florida over the last three decades have backed up the privacy argument (see sidebar).
But Marty King is glad philandering is still a crime. Otherwise, he could have found himself convicted of something worse: bigamy.
Nearly four years before he stepped into that bathroom, King and his bride, Lisa Sandacz, arrived at Coquina Beach around 4:30 p.m., just as a sunny November Saturday turned overcast. Both had been married once before; they didn't want a big wedding, didn't even want to arrange a small one. A wedding planner they'd found online had taken care of the minister, photographer and location. All Marty and Lisa had to do was show up, get hitched and start their new life.
Marty, 6 foot 3 inches and wide in the middle, wore an untucked white button-down shirt. Lisa was feeling queasy; dressed in a flowing, loose-fitting gown, she was already beginning to show. Since getting pregnant nearly two months before, afternoon sickness had become part of her daily routine. As she stood in the sand with her right hand clasped in Marty's left, Lisa felt herself turning green.
"I take you, Marty King, to be my lawfully wedded husband," she vowed in front of the 11 people, mostly family, that had been invited. "For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part."
After the quick service the couple took a photo-op walk down the beach, posing for more pictures with the Gulf lapping in the background. A modest reception awaited at Lisa's mom's place, along with a marble cake — half-vanilla, half-chocolate — to symbolize the newlyweds' union.
Marty walked off the beach happy that Saturday in 2002. He'd found the partner he'd share his life with, and she was carrying the child he'd always wanted. It was perfect.
Except for this: By marrying Lisa, he had just committed a felony.
Marty King's saga is a mash-up of an All My Children plotline and a creative episode of Law & Order. To understand the last four years of King's life — how he went from that wedding on the beach to an arrest for bigamy the following year to an adultery conviction this past July — you first have to know a bit about the sequence of events that started the whole mess.
King grew up around the Midwest, spending the most time in Omaha, Neb. A nine-year military veteran, including two on active duty, he went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, graduating in 1997. From there he went to graduate school in mass communications at the university's Omaha campus, but he failed to get his diploma. "All I need to do is finish my thesis," he says.
Unfinished business, you will find, is a recurring theme in this story.
The most glaring example, for our purposes here, is Marty King's failure to finish his first marriage to a woman named Kris Cardenas. As with most divorces, who-did-what-to-whom-when depends on whom you're talking to.
This much is clear: On Sept. 14, 2000, King married Cardenas in Omaha. Their marriage fell apart, and by April 2002, after skipping town without telling his wife or his friends where he'd gone, King was in Sarasota staying with Sandacz, whom he knew from speech tournaments in college. The two married seven months later while King was still legally wedded to Cardenas.
Here comes the he said/ she said part. In an email to the Weekly Planet, Cardenas wrote that King first asked for a divorce in late September or early October 2002, just a few weeks before his Coquina beach wedding to Sandacz.
Sounds like King knew he was still married, right?
Not according to him. "I thought I was done," he says of his wedding day. "I thought I was in the clear." He says the divorce process had started in December 2001, almost a year before he and Sandacz got married. He and Lisa pushed the wedding date back three times, he says, waiting for the final paperwork to arrive in the mail. Though the decree still hadn't shown up by Nov. 9, King assumed "it had to have gone through."
That was a poor assumption.
In fact, Cardenas had not filed the divorce papers. Instead, after finding out about the wedding, she called the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office on the morning of Dec. 11, 2002. She'd read Florida's bigamy statute — the crime is a felony here — and she wanted King charged. When asked why she decided to report King, Cardenas wrote in her e-mail "I contacted the Sarasota [County Sheriff's] office because Marty committed a crime. That was my basis."
It wasn't until Oct. 6, 2003, 10 months after Cardenas contacted local law enforcement, that the cops showed up at Marty and Lisa's door. He was at work, selling advertising for the Herald-Tribune, Lisa told them. She asked what they wanted, but the officers avoided telling her the charge. When they tracked him down at the office, they asked him simply, "How many wives do you have?"
A few hours later he was in handcuffs at the Sarasota County Jail booking desk. King remembers the officer who signed him in looking down at the report. "Bigamy?" the officer asked, unsure of what he was reading. He thought someone had misspelled "burglary." Since the Sarasota County State Attorney's office started keeping computerized records over 10 years ago, there have been 16 cases of bigamy. Apparently, King was this officer's first.
After a day in a lime-green holding cell and payment of a $1,000 bond, King was released. Lisa, now aware of the charges, was waiting outside. "It crossed my mind — 'Maybe Marty's trying to pull something,'" she says. But the thought faded. Marty, she was convinced, was positive his divorce was final before they got married. She signed the bond receipt "Lisa King."
Marty King now had a felony arrest record. But his luck started to turn. Though his marriage to Lisa was technically null and void, his divorce from Cardenas finally went through in June 2003. Then, before the bigamy case went to court in 2004, he was offered pre-trial intervention, a sort of preemptive probation. If he completed 80 hours of public service work, stayed out of any more legal trouble and paid $33.28 a month to cover the state's costs, the charges would be dropped after a year. King took the deal.
But again, finishing proved too tough. He had a baby girl, a job that he says took 60 hours a week, and little disposable income. He didn't work the service hours. He didn't pay the fees. On Sept. 8, 2005, the court was notified that King had failed his pre-trial intervention. He was thrown back into the legal system, and this time he was looking at a court date. The maximum sentence for bigamy? Five years.
"I couldn't believe it," says Lori Husskison, the public defender assigned to King's case in late 2005. "I couldn't believe he was getting charged with bigamy, and I couldn't believe it was a felony." Without pre-trial intervention as a possibility, Husskison prepared to go to court. She deposed Cardenas and a friend of King's from Omaha who claimed to have heard King's first wife bragging about duping him on the divorce and getting him arrested.
Though Husskison discussed possible plea bargains with the state's prosecuting attorney, the two sides couldn't reach a deal. King didn't want a felony on his record, and the state wasn't willing to offer anything less. The trial was set for April 2006. Husskison's office paid for the friend to fly in and testify. Then, just before they went to court, the state got a continuance. The trial was pushed back to July, and the public defender's office was forced to pony up for another plane ticket. Altogether, not factoring in the 30 to 35 hours Husskison estimates she and her assistant spent on the case, her office spent $1,340.51 of the state's money on Marty King's defense. (The prosecuting attorney, Betsy Sinphay, who has between 40 to 60 cases at a time, was unable to give the hours she worked on the case.)
On July 24, King, Husskison and Sinphay were at the courthouse to select a jury. Just before the prospectives were called in, the two lawyers began discussing a plea bargain.
Problem was, none of them knew what to plea down to. It wasn't as though King could be convicted of a speeding ticket; they needed something that related, somehow, to bigamy. Husskison picked up the Florida statute book, flipped to the index and looked under 'A'.
798.01-Living in open adultery: Whoever lives in an open state of adultery shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree.
"You always read about how states have stupid laws on the books, but I don't know what made me think of it," she says. "I wasn't aware that it was a crime — it's not something we covered in law school." Sinphay agreed to the plea on the condition that Marty complete six months of probation and cover the prosecution's plane tickets for Cardenas. Marty ducked into the hallway to decide.
"But you're not guilty," Lisa told him over the phone. The bigamy statute says that if you "reasonably believe" that you can legally marry, you're innocent. Lisa wanted him to fight. But King wouldn't risk the chance for a felony conviction. He walked back inside, took the deal.
Marty King was a convicted adulterer.
Sure, Marty King would rather not have adultery on his record. "I don't print it on my business cards," he says.
Still, it beats bigamy.
As for his former wife, she says his conviction has brought her some closure. "I am glad that it is over," says Cardenas, "and he was held accountable." And King, the man who was arrested for being married to two women at once, isn't legally married to anyone.
But he's planning to change all that. On Nov. 9, four years to the day after their wedding on the beach, he and Lisa are planning to get married. Again.
This time though, they are going to elope.
More "The Scarlet Letter, 2006"