Mother of Two Arrested - For Two Marriages
Posted on Nov 29, 2010 2:35pm PST
Christopher Herman found out that his common law wife, and the mother of his two children, was already married when he himself was seeking to divorce her, as reported by The Gazette in Colorado Springs.
After being confronted and arrested, Tiffani Coughlin, Herman's estranged wife, allegedly told him, "I hoped you would never find out about that."
Tiffani Coughlin, 33, of Security, was arrested on a felony charge of suspicion of bigamy on November 15 and placed in an El Paso County jail. She posted a $1,000 bail and was released the same day.
Robert Hodges, a Fort Carson soldier, is Coughlin's first husband. She married him in 2002 and allegedly never sought a divorce before involving herself with Herman the following year.
In the affidavit Coughlin claimed that the marriage to Hodges had been annulled after a single day.
In 2005 Coughlin announced that she was pregnant with Herman's child, which prompted the two to set-up house as husband and wife under a common-law marriage.
Dan Edwards, the investigator with the 4th Judicial District Attorney's Office, said in an affidavit, "He asked her about the birth control she was taking and she said she just stopped taking it."
It wasn't until Coughlin entered into a relationship with a third man that Herman sought a divorce, though their common-law marriage had been shaky prior to that.
When Herman went to the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder's Office he found that his wife not only had an earlier marriage license - he had presumed that he was her first and only husband - but he had also not found any evidence of an earlier divorce decree.
Coughlin allegedly defended herself in the accusation by telling Herman that she thought her first husband, Robert Hodges, "had taken care of it." She also contended that she thought that she had signed something at the dissolution of that first marriage.
Edwards alleged in the arrest affidavit that a friend of Coughlin's said that she had admitted to her that she knew that she was married to the two men at the same time.
Coughlin could not be reached for comment by the Gazette.
Robert Hodges told authorities that before he was deployed for a year to Iraq - in 2002 - that his marriage to Coughlin had irrevocably broken down. He contended that he sent her divorce documents when he returned to the states.
This is the second case, involving a soldier deployed in Iraq, of bigamy in Colorado. The first was Tammy Ann Patton of Peyton. She was charged with bigamy in May when police discovered she was married to two soldiers at the same time - one in Fort Carson and the other in Iraq.
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