Chapter 4: Divorce and Revenge

Monday morning I called work and arranged to have the day off then I called the attorney that my parents knew and explained my situation and asked if he could help me or recommend someone who could. He referred me to John Meyers, one of the partners in his firm. He said that Mr. Meyers was very good in cases like mine. I got lucky in that Mr. Meyers had a cancellation that morning and I was able to get in a see him at ten o'clock.

Mr. Meyers sat and listened to me as I told him every detail of what happened including the discovery of the video tape. When I was done Mr. Meyers asked me a few more questions. "The Lexus, whose name is the car registered in?

I said, "Lisa's"

"And the car loan, whose name is that in?"

"The loan is in Lisa's name but I make the payments for her."

"You said that you had never seen Bob before?"

"That's right."

Mr. Meyers sat back in his chair and turned it toward the window. He sat like that for a couple of minutes then turned around and pressed a button on his phone and the secretary answered. "Yes Mr. Meyers?"

"Ms. Randall, would you please begin preparing divorce papers to be served on Mrs. Lisa Jackson. I will provide you with all of the pertinent information as soon as Mr. Jackson and I are finished.

When he said divorce it scared me. In spite of everything that had happened I really hadn't thought about divorce yet.

Mr. Meyers began speaking and brought my attention back to the matter at hand. He said, "First we have to serve your wife with divorce papers. Then we can get a court order to prevent her from spending any of the money she took from your bank accounts until a settlement is reached."

I said, "Divorce? I hadn't thought about that possibility."

"Unless we serve her with divorce papers there is no way we can get any of your money back. At best we will probably only recover half. The divorce settlement will probably award her the other half."

I said, "What about the Lexus. The car is only a couple of months old. Does she get to keep it?"

"Yes and no."

"What do you mean yes and no?"

"Well the car is in her name and you have your own car. So she will get to keep the car but because she is also the one who signed the loan papers, she also is the one responsible for paying for it. So chances are she can't afford to keep the car now. She will have to sell it or it will be repossessed."

"Won't her boy friend help her pay for it so she can keep it."

"It is my experience in cases like this that the boy friend will only be around long enough to get all of your wife's money then he will dump her."

I said, "What?"

Mr. Meyers said, "This guy spots your wife pulling into the parking lot at a trendy watering hole driving a Lexus. So he makes a point of meeting her inside. It doesn't take him long to see that she is might be an easy mark because she doesn't get out much. So he works her. I don't know exactly how the game goes but these guys know all the right things to say to a woman to turn their heads around. Then once he has your wife hooked he convinces her to leave you for him. He tells her that when you find out about them you will take all of the savings and she won't get a dime of what is rightfully hers. So she empties the joint accounts. The next step is to get your wife put the money into his savings account. He tells her she doesn't need her money because he has plenty and he will take care of her. It may sound pretty lame but it works."

"Are you saying I may have lost my wife to a con artist?"

"That's about it. Once she catches on to what happened to her she will probably come back to you and ask to be forgiven. What you do then is up to you."

"I can't believe that creep would do all that for just $25,000."

"I'm sure he thought there was more. Here is the important thing, if he thinks your wife will get more in the divorce settlement he'll hang around until then and try to get his hands on that money too. Our job now is to convince him there is more money so he will hang around. We need to keep him here for our end game."

I asked, "What do you mean end game?"

"Did you know that in North Carolina you can sue for alienation of affection?"

"What does that mean exactly?"

"If you have a solid marriage and some third party comes along and causes the marriage to break up, like Bob did, that person can be sued for alienation of affection, and that's what we are going to do to Bob. We will get him for court cost, my fee, your $25,000 and a penalty the size of which will depend on whether he settles out of court or not. That's why we need to keep him around, so we can investigate him to see if he has done this sort of thing before. If we can show that he has done this before we could end up with a very nice settlement."

"How are you going to investigate him, I don't know even know his name or where he lives?"

"Don't worry about that, I will take care of it. This is important. I don't want you talking to your wife, Bob or any attorneys that may be representing them. You refer anything to do with the divorce to me. You wife's attorneys will be trying to get financial information. We want them to think you have some money stashed without telling any lies. That will keep our friend Bob hanging around. Do you understand all this now?"

"Not completely, but I will figure it all out and in the mean time I'll keep my mouth shut."

Mr. Meyers said, "Good. Then if you don't have any questions we'll get the paper work taken care of and you can stop back tomorrow to sigh the papers."

That concluded the meeting. I left Mr. Meyers office not feeling better but feeling that at least I will get some measure of revenge for the pain I was in. Lisa would lose her car because she can't afford it, Bob will not only not get the $25,000 he may lose more than that out of his own pocket before this is all over. The problem was I still missed Lisa and would probably take her back.

Things started slowly at first. Lisa got served the divorce papers about a week after my meeting with Mr. Meyers. I thought maybe she would call me but she didn't. Another couple of weeks went by before I got a call from Lisa's lawyer. He said he just had a few simple questions he wanted to ask me. I referred him to Mr. Meyers. It was over a month later that Mr. Meyers called me with some news. He said, "I have two items of interest to you. The first is that yesterday we served papers to one Robert Devers, naming him as the principal defendant in an Alienation of Affection law suit. The second item is that we found two woman who are willing to testify that Mr. Devers broke up there marriages with promises that he would marry them then he took off with their money. To put things simply I think our Mr. Devers is toast."