A woman was shocked when she received a friend suggestion from Facebook that turned out to be her husband's second wife.
It wouldn't have been particularly alarming except for the fact that the woman and her husband were not divorced.
"Wife number one went to wife number two's page and saw a picture of her and her husband with a wedding cake," Mark Lindquist, the Pierce County Prosecutor, told the Associated Press.
The first wife then called the defendant's mother.
"An hour later the defendant arrived at [wife number one's] apartment and she asked him several times if they were divorced.
"The defendant said, 'No, we are still married,'" according to court records.
O'Neill allegedly told his first wife not to tell anyone about the situation and promised to fix it, but she didn't listen and instead went to the police.
Alan L. O'Neill married his first wife in 2001 and moved out eight years later without divorcing his wife. He then changed his name and remarried, making him a bigamist.
In 2010, the first wife was arrested after an altercation took place with the woman who eventually became the second wife.
O'Neill, who was formerly known as Alan Fulk, worked as a Pierce County corrections officer for five years, according to sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer. Due to his illegal actions, he was placed on administrative leave on Thursday and arrested. He is being charged with bigamy and faces up to one year in jail if he is convicted.
He also likely faces bills from a divorce attorney, possibly two of them.
"Facebook is now a place where people discover things about each other they end up reporting to law enforcement," Lindquist said. "Every few years we see one of these bigamy cases. About the only danger he [O'Neill] would pose is marrying a third women."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
