WIth several break-in’s in nearby neighborhoods, I thought it wise to get a security system, so I went for a wireless one and setup the smoke alarms and each of the doors with open/close sensors. My wife had been after me to replace the smoke alarms, but when I told her about the sensors, she went ballistic. She couldn’t articulate why she thought they were a bad idea, but wasn’t comfortable at all with them in place. I didn’t see any sense to this.
I mentioned it offhand to a friend (also an attorney), and he said, have you ever thought there may be someone else coming and going while you’re not there? She doesn’t want you to see this activity.
Rather than punch him for accusing her, I just grumbled. But it nagged at me. A week later I had a business trip overnight for three nights, and when I checked the alarm system in the evening. it wasn’t online. I checked it the next morning and it was back. I swallowed this and didn’t say anything to her. But it repeated the next two evenings. Offline, and then back online. I mentioned this to my friend and he said alarm systems aren’t that flaky. Don’t you think it’s strange that it’s offline when you are away but never has this issue otherwise?
So I went to the store a got a camera to hook up to the system, and set the camera facing the system itself, and was tempted to tell her about it, but I didn’t. The following week, I had a day trip, and it went offline again, but this time I had a recording – my wife was disconnecting it!
I wanted to confront her but my friend told me no – you don’t have enough evidence. Be patient.
I said – how will I ever get the evidence if she’s turning it off? He said – get a decoy, and explained it. So I bought another hub for the security system, put the original under the counter and out of sight, but hooked up the new one as though it was the original. I was too anxious to see if it would work, so I told her I had another day-trip the next day. I left for the day and stayed out of sight.
Sure enough, she appeared on the recording turning it off, but I got the system logs that the door-open sensors had triggered. I had her!
No, my friend said – still not enough. So I was very patient and set the rest of it up in stages. Each time letting her get away with it, and each time gathering more evidence.
I got another camera for the system, a wireless one, and placed it facing the entry door that had triggered, and learned over several more discoveries she was having a male guest. He was parking his car several streets over, and I found out which one was his.
My friend told me it’s easier to put a GPS on his car, which is illegal, but better than trying to follow him and get caught doing it.
So I waited, and told my wife I would be working in the city (forty miles away), and would be doing it for the rest of the week. I took a week off from work.
That day the lover came over and I put a GPS on his car. It would ping my hub once a minute for the next several days. I traced it on my laptop in real time. and when he was at home, the GPS gave me an exact location. In our state we can look up property information online and find who owns the property. So now
Now I had his name, and his wife’s name. They’d been married seventeen years, with all their kids in high school.
Then I put the wireless camera in our bedroom, only to find out they weren’t doing it in the bed, but in our walk-in closet, which is spacious enough to get the job done. The camera picked up the audio but not the video. I captured some, such as them leaving the closet naked, but not actually in the act. I waited for her to leave for shopping, and repositioned the camera in the closet. I caught them in full glory the next time he came over.
Now what?
My friend told me while I had enough evidence, she will still put up a denial because she doesn’t want to get him in trouble with his wife. So she’ll dig in and won’t give. Your best bet is to bundle all this stuff together, and give it to her lover’s wife – anonymously. Once this happens, the dominos will flow backward and your wife will have to come to you with a confession. If you do it right, you can erase all your fingerprints from the whole situation. Keeps you from being the accuser.
I liked this plan, but I really wanted to get it over with.
So I used some movie-maker software and pieced together all the parts and stages of the investigation. Dates, times, etc. and strung these together in a timeline. This part was kind of fun, so I added context-captions for more information. Once this was all done, I had the urge to set it to music, so I used spy music like Mission Impossible, and when the two lovers met at the door I used Gershwin tunes, and for the big love scene I set it to a rock music tune (Billy Idol, Rebel Yell) and made it do close-up zooms.
I was getting all the anger out of my system while I was making it. Seems a little strange, but there was this odd thrill of having not only won the game, but mastered it and now I was about to play her instead of the other way around. Might as well knock it out of the park. I added comedy pop-ups next to their heads, with thought-bubbles of quips. I started laughing hysterically. After it was done. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was losing it.
But when I first handed it to the lover’s wife, she didn’t know who I was. I said I was doing a background investigation on her husband for a new position he was being considered for at work. and after following him around, this is what I discovered, and left it with her. Only much later did she learn who I was.
TSo after I dropped it off with this chєated-on wife, I waited for the bombs to fall. That evening my wife came to me teary-eyed, and confessed the whole thing. I asked her, why now?
And she told me the wife had called her with the information and how she had obtained it. And would allow her to tell me about it first, but she was going to do it if my wife didn’t. So my wife got in front of the train and spilled her guts about everything. I had the presence of mind to keep the wireless camera handy in the room, and when she started the confession, I started recording. Got the whole confession on record.
Bonus – I got her to confess she’d been doing it almost four years with this guy. She’d gotten pregnant with him once, and it miscarried. I still recall the episode – she made up a fake medical reason for it. I was so worried for her health when it happened. Pretty stupid I know.
It was highly satisfying to pretend ignorance while she confessed her heart out. I could ask anything at that point – totally non-confrontational – well worth the effort. I told her I wanted her to file for divorce – to start the papers rolling – and to assume she would get nothing in the settlement, but that I would give her something after the fact – to get credit for my good will in all this.
She would have none of it.
She hired an attorney who tried to get her more than half the community property assets including the house and leave me with all the credit card debt – AND pay for her attorney fees from my half. Her attorney made it sound like a one-night-stand.
My attorney argued she should have nothing, and handed over all the evidence, including stuff the other wife didn’t have. The mediator (we didn’t have a judge – yet) took sides with my attorney since I had the recording that she’d been deceiving me for almost four years. My attorney also argued that I had offered to give her something back if she would make it simple and short. I had also offered to bury the chєating so nobody had to talk about it anymore, and this was the purpose of making her file on me first, so it would look like she left on her own (which is true, she left me when she chєated)
Oddly, her lover came to the hearing and sat in the back, and since we had never officially met, I guess he thought I didn’t know who he was. I introduced myself to him on a recess break and he gave me a fake name and lied saying his hearing was coming up, which is why he was sitting there. I corrected him on it and told him exactly who he was and why he was there. I thought he might leave at this point, but he stuck it out.
The lover and his wife divorced – she took the lion’s share. Sometime later they happened to be in a supermarket and were trading a superficial greeting when I walked past them into the store. I didn’t see them standing there – but I saw her in the store right after – but didn’t say anything.
She cornered me alone in the dairy section and said, “You dropped off some valueable information with me, not too long ago.”
And I acknowledged, and we traded some “how have you been” statements back and forth until she said – “You’re the hushand.”
Busted.
So I confessed to who I was. She thanked me for my self control (this is about the only time I’ve ever been complemented on self control) – in that I patiently gathered evidence and got it to stick.
I get a call from my ex that evening – and she was bat-poop-crazy about it. Clearly the other couple did the math and figure out who I was. The lover had called my ex and told her of this.
Until that moment, all of them believed the original cover story – that a work-related investigator had handed over his findings.
And I told my ex-wife – so what? You came to me and confessed. I didn’t have to play bad cop and pound a table and rake you over the coals. The writing was on the wall, and it was time to confess. And you knew it.”
She said, “No, if I had known, I would not have confessed.”
Right. Exactly. I got what I wanted, in the only way I could have gotten it.
And frankly, had blast doing it.
For any of you who plan to confront your wife, don’t to it in real-time as she flirts or commits acts – wait – take pictures – gather evidence.
Source: quora.com
