Insufficient Evidence to Find Allegedly Bigamous Marriage Void

Tennessee case summary on validity of marriage in divorce proceedings.

Kathy Fowlkes v. Flora Fowlkes

The petitioner in this Dyer County, Tennessee, case was born in Tennessee in 1970.  A month later, her parents married and moved to Arizona.  The parents later separated and the mother returned to Tennessee.  The father later informed the mother that he had obtained a divorce in Arizona.  In 1979, the mother filed a petition for child support in Tennessee, and that case was transferred to Arizona.  The father paid child support until 1991.  The mother remarried in 1996, and the father remarried in 2001.  The father died in 2017.

Later that year, the daughter filed a petition for a declaratory judgment that the father’s subsequent marriage was null and void.  She submitted documentation showing that a search of Arizona records failed to uncover any record of a divorce.

The trial court denied the petition, and the daughter appealed to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.  The appeals court began by noting that bigamous marriages are not recognized, but that there is a presumption of validity of a marriage, and thus a presumption that the first marriage ended in divorce.  This presumption is strong, and the court cited an earlier case holding that it cannot be overcome merely be a general search of records finding no record of a divorce.  Instead, it must be shown by clear and convincing evidence.

The appeals court agreed with the lower court that the daughter had failed to submit sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption.  In particular, the father had stated that he had obtained the divorce “somewhere in Phoenix,” and there had been so search of surrounding counties.  In fact, the search failed to uncover the child support petition that had been filed in Arizona, which supported the conclusion that the search had been lacking.

For these reasons, the Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling of the lower court.

No. M2018-00050-COA-R3-CV  (Tenn. Ct. App. Aug. 16, 2018).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see The Tennessee Divorce Process: How Divorces Work Start to Finish.