Lovefraud.com > Anthony Owens marries eight women

Anthony Glenn Owens presented himself as a minister, a man of God. He said he was an important preacher, bishop over a fellowship of more than 100 non–denominational churches.

In 2002, Owens met a woman in Texas who was recently retired from the Air Force. To her, Owens seemed to be a pious man of his word, devoted to his church. Not long after they met, Owens proposed—in fact, he traveled to Mississippi to ask the woman's father for her hand in marriage.

They married in June, 2002. But as the woman later discovered, Owens was already married. In fact, he was married to seven other women, and divorced from none of them.

Investigating her husband

The couple moved to Duluth, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, where Owens wanted to start a church. His congregation met in the conference room of a local hotel. By April of 2003, however, Owens started coming home late at night, claiming to be working on church business. His new wife suspected that Owens was cheating on her.

Then a female minister approached her at a church function. "She told me that I was the eighth woman that she had seen with him over the years," said the wife in the Atlanta Journal–Constitution. "She said that he was going to steal and take things from me. That's when I started digging into his background. I found out more than I wanted to know."

So while still living with Owens as his wife, the woman searched for evidence of his other marriages.

She called numbers on her husband's phone bills that she didn't recognize, and spoke to several women who identified themselves as the wife of Anthony Owens. She searched for marriage certificates in the states where the women lived—Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama. She found the marriage certificates—but no evidence of divorce.

With her documentation, she went to the police in Gwinnett County, Georgia.

The police charged Owens with one count of bigamy—he only lived with the most recent wife in their jurisdiction. Owens was supposed to turn himself in on October 30, 2003, according to the Atlanta Journal–Constitution. He didn't show up, so the Gwinnett police put out a warrant for his arrest.

A week later, Owens was captured in Shreveport, Louisiana, and extradited back to Gwinnett County. His bail was set at $50,000, which Owens could not post.

Marrying women, leaving them broke

The wives of Anthony Owens kept telling the same story: He swept into their lives, married them, then took their money.

• Gwen Robinson married Owens in 2002. "He leaves you destitute," Robinson told the Atlanta Journal–Constitution. "He passes himself off as a bishop. But he steals and makes you buy things for him."

• Shirley Rhodes of Tennessee married Owens in November, 2001. "I lost everything when I was with him," Rhodes told the Atlanta Journal–Constitution. "I was homeless for a year and it took some time for me to get back on my feet."

• Paulette Miller of Tennessee married Owens in January, 2001. Miller–Owens moved to Texas with Owens, where he wanted to start a church, according to the Atlanta Journal–Constitution. The church never became a reality, and Miller–Owens returned to Tennessee after she ran out of money. She has a son with Owens.

• Mattie Noland of Alabama married Owens in 1999. "They called him the preacher man. He's a smooth talker," Noland told the Atlanta Journal–Constitution. "When I married him I had five cars and a house. When he got through with me, I was dead broke."

Six months after Noland married Owens, sheriffs from Tuscaloosa, Alabama had a warrant for her arrest. She was accused of passing $50,000 in bad checks. It turned out that Owens had taken Noland's checkbook, and had another woman writing the bad checks.

Several other women who had married Anthony Owens declined to cooperate with investigators.

Owens tells his story

The story of Anthony Owens and his eight wives was picked up by media all over the United States. Newspapers such as the Philadelphia Daily News and the Star Tribune of Casper, Wyoming ran articles. Four of the wives appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, and several also appeared on the Montel Williams Show.

Owens wanted to tell his side of the story. So in a jailhouse interview with the Atlanta Journal–Constitution, he denied that he ever intended to hurt the women.

"People think that I just went around marrying women, that I just married them to hurt them," he said. "This was something that was based on my religion and not just me going out to hurt and marry women. I want the world to know the truth."

Owens claimed that his mother died when he was 12, and he was searching for a mother figure. As proof, he noted that the women he married were older than he was.

Then he said he did not believe in divorce because he had become a minister and was studying the Mormon faith. "Their book showed me how it was okay to marry without getting a divorce," Owens told the newspaper. "I was misled in the spiritual aspect of life. I was thrown off–track." (Official Mormon doctrine abandoned polygamy in 1890.)

Found guilty of bigamy

Owens was arrested for bigamy, but police said they did not have enough evidence to press fraud charges. Two companies, however, had filed civil suits in Gwinnett County, Georgia, against Owens and his New Dominion Churches corporation for non–payment of bills. Plus, while Owens was in Texas, he contracted for services—printing, limousines, bodyguards—without bothering to pay for them.

Another Atlanta church was concerned that Owens may have scammed it, the Atlanta Journal–Constitution reported. Owens preached at the church, promised it a $200,000 grant, and asked the church for its nonprofit number. He never delivered any money.

On March 17, 2004, Anthony Owens was in the Gwinnett County Superior Court before Judge Homer M. Stark. Owens pled guilty to one count of bigamy. Following the recommendation of the prosecutor, Stark gave Owens a six–year sentence—two years in state prison, four on probation. Owens was also ordered to make $570 in restitution to Gwinnett County to cover the cost of extraditing him from Louisiana.

Epilogue

Anthony Owens was released from prison on parole on November 5, 2005.

The day before his release, he was interviewed again by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He claimed that he made mistakes, but is not a con man.

In February, 2007, Lovefraud received an e-mail from a woman who became involved with Owens in 2006. "He claimed to have a boat load of money coming in from a movie deal, and that he was in the process of buying a house and a church in Tennessee," she wrote. The woman also said that when she told Owens she was pregnant, he disappeared.

In April, 2007, Owens was in jail again, charged with parole violation. He had left the state of Georgia and moved back to Tennessee to re-establish his traveling ministry. And in less than 18 months, Owens proposed to four more women.