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I've just watched the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode Three Wives Too Many from 1964.

In it, a man has a wife in four different USA states, traveling between them constantly and keeping them secret from one another. Apparently, the punishment was extremely harsh -- death, even?! -- for "bigamy", so he's very scared of this becoming revealed.

Yet he is legally married to four different females.

How is this possible? How can there not have been some sort of central authority keeping track of this, especially if it's not only illegal but an extremely serious crime? Were the different (even nearby) USA "states" so extremely detached as to not share this kind of basic information?

Maybe it's only silly TV nonsense, but they make it seem like the different states are almost like different parallel worlds. I may also have misunderstood the part where one of the wives threatens him with revealing the whole setup, but she seems to suggest that he will be executed for bigamy.

B. E.
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Pat W. Feb 20 '22 at 15:38
  • My father had something like 20 different driver's licenses in a dozen different states under at least three different names. He was able to maintain this fraud up until at least 1979. – RBarryYoung Feb 20 '22 at 16:10
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    OTOH, Bigamy as a crime is generally treated as a type of fraud (possibly tax fraud), it was never punishable by death under the law. However what an angry mob might do to an exposed bigamist is another story, and there may well be cases where they were murdered for such. There have certainly been cases of mob killings of members of the Church of Latter Days Saints ("Mormons") from their early years (pre-1900, mostly) and this is usually attributed to the general American public's aversion to polygamy at the time. – RBarryYoung Feb 20 '22 at 16:19
  • Bit of a spoiler, but the “punishable by death” crime would have been the murder of his wives, he wasn’t guilty but there would have been enough circumstantial evidence for a conviction. Interestingly enough, if he had married the other women in a jurisdiction that allowed multiple wives (obviously outside the US), he may have been immune to prosecution in the US for bigamy (although not of course for the suppose murders) – jmoreno Feb 21 '22 at 01:45

4 Answers4

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I'm thirding the "very plausible" on the disconnect.

Something to keep in mind is that the US is big. Really big.

It's one of the top things people who aren't familiar with the US just don't grasp. The time to drive from Los Angeles, California to New York City, New York is only about 25 minutes less than the drive from Lisbon, Portugal to Moscow. The time it takes you to drive through multiple countries in Europe won't even get you out of some of our states. You could dedicate an entire day to your cross country trip just getting between El Paso, Texas and Houston, Texas. While there are a few small states, the end result is that most states are disconnected, in the sense that you mean, just by virtue of distance alone. The reasons mentioned in the other answers--fiercely independent states with all of these records administered locally, and lack of substantive computer database technology for several more decades--reinforces this. But physical disconnection is itself a powerful force here, and has long contributed to significant differences in culture and law between states. Not quite the cultural and legal disparity between, say, Spain and Russia, but enough to be noticeable.

For example, Ted Bundy went on a seven state killing spree in the mid 1970's, racking up 20 confirmed and 30 confessed murders, assisted by his knowledge that states rarely ever communicated information about murders and missing persons to each other. When he was at last arrested for good in Florida, it took a lot of time for authorities to even know who they had on their hands and the severity of his crimes, due to this lack of sharing (and his using a false name; which they figured out was false fairly quickly, but that still didn't tell them his real name). These killings helped to spur states to create better information sharing agreements and cooperation with Federal authorities, but point being: even murder wasn't something states felt was worth keeping other states informed of as late as the 70's.

zibadawa timmy
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    Physical disconnection was even worse in 1964 than it is today, because aviation was still heavily regulated, the Interstates were still under construction, and transportation in general was very underdeveloped by modern standards. – Kevin Feb 18 '22 at 05:35
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    Fun fact: If you want to drive from Houston to Los Angeles, by the time you reach El Paso you're more than halfway to the destination. I took my family on an extended work trip / vacation to a conference very close to Disneyland. I got to go to the conference while the rest of the family went to Disneyland. We decided to make it a driving trip rather than flying. By the time we got to El Paso, our kids were saying "Can we go home now?" – David Hammen Feb 18 '22 at 10:02
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    Not only were states disconnected, even agencies within the federal government were. That's why the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11, to coordinate among many departments related to safeguarding Americans. – Barmar Feb 18 '22 at 14:54
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    Size is very relevant (+1 for that). But equally important is that the Americans are allergic to central registries of the population. I have tried, in vain, to explain how my native Finland (size of Colorado in both area and population) managed it more than a century ago. What I have a hard time grasping is that the Americans sincerely seem to believe that such a registry is only a tool for a totalitarian regime, when, in my opinion, the exact opposite is true. – Jyrki Lahtonen Feb 19 '22 at 18:03
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    USA is smaller than Europe. See this Quora comment https://www.quora.com/As-a-British-person-visiting-the-U-S-what-is-the-most-astounding-thing-someone-over-there-has-said-to-you/answer/Marcus-Lasance?comment_id=171339060&comment_type=2. In fact, Europe is bigger than Canada as well (and Canada is bigger than USA). – d-b Feb 20 '22 at 00:16
  • @JyrkiLahtonen The american IBM has plenty of experience with providing population registries for totalitarian countries (doing that literally as soon as the technology was available). – Luaan Feb 20 '22 at 08:22
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    @Luaan That may be the case, but is totally irrelevant. Totalitarian countries also use cars, but the existence of cars in a country does not make it totalitarian. – Jyrki Lahtonen Feb 20 '22 at 08:28
  • I wouldn't put too much weight on the Ted Bundy case;there was a serial killer in soviet Czechoslovakia who murdered 7 women (with 4 more attempted murders and 14 rapes) over a tiny area round one bigger local city. He would have been caught quickly and easily... if the police communicated with each other, or if they informed the public about the case (of course, socialist state meant that noone was allowed to say there was a serial killer on the loose - that was a "capitalist problem"), they would have caught him easily. As it was, he was eventually apprehended for petty theft. – Luaan Feb 20 '22 at 08:32
  • @Luaan Lots of places, including the US, have serial killers to this day, but simply being one wasn't the point. The point was how that particular serial killer got away with it for so long: because state authorities largely didn't consider sharing murder and missing peoples reports with other states to be worthwhile at the time (so as to contrast with the seemingly less important matter of communicating marriages). Your case is basically the same issue, taken to the extremes of much smaller areas. – zibadawa timmy Feb 20 '22 at 18:24
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    @d-b Which actually sort of reinforces the point: the amount of connection you should expect between US states should start at what you'd expect between the separate nations of the EU. It'll be more connected in the end due to having a stronger federal system in place for longer, with (mostly) one language and starting with (mostly) Britain as its cultural and legal base. But moving away from "very different nations" should get you a better understanding than trying to move away from "states (or state-equivalents) within specific European nations". – zibadawa timmy Feb 20 '22 at 18:33
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    That said, I always find size comparisons of nations, continents, etc. to be kind of fascinating. As I, and I think a lot of people, were taught global geography primarily through projections that result in almost nothing looking the size it ought to (Alaska is way bigger than Texas, Greenland's huge, etc.). So the factual reality of distances and area has this perpetually shocking quality to it, no matter how often I hear it, because my brain is always using those distorted maps as its starting point. – zibadawa timmy Feb 20 '22 at 18:36
  • Seconding @zibadawatimmy's comment. It is almost always more relevant to compare individual EU member nations to individual US states, and the federal layer of US to the level of EU. For example the grassroots level mistrust many Americans have towards other parts of the union (or towards the federal government) is easier to comprehend when you compare it with similar attitudes within the EU. – Jyrki Lahtonen Feb 20 '22 at 20:37
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Were USA states really this disconnected in 1964

Yes.

Indeed they still are quite disconnected by the standards of other federated nations. US states have always jealousy guarded their autonomy. Marriage has always been a state responsibility and, in some states, the responsibility is passed onto local government. Even today there is no national register of marriages and there may not even be statewide ones.

Notwithstanding, in 1964, marriage records were not computerised. The only record of your marriage was a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. If there are 4 pieces of paper in 4 different filing cabinets in 4 different states (or counties), how would anybody know?

Was bigamy really punished by death?

The United States, due to the presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has had more experience with polygamy than most western nations. However, it has never been punishable by death.

david
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Dale M
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  • Forgive me if I'm all wrong about this, but didn't they even in the late 19th century (1800s, that is) use primitive computers to calculate taxes and stuff like that? I mean the government -- not every home, of course. 1964 seems very late for not having computers in the government. – B. E. Feb 17 '22 at 23:23
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    It took till about 1980 for computers to reach all areas of the government as this little booklet tells us. in 1950, there were 2 computers in the whole US government, in 1980 it were 15800 - which means many branches still had very limited computer access and those machines were still mostly restricted to experts. And a 1980s era computer was still about the size of a large room in many cases, with terminals in the whole building. – Trish Feb 17 '22 at 23:43
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    @B.E. To use a computer for "calculating taxes" is one thing. To use it to match data records is quire another. Even now, consider what information is typically gathered for a marriage record: The names and dates of birth of the parties; their current addresses; possibly the names of their parents. None of those, alone or in combination, are reliable match targets. A unique Id such as an SSN or a driver license # would be, but I believe that those are not routinely collected even now in the US, and surely were not in 1964. And let's not forget possible false names. [...] – David Siegel Feb 18 '22 at 00:17
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    FWIW, there is still no national registry of either marriages or divorces in the United States in 2022, notwithstanding modern IT tech. There aren't even state registries that include all legal marriages in every state, since common law marriage is allowed in a number of U.S. states. This is sometimes a practical issue when, for example, someone got divorced in an unexpected county and you have to prove that it happened. – ohwilleke Feb 18 '22 at 00:34
  • @B.E. [...] Even if one had all the marriage rerecords from say 1930-1964 digitized on a modern DB server, could one take the info on a 1964 marriage license application and get a reliable indication of whether this is a bigamous marriage? I think not. Too many false positives, too easy to evade a match by using a false name. In any case I don't think such automated checks are routinely done even now, and I am confident that they were not in 1964. – David Siegel Feb 18 '22 at 01:23
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    @B.E. They had simple adding machines in the 19th century. These got progressively more sophisticated. What they certainly didn't have in 1964 was large, fast, reliable storage. Until you've got that, you can't run lookups on a database with 100 million entries. Cost-effective hard disks were a prerequisite for this. Mag tape or other earlier storage doesn't cut it. – Graham Feb 18 '22 at 08:37
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    @B.E.: In the 1800s, "computer" meant a job, not a machine. – user2357112 Feb 18 '22 at 09:53
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    @B.E. - they did have computers in government in 1964, but those computers were used for, as the name says, computing. Those were the first applications of computers - first military, e.g. used for breaking codes during WW2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer), then civilian, for calculating e.g. taxes - because these computers could perform calculations faster and more accurately than humans, but the storage capacity was still extremely limited. – rob74 Feb 18 '22 at 10:06
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    @B.E. Keep in mind that the very futuristic Mother Of All Demos occurred in 1968. The world was very disconnected until the 1980s, and remained rather disconnected until this millennium. – David Hammen Feb 18 '22 at 10:14
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    Elaborating on the point by @user2357112supportsMonica , computers were predomoninately male human beings until the early 20th century. The first world war made people look at females as possibly working as (human) computers. Females were equally capable of performing computations and they were willing to work for much lower wages than were their male counterparts. By the 1950s the field was almost entirely underpaid females. The career of being a (human) computer started to vanish in the mid to late 1960s. – David Hammen Feb 18 '22 at 10:33
  • @Graham: Mag tape wouldn't be adequate if one needed to process many queries individually, but would be sufficient if it were acceptable to e.g. gather together all of the lookup and update requests that are received before noon, run them all against a tape-based database, and then later run all requests received between noon and 4:30pm and at 4:30 run all of those against a tape-based database. – supercat Feb 18 '22 at 23:30
  • @ohwilleke: although the subset of divorced people who owe but don't pay child support are reported (by agencies in each state) to the federal Treasury to be collected from any tax refunds -- excepting the second and third (but not first) COVID 'impact payments', which many people don't realize were legally advance refunds of projected income tax credits. – dave_thompson_085 Feb 19 '22 at 00:04
  • @dave_thompson_085 Even that isn't the complete subset of divorced people who owe but don't pay child support, only the subset of those people for whom the government has paid welfare benefits in which case the government assists in child support collection. Married filing jointly and married filing separately returns are a much more comprehensive database of married people at the IRS but also not complete and not confirmed from source documentation. There are also survivor's benefit databases at the Social Security Administration, but again not comprehensive. – ohwilleke Feb 19 '22 at 01:07
  • Incidentally, there are a handful of cases where multiple spouses of the same person at the same time (one legally married and another a putative spouse who was deceived by a bigamous husband in almost all cases) receive Social Security benefits at the same time. – ohwilleke Feb 19 '22 at 01:09
  • I have an ancestor who apparently was a Catholic bigamist, in the first half of the 19th century. He abandoned his first wife soon after she joined the LDS church, wandered back back to his native Rhineland, remarried there, and then brought his second wife to the United States. He served in the military about the time if the Black Hawk War (possibly in a recruitment band), and also in the Civil War. – david Jul 01 '22 at 18:02
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Yes, the Disconnect is Plausible

The US has always been quite localized in the collection and retention of vital statistics. Even today there is no central repository or database of such information; when federal officials require proof of identity they ask for a state document certified by a state or local authority. Many birth certificates even now are certified by a local county or municipal clerk, not a state official, and there may be no state-wide database of births.

For marriages, I recently had to provide a marriage certificate to a federal authority. They wanted an original document, certified by the local authority. There was and is certainly no US-wide database of marriages to consult. In 1964, I very much doubt whether there would have been any state-wide files, and even if there were, how would they be compared? Neither the SSN nor any other nation-wide identifier was routinely used on a marriage record at that time, and names are far from unique. Even if there had been some sort of national file of marriages, there would have been no practical way to determine whether a person seeking to enter into a marriage had previously married in some other state, even under the same name, let alone under a different name. One would have to know first the locality, names, and approximate date of a possible previous marriage to be able to do a records search to confirm it.

The traditional common-law way of preventing plural marriage was “posting the banns”, that is, announcing in church a planned marriage for each of several weekly services prior to the date scheduled for the marriage. This worked when most people did not move around much, and an attendee would likely know of any previous marriage. Even in the middle ages, such people as merchants, peddlers, and traveling laborers were not detected by this system if they entered into a bigamous marriage.

I will have to check on the possible penalty for bigamy in the 1960s. It might be that the more plausible threat was of private violence from one or another bride's relatives. A Wikipedia article says US penalties for bigamy are “up to five years in prison” but cites no source and gives no date.

TRiG
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David Siegel
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    "The US has always been quite localized in the collection and retention of vital statistics" – One of the major pieces of "evidence" cited by many Birthers (i.e. conspiracy theorists who believe that Barack Obama was not born in the US) was the fact that his birth certificate looked different than theirs, which they took as "proof" that is was faked. Of course, the real explanation is simply that most of the conspiracy theorists weren't born in Hawaiʻi, and since every State has its own birth certificate, of course, a Hawaiʻian birth certificate looks different than, say, a Texan one. – Jörg W Mittag Feb 18 '22 at 10:00
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    This is a somewhat well-known real-world example of just how federalist this system is, where the States don't even agree on the title or format of basic legal documents. – Jörg W Mittag Feb 18 '22 at 10:01
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    My mother recently moved from one state to another and had to deal with her new state not accepting the marriage certificate issued by the old state. It was a giant hassle. For people who live in, say, France, the idea that you have to get new health insurance because you moved across a state border would sound crazy. – WaterMolecule Feb 18 '22 at 17:25
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    @WaterMolecule not only might you need to get different health insurance when you cross state lines, the regulations around coverage and eligibility can be completely different. One of the big challenges of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was trying to impose a national standard on a system made up of 50+ different sets of rules. – Seth R Feb 18 '22 at 20:17
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    How about centralized voter registration? Not in the USA. It's a crime for one person to vote in two different states in a federal election, but how can this crime be detected? – Phil Freedenberg Feb 18 '22 at 20:38
  • @PhilFreedenberg it is a crime to vote in a jurisdiction (state, city, county, ward, etc.) in which you are not a legal resident. You can only be a resident in one place at a time, it is up to the jurisdiction to determine if you are eligible to vote there. If you try to vote in a state where you are not eligible, you risk being prosecuted there. – Seth R Feb 18 '22 at 22:12
  • Jörg, some bizarre evidence. If I faked a birth certificate I would make it look exactly like any other. – gnasher729 Feb 18 '22 at 23:06
  • @Seth R While itis true that a person can have only one legal domicile, it can easily be the case that any of several places could qualify as a domiclile, and only the person's choice defines which i used. If a person (improperly) cleaims each of several places to be a domicile, it would take considerable comparison of records to determine which one was actually valid. It is not something that a given jurisdiction can determine without consulting the records of others (or a central DB if one exists). Indeed that could be a good question here. – David Siegel Feb 19 '22 at 04:22
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    @gnasher729: No-one ever accused conspiracy theorists of being clever. – Jörg W Mittag Feb 19 '22 at 23:55
  • I think the main penalty in regards to bigamy is having more than one wife. Something which to me is a fate worse than death. – Neil Meyer Feb 20 '22 at 09:51
  • I guess some bigamists may welcome the death penalty if it could only make the nagging stop. – Neil Meyer Feb 20 '22 at 09:53
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How is this possible? How can there not have been some sort of central authority keeping track of this, especially if it's not only illegal but an extremely serious crime? Were the different (even nearby) USA "states" so extremely detached as to not share this kind of basic information?

Other answers and comments have focused on the technology aspect, but it is primarily an issue of government organization and legal rules, rather than one of technology.

This wouldn't have happened in France, even in the 19th century (i.e. post-French Revolution after marriage laws were standardized in the French Civil Code and in related bureaucratic centralizing reforms initiated by Napoleon). There, all of the marriage and divorce and name change records of a person are maintained at the local clerk's office of the local government in the place you were born, and there is no counterpart to the notion of "common law marriage" that exists in a few residual common law jurisdictions including a number of U.S. states.

This old fashioned paper records in a file cabinet method worked because each person had only one designated file cabinet. If you tried to get married under a false name and the local clerk's office where the person of that name purported to have been born didn't have a birth certificate for that person, the marriage would have been promptly annulled by operation of law even if no one complained, and a fraud investigation would have been commenced.

Likewise, if a French citizen got married a second time, without the proper paperwork showing that their existing marriage had been terminated by death or divorce filed with the local clerk's office in the place that they were born, the marriage would also have been annulled by government officials even if no one complained, and a bigamy prosecution would have been begun as a matter of course.

In a sense, this method of personal record keeping was even decentralized. There was no single central databased of birth, death, marriage and divorce records for most of French history, although there may be one now in very recent times developed long after WWII.

But, while the record keeping was decentralized, it was still highly coordinated in an efficient pre-modern bureaucratic system.

The Japanese family registry system of the late 19th century and beyond would have been similarly effective and efficient in a low technology era by similar means (except that polygamy wasn't prohibited there until after WWII, so this particular problem wouldn't have arisen).

ohwilleke
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    It works the same way in Germany and even in such a huge organisation as the Catholic Church. It is not really complicated to ensure a (mostly) correct register of martial status, if you say to everyone who wants to marry: "First give me a current certificate from your home town/parish." And then give this office notice of the marriage. – K-HB Feb 19 '22 at 15:13
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    It would have some loopholes, of course. If word gets around that the clerk's office in the town of Trifouillis-les-Oies has burned down, then anybody who wants to hide their identity can claim to be from Trifouillis-les-Oies. – Nate Eldredge Feb 19 '22 at 20:22
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    (+1) @NateEldredge You don't get to do that just like that. In that case, you need a court to issue a decision vouching that you were indeed born in Trifouillis-les-Oies, based on the testimony of three witnesses and explaining how the original registry disappeared (that's called an acte de notoriété). The court can also conduct additional investigations if necessary. I actually know someone in just that situation (born in Kinshasa). The real loophole here is that you can get a judge in another country to do it and the integrity of the judicial system in, e.g., the DRC is debatable. – Relaxed Feb 20 '22 at 17:22