A man in the US married as many as 105 women between 1949 and 1981 without ever getting divorced, earning himself the title of most bigamist marriages.
According to the Guinness World Records, Giovanni Vigliotto’s wives did not know each other and neither did they know about the man they got married to.
Vigliotto married over a hundred women across 27 different states in the US and 14 other countries. He used a fake identity each time when he married someone.
His real name wasn’t Giovanni Vigliotto as he was using that name when he married his last wife. He would propose to his wives on the first date and would decamp with their money and possessions.
Vigliotto then sold the items he stole from his wives at flea markets where he would look for his potential new victims.
However, things went bad for Vigliotto when his last victim Sharon Clark decided to take matters into her own hands and found the man herself by tracking him down. He was arrested on 28 December, 1981
The man was charged with bigamy and fraud for marrying Clark while still being married to Patrician Ann Gardiner.
“The police have this thing all wrong. I don’t recall half a dozen times when I had to ask anyone to marry me. It was always the women who popped the question,” Vigliotto said in an interview.
He also said that he treated the women he married well. “If the rest of the men in the United States don’t treat women that way, then I’m sorry for the women in this country,” he added.
Giovanni Vigliotto claimed that his real name was Nikolai Peruskov during his trial in 1983. He also listed 50 aliases he used while he was involved in fraud and also the names of his 105 wives with their addresses.
The man was sentenced to 34 years in prison and fined $336,000. Vigliotto spent the remaining eight years of his life in Arizona State Prison before passing away in 1991 at the age of 61 due to a brain haemorrhage.
