Francis Van Wie

On January 23, 1945, the police announced they were looking for Van Wie, who the press dubbed the "Carline Casanova", for three bigamy warrants and possible impersonation of authority, as one of his wives reported he was away from home so much "because he was an FBI man." Van Wie had disappeared from his job a week earlier on January 16. His bigamy was discovered after Voloshin (then thought to be his fifth wife) filed a suit for divorce; she then learned that he had married two times in 1944 alone. at the time, he was charged with having nine wives, although records indicated he had been married as many as twelve times since 1913, having divorced one wife, annulled another marriage, and survived the death of a third. Around this time, Stanton Delaplane, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, gave him his most enduring nickname, calling Van Wie the "Ding Dong Daddy of the D-car Line", after the song "I'm a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas" popularized by Louis Armstrong. Although Delaplane's nickname gave him credit for serving the D Geary-Van Ness line, that appellation had been chosen for its alliteration. Later research indicated that Van Wie probably worked the 22-Fillmore line. Delaplane won a 1946 National Headliner Award for his coverage of Van Wie.

When he was arrested, Van Wie stated in his defense that he had been seeking "a happy home and contentment" However, several wives reported that his ardor cooled quickly after a few weeks of marriage—Van Wie would become abusive and jealous, then abandon their homes; one wife stated flatly that "Frank's a card in the parlor, a gentleman on the street, and a beast in the home." Voloshin, who he married in 1941 or 1942 Both Voloshin and Van Wie claimed the other was physically abusive to them. Van Wie was represented by defense attorney James Toner; another prominent local attorney, Jake Ehrlich, was also present to represent the "Ding Dong Daddy defense fund", provided by wealthy donors who were amused by his story. The defense fund paid for his bail and his stay in Room 707 of the Padre Hotel, where he resided while awaiting his court date. On February 1 Van Wie said he would change his plea to guilty and ask for probation; Judge Cunningham instead held him over for trial on three counts of bigamy, increasing his bail to cash or bond, remarking that since it was unlikely he could afford that amount, "it would be wise, perhaps, if he spent some days in jail, for some serious thinking."

The jury was seated for his trial on March 19 and Van Wie made a double plea of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury found him guilty after ten minutes of deliberation on March 22, 1945. The prosecution asserted he had married Sadie Levin in February 1941, then subsequently married Myrtle Wheeler, Mary Bergman, and Evelyn Brown within fifteen months between 1943 and 1944 without first divorcing Levin. Van Wie's defense team did not contest the 1943–44 marriages, but appealed the verdict, saying the marriage to Levin was itself invalid as a bigamous marriage. When he married Levin, he promised he would divorce an earlier wife named Mabel and disappeared for six weeks to do so, saying he was headed for Reno and sending her a newspaper clipping proving he had divorced Mabel; Levin later found out he had gone to Sacramento instead and when she accused him of lying, he said that Mabel had died before he married Levin.

After a separate trial, the same jury found him sane on April 3 after deliberating for 55 minutes. During his insanity trial, he testified that his latest (twelfth or thirteenth) wife, Evelyn Brown, was the "only real love of [his] life" and his defense relied on several incidents of head trauma due to a mule kick, an axe blow, and a fall from a smokestack. However, the three psychiatrists that testified were summarized as concluding he was "slightly on the psychopathic side but not insane." Evelyn sent him an Easter card during the second trial, which made him "very happy"; although she had forgiven him, she said she would never go back to him.

He was fined and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment by Judge Herbert Kaufman on April 5, who ordered the three ten-year sentences to be served consecutively. The Court of Appeals of California (First Dist., Div. One) rejected the appeal and upheld the guilty and sane verdicts in December: "If [the defendant] establishes the invalidity of the prior marriage by proving a valid earlier marriage and does not establish that this earlier marriage was dissolved prior to the dates of the alleged bigamous marriages, he is still guilty of bigamy." after good behavior and a plea for leniency from Judge Kaufman. Upon his release, he asked his defense attorney, James Toner, to check if all his prior marriages had been concluded.

After release In September 1949, he was married again (for the fourteenth time) to Mrs. Mary Aba by Judge Kaufman, who previously had asked that Van Wie abstain from marriage for five years as a condition of his release. At the time, Van Wie said "this is the real thing and this is going to be the last one for me", but a month later, Aba complained to Judge Kaufman that Van Wie was simultaneously too amorous and stingy; by February 1950, she told the Judge that she planned to file for divorce: "Our love nest is over and I'm moving out."

In August 1952, Van Wie again made headlines for suspecting that he had again committed bigamy with his recent fifteenth marriage to Amelia Pritchard upon learning his divorce with Aba had never completed; He was arrested a week later for bigamy while appearing in the show "My True Love Life", staged at the El Rey burlesque theater in Oakland. It turned out that Pritchard was actually his sixteenth wife: after Aba, a fifteenth wife, Martha Moyle of Long Beach, learned from the prior week's news story that he had married Pritchard in Las Vegas without divorcing Moyle first. When he was arrested, Van Wie blurted "All I can say—" onstage before his attorney escorted him to waiting police officers, and he was forced to stand trial again. Van Wie's marriages continued to gather press coverage in later years, including in 1953, when he simultaneously annulled his fourteenth (Aba) and sixteenth (Pritchard) marriages. Authorities arrested Van Wie in April 1959 for violating his probation after discovering he had married his eighteenth wife in August 1958; at the time, he was being pursued for abandoning his seventeenth wife.

After that, Van Wie's marital status was not publicized and he died in 1973.

Legacy In 1997, the Cherry Poppin' Daddies released their album Zoot Suit Riot with the song "Ding Dong Daddy of the D-car Line" inspired by Van Wie.