Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service with me Ashley Byrne.

This week we're looking back at the early 1980s when a court case about Bigamy gripped the United States.

I've been speaking to prosecutor Dave Stoller about his part in the trial of Giovanni Viglio

a notorious fraudster who claimed to have married more than a hundred women.

Overnight came a story from the United States of a man whose record of marital misdemeanors would

be hard to equal.

Bob Friend reports on this extraordinary case.

It has said society and presumably its female members in particular

needs to be protected from America's most audacious bigamist.

Oddly, Mr. Viglioto's 100 or so wives seemed fairly slow to take offense.

It was the 8th of February 1983,

and the trial in Phoenix, Arizona

of multiple bigamist and Comman Giovanni Viglioto

was finally coming to an end. After weeks of media

frenzy in a courtroom atmosphere that many described as a soap opera, the jury

delivered their guilty verdict. It didn't take them very long.

They were out, strikes me that it was not more than an hour.

It might have been a little less.

Dave Stoller was the Arizona prosecutor

who took on the case against Viglioto.

I felt that I was doing something that was very worthwhile.

I realized that other people laughed about it.

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