California Divorce a Long Time Waiting in the Wings!
A strange California divorce case reveals the importance of having an experienced divorce lawyer on your side throughout the process to make sure that everything is final. After filing for divorce in 1984 and being separated from his wife Lois for 30 years, John van Tienen learned last August that his divorce is still pending. Van Tienen was contacted on Tuesday by a Riverside County Superior Court clerk saying that the matter will now have to go before a judge because of a statutory limitation, according to an interesting story in The Californian.
The story said that John and Lois van Tienen married in Las Vegas in August 1975 and lived together as husband and wife for two years. While the couple had two children together, they separated in 1977. John officially filed for divorce seven years later and thought everything was finished later that year when he received a document which he mistook for a final divorce confirmation. Rather, the document was a notice of an interim judgment which gave the couple a waiting period before they could make the divorce final. Lawyers told The Californian that the waiting period was eliminated in the state in either 1985 or 1986.
In the 30 years that John van Tienen had separated from Lois, he lived in three states, had another child, and remarried and divorced in the mid-1990s. So how did van Tienen finally realize that he was still married to his first wife after all this time? After being injured in an auto accident last summer, van Tienen said that he decided to make sure that his affairs were in order in case he suffered another accident or illness. When he couldn’t find any documentation about his divorce from Lois, he contacted the court in Riverside and realized that it was never finalized.
Van Tienen blamed himself in the story for not “being on the ball” and failing to check that his divorce had been finalized. While he received some advice from a law firm in 1984, van Tienen acted as his own attorney and was responsible for filing all documents. The whereabouts of Lois van Tienen were not disclosed in the story.
