Accused bigamist arrested in Flagler
A Bunnell man who’s a registered sex offender was arrested Thursday after Flagler County deputies learned he has two wives.
Paul Stout, 49, of Papaya Street, was charged with bigamy and remained jailed at the Flagler County Inmate Facility on $1,500 bail Thursday afternoon.
According to arrest reports, Stout married a woman in Flagler County in June 2013 but never dissolved his marriage with Tracie Stout, 43, from Indianapolis with whom he tied the knot in 1996.
Court records show Tracie Stout first reported the allegations to Flagler County deputies in August 2013, and investigators charged him with bigamy a month later. Prosecutors later dismissed that case.
According to reports from Paul Stout’s first arrest, Tracie Stout told officers they were married in Marion County, Indiana in October 1996 and had been separated since June 2005. She said she discovered he’d remarried a woman named Lisa through Facebook. When Tracie confronted Paul Stout about it, she said he told her he filed for divorce while living in Kern County, California, but she said she found no evidence of that in court records. She said he agreed to send her copies of the paperwork but later changed his phone number.
Deputies questioned Paul Stout at his Palm Coast home in August 2013 and he also told them he’d filed for an absentia divorce in California. He said he was waiting for a copy of the divorce papers to arrive but never provided investigators with copies of the documents. Tracy Stout, however, brought Paul and Lisa Stout’s marriage license to the Sheriff’s Office in September 2013 along with an email from the clerk of court’s office in Kern County, California that indicated there were no records of a divorce filing from Paul Stout.
Deputies arrested Paul Stout seven days later but prosecutors held the bigamy charge for further instructions, according to court records.
Flagler County detectives reopened the investigation in February and spoke to Lisa Ann O’Connor, Paul Stout’s second wife. She told officers she didn’t know his first marriage hadn’t dissolved when she married him in 2013 and said she wanted to pursue charges against him as well.
Paul Stout also was arrested in January 2015 and charged with 10 counts of possession of child pornography. Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents raided his Palm Coast home in December 2014 and seized a cellphone, two laptops and a hard drive. They performed a forensic analysis and found numerous child porn pics on his laptop along with 350 downloaded child porn files, an affidavit stated.
Stout pleaded no contest to two of the counts in August 2015 and Circuit Judge David Walsh sentenced him to five years of probation and ordered him to register as a sex offender. Stout has twice since been arrested for violating his sex offender probation — once in November 2015 and again in December 2016. He served more than six months in prison for one of the violations between April and November 2016, Florida Department of Corrections records indicate.
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