KEY POINTS:
It was a Sunday afternoon in January when a female detective knocked on the door and asked to speak to her, in private, about her first husband.
He had committed suicide more than five years before, and with his body believed to have been washed out to sea, the woman thought they had found some remains.
She was remarried, and their two children, boys now aged 13 and 9, were getting on with their lives as much as possible.
Then came the blow: the death was faked, and he was alive and well, living under a new name in Christchurch.
"I just lost it, screaming: 'What am I going to tell my kids?'
"I had to sit the kids down in the first place and tell them their father had died. How was I going to tell them that all this time he was playing some sort of stupid sick joke and that he's really alive?"
The man had staged his suicide at Port Waikato's Sunset Beach in November 2002 and been caught out after applying for a passport in his real name.
There were a lot of questions. But the woman could not delay telling the children - he had been charged by police and was appearing in court the next day.
She got the man's teenage daughter from an earlier marriage over to her home and sat the three children down on the couch.
"I didn't know how to do it. I just burst into tears and said, 'look I'm sorry you guys but your father has been found alive'."
The teenage daughter "just screamed and screamed and screamed".
The nine-year-old, who was three when his father disappeared but knew he had a real father who died, was placid.
The 13-year-old ran across the road and was throwing rocks saying: "I hate him, I hate him."
"It just went on and on and on," the woman said. "It is the hardest thing I have ever had to do."
The couple had split six months before his disappearance. He had gone to extensive efforts to stage his suicide, telling her in advance he was going to kill himself to which she said she laughed and said he "didn't have the balls to do it".
He even sent his grandmother flowers on the day he disappeared.
After an extensive search, police and the family agreed he had died.
In 2004, the woman had him legally declared dead so she could claim the two insurance policies worth more than $1.12 million.
The declaration was also closure, and all three children went to the beach for a funeral service.
"The children made boats and canoes and put letters in them to their father, telling him how much they loved him and they were going to miss him. The daughter sent flowers and a note and they sent them out to sea - where he supposedly went under the water."
The woman has been publicly cleared by police as an "innocent agent" in the man's fraud, but says she is aware of speculation that she was "in on it", such as in the British case of John Darwin, who made headlines around the world after turning up in December last year.
Darwin's wife Anne had gone along with his supposed death in a canoeing accident when he was really living in their home and the house next door.
The woman became emotional describing the funeral service and said: "Would I put my children through that if I was in on it too? Of course I wouldn't."
The woman said headlines about the $1.12 million insurance payout had become an "issue".
She explained how the first $121,681 policy was mortgage insurance and had to be used for that. The later $1 million policy had $300,000 divided evenly into trusts for the two boys and the daughter from his first marriage as according to his will.
She said the remaining $700,000 mainly went towards a freehold home, debts to pay off, and a major legal bill from having him declared dead that also involved hiring private investigators.
The woman said her modest weatherboard home "is certainly not a millionaire's house" and will be left to the three children when she dies.
"I'd rather not have gone through all this. I don't care about the money. We were happy before surviving on a solo mother's benefit."
"We had nothing. We had the basics ... I bought a washing machine, a dryer. A car, but not a brand new one. It's easy to get rid of that much money."
She said publicity about the reappearance and payout had seen "people ringing up and wanting donations - they see the big figure in the paper and think I've got that now".
The woman's efforts to have him legally declared dead also appear to have led to him being caught.
She said he was obviously unaware of it when applying for a passport under his real name assuming she would have to wait the usual seven years. A check by Internal Affairs revealed his deception.
"He's clever. You don't stay hidden for over five years without being very clever. He was aiming to get to Australia and further away."
The woman said they had learned the man, a cabinet-maker who set up a business in Christchurch, had been coming to work in Auckland, just a short drive from both the teenage daughter and the boys. "He could have found us. He could have come to his children. But he didn't."
The woman was angry he had not admitted the charges until after she had to give evidence against him at a pre-trial depositions hearing on Thursday last week, facing him for the first time.
She had initially come away "thinking I'd won something for the children".
She had since became angry at the extensive suppression order protecting his identity and the decision to give him bail ahead of his sentencing in July.
She said their identities had leaked out among her community but he was being protected from the public glare.
"I know nobody is supposed to know my name but I go shopping and I'm so paranoid that people are looking at me going 'there's that woman, she's got all that money' or 'those poor children'. His name should be out there."
She was upset that some of her evidence had been suppressed, and that so had some details of of the crime, including the "absolutely disgusting" method he used to obtain his new identity.
The tears he shed in front of her before his surprise guilty pleas mid-way through her evidence had sickened her, as had seeing his lawyer Barry Hart describe how he had a tough time in jail.
"He's only crying because he got caught. How much crying have I had from my children in the last few years?
"So what if he's been in prison. There's a lot of other people who go into prison for worse things than what he's done and they survive. To me he deserves everything he gets." The woman said what he had really done was tantamount to "child abuse".
"He should do a year in jail for every year he has been away from the kids' lives. For what he's wasted, for what he's put them through."
The woman said the man had sent letters to the children but she had read them and found "them full of bullshit".
"He is only writing them because he got caught. That's not love as far as I'm concerned so how dare he say he loves these kids."
The woman described how the teenage daughter had come to her late last year and asked if all the children could go away "as a family".
They did, and had a wonderful time, she said. "Then all this comes out. I'm going to say it again - it's child abuse."
