KEY POINTS:
The wife of the Auckland man who faked his own death leaving her to raise their two children says his deception is "child abuse".
And she says she has been pestered by people seeking "donations" after publicity about a $1 million insurance payout.
The woman has spoken publicly
for the first time, saying her former husband's re-appearance in January after more than five years had "psychologically wrecked" their sons, now aged 13 and 9.
Court suppressions mean they cannot be named or identified.
"I believe it is a form of child abuse," she told the Herald. "He should do a year in jail for every year he has been away from the kids' lives."
The man faked his own suicide at a Port Waikato beach in 2002, then lived under a new identity in Christchurch until he was uncovered and arrested in January.
The family claimed life insurance policies worth more than $1.12 million, but police have cleared the woman as an "innocent agent".
The man will be sentenced in July after entering guilty pleas in the Christchurch District Court last Thursday to four charges of fraud relating to the disappearance and life insurance policies.
The man, who has been in jail since his arrest, was freed on bail.
The fraud charges carry a maximum of seven years in prison.
The woman - who separated from the man six months before his disappearance - said the $1.12 million had largely gone.
A $121,681 policy was mortgage insurance, and had to be used for that.
From the $1 million policy he took out later, $300,000 went into trusts for the two boys and a daughter from his first marriage, as set out in his will.
Most of the remaining $700,000 went towards a freehold home, paying off debts and paying a big legal bill for having him declared dead.
The woman said her modest weatherboard home "is certainly not a millionaire's house".
"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."
She said publicity about the case and the payout had resulted in "people ringing up and wanting donations - they see the big figure in the paper and think I've got that now."
The woman dismissed speculation she was "in on it", describing how she had arranged a funeral service for the children at the beach where the man supposedly drowned.
"Would I put my children through that if I was in on it too?"
The woman, who has remarried, said comments by the man's lawyer, Barry Hart, about how he had struggled with prison life were sickening. "Isn't prison where guilty people are supposed to be? I've struggled for 5 1/2 years to give answers to my children and he wants everybody to feel sorry for him."
The man had sent letters to the children but she had read them and found "them full of bullshit".
"They are full of 'I still love you' and 'lets be sorry for Dad'. He is only writing them because he got caught. That's not love ... how dare he say he loves these kids?"
She was equally sickened by the man's tears in court.
"He's only crying because he got caught. How much crying have I had from my children in the last few years?"
