A story from a 1989 NBC broadcast was forgotten -- NO violence or supernatural

[brian.grimace]

Hello, fellow fans, this is my first post here.

I'm starting a new thread because I'm pursuing my vague memory of a story that NBC showed for the first and only time in 1989. Can anyone here help?

My vague memory comes from a Lifetime channel rerun circa 1994. I believe Lifetime repeated it just once or twice, and nobody has seen it since the mid 1990s. That makes sense when you consider that nobody dies in the story, nobody disappears and it has nothing to do with the supernatural. Don't some of the stories disappear if they aren't serious enough and they become too old? I saw this particular rerun shortly after I got hooked on UM. Watching Lifetime faithfully for years thereafter, I never saw the story again. Alright, here is what I found for the story when I searched carefully in the UM episode guide that is in this "Sitcoms Online" group.

July 19, 1989
A segment on a New York man who, according to this report, escaped after being arrested for bigamy. (It seems to have been the first story on that NBC broadcast. Also, NBC evidently never repeated it. Only the Lifetime channel did at least five years later, and it disappeared shortly thereafter.)

Does the above summary jog anyone's memory ? Is there any way I can pay someone for a videocassette copy ? It's not on You Tube, and that means it probably never will be.

Here are other details I recall that make the story fascinating. The story did not focus on the New York man's arrest. The man died circa 1961, leaving behind a son who was about 12 years old. When the son started approaching middle age in the 1980s, he looked through a trunk in his mother's attic and found documents about the father that appeared to have been doctored or forged. Suspicious of a medal allegedly awarded to his father by the U. S. military, the son contacted the military and learned that nobody with his father's name and date of birth ever served in the military. The son suspected that his mother had known a lot about the mystery, but he neglected to question her before her death in 1983.

The summary of the story on this web site refers to the father's arrest for bigamy. As I recall, we don't know the father was arrested. We just know he evidently had two wives simultaneously during the 1940s and early 1950s. One wife was in midtown Manhattan. The bigamist had another life in Northern Virginia, where he worked as a vending machine repairman and supported a wife and son -- or did the son have siblings ? Forget that detail. That's not so important. Focus on the fact that a son of the alleged bigamist evidently approached Unsolved Mysteries in the late 1980s.

The son was about 12 when Dad died of natural causes in a hospital in 1961. While Dad was on his hospital deathbed, Son asked Dad about that mysterious New York episode that he had overheard parents talking about with hesitation a long time ago. Mom, standing near the hospital bed, interrupted and said we're not going to bother Dad about that. So they didn't.

If you can't enable me to watch this again, can anyone possibly share memories of this story ? By any chance, can anyone find the name of the man who was born circa 1949 and who initiated the search for his late father's identity ? Maybe I can find a newspaper article from circa 1989. Without a name I'll never find anything. If the last name is common, such as Harrison or Jones, then I'll never find anything.

Thanking all of you in advance for your attention.

[justins5256]

The father's name was Richard Coleman. I don't remember the airdate offhand, but it was some time in 1994, and I believe the story was repeated on Lifetime. Your description was pretty accurate. The man's father had an unusual past and he was trying to learn more about it. If you search the forum using his name, you'll find some posts about him. I think there was even an update years later that some of his other family was located, but I'm a bit foggy on the details.

The story you found in the episode guide is actually about Louis Carlucci, a conman who made his living by marrying women and basically leeching off them, only leaving after he had cleaned out their bank accounts.

[brian.grimace]

Thanks so much, "justins5256." I found a thread in which you participated immediately before Christmas 2009 that covered this case that I was pursuing as well as another non - violent case. (The other dates from the 1930s.)

I apologize to everyone for mixing up the 1989 story of bigamist Louis Carlucci with the one I was pursuing, which was a mid 1990s story about Bob Coleman's search for his late father. The URL link you provided last year for an Ancestrymagazine.com article still works. It tells you Mr. Coleman solved the mystery as best he could in 2006 using online records of draft registration cards. He'll never know a lot of details because by 2006 most people who knew his father (who eventually changed his name to Richard Coleman) were dead. But at least Bob Coleman can place his father, who lived from 1895 to 1961, in a large family where he had seven siblings. And Bob discovered his own half-brother and two half-sisters. Click below for more.

http://www.ancestrymagazine.com/2007...s-information/

I apologize again for mixing this up with the nasty man who stole money from multiple wives.

[justins5256]

Oh wow, I had forgotten about that thread. Glad the links still worked.