Businessman Faces Bigamy Trial

A prominent San Diego restaurant food wholesaler is either a bigamist who deceived several wives or a lonely man in desire of a stable marriage who himself has been victimized by several women.

According to a San Diego Municipal Court judge, there is enough evidence to support the former--that 42-year-old Guy Newton Swezey was simultaneously married to three women during most of last year.

Judge Patricia A. Y. Cowett ordered Swezey on Wednesday to stand trial on three felony counts of bigamy. He is scheduled to be arraigned and receive a Superior Court trial date July 1.

“He has more expertise in marriages and dissolutions than Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor . . . so he really can’t claim ignorance of the law,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Buck, who is prosecuting the unusual case.

One of the women named as a victim in the criminal complaint, Teresa Watts, still lives with Swezey in the 1900 block of Menendez Road in Southeast San Diego. Another alleged victim has been granted a dissolution of marriage, and Swezey claims the third marriage was recently ended.

“Everything’s cleaned up now,” said defense attorney John Crawford. “All of his marriages have either been annulled or dissolved, so there’s really no big deal.”

Crawford said Swezey owns a large nut and dried-fruit wholesaling firm in Southern California. But records indicate he has not had as much success with previous marriages.

In the “license of confidential marriage” which documents his June, 1989, ceremony at Chula Vista’s Chapel of the Valley to the first alleged victim in the bigamy case, Swezey notes that he has already had five previous marriages.

Local authorities began to investigate Swezey earlier this year after they were contacted by Mexican officials who had an angry citizen on their hands.

Buck, the prosecutor, said that Maria Luisa Pastrana, who lives in the Mexican city of Sahuayo, Michoacan, approached officials after she had trouble re-entering the U.S. because her passport had been stolen.

“Apparently she was upset . . . she felt deserted because the man she considered to be her husband had failed to show up at a 1991 family Christmas celebration,” Buck said.

According to a statement Pastrana gave to Mexican officials last year, she met Swezey through a publication called “International Introductions.”

“I told him I was pregnant and he answered that he was a lonely man, and he asked me to marry him so that he could be the father of my child,” Pastrana said in the Oct. 19, 1991, statement. After concluding that “he seemed to be a nice man,” she consented to his proposal, according to the legal document.

In his own statement in response to Pastrana’s claim, Swezey said she had moved to her home in Mexico at the end of 1990, several months after he had financed the birth of a child fathered by another man.

Although Mexican authorities may be pressing for his prosecution because he allegedly failed to treat the women properly, “I think it may be the other way around,” Crawford said, noting that the minister who married the couple never filed the appropriate paperwork and that the marriage was never consummated.

At a preliminary hearing earlier this week, Buck introduced as evidence a marriage certificate from Clark County, Nev., which indicates that Swezey married Watts on April 13, 1991, even though he had apparently been married to Pastrana for one year.

Swezey remains free on his own recognizance.