A BRIDE who was conned out of £100,000 by her husband has spoken for the first time of her fury at the six-year lie she shared with the fraudster.
During his "campaign of fraud" Chelmsford resident Colin Jarvie took thousands of pounds from wife Letizia Salaris stealing cash she had contributed toward their dream home, money to pay off their wedding bill and even her engagement ring worth £9,000.
And despite the fact that Jarvie was jailed for 27 months in May after admitting seven charges of fraud and one of theft, the 29-year-old accountant is still receiving charging orders against the property the couple bought together.
"For those seven years together, I'm slowly understanding that absolutely everything we had was a lie," said Letizia. "From the moment we bought our house he was extorting money from me, spending it on a life I knew absolutely nothing about."
The accountant met electrical engineer Jarvie in 2006 via an online dating site, having recently moved from Italy in order to improve her English.
After chatting on the web for three months the pair met for a drink and quickly fell in love, buying their first home together in Crawley, West Sussex in 2007.
However, when it came to exchanging contracts Colin, 38, broke down and admitted he couldn't pay his half of the deposit, despite declaring earnings of more than £50,000 a year, and forcing Letizia to take out a last-minute bank loan to cover the £10,000 shortfall on the understanding he would cover the repayments.
"Although I gave him half the money to cover all the household bills every month, he took charge by paying everything from his account," Letizia added.
"He liked shopping and designer clothes and would often come home with different cars. During our time together I remember a Porsche, Mercedes, Range Rovers and an Audi.
"He was flashy where as I was more conservative, preferring to buy clothes from cheaper shops like Primark."
Believing they had a "happy relationship" Letizia accepted Colin's proposal in June 2010 but watched her fiancé become ever more distant the closer their wedding day came, before he finally told her six months before their big day he was suffering from a serious heart condition.
In the months that followed the 38-year-old spent weeks away from home purportedly undergoing tests until just days before the wedding he claimed he had been banned from flying and that their dream honeymoon to Bali would therefore have to be cancelled.
Then less than 24 hours after the pair exchanged their marriage vows in front of 70 guests on June 23, 2012 Colin vanished, refusing to take calls, and forcing his new bride to report him missing to police.
When the now part-qualified chartered accountant eventually managed to contact her husband he claimed to be building a relationship with a nine-year-old daughter called Stacey in Essex, and asked if the couple could try marriage counselling.
"But just before I left for the appointment I found a bank statement with purchases from the women's lingerie shops la Senza and Ann Summers. His game was up and it finally dawned on me that he was having an affair," said Letizia.
"Days before the session a bailiff called at the house claiming he was chasing an unpaid £1,600 council tax bill which, ironically, I had to pay using £1,000 our wedding guests had given us towards our honeymoon. From there everything unravelled.
"I went through every piece of unopened mail in the house. I searched his home study and the loft. The more I looked the more evidence of him being in serious debt emerged.
"There were unpaid loans for the flashy cars he'd bought along with a Mini Cooper in 2009 I'd never even seen but, looking back, was no doubt for one of his girlfriends.
"There was a woman's bra in the study and love notes from an American woman called Heather, who he appeared to have met on a 'business trip'."
Five months later Letizia was in a new relationship with Paul Wood, 33, and wanted a divorce from Jarvie, who was now on the run from police for fraud against his employer Socomec.
"Paul and I broke into the garage. It was waist-deep with hundreds of letters from companies chasing money and a £17,000 charging order for a car loan he had defaulted on. There was also property he had stolen from his employer," the 29-year-old added.
"There was a note from a pawnbroker to show he'd sold my engagement ring he'd said was being cleaned for £2,000 – and then submitted a false insurance claim to Aviva for almost £9,000.
"But most hurtful of all was the discovery of a letting agreement taken out with another woman just five days after we were married along with hundreds of empty packets of Viagra."
It took nearly a year for police to catch up with Jarvie, who by then had moved to Chelmsford and become a father with a woman called Stacey Eustace, and in May this year he pleaded guilty to seven charges of fraud and one of theft.
The 29-year-old added: "He's now in prison but I'm still receiving charging orders because everything he did, he did against this property. I have no idea where it will end."
