Vivian Dowers (Paul Martinka)
HAUNTED: Vivian Dowers discovered her late husband, David, secretly divorced her eight years before his death. (
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First, he died and left her a widow — then he really hurt her.
An elderly Brooklyn woman was still mourning her longtime hubby’s death last year when she discovered he secretly divorced her eight years earlier — cutting her out of his pension money and a $44,000 life-insurance payout.
Vivian Pitt Dowers, 75, had been married to Columbia University janitor David Dowers, 65, for more than 30 years when he died of natural causes in their Crown Heights home in February 2011, according to papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.
When the widow went through his things, she found, in a briefcase under his bed, divorce papers from 2002 that claimed she had “abandoned” him.
“What you talking about? Me no sign no divorce papers!” Vivian, a native of the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, said she exclaimed.
The couple, who had no children, lived together up until his death, she said.
They were happy, she insisted — although a source close to the case speculated that David may have had a girlfriend on the side and planned to run off with her.
David Dowers had gotten the “uncontested” split in 2002 by claiming his wife left him over their financial problems. He said in court documents that she moved to Canarsie and had been served with divorce papers.
After David’s death, Vivian got a lawyer and proved that the Canarsie address she had supposedly moved to didn’t exist and that the process papers were forged.
“Once he sold a piece of land behind my back,” she recalled but added, “I never knew he was going to be like that” about the divorce.
She said she still loves him.
Vivian and her lawyer — Roger Hawke of the Legal Aid Society’s Brooklyn Office for the Aging — sought to throw out the divorce over the opposition of David’s children from an earlier relationship. The children, born before Vivian and David married, stood to inherit their dad’s estate if he was single when he died.
Their lawyer did not return a call for comment.
Last month, a judge ruled the divorce fraudulent, and Vivian received David’s life-insurance payment and is now in line to get his pension money.