Patricia Spann and Misty Spann got married. They"re also mother and daughter.
You would think that a story about a mother and daughter who married each other wouldn"t get any more bonkers than it already is.
But in this case, their super creepy marriage is only part of the story, as you"ll see in the video below.
According to records, 42-year-old Patricia Spann married 25-year-old Misty Velvet Dawn Spann last year.
Misty is Patricia"s daughter.
So it"s super gross already. The details, however, make this even weirder than you"d think.
First of all, though they were allowed to marry, their marriage isn"t legal because Oklahoma law definitely doesn"t allow you to marry your kids.
Maybe the two most important things for you to know about these two are:
Misty is the one who turned her mother (and herself) in, and has been sentenced to 10 years of probation after entering a guilty plea.
(Under state law, felony incest can result in a lengthy prison sentence)
The other thing that you need to know?
Misty isn"t even the first of Patricia"s children whom Patricia"s married.
Patricia had previously married her son, Jody Spann Jr, in 2008.
That marriage was annulled in 2010. Would you care to guess why?
Patricia was the birth mother of both of them, but lost custody of them when they were young. Only in adulthood were they reunited.
Now, Patricia said that her relationship with Jody Spann Jr was in order to prevent him from being deployed. (We have no idea what kind of ridiculous logic is behind that, as members of the military with spouses are deployed all of the time)
With Misty, Patricia found another reason to marry her child — an alleged desire to adopt.
One, that sounds horrifying as she had already proven so unfit that her natural-born children were taken away.
Two, anybody"s who thinks that marrying their child makes them a better candidate for adoption does not need to be caring for so much as a houseplant.
Three, police don"t buy that as Patricia"s motive, and believe that she may have been trying to defraud the state into giving her more benefits.
By the way, Cody Spann — the son whom she didn"t marry — has been vocal and public about his disgust at Patricia, and believes that she forced Misty into it.
Whatever you might think about Daenerys and Jon Snow hooking up on Game of Thrones, we all hopefully understand that real-life incest is almost never like that.
Most real-life incest takes one of two forms.
The first is the most common and upsetting, and that"s child-abuse. It happens when parents (or other relatives) sexually abuse their children.
The second, which has only really begun to gain attention during the past few years, is adult parent-child relationships that occur between parents and children who have either neither met or have been separated for a very long time.
This latter group is gross but less obviously upsetting, and the result of what"s called genetic attraction. See, human instinct is to feel a deep bond of affection for close family members combined with a learned feeling of revulsion that prevents people from seeing each other sexually.
So it is believed that some people who meet their parents as adults may feel an instant sense of sexual attraction.
We"ve read a number of (gross!) stories over the years of people confessing, often anonymously. Most often, it seems to be daughters who in their 20s met their fathers for the first time and quickly began a sexual relationship.
In the case of Patricia Spann, it sounds like these marriages are also a means to an end … but there may be real elements of that genetic attraction scenario at play, even if they might be one-sided.
Patricia"s trial isn"t until January, but it"s likely that they"ll dig into records to see how she may have used her marriages for financial gain.
And you can bet that her now annulled marriage to her son is going to come up.
This story is sensational, but a good reminder of a couple of things:
No matter how we feel about relationships in Game of Thrones or other fiction, we shouldn"t romanticize incest. In real life, it"s always gross and usually abusive.
Different states have different laws, folks. Most of them specifically outlaw incest.
(And no, we have no idea why they both are so often pictured in Superman shirts)
