Through Google and phone records searches she learned:

—Her husband of 10 years, Dr. Kenneth Mitchell, a metro Detroit podiatrist, already had a wife in California when he married her in 1999.

—And in 2003 he had married yet another woman, a podiatrist in Quebec.

Equally astonishing, Mitchell, 48, a practicing Protestant who belongs to a Lutheran church with Miller, had converted to Islam in 2002, taken the Arabic name Mustafa and traveled twice to Saudi Arabia on religious pilgrimages, according to court records.

Mitchell, who operates several podiatry clinics in metro Detroit, says in court filings that he thought he was divorced from his first wife, and that the third marriage was never finalized because the necessary papers were not filed.

"I just thought he was working a lot of hours and away at medical conferences," Miller said in a recent interview at her attorneys' office in Bingham Farms. "It was devastating. It brought me to my knees."

She is seeking an annulment from Mitchell and child support for their two children. A hearing is set for Jan. 28.

Faye Miller met Kenneth Mitchell in the late 1980s when they were co-workers at an environmental laboratory in California.

She said she found him charming and mysterious.

"He was like a big teddy bear," she said. "But very independent."

She said Mitchell told her he once played for the National Football League's San Francisco 49ers. The Detroit Free Press could find no record of his employment with that team.

They spent the next 10 years getting advanced degrees — sometimes living together, sometimes apart. She eventually earned a doctorate in education. He graduated medical school.

Miller said she learned in 1997 that Mitchell had been having an affair with Shazia Malik, a Canadian podiatrist, but he reassured her it was over. They went into counseling, and in 1999 they were married in Rochester Hills by a magistrate.

Miller, then 41, had two children shortly afterward. Mitchell eventually opened four podiatry clinics: two in Detroit and the others in Southfield and Dearborn.

But he was gone all the time and often not accessible by phone. She thought he was working hard to support their growing family, but still. Even on Sept. 11, 2001, when she was calling around the country trying to find him to make sure he was OK, she said it took him two days to get back to her.

She came to accept her lonely life as a single parent. But in early 2009, she began therapy to help her deal with the death of her mother. Her therapist slowly encouraged her to examine her unusual marriage.

So, in the last week of August, she logged on to the family computer and started looking. She found papers in California, showing that he did not divorce his first wife until long after he had married her, according to court records. She knew then that her own marriage was invalid.

Then she began sorting through her husband's cell phone numbers and said she found repeated calls to Canada. She called, and when she heard Malik's voice, she hung up. Malik called her the next day.

"She said, 'We have a problem here,' " Miller recalled. "She said, 'I think you're married to my husband.' "

Mitchell, through his attorney, Stephen Barker, declined an interview request from the Free Press. But Barker said his client never meant to mislead any of the women.

Daphne Mitchell, the California wife — who divorced Mitchell in 2002 after he had married Miller, but before he married Malik — could not be reached for comment.

The Canadian wife, Malik, who has a practice in Quebec, also declined to talk about the case with the Free Press, except to say: "I don't want that bastard tarnishing my reputation anymore than he already has."

Miller said she sometimes wondered whether her husband was having an affair. He was away from their Rochester Hills home a lot attending medical conferences, and sometimes did not come home at night after hospital rounds, telling her he was staying in the residents lounge.

An affair would have been something of a relief, considering what she uncovered about his two other wives and his religious conversion.

"You think you know somebody," said Miller, 51, shaking her head in her attorneys' office during an interview last month.

Mitchell's explanation, based on court records, is that it's all a big misunderstanding. He claimed he thought his divorce from Daphne Mitchell was final when he married Miller.

And he said the Islamic wedding to Malik, with 100 people in attendance near Toronto, was a sham — that he only pretended to marry her so that her parents could not force her into a prearranged marriage with another man.

"So he wants us to believe these were kind of like accidents," said Miller's attorney, Lisa Ritchie Neilson. "We're calling it the Britney Spears defense, 'Oops, I did it again.' "

Barker said his client should have followed up to confirm his divorce was final in California before marrying Miller.

The marriage to Malik, Barker said, was to "get her mother and father off her back. It's a case where no good deed goes unpunished."

He said the paperwork for the Canadian marriage was never finalized.

And, he said, Mitchell wants to maintain a loving relationship with Miller and their two children.

"It's not reached Tiger Woods proportions yet," Barker said. "I've seen stranger things happen."

But reconciliation is not likely, as far as Miller is concerned.

For Miller, a former college professor, it means her life, as she has known it, is over for good.

She said she plans to return to work and may even leave the state to start a new life with her children.

Mitchell has been ordered to pay $4,000 a month in interim child support and household expenses pending the upcoming court hearings in January before Oakland County Circuit Judge Cheryl Matthews. "Men in power feel that the rules don't apply to them," Miller said. "Well, the rules do apply."

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