Aug 10, 2008 - 04:30 AM

By Jennifer Stone and Stefanie Swinson

PETERBOROUGH -- As Stanley Tippett awaited his first court appearance Thursday, stories emerged -- some of them contradictory -- about the man from the various women in his life: from his wife to his mother to a woman claiming to be close friends with his fiancee.

He was married. And engaged. He has five children, including a three-month old daughter with his wife. And he’s purportedly expecting another with his fiancee.

He claimed to work, making assistive devices for the disabled, said Margaret Cassidy, who said she was a former neighbour and close friend of his apparent fiancee, identified only as Felicia.

But his only means of income was a pension collected as a result of a condition he was born with called Treacher Collins Syndrome, said his mother. He had to be away from home for long periods of time to go to California, Ms. Cassidy said he told them. But his absences from the home he shared with his wife and five children could be explained because he had to go to Toronto for dialysis treatments, said Natalie Tippett, married to Stanley for 12 years.

He collected a disability pension as his main means of income, his mother Susan Anderson and wife said. But Ms. Cassidy said he claimed to make $10,000 a month building the assistive devices. He had purchased an extravagant engagement ring for Felicia, who Ms. Cassidy said is now three months pregnant.

But all of them had heard the same story about what he said happened in the hours leading up to his arrest and subsequent charge with kidnapping and sexual assault of a 12-year-old Peterborough girl who was eventually found in Courtice: he had been carjacked at gunpoint, they said he told them.

“He said that he was held at gunpoint and he was thrown in the van. His van got stolen, (and) they went on a highway pursuit,” Ms. Tippett said Thursday, as she awaited her husband’s bail hearing in Peterborough. “They threw him out of the van and he blacked out and he was walking along the railway tracks in Bowmanville.”

The little girl was allegedly abducted at around 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, after she had left a birthday party in south Peterborough. She was sexually assaulted and left at Courtice Secondary School, police say.

Mr. Tippet was eventually arrested, in his uncle’s van, around 8:40 a.m. on Wednesday in Manvers Township.

It was a surreal moment outside the courthouse Thursday as Ms. Cassidy approached Ms. Tippett -- the two meeting for apparently the first time -- and asked who the three-month-old baby belonged to.

“The tangled web he has weaved,” said Ms. Cassidy, after finding out Ms. Tippett was Mr. Tippett’s wife -- not his sister, as Ms. Cassidy said he had claimed.

“They had plans of getting married next year,” Ms. Cassidy said, of her friend Felicia, who was not on hand at the courthouse. In fact, Ms. Cassidy said, he had purchased a huge diamond for his fiancee.

“It’s a big rock,” she said.

For her part, Ms. Tippett looked shell-shocked Thursday as she heard the many allegations against her husband.

It’s not his first brush with the law. He was found guilty in 2005 of criminal harassment and breach of a court order, related to what police believed was an attempt, using a phoney job offer, to kidnap a 21-year-old woman. He was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary.

At the time of the arrest in that case, Mr. Tippett was on probation as a result of a conviction for criminal harassment of a Barrie-area woman.

In 1999, he told The Toronto Star he had been interrogated three times by police in connection with the disappearance and unsolved murder of 15-year-old Toronto resident Sharmini Anandavel.

The day before Sharmini went missing, she told a classmate she was going to a job arranged by a friend. She told her parents the job was answering phones at a location near Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue and the job was arranged by Mr. Tippett.

Until just before Sharmini disappeared, she had lived in the same Don Mills Road apartment building as Mr. Tippett, who then moved to Oshawa.

He was never charged in that case, but told The Star that not only had he been interviewed, but his home and car had been searched and that he had been followed by police.

Through all of that, his wife stuck with him. Now, she’s not so sure she can.

“I’m devastated,” she said, in a small voice, outside the courthouse.

Mr. Tippett was led into the courtroom just after 1 p.m. Wednesday, handcuffed, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Over and over, he mouthed the words “I love you,” to his wife, sitting in the spectator’s area.

“I know what you did,” she mouthed back.

Mr. Tippett returns to court in Peterborough Monday, for a bail hearing.