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Provo • It was a December day in 2005 when the woman received the first email message.

It was a vindictive note, threatening in nature.

It would be the first of countless messages the Lindon woman would receive over the next nine years, sent from an unknown person who threatened to tell her family that she had been unfaithful in her marriage unless she complied with the emailer's demands. This sometimes meant replying with sexually explicit messages, the woman told a Utah County judge Monday.

After nine years, the woman went to the police — and was stunned when they discovered it was Richard Mockbee, her own husband, who had sent all the emails.

"I finally contacted the police," she said during her husband's sentencing hearing Monday. "And I was completely shocked that all the emails had been traced back to Rick. … I've spent 10 months trying to cope with my new reality: that for almost 10 years, the person I trusted and loved was deceitful and duplicitous."

Mockbee, 50, pleaded guilty in October to a single count of third-degree felony stalking, admitting in court papers that for years he sent emails to his wife that he knew would "cause her emotional distress." As part of a plea deal, nine other similar counts were dismissed.

On Monday, 4th District Judge Fred Howard suspended a zero-to-five-year prison sentence for the man, and instead sentenced him to spend 36 months on court probation and 120 days with a GPS ankle monitor.

Deputy Utah County Attorney Craig Johnson told Howard that he believed the GPS monitoring was more appropriate than time behind bars because the defendant had no other prior criminal history.

"With the hell that he put her through, to wear an ankle monitor for four months is a small price to pay," Johnson said.

Lindon police officials wrote in a June arrest warrant that the wife — who requested not to be identified — initially reported that she was being harassed by "an unknown male" over email for years.

The woman reported that the emails had been sent to her for about nine years, and she sometimes received 40 emails a day from different accounts, according to police. They were often sexual in nature.

An investigator with the Utah County Attorney's Office eventually traced the threatening emails back to the same computer that the victim used. The investigator determined that the woman's husband was sending the emails by logging in to various email accounts from the computer he shared with his wife.

When interviewed by authorities, Mockbee said that he knew his wife was being harassed by the unknown email sender. Once he was informed that the computer had been searched and he was a suspect, the man admitted that he had created the accounts to "make her pay for being unfaithful in their marriage," according to the arrest warrant.

Police wrote in the charging information that the original 10 counts of stalking filed against Mockbee covered only four years of past behavior due to the statute of limitations.

Prosecutors agreed as part of a plea deal to not oppose Mockbee's future efforts to reduce the conviction to a misdemeanor charge — but only after nine years of crime-free living, according to court records.

The wife filed for divorce in September, according to court records.