In the beginning, there was Checkmate. And many of the infidelity-detection kits that landed on the market following Checkmate’s 1999 introduction tread on its success. That’s the claim made by Brad Holmes, Checkmate’s irascible owner. But after years of feuding with his competitors, the self-proclaimed father of the home-based semen detection industry now says he’s leaving the business. Back in 2009, Holmes told SW that he’d gotten rich on Checkmate’s back. Priced at $39 per unit, Holmes claimed to have sold thousands of kits to customers from around the world.In a typically irate e-mail sent this week, Holmes says, “I really have something here, I’ve worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for years to get it to where it is today, I’m constantly getting offers to sell out.” Later, he confirms that he’s accepted one of them. Holmes won’t say how much Checkmate was bought for. Nor will he go into detail on why, after over a decade of operation, he decided to sell. But it likely has something to do with the contentious relationship he’s developed with some other semen-detection kit mongers in the industry, at least one of whom he’s threatened to kill.Steve Calvert, the Texas-based semen-detection kit seller who was the target of that threat, says that Holmes continues to send him harassing voice mail messages. Via e-mail, Holmes re-iterates his claim that Calvert and a few other infidelity-detection kit vendors are trying to ruin his reputation by publishing false claims about him, and the accuracy of the Checkmate test, on their websites. Whatever the case, Holmes is not long for the industry. He says the new owners are scheduled to take possession of his company sometime in the next 10 days.