The 3-year-old girl mentioned in the yellowed news stories sits on her couch.
It’s been 39 years.
She was so young then, but she remembers a few things about – as she puts it
– “that night he came to our house.”
“The door in our kitchen was kind of like the one I have here, with the
squares in it,” she says, pointing toward the back of her house .
“And I remember someone being at that door.”
Then she got sent to bed.
What happened as Natalie McKown slept in her Chesapeake home that evening
would today be a cable TV news sensation. Even in 1969, the Norfolk newspapers
covered every turn of the heinous story.
First, the disappearance of Natalie’s father, Timmy McKown, a young Naval Air
Station worker, a Marine who had just returned from Vietnam. Then the discovery
of his body in the Elizabeth River, his head and hands cut off.
Natalie was one of the first to know who did it, but she was too young to
convey it.
“At some point, I had to get up to go to the bathroom,” she says, “and they
were moving my father across the hall, and I actually had to step over him to
get to the bathroom.”
Then came the arrest and trial of the man Natalie saw at the door that night,
her mother’s boyfriend, and the arrest and conviction of Cora McKown, Natalie’s
mother.
Natalie doesn’t remember much about all that, just “CSI”-like flashes from
the night of Jan. 6, 1969.
That was the night that something was taken from a child, something she’d
scramble for decades to rebuild:
A normal life.
A family.
Natalie Geis has one leg tucked under her like a little kid might, a
pink-and-yellow-flowered Chuck Taylor sneaker sticking out from under her, and
flowing red hair. During the workday, she’s dressed for her job as a paralegal
in downtown Norfolk, but it’s a spring Sunday and she’s casual, a mom.
Her family, except her youngest son, knows what happened when she was 3, but
other than them and a few friends she has always left it unsaid. Natalie had
heard for a long time that the man convicted of murdering her father had
threatened her and her mother if they talked.
Back in March, though, a friend of Natalie’s called. The friend had signed up
on a victim notification Web site, and an e-mail came through that Henry Lee
Clere, the man who had come to Natalie’s door that night, had died in prison.
Natalie made a few phone calls to check for sure.
“March 8,” she says. “They wouldn’t tell me what of. I’d love to know.”
Clere had lived in Portsmouth, worked at a used-car lot, then landed a job at
the GE television plant. When he was arrested and charged with killing Natalie’s
father, he had already been sentenced to five years in prison for burglary in
Chesapeake. He had appealed and was out on bond. A young woman had testified
that Clere followed her to her house on Centerville Turnpike, his car equipped
with red lights, and that he carried a gun and said he was a vice squad
detective.
Natalie, while her father was still missing, told her aunt: “The policeman
came and took my daddy.”
Today , Natalie can’t describe how she feels about Clere’s death, but if it
seems she’d be happy about it, she’s not. Tears swamp her eyes.
“I feel bad for his family,” she says. “They grew up without a father, too. I
find it sad for this guy, even though he was as involved as he was, that he died
in prison. He wasn’t the only one involved.”
Clere had been sentenced to the electric chair but was spared by the Supreme
Court’s 1972 ruling that elements of the death penalty were unconstitutional. He
was sentenced instead to life in prison.
But it was Natalie’s mother’s involvement in the crime, and her punishment ,
that threw Natalie into a different world.
Natalie’s in the middle of a story about her “mom,” and she
stops to explain something.
When she says “mom,” she does not mean the woman who gave birth to her. She
means her aunt, whom she went to live with after her mother’s arrest. Natalie’s
not angry when she explains this, just matter-of-fact. She chuckles when she
remembers the first time she called her aunt “Mom.” It was mundane, to the
effect of: Hey, Mom, please pass the ketchup.
She calls her biological mother by her first name, Cora.
Natalie was about 8 when she first really thought about what her mother did,
and what it meant for her: no father, no mother, no little family.
She was sitting inside a toy chest that her father had made for her. She
remembers the dark, wood stain of the chest and its rope handles. Natalie had
been rooting around in her aunt’s jewelry box, found some newspaper clippings
and was reading them. “I remember crying, just being very adamant that it wasn’t
her, and I don’t know why,” Natalie says, “other than I was 8 years old and it
was a terrible thing to read that your mother did.”
Down through the years, the more she read, the more she learned.
Cora Ernestine McKown was a magnet for media intrigue in the case, her attire
and appearance extensively described in reports of her arrest and court visits.
A Virginian-Pilot story on March 14, 1969, called her “the attractive young
widow” and went on:
“She wore a black pencil skirt, black sweater, and black three-inch heels
when police picked her up Wednesday. A long, flowing red scarf was wrapped
around her shoulder-length, straw-blonde hair. From time to time, she slung a
white cardigan sweater with dark piping around her shoulders.”
Cora McKown, 22 at the time, had reported her husband missing on Jan. 7, 1969
– the day after he was killed, police later determined . For two months after
that, she helped police as they tried to locate her husband, Natalie’s father.
She walked over to a neighbor’s house a week after her husband’s stabbing
death and asked if the neighbor had seen Timmy. She told the neighbor, “He just
walked out of the house and said he’d be back.”
Then on March 8, a man walking the shoreline in West Norfolk found a corpse,
wrapped in a homemade blanket. The head and hands had been hacked off.
Natalie, perched on the couch, picks up an old newspaper story and reads in a
gentle voice about her father’s car being found: “Dredge operators reported
striking a solid object several times in the past two weeks while working in the
area.”
A few days after Timmy McKown’s body was found, his 1968 Chevelle was
dragged out of the river just off Crawford Parkway in Portsmouth. The
Ledger-Star reported that police, reporters and a crowd that had gathered rushed
forward to see whether, as rumor had it, the head and hands were in side. They
were not .
Natalie’s mother at first confessed to the killing. In a statement to police,
she wrote that she had become enraged by her husband , had hit him in the head
and stabbed him to death. Cora McKown then wrote that she dragged him out of the
house, dumped the body and drove the car into the river.
At the bottom of that statement, in all capital letters, she wrote: “THIS IS
ALL A LIE.”
She typed out another version of events: Clere had barged into the house that
night, went into the bedroom and killed her husband. She just helped with the
cleanup. And with the cover-up, in reporting her husband missing.
Cora McKown told detectives that “she and her 3-year-old daughter, Natalie,
were threatened by Clere should she not comply.” In court, she hedged so many
times that The Virginian-Pilot report seemed to mock her as it listed her
reasons for letting Clere in the house that night:
“… because she was afraid of him; … because he might want to talk with her;
that she was afraid of hurting her husband; that she did not know Clere was
going to kill him; … that Clere was cruel; that her husband, once cruel, had
become loving.”
The courtroom of people also heard that two months before Timmy McKown’s
death, the couple took out a $10,000 life insurance policy for him, and she was
the beneficiary.
The jury considered it for all of an hour. Guilty.
The sentence: Life in prison.
Natalie has shoulder-length hair, a button nose and full
lips. Look at her, then a picture of her mother back in 1969, and … “I know,”
Natalie says, softly.
There are times when she can muscle what happened into a corner of her mind,
she says. But it’s always there – the vacuum left by not having a father – and
the unresolved nature of her mother’s role and whether justice was done.
In fact, when the event barges into the forefront of Natalie’s life once in a
while, it’s usually because of her mother .
Natalie remembers one day, Jan. 12, 1982 – “almost 13 years to the day that
she killed him.”
She lived out in Blackwater with her aunt . She was 16 years old, on the long
bus ride to Kellam High School. Somebody was playing a radio, and the news came
on:
“Cora Ernestine McKown was released from prison …”
Natalie froze.
Back then, she says, everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew last names.
“People just kind of looked at me like, 'Isn’t that your last name?’”
She could hardly believe it. She got to school, went straight to the library
and pulled out the newspaper. There it was on the front page.
In one of his last official acts in office, Gov. John Dalton gave Cora McKown
a conditional pardon. He cited her “outstanding achievements and record during
her incarceration.”
Cora McKown, at the age of 35, was free. She went to live with a woman she
had been staying with during prison furloughs, and she landed a job at the
Virginia Commonwealth University library.
These days, she’s remarried and living in Southern California. Attempts to
reach her for this story were unsuccessful.
Natalie has come to suspect, more and more down through the decades, that her
mother directed the killing of her father, and she has developed greater
resentment.
They kept in touch through Natalie’s teen years and into her adulthood.
They’d catch up on the phone every couple of years.
Then Natalie’s oldest daughter ran away, and Natalie didn’t know where she
was for a year and a half. In the end, Natalie found out that Cora did know and
didn’t tell Natalie. That, to Natalie, was unforgiveable.
“She’s been married 20 years now, got a nice big house in a nice quiet town,”
Natalie says. “She’s got it all. “I mean, how dare you brush yourself off and
walk away?”
For Natalie, it wasn’t that easy.
Birds chirp outside on the warm Sunday as she pulls out two photo albums from
her childhood.
Natalie on Santa’s lap.
“I was probably 2 in that one,” she says.
Natalie and her dad.
“This is when he came back from Vietnam. This is the first time he saw me.”
There’s Natalie walking in one photo, her hair getting longer with each
picture.
“That one was taken just before he died,” she says, “but just before.”
Then there’s Natalie, standing with her four cousins.
“That was just after he died,” she says, “because I went to live with them in
March, and Easter was just after that.”
There are some long gaps in the documentary. She ran away a bunch of times.
One time when she was picked up she gave the wrong name and address to the
police. She was arrested.
At 16, while in summer school, she wrote a vivid English paper about a
murder, and everybody thought, uh-oh. When she said something provocative , she
was deemed homicidal and sent to psychiatric centers in Portsmouth and Norfolk
for almost a year. At 17, she got pregnant, then lost the baby.
When she turned 18, she got married, “because I could.” And got pregnant
almost immediately, “because I could.”
She got divorced, married again, and had two more children. She got an
associate degree and became a paralegal specializing in divorce.
She divorced again, married again and had another child. Her fourth – two
girls and two boys.
“You know, it’s funny,” she says, “growing up, all I ever wanted was to be a
wife and a mother. That’s all I wanted. I wanted the family.”
Tears again flood into her eyes.
“Because those two took it away.”
Natalie has, in a nontraditional way, built a strong family around her. Her
second husband and the two kids they had together share the other half of the
duplex with her family, and her oldest daughter lives nearby with her son.
Natalie still has bad days “for no reason,” she says. She refuses to use what
happened to her as an excuse. One day recently, she and her husband were having
lunch, and she noticed a 50-something woman with an older man. Probably dining
with her father, thought Natalie, doing something she’ll never get to do.
But she reminds herself, as she tells her kids, to suck it up. She figures
she must have survived all this for a divine reason, though she hasn’t figured
out yet what that might be.
She’s taking classes and aiming for a degree in psychology. She’d like to
help marriages that are in trouble and the children of divorces. If she could,
she’d like to help kids who lose their parents in violent crimes.
Natalie thinks about stories such as the Tennessee minister killed by his
wife in 2006, and the effect on their three kids . She knows that’s a life-long
event for those children; she’s living that life.
“It’s always kind of there,” Natalie says. “It’s not something that in 10
years they’re going to be OK with it. In 20 years … in 30 years …”
But after almost 40 years?
Most days, she’s doing pretty well. (Source >>>)
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