Memories of her father's murder haunt Beach woman

VIRGINIA BEACH

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.

Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, lon.wagner@pilotonline.com