Myra gale brown where is she now

This caused an uproar and after a few dates, the tour was cancelled. By the time they returned to Memphis, it had been discovered that Brown was the daughter of Lewis' cousin and bass player, J.

In addition, Lewis had not yet divorced his previous wife, Jane Mitcham. After Lewis finalized his divorce from Mitcham, he remarried Brown on June 4, The scandal over the marriage destroyed Lewis' promising rock career, but strengthened their marriage.

Lewis eventually found success in country music. In , Brown filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery and abuse; charging that she had been "subject to every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable. After her divorce, Brown was briefly married to the detective she had hired to trail Lewis and document his infidelities.

The technicians from the state crime lab headed back toward Batesville, Mississippi, with their van full of stuff from the house on Malone Road. The state investigators, Jay Clark and Creekmore Wright, were out at the house again Thursday, but they assured all comers they had a good work-up on the scene; it should be smooth sailing from that point. Sheriff Sowell also said he already had most of the mystery cleared up.

In the days ahead, Sowell would release his account of the Shawn Lewis death. The Memphis metropolitan daily, the aptly named Commercial Appeal , took a swan dive on the story. The bruises were described by Sowell as superficial, the kind that anybody might have.

Sowell noted that there was nothing to indicate that anybody had been attacked. He called J. Whitten for permission, then fetched the local priest. Danny Phillips says they told him it never comes right after they open up the head for an autopsy.

Then he saw the cross. He was mad. He turned to J. And you fucked up. The funeral went off at Saturday. No one would say anything about Shawn. The Killer wore a white tuxedo and a red ruffled shirt. Shawn was buried in the Lewis family graveyard, where Jerry Lee had played as a child.

The Yankee strangers left as soon as they could. They barely talked on the long ride north to Memphis and the airport. There was nothing for them there.

The Killer, too, barely paused in DeSoto County. Interview: James Albert Riley, sheriff-to-be. He sat before a wall full of badges, in a big swivel chair, his bovine features set in mistrustful concentration.

Big Dog had picked the time. A: Now, shit. His elbow started hammering on the padded arm of the chair. It gets you in a damn magazine with this Jerry Lee Lewis shit to fuck up your whole damn life. Interview: Roger Jones, County Coroner. He was a deputy sheriff. Meant to be sheriff someday, too. A: Well, in this case, an autopsy was performed by Dr. Jerry Francisco. We investigate…. That takes the pressure offa everybody.

Death certificate just shows the people dead. Far as I know, there was two people there—him and her. You gotta ask him or her. You gotta take a man at his word.

A: Well, I asked Bill Ballard. Tuesday, I took the certificate over to Ballard. He showed me some paper, showed me he was gonna clip it together. Whitten squeezed the sleep from his eyes. He slowly adjusted to the afternoon sunlight filtering into his Memphis house. His little dogs greeted him, yapping and licking, climbing up the front of his bathrobe.

They are Nickie and Kai. Then J. You know they just liked the money. He got with him just by hanging around, being the biggest Jerry Lee fan in town.

Now, Jerry Lee is his life. He confides, with something like pride, that the feds are planning to indict him, along with Jerry, on a tax charge. When J. She went to the bathroom. He noticed her lips were blue. He smashed the wall with his hand. Cut his thumb. Finally laid her on the other bed. She had that gown on…. Call the ambulance. Lottie called J.

He was at the gate in twenty minutes. A couple of hours later, Sheriff Sowell called him into the house, told him about the autopsy plan. Jerry wanted the autopsy and he wanted it in Memphis. He just wanted the best, and Francisco is the best in this part of the country. Sure, it cost us. They did their job, but they were very, very nice. Very understanding. Very sympathetic. Now, understand, now. I gave those contributions, but I did it for Jerry, of course.

No, not one particular friend…. Oh, yeah, I checked it out and felt he was the best qualified. The first two days, you could tell he was really bothered, but after that, he got it together….

Nickie and Kai. They were very understanding. There is still no indication of foul play. With the drug scans after the autopsy, Francisco found what he sought. He phoned Ballard with glad tidings: fluid in the lungs resulted from an overdose of methadone, the synthetic narcotic most commonly used to wean junkies off heroin. Ballard had the cornerstone of his case: a precise and non-violent cause of death.

It might have been a suicide, or an accident. But Ballard and Jay Clark went to the morgue in Memphis for a meeting. Francisco insisted at the meeting that Shawn herself must have taken the methadone. There were drugs by the scoopful in the big brick house on Malone Road. No one knew which drugs Shawn used, or even what all the drugs were.

The Mississippi state crime lab did not finish the testing for months. The tests were nowhere near complete by the time the case went to the grand jury.

No one knew whose blood it was. Once again, the crime lab did not finish the tests for months. They told him they never talked to Jerry Lee. It was Lottie who tried to let them in, when she drove up at about As she fiddled with her key in the lock, the Killer opened the door from within. Lottie went to the master bedroom to wake Shawn. What did Lottie find in the bedroom? And what was going on in the house while the drapers were stuck outside? The girls ran out of the house across Malone Road and begged the neighbors to take them to Memphis.

Did Shawn also try to escape? For example, the married couple who rode the girls back to Memphis tried to deny the incident when a couple of reporters showed up at their door. When the reporters mentioned that the incident was covered in the investigative reports.

A night before Shawn died, Jerry Lee was spotted sitting alone in his Cadillac, stuck in a ditch off the exit ramp of the freeway leading to Memphis. When Jerry Lee was taken home and his car was towed from the ditch, the deputies forgot to administer a test for intoxication.

She was in midsentence when the phone went dead. Was that the call of a woman planning suicide? And who cut the line? And certainly, evidence was altered. Broken glass was still on the floor, but the big pieces had been removed. Who tried to clean her up? Who reclothed her in the negligee? How did she get to the guest bedroom? Who stripped the sheets and pillowcases in the master bedroom? Lottie Jackson stripped those sheets. Shortly after he took control of the scene, McCauley found her locked in the master bedroom.

Lottie finally came to the door, and McCauley saw the cleanup in progress. If Shawn went to bed after a quiet night, how did she get dirty? If he laid her atop the guest bed when he could carry her and shake her no longer, how did she get under the covers?

Why did he say he send Lottie there to wake her? And sometimes, the why just lingers sometimes. But now he had a ten-page report from Francisco. He had his cause of death.

The last thing I want to do is have anybody think I was putting a lid on this thing. The grand jury met for about three hours. The only witnesses were McCauley, Clark and Francisco. Ballard Francisco.

The only witness to comment was Francisco, who brushed past reporters on the way out, after forty-five minutes in the jury room—the entire afternoon session. Francisco was asked to characterize his testimony. Michael Blake, the Detroit lawyer, came down to witness the jury process. The Killer already had a half-million dollars in judgments against him, and none of the plaintiffs could collect. Blake did get from Ballard a copy of the autopsy which he showed to a medical examiner back in Detroit.

It could be caused by a drug overdose, or it could be caused by drowning, strangulation, suffocation, asphyxiation, by trauma to the head or other parts of the body.

There is no mention of the bruises on her arm and hip. There is no mention of any residue of the tablets that Shawn is supposed to have taken. Did Shawn gulp twenty to forty pills? And was there nothing left of them? Could it be lake water or swimming-pool water gulped in extremis? Impossible to know.

Could it be just a big dinner, or liquid that she drank herself? Once again, hard to say. But methadone hits the bloodstream within a half-hour of oral ingestion.

It peaks at four hours. How could Shawn eat a big meal when she should have been already comatose? Or did the methadone enter her body with the meal? It would be soluble in liquids.

Once again, impossible to know. There was a tray of food remains visible in the master bedroom, but collection and analysis of the food seems to have been neglected. There was at least one hypodermic picked up at the house that day. Sowell refused to discuss any aspect of the case although in a carefully worded leak to the Commercial Appeal, Sowell admitted that the private, out-of-state autopsy was illegal. And Francisco refused repeated calls for more information about his report.

Ballard refused to release investigative reports. The witnesses and jurors were sworn to silence. There was still no indication of foul play…. Ballard came forward at his desk. His words grew more pronounced and even rose a notch in volume. And whether I know what happened in the last twelve hours or the last two days before the death of Shawn Lewis, there is… still… no… reason… to… suspect… foul… play.

It was four days after the grand jury session. They convened at about nine—record producers and independent truckers, ex-girlfriends of singers, Memphis matrons and off-duty cops, all bunching up at the door, flashing their printed invitations at a big black man in leather, whose eyes drifted unhurriedly from their faces, over their clothes to their shoes, with a detour toward the left armpit for men who might be packing guns.

Inside, the best tables went fast, staked out with bourbon bottles clumped in the center of the tablecloths. Late arrivals had to stand along the walls, leaning against the juke box or the poker machines. The men did a lot of back-pounding. Their women stood by, posing. A campaign button on his lapel showed him in a smile and a suit, and advertised his name and lever. Owner Kenny Rodgers slid through the swelling crowd.

The noise from the crowd barely diminished as an inaudible introduction gave way to a wobbly country song by Webb Pierce, another Louisiana hell-raiser who was singing hits while Jerry Lee Lewis was learning to shave in Ferriday. Now nearly sixty, a drinker, thirty years past his prime, Pierce finished his song, and the crowd gave him a big hand for who he used to be. Pierce bowed and beamed like they meant it. And then he was there! Here is Jerra. They had a long table for him, set up to one side of the dance floor: a pile of gifts and a forest of bottles.

Jerry drank from a glass of whiskey. Everybody tried to crowd around to the back of the table, to shake his hand, kiss him or whisper something. She whispered something and he answered, and she worked her way back through the crowd, beaming. There was Blondie on has right and a lovely Italianate brunette on the other side. There were a half-dozen other young women ringing the table. They took turns pouring or talking for him, if no one had his ear.

Jerry Lee looked, without change of expression, from one to the other, as if they were so many TV sets. The Instamatic flashes etched cruel skeletal shadows on his sagging face. The flesh seemed to have worn away with the millions of miles, millions of photos, millions of whispers.

His eyes stared, flat black spots, unmoving, unblinking, giving out nothing. Now the Killer reached over toward the pile of gifts, lifted a gold paper crown and put it on his head. The flashes started popping off like crazy. The King was all bones and coal eyes under the shiny gold headband.

The girls at the table all threw their heads back, threw their faces into bright young smiles… Oh, Jerry! Oh, Killer! Whitten said, looking on in approval, hovering at a corner of the dance floor. She was wiping lipstick off him. He was holding up a hand, smiling, acknowledging cheers. You know the grand-jury vote? Sure I got it. And you can quote me on that.

The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Print Article. Search for:. A living archive of the best print journalism, curated by Alex Belth. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

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