1308: The Pale-Faced Lie part 1

Speaker: I would imagine that most people, when they think of their earliest childhood memories with their father, they're probably thinking about throwing the football back and forth on the lawn, or weekend camping trip, or maybe even going over math homework at the kitchen table. For David Crowe, things were a little different. He wasn't just his father's child. He was also his criminal accomplice. I have an expression, childhood is a city you can never leave. And when you have a hard enough life, you grow to think that you deserve it, that you can do no better. You are no better. David Crowe is the author of a book titled The Pale Face Lie. It's a story about a father and a son living a life of crime. The father, who goes by the name of Thurston Crowe in the book, was a violent, convicted felon. And his son David was always by his side. The book follows a young David and his three siblings on a Navajo reservation. But David Crowe is not a Navajo Indian, and he sure as heck wasn't Native American. His father Thurston was an outlaw working in the reservation as a way of hiding from his enemies. And I was raised to think you'll never be anything. You're just the son of this terrible guy. And you'll do terrible things because he'll tell you to do them and you won't break that cycle. And it was a hard cycle to break. Imagine if the one person you trusted the most in this world used you to commit crimes. That's what David says happened to him. His father was an ex con. He was cruel, violent, and possibly a murderer. And David says he was right by his side the entire time. I'm Javier Leyva and this is Pretend. Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. Hey, this is Whitney. And this is Melissa from Colts Crimes in Cabernet. I'm Javier Leyva. We wanted to share some exciting news with you. On our journey of navigating advocacy through this true crime space, we believe that the name Colts Crimes and Cabernet no longer reflects our position on ethical true crime content. As much as we have grown to love our original name and our journey to get here, our evolution from that first glass of wine between friends to meeting with family members, survivors, and fellow case advocates has forever changed our stance. We're committed to amplifying the voices of victims, survivors, and experts who are fighting for justice and change in the criminal justice system. We're here to empower you to also become advocates for change, no matter where or who you are. That being said, We would like to introduce you to our new name, Navigating Advocacy. We invite you to join us in navigating advocacy through the murky waters of true crime. Let's make a difference together. We'll see you next week on Navigating Advocacy available wherever you get your podcasts. So i'm in college And my father has run off with an 18 year old indian woman that he met through his job So one day like a saturday afternoon I get a phone call, lived in a fraternity house, one phone for 80 guys. Somebody opens the phone and comes and finds me and says, There's a woman on the line and she's absolutely frantic and says you have to come to the phone. I get on the phone and it's the woman my dad's living with and she says, You have to save your dad's life. You've got five hours to get to Wheeling, West Virginia. At this point in his life, David was a college student in Maryland. He had a five hour drive ahead of him from Maryland to West Virginia. And she gave me instructions, you'll come up on this road and gave me the road, there'll be a bank of phones and there'll be a truck stop. So you can't miss it. So I got there, sure enough. Big truck stop. I go to the phone, call a number. It's getting pretty close to dusk at this point. My dad comes in a car with two guys I don't know, but they do not look like nice guys. And he says, what you need to do is he gets in my car is follow these guys down this long dirt road and turn off your lights. As soon as you turn on the road and I'll use a flashlight and we'll drive slow. David could feel his shoulders tense up and his palms begin to sweat. He knew that there was trouble almost immediately. They drove down about a half a mile, but it felt like forever. And he stops and he says, I want you to keep your headlights on for one minute and I'll swing my hand. So it's still dusky, I can see. And so he and these two guys open a trunk and there's about a six foot, looks like a human body to me, wrapped in a tarp. And they go and they start digging and digging and digging, bury this tarp, and cover it up, put leaves on it and all that. So, my dad runs to, and we had a signaling system when he was a thief. If I blink three times, there's huge trouble. Twice, beware. One, just keep your eyes open. So I knew the signal, didn't know any of the other circumstances other than, I know my dad, and I know this, he's not burying wood. How many times did he blink? He didn't blink because nothing came up. I'm terrified because I realized he's burying a human. He buries whatever he buries. He comes back to my car and I see blood. And there's blood on a duffel bag. And he throws it in my back of my car. He gets in and we start, my dad has complete control of me. He's always had complete control, right? And he starts saying, I want you to drive very slow. The guys behind me are going to drive left. You're going to drive right. You're going to go very slow. Then, they slowly started to drive back to College Park, Maryland, where David went to college. He and his dad started arguing. First time I've ever really talked back, and I said, that had to be a human body. And he said, none of your damn business. I said, sure it is. I'm an accomplice. He said, you're not an accomplice to anything. You're just an idiot son that I own, and you're going to drive left. And you're going to shut up. And I said, well, I can tell that's human blood on your clothing. There's human blood on that duffel bag. If a policeman stops us, there's evidence the body had been in the other car. So we're arguing the whole way back. And my dad, very much of a criminal mind. Is explaining to me the code if somebody crosses you and you kill him, they had it coming. It's okay to kill if the reasons are the right reasons and we're arguing and fighting and driving and we get back to where he lived. And I got out and I said, I'm never doing anything for you ever again. And I should go to the police and he grabbed me by the throat. He's built like an NFL linebacker and he said, you'll do anything I tell you to do boy. I own you shoved me back in the car and he drove off. Yeah. So as you can imagine, Javier, for the next days, weeks, even a few years, I woke up every day thinking I'm going to get arrested. And every day I'm thinking I should go tell somebody, but I didn't do either one of those things. It ruined several years. I broke up with a girl I probably would have married because I said, you don't want anything to do with my family. But this incident, you know, disposing of the body wasn't the first time that Thurston got his son David tangled up in a crime. These kinds of things just happened all the time, as long as he remembered. My first memory, we're on the reservation, working, he's working this job, is, We have to get rid of your mother. She's crazy, and if you grow up with her, you'll be crazy too. We have to get rid of her. And get rid of her, meaning, kill your mother? Yeah. And how old are you at this time? Or you're four years old Holy crap. Mostly, that's when you're forming your first memories. So your first memory is your father telling you that you gotta get rid of your mom. I have a hard time remembering when I was four or five, but I remember a glimpse of it. You would remember if it was incredibly traumatic. Thank God, I hope you did not have that. But when you have extreme trauma at an early age, it does things to you that can't be undone. And when your father tells you, we have to get rid of your mother and you know what he means, you're scared from that minute on. It was never a peaceful moment from that moment on. And did he ever try to carry through with that idea? Oh yeah. When I was 10, he almost did it. Very lucky that she didn't get killed. David told me that his father abandoned his mother when he was 10 years old. She was out doing something away from the house that day, and his father took him and everything in the house, I mean everything. He took the rent money, all the food, and even shut off the heat. But before they left, Thurston did one last thing. Gallup is in the San Juan basin. It was a huge coal mining area for a very long time. And the hills are very steep. It's almost San Francisco steep. So he cut her brake linings and we lived up on a hill and he figured that she'd hit the brakes and somebody would kill her. My, my mom, God bless her still alive at 92. If you can was quite mentally ill. Mom's a lover to death, but very mentally compromised. She was terrified. She's alone. She's in a broken down car. My dad expected after we abandoned her that he would read that she was killed and he could conveniently be rid of her. But she didn't die and she refused to leave the house. So he took me back to the house that she, where she was abandoned, our previous home. And I see her sitting in the living room. She had, there's a dirty mattress. She's wearing really thin clothes. This is February. The reservation gallops up between six and a half and 7, 000 feet. We have real cold winter, very cold. So she's house is freezing. She's shivering. She's sitting in the corner, an absolute look of hopelessness, which I never knew what that meant, but her face was completely vacant. And so I walked in, my dad said, go see if your mom's there, and she was there in that living room, and I had a, what I think is a nervous breakdown. I just started crying and shaking. That's my mom. And my dad came in behind me, because I'd been in the house too long. My mom jumped up and ran to me, grabbed onto me, said, my oldest son, you can't leave me. You've got to go out and be the man of the house. My dad comes in behind me, slams her to the ground, rips me away from her, hits me hard. She's in a fetal position, crying. We get in the car to drive away, and he hit me with his elbow in the head. I never felt it. I couldn't feel anything. That is the moment in my life I broke. Something broke inside me, and it took me all the way to my early 50s to understand what happened. And to begin the repair, remember when all this was going on, David was just 10 years old. From that moment on, he lived with his dad and sold that his siblings, they didn't get dragged into the accomplice stuff, but he was very vicious to them. There were sexual things with my sisters and my brother who didn't understand and go along, got beat even worse than I did. Well, we are both beat within an inch of our life with buckle into the belt all the time. According to the 2020 census, nearly 80 percent of mothers get custody of their children. It's very rare for a father to get custodial rights, but according to David Crow, this issue was handled outside the courts. Did your mother file charges against them or try to claim custody? My mother was more of a child than we were by the time I was six. She was easy to take advantage of and he did. And we knew that if we went with our mom, that he would come back and kill her. At some point, if we weren't in separate houses, she was not going to live. And I knew that. And I knew that my siblings couldn't take any more of what was going on. So now David was living with Thurston, his father, but he wasn't seen as a son. He was viewed more as a partner in crime. That's how his father always treated him. But now, with his wife and his kid's mother out of the way, there wasn't any restraint. Nothing was holding Thurston back. What kind of things did he make you do? So the Navajo Indian Reservation is bigger than West Virginia. And he's the inventory and safety engineer for the tribe. So there was warehouses spread out all over. And each one of them had like power saws and screwdrivers, all kinds of stuff. So what he would do is steal just enough from each warehouse that no one really knew that there was that much missing. So we would drive up to these warehouses on Saturdays and we had a very elaborate system. These are corrugated steel quonset huts. So he would pull up and I would sit in the car and my, my goal, I had to watch to see if anybody's coming. Could there be danger? Could there be somebody who could catch us? And of course the car looks like a pinhead. When you've got a wide, flat area and dust kicks up. So you really don't know. So I had three rocks in my hand and if I threw one rock and it hit, he could hear it inside. That meant, okay, be alert, be alert. There might be trouble. If I threw two in a row, boom, boom, that meant I'm worried and I want you near the front door. If I threw three. Boom, boom, boom. Run to the car and let's get the hell out of here. I can just imagine Thurston and his son David sitting around a fire after a long day of looting and stealing. What did these two talk about? School? Homework? Girls? Nah. Thurston told his son stories about murdering a guy in prison. Not exactly bedtime stories, right? And he told me about a couple of guys he killed in fights that no one knew. And I would trick him, if you will, into telling me more and more about his San Quentin life, there are times he didn't want to talk about it, but there are a lot of times when I could kind of, so what happened next dad? And he would just tell me these stories. And I remembered them, right? And there really grew some stories. I mean, San Quentin's not a fun place. San Quentin, by the way, is one of the most infamous male prisons in the United States. One of its most well known inmates includes cult leader, Charles Manson. There's even an excellent podcast called Ear Hustle, produced inside the prison. Anyway, back to the story. And so now you're kind of stealing equipment from the reservations. What other papers did he sent you on? You know, that you just It's almost always stealing, but we would game play. We'd be driving along. So these vast rural areas. And we one day give you just one example. We're driving along and there's a man, a Navajo man walking, and he's probably miles from where he left and miles to go. And dad would say, okay, I want you to tell me the last three license plates of the cars that came towards us, past us, where's the nearest police station? If we kill him, where would we put him? Who's going to find him? Who do you think will be the first person to come upon the body? Why? And if I didn't answer right, he would get extremely mad at me. So I got to the point where I could game play with him. It just did it to survive, right? But he constantly did that. When we went into any public place, He never sat near a window where he could be seen. There was always an entrance or an exit. David's job was just to sit there, face the window, or the door. He was the lookout. If he saw something unusual, somebody that didn't look like they fit in, or somebody looking nervous, he had to alert his father. And they had a very elaborate alert system. We had a system where he had lock boxes that he buried, and lots of P. O. boxes where he got secret mail. And in our system, this is, he'd say, you have to memorize these lock numbers. So lockbox number one, the code was Mickey Mantle. So Mickey Mantle's best year, year he won the Triple Crown, he batted 354, he had 56 home runs, and he had 114 RBIs. So I would know Mickey Mantle, and we had different systems, and I would memorize them. And this went all the way through high school. And he would always say, if I disappeared, don't come back. I want you to go through these lock boxes and go get some, I'll leave something behind so you'll know who to go kill. It was just crazy stuff, but you had to answer him right. You had to give him the right answers. Why you? Why did he pick you and not your younger brother or not your sister? Why you? I was the oldest boy, but second kid. So I hate to say this. I was the one most like my dad. I understood him. I completely understood him. I didn't like it, but I understood him. If you called my brother and said, I have this biggest secret in the world. Can't tell anybody. No, I don't mean something like you killed somebody, but like, you know, I'm afraid I'm going to get fired. I'm afraid my wife's mad at me. I'm afraid, you know, what, something like that. He would immediately call that person and tell them. I love my brother to death, but there's no filter on him. And so it got to a point where you never told him anything. And if I told him he'd tell, and then I'd get beat up. My sisters were somebody he could abuse and beat, but he never trusted him that way. Thurston saw David as his heir. At a certain point in his teen years, David said he knew what his father was thinking even before he did. That's how in tune he was with him. He had a blood vessel that came right between your eyes, you know, it's in your forehead. And if it bulge like a garden hose and his eyes bugged out, I call it the YV because the vein looked like a Y and the eyes bugged out like a Volkswagen Beetle. You knew he was extremely angry and something very bad is about to happen. And you couldn't stop him. If he got to that point, I'd study him. And if I could catch him before that happened, I might be able to talk him down or convince him not to do what he was going to do, but if he ever hit the YV it's over, and so I knew that I understood him. I tried to protect my siblings best. I could mostly. Couldn't and didn't. You just couldn't, but there are times I was able to deflect things, get somebody out. One guy tried to challenge him, and I jumped up in front of the man and said, Look, unless you want to die or kill him, walk away. And the guy did. You paint this picture of your father as this monster, which he very much sounds like a monster, right? But did he have another side to him? Was he always this despicable person? Well, inside he was, but what he had was two things. He was very bright. He just had a super high IQ and he was, he read a lot. He remembered. The other thing is he was incredibly manipulative. He had. When he wanted to get something from you, he could charm a snake. He was a huge BS er. And of course, the further he moved up any food chain or any work, people see that. It's like, I get on the phone, Javier is the smartest man I ever met. You're incredibly great. I'm like, God, you must be a billionaire. I mean, he would just throw this crap out and it either worked or no one cared, but he could throw on the charm and he had good charisma, very good IQ, and a very good presence. But it was always to get something from you or somebody. And it was something that they would not want to give. And we never went to any bar restaurant anywhere where he didn't try to pick up a woman. And he'd be there with his kids. Next thing you know, he's lending her money, buying her things. Getting her an apartment. There must have been a hundred of those. And you'd be there and you'd just be embarrassed, right? You're just like, oh my god. But he never let up. I mean, my show's about con artists. Would you consider your father a con artist? The best. The best. He's had to talking the chief psychiatrist and the warden in St. Quentin into letting him out early. And he told me that Talking his way out of San Quentin was simple, and I have to believe him. He got out pretty fast, and he got the chief psychiatrist on his side, and he told me, It's so easy to trick this psychiatrist. You tell him exactly what he wants to hear. I had a terrible childhood, and all these things went wrong, and I didn't really commit the crime I committed. Somebody did this to me and forced me to overreact. He told me at one point he, the chief psychiatrist had tears in his eyes and he'd go back to his cell and laugh his head off. He's very bright, very manipulative. He was brilliant and he knew what they wanted to hear. I asked David if he could give me access to anything that could verify his story. I wanted to make sure that the documents backed it up. I asked for prison records, anything I could use to double check it all. But many of the stories that David is telling us is all anecdotal. It's just the way he remembers everything unfolding. It's almost impossible to fact check this story. However, David spent many years amassing public records and other documents trying to put the pieces together. The other thing I did is I tracked down his accomplice's son, and I tracked down his first cellmate's son in the fish tank. Took years to do this. I went to San Quentin and Got myself an interview with the warden, obviously not his, I have all this prison records. You have his parole picture with the California prison number. I went back and talked to everybody I could ever talk to. So the only anecdotal part is who he might've killed and got away with before I was born. You'll never know. I believe him, but I tell you, he told me, in other words, I've spent. Enormous amount of energy, fact checking, verifying, going back through every single thing. Next time on Pretend, David's father tries to kill his next wife, and David says that he came up with an elaborate plan to stop him. That's next time on Pretend. After that, I told him I'd never do his bidding again ever, and I didn't know what he had gotten me into, and he wanted to kill other people. This episode was written and produced by me, Javier Leyva, and Audrey Gibbs. It was also edited by Puneet Shenoy with the Podcast Pundits. Hey everyone, it's me, Javier. I just wanted to jump in and give you an update on where everything stands. Of course, I am still following the Stalker case. We are marching our way towards trial, which will happen in July. But I also wanted to let you know of some other things that I'm working on. Believe it or not, I, I thought I had my fill with stalker stories, but I'm working on a stalker story that might actually be crazier than the one you've listened to on my show. I know, that's kind of hard to believe. And this one is personally terrifying. I'm even scared to air it for the repercussions that I might face. But I'm also working on some other things. For instance, I just launched the Ponzi playbook with my co host and friend, Neil McTighe. And if you guys haven't listened to the Ponzi playbook, I really want you to check it out. Please subscribe. The first episode is about our favorite congressman, George Santos, and his Ponzi scheme that no one seems to be talking about. But it's pretty, pretty crazy once you listen to the details. The first two episodes of the Ponzi playbook are out now. Episode three will drop on Wednesday, July 7th. And John Taylor and I are putting the final touches on criminal conduct. Season four. It's a case that we've been wanting to do since the very beginning. As soon as those episodes drop, you will be the first to know. And guess what? We're also working on Season 5 at the same time of Criminal Conduct, and that case is Bananas. It involves wrestlers, strippers, murder, and the mob. So there's lots of stuff cooking. I just wanted to let you know. So make sure to stay subscribed to this channel if you want to know the latest and greatest and get bonus content. Of course, my Patreon supporters and Pretend Plus supporters on Apple Podcasts are always the first to know. Thank you to David Crowe for sharing your story. His book, you can find on Amazon or wherever you get books, is called The Pale Face Lie. Alright, talk to you next week.