The Pale-Faced Lie

David Crow's memoir recounts his childhood under the control of his father, Thurston Crow, a violent ex-convict who raised his four children on a fabricated Cherokee identity while subjecting them to abuse, criminal schemes, and psychological manipulation.

David's earliest memories center on Navajo Station, a remote compound on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona, where Thurston worked for El Paso Natural Gas. At age three and a half, Thurston took David on a reckless car ride through a snowstorm and told him they needed to "get rid of" his mother, Thelma Lou. Thelma Lou was chronically anxious and emotionally fragile, spending most days on the couch while David's older sister, Lonnie, only seven, managed the household. Thurston subjected David to brutal physical "drills," throwing him in the air and letting him fall, all framed as Cherokee toughening. At the dinner table, he told the children they were Cherokees of "superior intelligence and courage," despite their pale skin, blue eyes, and reddish-blond hair, and recounted tales of Cherokee persecution and his own supposed war heroics.

By eavesdropping at his parents' bedroom door, David pieced together a darker history. Before David was born, Thurston and a friend named George had nearly beaten a man to death, and Thurston was sentenced to seven years at San Quentin State Prison. He manipulated a psychiatrist into supporting early parole, gaining release after three years. He betrayed George during the trial, and George vowed revenge. Thurston later obtained a gubernatorial pardon, erasing his criminal record.

The family moved repeatedly, each relocation bringing new crises. In Belen, New Mexico, where David's youngest sister, Sally, was born, his younger brother Sam's hand was severely burned in an industrial ironing machine, requiring months of hospitalization. In Albuquerque, David was diagnosed with poor eyesight, hearing loss, and dyslexia. Thurston dismissed the diagnosis as "a fancy word for stupid" and told David his IQ test results were far below average. David responded by reading obsessively, using a ruler to keep his eyes on the line. Meanwhile, Thelma Lou sabotaged Thurston's insurance career by hiding his policies under the carpet, and Thurston lost his job.

In Gallup, New Mexico, the family lived in a condemned duplex. Thurston orchestrated a campaign to force Thelma Lou out, instructing the children to make her life unbearable: Lonnie stopped doing housework, and David and Sam destroyed dishes and furniture on command. The pressure pushed Lonnie, then 14, to swallow a bottle of aspirin in a suicide attempt. Thurston sent Thelma Lou to a psychiatric hospital, and when she eventually returned and began a part-time job, he pulled the children from school and moved the family to Fort Defiance on the Navajo Indian Reservation while she was at work, leaving a note: "Don't look for us. We don't want you."

Life in Fort Defiance began in Mud Flats, a blighted neighborhood of condemned housing and feral dog packs. Thurston took David back to Gallup, where David found Thelma Lou slumped on the floor of the empty house, begging him to stay. Thurston dragged David away and hit him. Amid the hardship, an elderly Navajo woman named Evelyn began visiting the children daily, offering unconditional warmth and becoming the first adult David felt truly loved him. David befriended Tommy, leader of the toughest local gang, who protected him from bullies.

Thurston began stealing power tools from Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) warehouses, using David as his lookout. During their drives, Thurston confessed to multiple killings, including a man he claimed to have killed in a bar fight during his navy service. Thurston married Mona Tully, a nurse at the local Indian hospital, who imposed a punitive regime on the children. Mona created a punishment board, forced Sam to sleep in garbage, cut Sally's hair short and dressed her in boys' clothes, and locked David out of the house on a night when temperatures dropped to 17 below zero. After Navajo boys set David up to be shot with rock salt by an elderly Navajo man, Thurston, impressed by David's willingness to take risks, lifted all of Mona's restrictions.

Thelma Lou secured visitation rights and told David that Thurston had cut her brake lines after abandoning her, an attempted murder she survived by chance. She asked the children to live with her, but they refused.

The family moved to Kensington, Maryland, for Thurston's BIA training. David fell years behind his affluent peers and was mocked for his clothes and his claims of Cherokee heritage. Coach Chauncey Ford of the Walter Johnson High School track team became a crucial mentor, and David barely graduated, saved only by Ford's personal advocacy with teachers.

David talked his way into Montgomery College, earned an associate's degree, and transferred to the University of Maryland, where he joined Sigma Chi fraternity and found belonging for the first time. During this period, Thurston involved David in the most disturbing crime yet: David drove to Wheeling, West Virginia, and found his father covered in blood, then served as lookout while Thurston and two accomplices buried a body. David told his father he would never do anything illegal for him again.

During a period of aimlessness after withdrawing from college, David returned to the reservation, where Rex Kontz, the Fort Defiance postmaster and a Navajo code talker in World War II, told him bluntly: "Your father not Cherokee. He lies." The Cherokee identity, the family's only source of pride, was entirely fabricated. Shaken, David returned to Maryland and re-enrolled.

After graduating, David built a career in Washington politics, eventually joining the Reagan administration at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Thurston, still a USDA employee, was furious that his son outranked him and made disruptive visits to David's office.

The final crisis came when Sally called in a panic: Thurston had ordered her to drive him and Mona to a remote swamp in North Carolina, where he planned to kill Mona and use Sally as his alibi, threatening to kill Sally if she refused. David instructed Sally to hide, then wrote detailed letters to police, a local newspaper, and an FBI contact describing Thurston's criminal history and murder plot. He forged a confession from Thurston in red marker and sabotaged Thurston's car overnight, taping the letters beneath the windshield wipers and gluing the forged confession to the glass. Thurston called threatening retaliation, but David hung up mid-sentence.

Years later, at age 52, David sat outside the family's old house in Gallup. The new owner invited him inside, and David told his story for the first time. The man told him, "You can't change your childhood, but you can let it go." David decided to forgive both parents and himself. His lobbying firm thrived, he married Patty, the first person he fully opened up to about his past, and his relationships with his children deepened. In Thurston's final years, weakened by heart disease, he wrote on a hospital notepad, "Can you forgive me?" David told him yes. On his deathbed, Thurston said, "You were my favorite one. I love you, son. I always have." Using genealogical records, Patty and David traced the Crow family to 18th-century Northern Ireland and England. There was no Cherokee ancestry.