Cleo’s “heart as big as Texas,” as her attorneys claimed later, led Cleo to a pattern of “loving the wrong kind of men,” and she became engaged to Albert McDonald in the early 1960s. However, while on duty as a bouncer at a bar, Albert was arrested for carrying a gun during a fight and sent to prison effectively squashing the marriage plans.
A Creek County investigator and friend, Jack McKenzie, told Cleo, “McDonald’s not going to straighten up, and you should forget about him.”
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Why do places and people of extreme violence fascinate us so much? Are we just horrified that another human being could do such a merciless act in our society or are we worried that we ourselves, if in conducive circumstances, might do the same? Are the places where these acts occur silent or do they still echo the screams of terror and feelings of savagery?
Beginning at the age of six, on a well-known and often-travelled road in southwest Tulsa from home to the grocery store and back, my grandmother would scare me with the story of a woman’s body being found in the septic tank at an abandoned brown stone house that sat right on Union Avenue between S. 71st Street and S. 61st Street. The large windows were glassless and only showed the outline of the missing individual rectangular panes. It was the perfect setting for a ghost story. The worse of the story was the woman’s death was no accident but a brutal murder. I knew for certain that if I ever found myself there at night, I would see the bloody, half-rotten, sewage-covered corpse of the dead woman climbing up out of the ground from the septic tank seeking revenge on anyone she could catch with her grasping hands. Many, many years later as I was cleaning out my mother’s cedar chest in her bedroom after her death, I found a newspaper article from 1971 about Cleo Epps and her brutal murder. It re-ignited my fascination with the story. As I did some research, I found, other than newspaper articles, very little had been written about this fascinating woman. The tidbits that I did find indicated Cleo was a complex and strong woman. While she did break the law, she did it with class. No pun intended. She was a former school teacher before she changed career fields to bootlegging. Many years later, the series Breaking Bad would illustrate what can happen when a school teacher becomes desperate for money. Cleo was ahead of her time. So, I took Toni Morrison’s advice: “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” Cleo, I hope it does you justice. |
AuthorAndrea Chase ArchivesChapters |