The Killer and his wives.
Seven marriages. Two dead wives. One career destroyed at an airport. The full conjugal record of Jerry Lee Lewis.
HONKY TONK NOIR — No. 1
There is a photograph from May 1958 that tells you everything you need to know about Jerry Lee Lewis.
He is standing on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport, just landed in England for what was supposed to be a 37-date tour — the conquering American, the man positioned to swallow rock and roll whole, the next Elvis, maybe bigger. And at his side is a girl. A small girl with a purse and a Bible and a shopping bag, blinking into the flashbulbs.
A reporter asks her who she is.
She answers honestly. She doesn’t know any better. She’s thirteen years old.
The tour collapsed after three shows. The British press called him a cradle robber, a baby snatcher. By the time the plane touched back down in the States, the radio stations had already turned the music off. Sun Records wouldn’t return his calls. The man who had been making ten thousand dollars a night was, within weeks, playing for less than a hundred.
And the girl — his wife, his cousin, the daughter of his own bass player — would spend the next six decades being introduced to strangers as Jerry Lee Lewis’s child bride.
That is one marriage. He had seven.
I. Dorothy Barton — 1952 to 1953
The first wife is practically a ghost in the record. Dorothy Barton, daughter of a preacher. Jerry Lee Lewis was sixteen years old. The marriage lasted roughly twenty months, left no children, and was dissolved quietly before anyone was paying attention.
What it established, though, was the pattern: move fast, think later, let the paperwork sort itself out. He did not believe in mourning periods. Within days of the divorce being finalized, he had already moved on to the next one.
Sixteen years old. His first marriage was over before he could legally vote.
II. Jane Mitchum — 1953 to 1957
Jane gave him children. Two sons: Ronnie Guy Lewis, and Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., who would die in 1973 at nineteen years old when his Jeep went off a road in Tennessee. The loss of a son is the kind of thing that marks a man for life. Whether it marked Lewis in any useful way is another question.
The only photo of Jane Mitchum that I could find. This photo was from the press regarding her and Jerry’s divorce.
The marriage to Jane ended in 1957, and here is where the legal architecture of Jerry Lee Lewis’s conjugal life begins to get genuinely strange. Lewis claimed afterward that the marriage had never been legally valid to begin with — that some procedural irregularity in the ceremony rendered Jane’s divorce filing unnecessary. Whether that was true or merely convenient, the practical effect was the same: the paperwork wasn’t fully resolved by the time he had already taken a third wife.
Which brings us to England. And the photograph. And the girl with the Bible.
III. Myra Gale Brown — December 1957 to 1970
Young Myra - Jerry’s “Child Bride”
Let’s be exact about what this was.
Myra Gale Brown was thirteen years old. Jerry Lee Lewis was twenty-two. She was the daughter of his bassist, J.W. Brown. She was also his first cousin once removed. And at the time he married her, he had not yet finalized the divorce from wife number two.
So: underage. Family.
His handlers knew. They told him not to bring her to England. He brought her to England.
When the reporter at Heathrow asked who she was, no one had told Myra what to say. She answered the way a child answers — plainly, without strategy. She said she was his wife. And that was the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’s first career.
What gets lost in the scandal, and what Myra herself spent decades trying to correct, is that the marriage was not simply a grotesque footnote. It lasted thirteen years. It produced children, including a son, Steve Allen Lewis, who drowned in the family swimming pool at three years old. It was, by Myra’s own account, genuinely happy in the early years — pillow fights, laughter, a teenage girl managing a household and a touring career and the finances because her husband was constitutionally incapable of managing anything himself.
“I was called the child bride,” she said years later. “But I was the adult and Jerry was the child. I did all the work and made all the decisions and did all the running and taking care of business.”
Then the drugs arrived, and everything that had been reckless became mean. She hired a private detective to document his infidelities. She divorced him in 1970. She later married the detective.
She published her memoir in 2016. She called it The Spark That Survived. She is still living.
Lewis, to my knowledge, never fully reckoned with any of it.
IV. Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate — 1971 to 1982
By the time Jaren entered the picture, Lewis was thirty-six years old and the pattern was fully established. He married her within the year of divorcing Myra. She was already pregnant. They lived together for approximately the first month of the marriage and never again.
The decade that followed was a sustained legal war. Separations, reconciliations, divorce filings, withdrawals, counter-suits. By 1979, Jaren was alleging in court that Lewis had subjected her to adultery, cruelty, and prolific abuse of alcohol and drugs. A divorce settlement was being negotiated — one that, by all accounts, would have financially destroyed him.
In 1982, before the settlement was finalized, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate drowned in a friend’s swimming pool. No one witnessed it.
The divorce that would have bankrupted Jerry Lee Lewis died with her.
Lewis moved on within the year.
V. Shawn Stephens — June 7, 1983 to August 1983
Seventy-seven days.
Shawn Stephens was a twenty-five-year-old cocktail waitress from Michigan when she met Lewis through a mutual connection. She was described by everyone who knew her as warm, social, full of life. She had dreamed of marrying her boyfriend, but his family didn’t approve. Then a rock and roll legend started calling.
She told her friends she was going to go for it. She packed her things and flew to Mississippi to marry Jerry Lee Lewis.
On the wedding day, her father arrived at the house at eleven in the morning and sat outside the locked doors for over an hour before Shawn could come let him in. Jerry Lee appeared eventually — intoxicated, pounding his fist on the kitchen counter, screaming at guests. Her father stood in the hallway demanding to know what kind of operation this was. Lewis disappeared again.
On the wedding night, they couldn’t reach him.
Seventy-seven days later, on a morning in August, the housekeeper walked into the guest bedroom and found Shawn’s body in the bed, turned toward the wall, the covers drawn up to her chin. The wrist was cold. No pulse.
Lewis was in the master bedroom, behind a door fitted with iron bars. His personal physician was with him — Dr. George Nichopoulos, better known as Dr. Nick, the same man who had spent years writing narcotic prescriptions for Elvis Presley and whose medical license had been suspended for overprescribing. On Lewis’s wedding day, Shawn’s mother had found Dr. Nick sitting with Lewis in the bedroom, three pairs of pills laid out neatly on the nightstand. Two of each. Three different colors.
The preliminary cause of death was ruled pulmonary edema from a methadone overdose. Investigators said there was no evidence of foul play.
Then the journalists arrived.
A Rolling Stone investigation by Richard Ben Cramer documented what the official report had not fully accounted for: bruises on Shawn’s body. Blood under her fingernails. Scratches on Lewis’s hands. The fact that Lewis had admitted to fighting with Shawn the night she died. The fact that he had paid for a private autopsy. The fact that Shawn’s mother said her daughter didn’t use drugs — and that Shawn had told her family she was leaving Lewis just days before her death.
Shawn’s mother, at the funeral, looked at Jerry Lee Lewis and said: “He looked like he was going dancing.” She didn’t speak to him.
A grand jury convened and declined to indict. The Department of Justice reviewed the case and closed their file. Many of the county records were later destroyed in a flood.
The case has never been reopened. It has never been fully explained.
Lewis was thirty years older than Shawn Stephens. She was twenty-five when she died, three months after marrying him. His fourth wife had drowned in a swimming pool. His fifth wife died in a bed.
He has been called The Killer his entire career. He always said it was just a nickname.
VI. Kerrie McCarver — April 1984 to 2005
The sixth marriage was the longest — twenty-one years. Kerrie McCarver gave him a son, Jerry Lee Lewis III, born in 1987. In 1993, Lewis moved the family to Ireland, in what was widely understood — and officially denied — to be a tax exile. He lived in a rented house in Foxrock, Dublin. He returned to the States in 1997 when his tax situation had been resolved.
The marriage ended in 2005. Both parties accused the other of infidelity.
By the standards of what had come before, it was almost quiet.
VII. Judith Brown — March 9, 2012 to his death, October 28, 2022
Fun Fact: I was in the room when this photo was taken.
The seventh wife requires one more turn of the family screw.
Judith Brown had been married to Lewis’s cousin, Rusty Brown. Rusty Brown’s older sister was Myra Gale Brown — wife number three. The thirteen-year-old girl on the tarmac at Heathrow. Lewis married the ex-wife of his child bride’s brother.
By the time they married, Judith was sixty-two and had been working as his caregiver. His daughter Phoebe, who had been managing his affairs, didn’t know they were even dating until they announced the wedding. The day after the ceremony, Lewis severed Phoebe’s power of attorney.
It was, by all accounts, the most functional relationship of his life. Judith stood by him through strokes, surgeries, and the slow unwinding of a body that had spent seventy years operating at full destruction. She was at his bedside when he died.
His publicist reported that his final words to her were that he welcomed the hereafter. That he was not afraid.
Judith Brown is still living.
The Tally
Seven marriages. One ended before he could vote. One destroyed his career in the span of a single airport conversation. Two wives died before the ink was dry on the divorce paperwork — one drowned, one didn’t. One lasted twenty-one years and ended in mutual accusations. One lasted seventy-seven days and left questions that were never answered.
The official story on Shawn Stephens is overdose. The official story on Jaren Pate is accidental drowning. Both may be exactly what they appear to be. Jerry Lee Lewis was a man capable of destroying everything around him through sheer force of self — the drugs, the violence of his appetites, the absolute refusal to accommodate anyone else’s needs or limits. He didn’t necessarily need to be a murderer to be the kind of man in whose orbit people got destroyed.
But the timing, in both cases, was convenient. And convenience has a way of becoming its own kind of verdict.
The Killer. Everyone always said it was just a nickname.
Maybe it was.
Sometime I’ll tell y’all about the night I spent at a bar in Memphis when Jerry Lee played the piano and sang for 7-8 hrs with maybe 5 other patrons in attendance
I saw him at the Fillmore in San Francisco in the 1980s and his performance was electric. He was incredible — until you looked into his eyes (I was very close to the stage). They were ice cold, even while he was playing. It literally sent a shiver through me.
"The Killer"? I absolutely believe he was.