Movie icon Elizabeth Taylor took a horrible dark secret to her grave – her adopted daughter was married to a violent drunk who allegedly planned to pour gasoline around their family home and set it ablaze with both Liz’s daughter and the couple’s young son inside, The National ENQUIRER has exclusively learned.
The plot by Liz’s nutso son-in-law from hell, Thomas McKeown, was stopped by an alert neighbor, who called cops after seeing him with the gas can. The loose cannon was approaching the New Jersey home where he lived with Liz’s daughter Maria Burton and their then three-year-old son, Richard.
“He had nails in his mouth and he was going to nail the windows shut and set the house on fire with us in it,” said Mary Pitman, a next-door neighbor and Richard’s babysitter, who was inside the house at the time.
“He was insane! He would threaten to kill her and everything if she left him. His soul was black when he was drinking.”
McKeown, 59, turned pyromaniac on Oct. 22, 2003 after raging about a powerhouse nanny dispatched to Jersey by the “Cleopatra” beauty to protect her daughter and grandson, Mary said.
“They told McKeown she was going to be a babysitter but she wasn’t,” she told The ENQUIRER exclusively.
“She talked like a dude, shook hands like a dude, smoked like a dude, you knew it wasn’t no babysitter. She looked like an Israeli soldier with this short hair.”
A Monmouth County, N.J., judge gave Liz’s daughter an order of protection, legal docs obtained by The ENQUIRER show.
Maria, 53, escaped to Los Angeles. In Feb. 2004, she filed for legal separation citing “irreconcilable differences,” while McKeown cooled his heels in rehab.
He later accused Liz in the media of kidnapping his son and using her Tinseltown clout to prevent him from seeing his boy – neglecting to mention his pyromaniac stunt.
McKeown also claimed that he sought Liz’s help in mending the shaky marriage, “but instead of helping she turned Maria against me.”
To Liz’s horror, Maria later reconciled with McKeown, moving to Idaho.
Ten years later in Sept. 2014, she finally divorced him, again citing “irreconcilable differences.”
Mary told The ENQUIRER she prays that Maria keeps her word and stays away from McKeown.
McKeown refuted the gasoline can claim, but admitted to The ENQUIRER that he was arrested after slapping Maria in the face. He claims he found her passed out drunk on the living room sofa while their young son was left unattended.
