Robert True Houghton was an aircraft engineer from San Diego who died in a car crash in Baja California in March 1975, more than three years before his daughter married Robert Kardashian and began building what would become one of the most commercially successful family brands in American television history.
He was 43 years old when he died. He had been drinking. He never met any of his grandchildren.
His name did not go with him. In April 2018, Khloรฉ Kardashian named her newborn daughter True Thompson. Four days later, Kris Jenner settled the question of where that name came from with a single Instagram post: it had belonged to her grandfather, True Otis Houghton, then passed to her father, Robert True Houghton, and was now being carried forward by a child born into a world her great-grandfather never lived to see.
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Quick Facts: Robert True Houghton
| Full Name | Robert True “Bob” Houghton |
| Born | May 12, 1931, San Diego, California |
| Died | March 29, 1975, Rosarito Beach, Baja California, Mexico |
| Age at Death | 43 |
| Occupation | Aircraft and Aerospace Engineer |
| Parents | True Otis Houghton (Oklahoma) and Mary Lee Pickens (Texas) |
| Married | Mary Jo “MJ” Campbell |
| Children | Kris Jenner, Karen Casey Houghton |
| Buried | El Camino Memorial Park, San Diego, California |
Who Was Robert True Houghton?
Robert True Houghton was born on May 12, 1931, in San Diego, California, to True Otis Houghton, originally from Oklahoma, and Mary Lee Pickens, from Texas. He had one younger sister, Linda Lee Houghton, who died in 2014.
San Diego in the 1930s and 1940s was becoming a significant aerospace center. Companies including Convair and Ryan Aeronautical operated in the region, and Robert built his professional life inside that industry, working as an aircraft and aerospace engineer. He carried his father’s name as a middle name, a family tradition that meant little to the outside world and, decades later, would mean a great deal to his grandchildren.
No public records name the specific company he worked for, and no source confirms military service, despite his age coinciding with the Korean War years.
The Marriage, Point Loma, and Two Daughters
Sometime in the early-to-mid 1950s, Robert married Mary Jo Campbell, born in Arkansas in 1934, who would later run her own children’s clothing store. The couple settled in Point Loma, a residential neighborhood along San Diego’s western waterfront.
Their first daughter, Kristen Mary Houghton, was born on November 5, 1955. MJ was 21 years old. Their second daughter, Karen Casey Houghton, arrived in 1958.
The marriage lasted roughly a decade.
After the Divorce: Abandonment, Alcoholism, and a Cancer Scare
Robert and MJ divorced in 1962. Kris was seven years old. MJ sold the Point Loma home and moved both girls to Clairemont, in northern San Diego, where Kris attended Longfellow Elementary School. Robert stepped back from daily family life and, by most accounts, stayed back.
Alcoholism was reported as a central factor in the divorce. Star Magazine described him as a violent drinker who undermined his own professional ambitions repeatedly.
The emotional impact on Kris was documented in the 2021 unauthorized biography Dirty Sexy Money, written by journalists Cathy Griffin and Dylan Howard:
“Like many children in that situation, Kris could not shake the idea that she was somehow responsible for her dad leaving. Barely a day went by that Kris didn’t feel the sting of Bob’s abandonment. She longed for his attention and love. There were broken promises of trips to see her and her sister Karen, and a few missed phone calls, and even fewer letters.”
About a year after the divorce, Kris was diagnosed with a cancerous bone tumour in her leg. Doctors initially believed amputation at the hip would be necessary. She received the all-clear after surgery, but the combination of her father’s departure and that medical scare before her ninth birthday left a mark the biographers described plainly: “The divorce and cancer scare, coming so soon together, would no doubt have had a profound impact.”
MJ eventually remarried businessman Harry Shannon (1926-2003). The family relocated to Oxnard, California, but Shannon’s business partner allegedly left with all the company’s capital within months. They returned to San Diego. Kris worked at her mother’s store, Shannon & Company, graduated from Clairemont High School in 1973, and later worked as a flight attendant for American Airlines before marrying Robert Kardashian in 1978.
The Dirty Sexy Money biography also noted that Kris consistently sought relationships with significantly older men throughout her early adult years. At 17 she was in a serious relationship with professional golfer Cesar Sanudo, who was 12 years older. At 18 she began seeing Robert Kardashian, 11 years her senior. The authors concluded: “Those feelings of abandonment as a child could quite easily have manifested themselves in a desire to be loved and looked after. All her life Kris has been looking for a father figure.”
His Final Months
By late 1974, Robert Houghton was in his mid-forties and his personal life had contracted around alcohol.
His then-girlfriend, Leslie Johnson Leech, spoke about the relationship’s end in Star Magazine:
“I broke up with him in late 1974 because of his drinking. We were at his parents’ house and he just exploded at them. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
On his work life, she added: “He was very entrepreneurial and had all kinds of ideas about ways to make a lot of money, but he rarely acted on them, possibly because of his drinking.”
On his daughters: “Talking about the situation was painful for him, but he did often say how much he missed his daughters and how pretty they were.” He had, in her words, felt he “really dropped the ball.”
After Leech ended the relationship, Robert met Vicky Thomsen and the two got engaged within months. Less than six months separated Leslie’s departure and Robert’s death.
March 29, 1975: What Happened in Rosarito Beach
On the night of March 29, 1975, Robert and Vicky Thomsen were in Rosarito Beach, a coastal town in Baja California roughly 20 miles south of Tijuana and under 30 miles from San Diego. They had spent the evening drinking margaritas. The plan was to drive to the next town and get married in the morning.
Thomsen recounted what followed in Star Magazine:
“The plan was to hit the next big town and get married there in the morning. I was looking at the stars and mentioned to Bob how tired I was. It was 9:20 pm. Then I suddenly heard metal smashing and I woke up crushed under the dashboard.”
Robert, driving his Porsche, had swerved into an oncoming vegetable truck. The collision was catastrophic. He was impaled on the steering wheel and suffered severe internal injuries. Nuns from a nearby convent arrived at the scene and helped pull him from the wreckage. He was taken for medical care but died from his injuries.
He was 43 years old. Kris Jenner, his eldest daughter, was 19. She would not learn the full details of that night for years.
Robert True Houghton was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego, the city where he had been born.
The Name “True”: From One Generation to the Next
On April 16, 2018, four days after Khloรฉ Kardashian gave birth to True Thompson in Cleveland, Ohio, Kris Jenner posted on Instagram:
“FUN FACT… my Grandfather’s name on my Dad’s side was True Otis Houghton….my real Dad’s name was Robert True Houghton…so i am so excited Khloe named her daughter True!!! #lovebug #familytradition #family”
The line of inheritance is direct. True Otis Houghton gave his first name to his son as a middle name. Robert True Houghton carried it for 43 years. True Thompson, born in 2018, carries it now.
Kris Jenner, Karen Houghton, and What Became of His Daughters
Kris Jenner built the management and production apparatus behind the Kardashian-Jenner media empire. She married Robert Kardashian in 1978, then Caitlyn Jenner in 1991, and had six children across both marriages: Kourtney, Kim, Khloรฉ, Rob, Kendall, and Kylie. In 2021, she shared an old photograph of her father on social media. Kim reposted it to her Instagram Story and captioned it with his full name: Robert True Houghton.
Karen Casey Houghton kept her life out of the public eye. She worked as a flight attendant and later as a part-time nurse, and published two cookbooks. She had one daughter, Natalie Zettel. Karen and Kris had a publicly strained relationship for years, with Karen speaking critically about her sister in a 2014 interview, but the two reconciled by 2019. Karen died unexpectedly on March 18, 2024, at her home in San Marcos, California. She was 65. Her death certificate, obtained by TMZ, listed cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac arrhythmia as the cause, with Type 2 diabetes noted as a secondary factor. Natalie Zettel married Noah Warren at a beachfront ceremony in La Jolla in early 2025. Kris attended.
Robert True Houghton spent 43 years as an engineer, a divorced father, and a man who, by the accounts of the women who knew him, understood exactly what he had lost and kept drinking anyway. He was on a dark road in Baja California with a woman he had known for less than six months, at 9:20 on a March night, when he did not make it to morning.
None of his grandchildren ever met him. But his name is the first word out of a seven-year-old girl’s mouth when someone asks her what her name is.
That is what is left of Robert True Houghton, Kris Jenner’s father.
