Kathleen McCrone sat the Ohio bar exam in the autumn of 1989 and was admitted to practise on 6 November that year. She was 25, a law graduate of Cleveland State University, and the daughter of a judge.
Two years later she went to see Wayne Newton perform in Las Vegas.
They married in April 1994 and she has lived in Nevada ever since. She is 62 now, and she has never been admitted to practise law in the state.
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A judge’s daughter from Cleveland’s west side
Her father, William J. McCrone, sat first at Rocky River Municipal Court and later at the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. He married Marilyn Furman in January 1962 and they raised three daughters on the west side of Cleveland. Kathleen, born in March 1964, was the middle one, and the only one of the three who went into law.
Her mother had trained as a nurse at St John’s in Cleveland and built a career that went well beyond ward work. Marilyn set up the first intravenous therapy unit at Lakewood Hospital, and for a period she served as personal nurse to NASA astronauts going through spaceflight training.
The eldest sister, Mary Colleen, went into television and collected a dozen Emmy awards. She produced and directed at WJW Channel 8 in Cleveland before moving to Los Angeles to work on HGTV’s House Hunters and MTV’s Rock the Vote. She kept a horse, three cats and six dogs at her house in Chagrin Falls, wore Doc Martens to the office, and told the Plain Dealer in 2000 that she hated “all that chick stuff”. She had jumped off a bridge in New Zealand on a bungee cord before most Americans had heard of the sport.
Mary studied at the University of Nevada Reno, close to a family ski chalet, which put a McCrone in the state years before anyone in the family had met Wayne Newton. She died at home in Sherman Oaks in December 2009, aged 46, of sepsis that followed a kidney infection picked up while she was filming in Rio de Janeiro.
Tricia, the youngest, also settled in Las Vegas. She is the one who deals with reporters when they call the family, quoted by name when the Newtons moved house in 2013 and again after intruders were disturbed at their property in June 2018.
The night she met Wayne Newton
By 1991 Kathleen was two years into practice in Ohio. She was in the audience at one of Newton’s Las Vegas shows and was taken backstage afterwards through a family connection, PEOPLE later reported.
They were engaged by the summer of 1993, when a photographer caught them cheek to cheek in a hotel room during a flood relief concert.
The wedding was held on 9 April 1994 at Casa de Shenandoah, Newton’s ranch southeast of the Strip, with around 200 guests brought to the ceremony by horse drawn carriage. He had turned 52 six days earlier and had been headlining in the city since 1963. She was 30 and had been a lawyer for four years.
What happened to her law licence
Her name does not appear on Nevada’s roll of attorneys, under McCrone or under Newton. She moved to the state and never sat its bar exam.
Ohio kept her on the books. She is listed there as attorney number 41870, and for 27 years after the wedding she stayed on that roll under her maiden name alone. The directory records the change to Kathleen Ann McCrone Newton on 1 November 2021.
Her status now reads “Not Required, Suspended”. The register keeps misconduct and paperwork in separate columns. Against discipline history it records nothing at all. The suspension sits under administrative sanctions, the heading covering registration fees and continuing education, which is what lapses when a lawyer stops practising and stops filing.
The same record gives her occupation as company president, at a Las Vegas business called Erin Miel Inc.
The fight over Casa de Shenandoah
In June 2010 Newton sold the ranch to a company called CSD LLC for around 19.5 million dollars, he and Kathleen keeping a fifth of the business. The buyers meant to open the 40 acre estate to paying visitors, and the family were to move into a new house built on the grounds.
In May 2012 CSD sued. The complaint named Newton, his wife and her mother Marilyn, then 76, and accused them of obstructing the development. It also carried allegations about the care of the horses and about Newton’s conduct towards a stable worker, which the family’s Las Vegas attorney, Stephen Peek, rejected outright.
The following month a columnist for the Las Vegas Sun went down to watch a hearing. John Katsilometes had spent years reviewing Newton in the city’s showrooms. This time he found him at the county courthouse in a dark suit, Kathleen beside him and Peek out front. “I prefer the showroom,” he wrote.
The case ended in April 2013 with a settlement the bankruptcy court sealed. Two months later the family moved out after more than four decades on the property, and Kathleen told the Associated Press the new house would be called The Shenandoah.
Casa de Shenandoah opened for public tours in September 2015, with the Newtons at the VIP night. It changed hands again in 2019.
The family business had severed its connection with the estate in July 2017. So when a Las Vegas mother sued in 2019 over a capuchin monkey that had bitten her teenage daughter during a tour, Kathleen answered the wire service herself, by email. “We are not a party and have no idea what happened,” she wrote.
Is Kathleen McCrone still married to Wayne Newton?
They are, and they marked 32 years in April. Newton is 84 and still performing.
She has spoken to the press under her own name only a handful of times. Newton was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in 2001 after a USO tour in Afghanistan, and a recurrence interrupted a run of shows in 2007. “It means so much to him that the show will go on,” she told PEOPLE.
Her husband does most of the talking. In March 2017 he posted a birthday photograph of the pair of them and wrote underneath it: “I am a lucky man. I love you, my darling Kat.”
Their daughter, Lauren Ashley Newton, was born on 29 April 2002 and is 24. She played a waitress in the 2020 film Stealing Chaplin, in which both her parents also appeared. Kathleen is stepmother to Erin, Newton’s elder daughter from his first marriage to Elaine Okamura, which ended in 1985.
What is Kathleen McCrone’s net worth?
Nobody has published a reliable figure. The numbers circulating online run from 19 million dollars up to 150 million, and no filing, court record or interview supports any of them. She has no law practice of her own, and the only business linked to her name in the public registers is the one named on her Ohio listing.
The family now
Marilyn McCrone died at home in Las Vegas on 24 April 2025, aged 89. In her later years she had sung on stage with her son in law during his Christmas tours and travelled with him on USO trips. Her funeral was held at St Ladislas in Westlake, Ohio, and she was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Cleveland, beside her husband and beside Mary.
Newton posted another family photograph in October 2025, taken at Allegiant Stadium: Kathleen, Lauren, Tricia, Tricia’s husband Billy and their son Mark. The same group had sat for a portrait at home in May 2020, in face masks, with Marilyn among them.
