The Queen

by Josh Levin

  But that didn’t mean Taylor let Bailey play by a different set of rules. One Saturday morning, she shouted at him from upstairs, making what he thought was an insignificant request. He ignored her once, then raised his voice when she started hollering at him again. After that, the shouting stopped. Twenty minutes later, Taylor came downstairs with a pistol in her hand. She placed it against Bailey’s neck. “I’ll blow your motherfucking brains out if you ever talk to me like that,” she said.

  Taylor walked away and sat down at the dining room table. She asked Bailey to come over. He assumed she was going to apologize for losing her temper. She did not. “You ain’t going nowhere, nigger,” Taylor told him. “The only way you’re leaving is in a box.”

  * * *

  Around Christmastime in 1971, Taylor called Bailey and asked him to come to Michigan. Two days later, he got on a bus. When Bailey made it to Taylor’s house, he found himself surrounded by farm animals: chickens, pigs, and goats that she’d bought to graze on her land.

  While Taylor came and went as she pleased, Bailey was stuck out in the country minding her property. There was nothing to do in Covert, and nobody around except a bunch of children and the woman who helped take care of them. The nanny, Virginia Griffin, had lived in Chicago, too. Taylor had told her and Bailey the same thing: If they didn’t join her in Michigan, they were going to die.

  Bailey thought that Taylor underestimated him—that she believed he was young and dumb and would always fall in line. He knew the risks of a life with Linda Taylor. But when Bailey weighed his options, he decided he’d be better off as Taylor’s lackey than he would be doing anything else. Plus, if he stayed by Taylor’s side, he thought, maybe she’d be less inclined to hurt him.

  * * *

  Taylor used her house in Van Buren County as a base of operations. It was a place where she could escape, make plans, and drop off her children. It was also a place where the mail carrier could deliver checks from the State of Michigan.

  On November 16, 1971, she drove fifteen miles southeast of Covert to Hartford, Michigan, a tiny township surrounded by farms that produced a bounty of strawberries, cherries, peaches, and asparagus. Past the town’s only stoplight, just off Red Arrow Highway and south of the new fairgrounds, stood the Van Buren County Department of Social Services. Taylor parked her car, cradled the small child she’d brought with her, and walked in to apply for benefits.

  Inside, the building looked like the set of a horror movie. The basement was lined with cells that had once housed the mentally ill, and on rainy days water poured through the light fixtures. Idealists didn’t last long in that basement—the conditions and the caseloads could cauterize any bleeding heart. Some stories, though, were powerful enough to cut through years’ worth of cynicism and fatigue.

  How could you not empathize with a woman like Connie Green? She walked into the basement carrying an infant, a boy she called her “little black baby.” The eligibility examiner, a woman named Jessie Dinkins, thought he was a beautiful child, with ebony skin just like her own. Dinkins also noticed the boy’s unusual name, Hosa—Mrs. Green had corrected her when she spelled it J-o-s-e. He was one of seven children, she explained. Their father was a white man, and he’d run out on the family because of the child’s skin color. The infant, he’d told her, “was a disgrace to the white race.”

  Dinkins spoke with up to fifteen applicants each day, but Connie Green’s story was one of the saddest she’d ever heard. She approved the request for aid, handing over $81 in food stamps with a promise of an additional $236 every two weeks through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. An authorization form listed the seven children who stood to benefit from that money: Hosa Womack, age sixteen months; Willie Womack, age three; William and Francis Womack, a set of seven-year-old twins; and Jimmy, Judy, and Johnny Womack, six-year-old triplets.

  Another social worker who reviewed Green’s case got overwhelmed just looking at those names on a sheet of paper—she couldn’t imagine having to care for so many small children. But no one noticed something odd about those kids: The twins and triplets had birthdays just five months apart. That would’ve been a medical miracle if the children had actually existed.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for word to spread about the woman who’d just moved to Covert. A single mother with seven young children was the kind of person who drew attention in Van Buren County. So was a doctor from Chicago. So was a woman who wore enormous hats.

  After he sold a house to Dr. Connie Walker, Ed Hedlund went out to eat in downtown South Haven. At Marge’s Restaurant, he ran into his friend Claude Mann, a fellow real estate agent. Mann advertised on the front of the city directory, too—his slogan was “Serving you is my pleasure.” Just like Hedlund, he’d fielded a call from a Chicago heart surgeon. The woman Mann had spoken with, Dr. Howard, wanted to buy sixty-seven acres of land to build a new medical center. But as soon as he’d started talking dollars and cents, the doctor said she had to leave to perform emergency surgery.

  Hedlund always tried to think the best of people, but he wasn’t a fool. The state police hadn’t yet been introduced to the Chicago heart surgeon. But Hedlund realized right then that he’d never see the rest of the money Taylor was supposed to pay him. Covert also wouldn’t be getting a new hospital.

  The night he found out that Dr. Connie Walker was a fraud, Hedlund met up with his lawyer. There was nothing he could fix, nothing that could make him feel any less embarrassed about his gullibility. What he could do was drink, so he got plastered. The lawyer kept pace, drink after drink, because he’d been tricked, too. Taylor had come to him to draw up adoption papers—documents for kids he now wasn’t sure belonged to her.

  * * *

  Taylor hadn’t bothered to introduce herself to her next-door neighbor in Covert. The only thing Douglas Hale knew was that her last name was Walker. He also recognized her car, a blue and white 1969 Cadillac. One day, after Hale had been away for a while, he came home to find his neighbor’s Cadillac parked in his garage. When he asked her to move it, she said that wasn’t possible—it had engine problems. Not satisfied with that answer, Hale called the police.

  The state troopers knocked on Taylor’s door at 10 p.m. on February 12, 1972, but no one answered. They had better luck with the Cadillac. Inside the glove box, they found papers bearing the names Steve Walker, Viola Davis, Constance Nelson, Jackie Taylor, and Dr. C. Harbaugh. The Michigan State Police towed the car that night. They also opened an investigation into the woman who owned it.

  The next day, a trooper came back to Covert to look for Linda Taylor. Instead, he found Charles Bailey. Taylor’s teenage employee didn’t tell the officer everything he knew. He didn’t say that Taylor had asked him to move the Cadillac into her neighbor’s garage, or that he’d found money along with all those papers in the glove compartment. But Bailey said enough to get the police interested. He explained that he’d met Taylor in Chicago, and that she’d pretended to be a spiritual doctor from Africa. He said he knew her as Dr. Shfolia, Dr. Whoyon, Dr. Constance Jarvis, Dr. C. B. Levan, Connie Green, Connie Harbaugh, and Sandra Lewis. He also told the police that she’d hidden the car so she could report it stolen.

  It wasn’t just Bailey—everyone the state troopers interviewed had a story to tell. The cops learned about the house Taylor had bought and hadn’t paid for, the government assistance she received on behalf of seven children, and the car she’d purchased under the name Connie Jarvis. They also found out about the checks her nanny, Virginia Griffin, was getting in the mail. Griffin would later confess that she wasn’t yet old enough to receive Social Security. Taylor had instructed her to use a phony birth date so she could collect benefits before she turned sixty-five.

  When the Michigan police visited Bailey again five days later, he told them he’d spoken with Taylor, and had confessed to her that he’d “spilled the beans.” Taylor didn’t like that at all. She said she’d “take care of him” when she got back f
rom Chicago. Her first priority, though, was arranging her escape from Michigan.

  On February 19, 1972, the state police found Taylor standing in the snow and ice, loading up a moving van in front of her house in Covert. They arrested her, snapped her mug shot, and transported her to the South Haven city jail. As Connie Green, she was charged with making willful false statements about the number of children living in her home in order to receive $610 in public benefits. That was felony welfare fraud, with a maximum prison sentence of four years. A district court judge set her bond for $10,000, explaining that this high figure had less to do with the scale of her crime than his belief that Taylor was a flight risk.

  He was right. After that preliminary examination, the case was bound over to the state’s highest-level trial court, where a different judge reduced her bond to less than $1,000. Taylor got out of jail, left Michigan, and never showed up for trial.

  Her arrest hadn’t made Charles Bailey feel any safer. The day after the police took Taylor away, he’d gotten a phone call from her adult daughter, who’d said “her husband and brother were coming to Covert to get him.” That night, Bailey had seen one of Taylor’s cars drive past the house, but it hadn’t stopped. A few months later, he went to Tennessee with a neighbor’s sister. He never saw Taylor again.

  Virginia Griffin had cried when Bailey left, begging him not to go. The nanny stayed in Covert to take care of Taylor’s kids, if they were in fact Taylor’s kids. The seven-year-old twins and the six-year-old triplets she’d put on her application for social services—those were imaginary. Griffin told the police that four of the children in Covert were Taylor’s kin, including the “little black baby” Hosa and a white teenager named Robin. Griffin said she’d once overheard Robin talking to Taylor. He’d told her he was “going to Florida to find out what his real name was.”

  Taylor left behind a mess when she fled Covert. When Ed Hedlund got his property back, he discovered that she’d been using the crawl space as a kind of makeshift barn. Hedlund found all the animals Taylor had acquired—the chickens, pigs, and goats—huddled together underneath the house, unfed and abandoned.

  * * *

  A year and a half after Taylor ran away from Michigan, the state dropped the case against her—the prosecuting attorney saw no reason to proceed given that Connie Green couldn’t be found. But even if she hadn’t vanished, People of the State of Michigan v. Connie Green had little chance of moving forward. The Van Buren County Department of Social Services told the prosecutor that Green’s entire case history had gone missing. He suspected that someone inside the department, embarrassed that the staff had approved a phony application, had made the file disappear.

  In November 1973, the Michigan State Police placed Taylor’s old felony case on inactive status—nobody would review her file unless someone called with new information. In August 1974, the state police got that call. Jack Sherwin brought the case back to life.

  Along with a stack of old police reports, the Michigan state troopers sent Sherwin a fingerprint card. Now he needed to get some fresh prints, to prove he’d found the right woman. The detective made another visit to 8221 South Clyde Avenue and ran through the same set of questions: What’s missing? Did anyone see what happened? Is there anything you’d like to add to your original report?

  Taylor hadn’t been happy to see Jack Sherwin the first time. After the third visit, she’d had enough. She’d told him what was missing. She’d told the uniformed cops, too—she’d given them a whole long list, and they’d written it all down. That should have been all they needed. If Sherwin was such a great detective, she asked, why hadn’t he found her missing property already? Why couldn’t he just do his job without bothering her? Sherwin told Taylor he wouldn’t need much more of her time. Before he left, he had just one small request: Could he trouble her for a glass of water? Taylor did as he asked. When she came back with his drink, Sherwin kept the tumbler as evidence.

  The detective had never played a trick like that before, and he was eager to see if he’d pulled it off. Lifting fingerprints off a smooth piece of glass is much easier than grabbing them from a cloth or a wrinkled sheet of paper. But the process isn’t foolproof. In 1974, nearly a third of the latent fingerprints evaluated by the Chicago Police Department turned out to be unusable. Even good prints rarely broke open a case. That year, the city’s police officers fielded more than twenty thousand requests to match a set of latent prints. They scored a hit less than 10 percent of the time.

  * * *

  When Sherwin left her apartment, Linda Taylor called Area 2 headquarters and demanded to talk to whoever was in charge. She told the sergeant on duty that the detective had lost his mind. He kept stopping by to interrogate her about her stolen refrigerator. He was obsessed with her. He’d ruined her life.

  The sergeant listened to her grievances, weighing her trustworthiness against the reputation of a cop with a dozen years of exemplary service. He sided with Taylor. The poor woman had filed a burglary report, the sergeant told Sherwin, and he was treating her like a criminal instead of a victim. He was wasting time, screwing around with a case that wasn’t even a case. He needed to worry about clearing his other reports.

  Sherwin had always respected the chain of command. As a Marine and a police officer, he’d been trained to follow orders, and he’d been rewarded for his compliance. Now he felt as though his superiors had abandoned him. They seemed to prefer those lazy detectives, the ones who shuffled paper around their desks until it was time to clock out.

  A short time later, Sherwin heard back from the department’s identification unit. He’d gotten lucky: An evidence technician had found a clean print on the glass of water, and it matched the whorls on the fingerprint card from Michigan.

  If Taylor had created a new identity to escape her past, that plan hadn’t worked. Now that he’d confirmed who she was, Sherwin was able to trace her criminal history. One of her previous arrests had come in February 1967, when she’d been booked under the name Constance Wakefield and charged with endangering the life and health of two children. Officers had brought her into custody again the following month. This time, as Constance Womack, she’d been charged with a felony: kidnapping a child under thirteen years of age.

  She had a remarkable knack for dodging punishment. Every one of the Chicago cases listed on her rap sheet had been abandoned or dismissed. A series of police officers had interviewed Taylor and arrested her. Each time, they’d let her go.

  Sherwin wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He now knew where she’d been and what she’d been accused of doing. His sergeant had been wrong. Linda Taylor was a criminal, not a victim. And Sherwin had what he needed to arrest her.

  Chapter 3

  Page One

  On August 25, 1974, Jack Sherwin and three other Chicago police officers drove to Linda Taylor’s apartment on South Clyde Avenue. When Taylor answered the door, Sherwin said good morning and asked if he could come inside. Despite the complaint she’d filed with Area 2 headquarters, she waved him in. Sherwin walked into the front room and sat in a chair facing Taylor’s couch. The detective told her he hadn’t dropped by to chat or ask questions or get a glass of water. He’d come to take her into custody on behalf of the State of Michigan.

  After Sherwin read Taylor her rights, she called someone to come pick up the two children she had with her, then asked the officers for a moment to change out of her housecoat. Taylor stepped into the bedroom and put on a new outfit, a short-sleeved brocade dress. She then took a cardboard suitcase from the closet and placed it on her bed. Taylor shuffled from her dresser to the suitcase and back again, grabbing armfuls of clothes and stuffing them inside the cheap piece of luggage. Five minutes after she’d started packing, one of the other detectives shouted at Sherwin—he thought he’d seen Taylor try to stash something away.

  When Sherwin entered the room, Taylor slammed the cardboard suitcase shut. The detective asked her what was inside. “Clothes for the children,” she
said. Sherwin opened the valise. He found a bunch of children’s clothing, as well as green Illinois Department of Public Aid identification cards bearing the names Connie Walker and Linda Bennett. One of Sherwin’s fellow officers searched Taylor’s purse and found another welfare ID card that had her name as Connie Walker, plus a driver’s license that said Linda Bennett. Sherwin seized the ID cards, the driver’s license, and every other piece of paper he could find in the apartment. There was an apartment lease, a receipt from a hospital stay, and stock certificates from old-time prospecting firms like the West End Extension Mining Company and the Boulder King Gold Mining Company. Sherwin also found eleven books of food stamps and a delayed record of birth for a Constance Beverly Wakefield. It took six police department inventory forms to write it all down.

  “I know you by the name of Connie Jarvis. I know you by the name Connie Walker. This card says you’re named Linda Bennett,” Sherwin said. He asked Taylor to tell him her real name. The woman at 8221 South Clyde Avenue wouldn’t give him a straight answer.

  On his arrest report, Sherwin took his best guess. He typed the name “Taylor, Linda,” then wrote in more names underneath: “Gordon—Green—Connie.” He listed Linda/Connie Taylor/Gordon/Green as an unemployed nurse, height five foot one, weight 130 pounds. Her race was N, for Negro, her eyes brown, hair black, and complexion light. He guessed at Taylor’s age, listing it as thirty-nine. That afternoon, the Chicago Police Department took Taylor’s fingerprints one more time. She posed for two mug shots, one with her hair hanging down in a loose ponytail and the other with her natural locks hidden beneath a black curly wig. In both photographs, Taylor fixed her lips into a frown, and the flash from the camera reflected off her brocade dress.