The Queen

by Josh Levin

  Jack Sherwin shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the Legislative Advisory Committee was a nakedly political operation. He’d been seduced by the opportunity to lead a real investigation, but he’d never been in control. Senator Moore had an ax to grind. Sherwin had been brought in to wield that ax. Now the detective’s monthlong detail was over, and it was time for him to go back to the Chicago Police Department. Sherwin’s stint with Moore’s committee had left him convinced that Linda Taylor was dangerous. He also believed he’d just lost his best chance to stop her.

  Chapter 5

  Friend

  Patricia Parks had needed help. The thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher had three children—nine, seven, and five years old—and she was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce. Parks had multiple sclerosis, plus recurrent bladder and kidney problems, and she alleged in her divorce proceeding that her soon-to-be ex-husband wasn’t helping with her medical bills. Just making it through each day felt like a major accomplishment. She’d been desperate to find someone to look after her kids—she’d emigrated from Trinidad, and none of her relatives lived close by. Linda Taylor had been a godsend.

  The women had met on the South Side at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, though Taylor wasn’t strictly Catholic. She and Parks were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, who’d explained that “Linda Mallexo” was an African voodoo priestess. Taylor invited her new friend to a séance, and told her she’d had an alarming vision: Parks would be dead in six months. Taylor promised to change the sick woman’s fate. In November 1974, the month after she paid $1,000 to get released from custody, she brought her belongings to Parks’s house at 8046 South Phillips Avenue, a small brick bungalow just eight blocks from Taylor’s apartment on South Clyde. On the day she moved in, Taylor told Parks’s nine-year-old daughter, Bridgetta, “I’m here to take care of you.”

  Patricia Parks had hired nannies before. Bridgetta hadn’t liked all those women, but none of them had made her feel uncomfortable. While Taylor always seemed to have a couple of her own children with her, she showed no interest in being around kids. She wasn’t friendly or nurturing; she didn’t read Bridgetta and her siblings bedtime stories. On the rare occasions when she spoke, she issued commands. Go stand over there. Go to bed. Go away. The kids could do whatever they pleased, so long as they stayed in the back of the house, away from their mother’s room. Taylor had taken over her friend’s care, dispensing medication and putting strict limits on visiting hours. It was important, she explained, that Patricia get her rest. “I’m taking care of your mom,” she told Bridgetta. “She’s going to get better.”

  Just in case her health didn’t improve, Parks wrote her last will and testament. She bequeathed her entire estate to a trustee, who’d be responsible for doling out her assets to her three children. She also named an executor, whom she empowered to “sell, lease, mortgage, deed, and convey any real estate” in her possession. She appointed the same person to fill both roles: “My friend, Linda.”

  * * *

  Near the end of her first month as Patricia Parks’s housemate, Linda Taylor went to Cook County Criminal Court and pleaded not guilty to bigamy, perjury, and theft by deception. The executive director of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid did not presume her innocent. She “is without a doubt the biggest welfare cheat of all time,” Joel Edelman told George Bliss. In an AP item that got picked up by the New York Times, he described Taylor’s criminal behavior as “uncanny, like some science fiction story.” The details of this yarn were both unbelievable and incredibly specific. “In about one year, it has been determined that she got $154,000 under 14 aliases,” Edelman said. He added that Taylor had used eighty names and made claims on twenty-seven children in as many as eleven states, had been receiving Social Security checks for twenty-eight years, and had bought three federally insured houses.

  These were astonishing figures, ones that didn’t line up with the charges the State of Illinois had brought against Taylor in criminal court. Edelman, Don Moore, and the Legislative Advisory Committee’s welfare fraud investigators believed Taylor had pilfered much more than the $7,600 she’d been charged with stealing. The prosecutor assigned to the case agreed that Taylor was getting off easy, but she didn’t see any alternative. According to the UPI, Bridget Hutchen “said most of the investigators’ stories about [Taylor] probably are true,” but added that “most of them are not indictable. We simply don’t have the facts on all of those things.”

  Though an indictment had already been secured against Taylor, the Legislative Advisory Committee didn’t stop trying to prove that she was the biggest welfare cheat of all time. Edelman would later articulate his suspicions in a private letter to the committee’s allies at the Chicago Tribune. “One of the reasons, in my opinion, that the state’s attorney has settled for charges against Linda Taylor amounting only to $8,000 worth of welfare fraud, instead of the $100,000 or more we know of, is the failure of the [Illinois Department of Public Aid] to follow up on this case,” he wrote. “Their failure is partly due to ineptness, in my humble opinion, and largely due to embarrassment and a desire to suppress the matter and avoid further publicity.”

  Jim Trainor, Edelman’s successor as the head of the Illinois Department of Public Aid, scoffed at the claim that Taylor had stolen “$100,000 or more,” and at the implication that his agency had something to hide. He repeatedly asked Edelman and Moore where they were getting their figures. If he got a reply, it hasn’t been preserved in the Illinois State Archives, and it was never recorded in the press. In January 1975, three months after the legislative committee’s investigation began, Trainor sent along his best guess at Taylor’s total take: $40,000 in public aid, for cases under the names Linda Bennett and Connie Walker. That was a lot more than the $7,600 that Taylor had been formally accused of stealing, and far less than the $154,000 that Edelman had touted to reporters.

  The Legislative Advisory Committee kept fighting to close the gap between the official record and what it believed to be the truth. That same month, Moore and Edelman’s investigators wrote their bosses a memo indicating that they were “still receiving inquiries on this case from other states, and we ourselves are still following up on leads we are getting.” They added, “very soon the Federal government will have their indictments ready.” Several agencies had indeed started looking into whether Taylor had dipped into federal coffers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture chased after proof that she’d signed up for food stamps using multiple names, the Veterans Administration wanted to figure out if she’d been stealing survivors’ benefits, and the FBI asked Taylor’s mail carrier about a Social Security check he’d delivered to her apartment. On January 21, 1975, a special agent from the bureau declared in a memo that an assistant U.S. attorney “will prosecute TAYLOR when fraud confirmed.”

  To convict Taylor of theft by deception, Cook County state’s attorneys would need to prove that the woman Jack Sherwin arrested had signed the names Connie Walker and Linda Bennett on checks issued by the Illinois treasurer. The FBI could help with that. The feds had their own interest in scrutinizing Taylor’s writing, and the bureau’s laboratory in Washington, DC, was stocked with equipment and experts that states didn’t have. On November 12 and 13, 1974, the same days a grand jury heard prosecutors lay out the state charges against her, Taylor visited the FBI’s Chicago field office on the orders of a federal judge. On a handwriting assessment form developed by the Chicago police, the alleged welfare cheat wrote “Lake Parker, Washington” in cursive and “THE MONEY IN DOLLARS WHICH DICK ZASS RECEIVED FROM VIRGINIA” in block-letter print.* With her right hand, she drew the curves and swoops of individual letters—twenty-eight lowercase g’s followed by twenty-four z’s and twenty-three w’s. She also inscribed her various names on a stack of blank white pages, filling each sheet with Linda Taylors, Connie Walkers, and Linda Bennetts.

  Her signatures didn’t always stay on the same horizontal plane. They’d bend up and down, length
ening and contracting. Sometimes Linda was obviously Linda. It could also look like Linde, Zinda, Zeinda, or Lindon. The FBI’s document examiner, David Grimes, eyeballed all these signatures and came to a quick conclusion: Linda Taylor had disguised her true handwriting. The thirty-four pages she’d filled out, under the supervision of a federal agent, were totally useless.

  * * *

  John Parks couldn’t see what was going on inside his ex-wife’s house. He’d lost the place to Patricia in their divorce, and he mostly stayed away from 8046 South Phillips Avenue—his lawyer had said that would be for the best. He’d get little snippets of information, sometimes from Patricia, and more often when he saw their children every other weekend. One day, the Parks’s youngest child told him their mother’s new friend had taken the kids shopping on Seventy-Ninth Street.

  “Daddy, Daddy,” the five-year-old said, “that woman wants us to steal.”

  Mr. Parks gave his son a message: “Tell your mommy…that she’s not supposed to be with Linda Taylor.”

  John Parks considered himself a people person; Taylor curdled his good nature. He hated the sight of her face, he hated what she was telling his kids, and he hated that Patricia listened to her instead of him. Patricia was kind, open, and trusting. But John didn’t see how anyone could be this credulous. He thought Taylor had brainwashed his ex-wife. Whatever she said to do, Patricia did.

  Patricia Parks had been a teacher in Trinidad. She went back to school in Chicago, getting her master’s in education at Erikson Institute in 1972. She got a job at a preschool on the South Side and socialized with women she knew from work or her graduate program. It was a small, tight circle, and Linda Taylor didn’t fit in. Parks’s friends were polished and posh. Taylor looked as though she’d been around the block a couple of times and was getting started on her third lap. She was flamboyant, not refined. Everyone noticed when she pulled up in her Cadillac.

  Taylor would leave the house if she had some important business to attend to—an arraignment or a court-mandated writing exercise. The Parks’s three children didn’t know anything about what happened beyond the front door at 8046 South Phillips Avenue. After Taylor entered their lives, Bridgetta and her two younger brothers stopped going to the big department stores downtown. They stopped seeing their friends. They stopped going to church. Sometimes they’d play with the two young boys, Hosa and Duke, whom Taylor had in tow. Taylor’s daughter, who was in her twenties, would also come around occasionally—Sandra was a lot nicer than her mother, Bridgetta thought. But the Parks children mostly had no adult supervision. They were left to fend for themselves.

  Their mother had always served big, delicious meals: seafood, rice, freshly baked bread. Now Bridgetta went to bed hungry, and her little brothers scrounged for food. Hosa and Duke taught the Parks kids to eat whatever they found lying around. One time, Bridgetta caught the boys hiding in the pantry, shoving dog biscuits into their mouths.

  By February 1975, around the time of her thirty-seventh birthday, Patricia Parks had stopped going to work. The previous year, she’d told the judge in her divorce case that her husband was “tired of my sick butt.” Her multiple sclerosis was affecting her speech; a doctor had prescribed her tranquilizers. Now she filed another petition with the circuit court, requesting that John Parks be forced to pay child support. She needed the money, she wrote, because she was “physically ill and in a weakened condition.”

  Taylor had precipitated some of that weakness. Not long after predicting Parks’s death during a séance, Taylor had immersed her new friend in freezing cold water. Parks’s body temperature had crashed, and she’d pulled herself out of the bathtub and made her way to a nearby hospital as quickly as she could. The bath hadn’t made her feel better, and neither had the potions that Bridgetta found scattered around the house. But Parks still believed in nontraditional cures. Her mother would send letters from back home in Trinidad, encouraging her to try various West Indian remedies. Parks had gone to see regular doctors, and they hadn’t done much for her. She was willing to try anything.

  But no matter what treatments Parks tried, she kept getting sicker. As Parks’s health declined, Taylor put her in isolation, moving her into her daughter’s bedroom. Bridgetta, who turned ten in 1975, got crammed into a smaller room with her brothers—she slept in one of the two beds and the boys shared the other. Taylor installed herself in the master bedroom.

  In May, Parks checked into South Shore Hospital. Five months earlier, she’d made Taylor the trustee of her estate and the executor of her will. Now she updated that will, changing the beneficiary on her life insurance policies from her ex-husband to her three children. Her lawyer, Jeannette Nottingham, handwrote this addendum on a Saturday night, and Parks signed it from her hospital bed. The other witness was Linda C. Jones, address 8046 South Phillips Avenue.

  Taylor was no longer a guest in the Parks family’s brick bungalow. On April 30, 1975, Patricia had given Linda the title to her house. The Cook County quitclaim deed—an instrument typically used to transfer property between family members—identified the grantor as Patricia Marva Parks and the grantee as Linda C. Wakefield. The deed said the house changed hands “for the consideration of one dollars.”

  Parks was released from the hospital on June 11. She was found unconscious at her home four days later. Patricia Parks was judged dead on arrival at South Shore Hospital at 7:10 p.m.

  The coroner’s certificate of death described Parks as a divorced schoolteacher. Her middle name was misspelled—“Marvel” rather than “Marva”—as was her birthplace, “Trinadad.” In the middle of the page, below the names of Patricia’s father and mother, was the informant’s signature. Name: “Linda C. Wakefield.” Relationship: “friend.”

  * * *

  Bridgetta never thought her mother was going to die. Everything had been fine until Linda Taylor showed up, and Bridgetta had figured everything would return to normal when Taylor left. They’d shop at the big department stores, they’d see their friends again, and they’d go back to church. But now Bridgetta’s mom was gone and Linda Taylor was still there. The ten-year-old was in shock. She wanted to get to her father, but Cook County social workers weren’t sure that was the right move. They needed to figure out who should have custody of the three children: Patricia Parks’s ex-husband, John, or her friend Linda.

  While that got sorted out, the county placed Bridgetta and her two brothers in emergency foster care. John Paul, the seven-year-old, didn’t understand what was happening. He didn’t know how his mother had died, or why they kept moving from house to house. In the car on the way to their second short-term foster home, Bridgetta told a county social worker that she had to go to her mother’s funeral—that she needed to say goodbye. The bureaucrat said that she’d already missed it. The funeral had been that morning.

  The second foster home was crawling with roaches, and the kids got peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner and for breakfast the next morning. The three children shared a single bed, but Bridgetta never went to sleep. She stayed up for twenty-four hours straight, trying to will her life back to normal.

  A month after Parks’s death, a Cook County judge made his decision: The schoolteacher’s ex-husband would get custody of the three children. The kids were delivered to their grandparents’ house; after the divorce, John Parks had moved back in with his mother and father, who also lived in Chicago. Bridgetta’s grandmother and grandfather were shocked when they saw her—she looked emaciated and malnourished. Her grandparents told the children that they could eat until they puked. They’d feed her and her brothers all day long, bringing home their favorite pies from Bakers Square. It took Bridgetta’s brother John Paul some time to adjust to a more normal life. He would hide picked-over bones and seeds from discarded fruit underneath his bed, just in case this new bounty got taken away.

  Although he was now the children’s legal guardian, John Parks wasn’t around to do any parenting in those first few days. He’d barricaded himself i
nside the house at 8046 South Phillips Avenue, and he wasn’t letting Linda Taylor or anyone else inside.

  * * *

  John Parks blamed Taylor for his ex-wife’s death, but he also blamed himself. He’d been angry, and he’d let his rage overwhelm him. Patricia had claimed in the divorce case that he’d come to the house two days before Christmas and removed “lingerie and various personal items belonging to the housekeeper”—Linda Taylor. Patricia’s attorney also said that John had made harassing phone calls in November, December, January, February, and March. In April, May, and June he’d gone silent. Now it was too late. He couldn’t take back those calls or change what Linda Taylor had done. But he could take back his house.

  Parks knew that Taylor would be away from home on Thursday, June 19, 1975, the day of his ex-wife’s wake. He skipped the viewing, seizing the opportunity to break into his old house via a side window. When Taylor came back, he refused to let her in. He turned her away on Friday, too. By Saturday, the confrontation had made the local news.

  Parks, the Tribune wrote, had changed the locks at 8046 South Phillips and was guarding the property with a 12-gauge shotgun and two Doberman pinschers. “They’re looting, vandalizing, and destroying her personal possessions while police stand by and watch,” Jeannette Nottingham told the newspaper. Nottingham had been Patricia Parks’s attorney; she’d handwritten the addendum to Parks’s will. Now she was representing Parks’s friend Linda Taylor, who she believed was the rightful owner of the Parks family home. Nottingham said she and Taylor would return on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. “We will use what force is necessary to take and secure the property,” she explained to the Tribune.

  The women did return, and this time they brought backup. Taylor, who’d accessorized a sporty striped twinset with a bucket hat that shielded her face from the summer sun, directed a team of armed security guards to bust inside the locked front entrance. Neighbors came out on the street to gawk. Reporters, who’d headed out to South Phillips Avenue after hearing the Taylor camp’s promise to “secure the property,” staked out the best spots to watch the show. A Tribune photographer got an image of one of Taylor’s guards kicking the door. It ran on page one, above the caption “Welfare Queen can’t get in.” The Chicago Defender published a story with the headline “House under siege by many-named lady.” The Parks children saw the face-off on the TV news. Their father emerged from the family home only briefly, poking his head out to declare that he wasn’t going anywhere.