The Queen

by Josh Levin

  After a half hour, a Chicago police sergeant told everyone to disperse. “Armed guards don’t belong here,” he said. “Everybody move out or everybody’s going to jail.” When Taylor heard talk of arrests, the Tribune wrote, “she quickly called off her guards, climbed into her car and sped away.”

  Taylor’s belongings were trapped inside that small brick house. But she had much bigger problems than a locked front door. On June 26, four days after the standoff on South Phillips Avenue, the Tribune reported that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had launched an investigation into the death of Patricia Parks.

  * * *

  Like the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid, the state’s attorneys had their own team of investigators. Those sleuths, the Tribune wrote, got suspicious when they “learned that Mrs. Parks reportedly had willed her home to Miss Taylor and had made her…the guardian of her three children.” The facts they uncovered about the last days of Patricia Parks’s life weren’t any more comforting. The funeral director had told someone from the coroner’s office that Parks had suffered from cervical cancer. But the doctor who’d treated her most recently was adamant that she’d never had that diagnosis; he’d refused to sign her death certificate. The information about cervical cancer, the funeral director explained, had come from Linda Taylor.

  The state’s attorneys had tried to take possession of Parks’s corpse prior to her funeral, but their investigators didn’t get there fast enough. They’d had to settle for moving her body to the morgue after the service was over, before it could be interred. On June 29, the Tribune reported that coroners subsequently “found an excessive amount of medical drugs, including barbiturates, in a sample of the dead woman’s blood.” That didn’t prove Parks had been murdered. It did raise plenty of questions about Parks’s caretaker, and how she’d insinuated herself into the Trinidadian woman’s life.

  In a story in the Defender, a spokesman for the state’s attorney’s office described Taylor as Parks’s “housekeeper, nurse, and companion.” Though out on bond after an indictment for welfare fraud, Taylor had somehow been “approved by the Illinois Department of Public Aid as a paid housekeeper for Mrs. Parks,” the Tribune wrote. The state hadn’t sent her any checks this time, though, “after she was questioned by investigators from the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid.”

  Taylor’s attorneys said she hadn’t been Parks’s employee, insisting that the women had been friends for years. A preacher named Frances Fearn countered that she’d introduced them only very recently, in the fall of 1974. Taylor herself said she and Patricia were related by blood. On February 1, 1975, she’d been detained by Chicago police for driving her new Cadillac without a license. According to the Defender, Taylor had told the cops that the woman riding with her—Patricia Parks—was her sister.

  Though Taylor didn’t deign to speak with the welfare queen–publicizing Tribune, she was willing to talk to Chicago’s black newspaper. The Defender wasn’t just an institution in black Chicago—it had helped create black Chicago. In the 1910s, the paper had been a major catalyst for the Great Migration, urging men and women who’d been deprived of economic opportunity and terrorized by lynchings to come north for better wages and better treatment. The Defender, which published the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King Jr., served an audience whose perspectives weren’t represented in the city’s white-owned media outlets. That need was particularly acute during the civil rights movement, when the Tribune, for instance, suggested quelling anti-police unrest on the city’s predominantly black West Side in 1966 by ordering rioters “to get out of the city within 30 days and never to come back.” The Defender’s reply: “The Tribune’s prescription for getting rid of a disease seems to be the banishment of the patient.”

  By the 1970s, the Defender’s cultural influence had started to wane, in part because its competitors belatedly recognized the importance of hiring black staffers. The newspaper’s daily circulation of twenty-five thousand was a tiny fraction of the Tribune’s 751,000. Even so, sitting for an interview with the Defender was a great way to make common cause with black Chicagoans, plenty of whom would recognize Taylor’s complaint that the police had subjected her to a bogus traffic stop. In the 1974 book Working, a black patrolman named Renault Robinson told Chicago author and broadcaster Studs Terkel that cops in the city used trumped-up traffic violations to hassle law-abiding black citizens. “Black folks don’t have a voice to complain,” Robinson said. “Consequently, they continue to be victims of shadowy, improper, overburdened police service.”

  In February 1975, Taylor told the Defender that she’d turned to the police for help—that she and Parks “had gone to collect a long overdue debt from her ex-mother-in-law and were confronted by the woman’s daughter who waved a gun at them.” But instead of helping her and “her sister, Patricia,” fend off this armed assailant, the cops had given Taylor a series of traffic citations, then held Taylor and Parks for “three hours while they were asked such questions as ‘where did you get that fancy ring,’ and ‘aren’t you the welfare cheat?’” The police had hassled a sick woman, Taylor told the newspaper: “Mrs. Parks, who was not feeling well, had planned to go to a doctor after their errands were completed.”

  The Tribune didn’t air Taylor’s side of this particular story. Five months later, Chicago’s most popular newspaper reported that Patricia Parks “evidently was the subject of voodoo sessions before she died.”

  When investigators entered the dead woman’s bedroom they found five lamps directed toward a hospital bed, a pair of witch doctors’ masks hung on walls, candles, a voodoo manual, and a religious statue on a nearby table.

  Sources close to the investigation said it appeared that witchcraft spells had been used in an attempt to cure Mrs. Parks of internal hemorrhaging.

  Taylor responded to this accusation in another interview with her preferred publication. “I don’t believe in that mess!” she told the Defender, denying any knowledge of the dark spiritual arts. She claimed that her supposed “voodoo artifacts” were pieces of art she’d bought in Nigeria.

  Taylor demurred when asked if she was really related to Parks, saying, “Yes and no—I rather not discuss that.” She did take the opportunity to speak out against John Parks. “I wish I did know voodoo,” she said. “If I knew it I would practice it on him because he’s in my home and his white lady is eating my food.” Taylor, who didn’t specify which white lady she was referring to, said she’d been Patricia Parks’s savior. She’d “tried to prevent Mrs. Parks from taking non-prescribed medication,” she explained. She blamed her friend’s death on Frances Fearn—the preacher who said she’d introduced Linda and Patricia. In Taylor’s telling, Fearn was “a voodoo worshiper who was defrocked.” Fearn had been the one “giving Patsy something to take.”

  * * *

  By June 1975, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had assigned a new prosecutor to the Linda Taylor welfare fraud case. In the previous four years, Jim Piper had handled the prosecutions of police officers for murder, battery, and auto theft; the conviction of a firearms dealer; and the breakup of a prostitution ring. Piper was young, smart, and ambitious, but his aggression could sometimes get the best of him. Once, when a bond court judge held him in contempt for sustaining a line of questioning the judge didn’t approve of, Piper’s boss had to go in and apologize on his behalf. The head of special prosecutions liked to say that the brash assistant state’s attorney operated under “Jim Piper rules.”

  Although Piper was one of the more seasoned attorneys in the special prosecutions division, he’d never shared a courtroom with such an infamous defendant. Piper read the papers—he recognized that he could boost his career by convicting the Chicago welfare queen. Based on what he already knew about Taylor, he believed she was a world-class con artist. Given what he was hearing about Patricia Parks’s death, he was starting to think she might be a killer, too. He wanted the FB
I to help him prove it.

  On July 9, Piper shipped the bureau a packet of evidence: samples of the drugs found inside the house at 8046 South Phillips. He also sent along a memo laying out what he’d learned up to that point, and what he still needed to figure out.

  Patricia Parks, negro female, died 6/15/1975 at her home, 8046 South Phillips, Chicago, following hospital treatment which ended 6/11/1975. Linda Taylor was introduced to Parks in 11/74 as a “Voodoo Doctor.” Parks, reportedly a native of Trinidad, allowed Taylor to move in her home and treat her for reported bleeding and/or hemorrhaging of Parks’ vagina. Welfare caseworker visiting Taylor at Parks’ home was witness to Taylor, in possession of approximately 25 drug containers, stating that she had to give Mrs. Parks her medicine. Following Parks’ death from an apparently minor medical problem and disclosure of her will which designated Taylor as beneficiary of all assets, an autopsy was performed after Parks was embalmed and disclosed death due to an overdose of Phenobarbital. The death of Parks and Taylor’s suspected involvement are the subjects of a special investigation presently being conducted by the Office of the State’s Attorney.

  The Physics and Chemistry Section of the FBI Laboratory is requested to perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of evidence items…which were obtained from the Parks home after her death. These items contain various drugs which either do not necessarily match the prescribed contents or appear to have been used for mixing drugs as Taylor’s “Voodoo Training” may have dictated. These items have not been previously examined by another agency. In view of their special investigation, the state’s attorney has requested that this examination be expedited.

  Piper’s request wasn’t an absurd one. The FBI and the Cook County state’s attorneys had been collaborating on the Taylor investigation for nine months. Bureau document examiner David Grimes had helped the State of Illinois by analyzing Taylor’s signatures. When she’d provided an obviously disguised writing sample, Grimes had advised agents from the FBI’s Chicago field office on how to compel Taylor to jot down a more serviceable sheaf of cursive signatures and printed letters.

  The Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid had also fed information to the FBI. Thanks to a lead from the legislative committee, the bureau had started looking into payments Taylor received as the widow of a navy enlisted man named Paul S. Harbaugh. Between 1968 and 1975, she’d collected around $7,000 in survivors’ benefits from the Social Security Administration on behalf of her daughter, Sandra. Taylor had gotten that money even after Sandra turned eighteen in 1969 because she’d been designated a “helpless child.” A form that came via the Department of Veterans Affairs indicated, based on information given by Taylor, that Sandra Brownlee “has a mental age of 10 and IQ of 66 percent, is hard of hearing, has heart disease with dyspnea, and is unable to handle funds.” Sandra would tell the authorities on multiple occasions that her hearing had been damaged in the 1958 fire at Our Lady of the Angels School. That conflagration had killed ninety-two elementary schoolers and three nuns. George Bliss had been assigned to go to the morgue that day, to watch as mothers and fathers claimed the bodies of their dead children.

  Linda Taylor’s daughter hadn’t been hurt in the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. The FBI learned very quickly that she hadn’t even gone to school there. She didn’t have a mental age of ten—federal agents and the legislative committee’s investigators figured that out when she sat down with them for interviews. She’d also gotten married in 1972 and was thus ineligible for benefits as anyone’s dependent. Taylor had exploited her own daughter, and it had worked for years, netting her thousands of dollars in government checks.

  The feds marshaled significant resources to chase down Taylor’s financial crimes, interviewing her daughter, gathering medical records and birth certificates, consulting with the Veterans Administration, and contacting officials from Our Lady of the Angels. But when Piper sent a request for help with a potential murder case, the bureau wasn’t willing to pitch in. The state’s attorney received a curt reply to his memo on Parks: “The FBI does drug analyses only in cases under direct investigation by the FBI.” The samples Piper had sent along for analysis were never examined. They were returned to Chicago as “unopened evidence.”

  After getting rejected by the FBI, Piper tried another approach, asking South Shore Hospital for samples of Parks’s premortem blood. The hospital, though, told him the woman’s blood draws had been misplaced. The prosecutor believed that Linda Taylor had killed her friend. But without those samples, he doubted he had enough evidence to go forward.

  On the other hand, Piper had copious documentation that the Tribune’s welfare queen had stolen public aid checks. The Taylor welfare fraud case was a huge opportunity for him—his first really big prosecution—and he couldn’t afford to screw it up. Piper was wary of being labeled a publicity hound; he didn’t want to add a couple more rings to a court case that already looked like a three-ring circus. This time, he saw the virtue in tamping down his aggression. He decided to forget about the homicide and focus on the case he knew he could win.

  * * *

  When a thirty-seven-year-old black woman died under suspicious circumstances in Chicago in 1975, no journalist bemoaned the failure to prosecute her possible killer. No crusading state senator pushed the state’s attorneys to keep their investigation alive. The Chicago Police Department could’ve done its own intensive investigation of Patricia Parks’s death rather than defer to the state’s attorneys. It didn’t. Police higher-ups could’ve asked Jack Sherwin to take a few days off from the burglary beat to take a look. They didn’t. This was something for the homicide division, if they wanted it. They didn’t. John Parks waited for someone to ask him what he knew about his ex-wife’s death. No one ever did.

  The Cook County coroner and his deputy signed Parks’s death certificate on August 18, 1975. The cause of death was listed as combined phenobarbital, methapyrilene, and salicylate intoxication. They declined to rule the death an accident, suicide, or homicide, instead writing the word undetermined.

  * The document examiner who developed that handwriting form explained in a scholarly article,

  To obtain material for comparison in obscene letters, we combine the last part of Virginia McLong’s last name with the first name of Dick Zass. Dropping the last two letters in “Virginia” and the capital letter “Z” in Zass exposes words that show up on obscene letters.

  Chapter 6

  A Woman in Chicago

  On January 15, 1975, President Gerald Ford stood before a joint session of Congress and announced that “the state of the union is not good.” Ford began his prime-time address by detailing everything he’d failed to fix in the five months since Richard Nixon’s resignation. “Millions of Americans are out of work,” he said. “Recession and inflation are eroding the money of millions more. Prices are too high, and sales are too slow.”

  Ronald Reagan claimed to know why prices were high and sales were slow. In a radio commentary taped a week before Ford’s State of the Union address, Reagan explained that American businesses were being choked to death by unnecessary regulations. A pharmaceutical manufacturer had to generate seventy-two thousand pages of data to license a new drug. A baker had to choose between filling out paperwork and making his daily bread. A small businessman had been forced to build separate men’s and women’s bathrooms for his two employees—himself and his wife.

  Reagan, who’d just finished his eight-year tenure as the governor of California, declared that he’d now be spending his time “preaching the gospel of free enterprise.” In radio spots, a syndicated newspaper column, and corporate speeches, the actor-turned-politician lamented the government-induced decline of a once-mighty nation. Reagan, however, paired his recitation of the country’s ills with an optimistic vision of America’s future, one in which meddlesome bureaucrats and high taxes no longer troubled business owners and the working class. On November 19, 1975, he called Ford to say he wanted to make this vision a real
ity: He was going to challenge the sitting president for the 1976 Republican nomination.

  Despite the Bedtime for Bonzo star’s name recognition from his Hollywood days and his reputation as a capable governor, Reagan’s White House bid was still seen by many as a fool’s errand. “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President,” wrote veteran columnist James Reston in the New York Times. Reagan needed to prove the doubters wrong, and he needed to do it quickly. His handlers planned an ambitious itinerary leading up to the New Hampshire primary, loading Reagan’s schedule with visits to dozens of small towns. It was extraordinarily cold in the Granite State in January 1976, even for New England in winter—at one campaign stop in the White Mountains, the temperature dipped to seventeen below zero. Reagan, who would turn sixty-five on February 6, often braved the wintry weather without a hat or topcoat, conducting a series of outdoor question and answer sessions in which he spoke directly to voters.