by Josh Levin
In this pretrial hearing, she told the story of her arrest in simple declarative sentences. On August 25, 1974, she was living at 8221 South Clyde Avenue. That morning, a group of Chicago police officers entered her home. They conducted a search. They seized her property. They did not show her a warrant. She did not consent to the search. She had not been in violation of any laws. Although Sherwin had written “Linda Taylor” on his arrest report, she denied ever giving the detective that name. Under cross-examination, she said she’d met Sherwin earlier in August 1974, when “he was searching Mrs. Taylor’s home across the hall from me.” When Sherwin brought her in on August 25, she said, he’d stolen the food she’d packed to feed her two children, just as the prosecutor Jim Piper had stolen her ring, television, and dishes.
Sherwin remembered their encounter differently. He testified that Taylor had invited him inside, and that they’d chatted for twenty minutes before he showed her a Michigan arrest warrant. Although he didn’t have a warrant to search her apartment, another detective had waved Sherwin over after spotting possible contraband: Illinois Department of Public Aid ID cards. “None of them had the name that I knew the defendant by at that time,” Sherwin said, “nor were any of them issued to that house, nor were any of them issued to the same person or at the same address.” Gant countered that the detective had used an out-of-state arrest warrant as a pretense to invade Taylor’s privacy: “Judge, the U.S. Constitution as well as the Illinois Constitution guarantees every person, every citizen—that includes Linda Taylor, Linda Bennett, Linda Smith, Linda Jones—the right to be secure in their homes.”
Jones didn’t buy that Linda Wakefield, Linda Taylor, or whoever it was sitting at the defendant’s table had been done a grave injustice. “Obviously, the policeman in the exercise of his duties would be required to take the cards,” he said. “No question about it in my mind.” The motion to suppress evidence was denied. Gant’s first tactic hadn’t come close to succeeding, but he had learned an important lesson: No matter how many Bibles she swore on, Linda Taylor wasn’t going to tell the truth. She wouldn’t take the stand again.
* * *
Pincham had taught his protégé that jurors need someone to latch on to, to tell them what to think and how to feel. When Gant opened the door to Mark Jones’s well-appointed, air-conditioned fifteenth-floor courtroom, he acted as though he was still in the friendlier, grimier confines of the Criminal Courts building at Twenty-Sixth and California. Taylor’s lawyer, a new carnation affixed to his suit, pantomimed friendship and familiarity with the clerk and bailiff, trying his best to make them laugh. If the defense attorney looked comfortable, the people deciding his client’s fate would feel comfortable with him.
It took four days to pick a jury, a process that just one of the Chicago papers deemed worthy of scrutiny. The Chicago Defender reported that prosecutors Jim Piper and James Sternik had “used eight of their ten peremptory challenges to dismiss the first eight prospective jurors—all of whom were welfare recipients.” The city’s black newspaper was also the lone media outlet to note the jury’s racial makeup. Eight women would sit in judgment of Linda Taylor, five of them white and three of them black. They were joined by four white men.
Given that he’d failed to make those public aid ID cards disappear, Gant needed to convince a mostly white jury to empathize with a South Side welfare cheat. On March 4, 1977, the defense attorney told the jurors that Linda Taylor wasn’t who she’d been made out to be. “The term ‘welfare queen’ gives the image of a cunning, slick woman who could dupe the all-massive, politically job-laden Department of Public Aid,” he said in his opening statement. “This welfare queen syndrome was an effort of the State of Illinois and Department of Public Aid to cover up their own frailties. This woman is the fall guy.”
Piper countered that Taylor was no scapegoat. Rather, she’d made marks out of the kindhearted social workers who tried to ensure that everyone in Chicago had enough to eat. If well-intentioned bureaucrats had been Taylor’s dupes, then Jack Sherwin was the cop she couldn’t fool twice. Piper described how the detective had first run across Taylor in 1972, then tracked her to Michigan, grabbed her fingerprints, and arrested her. Sherwin hadn’t taken part in any kind of cover-up. He was the only man who’d cared enough to stop an unrepentant thief.
Sherwin led off the prosecution’s case, repeating his account of Taylor’s 1974 arrest for the benefit of the jury. He said he’d held up one of Taylor’s Department of Public Aid ID cards—one of them identified her as Connie Walker, the other as Linda Bennett—and urged the arrestee to take a closer look. “Is this your card?” he’d asked.
“No,” Taylor had responded.
“I am looking at this card,” Sherwin had said back in 1974, “and I am looking at you, and I am looking at this card, and I am looking at you, and I am looking at this card, and I am looking at you, and you are telling me this is not your card?”
According to Sherwin, Taylor eventually confessed that she’d received public aid as Walker “for a while” and as Bennett at some indeterminate time in the past, “but not anymore.” That was the closest she ever came, at least in Sherwin’s presence, to an admission of guilt.
The Defender’s Nathaniel Clay saw the defendant as the day’s clear loser. Taylor, he wrote, appeared “pained and pensive,” sitting “in worried silence as her two young black defense attorneys were overruled time and again.” That evening, Walter Cronkite narrated a report on the CBS Evening News, one that told the familiar story of Taylor’s role in the 1976 campaign.
During last year’s race for the Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan talked often about welfare abuses, and he almost always cited the case of an unnamed Chicago woman he says used eighty names to collect more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in tax-free income. Well, testimony began in Chicago today in the fraud trial of that woman, forty-eight-year-old Linda Taylor, called by newspapers the “welfare queen.” The amount she’s charged with receiving is not a hundred and fifty thousand dollars but eight thousand dollars. The prosecutor says he must go with what he can prove.
The nation’s most-watched newscast, helmed by the journalist known as the most trusted man in America, beamed Taylor’s unsmiling visage and Gant’s red carnation into more than ten million homes on March 7, 1977. As Cronkite said the words “welfare queen,” the screen showed Taylor walking through the Daley Center, her torso sheathed in a tight-fitting caramel-colored leather jacket. When he mentioned her hypothetical prison sentence, the camera zoomed in on the left side of Taylor’s face. At that moment, she brought her hand up to scratch her nose, revealing the huge, dark stone on her right ring finger.
While television cameras crowded the halls of the fifteenth floor, national print coverage of the Taylor trial was sparse. Collectively, the big papers ran a solitary takeout on the welfare queen’s legal imbroglio, a Washington Post piece that noted how “details of Taylor’s escapades have been reported with great relish by Chicago newspapers, providing some tongue-clucking reading for the citizenry.” Even the Chicago papers kept their relish to a minimum, playing the trial as one local story among many. The Chicago Tribune’s first dispatch, a 230-word news brief by Daley Center beat reporter Charles Mount, ran in a small box on page ten of March 8’s final edition.
That same day, the Tribune published a front-page piece by George Bliss and Michael Hirsley on the many failings of the Cook County probation system. The Tribune’s city editor, Bernard Judge, didn’t think he needed Bliss at the Daley Center. Bliss was a reporter, not a wordsmith, and there wasn’t much left to uncover about a human-interest story in which the human interest had expired. Between March 4 and March 18, the Tribune ran three separate front-page stories about the clubbing of baby seals, but Linda Taylor—the villain Bliss and the Tribune had introduced to the world two and a half years earlier—never made it to section one, page one.
During the second week of testimony in Jones’s courtroom, the Tribune did
publish a front-pager on a Cook County court case. A onetime Chicago police officer had been acquitted of trying to kill his son—the boy had survived after his father had allegedly hit him on the head during a fishing trip and tossed him in Lake Michigan. “Ex-cop rejoices,” the subhead said. “Youth, 18, stunned.” Taylor’s days in court weren’t nearly so shocking or lurid. What had gained purchase in the press as a story about luxury cars and dead husbands had transformed, in a court of law, into a mostly humdrum tale of canceled checks. But for those who cared to look and listen, the trial served as a weeks-long answer to the question the Tribune had asked but never satisfactorily pursued: What had Linda Taylor done, and how had she done it?
* * *
When Taylor applied for government assistance as Linda Bennett, she didn’t use a driver’s license, Social Security card, or birth certificate to prove she was who she said she was. At 9 a.m. on October 24, 1973, she showed a public aid eligibility worker her wrist, which carried an armband from Cook County Hospital. She’d just been discharged, she said, after getting treated for the lung disease sarcoidosis. Using an armband as a form of identification was unconventional, but Annette Slimkowski allowed it. This woman was sick and desperate, and intake workers weren’t in the habit of shooing away sick and desperate people.
On March 9, 1977, three-and-a-half years after she’d sat across from Taylor at the public aid office at East Eightieth and South Cottage Grove, Slimkowski testified that Linda Bennett had told her she’d never received public assistance before. “She did not know the whereabouts of all of her husbands,” Slimkowski said, and she had four children under the age of five: William, Duke, Joseph, and Electra. The two oldest boys had a white father and had been born in Arkansas, the applicant said. The father of the two younger children had left the family in 1973. In addition to lung disease, she had a heart condition that would soon require surgery. She hadn’t been able to pay rent for three months. She’d sold her last item of jewelry, a ring, to a neighbor that very morning.
Slimkowski quickly put through an approval for emergency aid. She gave Taylor food vouchers that day, and a pair of checks totaling $419.33 arrived at her door the following week. The intake worker had spent less time pondering whether the state should send Taylor money than she had puzzling over her race, which she was obliged to ask about to ensure that the department didn’t violate applicants’ civil rights.
“You had a hard time telling whether this person was white or was black?” defense attorney T. Lee Boyd asked on cross-examination.
“I would have to ask her,” Slimkowski said.
“Have you ever observed a pale black person?” Boyd continued.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Would you say that it is nothing to see a pale black person?”
“If the paleness is the only problem, but it was not the only feature.”
“Tell us the other problem.”
“She had as I recall Caucasian features,” Slimkowski said.
Boyd had no further questions.
In subsequent testimony, public aid employees said that Taylor’s push to get emergency aid was a ploy to cement her name on the rolls with minimal vetting. Once the department fast-tracked emergency relief, it would also start mailing out monthly Aid to Families with Dependent Children payments. It might take ninety days or longer for anyone in the department to give a new file a second glance, and Taylor did her best to expand that timeframe. Whenever she moved to a new neighborhood, her paperwork would transfer to a caseworker who covered that specific region, restarting the clock on a potential in-home visit to verify her eligibility. While both Sherwin and one of Taylor’s landlords testified that they’d seen her with only two children, she goosed her payout by listing four on her application. By claiming that those kids were very young, she also ensured that the Department of Public Aid wouldn’t be able to confirm their existence by checking school records. It was a simple system, one that preyed on the sympathies of overworked bureaucrats and exploited rules designed to help the vulnerable and destitute. Most of the time, it worked.
In April 1974, when Taylor was already getting welfare money as Connie Walker and Linda Bennett, she dropped into the public aid office at 1010 North Milwaukee Avenue and launched into her usual routine. She told the intake worker that she was Sandra Brownlee—her daughter’s name—and that she’d never been on AFDC before. She was penniless after the death of her stepfather, and she needed emergency aid for a set of triplets and two sets of twins. It was essentially the same story she’d told an eligibility examiner in Michigan in 1971—the case that had clued Jack Sherwin in to Taylor’s history of scams. This time, the intake worker got suspicious. Rather than grant Taylor’s emergency request, Etta Tomczyk sent an investigator to Taylor’s alleged home address of 439 North Kedzie Avenue. When she couldn’t be found, her application for public assistance was denied.
No newspapers or wire services reported on any of this testimony. The Tribune’s Mount did write, however, that the prosecution “suffered a setback” when Slimkowski and another public aid official failed to identify Taylor in the courtroom. After three or four years and thousands of client interviews, they explained, they couldn’t pick Linda Bennett out of a crowd. The prosecutors, undaunted, told the jury that Taylor’s looks weren’t all that material. The man they described as their “key witness” was someone who’d never seen Taylor in person.
David Grimes had been eyeballing Linda Taylor’s handwriting since the fall of 1974. After Taylor’s arrest, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had sent the FBI document examiner a package full of Illinois treasury checks. The back of each of those checks carried the all-caps admonition “KNOW YOUR ENDORSER,” followed by a longer warning to potential fraudsters: “I understand that the endorsement hereon or deposit to the account of the within named payee is done with the understanding that payment will be from federal and/or state funds and that any false claims, statements, or documents, or concealment of a material fact may be prosecuted under applicable federal or state laws.” Taylor didn’t always keep her aliases straight when putting her pen to the endorsement line. On one check issued in August 1974, she signed “Connie Walker,” crossed it out, and wrote “Linda Bennett” instead.*
The prosecution’s case depended on those signatures. Grimes had compared the backs of Taylor’s welfare checks to her known handwriting, including nearly a hundred pages’ worth of samples the FBI had procured from her under court order in 1974 and 1975. Any writing obtained under duress was suspect, though, especially when it had been acquired from a likely scammer. More valuable was the scribbling Taylor had done of her own free will. At the FBI laboratory in Washington, DC, Grimes had pored over the all-caps scrawl on Taylor’s applications for public assistance, the neat script on her driver’s licenses and car titles, and the loops and slashes on the order forms for How to Tell Fortunes with Cards and Psychic Perception: The Magic of Extrasensory Powers. He’d learned to copy Taylor’s penmanship, writing her various names on blank sheets of paper and drawing arrows to point out distinctive characteristics: the downward curl at the top of the capital C in Connie, the horizontal slash that crossed the double t in Bennett.
About a month before the trial, Piper had asked Grimes if they could get together to talk about his testimony. “I don’t know what we have to talk about,” the document examiner told the state’s attorney. “I saw what I saw.” Grimes had told Piper he didn’t need to bring any comparison charts to show the jury. “I’ve testified dozens of times,” he’d said. “I say what my opinion is, and that’s good as gold.”
Grimes’s opinion was that the Connie Walker and Linda Bennett signatures on thirteen of the twenty-three checks at issue matched Taylor’s known writing. Eight of the remaining ten endorsements were probably a match, while the other two “may have been the same.” Although he didn’t feel confident enough to issue a definitive opinion about every signature, Grimes testified that he was absolutely certain about t
hose thirteen checks. If the jurors believed him, they’d have no choice but to find Taylor guilty.
* * *
Skip Gant began his closing argument as R. Eugene Pincham once had: by invoking the Gospel of Matthew. “So the last shall come first and the first shall come last,” the defense attorney said, telling the eight women and four men in the jury box that they’d been “called here for a particular purpose.” They’d been chosen to serve because of their impartiality, and impartiality was what this case demanded. Gant said that guilt should not be determined by the number of witnesses the state calls, nor “by the number of documents that you see spread before you.” Rather, it should be decided based on the quality of the evidence. By that measure, he told the jurors, the prosecution of Linda Taylor had been a colossal failure.
David Grimes had given Gant an opening to ratchet up the jurors’ reasonable doubt. The document examiner had come off as arrogant and aloof—he hadn’t deigned to walk through his analyses or explain how he’d gone about assessing Taylor’s letter forms. “I asked him, ‘Mr. Grimes, did you use any microscopes?’” Gant reminded the jury. “What was his answer? ‘Well, that depends on what you mean by a microscope.’” Grimes had told everyone in the courtroom that they should just take his word for it. Gant argued that the “almighty handwriting expert from Washington, DC,” hadn’t done enough to earn their trust.
