The Queen

by Josh Levin

  Taylor’s attorney also questioned the integrity of Jack Sherwin. Under cross-examination, Sherwin had said that another detective had looked through Taylor’s purse. Piper’s notes, however, indicated that Sherwin had searched the purse himself. “Something is either mistaken or someone is lying,” Gant said. “If they are mistaken, then they can be mistaken about half the other things in this case. That constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And if they are lying, they can be lying about other things.”

  Gant didn’t claim that Taylor was a victim, and he didn’t say her acquittal would represent a triumph of good over evil. He simply urged the jurors to follow the law, even if it left them nauseous. “You may feel that that little lady sitting over there, she done something,” Gant said, gesturing dramatically in Taylor’s direction, his voice rising.

  You may feel that maybe she signed one of these documents. You may feel that, but you have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that they proved it.

  Now, you may say, “Well, Mr. Gant, that seems a little unfair.” You may think, Well, the system is not right. And I am not here to quibble with you as to what is right and what is wrong.…

  You may feel the law ought to be changed. But this, ladies and gentlemen, this is not the forum wherein you will accomplish that.

  The young carnation-wearing lawyer wrapped up his thirty-minute monologue by saying that the only thing more foolish than trusting Linda Taylor would be trusting the U.S. government. “If there is one thing that the citizenry of this country has learned in the last ten years, especially in the mid and late nineteen seventies as a result of the Watergate incident,” Gant said, it’s that “it is healthy for we as citizens to scrutinize the conduct and the actions of government officials.”

  When Gant sat down, a government official got to his feet. Jim Piper told the jurors that Sherwin could’ve left Taylor’s apartment when he saw those welfare ID cards; instead, he chose to stick around to protect the taxpayers’ money. David Grimes, too, “was a person…of integrity,” a credentialed analyst who deserved the jury’s deference. “He is the expert, ladies and gentlemen,” the prosecutor said. Linda Taylor, by contrast, was “just a parasite.” If she’d been singled out, Piper argued, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “When the public learns that this defendant was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of welfare fraud and a jury of her peers convicted her on all counts and counts on perjury…it will have some deterrent,” he said. Piper added, “It is not welfare that is on trial.…It is the fraud. It is the depriving. You know, there is only so much water in the well.”

  Taylor, who was wearing glasses and a white pantsuit, “sat stoically through the summations,” reported the Associated Press. The Defender saw something different. “With her face pinched and drawn, the fashionably dressed Mrs. Taylor twitched nervously at the defense table,” the black newspaper wrote. As Taylor either twitched or sat impassively, Jones read the jurors their instructions, then sent them off to deliberate.

  A few seconds after the alternate juror collected her coat, Gant and Boyd requested a mistrial, telling the judge that he’d read the jury instructions out of order. “You seriously offer that as grounds for mistrial?” Jones asked. The defense attorneys were serious. So was the judge. The motion was denied. A short while after this failed maneuver, Boyd blew up. “All you have done throughout this case, judge, is turn around and let [the prosecutors] do exactly what they want to do,” he said.

  Boyd’s accusation would’ve been more credible in almost any other courtroom in Chicago. Although he hadn’t given the defense’s Hail Mary motion much consideration, Jones was known as a fair and incorruptible arbiter in a city where such a thing couldn’t be taken for granted. Six years after the Taylor trial, the Tribune revealed the existence of Operation Greylord, a sting operation in which undercover federal agents planted bugs in Cook County judges’ chambers. Among the fifteen judges convicted of bribe collecting and case fixing was Wayne Olson, who in 1974 had reduced Taylor’s bond in a court hearing after her extradition from Arizona to Illinois. Although no allegations were ever made about Olson’s behavior vis-à-vis Taylor, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for soliciting and accepting bribes as a narcotics court judge. The evidence used to convict Olson included a recording in which he’d enthused, “I love people that take dough, because you know exactly where you stand.”

  Attorneys had a tougher time knowing where they stood with Mark Jones. A contemporary of Pincham’s, Jones had been the first black lawyer to work in the civil division of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office before winning election to a judgeship in 1963. His easygoing manner on the bench belied his fierce resolve. In the mid-1970s, Jones had insisted on hearing a case involving the head of the American Nazi Party despite receiving anonymous threats that he’d be killed if he didn’t stand down. He wasn’t going to be flustered by an angry defense lawyer. “You may feel that way,” Jones said in response to Boyd’s complaint that he’d given the prosecution preferential treatment, “but there is no facts to support that.”

  Taylor’s attorneys didn’t have much time to feel sorry for themselves. It took just six hours for the jury to reach a consensus.

  On the evening of March 17, the foreman passed a pile of papers to the clerk. The first sheet was the verdict form for count one, theft by deception of State of Illinois treasury check PB 7454065, a payment of $306 issued to Linda Bennett on October 31, 1973.

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Linda Bennett, also known as Connie Walker, also known as Linda Taylor, guilty of theft of property of value in excess of a hundred and fifty dollars.” Linda Taylor was guilty of a felony.

  Next was count two, exerting unauthorized control over the same Illinois treasury check.

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Linda Bennett, also known as Connie Walker, also known as Linda Taylor, guilty of theft of property.” Another felony.

  Count three, theft by deception of a check for $249.33, issued to Linda Bennett on December 14, 1973:

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Linda Bennett, also known as Connie Walker, also known as Linda Taylor, guilty of theft in excess of a hundred and fifty dollars.”

  Count four, exerting unauthorized control:

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Linda Bennett, also known as Connie Walker, also known as Linda Taylor, guilty of theft of property.”

  After the clerk read guilty verdicts for three more counts, she got permission to stop reading each sheet of paper in full.

  “Count eight, guilty. Count nine, guilty. Count ten, guilty. Count eleven, guilty. Count twelve, guilty. Count thirteen, guilty.”

  Before the case went to the jury, the prosecutors had dropped three of the perjury counts as well as two theft counts that weren’t tied to specific checks. Taylor was found guilty of the remaining three counts of perjury and forty-six counts of theft. After the clerk said “guilty” forty-nine times, Jones asked the twelve jurors to affirm that these were indeed their verdicts. All twelve said yes.

  Now that Taylor was a felon forty-nine times over, Jones had to decide whether she could remain free while she awaited sentencing. When asked about her living situation, Taylor told the judge that two of her children had been taken from her. “Mr. Piper had them put in the juvenile home because one of them was a white child and another one was dark,” she said.

  That accusation made Piper angry. He said the children had been taken away by the juvenile court, and that blood tests were being done to determine their parentage.

  “I don’t want to get into that,” Jones said. “She may remain at large on the same bond she has now.”

  The Tribune published a short, dry account of Taylor’s conviction on page three of the Friday paper. The Chicago Sun-Times, which put Taylor on the front page, added a bit of courtroom color, writing that “Miss Taylor showed no emotion at the reading of each guilty finding by the clerk,” an observation echoed by the Associated Press. The Defender
, again, had an alternative perspective. Taylor appeared “nervous and gloom-stricken,” Nathaniel Clay wrote. “Fighting back the tears, Mrs. Taylor, awaiting the jury’s verdict, was overheard to murmur, ‘Only God can help me now.’”

  Skip Gant had set out to change one juror’s mind. In Clay’s view, he’d never had a chance. “Although it was obvious from the very beginning of her two-week trial that she was ‘guilty as hell,’” he wrote, the predominantly white jury, one from which welfare recipients had repeatedly been struck, “had their minds made up before they retired to deliberate the defendant’s fate.”

  Everything Gant had said in his opening statement was true. The Illinois Department of Public Aid was a dysfunctional agency, and Taylor had been the fall guy for a state government whose failings were monumental. But Taylor wasn’t just the fall guy for the Public Aid Department. She was the fall guy for everyone who’d lost his job, or had a hefty tax bill, or was angry about his lot in life and the direction of his country. R. Eugene Pincham had made his career by winning over white jurors, but even the great Pincham couldn’t have done much with Linda Taylor. She was guilty as hell, and she was someone it felt good to punish.

  When Taylor emerged from the courtroom, she didn’t look ashamed or chastened. The newly convicted felon grinned broadly as she strode past a swarm of lights and cameras. When she stopped at the elevator, waiting for a ride down from the fifteenth floor, the press pushed in tighter.

  “Ms. Taylor, what are your feelings after the verdict?”

  She turned her back and stared at the wall, ignoring the handheld microphone bobbing near her mouth.

  “Ms. Taylor, you said earlier that the verdict would be in the hands of God. Do you feel that it was a fair verdict tonight?”

  She jammed her right hand on the down button, impatient for the elevator to whisk her away.

  “What do you intend to do now, Mrs. Taylor?”

  She tilted her head upward, haughty and dismissive.

  “You’re not going to talk to us, are you?”

  She shook her head no.

  * Three of the canceled treasury checks submitted to the FBI carried an additional signature on the back: Robert Taylor. Although this Robert Taylor seems to be the likeliest source for Linda Taylor’s best-known surname, no individual by that name ever materialized in court or in the press.

  Chapter 9

  She Couldn’t Stop

  Linda Taylor’s probation officer couldn’t find her. The residence she’d listed on South Harvard Avenue was a vacant lot, and nobody on the block had seen her or knew who she was. A few days after she’d been found guilty of forty-nine felonies, Taylor had dropped out of sight.

  And then, suddenly, she reappeared. When Taylor showed up at the Daley Center on March 25, 1977, she was carrying an enormous Bible. At her bond revocation hearing, she told Judge Mark Jones that she’d gone into hiding “to avoid police harassment.” Jack Sherwin was in attendance, and Taylor faced him as she spoke. “Since you came and searched my house, I’ve got several places I can stay,” she said, with the Tribune noting her additional claim that “she attended church meetings at different locations and often spent the night where the meetings were held.” She told the judge her primary residence was a different place on South Harvard Avenue, where she lived with her husband, Sherman Ray; four children; and two dogs.

  Jones was skeptical. “I’m not sure where she lives,” he said. “We couldn’t find her, and the state couldn’t find her.” The judge declared that he was revoking Taylor’s bond and sending her to jail.

  “Judge, can I say something?” she asked. “They’re looking for Linda Taylor, and I’m not Linda Taylor.”

  Jones’s response: “Take her away.”

  While the Bible was a new accessory, Taylor didn’t say or do much in the last week of March 1977 that she hadn’t said or done before. A month earlier, she’d denied that she was Linda Taylor in a pretrial hearing. In July 1976, she’d gone to jail for changing addresses without informing the court. That punishment hadn’t deterred her, and neither had anything else. In his closing statement, Jim Piper told the jury that Taylor had cashed welfare checks even after getting arrested in August 1974. She’d also conned the Public Aid Department into paying for her personal housekeeper, taking advantage of a service the state provided for those too ill to take care of their own children. It was a scam on top of a scam. “She was so greedy she couldn’t stop,” the prosecutor said.

  At Taylor’s sentencing hearing on May 12, Piper described her “cold, calculated plan to collect welfare checks like clockwork,” a scheme that was “an insult to all the hardworking people of the county.” The prosecutor asked Jones to give Taylor a sentence that would deter other potential cheats. Piper thought two decades in prison would do the trick.

  In arguing for leniency for his client, Skip Gant again brought up Watergate. “If there is anybody in the history of mankind who duped anyone, it was Richard Nixon,” he said. “He didn’t even get probation.” Gant also cited French singer and actor Claudine Longet, who was serving just thirty days behind bars for criminally negligent homicide after killing her Olympic skier boyfriend, and newspaper heir Patty Hearst, who’d been sentenced earlier that week to five years’ probation for her role in a 1974 Symbionese Liberation Army crime spree. Taylor should get probation, too, Gant proclaimed—she was “much less a threat” than the machine-gun-toting Hearst. “Black schoolchildren in Chicago will take a more cynical view of the criminal justice system,” he said, if Taylor’s punishment was disproportionate to her crimes.

  In addition to figuring out where to place Taylor on the spectrum of mid-1970s female notoriety, Mark Jones had to sift through a huge stack of mail. The judge told Piper and Gant that he’d been besieged by letter writers—that people around the country had been “telling me what to do.” Jones definitely wasn’t giving Taylor probation, but twenty years behind bars seemed like an absurd sentence for stealing just less than $9,000. The judge’s first move was to reduce the forty-six counts of theft against Taylor to twenty-three, one for each check she’d stolen. That was a consequence of an Illinois rule that prohibited a defendant from being convicted of two offenses that arose from a single act (i.e., the theft of one welfare check). Jones eliminated each count of “theft by deception,” leaving in place the jury’s twenty-three guilty verdicts for exerting unauthorized control over state property. For each of those counts of theft, he sentenced Taylor to a minimum of two years and a maximum of six years in a state penitentiary, with those terms to be served concurrently. When she’d done that time, she would be imprisoned an additional one year and one day for perjury.

  Taylor, who was dressed in a white pantsuit—the same muted ensemble she’d worn for closing arguments—didn’t make a scene upon hearing that she’d be locked up for three to seven years. The Chicago Defender reported that she’d “quietly replied ‘No’” when asked if she had any words to offer in her defense, while the Sun-Times added that she had tears in her eyes when Jones read the verdict. “Linda Taylor, the so-called welfare queen, was sentenced in a Chicago courtroom today,” Walter Cronkite announced on the CBS Evening News. The report lasted just fifteen seconds.

  * * *

  Before, during, and after her trial, Taylor acted as though she had a compulsion to lie and steal. Prosecutor Jim Piper argued that there wasn’t anything complicated about Taylor’s behavior: She was greedy, and she took what she wanted with no regard for the consequences. A new member of Taylor’s legal team offered an alternate explanation. “I’m concerned about her mental capacities,” William Starke said in a hearing in Jones’s Daley Center courtroom.

  Starke wasn’t one of Chicago’s most respectable lawyers. His law partners had shut down their firm earlier in the 1970s because money from Starke’s clients never seemed to leave his own pocket. A decade after Taylor’s trial, he’d be disbarred due to “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.” But in 1977, with Skip Gant and T. Lee
Boyd having failed to stave off a multiyear prison stint, Starke presented Taylor with a new legal strategy. “If she was convicted at a time when she was mentally incompetent, then the trial would have to be declared a nullity,” he told the Sun-Times.

  At a hearing on March 31, Starke persuaded Jones to have Taylor evaluated by a pair of psychiatrists. But when the judge looked over the psychiatrists’ report several weeks later, he wasn’t swayed by the argument that Taylor had been mentally incompetent to stand trial. Starke disappeared from the scene just as quickly as he’d arrived, and that psych evaluation wasn’t written about in the press or included in Taylor’s court file. The report’s conclusions did surface a year later, as part of a petition in Taylor’s other outstanding legal matter—the case in which she’d been accused of stealing Everleana Brame’s fur coat, TV set, and electric can opener. In that petition, another of Taylor’s lawyers wrote that he’d spoken with Boyd, R. Eugene Pincham, and Jeannette Nottingham—the woman who’d represented Taylor in the fight over Patricia Parks’s estate—all of whom said that she “was incapable of knowing whether or not she was telling the truth.” Taylor’s attorney in the Brame burglary case also said he’d looked over “the reports of two psychiatrists who examined her which referred to her as being psychotic and unable to understand the nature of the proceedings of which she was a defendant.”

  In an interview with the Defender in early May, the pastor of Chicago’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ said that Taylor “should be given psychiatric help, not an extensive jail sentence.” This was a minority opinion. If Taylor wasn’t entirely responsible for her own actions, that would undermine the larger narrative that had been constructed around her, one in which she had come to represent the archetypal welfare fraudster. And so, like every other circumstance that complicated the Linda Taylor story, the psychiatrists’ report got cast aside.