The Queen

by Josh Levin

  On the day of Taylor’s sentencing, her lawyers filed a notice of appeal on their client’s behalf. Over the prosecutors’ objections, Jones set an appeal bond of $50,000. Taylor’s daughter, Sandra Brownlee, said that she and her family would get to work raising the $5,000 in cash they’d need to get her mother free.

  * * *

  Although he hadn’t stayed on the Linda Taylor beat, George Bliss still kept in close contact with the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid. On March 20, 1977, he quoted the committee’s executive director, Joel Edelman, in a piece about the Public Aid Department’s largely failed efforts to track down absentee fathers. According to Edelman, many of those missing dads weren’t really missing—they just hid from caseworkers to ensure that their families would continue to qualify for aid. The agency’s policy of informing welfare recipients in advance about home visits, Edelman said, was like “a bank telling a bank robber when guards at the bank will be absent.”

  By the early part of 1977, though, Bliss had mostly moved away from public aid stories. In addition to working on the articles on the Cook County probation system that ran during Taylor’s trial, Bliss devoted three months to reporting on child pornography and child sex trafficking. The four-part series he co-bylined with Michael Sneed led to U.S. Senate hearings and the passage of the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act, the first federal legislation to make the production and distribution of child porn a criminal act.

  That was the last great success of Bliss’s professional career. Doctors had diagnosed him as bipolar, and no treatment eased his symptoms. Bliss spent most of the workday sitting at his desk making phone calls. He’d ring up his adult children, telling them the paper’s top brass wanted to let him go. “Larry,” he’d tell his thirty-four-year-old son, “they’re looking at me.” One morning, he called his colleague Bill Mullen before work. Bliss was in tears, saying he couldn't remember how to drive to Tribune Tower. He’d really started to panic after he’d turned his car around and realized he didn’t know how to make it back home.

  Management at the Chicago Tribune didn’t have any intention of firing George Bliss. In August 1977, after Bliss had checked into Lutheran General Hospital in Chicago’s northern suburbs, the newspaper’s editor, Clayton Kirkpatrick, sent him a note on Tribune letterhead. “We miss you around here,” he wrote. “There are all kinds of projects awaiting your return, and I hope that you can be back on the job soon. However, there is no need for you to rush your recovery—we want you completely restored and with your old enthusiasm when you return.”

  Bliss was given shock treatments at Lutheran General. They didn’t help. Shortly after that inpatient stint, the Tribune sent him to a psychiatric facility in New Jersey. That didn’t work either. When he came back to Chicago after six months on the East Coast, Bliss was prescribed lithium. The medication flattened him out. The last vestiges of his old enthusiasm were gone.

  When Bliss walked back into the Tribune’s newsroom in May 1978, his colleagues were dismayed. His face was sunken, and his emaciated torso disappeared inside his baggy off-the-rack suits. Bill Recktenwald, who’d worked with Bliss at the Better Government Association before joining the Tribune, noticed one day that his friend had blood on his collar. Later, he learned that Bliss had thrown himself down a small staircase. His ten children heard their father’s cry for help very clearly. In August, Bliss’s son Larry insisted on taking him to see another doctor. At that appointment, Bliss said he couldn’t stand to be alive anymore. Larry couldn’t believe that the doctor had just let them leave the office.

  On September 2, the family convened for Bliss’s daughter Carol’s wedding. Bliss had told the doctor that he was terrified he’d make a fool of himself. The father of the bride managed to walk his daughter down the aisle, then faded into the background. Unless you were looking for him, you wouldn’t have known he was there. A photo taken at the reception showed twelve people looking straight at the camera. Bliss was in the middle of the frame, staring off to the side, unsmiling.

  The day after the wedding, Bliss asked three of his sons to play a round of golf. He’d dug up some of his best stories on the course—politicians, he found, talked more freely when they were roaming the fairways. But golf wasn’t just an amusement for Bliss. He’d been the Tribune champ for years, and was such a great shotmaker that some of his playing partners thought he could’ve gone pro. That Sunday, he shot a 44 on the front nine and a 36 on the back. An 80 was a relatively poor round for him, but Bliss’s children were amazed that he’d played so well considering how bad he looked.

  The following weekend, on the night of Sunday, September 10, Bliss and his wife, Therese, went to a birthday party in Western Springs, a Chicago suburb fifteen miles from their home in Oak Lawn, Illinois. They were celebrating the father of Bliss’s first wife, Helen. Although thinking about Helen’s death in childbirth caused Bliss tremendous pain, he loved his former father-in-law, a man who was crowned “king of the family” each Christmas by his children and grandchildren. On their way home, Bliss and Therese stopped by his son Larry’s house to say a quick hello. Therese told Larry the party had been good for her husband. “I think your dad’s doing better,” she said.

  At around five thirty the next morning, Bliss’s sixteen-year-old son, Terry, and twenty-two-year-old stepson, Charles, woke up to the sound of gunshots. When they opened the door to their parents’ bedroom, they heard their mother moaning, “What happened? What happened?” Charles ran to call the police, while Terry stooped to the floor to give his father mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When an officer arrived at the house a few minutes later, he found no sign of forced entry, and no evidence that the home had been burglarized. Therese had lost consciousness. She was lying in bed, with gunshot wounds to her right arm and the back of her head. Bliss was on the floor, faceup. He, too, was unconscious, and had a bullet wound on the side of his head, four and a quarter inches above the midpoint of his right ear. On the ground, twelve inches from his right hand, was a .38 caliber Colt revolver. Paramedics transported both of them to the emergency room at Christ Hospital. The fifty-one-year-old Therese Bliss was rushed into surgery. George Bliss was pronounced dead on arrival at 6:42 a.m. on September 11, 1978. He was sixty.

  While there wasn’t any kind of note at the scene, nobody who’d been in the room had any doubts about what had happened: Bliss had shot his wife, then shot and killed himself. The revolver was a blue steel snub-nosed Detective Special, the kind plainclothes officers concealed in their coat pockets. A check of the weapon’s serial number showed that it was registered to Bliss’s friend John L. Sullivan, the man he’d praised in the Tribune in 1951 as “the politest and most efficient policeman in Chicago.” The police officer and the police reporter had grown up together as young men on their respective beats, and they’d stayed close in the decades since. Sullivan told the Oak Lawn police that Bliss had asked to borrow the gun on September 9, saying he needed protection in case a burglar tried to steal the gifts that had piled up after his daughter’s wedding. Bliss had never previously kept a gun in the house—he thought it was too dangerous with all the kids around. Thirty-six hours after getting hold of Sullivan’s revolver, Bliss fired the weapon twice, leaving four rounds in the cylinder.

  Therese Bliss died of her injuries on the night of September 14, 1978. Her death certificate listed her as the victim of a homicide. George Bliss’s death was marked down as a suicide by self-inflicted bullet wound. An autopsy found that he had a gastric ulcer and coronary atherosclerosis. A toxicological analysis came back negative for alcohol, barbiturates, opiates, and tranquilizers.

  In his remembrance of Bliss, the Tribune’s Bob Wiedrich wrote that his longtime colleague had taught him understanding, compassion, and honesty. It had been Bliss who’d mentored him when he was a cub reporter in 1948, and who’d consoled him on the front steps of Our Lady of the Angels School following the 1958 fire that killed ninety-two children. Bliss had given the paper and its read
ers “his integrity, his expertise, and his heart,” Wiedrich wrote. “And the only way any of us can ever repay that is by carrying on his tradition of helping still others become good newspapermen.”

  Clayton Kirkpatrick, who’d helped revive the Tribune’s fortunes by luring Bliss back from the Better Government Association, did his best to encapsulate the great journalist’s life and death in one long quote. “George Bliss was, in effect, a victim of his own intense devotion to journalism,” the Tribune’s editor said in the paper’s front-page obituary.

  He was a perfectionist who never was satisfied with his stories. He agonized over details of the brilliant investigative work that resulted in three Pulitzer Prizes.

  Some time ago he began to suffer from severe mental depression. Medical treatment, including institutional care, did not bring relief. The terrible burden of mental illness compounded by an awareness of its presence ultimately proved too severe.

  The tragedy that followed ended the career of a man who undoubtedly was the foremost investigative reporter in the nation.

  An editorial published in the Tribune on September 12 expressed “hope that his death will help spur researchers in the field of mental health to the same tireless dedication that he showed in his career, and that the means will be found to conquer or at least tame the kind of illness that conquered him.” A newspaper out of Central Illinois, the Decatur Herald, wrote that “people like Bliss need understanding and care, not punishment for a problem that’s not their fault.” That item, which didn’t mention Therese Bliss, ended with a request for empathy: “Bliss, who could afford private psychiatric care and who had many friends even among his professional competitors, met a tragic end nevertheless. Think of the lives of the mentally troubled people with no money, no fame, and no friends.…What happened to George Bliss could happen to anyone else.”

  * * *

  Linda Taylor’s welfare fraud conviction in Illinois could’ve been the first of a hat trick for prosecutors. She was still wanted for felony welfare fraud in Michigan, where she’d jumped bail in 1972, and the FBI continued to write regular status updates on a potential federal case in connection to her misappropriation of Social Security and veterans’ benefits. After Taylor’s sentencing in Chicago, a prosecutor in Michigan’s Van Buren County told the local press that her three-to-seven-year sentence was “really not enough.” The time and expense required to extradite and prosecute Taylor didn’t seem worth it, though, given that she’d been charged with receiving just $600 or so in relief money in Michigan. That was a felony, but not one that would warrant locking her up for a long stretch, even with the extra time she’d likely get for absconding on her bond. The feds, too, eventually decided not to pursue a case against Taylor. In May 1977, an assistant U.S. attorney from the Northern District of Illinois affirmed the office’s earlier decision not to go forward, saying that Taylor had already been convicted in state court “on very similar charges.” A federal prosecution would’ve been redundant. That decision was final.

  In Cook County, state’s attorneys Jim Piper and James Sternik still had one more Taylor-related welfare fraud case to close out. On June 20, 1977, Taylor’s daughter, Sandra Brownlee, pleaded guilty to eighteen counts of theft for receiving public aid checks worth $271.76 each without reporting her husband’s earnings. She was sentenced to three years’ probation and ordered to pay the state $2,414 in restitution. Upon her conviction, at least one newspaper referred to her as the “welfare princess.”

  Illinois prosecutors never asked Taylor to pay restitution directly; in 1978, they managed to claw back $7,000 of the $8,865.67 she’d been convicted of stealing by taking possession of various bonds she’d paid to stay out of jail. The state had worse luck getting Taylor’s daughter to replenish its coffers. Brownlee told her probation officer that poor health prevented her from working. She said she’d gone partially deaf in the Our Lady of the Angels School fire—a claim the FBI had disproved in 1975. She also reported that she’d had surgery for sarcoidosis in 1973, the same year her mother had told a Public Aid Department employee that she’d been receiving treatment for that lung disease. Taylor’s health hadn’t improved, her daughter said. An August 24, 1977, entry in Brownlee’s probation ledger noted that “her mother is going in surgery in the morning so she will have to be there with her.”

  In a November interview with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Piper affirmed that Taylor had been admitted to “a hospital for treatment of an undisclosed ailment.” The prosecutor told the Globe-Democrat that Taylor had applied for welfare during her hospitalization and that “investigators believe she is financially solvent and may have falsified information on the welfare application.”

  While that allegation never led to criminal charges, Taylor’s behavior had by this point exhausted the patience of every stakeholder in the Cook County legal system. On November 18, 1977, the judge in Taylor’s burglary case sent her to jail for missing three consecutive court appearances. She spent the next three months in the county’s Women’s Correctional Center. In January 1978, Skip Gant and T. Lee Boyd withdrew as counsel in that case. Gant never succeeded in getting Taylor to pay her bill. In February, the attorney Taylor hired to replace Gant and Boyd also withdrew, telling the court he “had absolutely no cooperation whatsoever with the defendant” and that “Linda Taylor should seek other counsel to represent her in this matter.” That same month, the appeal in her welfare fraud case was dismissed. In March, Taylor’s newest lawyer filed a petition for a behavioral-clinic examination in the burglary case, writing that he “has been unable to substantiate any of the information relayed to him by his client” and that he doubted “whether or not the Defendant is capable of understanding the nature of the proceedings herein.” That petition was denied.

  After three and a half years of motions and petitions, Linda Taylor was out of options. On March 27, 1978, she pleaded guilty to stealing Everleana Brame’s fur coat, television, and can opener. When Judge Robert Sklodowski asked her if that plea was correct, Taylor said “Yes.” She said yes again when asked if she understood the theft provision, and once more to affirm that she was waiving her right to a trial by jury. She said yes ten times and no just once, to indicate she hadn’t been coerced to plead guilty. The fifty-two-year-old defendant uttered only a single lie, when she told the court she was forty-two.

  Sklodowski sentenced Taylor to five and a half years in prison, to be served concurrently with her preexisting three-to-seven-year term for theft and perjury. The burglary case was closed. There were no more outstanding warrants for Taylor’s arrest, in Illinois or any other state. She didn’t have anything more to run away from, and she didn’t have anywhere to run. Linda Taylor had been stopped.

  * * *

  Jim Piper had spent years toiling as an ordinary assistant state’s attorney, one of hundreds of lawyers in the second-largest prosecutor’s office in the United States. After his successful shepherding of the Taylor case, Piper became a star. In the fall of 1977, he was asked to head up a new division: a dedicated unit in Cook County that would ensure that welfare fraudsters paid the price for their actions.

  The State of Illinois had at one point considered taking a very different approach to corralling cheaters. In 1975 and 1976, the Department of Public Aid had experimented with offering amnesty to rule breakers who turned themselves in and arranged to make restitution. That program didn’t last, though, and the prevailing political mood made it a certainty that amnesty wouldn’t be on the table again. “I think the welfare queen Linda Taylor brought about a change in thinking,” Piper told the Tribune the following spring. “Millions each year are being stolen and we decided to do something about it.”

  In interviews, Piper emphasized that he had his sights on only the most egregious criminals. “We don’t prosecute the mother of 10 on welfare and one afternoon a week she works a couple of hours at the Dairy Queen,” he told the Sun-Times. The prosecutor estimated that 35 to 40 percent of the people he investigated were
government workers, including public aid staffers who cashed welfare checks in addition to dispensing them. The news stories that reported those indictments, though, mostly presented white-collar scofflaws as an undifferentiated mass—a list of names, ages, addresses, and dollar amounts.

  Piper understood the unique power of Linda Taylor’s story—how a single outlandish case generated more publicity than a long list of indictments. “The thing that made this case draw so much attention was that she fit the welfare abuser stereotype—it was so blatant,” he said in an interview with a UPI reporter. “She would drive an Eldorado to the court and wear these flowery hats, diamonds—the whole shtick.” Before Taylor, the fur coat–wearing, luxury car–buying public aid chiseler had been something akin to the abominable snowman. The welfare queen had been lurking just out of reach for decades, a mythical being rumored to hang around grocery store checkout lines and Cadillac dealerships. Taylor’s mere existence gave credence to a slew of pernicious stereotypes about poor people and black women. If one welfare queen walked the earth, then surely others did, too.

  A few months before Taylor went on trial, George Bliss wrote that the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid had found “Chicago’s second welfare queen,” a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Mildred Hawkins who “was using wigs, different addresses, various Social Security numbers, and other phony identifications” to freeload an alleged $21,600 a year. Although Tribune readers never got a follow-up, Hawkins would ultimately get convicted of thieving just $1,013; she’d be sentenced to 1 year and 1 day in prison. In 1978, Piper found a woman whose shtick went well beyond wigs and phony IDs. On April 28, thirty-year-old criminal justice graduate student Arlene Otis went to the Criminal Courts building at Twenty-Sixth and California to interview a judge for a school project. A few minutes after leaving his chambers, Otis was arrested and charged with stealing $118,456 from the Department of Public Aid. “She had to write a report with four other students on how the judicial system compares with reality,” explained the judge, Earl Strayhorn. “She’s a good student. Now she can write a good report.”