by Josh Levin
While the 1943 will extolled the virtues of Constance B. Wakefield, this one lingered on her nemesis. “Rosa Kennedy” would get just $1, it stated, as she was “no good and will try to take everything from my baby C. B. Wakefield and my Grandchildren.” The will wrapped up with a final burst of character assassination: “In event of my death Constance will know what to do for Rosa Kennedy has said she is going to kill me with some kind of Chemical.”
The Tribune reported on these documents credulously, topping its October 15 story with the headline “2 Wills Back Daughter of Policy King.” It was doubtful, however, that anyone in Tribune Tower had seen the full text of the wills, given that a probate judge had sealed the Wakefield case file months earlier. Additionally, it was more than a bit suspicious that paperwork unearthed by Constance Wakefield supported her case so comprehensively—the older of the two wills said, essentially, “Our daughter, whom we love above all else and who has the following marks and scars, shall rightly profit from our abundant wealth.” A few of the words on that piece of paper raised even more questions about its authenticity. The first line—“This is our will to Constance Beverly Wakefild”—and the sign-off—“Daddy Lawrnce W. Wakefield”—both contained unlikely misspellings. To accept that this was Lawrence Wakefield’s handiwork, you’d have to believe he wrote up a will without knowing how to write his own name.
Kennedy’s attorneys took note of those missing e’s, hiring the president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners to inspect the wills under a microscope. The lawyers also scrutinized the woman who’d brought the documents to the court’s attention. The more they learned about this Constance Wakefield, the more certain they became that she wasn’t who she claimed to be.
* * *
On the morning of November 9, 1964, Linda Taylor took the stand in a cramped courtroom on the sixth floor of the Cook County building and promised to tell nothing but the truth. Under questioning from her lawyer Milroy Blowitz, she declared that she was Constance Beverly Wakefield, the only living child of Lawrence Wakefield and Edith Elizabeth Jarvis. She said her parents had exchanged marriage vows in Mexico in 1929. She’d confirmed those facts on a recent trip to Tijuana, during which the American consulate in Mexico had certified the Wakefields’ marriage certificate. Her own birth certificate, she said, had somehow gone missing from the county clerk’s office, so her mother’s obstetrician, Dr. Grant Sill, had been kind enough to fill out a delayed record of birth on her behalf. That certificate, which had been accepted and affirmed by the Illinois Department of Public Health, identified Constance Beverly Wakefield as a white female. She’d been born to Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Wakefield on Christmas Day 1934.
The petitioner had asked for her proof of heirship hearing to be held before a jury, but Judge Anthony Kogut denied the motion, saying his courtroom couldn’t possibly house all that extra humanity. While the Cook County building itself was a block-dominating downtown landmark with a lobby fashioned from Botticino marble, room 643 was tiny and unadorned. Kogut typically presided over matters that drew scant attention—hearings attended by the interested parties, their lawyers, and nobody else. This wasn’t a typical probate case. In addition to the judge, his clerk, the bailiff, the witnesses, and a bunch of journalists, the courtroom had to accommodate two attorneys each for Constance Wakefield and Rose Kennedy, as well as lawyers representing Cook County, the City of Chicago, and the public administrator who’d been appointed to oversee the Wakefield estate. It was impossible for anyone to confer with the judge privately, and the courtroom was so packed that some onlookers had to line up against the back wall.
As Wakefield’s alleged progeny explained how she’d procured her delayed birth certificate, a small army of opposing attorneys prepared to poke holes in her story. She faced four separate cross-examinations before the clock struck noon on Monday, November 9. The lengthiest of these were conducted by Cook County assistant state’s attorney Gerald Mannix and Rose Kennedy’s lawyer Norman “Jack” Barry. In the lead-up to the heirship hearing, the state’s attorney’s office and Kennedy’s brain trust at the firm of Rothschild, Hart, Stevens, and Barry had joined forces to defeat a common enemy. If Constance Wakefield convinced the judge that she was a legitimate heir, she’d likely wrest away the entire estate.
The man from the state’s attorney’s office took the first shift. Mannix asked the witness if she’d ever gone by the names Beverly Steinberg and Beverly Singleton. She said yes. She also volunteered that she’d used the last name Miller and had once been known as Constance Steinberg Yarbough. She then added that she’d married a man named Paul Steinberg Yarbough in Oakland, California, in 1948. They’d had a pair of children—twins, Sandra and John—in Arkansas in 1952. She’d had another child, this one out of wedlock, in 1963. That was the extent of it, she said, a complete accounting of her names, relationships, and offspring.
Mannix kept on going, asking about her paternal grandfather and if her mother’s mother had any children and whether she had any aunts. As she pleaded ignorance—“I don’t know nothing about my grandfather”—her lawyer Milroy Blowitz complained that this was all a waste of time. “What her great-grandmother’s name was or great-grandfather’s name was…is absolutely immaterial and irrelevant,” Blowitz said.
“I am attempting to establish the family tree of Constance Wakefield,” Mannix had explained at the start of his questioning, “which I believe is separate and different from the family tree of Lawrence Wakefield.” The judge allowed him to proceed.
“Were you ever known as Martha Louise White?” Mannix asked.
“No,” she answered.
Jack Barry then took over, asking if she knew of the town of Arab, Alabama. She said she didn’t.
“Were you born in nineteen twenty-five?” Rose Kennedy’s attorney continued.
“I was not.”
“Was your mother’s name Linda Lydia Mooney?”
“She was not.”
Barry kept on listing names and places, and Constance Wakefield kept on swatting them away. She’d never been married to a Buddy Elliott. She hadn’t given birth to a Clifford Lee Harbaugh. She didn’t have a sister named Mary Jane. The witness appeared alternately evasive and annoyed. “I don’t know no Lucy Miller, and there is no Lucy,” she said, responding to one of a series of queries about people with that last name. At one point, she claimed, bizarrely, that she had a child at home named Robert Heilgeist. That was the name of one of her lawyers.
Blowitz, her lead attorney, was apoplectic. After she admitted to sharing a residence with “a Mr. Miller and his wife,” he bellowed, “What difference does it make who she lived with? She lived with a dozen men.”
The judge told Blowitz to back away from the stand; he was practically sitting in the witness’s lap. The lack of elbow room, it seemed, was making everyone irritable and claustrophobic. With no jurors to placate, the lawyers saw no reason to hide their mutual contempt. Barry accused Blowitz of exchanging notes with his client. Blowitz said he was sick of watching her get pushed around by Rose Kennedy’s attorney—someone, he said, who was representing a “cheap and phony wife.”
When the men got done casting aspersions on each other, Barry asked Constance Wakefield if she knew a man named Hubert Mooney.
“Yes,” she said.
“And who is Hubert Mooney?” Barry replied.
“I don’t know.”
Blowitz, exasperated, said that none of this could possibly be of any importance. The heir-to-be then blew up when Barry asked if she’d known Mooney for a long time. “I told you I don’t know him,” she said. “I don’t know anything about him, anything about his work or what he does.”
“Get Hubert Mooney, please,” Barry said. The lawyer sent his colleague Norris Bishton into the hallway to fetch their witness.
“What is this? What’s going on here?” Blowitz fumed.
A few seconds later, a short, slender man with a receding hairline walked through the doorway. Although her
lawyer had no idea who this person was or what he was going to say, the woman on the witness stand knew what was about to happen. Hubert Mooney had traveled a long way to get to Chicago. He’d come up north to inform the court that his niece wasn’t telling the truth about who she was.
* When the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company did its own tally later in the week, it pegged the fortune at $761,385.66. Bank officials suggested that the difference was due to police officers’ “faulty arithmetic.”
** Although the origins of the term “policy” aren’t entirely clear, one etymological explanation—suggested in, among other places, an October 1964 Ebony story about Wakefield—is that working-class men and women “risk[ed] their insurance policy money” to place low-probability bets.
Chapter 11
Everything Is Fictitious
Hubert Lee Mooney had lived all around the country and traveled across the world. No matter where the forty-three-year-old refrigeration engineer ended up, he always managed to keep tabs on his family. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mooney spent his time off work taking long road trips with his wife and children, leaving from Amarillo, Texas, and stopping off in Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee to visit his mother and six living siblings. They’d reminisce for hours, swapping stories about the relatives who’d stayed close and those who’d strayed from the flock.
“Are you acquainted with the lady that we know as Constance Wakefield Steinberg?” asked the lawyer representing Cook County’s public administrator.
“I am acquainted with the girl back there, yes,” Mooney told the crowd gathered in room 643.
“Will you identify her for the record?”
“Martha Louise White.”
Martha had been born in Summit, Alabama, sometime around 1926, Mooney said. Her mother was his sister Lydia, and her father was a man named Marvin White. Mooney, who was born in 1921, had spent a good amount of time with his not much younger niece. For most of the 1930s, he’d seen Martha, her mother, and her stepfather each fall, when they came to Tennessee to harvest cotton. Mooney said he’d then lost track of her for a spell prior to a serendipitous reunion in Oakland, California, in the mid-1940s.
A week after that surprise rendezvous, Martha had called her Uncle Hubert looking for bail money. As soon as he got her out of jail, she’d disappeared. They’d seen each other just two times since then, he said. The first was in the early 1950s, near the Arkansas-Missouri state line. The second time was in November 1964, in the Cook County courtroom of Judge Anthony Kogut.
At the prodding of Rose Kennedy’s lawyer Jack Barry, Mooney answered yes to a sequence of questions his niece had waved away. He was certain that she did know of Arab, Alabama, he said; in fact, she had family there. She had been married to a man named Buddy Elliott. She did have a child named Clifford. She did have a sister named Mary Jane.
For Constance Wakefield’s attorneys, this was all extremely perplexing. “If we would feel our client’s pedigree supposedly was as stated here today, we wouldn’t be in court,” said Milroy Blowitz’s co-counsel Leon Wexler. Barry, meanwhile, reveled in the success of his gambit. “I can understand counsel being surprised,” he said. “I am sure they are.”
* * *
Barry’s young associate Norris Bishton had spent months laying the groundwork for that courtroom ambush. Early in the morning and after his office shut down at night, the twenty-eight-year-old lawyer had pushed aside his other duties and set his mind to solving the puzzle of Constance Wakefield. Bishton had quickly realized that the aspiring heir didn’t know all that much about her alleged genealogy. In her depositions and on the delayed birth certificate she’d obtained from the State of Illinois, she’d claimed her mother was Edith Wakefield. She was a generation off: Edith was Lawrence Wakefield’s mother, a fact confirmed by Lawrence’s own 1904 birth certificate.
Bishton had gotten enmeshed in the Wakefield case as soon as the Chicago police began hauling bags of cash out of 9312 South Rhodes Avenue. Edward Egan, the commander who oversaw the raid and Rose Kennedy’s subsequent arrest, had told Kennedy she might want to speak with his son Donald, a lawyer at a fancy downtown firm. Recognizing the inherent conflict of taking on his father’s arrestee as a client, the younger Egan had referred her to his colleague Bishton, who’d helped the seventy-year-old widow get bonded out of jail, and had then driven her to the South Side so she could be reunited with her unfed pets. “Just say her attorney went out to buy dog food,” Bishton had told a Daily News reporter who’d harangued him outside Kennedy’s home. He’d then added, with respect to the Wakefield stockpile, “We are going to try to get it all. We are trying to protect her from thieves.”
A couple of the higher-ups at Rothschild, Hart, Stevens, and Barry had wanted Kennedy to take her business elsewhere. Among them was future Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, an antitrust specialist who didn’t think his corporate clients would care to align themselves with a firm representing a gambling magnate’s ex-prostitute common-law spouse. Bishton and Egan, not wanting to lose out on a potential windfall, had enlisted the help of Jack Barry, a personal injury lawyer who was more of a courtroom brawler than his starchy fellow partners. “We’re the best law firm in Chicago,” Barry had proclaimed during a staff conference call not long after Bishton bought Rose Kennedy dog food. “I believe someone with that amount of money deserves the best law firm in Chicago.” Stevens had relented, asking Barry to do what he could to keep the matter out of the newspapers. He hadn’t always complied with that request. In April 1964, the Pittsburgh Courier asked Barry what Kennedy might do with all the cash. “I hope she has a good time,” he said.
While Barry did most of the talking in and out of court, Bishton handled the grunt work. He’d spent weeks staring at Constance’s wills, trying to figure out the provenance of the loopy signatures at the bottom of both documents. Although Kennedy said she recognized her deceased partner’s penmanship, the names looked strangely tiny. Bishton had found an authentic sample of Wakefield’s handwriting on his mother Edith’s death certificate, which Lawrence had signed as the informant. The Cook County clerk’s office had printed the lawyer a duplicate—a copy, Bishton discovered, that came out much smaller than the original. The firm’s document expert had confirmed that the undersized Wakefield signature on the 1962 will matched the inscription on the undersized copy of Edith Wakefield’s death certificate. A further forensic examination had revealed a telling series of pencil marks. The prospective beneficiary, it seemed, had acquired a miniature version of Lawrence Wakefield’s autograph from the county clerk, then traced it in graphite before putting pen to paper.
By the fall of 1964, Bishton knew that Constance Wakefield wasn’t the policy king’s daughter. To dismantle her heirship petition, he’d need to do more than show that she was lying about her bloodline. He’d have to demonstrate that she belonged to someone else’s family.
Constance’s depositions were a mind-bending thicket of illogic, a collection of assertions that Bishton later termed “the biggest morass of contradiction you would ever want to see.” The four hundred pages of transcripts on his desk did serve, though, as a kind of dossier, one larded with scores of names and locations. The young lawyer had a long list of clues. He just needed to figure out which were real and which were bogus.
Bishton had chased down every lead he could find, making calls to hospitals, bureaus of vital statistics, and county recorders’ offices. He’d used the same opening line each time he got someone on the phone: “I need your help.”
Rose Kennedy’s attorney had reached out to a surgeon who’d once practiced in Arkansas, an amateur sleuth in Alabama, and a lawyer in Texas. These far-flung aides-de-camp had put Bishton in touch with neighbors and acquaintances and supposed relatives. Eighty-seven long-distance phone calls later, he had something resembling a biographical sketch of Lawrence Wakefield’s ersatz daughter. As Bishton watched Hubert Mooney testify on the morning of November 9, he was confident he’d done enough to mak
e Constance Wakefield pack up her phony documents and go home.
* * *
Judge Anthony Kogut adjourned the heirship hearing after Hubert Mooney left the stand, to give Constance Wakefield’s legal team a bit of time to “check some of these names and some of these people.” Eighteen hours later, having failed to make much progress with his background research, Blowitz accused Barry of purchasing his star witness’s testimony. When the judge refused to grant Wexler another extension to prepare for cross-examination, the lawyer groused that he knew nothing about Mooney—that it would be “strictly a fishing expedition.”
With no choice but to proceed, Wexler cast out his line.
“Are you a Negro?” he asked the pale-looking Mooney.
“I hope I am not,” the witness said. “I don’t look like it.”
“Are you white?” Wexler continued.
“I think so.”
“With reference to Constance Wakefield, is she a Negro?”
“No, definitely not,” Mooney said.
“The person who appears in this court with the petition under the name of Constance Wakefield you are identifying as a white woman?”
“Yes. At least I know her mother is white.”
Mooney went on to clarify that his niece’s father wasn’t a Negro either. He then assured Wexler that there were no Negroes at all in the Mooney family tree. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “there has never been a Negro lived in Cullman County.”
That wasn’t much of an exaggeration. The 1930 census, taken four years after Martha Louise White’s supposed birth date, listed a total of eleven black people in the Cullman precinct. In the area around Summit, the town where Mooney said his niece had been born, there were zero people listed as “Negro” in 1930. Thirty years later, that number had not changed.
