by Josh Levin
Mooney, who was born in the town of Cullman, grew up in a place where white separatism was official policy. In 1908, a pair of small Southern newspapers reported that Cullman was “the only strictly white town in North Alabama, if not in the entire state.” That rule was publicized, the papers said, via a sign affixed to the railroad water tank: “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You Here.” Twenty-eight years later, a black newspaper out of Virginia wrote that black “motorists buy all the gasoline their cars can hold in order not to have to stop at Cullman for any purpose.” The publication noted with relief that the upcoming trial of two of the Scottsboro Boys—the group of young black men who’d been falsely accused of raping two white women on a train—wouldn’t be held in Cullman County. In 1936, a Scottsboro defendant had been shot near the county line after trying to escape custody. The Cullman sheriff lamented that the convict hadn’t been mortally wounded, telling his Morgan County counterpart, “You ought to have killed all the niggers!”
“Constance, would you stand up?” Wexler asked.
Constance Wakefield, or Martha Louise White, claimed that her father was black. As she rose to her feet, Hubert Mooney glanced at his niece’s skin. She didn’t look like most white people from North Alabama.
Wexler pressed on.
“There has never been a Negro living in Cullman County?”
“No, sir,” Mooney said.
“Your vision is adequate, I assume?”
“Twenty-twenty.”
“You are looking at Constance Wakefield?”
“Yes.”
“You are telling me that she is not a Negro, and she is white?”
“Well, if niggers can be born from white women,” Mooney said, “she is probably a nigger.”
Wexler told his client she could sit down.
* * *
Norris Bishton had concentrated his investigative efforts in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, the places the ostensible Constance Wakefield talked about the most in her meandering depositions. His collaborators in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had focused on a time and place she hadn’t seemed as inclined to discuss. Hubert Mooney had testified that his niece had a rap sheet in Oakland. After Mooney was excused, assistant state’s attorney Gerald Mannix called Constance Wakefield back to the stand and confronted her with that list of arrests.
The Cook County prosecutor began by showing her a pair of photographs from August 4, 1945—Oakland Police Department mug shots of a woman named Connie Reed who’d been arrested for malicious mischief. The accompanying police report said she’d been born in Missouri on January 24, 1926. At the top of the form, her race was recorded as Mexican. At the bottom, she was identified as white.
Constance Wakefield said she didn’t recognize the pictures, and that she couldn’t recall if she’d been in California on that date. Mooney, though, hadn’t hesitated when he’d been shown State of Illinois exhibit No. 1. “That is Martha Louise White,” he’d said.
Mannix wasn’t through enumerating her criminal history. On April 25, 1946, she’d been taken into custody on a prostitution complaint under the name Betty Smith. This time, her date of birth was December 25, 1924, and her home state was Tennessee. Two years later, Connie Fay Harbaugh—not Yarbough, as she’d testified earlier—was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. This police report said her birth date was December 25, 1927, and that her race was Hawaiian. When she was fingerprinted by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, she gave her nearest relative as Lydia Mello of Luxora, Arkansas. She listed Lydia as her mother.
On the stand, Constance Wakefield claimed she’d never said she was born in 1927, and she wasn’t sure if she’d told the cops that Lydia Mello was her mother. One thing on the report did ring true, however: “I do remember saying that I was Hawaiian.”
Whether or not they were wholly accurate, these Oakland arrest reports established a few key facts about Linda Taylor’s early life. She’d moved out West as a young woman. By the mid-1940s, she’d been in trouble with the law. She’d also tried on different identities—an overlapping set of names, birth dates, races, and places of origin—and she had a habit of dropping hints about the past she’d left behind.
On the afternoon of November 10, a Chicago police officer testified that he’d examined Connie Harbaugh’s Alameda County fingerprint card. That set of prints, the officer said, matched one the Chicago Police Department had on file. In 1963, a woman had been arrested near Wicker Park for assaulting a twelve-year-old girl. That woman had told officers that she was from Hawaii, and she’d given her name as Beverly Singleton—an alias that Constance Wakefield admitted she’d used in the past.
Mannix told the fingerprint technician he had no further questions. He then moved to have Constance Wakefield held in contempt of court for perjury. Judge Anthony Kogut asked the attorneys to step into his chambers. Out of earshot of the press and public, he made his opinion of Constance Wakefield known. “She has been contradicting herself and lying about everything down the line,” he said. “Everything is fictitious. Everything she has submitted so far is fictitious.”
Her lead attorney conceded that his client didn’t have a spotless record. “We admit this girl was arrested,” Milroy Blowitz said. “We admit that this girl may have prostituted herself. We admit that this girl used a number of names. We admit that this girl may have said she was born in Hawaii, she was born in Tennessee, she was born in Arkansas, she was born in Chicago.” Despite all that, Blowitz argued, nobody had gotten anywhere close to proving that Constance Wakefield wasn’t Constance Wakefield.
Kogut wasn’t inclined to see her as an honest broker. The judge went on at length about her pathetic lineup of corroborating witnesses. One of the people who’d testified on her behalf was her own paid employee. Betty Day, who’d been drawing a salary from Constance for five years, swore she’d been present when Lawrence Wakefield’s daughter came into the world, and added that the petitioner had a twin brother who’d died shortly after emerging from the womb. Constance Wakefield also had Grant Sill in her corner. But the doctor who’d filled out her delayed birth certificate had his own credibility issues, given that he’d recently been arrested for selling prescription drugs to high schoolers.* Sill’s story also didn’t match up with Day’s: While the obstetrician said he’d seen a baby girl in the Wakefield home on Christmas Day 1934, he denied tending to a second baby. “The only evidence [Constance Wakefield] offered to establish her date of birth and place of birth was by a colored person who was obviously vague,” Kogut said. “You have the very doctor, your own witness, in the court, who testifies contrary to her own testimony.”
To have any chance of rescuing their case, Blowitz and Wexler would have to furnish a different kind of testimony. They’d need to find an unimpeachable witness, someone who’d help them demonstrate that Constance Wakefield really was Constance Wakefield. They told Kogut they’d found just such a person. Lydia Mooney Blount was on her way from Arkansas, and she was going to testify on behalf of her alleged daughter.
* * *
Since he’d landed in Chicago, Hubert Mooney had reached out to all the relatives he could find, urging them to come up north and help out with what he termed “a little court deal.” Mooney testified that one of his sister Lydia’s sons had been too afraid to make the trip—he thought Martha Louise White, “as slick as she is,” might figure out a way “to bribe me or frame me.” Mooney also recounted a conversation he’d had with Lydia herself.
I told her the only thing—the people are trying to establish facts in this country, and that is what the world should be made out of, not a bunch of criticism and slanderism. And I said, “The fact is, all you got to do is come up and identify the girl.”
Mooney said his fifty-six-year-old sister had been unmoved by his monologue. On the evening of November 9, she’d told him she wouldn’t leave her home in Arkansas under any circumstances. And yet three days later, Lydia Blount got on the witness stand in room
643 and explained how she’d come to know Constance Wakefield.
Blount’s testimony was hard to hear and at times hard to follow. Blowitz told the court she was a “sick lady”—that she’d had multiple heart attacks and had lost consciousness that very morning. He coaxed Blount along, first asking if she knew the petitioner.
“Yes,” she said.
“How long have you known her?”
“Since she was three months old.”
“Did you know her by any other name than Constance Wakefield?”
“Well, no, I didn’t,” she answered. “It was Connie Wakefield on her arm on her tag when they left her at my house.”
Blount said a woman—someone she’d never seen before and never saw again—had left the infant at her home. Hubert Mooney’s sister had raised this tag-wearing foundling in Luxora, Arkansas, until the child was six years old, at which point “they said they wouldn’t allow colored kids in the white school.” After Connie was expelled from elementary school, Blount said, a group of “colored people” whose names she didn’t know took the girl to Dell, Arkansas. Connie had lived with those nameless strangers until the age of twelve, when “a car came and got her.”
“Do you know whose car this was?” Blowitz asked.
“They said it was Wakefield’s car,” she replied.
Blount professed that she wasn’t sure of Constance Wakefield’s race. “I don’t take blood tests,” she said. She was certain, though, that she hadn’t given birth to the woman sitting a few feet away from her in room 643. Blowitz finished up with a simple question: “Are you her mother?” Blount said no.
She quickly wilted under cross-examination. After a few queries from Jack Barry about names and dates, Blount started to look so peaked that Kogut halted her testimony and sent her home to rest.
Rather than adjourn the hearing for the day, the judge allowed Hubert Mooney to return to the stand to offer additional insight into his sickly sister’s state of mind. Mooney said he’d been surprised, after all his sister’s protestations, to lay eyes on her in Illinois. He then went into more detail about their phone conversation on November 9, expounding on the arguments he’d used to persuade his sister to tell the truth.
I said, “[Martha] is up here and she is claiming she was a daughter of some guy that had died, and she was born in thirty-four up here, and her people were colored people, which there never was any colored blood in the county at that time, and you know it.”
Mooney said he’d told Blount that he couldn’t in good conscience allow such falsehoods to stand: “Now the thing that I am up here for is to defend the rights of my people and not to criticize them and run them down into the ground any lower than this so-called—I don’t know what her name is—has run them already.”
That line of reasoning hadn’t moved Hubert Mooney’s older sister. He testified that Lydia Blount had told him she’d never reveal her daughter’s lineage. “I don’t want people to know she is no relation to me or ever has been,” Mooney claimed she’d said, “because she was down here in Arkansas last year with a nigger kid and almost got me in trouble with it.”
* * *
When Blount resumed her testimony the next morning, she seemed to be suffering from catastrophic memory loss. She said “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” 135 times, professing not to recall when she’d gotten married, when her children had been born, and how old she was when the three-month-old Connie Wakefield had been abandoned at her house.
Faced with this sudden burst of amnesia, Cook County assistant state’s attorney Gerald Mannix tried a different strategy.
“Constance, would you come up here, Martha?” he asked.
Blowitz, annoyed by the request, told Mannix to use the petitioner’s real name.
“Constance Beverly Singleton Harbaugh Wakefield Smith Reed White,” the assistant state’s attorney said. “Steinberg Singleton,” Bishton interjected, alerting his co-counsel to a surname he’d missed.
“Would you come up here, please, Miss Wakefield?” Mannix said, adopting a softer approach. The many-named woman moved closer to the witness stand.
“Is this your daughter?” Mannix asked Lydia Blount.
“No,” Blount said.
“What is her name?”
Blount didn’t answer.
“What is her name?” Mannix asked again.
Again, Blount didn’t answer.
“What is her name?”
Still nothing.
“What is her name?”
Constance Wakefield’s attorney got angrier and angrier with each repetition. “Judge, why do we have to have a demonstration as asinine as this?” Blowitz asked, imploring Kogut to put an end to the interrogation. “How stupid can a man be?”
Lydia Blount was almost close enough to reach out and touch her daughter, but she didn’t make a move or say a word. She just sat and waited for the yelling to stop, and for somebody to tell her she was free to go.
* * *
By the afternoon of November 13, it was clear to everyone in the Cook County building that Constance Beverly Steinberg Singleton Harbaugh Wakefield Smith Reed White was no policy heir. Even so, Rose Kennedy’s attorneys had gone to the trouble of tracking down one more surprise witness, a woman they believed would bring this interminable probate case to a close.
The previous evening, Norris Bishton and Hubert Mooney had slipped away to catch a flight to Tennessee. The Chicago lawyer and the Amarillo refrigeration engineer had rented a car at the Memphis airport and driven sixty miles on rutted mud roads to a small cabin on a farm not far from the banks of the Mississippi River. Mooney had exited the car first, shouting out a warning to ensure that they wouldn’t be met by a shotgun blast. They’d been greeted by a rail-thin woman with long gray hair and toothless gums. Once they’d made it inside, Mooney had sat beside a kerosene lamp and gotten to work convincing his mother to go with them to Chicago. Not long after they’d arrived in rural Lauderdale County, the visitors headed back to the airport, this time with another passenger in tow. Sarah Jane Mooney had been born in the early 1880s. This would be her first time on an airplane.
Less than twenty-four hours later, the octogenarian situated herself in the seat that had just been vacated by her daughter Lydia. She was wearing a long-sleeved black dress that had been cinched at the waist, and she had a shawl draped around her shoulders to ward off the autumn chill. She spoke swiftly and decisively, showing off an easy command of her family’s history. She told the court that she didn’t see her granddaughter Martha for about a year in the late 1920s—a “smart little while”—because the child and her mother had moved across the river to Arkansas.
Sarah Jane Mooney was a midwife, and she’d assisted with the births of a great many of her grandchildren. When asked by Jack Barry if she’d been present when Martha was born, she said, “Yes, yes, I guess I was.” Barry then passed her a photograph taken in 1942. It showed a beautiful young woman with olive skin, brown eyes, and long dark hair. The woman, a teenager, had her left arm wrapped around the shoulders of an older-looking man with a busted nose and a cauliflower ear. Sarah Jane Mooney was nearly blind, but she knew who was in that picture. “That’s my oldest son,” she said, identifying the man as George Mooney. “And that’s Martha.”
Barry asked the petitioner to come forward again, this time directing her to remove her sunglasses. It had been twenty-two years since she’d posed for that photo, tilting her head slightly to the left to rest it against her uncle’s right temple. Sarah Jane Mooney looked at her granddaughter—the baby girl she’d delivered and cradled in her arms. “Yes, I believe that’s Martha,” she said. Barry then asked Constance Wakefield if she recognized her grandmother. “I saw that lady in 1939 or 1940,” she said. “That’s the only time I can remember seeing her.”
At the end of the day’s proceedings, Blowitz asked to take the weekend to find rebuttal witnesses. When the heirship hearing recommenced on the morning of November 16, he announced his plans t
o bring in his own octogenarian. Constance’s alleged maternal grandfather, Joe Jarvis, had gotten held up in Florida, though, “because of his age, and because of a lack of time.” Given the circumstances, Blowitz asked for another delay to allow this Mr. Jarvis to make his way to Illinois. In the meantime, Blowitz said, his client had requested that he withdraw as her attorney. Blowitz then introduced a lawyer named J. H. Silver, who asked for thirty days to familiarize himself with the case.
Silver likely would’ve had better luck asking for permission to punch Judge Anthony Kogut in the face. No one was going to convince Kogut to deal with this madness for five more minutes, much less another month. He denied the motion for a continuance, then zoomed forward to his ruling on Cook County’s effort “to strike and dismiss the petition of Constance Wakefield as being unfounded in fact.”
“The petition of Constance Steinberg Wakefield to amend the heirship is denied,” Kogut said. “The court further finds she has acted with a willful conscience in a deliberate attempt to defraud the estate of Lawrence Wakefield.” As a consequence of that “direct contempt,” the judge declared, “I commit her to the county jail for six months.”
Constance Wakefield had spent the better part of a year trying to corral a monumental sum of money. Now, those riches would land in the lap of the woman she’d accused of poisoning her with strychnine. Rose Kennedy got a payout of $431,385, with $270,000 kept in reserve for other claimants. The final $60,000 of the Wakefield fortune—cash that had been found intermingled with policy slips—went to Cook County as contraband. Norris Bishton, too, got the windfall he’d been hoping for, earning a $25,000 bonus from his firm. Constance, meanwhile, was ordered to pay roughly $23,000 in court costs and attorneys’ fees—the expenses incurred by all the lawyers tasked with proving she wasn’t who she said she was. She also had to post a $5,000 appeal bond to buy herself a reprieve from jail.
It took more than two years for a three-judge panel to rule on that appeal. On November 29, 1966, the Appellate Court of Illinois decreed unanimously that Kogut had erred in refusing to grant Constance Wakefield’s request for a change of venue—a maneuver the judge had seen as nothing but a stalling tactic. On account of that mistake, the appeals court said, everything that had taken place subsequently would be considered null and void. The petitioner wouldn’t have to go to jail, and she wouldn’t have to pay those court costs and lawyers’ fees. In the eyes of the State of Illinois, that humiliating heirship hearing had never taken place.
