by Josh Levin
I writin you a letter askin for help with my minor children for Paul and his wife refused to help me and would not let him see the children and they didn’t know thir father had past away until I got a letter from the court telling me
The Veterans Administration approved Connie Harbaugh’s claim, mailing her $42.30 per month—$14.10 for each of her three eligible children. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t convince the VA to send money for her son Clifford, who was no longer a minor. She would, though, figure out a way to misappropriate federal funds. Per an FBI memo, Paul Harbaugh’s second wife, Jean, reported that “shortly after her husband’s death, probably in early 1959, Connie Harbaugh sent a change of address to the Veterans Administration…and had the VA widow’s benefit check, which was rightfully hers, Jean Harbaugh’s, sent to Connie Harbaugh.”
Connie was a master of the change-of-address form. The VA sent her first check to 2020 North Cleveland Avenue in Chicago. A little more than a month later, she’d ask for her money to be delivered to Route 1, Manila, Arkansas. Seven months after that, she’d say she’d moved to 306 Kane Street in Peoria. Overall, the Veterans Administration would process twenty-five address changes on her account, with those adjustments made at the behest of Connie M. Harbaugh, Connie M. Wakefield, Connie Womack, Constance Howard, and Dr. Constance Howard. The last of these modifications, on March 24, 1975, would come after she’d been indicted in Chicago for stealing public aid checks. That final change of address would redirect her monthly VA stipend to 8046 South Phillips Avenue—the Parks family’s house on the South Side of Chicago. Patricia Parks would die of a barbiturate overdose less than three months after that request went through.
Back in 1961, the VA slashed her monthly check because of reports she “had deserted [her son Paul] and moved to Chandler, Arizona.” Indeed, the letter she’d written about paying someone to “keep” Paul had been scribbled on a blank lab report from the Arizona air force hospital she’d visited with Sandra. In that missive, she’d pointed out that she’d been getting just $14.10 each month from the government for her son’s needs, while she’d just bought Paul “$60 of clothes.” She’d decided not to ship him that clothing, she wrote, “for my attorney said he would be home in about 2 more weeks.”
It wouldn’t have shocked Paul to learn that his mother had said one thing and done another—after all, she’d told her son she’d come get him when she returned from Arizona and she hadn’t fulfilled that promise. Upon reviewing the available evidence, the Illinois Department of Public Welfare decided it would be in Paul’s best interest to get away from Connie Harbaugh. By April 1961, he’d been placed under the custodianship of the superintendent of a state-run school for dependent children.
Four years went by before Connie asked the VA about her son again. In 1965, a year after Lawrence Wakefield’s death, she wrote that she’d been praying “to the Good Lord” that the agency might pass along Paul’s address. The last she’d heard, he’d been living in Peoria. She said that Paul had been “taken when I [had] to take Sandra Kay Harbaugh to a hospital and now my father is dead.” She signed her name Connie Wakefield.
The VA responded brusquely: “We are sorry, but we are not able to furnish [Paul’s address] under existing regulations.” The government had seized her son, and it wasn’t going to give him back.
* * *
The Illinois Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s School opened its doors in 1869 as a home for Civil War orphans. Nearly a century later, the fifty-five-acre campus in the city of Normal housed close to three hundred children of military veterans. That population, according to a 1958 article in Central Illinois’s Pantagraph newspaper, consisted mainly of teenagers who were “emotionally disturbed as a result of indifferent or difficult home backgrounds.”
Most of the boys and girls at ISSCS had been neglected and mistreated. Some of their parents were dead, and others were abusers or just not around. For students like Paul, the school was an oasis. They bunked in two-story brick cottages with houseparents they called “Mom” and “Pop,” swam in a thirty-by-seventy-foot pool, and watched a movie in the auditorium every Friday night. For breakfast, they’d get scrambled eggs, and sometimes pancakes and waffles. Dinner would be roast beef, chicken, or ham.
Paul would live at ISSCS for five years. He felt secure at the state-run school, which imposed some structure on his chaotic life and allowed him to experience success. He spent much of his time in the machine shop, mastering the lathe and die cutter. He was also a fantastic athlete—at an invitational track meet in 1964, he finished first in the 220-yard dash, the 440-yard relay, the broad jump, and the shot put.
But Connie Harbaugh’s son was never totally comfortable in Normal. Paul was one of just a handful of dark-skinned students at ISSCS. Although sports helped many of the school’s black children bond with their white classmates, he always hung back from the crowd. Paul didn’t know how or why he’d landed at a school for misfits, and he felt just as estranged from his surroundings as he had in the Deep South. He hadn’t fit in down in Arkansas. Now he felt like an outcast among outcasts.
While other students’ relatives would come to campus during holidays, he never had a single visitor. He also didn’t have the slightest grip on his own identity. Paul’s mother hadn’t told him much about his father, and what she had said hadn’t made any sense. Three years into his stint at the Illinois Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s School, when Paul was fifteen years old, a state social worker tried to get him the answers he needed.
In September 1964, a supervisor with the state’s Department of Children and Family Services mailed a letter to the Veterans Administration. “Gentlemen,” it began, “we should appreciate learning the race and nationality of the above-mentioned man.” That man was Paul’s purported biological father, the navy veteran who’d died without his son getting the chance to know him. The letter continued,
Paul’s natural mother seemed to prefer to keep Paul’s [siblings] with her but wished to “farm” Paul out.…
Paul is very sensitive about his coloring and although his birth certificate lists both his parents as being in the white race, Paul has rather definite Negroid features and coloring. Our agency has received reports also that his mother was a native of Hawaii and his father a native of Puerto Rico. Paul seems more concerned with obtaining information regarding his father than his mother, as he remembers very little about him.
The note concluded, “We would be grateful for any information or pictures you might be able to give to us to enable us to work with Paul.”
The bureaucrats at the VA sent back a three-line response, saying only that the man who was supposed to be Paul’s father, “as indicated by our records, was of the Caucasian race.” The agency didn’t send along any photographs, or any leads on possible blood relatives.
* * *
Nobody had paid attention when Connie Harbaugh filed her $1 million lawsuit against the Peoria Board of Education in 1960. She became a public figure four years later when she transformed into Constance Wakefield. It wasn’t just the Chicago newspapers that took notice of the flamboyant, fast-talking woman with the manufactured wills. The FBI also started scrutinizing the so-called policy heir. She got the bureau’s attention by reporting a kidnapping.
On April 17, 1964, the Chicago Sun-Times published a piece saying that “Constance Wakefield Stineberg” had told the authorities her eleven-year-old son, Johnnie, had been taken on his way to the grocery store. Johnnie’s captor, she’d said, had phoned her to demand a $20,000 ransom for the boy’s safe return. She’d insinuated that the crime was connected to her bid for Lawrence Wakefield’s estate, explaining that she’d taken to carrying a “pistol because of threatening phone calls demanding that she abandon attempts to get [Wakefield’s] money.”
This story was a sham. A pair of FBI agents had found Johnnie wandering the streets not far from the family’s home. The teenager—contrary to his mother’s report, Johnnie was fourteen rather than el
even—told them he hadn’t been kidnapped by anyone. He’d run away from home after getting into a fight with his sister, Sandra.
Although the Sun-Times article didn’t indicate as much, the bureau had pushed for Constance Wakefield to be charged with making a false report. The U.S. attorney’s office hadn’t signed on to that plan. A document produced by the FBI’s General Investigative Division said a government lawyer had “declined prosecution as there was no way of proving that Wakefield did not receive the ransom call.”
Constance Wakefield talked about kidnappings all the time. The day after the Sun-Times ran its piece, the Chicago Defender published her assertion that she’d been “kidnapped by two white men on her 13th birthday and held for $40,000.” She said the incident had ended happily, at least for her: She’d been released after four days “and the kidnappers were murdered.”
She also described additional plots centering on her children. On August 19, 1965—after her heirship claim had fallen apart and she’d moved her family to the South Side—she told the FBI that her daughter had disappeared. The concerned mother said she’d received a threatening phone call: If she ever wanted to see Sandra again, the kidnapper had allegedly growled, she needed to drive south on Route 66 and pull off at the “first unoccupied service station, then turn right into a grove.”
The FBI didn’t say whether Constance Wakefield had followed the abductor’s directive. A separate report issued a month later, however, revealed that Sandra had returned home; her mother said the girl had been “staying with relatives” the whole time.
By 1965, a Cook County judge had decided Constance Wakefield wasn’t really Constance Wakefield, and the FBI had concluded she wasn’t a reliable source. “In view of background of Wakefield,” an agent had written about her latest fantastical yarn, “no active investigation being conducted by Chicago office in this matter.”
And yet on February 23, 1966, the bureau dutifully generated a communiqué regarding her latest missing person report.
She reported subject, her daughter, missing to Chicago PD and claims has not received satisfactory action. States at time of subject’s disappearance, heard subject scream; subsequently bloody clothes were found but Chicago PD refused to process.
Wakefield claims she received “ransom notes” which were turned over to PD, and received third note instant, which was found lodged in Wakefield’s door, and written on paper bag in crayon, “If you want to see Sandra alive again, bring the price of the house in cash one seven one six Halsted……bring no flatfeet….”
The teletyped dispatch went on to say that the complainant had skipped a planned meeting with the Chicago police, that she had “not turned over any ransom notes,” and that she “complained about Chicago PD and FBI and claimed to have sent telegram to President Johnson.”
While Lyndon Johnson didn’t acknowledge receiving this message, news of Sandra’s latest kidnapping did make it to the Defender. “Sandra Stienberg…has been missing from home for 18 days,” the paper reported on March 3. “Her mother, Mrs. Constance Wakefield, says she believes her daughter has been abducted.” The photo that ran above that squib showed the fourteen-year-old Sandra with her eyes closed. She had sideswept bangs, and she was wearing a patterned sleeveless top. In that moment, she looked unguarded and happy.
Sandra didn’t know what it felt like to settle in a particular place with a particular group of people. She’d spent her whole life getting uprooted from one spot to another, and she’d seen her siblings get dropped off and picked up again and again. Just after her ninth birthday, she’d been made a pawn in a bogus lawsuit, and been dragged to various military hospitals to get poked and prodded. Given what her mother had already put her through, Sandra would’ve had no reason to believe her teenage years would be any less erratic. That may have been why, in February 1966, she set out on her own.
There had been no scream, no bloody clothes, and no crayoned ransom note. Sandra had run off to a ritzy suburb on Chicago’s North Shore and found work as a domestic. Her stint away from home wouldn’t last long. She was arrested in Glencoe, Illinois, in April 1966, two months after her mother declared her a missing person. According to the FBI, she was “charged with being a runaway” and was held temporarily in Chicago’s Audy Juvenile Home. Constance Wakefield, in turn, was investigated for contributing to Sandra’s delinquency, although she wouldn’t ultimately be prosecuted for that misdeed.
Sandra’s mother likely harangued the FBI and the Chicago police about her daughter for the same reason she’d written the VA about Paul: She wanted someone to tell her where her child had gone. It was in keeping with her proclivities for melodrama and fabulism that her cries for help sounded like plot points from hard-boiled detective stories. But not all her kidnapping tales were entirely fictional.
* * *
Johnnie Harbaugh had a job to do on the morning of Monday, February 6, 1967. Before dawn, he bundled up and trudged through the drift-covered streets to an L station on the city’s West Side. A week and a half earlier, the biggest blizzard in the history of Chicago had dumped twenty-three inches of snow on the city in twenty-nine hours, leaving twenty-six people dead and fifty thousand cars marooned in the streets. Railroad firms had shipped some of the estimated seventy-five million tons of frozen precipitation out of state in freight cars bound for Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. But that hadn’t been the end of it. On Sunday, February 5, another massive storm had covered the ground in eight and a half more inches of white powder. This latest blizzard, the Chicago Tribune had reported, “caused snow-fighting crews to moan in despair.” Mayor Daley urged Chicagoans to stay off the roads if possible, and to take mass transit to work.
Johnnie got off the train at 43rd Street station, just a few hundred feet from his mother’s place on the 4300 block of South Calumet Avenue. The seventeen-year-old walked up the building’s back steps, opened a window, and shimmied into her apartment, taking care not to trip the burglar alarm. Once inside, he snatched a baby girl from her crib and reversed course, climbing out the window and going back down the steps. With the wind gusting to twenty miles per hour, he made a beeline back to the L station and got on a northbound train. The whole thing took a couple of minutes. His mother hadn’t even woken up.
A few hours later, the Chicago Police Department got a call from a woman on South Calumet Avenue. The complainant, who said her name was Constance Womack, told the police her infant daughter was missing or kidnapped. She said the girl’s name was Lena.
Local and federal authorities had determined that Constance’s previous kidnapping claims were entirely fabricated. This time, they concluded that she was lying about a real kidnapping. She was not, it turned out, the mother of the girl who’d been taken from her apartment. Also, the child’s name wasn’t Lena. It was Ana Maria.
Ana Maria Garcia was the daughter of a friend of Johnnie’s, Lorraine Termini. When Lorraine had needed someone to watch her child, Johnnie’s mother had agreed to look after the girl for a few weeks. At some point during this babysitting gig, Constance had decided she was going to keep Ana Maria and give her a new name. Lorraine pleaded with Johnnie. If he didn’t help her, she said, she was going to lose her daughter for good.
Johnnie hadn’t gone to school regularly since the fourth grade. Around 1964, the year his mother reported he was being held for $20,000 ransom, he’d started hanging out with Latino gang members on Chicago’s North Side. After Constance Wakefield lost her heirship bid in November of that year, he’d moved with her to an almost entirely black neighborhood. Her apartment on South Calumet Avenue was just north of Bronzeville’s Liberty Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.’s headquarters during his mid-1960s push to desegregate the city’s housing. Johnnie, for his part, had helped integrate the South Side’s Blackstone Rangers gang, getting a tattoo of a panther to cement his affiliation.
The Chicago police had arrested Johnnie for the first time in 1965, bringing him in on suspicion of auto theft. Although he ultimately w
ouldn’t be charged with that offense, the police did take a trio of mug shots. Their photographs showed a skinny fifteen-year-old kid with wavy hair and a baby face, a long-sleeved, zipped-up, Nehru-style jacket hiding the tattoo on his left hand. He was standing ramrod straight, his stiff posture conveying the nervousness of a child who knew he’d gotten into trouble. In June 1967, four months after he snatched Ana Maria, Johnnie would get arrested for burglary; that would later get reduced to “criminal damage to property,” and he’d be sentenced to probation. In this set of booking photos, he’d look the part of a juvenile delinquent, with a shaved head, slumped shoulders, and a dark shirt buttoned up to the collar.
As soon as Constance Womack reported that a young girl had gone missing, the police went looking for her son. When they tracked down Johnnie on the West Side, he told the officers he’d taken the baby, and that he’d returned Ana Maria to her real mother. Despite the teenager’s reputation as a budding criminal, the cops believed he was telling the truth, and they didn’t arrest him for his act of vigilantism. His mother wouldn’t be so lucky.
On February 7, the day after she’d called the police, Constance Womack was charged with endangering the life and health of a child. The arresting officer’s narrative didn’t mention a kidnapped girl. Instead, the children she stood accused of endangering were a pair of boys—a white eight-year-old and a black four-month-old—the police had found alone and neglected in her apartment. She was arrested again two weeks later and charged with contributing to the dependency of a minor, though in this case the report didn’t indicate which minor she’d neglected. During that encounter, the cops found a six-and-a-half-inch kitchen knife in her purse, a discovery that would lead to a weapons charge. On March 6, she was arrested for a third time in a one-month span and charged with the felony kidnapping of a minor under the age of thirteen. The informant, the report said, was Ana Maria’s mother, Lorraine Termini.
