by Josh Levin
An honest person never would’ve tried to profit from the explosion at Webster School. A typical con artist would’ve quit trying to do so after her lawsuit got tossed out of court. But Taylor wasn’t the type to let things go. In this case, she was rewarded for her doggedness. Owing to her supposed mental and cardiac impairments, Sandra K. Harbaugh was declared a “helpless child” by the VA. Although she was no longer a minor, she was entitled to government support. Sandra’s mother, Constance Howard, was named her custodian and granted a stipend to subsidize her care—an outlay that would reach $125 per month. After trying for ten years, she’d finally made money off the Peoria school explosion. She couldn’t have done it without her daughter’s help.
While Sandra appeared at least somewhat reluctant to lie to the VA’s doctors in 1969, she didn’t tell the agency she had a child of her own. Sandra and her mother also failed to inform the VA when, in 1970, she had a second baby, as well as when she married Roosevelt Brownlee in the summer of 1972. Later that year, a VA field examiner noted that the twenty-one-year-old Sandra was “partially deaf…has a serious congenital heart ailment which renders her helpless at times, is severely disturbed emotionally, takes medication, and is rather dull and unresponsive.” The examiner reported that “the minor appeared to be receiving good care”; the checks would keep on coming. The spigot wouldn’t get turned off until 1975, when the FBI would learn that Sandra had been married for three years. The VA would send Taylor a letter demanding $3,520—everything she’d received since Sandra had ceased to be her dependent. The federal government would never get its money back.
In the 1970s, Sandra would stand up for her mother both in private and in public. Charles Bailey would tell the Michigan State Police in 1972 that Sandra had threatened him, saying her male relatives would make him pay for revealing her mother’s welfare fraud schemes. In 1976, news crews captured Sandra walking alongside Taylor after a court appearance. The two women looked like confidantes, laughing together as Sandra joked that the welfare queen should smile for the cameras. And upon Taylor’s sentencing in Cook County Criminal Court in May 1977, Sandra told the press she’d help raise the money to bail her mother out of jail.
Taylor had used the alias Sandra Brownlee—her daughter’s name—to steal public aid money. A month after Judge Mark Jones gave the older woman three to seven years, Sandra herself would plead guilty to receiving illegal welfare payments from the State of Illinois. The Pittsburgh Courier, in reporting Sandra’s sentence of three years’ probation, noted that “the acorn seldom falls far from the oak.”
In December 1974, the FBI interrogated Sandra to suss out whether she was in cahoots with her mother. Specifically, the bureau wanted to know how a self-sufficient adult had been classified as a helpless child. Investigators reported that Taylor’s daughter said she’d done nothing wrong—that she hadn’t schemed to trick the VA, and that she’d “never learned the basis of [her mother’s] claim.” Sandra admitted she didn’t have any heart problems and hadn’t contracted any illnesses that had left her disabled. She did say, however, that she’d lost the hearing in her right ear in Chicago’s Our Lady of the Angels School fire, the 1958 disaster that killed ninety-two elementary schoolers. This wasn’t anything close to the truth. Sandra hadn’t gone to Our Lady of the Angels. Even if she had, the FBI quickly learned that there had been no reports of children suffering deafness as a result of the fire.
Ron Cooper didn’t think Sandra was being totally honest. Nonetheless, the FBI agent suspected that she was an innocent victim—or at least that she was a lot more innocent than her mother was. Cooper believed Taylor had orchestrated Sandra’s agitation during that 1969 VA medical exam and had fed false information to the agency’s doctors. Jim Piper, the Cook County state’s attorney who’d prosecute both Taylor and her daughter, knew that Sandra didn’t have a mental age of ten. He told the VA she was “very ‘sharp’ and appears to have greater than average intelligence” and that she had “an extraordinary memory for past events (dating back as far as 20 years).” He also reported that she had “no noticeable hearing disability.”
In her interview with the bureau, Sandra never quite said her mother was a criminal, and she didn’t give the FBI any new leads. At the same time, she depicted Taylor as a cruel, unfeeling parent, telling the FBI that her mother had purposely misled her about her origins. As a child, Sandra had believed that Paul Harbaugh was her real father. Later, she said, Taylor had showed her baby pictures to prove it was a different man. Sandra told the FBI her mother was black, and claimed that she wasn’t sure how Taylor came to have kids of different races. She explained that Taylor had several children of unknown provenance, among them a white boy known as Duke and a black boy named Hosa.
Sandra, again, wasn’t telling the whole truth. Those two boys weren’t Taylor’s biological kids, and Sandra knew where they’d come from. Duke and Hosa were her own children—the sons she’d given birth to in 1968 and 1970, respectively.
In this case, Sandra may have misled the FBI to protect her mother. Just as Taylor used Sandra as a moneymaking tool, she also deployed her grandchildren for financial gain. In Michigan in 1971, she won the sympathy of a welfare eligibility examiner by saying that Hosa—who she called her “little black baby”—had been rejected by his father, who’d declared him “a disgrace to the white race.” She also listed both Duke and Hosa as her children on the fraudulent applications she submitted to the Illinois Department of Public Aid.
Taylor didn’t just claim those two children as her own on government forms—she fed the same story to at least two of her husbands. First, she tried to convince Willie Walker that Duke and Hosa were her kids, and that he was the boys’ biological father; they were the two children, one white and one black, that Walker told the FBI had shown up out of the blue. Later, she told Lamar Jones that Duke and Hosa belonged to her, and that Sandra—whom she called Constance—was her younger sister.
Jones didn’t buy that Duke and Hosa were his wife’s kids. It did appear, though, that Taylor was responsible for the boys’ care, and that as a result they got hardly any care at all. When Taylor went on the lam in Arizona in the fall of 1974, she brought the five-year-old Duke and four-year-old Hosa with her. After the Tucson police arrested her, Sandra came to Tucson to pick up the children and found that they didn’t have any shoes. The following year, the two boys came with Taylor when she moved into Patricia Parks’s house on the South Side of Chicago. Parks’s children got the sense that Duke and Hosa had learned to survive without adult supervision. When there wasn’t any food available, the two boys told Parks’s young sons they could eat dog biscuits.
The Parks children were left motherless in June 1975. Taylor’s grandchildren were shuttled to the next place. When Jack Sherwin and a crew of his fellow officers arrested Taylor for burglary in 1976, they were appalled by what they saw in her apartment. The police described the seven-year-old Duke and five-year-old Hosa as “dirty, hungry-looking, and ‘depressed.’” A police investigator told the Tribune that “there were no bedding facilities. And the boys hadn’t been bathed in a long time. Their clothes were rags falling from their bodies.” Taylor was charged with two counts of child neglect, and Duke and Hosa were taken away by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
Sandra may have relied on her mother for child care because she was in dire economic circumstances. It’s also possible that she was too unsettled to parent two young kids, or that Taylor simply persuaded her daughter to do her bidding, just as she’d persuaded so many others to abandon their best judgment. Regardless of the rationale, this arrangement perpetuated a cycle of neglect and abandonment. The lack of food, the tattered clothes, the arrival of child services—all of this was familiar. Sandra and Johnnie and Paul and Duke and Hosa were all damaged by Linda Taylor. No matter the circumstances, the results were always the same. The children suffered the consequences. She did not.
Chapter 16
Clever, Conniving, C
allous
New inmates came to Dwight Correctional Center in handcuffs, their possessions stuffed inside a pillowcase. The warden of Illinois’s only women’s prison would watch them line up at the iron gate that separated the facility from the outside world, their eyes focused on Dwight’s solid stone walls. When the entrance buzzer blared and the gate swung open, they’d march into the warden’s office and tell their stories. It didn’t matter what they’d done or what kind of life they’d lived. In those first moments, every woman looked at least a little scared.
When she heard that buzzer on February 16, 1978, Linda Taylor was fifty-two years old. In a photograph snapped two months later, prisoner A-87028 looked more defeated than frightened. An intake form listed her age as thirty-nine and her race as black. Taylor had a “short-stocky” build, brown eyes, and “black/dyed blonde” hair. Her occupation was “minister,” and her daughter Sandra was marked down as a correspondent.
Taylor had been sent to Dwight for three to seven years after getting convicted of welfare fraud and perjury; shortly after she arrived, she’d plead guilty to stealing clothes and appliances from her former housemate, a crime that carried a five-and-a-half-year concurrent term. In April 1978, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board—the group that would eventually decide whether to grant Taylor parole—received an official statement of facts from a Cook County state’s attorney.* Taylor was “a nationally known welfare cheat” and “a career criminal,” the prosecutor said. He advised that she be locked up for the full seven years, “the maximum period allowable by law.”
Despite arrests dating back to the 1940s, Taylor had never served a long stint in prison. At Dwight, she wouldn’t be required to wear a uniform—in that prison photograph, she had on a collared shirt with a paisley print—and she wouldn’t spend her nights behind bars. The state penitentiary, located roughly halfway between Chicago and Peoria on a property laden with oaks and spruces, looked like a country club or a college campus. Dwight, like the Illinois Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s School, which had housed Taylor’s son Paul in the 1960s, boarded its occupants in cottages, although one journalist argued that calling the brick-and-stone structures “cottages is like calling Aristotle Onassis’ yacht a dinghy.” The mock-medieval buildings, most of which had been built in the 1920s, looked fancy on the outside, with slate roofs and brass front doors. On the inside, the dormitories were outfitted with shared kitchens and common areas, while the prisoners’ rooms were individually decorated and furnished.
As far as Dwight’s residents were concerned, the state-run institution wasn’t so idyllic. The cottages had balky plumbing and inadequate heat, and up to five women got crammed into each small bedroom. For a time, the guards banned their charges from touching each other, and women suspected of lesbianism were isolated in a high-security unit. “Tell all the people out there that this isn’t fun; it’s not exciting or interesting,” a prisoner told the Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1979. Another said, “All this place does is teach you how to really hate.”
* * *
Taylor was an outlier at Dwight. More than half of the prison’s three-hundred-plus convicts had been sent away for violent offenses. Among them was Patricia Columbo, who’d helped plan and carry out the murders of her parents and thirteen-year-old brother, the latter of whom was stabbed ninety-seven times. In August 1977, Taylor’s former attorney R. Eugene Pincham, who by then had ascended to a circuit court judgeship, gave Columbo a two-to-three-hundred-year term; he’d later say he would’ve sent the twenty-one-year-old to the electric chair if that option had been available to him. While the Tribune had noted Taylor’s sentencing on page two, Columbo—a white woman whom one of the paper’s columnists characterized as a “suburban sylph” with “Frederick’s of Hollywood hair”—got front-page billing, with news of her multicentury hitch superseding Ernie Banks’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Columbo continued to draw attention after she got shipped off to Dwight. In September 1979, the young killer would face accusations that she’d recruited other felons to have sex with correctional officers.** Taylor, by contrast, essentially disappeared once she passed through the prison’s front gate. In March 1979, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a short item reporting that she had a “minor violation on her prison record—she allegedly used state-owned materials to make cushions and sell them.” No other major outlet—not the Tribune, and not the national wire services—would write a single story about what had become of Chicago’s original welfare queen.
Inside Dwight Correctional Center, Taylor was deemed a minimal security risk, a designation that enabled her to roam the grounds without being escorted by a guard. The prison’s doctors also declared her unfit for heavy manual labor, prescribing her a medication, Nitrospan, that was typically used to manage chest pain. On account of her condition, Taylor was detailed to clean the inmates’ cottages, a job her fellow residents—many of whom earned $5 a day as seamstresses in an on-site factory that produced drapes, pajamas, and dresses—considered a plum assignment.
Taylor’s file with the parole board contained just one disciplinary report, a document detailing an incident that took place nineteen months into her sentence. On the afternoon of September 9, 1979, a guard conducting a “routine shakedown following a visit” found a plastic package inside Taylor’s bra. That pouch contained twenty pink pills—a more potent heart medication that wasn’t stocked by the prison pharmacy. Taylor said she hadn’t known the contraband was in her bra and suggested that she may have been “set up by correctional guards.” She also requested that a man named Willtrue Loyd be allowed to speak at her disciplinary hearing, falsely claiming that he was her father.
Prison officials didn’t speculate about what Taylor intended to do with those pink pills. The most likely explanation is that she wanted a stronger, quicker-acting drug to manage her chest pain, which by all indications was a real affliction. The Prisoner Review Board, though, didn’t care why she’d smuggled in the pills, nor did it agree to listen to Loyd’s testimony. The board had no doubt that Taylor had broken prison rules, and that she was refusing to admit as much in the face of overwhelming evidence. In November 1979, state authorities would revoke a handful of Taylor’s good conduct credits, delaying her eventual release by fifteen days.
The following month, as Taylor neared her first possible parole date, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office reiterated its view that she should remain in prison for seven years. Taylor, the chief of the felony trial division wrote, “will no doubt resume criminal activity immediately upon her release.” The state’s attorneys, who in the aftermath of Taylor’s successful prosecution had launched a dedicated unit to go after welfare cheaters, also made the perverse argument that she should be punished for giving public aid recipients a bad reputation.
This “Welfare Queen,” as appropriately titled by the media has preyed on society and government since 1944. Her actions and others of her ilk, deprive decent citizens who may need welfare as a temporary measure, of the sympathy of taxpayers who contribute to that support, and who have become disenchanted with the ever increasing tax burden required to meet those needs. Her actions have tainted the legitimate recipients to the point where taxpayers believe all recipients are out to “get all they can.”
The parole board didn’t listen to the prosecutors’ advice. An early release checklist included in her prison paperwork indicated that Taylor had no serious juvenile record and no history of crimes related to alcohol or drug abuse. Her offense also didn’t involve a weapon or threats of force. Taylor, whom the state could’ve kept under lock and key until 1985, was released from prison on April 11, 1980—two years, one month, and twenty-six days after she’d entered Dwight Correctional Center.
A year later, Taylor’s parole officer reported that she was married and living on the North Side of Chicago. Although Taylor had planned to “be self-employed with sewing and crocheting for customers,” a “variety of illnesses and ailments” had left her u
nemployed. Consequently, she was receiving $186 per month in public aid.
As of April 1981, the parole officer wrote, Linda Taylor was older and wiser. “At age 50,” the parole officer said of the fifty-five-year-old Taylor, she “displays no inclinations to return to the criminal acts that caused her incarceration.” A few weeks later, on May 26, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board granted Taylor her final discharge, expressing its confidence that “she will remain at liberty without violating the law.” Taylor’s release, the board said, “is compatible with the welfare of society.”
* * *
The Chicago Tribune may have lost interest in Linda Taylor when she went to prison, but the newspaper didn’t forget about the prosecutor who sent the welfare queen away. On February 16, 1978, the same day Taylor entered Dwight Correctional Center, the Tribune reported that Jim Piper’s welfare fraud unit had won seventy-seven indictments since its inception the previous fall. Three days later, the assistant state’s attorney was quoted in a story chiding the Cook County courts for being “soft” on welfare cheaters. “These people are crying in front of the judge but laughing all the way to the bank,” he said.
Piper’s cause was arguably a righteous one: He was going after men and women who stole taxpayer money, with a specific focus on civil servants who collected both government salaries and government benefits. Among the people his division indicted in April 1979, the Tribune wrote, were “11 employed by the State of Illinois, 8 by the Chicago Board of Education, 7 by Cook County Hospital, and one by the City of Chicago.”
While Piper was happy to push this anti-corruption storyline, the nation’s best-known welfare fraud prosecutor also recognized the importance of going after big, media-luring targets—the kind that would keep the public excited about locking up chiselers. Arlene Otis, the thirty-year-old black criminal justice graduate student who’d purportedly stolen in excess of $100,000 in public aid money, was just the type to stoke those feelings of righteous indignation.
