by Josh Levin
Diana Ray had adored her new aunt from the start. The eight-year-old, the daughter of Sherman’s younger brother Edmond, lived with her grandparents in the family home on South Langley Avenue. Diana had stayed with her Aunt Linda and Uncle Sherman the night of John Ray’s drowning, and she was excited when Taylor asked if she wanted to sleep over again after the repast. While everyone was downstairs drinking, Diana went up to her room and dumped some clothes in a Jewel grocery bag. A short time later, she was in Taylor’s car, heading to a big, beautiful white house with a stairwell just inside the front entrance.
The next day, Taylor threw out the clothes Diana had packed and took her to a department store to get a whole new wardrobe. She also bought the elementary schooler a bunch of toys, including a life-size doll. Diana found that doll extraordinarily creepy, but otherwise she was having a fantastic time with her aunt. Taylor cooked her breakfast, gave her hugs, and said she loved her. Diana was thrilled to find she had her own bedroom, and she didn’t mind that Taylor told her she wasn’t allowed to go outside by herself. She played with a little boy who was close to her age; he, too, had his own bedroom, and he got just as many toys as she did. Taylor told Diana he was her Uncle Sherman’s son.
Diana was close to her uncle. Before he’d married Taylor, Sherman Ray had been his niece’s go-to babysitter—he’d make her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they’d watch All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital together. But Diana saw him just a handful of times during this post-funeral excursion; mostly, Taylor was the only adult around.
The little girl never quite grasped that she’d become a missing person. Diana’s grandfather had gone to where he thought Sherman and Linda were living and found the place empty. He didn’t know anything about the big white house with the stairwell by the front entrance. Diana, in the meantime, had lost track of time. After more than three days, and maybe as much as a week, her grandfather came to the big white house late at night. Diana woke up when she heard Raymond Ray shouting at her to come downstairs. He wasn’t alone. After Diana roused herself and walked to the ground floor, a police officer draped his jacket over her pajamas. Her grandfather then carried her to a waiting car, as she wasn’t wearing any shoes.
Diana would later find out that it had been her Uncle Sherman who’d told her family and the police where Taylor had taken her. The eight-year-old had a hard time believing she’d been kidnapped, and she didn’t understand when her grandparents called Aunt Linda the devil and a witch. Diana thought she had a special bond with her aunt. Her grandfather told her she’d been conned, that Aunt Linda had thought she could pry Diana away because the girl’s parents weren’t in the picture. He also said the boy in the big white house wasn’t really her Uncle Sherman’s child. Diana would never see that boy again, and she’d eventually forget his name.
Raymond Ray was horrified that his son had stood by as his wife abducted Diana. He did his best to ensure Taylor could never get close to his granddaughter again, asking his neighbors to be on guard for another abduction. If Aunt Linda called their house, Raymond Ray told Diana, she needed to hang up the phone immediately.
Taylor, already facing prosecution for welfare fraud and burglary, wouldn’t be charged with kidnapping Diana. But on July 8, 1976, three weeks after John Ray’s funeral, she was arrested on a fugitive warrant after failing to give the Cook County circuit clerk her current address. She’d be jailed in November of the following year for missing court dates, and she’d land in Dwight Correctional Center on February 16, 1978. Taylor wrote Diana when she was in prison, but the girl’s grandfather intercepted those missives. Diana did manage to see one of her aunt’s letters, a note in which Taylor said the charges against her were “a bunch of hogwash.” She also told Diana that she missed her, and that she’d come by for a visit as soon as she got free.
Raymond Ray would succeed in keeping his granddaughter away from his daughter-in-law. Raymond’s son, though, stayed with Linda Taylor despite his family’s disapproval. After she was released from Dwight in 1980, Linda and Sherman moved further away from his relatives, taking up residence at a pair of addresses on Chicago’s Northwest Side in 1981 and 1982. While Ray would still swing by South Langley Avenue on occasion, Diana would see her Aunt Linda just once after she got out of prison. That meeting would come in August 1983, at her Uncle Sherman’s funeral in Kankakee County, Illinois.
* * *
For Linda Taylor, Pembroke, Illinois, was just the right distance from home. Like Covert, Michigan, the rural township on the shore of Lake Michigan where she’d run a series of cons in the early 1970s, it was close to Chicago yet seemed very far away—a spot where her infamy didn’t precede her. Just sixty miles south of the city and twenty miles east of the county seat of Kankakee, the sand dune–laden, sparsely populated, mostly ungoverned patch of land hugging the Indiana state line had, according to a 1981 Tribune feature, “no industry, no policeman, no dentist, no drugstore, no public transportation system, no gas pipeline, no central water supply, and no bank.” What the predominantly black enclave did have in abundance was “the flotsam of poverty”: busted-looking shacks, piles of worn-out tires, and “stripped, stolen cars [that]…serve as a monument to past crimes.”
What looked like a trash-strewn hellscape to visiting reporters represented something very different to black Chicagoans. For much of the twentieth century, racially restrictive housing covenants and violent mobs ensured that large swaths of Chicago and its surrounds remained white-only zones. Brochures handed out to aspiring home buyers on the South Side touted Pembroke as a place free of these impediments—a kind of unspoiled, egalitarian paradise. The wide-open spaces of rural Kankakee County, where black families had settled as far back as the 1860s, offered an opportunity to “own part of ‘America’ forever” for the price of a $20 down payment. Given Pembroke’s lack of jobs, infrastructure, and arable land—a geographer once said the area, with its sandy soil, was “preprogrammed for poverty”—that $20 was often an investment in false hope. Still, it could feel liberating to escape the confines of the city, and to set out for a place where what you’d done in the past had little bearing on the present.
Sherman Ray, ever the loyal husband, tagged along with Taylor when she went to Pembroke in late 1982 or early 1983. The couple was joined by an old man, Willtrue Loyd, who Taylor insisted was her father. Ray’s sister Patricia found the arrangement very mysterious. Loyd, who stayed in a trailer not far from where Taylor and Ray lived, acted more like Taylor’s crony than her relative.
Loyd was born in December 1919, making him about six years older than his alleged daughter. A veteran of World War II, he worked as a nurse’s aide at the VA hospital in North Chicago, the infirmary where Ray spent significant time in the 1970s. Whether or not the trio originally linked up at the hospital, they’d become financially intertwined by the time Taylor and Ray got married in January 1976. One week after their wedding, the newlyweds put down a deposit on a rental apartment using a check issued to Loyd. And that December, the three of them went in together on a two-story stucco house on South Harvard Avenue, a property they purchased with no money down with the help of a loan backed by the Veterans Administration. A foreclosure action would be brought against them less than a year later.
Like his fake daughter, Loyd was a well-practiced scammer. In July 1977, he forged two people’s signatures on a check in order to steal $18,000. In January 1978, a month before Taylor went off to Dwight Correctional Center, the Chicago Police Department arrested Loyd for “deceptive practice,” accusing him of filching a $2,414.88 check, erasing the payee’s name, and writing in his own. His booking photo showed a tall, thin black man with a balding pate and a heavily lined face. Loyd was fifty-eight. He looked seventy.
Ray was arrested himself in 1980, nabbed by the Chicago police for shoplifting. In his mug shot, the man who’d looked so dapper at his wife’s welfare fraud trial appeared bloated, unkempt, and possibly inebriated. Ray was hospitalized after
car accidents in both 1981 and 1982 and found to have abnormal EKGs, abnormal liver function, and chronic hepatitis. At the tail end of 1982, the VA brushed off the Vietnam veteran’s fourth attempt to get compensation for what he claimed were service-connected mental health issues; years earlier, the agency had concluded that Ray had a “history of alcoholism” but “no mental condition.”
The two men in Linda Taylor’s life didn’t get along. On the afternoon of August 25, 1983, their conflict escalated. Ray and his best friend, Michael Booker, who was visiting Pembroke Township from Chicago, were drinking together in the vicinity of Loyd’s trailer. Loyd, who by this time was sixty-three years old, would tell a detective with the Kankakee County Sheriff’s Police that he’d been having some difficulty with a seven-foot snake—that he “would go down to pick corn for my animals and the snake would always come in between me and the corn.” Loyd said he was out hunting for that gigantic snake with his 12-gauge shotgun when his “stepdaughter’s husband” came up behind him. “Sherman told me to give him the gun and I said no,” Loyd told the police. He said Ray then grabbed at the gun two separate times. The second time Ray reached for the weapon, Loyd said, “is when the gun went off. And Sherman stood up and then fell to the ground.”
When the police arrived at the scene, Ray was lying faceup in a yard strewn with garbage. Metal pellets from Loyd’s shotgun had perforated his liver, esophagus, and heart. He’d been killed within seconds. Loyd was handcuffed, placed in a squad car, and brought to the Kankakee County Detention Center. He’d be released the next morning without being charged with a crime.
Although the officers who checked out the killing weren’t sure Loyd was telling the whole truth, there were a couple pieces of evidence that backed up his version of events. A postmortem toxicology report, which determined that the victim’s blood alcohol content was an extraordinarily high 0.333 percent—a level “usually associated with stupor and marked incoordination,” the coroner’s physician wrote—gave credence to Loyd’s claim that Ray had been acting irrationally. And although he didn’t make a note of it in his case report, the responding officer would say decades later that Loyd hadn’t been imagining that giant snake—that he’d seen the reptile when he’d been out on patrol.
The foremost reason that Loyd was allowed to go free, in the words of the lead detective, was that “everybody that was there stated they didn’t see anything.” That included Michael Booker, who told the Kankakee police that he “did not see the incident.”
Booker came to Raymond Ray’s front door with a different story. He told his friend’s father that Willtrue Loyd had been the aggressor and that Sherman Ray had been shot in cold blood. He also said Sherman’s wife had been at the scene. The case report, by contrast, hadn’t mentioned her at all.
It’s possible Booker was covering for Sherman Ray, concocting an account that absolved his best friend. But Diana Ray was in the room when Booker explained what he’d seen, and she was certain he wasn’t lying. Booker was genuinely scared: He believed that Loyd and Taylor were responsible for Sherman Ray’s death, and he believed they were capable of killing him, too.
In Diana’s recollection, her grandfather convinced Booker to tell the authorities what he knew. But when the time came for Booker to make his statement, he didn’t show. He also didn’t pay his respects at his best friend’s funeral. The Rays would never see Michael Booker again.
In 1974, Taylor had told her then-husband Lamar Jones that she’d shot and killed the first man she’d married. That claim would never be verified by Jones or anyone else. Taylor’s role in Sherman Ray’s demise would remain similarly mysterious. Without Booker’s eyewitness testimony, no one—not Taylor, and not Willtrue Loyd—would be held accountable for Ray’s killing. Ray’s death, like that of Patricia Parks in 1975, was of no political consequence. Taylor’s husband had been shot in an all-black rural ghetto that was practically off the map. By moving to Pembroke, Taylor had situated herself in a place where nobody knew her names or her modus operandi. It didn’t raise much suspicion, then, that Sherman Ray had purchased two life insurance plans before his untimely death, and that his wife was the sole beneficiary of both policies. The Kankakee police never figured out that Linda Ray was Linda Taylor, and no one in the press would connect the shooting to the Chicago welfare queen. By 1983, Taylor had been out of the newspapers and off the TV news for five years. Her husband’s killing wouldn’t bring her back into the spotlight.
In the days after Sherman Ray’s death, Taylor busied herself with funeral preparations. On August 28, she sent the VA a request for an American flag for burial purposes, signing the form “Rev. Linda Ray.” The interment took place three days later, at a cemetery just outside Pembroke Township. When Raymond Ray lifted the veil covering his son’s face and leaned down to give him a kiss, Taylor screamed, “Don’t touch him!” Ray’s widow was kinder to her niece Diana, asking the fifteen-year-old to sit with her in the front row. It was the first time they’d been in each other’s company since Taylor abducted the then eight-year-old in 1976. It would also be the last time they’d speak to each other.
Taylor’s stay in Pembroke Township would be a short one. A month after her husband’s funeral, she’d buy a house in Florida, signing the mortgage deed “Rev. Linda Ray.” Taylor wouldn’t go to the Sunshine State alone. Her husband’s killer would move there with her.
* * *
In 1982, one of Linda Taylor’s new neighbors, a sixty-three-year-old army veteran and tomato seller, told a reporter he was “friendly to strangers unless they might be bureaucrats, welfare cheats, ‘fancy-britches lawyers’ or judges who grant convicted killers stays of execution.” The residents of Bonifay, Florida, a poor, agrarian, deeply conservative, and overwhelmingly white Panhandle city of twenty-five hundred, didn’t know that the world’s most famous welfare cheat now lived among them. In Florida, Taylor mostly stole from individuals rather than government agencies. She lied, scammed, and manipulated to get what she wanted, and she never stopped wanting more.
Taylor told the sellers of the house she bought in Bonifay that she “was coming into money.” That money never came, and the Reverend Linda Ray got evicted. On her way out, she stole the homeowners’ furniture and some cement sculptures of chickens. She told a man named Kenneth Lynch, a partner on a land deal, that she’d make him whole as soon as a sure-thing injury settlement came through. She never paid him what she owed and she swiped his last name, rechristening herself Linda Lynch. After defaulting on a contract to buy yet another house, she was arrested for allegedly stealing the owner’s refrigerator. That charge was ultimately dismissed. So was a charge of grand theft, which she picked up after commandeering four bulls that had wandered off someone else’s property. Linda Ray Linch—it’s unclear whether she misspelled her own borrowed last name or the typo was the fault of the clerk of court—managed to convince a prosecutor that she owned similar-looking bulls, and that it was all just a misunderstanding.
Taylor undertook these scams in Bonifay and elsewhere around the state. Between 1983 and 1989, she’d leave a paper trail in at least six different counties, and courts in those counties would enter at least six civil judgments against her. Some of the swindles she executed were otherworldly. She’d tell people in Florida, as she’d told Patricia Parks, that she could see into the future. At Linda Lynch’s instruction, Reta Hunter would collect four new $20 bills from the bank, then watch her psychic friend singe the edges of the currency. This money-burning spell, she promised, would soon bring Hunter prosperity. In the meantime, Linda would keep those $20 bills for herself.
Hunter’s husband, Leroy, also got himself entangled with Linda Lynch, building her a set of feed troughs she never paid for. She told Leroy, who was white and in his early fifties, that she had magical powers. He replied that he’d see her “black ass in court.” Leroy Hunter would be awarded a $738 civil judgment, thanks in part to an older black man who confirmed that Linda Lynch had promised to buy those feed troug
hs. Reta Hunter would overhear Linda snapping at that man, presumably Willtrue Loyd, “I told you not to say anything.”
* * *
Reta Hunter didn’t perceive Loyd as a rabble-rouser. She thought the man who’d spoken up in court was Linda Lynch’s lackey, and she felt sorry for him; he looked beaten down and afraid. Sandy Paderewski, a lawyer based out of Sarasota, didn’t register Loyd as much of a presence at all. The woman who came into his office, he believed, was the brains of her own operation.
Paderewski was looking for a payday, and he thought his new client could get him one—maybe more than one if he got lucky. Linda Ray Lynch didn’t strike the young attorney as all that trustworthy, but she was a great storyteller, and the stories she told were, from the perspective of a personal injury lawyer, extremely alluring. Her husband had been shot and killed in Illinois, she told Paderewski, and her six-figure insurance claim had been denied for no good reason. Also, since moving to Florida, she’d been mutilated by an unlicensed plastic surgeon. That looked like a strong case, too, one that might get decided very quickly if Paderewski alerted the press to her horrific injuries.
In October 1985, the Miami Herald reported that thirty-nine-year-old Linda Ray Lynch—she was actually fifty-nine—had gone to a rejuvenation clinic housed in a South Florida motel. Lynch, a police detective said, had been kept a “virtual prisoner” in that motel after being charged $5,900 for a chemical treatment. The detective reported that her “face was red like a tomato.” Paderewski gave his diagnosis a bit more oomph. “Her entire face was eaten off,” he told the Miami newspaper.
