by Josh Levin
The front man of the motel clinic, Bernard Gross, had lost his medical license more than a year earlier, after pleading guilty to selling six thousand homemade quaaludes out of the trunk of his Chrysler. Gross was charged with three felonies in connection to his alleged treatment of Linda Ray Lynch, though prosecutors would ultimately choose not to pursue a criminal case against him. His aggrieved patient, however, would move forward with a civil case against the erstwhile doctor and six other defendants, including the physician Gross said had performed the procedure. Paderewski felt good about this motel-chemical-scar-treatment litigation. While his client’s face didn’t appear disfigured in the present day, she did have some grisly-looking photographs. A civil court judge was less impressed—he’d dismiss the case in 1986, citing a Florida statute mandating that the claimant’s attorney do a “reasonable investigation” into accusations of medical negligence.
Despite that courtroom failure, Taylor still had a chance to make a big score. By the time she met Paderewski, Sherman Ray’s widow had already collected on one of her husband’s two life insurance policies. Although the value of that first policy hasn’t been preserved in any public records, Ray’s second insurance contract stipulated a payout of $100,000. The firm that had underwritten that policy, Veterans Life, had no intention of paying up. The company’s reluctance to cut Taylor a check had nothing to do with the manner in which Ray had been killed or the fact that his wife’s so-called father had done the killing. Rather, the pertinent issue was that Ray hadn’t reported his heart and liver problems when he’d signed up for coverage eleven months before his death. Paderewski’s complaint, filed in September 1985, argued that was irrelevant: The Rays had paid their monthly premiums, and Sherman had died of a gunshot wound, not heart disease or liver failure.
Veterans Life and Linda Ray would fight it out in both state and federal court, filing motions and memorandums and supplemental answers for more than two years. The parties finally reached a settlement in January 1988, with the specific financial terms of that agreement remaining confidential. Taylor didn’t get the full $100,000 she wanted, but she did get some more compensation for her husband’s death.
Paderewski would represent Linda Ray Lynch in one more matter: a separate insurance case that was still in process when he worked out a settlement with Veterans Life. Given the time and money he was putting into these various legal excursions, Paderewski wasn’t satisfied with the return on his investment. He liked having Linda Ray Lynch around—she was far more entertaining than the people who usually sought out his services. But Paderewski worked on contingency, and he was losing patience with his client’s long-running, labor-intensive disputes.
Taylor wouldn’t give up so easily. In Florida, she preyed on strangers, acquaintances, and friends. Almost everyone she met became a mark. The people who thought they were close to her lost the most.
* * *
Linda Lynch was sitting by herself at the airport in Dothan, Alabama, in 1985 when she struck up a conversation with a twelve-year-old girl. Lynch, who was waiting for her grandsons’ plane to touch down, was extremely friendly and a very fast talker—she seemed excited to have some company. She chatted up Karen Snell for just a few minutes before coming over to meet the girl’s mother, Queen. Not long after that, she invited the whole Snell family to her property in Esto, Florida, a tiny town north of Bonifay in rural Holmes County.
The thirty-six-year-old Queen Snell and her three daughters, who lived one county over in Graceville, had never had any occasion to visit Esto. The Snells were black, and people who looked the way they did weren’t typically welcome in that corner of the state. Holmes County, which was more than 96 percent white, gave 86.4 percent of its votes to George Wallace in the 1972 Florida Democratic presidential primary. Two decades later, members of the Dupree family—reportedly Esto’s only black residents—would scuttle plans to bury their 104-year-old matriarch in the all-white town cemetery after getting an anonymous threat that men with shotguns would turn up at her funeral.
Queen Snell’s oldest daughter, Jane, who was fifteen, thought her mother’s friend looked out of place in Holmes County.* Jane suspected she’d come from an island, or some other exotic, faraway place. Linda Taylor, who’d represented herself as black since Lawrence Wakefield’s death in 1964, may have tried to blend into her surroundings in Esto. When Taylor was charged with stealing four bulls in 1985, a Holmes County deputy sheriff noted on the criminal complaint that she was white. She didn’t, however, tell her neighbors anything about her background. In a place where everyone knew everyone, nobody knew anything about her at all.
Although he wasn’t sure, the farmer whose land abutted hers believed that Linda Lynch was a light-skinned black woman. She certainly didn’t hide the fact that she had black relatives. The first time Queen Snell and her girls came over to visit, they met a pair of teenagers named Duke and Hosa, the latter of whom had dark skin. Those were the kids—her daughter Sandra’s sons—Linda had picked up at the Dothan airport. The Snells would also meet her son Paul, who was in his late thirties. A quarter century after he’d been sent to a state-run home, he seemed to be on good terms with the woman who’d abandoned him.
The Snells were impressed with Linda Lynch’s spread. She lived in a big brick house on a ninety-nine-acre plot with a lake full of bass and bream. The property, which she’d settled on after convincing Kenneth Lynch to pay the mortgage, was a working dairy farm, with automatic milkers, a cow lift, and an eight-hundred-gallon milk-cooling tank.
While Duke and Hosa were just visiting and Paul lived elsewhere on the Panhandle, the farm did have two other permanent residents. Willtrue Loyd was pleasant enough but wasn’t the type to stop and chat; whenever the Snells saw him, the sixty-five-year-old was busy doing odd jobs. Mildred Markham, who was in her mid-seventies, was mostly noncommunicative. Linda described the elderly black woman as her grandmother—she’d tell other people Markham was her mother—and said her aged family member wasn’t allowed to stay inside because she practiced voodoo. Jane thought that was ridiculous—the old lady didn’t strike her as evil or dangerous. Even so, it felt rude to stick her nose into another family’s business. At dinnertime, the Snells watched in silence as Markham collected her plate, walked out of the main house, and headed into a barn to eat on her own. She and Loyd slept in that barn, too. The entire situation felt bizarre and sad.
Linda Lynch liked to talk about money—how she was related to a family in Graceville that had bushels of it, and how she was working on a bunch of “cases” that would bring in still more riches. She brought Queen Snell in on one scheme, in which they’d procure day-old baked goods from a bread outlet and resell them out of the back of Linda’s red pickup truck. But the two women weren’t business partners for long. One afternoon in the spring of 1986, Snell’s daughters came back from school to find Linda alone in their house in Graceville. Their mother was gone, she explained. She’d be taking care of them now.
Jane, Karen, and their eleven-year-old sister, Sheila, couldn’t believe what they’d just heard. Snell’s daughters understood that their mother was in a bad relationship, and they knew their uncles had urged her to leave the man she was seeing and come live with them in New York. Still, it wasn’t like her to leave without any warning, and it made no sense that she’d appoint a virtual stranger to watch over them. But Linda was telling the truth: Queen Snell was already on her way out of town.
Snell did eventually talk to her daughters on the phone, saying that she was en route to New York and would send for them when school was out for the summer. Sheila, the youngest of the three girls, refused to sign on to this plan, raising such a ruckus that her mother relented and brought her up North right away. The oldest daughter, Jane, didn’t trust Linda at all. She insisted on going to her grandmother’s house in the nearby town of Noma; when Linda tried to retrieve her, Jane locked the doors and wouldn’t come out. Karen was the only one of the girls to accede to her mother’s wishes. She agree
d to stay in the family’s house in Graceville, where she’d share a room with her new caregiver.
This house-sitting opportunity came at a convenient time for Linda Taylor. Nobody had been making the payments on her property in Esto, which was foreclosed on in October 1985, just six months after the purchase had gone through. In early 1986, she’d make herself at home in the Snells’ three-bedroom residence, and she’d bring along Willtrue Loyd and Mildred Markham.
Karen, who would turn thirteen in February 1986, wouldn’t be neglected or physically abused, but she’d bear witness to a lot of cruelty. Linda had a puppy named Pierre that she’d tote around wherever she went. The dog, which looked like a little rug, had an unusually long tail. One day, Linda ordered her male companion to chop it off. Loyd did as she’d requested, performing the in-home surgery. Afterward, Pierre wouldn’t stop howling, and in the succeeding days the pooch’s body swelled up and he refused to eat. Although the dog would get better, Karen found the episode profoundly unsettling. She didn’t understand how people could inflict so much pain on a helpless animal.
Linda wasn’t any kinder to Mildred Markham, calling the old woman stupid for drinking milk that had been purchased for the dog. It wasn’t clear if Markham knew she was getting berated. Regardless, she absorbed her supposed granddaughter’s insults in silence. At night, she and Loyd retired to a bedroom outfitted with nothing but a dirty mattress and a tattered blanket. One room over, Karen would watch Linda take off her shoulder-length blond wig before going to sleep each night. Underneath those fake tresses, she didn’t have much hair at all.
The few times Jane came over to check on her younger sister, she was disturbed to see what Linda Lynch had done with the place. The high school sophomore called her mother to say that Markham and Loyd were living in filth, and to report that Linda had brought in her own living room furniture and dining room set. Queen Snell wasn’t concerned. Her friend had told her that she’d found and killed a big snake on Queen’s bed. That was a sign, Linda had explained, that Queen had been right to run away from her bad relationship.
While Jane didn’t believe any of that voodoo nonsense, Karen wasn’t sure what to think. The sixty-year-old Linda Lynch treated the thirteen-year-old girl as a confidant. Linda would spend hours driving Karen around the northern Panhandle in her red pickup, pointing out all the places she was planning to buy. She said they were going to leave Graceville very soon, and that they’d move into a brick house with a pool. She cruised by that brick house again and again, as if she was trying to will it into her possession.
The Snells didn’t have much money. Karen heard Linda complain to the mailman and neighbors about the ragged condition of her stopgap home, and she disparaged Queen’s green Ford LTD as an “old-ass car.” This wasn’t the life she felt she deserved. She’d have to go somewhere else, and con someone else, to ascend to her rightful station.
As soon as the 1986 school year was over, Jane and Karen got on a plane to join their mother in New York. When the whole family returned to Graceville in 1987, they came back to an empty house. Linda, they’d find out, had put everything the Snells owned into a storage facility, and she hadn’t kept up with the rental fees. Queen couldn’t afford to get their stuff out of hock. All of their belongings—the living room furniture, the girls’ Barbie dolls, and one of her youngest daughter’s trophies—were gone. So was Linda Lynch. Queen Snell and her daughters would never get the chance to ask her why she’d done what she’d done, and whether she’d gotten what she wanted.
Jane had come home to Florida well before her mom and her sisters—she’d hated New York, and her best friend’s family had agreed to take her in. The first night she was back in town, staying temporarily with an old neighbor, she saw an ambulance stop in front of her mother’s house. Jane watched as Mildred Markham was carried out on a stretcher. Two months later, Markham would be dead.
* * *
Linda Taylor had brainwashed Mildred Markham. That was the only explanation Markham’s real granddaughter could come up with. Theresa Davis wasn’t sure where Taylor and her grandmother had met—one possibility was that they’d crossed paths when they’d been patients at the same Chicago hospital—and she wasn’t sure what this Linda person had said or done to insinuate herself into Markham’s life. All she knew for certain was that in the early 1980s, Markham had started telling her friends and relatives that Linda was her long-lost daughter.
Markham, who was seventeen years older than Taylor, was born in Louisiana around 1909 but had lived in Chicago for most of her life. In 1937, she’d married James Monroe Markham in a wedding officiated by the pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, a South Side institution known as the birthplace of gospel music. James was a Pullman porter for the Illinois Central Railroad, one of the few decent-paying, high-status positions available to a black man in Chicago at that time, while Mildred worked out of their home as a seamstress and helped raise their granddaughter. A 1945 item in the Defender, which noted that Mildred and Theresa had “spent their vacation touring Florida and Alabama,” said that “Mrs. Markham is well known for her work in charity throughout the community.”
Theresa Davis’s grandparents had been her primary caregivers, and they’d ensured that she’d grown up in a stable and loving household. After Markham became a widow in the spring of 1983, Davis wanted to make sure her grandmother was similarly safe and comfortable. But when she asked Markham to come live with her, the septuagenarian demurred. All she wanted to talk about was Linda.
James Markham had still been alive when his wife first started seeing Taylor. As soon as Markham’s husband died, her newfound daughter began coming by a lot more often and telling the old woman she’d take care of all her needs. Markham thought that sounded great.
Davis discovered that her grandmother was missing on a Saturday morning in 1983, when she went to Markham’s Chicago apartment and found the place empty. Markham’s furniture, sewing machine, fur coats, and jewelry had been carted off. The money in her bank account was gone, too. Markham’s neighbor told Davis she’d left willingly—that she’d actually been grinning as she walked out the door, telling anyone who’d listen that she was going with her daughter.
A month or two later, Davis got a letter from her grandmother. She said she was with Linda in Kankakee County, Illinois, and was ready to come home. When Davis and her husband traveled from Chicago down to Pembroke Township to search for Markham, the place where she’d been living was fenced in and locked up. Nobody seemed to know where she and Taylor had gone.
A few months after that, Davis would get a second letter, this one postmarked in Florida. Markham told her granddaughter that she was being mistreated—that Linda wouldn’t let her stay in the main house. This time, Davis tried and failed to track down her grandmother from afar. She’d never see her again.
At around the time Markham wrote to her granddaughter from Florida, Taylor’s son Johnnie Harbaugh and his wife, Carol, came to the Panhandle for a visit. On that trip, they met Markham for the first time. It didn’t take them long to gather that she was being held against her will. They watched Taylor scream at the seventy-five-year-old and lock her in a room, and they heard Markham say she wasn’t getting enough to eat. Markham begged the Harbaughs to take her back to Chicago. Thirty years later, Johnnie wouldn’t have a clear memory of what happened next—maybe Markham had changed her mind and decided to stay in Florida, or perhaps he’d concluded that he didn’t want to get involved. Carol would remember the chain of events more distinctly. Johnnie had backed off, she’d recall, after his mother had warned him, “You even think about it, and I’ll blow your head off.”
Taylor had good reason to want Mildred Markham to remain under her control. Unlike Queen Snell, Markham had substantial money and property. On October 29, 1985—five days after the Miami Herald reported that a plastic surgeon had burned Linda Ray Lynch’s face and kept her a prisoner in a motel—Markham deeded 185 acres of land to Linda Lynch and Clifford L. Harba
ugh. Clifford, Taylor’s oldest son, would later deny having any knowledge of that deal. It’s undeniable, though, that Markham was fleeced. Although the document spelled out that Markham would be paid $150,000 for that acreage—a parcel her husband James had bought in Lincoln County, Mississippi, with savings he’d accrued as a railroad man—there’s no indication that any cash ever changed hands.
Four months after Taylor secured possession of Markham’s land holdings, Taylor’s faux father married her faux mother. The couple’s Florida marriage record identified the groom as Willtrue Loyd and the bride—Mildred Markham—as Constance C. B. Wakefield Rayner. The shaky signature on that document—“Constance Wakefield”—appeared to have been written by the same hand that had scrawled Markham’s name on that warranty deed in October 1985.
Although Loyd and Markham slept together on a dirty mattress, Karen Snell didn’t think the newlyweds were romantically involved. The thirteen-year-old did, however, see Loyd strike his wife. The Graceville Police Department investigated another domestic dispute at the Snells’ house on May 16, 1986, this one involving Linda Springer and Mildred Loyd. There’s no record of how that dispute was adjudicated. There’s also no reliable third-party account of the incident that put Mildred Markham into a coma.
* * *
When Markham was admitted to Flowers Hospital in Dothan on August 10, 1986—more than likely the day Jane Snell saw her getting carried away on a stretcher—her eyes were closed and she couldn’t speak. Willtrue Loyd told the attending physician that his wife, who he said was named Constance, had fallen a week earlier and hit her head. She’d suffered from increasingly severe headaches after that fall, Loyd said, and had lost consciousness while sitting in a chair. Bruce Woodham, a neurosurgeon, diagnosed Markham with a subdural hematoma in the right frontal and temporal regions of her brain as well as with herniation syndrome—a displacement of the brain caused by pressure in the skull. “I believe that she has an imminent chance of dying,” the doctor wrote after conducting his initial examination. “I have discussed this situation with the husband. He understands the bleak outlook that we have here.”
