by Josh Levin
Woodham operated immediately, sawing open Markham’s skull to remove the clotted blood and to relieve the pressure on her brain. Although Markham survived the surgery, her condition did not improve. Forty-four days later, the surgeon wrote that she had “become a chronic akinetic mute.” Markham was left in a vegetative state, able to suck and chew but totally unresponsive to sound and light. On September 24, she was released from the hospital and brought back to Queen Snell’s house in Graceville. Markham had a feeding tube and a catheter, and her discharge instructions called for her body to be turned every two hours. A county home health certification form indicated that her husband was capable of “providing adequate care.”
Mildred Markham died less than two weeks later. The Graceville police reported that Willtrue Loyd found her in her bed at 5:57 a.m. on October 5, 1986, four or five hours after she’d stopped breathing. Markham’s death certificate, which identified her as Mildred Constance Raner Loyd, didn’t include a Social Security number. It was also peppered with false information. The document stated that Markham was a citizen of Patricia Parks’s home country of Trinidad. It also said she was the daughter of Edith Wakefield, the woman who, during 1964’s Lawrence Wakefield heirship case, Linda Taylor had asserted was her own mother. The medical examiner from Florida’s Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, finding nothing untoward, gave his permission to have Markham’s body cremated. There would be no autopsy.**
Markham, like Sherman Ray, had two life insurance policies. Taylor was the beneficiary of both. The medical examiner’s records suggest that Gulf Life Insurance Company paid Taylor’s claim without much fuss. Union Fidelity Life Insurance Company, however, asked a lot of questions.
The Union Fidelity plan Mildred Markham had signed up for was touted by seventy-something celebrity pitchman Danny Thomas as “one of the best life insurance plans available today.” It wasn’t. In 1987, the magazine Money warned its readers that mail-order term life insurance was typically a very bad deal. Such policies, which were advertised relentlessly on daytime television, paid out a piddling sum upon the death of an older customer—$3,000, for instance, for the non-accidental death of a seventy-five-year-old woman. On the plus side, Union Fidelity plans were cheap, costing just $24.45 per month for the maximum amount of coverage. The company also vowed that no physical examinations or health questions were required, and that no one between the ages of forty and seventy-four could be turned down “for any reason whatsoever.”
Mildred Markham’s enrollment form was dated July 28, 1986, just less than a week before she’d supposedly fallen and hit her head. Markham, who’d bought the maximum five units of coverage, should’ve been ineligible for the plan given that she was seventy-seven years old. Her age, though, was listed as fifty-nine on the date the policy was issued. The two signatures on the form—Mildred Rayner, the policyholder, and her daughter Linda Lynch, the beneficiary—looked remarkably similar, suggesting that one individual had handled all the paperwork.
No matter what was written on that form, Union Fidelity wouldn’t have to pay up if Markham had died of natural causes, as the policy covered only accidental deaths during the first two years. But after some back-and-forth with Markham’s neurosurgeon, the medical examiner’s office decided her death had indeed been accidental—a consequence of the fall she’d suffered two months earlier. Union Fidelity wasn’t convinced. In June 1987, with the claim still unpaid, Sandy Paderewski filed a civil complaint on behalf of his client Linda Ray Lynch. The case would eventually go to arbitration, and the two sides would reach a settlement in the latter part of 1988. Although the terms of that agreement were confidential and thus can’t be verified, the lawyer who represented Union Fidelity would remember losing the case. The company’s newspaper ads promised a payout of $41,500 when a fifty-nine-year-old woman died accidentally. Linda Taylor likely got close to that amount.
Perhaps it was a coincidence that Mildred Markham went into a coma immediately after the con artist who was holding her captive purchased a life insurance policy in her name. It’s also possible that Markham fell and hit her head, and that Taylor then sent away for mail-order life insurance, fudging the date on the enrollment form to make it seem as though she’d applied before Markham’s brain injury. Or maybe Taylor, with or without an accomplice, killed Markham for her money.
When Theresa Davis learned that her grandmother was dead, she immediately suspected that Taylor was responsible, and she was sure it hadn’t been an accident. Bruce Woodham, the neurosurgeon, would later say he couldn’t be certain that Mildred Markham’s injuries were the product of an accidental fall as opposed to, say, a push down a flight of stairs or a strike from a blunt instrument. But without an autopsy, it was impossible to tell what had caused Markham’s brain to bleed, and since her corpse was quickly cremated, no such determination would ever be made. Mildred Markham’s death, like the deaths of Patricia Parks and Sherman Ray, would remain unexplained and unprosecuted. And Mildred Markham’s family, like the families of Patricia Parks and Sherman Ray, would have no doubt that Linda Taylor was a killer.
Taylor didn’t stop preying on Markham after the old woman took her last breath. Less than a month after her phony mother was cremated, Taylor started collecting government checks in Mildred Markham’s name. Between 1986 and 1993, she’d nab more than $60,000 in ill-gotten benefits. This Taylor scam wouldn’t come to an end until she was sixty-seven years old, when federal agents would get a tip on a toll-free hotline.
* There was a history of mixed-race people living in the area. The 1950 census identified sixty Holmes County residents as “Dominickers,” a group of “reputed Indian-White-Negro racial isolates” concentrated near the Choctawhatchee River. By the 1980s, the group—whose pejorative descriptor referenced the black-and-white coloring of Dominicker chickens—had dispersed or assimilated, and there was no longer any record of an organized settlement in the county.
** The medical examiner, Dr. William Sybers, would plead guilty to manslaughter in 2003 after standing accused of killing his wife by injecting her with the poison succinylcholine. Sybers, who died in 2014, continued to profess his innocence even after taking that plea deal. “If I had truly killed my wife,” he told the New York Times, “I would have ordered a cremation.”
Chapter 18
Deficits of Memory
Mark Squeteri had never been on a stakeout before. The twenty-eight-year-old, a special agent for the United States Railroad Retirement Board, mostly investigated benefit fraud—making sure, for instance, that people collecting unemployment from the federal agency didn’t have hidden stashes of undeclared income. It was a stultifying gig, one that required the young bureaucrat to sit behind a desk making phone calls and writing reports. For Squeteri, who worked out of the RRB’s main office in Chicago, the opportunity to spend time on a seedy commercial strip in Tampa was something to be cherished.
Squeteri’s search had kicked off in October 1993, when the RRB got a tip on its fraud hotline that a woman who went by Linda Springer had been stealing pension checks made out to Mildred Markham. In the months after getting that call, Squeteri had gone to Florida multiple times. His detective work eventually led him to a spot on North Nebraska Avenue just east of I-275, a stretch of road dominated by used car lots and roadside inns. Squeteri set up outside the Sulphur Springs post office, a squat white building that had once been an A&P grocery store. He was on the lookout for a woman whose rap sheet had entries dating back almost fifty years, and who’d been arrested in at least six different states.
The special agent knew that Linda Springer was a thief, and he suspected she might be a murderer. If he didn’t catch her, it was unlikely anyone ever would.
* * *
Mildred Markham’s husband had commenced his career as a Pullman porter in the mid-1930s, right around when the newly constituted Railroad Retirement Board began sending money to eligible retirees. James Markham, who was born in 1896, had started getting a monthly pension after retiring at seven
ty, and Mildred had become eligible for survivors’ benefits upon his death in 1983. The RRB should’ve cut off those benefits when she died in 1986. Instead, her checks had been redirected to Linda Springer. As of the fall of 1993, she’d received $62,315.44 in unwarranted payments.
When Squeteri fielded that hotline call, he didn’t just get a heads-up that someone was stealing government funds. The agency’s confidential informant also guided Squeteri and his boss, Terrence Hake, toward the conclusion that Linda Springer was Linda Taylor, the notorious Chicago welfare queen.
In the early 1980s, Hake had been the key figure in the FBI’s Operation Greylord, going undercover in the guise of a corrupt lawyer to catch Cook County attorneys and judges soliciting and collecting bribes. A decade later, having moved on to a mellower gig at the RRB, Hake asked his contacts at the FBI to pass along Taylor’s file. Mark Squeteri had never seen anything like it. He pored over pages full of aliases, plus reports about multiple kidnappings and a possible homicide—the 1975 death of Patricia Parks, which the FBI had known about but had declined to pursue.
As soon as Squeteri saw that file, he understood he’d stumbled onto a big case. When he started to dig into Taylor’s life in Florida, he got the sense he might be embarking on a life-changing investigation.
Everything about Mildred Markham’s death certificate looked dubious. While her Cook County marriage license indicated that she’d been born around 1909 and that her maiden name was Hampton, Markham’s Florida death record asserted that she was nearly twenty years younger and that her parents’ surnames were Raner and Wakefield. Most notably, the Florida document listed Markham’s Social Security number as “None”—an omission that ensured her death wouldn’t be reported to the federal government. So long as the Railroad Retirement Board believed that Mildred Markham was still alive, it would keep on mailing her checks.
On October 1, 1993, the RRB sent $820.37 to Markham care of Linda L. Springer, P.O. Box 8334, Tampa, Florida. Later that month, that same U.S. Treasury check was transferred to a doctor’s office as payment for cosmetic surgery. The back of the check—the eighty-fourth and final one Taylor would receive from the agency—was signed by both Linda Springer and Mildred Markham, the latter of whom had been dead for seven years.
Squeteri tracked down the plastic surgeon’s administrative assistant, who said the patient who’d proffered that check matched a photograph of Linda Taylor. He also interviewed Taylor’s son Paul, Markham’s neurosurgeon, the chief of the Graceville Police Department, and four other potential witnesses. The special agent left those conversations convinced that Mildred Markham’s death hadn’t been an accident.
Squeteri’s personal theory was that Taylor had killed Markham to get her pension money, and that she’d done it by shoving the old woman down some stairs. In the early stages of their inquiry, Squeteri and his boss, Terrence Hake, ran that idea by a figure from Taylor’s past. Jim Piper, who’d prosecuted Taylor for welfare fraud in the 1970s, told them he believed she was definitely capable of killing someone.
Although Squeteri had no concrete evidence that Linda Taylor had murdered Mildred Markham, he did have solid proof that she’d stolen from the Railroad Retirement Board. On October 28, 1993, he secured a federal warrant calling for Taylor’s arrest on check fraud charges.
To arrest Taylor, Squeteri would have to find her. Most of the people he talked to in Florida said he was doomed to failure—that the woman he was looking for had a tendency to vanish. By February 1994, Squeteri had decided his only move was to wait her out. He’d go to the spot in Tampa where she picked up her mail, and he’d bide his time until he caught sight of his quarry.
Squeteri lingered on North Nebraska Avenue for days, peering out the window of his car in search of a woman who resembled Taylor’s nearly two-decades-old Chicago mug shots. On February 23, he spotted a suspect behind the wheel of a red 1992 Mercury Cougar. When she parked and went inside the post office, Squeteri ran the plates on the Mercury. He got a hit. He’d found Linda Taylor.
When Taylor came back out, Squeteri told her she was under arrest. He spelled out everything he’d learned about her criminal history—her aliases and arrests and the offense that had made her infamous.
“Linda, why’d you do this again?” the special agent asked.
Squeteri thought she looked surprised, as though she couldn’t believe he’d uncovered her secret past. It was also possible he was flattering himself. She told Squeteri she hadn’t done anything, and that he must’ve gotten her confused with someone else—she wasn’t Linda Taylor or Linda Springer or the welfare queen.
* * *
In the fourteen years since she’d emerged from an Illinois prison, Taylor had perpetrated all sorts of criminal acts and had faced almost no consequences. Now she was charged with six felony counts of illegally cashing U.S. Treasury checks, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of ten years.
Thanks to Mark Squeteri, the federal prosecutors tasked with trying Taylor’s case had some idea of her background. The indictment they filed in March 1994 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida identified the defendant as Linda Taylor, Linda Springer, Linda Bennett, Linda Lynch, Linda Ray Lunch, Constance Wakefield, Constance W. Womack, Constance Green, Martha Lee Davis, and Mildred Markman. But Squeteri didn’t see that indictment as the end of his investigation. The special agent was certain he was just getting started.
In the week after he arrested Taylor, Squeteri interviewed Queen, Jane, and Karen Snell, who told him what they knew about the woman who’d squatted in their house and disposed of all their possessions. He also talked to the funeral director who’d arranged Mildred Markham’s cremation and the owner of the crematorium that had incinerated Markham’s body. The U.S. attorney’s office, in the meantime, acquired Markham’s medical records, as well as correspondence from Union Fidelity Life Insurance Company, the firm that had resisted paying the accidental death claim filed by Markham’s ersatz daughter, Linda Lynch. The main prosecutor attached to the case told Squeteri that they’d soon have enough to charge Linda Taylor with murder.
Taylor had been released on $25,000 bond the day after she’d been arrested. In a financial affidavit, she identified herself as an unemployed widow. Although she owned 185 acres of Mildred Markham’s land in Mississippi, Taylor attested that she had no real estate holdings, and said the only income she’d received in the previous twelve months was $300 to $400 from her children. Another form listed her residence as 7007 North Nebraska Avenue. That was the address of the Haven Motel, a low-rent lodge three blocks north of the post office where Squeteri had spotted Taylor driving a red Mercury Cougar. At the time of her arrest, Taylor lived alone. Her companion, Willtrue Loyd, had died of natural causes a year and a half earlier, at the age of seventy-two.
At her arraignment on March 31, Taylor pleaded not guilty to six counts of fraud. Three weeks later, her public defender, Craig Alldredge, was granted a continuance so she could receive treatment for a heart condition. But his client’s heart troubles weren’t Alldredge’s biggest concern.
In 1978, three of Taylor’s lawyers in Chicago had said she “was incapable of knowing whether or not she was telling the truth.” That same year, another of her attorneys had noted that two psychiatrists had previously said she was “psychotic and unable to understand the nature of the proceedings of which she was a defendant.”
Alldredge came to a similar conclusion in 1994, telling a judge that Taylor wasn’t able to assist in her own defense. Every time he tried to discuss the case with her, he wrote, “she was vague, tangential, and related facts which were extremely improbable, if not impossible.” When he “attempted to investigate these facts,” Alldredge said, “it became clear that in many instances that which she related did not exist.”
* * *
It wasn’t up to Craig Alldredge to determine whether Taylor was competent to stand trial. In 1994 and 1995, a succession of mental health professionals would conduct their own as
sessments on behalf of the defense attorney and the district court. The experts who examined Taylor were operating at a severe information disadvantage, relying on an inveterate fabulist to tell them who she was and what she’d done.
“It is difficult to say what type of problems she may have,” psychologist Michael Gamache wrote after putting the sixty-eight-year-old Taylor through a battery of tests. “Her symptoms are truly bizarre and unusual.” Those bizarre and unusual symptoms manifested themselves in what Gamache termed a “peculiar, disorganized, and inconsistent history.” Taylor first claimed to have been born in Trinidad, then Chicago. Gamache noted that she was obsessed with someone named Lawrence Wakefield, a man she said was her biological father. “She described his death in considerable detail, and remarked in particular on police officers and federal agents pulling bags of money out of his house,” he wrote. Taylor told Gamache she’d been so distraught after Wakefield’s death in 1964 that she’d attempted suicide.
Taylor laid out a long litany of alleged maladies. She’d been hit by a police car at the age of five “and suffered a fractured rib cage and legs,” Gamache recorded. More recently, she “had been the subject of both abdominal and brain surgery.” Although Taylor told the psychologist she’d never been treated for mental health issues, Gamache thought something was amiss. She failed to understand common proverbs, “struggled to recognize irregularities in absurd statements,” and reported perceiving auditory hallucinations. “I heard a voice last night, they told me to live on and be happy,” she said. “I was just lying in bed reading the Bible…it was a woman’s voice…like maybe the Virgin Mary.”
