The Queen

by Josh Levin

  When Gamache asked Taylor about the criminal charges she was facing, she rambled “about death certificates, her mother traveling in Uganda, and multiple surgeries.” She also said her case centered on clearing her name, “literally meaning clearing up some misunderstanding about aliases.” She responded to a question about the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison by saying, “Life is uncertain, but death is for sure.”

  Gamache was convinced that Taylor didn’t belong in a courtroom. At the same time, he professed that he couldn’t make a firm diagnosis. His best guess, he wrote, was that she had some kind of brain disease “or senile dementia complicated by an underlying psychopathology or mental illness, probably a psychotic disorder or delusional disorder.”

  Eight days later, Taylor submitted to another examination, this one conducted by a court-appointed psychiatrist. Dr. Donald Taylor described his subject as agitated, digressive, and vague. Under his questioning, she explained that she’d been abandoned by her mother and she again appeared preoccupied by the death of her purported father, saying she’d won a court battle over the rights to Lawrence Wakefield’s fortune and “that the estate was worth seven million dollars but that the money is being held by the Federal government in a bank in Chicago.” In a section marked “Educational History,” the psychiatrist wrote that Taylor said she’d been raped multiple times by a teacher when she was ten years old, and that she’d been afraid to go to school after those sexual assaults. She also reported being mistreated because of her mixed-race heritage—that “she was too black to be accepted at white schools and vice versa.”

  Donald Taylor believed that his subject was experiencing “deficits of memory, calculations, and abstract thought.” She could name Bill Clinton but couldn’t remember Ronald Reagan or any other president, and she could spell world forward but not in reverse. “She indicated she has had both male and female voices talking to her several times a week for two years,” he wrote. “She also occasionally sees the vision of a woman in her home.”

  At the end of his report, the psychiatrist said that Linda Taylor might be suffering hallucinations due to a head injury or brain tumor. He also suggested that she might have a factitious disorder—that she could be exaggerating her symptoms, or perhaps even causing her health problems intentionally. Either way, Donald Taylor said, she was likely incapable of consulting with her attorney. And so, on June 1, 1994, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, a judge ordered that Linda Taylor be committed for psychiatric treatment. After four months, she’d be reevaluated to determine if her trial could proceed.

  * * *

  On her first day at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, Taylor told a nurse she enjoyed sewing and crafts, and that she’d like a visit from the chaplain. She also checked boxes denoting that she’d been afflicted with twenty-six different medical conditions, among them rheumatic fever, broken bones, recurrent back pain, foot trouble, neuritis, depression or excessive worry, amnesia, and nervous trouble. A staff member wrote that the new prisoner suffered from the delusion that “white women killed her father.”

  The federal prison at Lexington, which had been founded in the 1930s as a “narcotic farm” for recovering addicts, held roughly two thousand women, more than half of whom had been locked up on federal drug charges. Taylor, who was housed in Lexington’s mental health wing, didn’t do much socializing, preferring to spend her time knitting and watching television. Nurses described her as pleasant and cooperative, although she did complain about the diet she was given to help control her diabetes. Her charts indicated she’d gotten agitated with another inmate only once, when her roommate moved out and made off with a set of blinds.

  Within twenty-four hours of her commitment, Taylor consented to taking major tranquilizers (“I WONT. MEDIC. FOR MY NEARVES,” she wrote on one form) and antidepressant medication (“I NEED SOME FOR DERASON”). On August 31, a week after she’d arrived in Kentucky, her daily Prozac dosage was doubled to forty milligrams.

  The next day, prison psychologist Katherine Freiman tried giving Taylor an exam designed to diagnose, among other things, depression, hysteria, psychopathy, paranoia, and schizophrenia. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory comprised 567 true-or-false statements, including “Evil spirits possess me at times,” “I have never been in trouble because of my sex behavior,” and “I think a great many people exaggerate their misfortunes in order to gain the sympathy and help of others.” Taylor refused to play along, saying she didn’t have her glasses.

  During her next session with Freiman, Taylor became “frustrated and angry.” She passed on taking one test because she said she was hungry, then decided she didn’t want to eat. She cut a different exam short because she claimed she had a headache. She was unable or unwilling to do simple arithmetic, couldn’t repeat the phrase “no ifs, ands, or buts,” and did not “appear able to write a sentence.” Her performance on a card-sorting task, the psychologist wrote, “suggested a passive-aggressive stance as she was able to state the difference between a correct and an incorrect response, but continued to sort the cards incorrectly.”

  Taylor was more willing to share her version of her life story. She told Freiman and other hospital staff that she’d grown up with white foster parents in Arkansas and Missouri. These white people had kidnapped her and her sister, Mary, and they’d called her a nigger, beaten her with an electrical cord, and forced her into prostitution.

  Early in her hospitalization, Taylor had told the medical center’s chief psychiatrist that she was “searching for my real mother and sister. I found only impersonators!” Later, she’d insist that Mildred Markham was her real mother. Markham, she said, had come into her life after Lawrence Wakefield’s death—she’d been one of many women who’d tried to establish their maternity so they could get a chunk of Taylor’s sizable inheritance. Markham had been the only one of these contenders who “had blood similar enough to her own to be her mother.” Taylor said that Markham was now eighty-nine years old and doing missionary work in South Africa. She explained that she’d “been cashing her mother’s checks in order to send her a package of items she needed on her mission.”

  The staff at the Federal Medical Center knew of one source who could potentially corroborate Taylor’s stories. On September 25, Sandra Smith surprised her mother by making the 360-mile trip from Chicago to Lexington. Three days later, she told a social work intern that Taylor “needs some type of help.”

  Taylor had told the staff at Lexington that her daughter was a pediatrician. Smith, who’d taken her husband’s last name upon getting remarried, was actually a cosmetologist. The forty-three-year-old Chicagoan said, per a memo jotted down by a social work intern, that it “bothers her that her mother truly believes she is a doctor.” Smith, who thought Taylor was telling the truth about being Lawrence Wakefield’s daughter, explained that her mother had been “mentally disturbed” ever since the policy king’s death. “It would be wrong to say she is a habitual liar,” Smith said. “I believe that the things she says, she truly believes in her mind that these things have occurred.” Smith didn’t think her mother should be in prison. She claimed she’d tried to get Taylor “committed to an institution” but, according to the social work intern, Smith alleged that her “brothers wouldn’t go for it.”

  Lexington psychologist Katherine Freiman could only speculate about the precise nature of her patient’s mental disturbance. It was possible, she wrote, that Taylor’s “intense grief over the death of her father” could’ve made her delusional. “At times she appeared to be deliberately misrepresenting herself or willfully withholding information, and at other times, she appeared to be genuinely confused about events and their timing,” Freiman continued. If Taylor was indeed suffering a cognitive decline, her impairment was “not extreme,” as she had no trouble following the prison’s rules. Taylor’s “primary problem,” the psychologist said, “appears to be delusional thinking compounded by borderl
ine intellectual functioning, an impoverished early learning environment, and personality variables.”

  Freiman diagnosed Taylor with “personality disorder not otherwise specified”—an admission that she didn’t have enough information to reach a firm conclusion. The psychologist added that Taylor exhibited traits of antisocial personality disorder, a condition characterized by a disregard for the consequences of one’s actions and a total lack of remorse.

  For all her uncertainty about Linda Taylor’s affliction, Freiman had no doubt that her patient was competent to stand trial. Taylor knew the charges against her, understood the concept of a plea bargain, and remembered her attorney’s name. She was thus able to assist in her own defense despite her “psychological and cognitive difficulties.”

  Just before her evaluation period was set to expire, Taylor underwent surgery to have a basal cell carcinoma excised from her forehead. After a few weeks of recovery, she was transported back to Florida, where she’d spend the next fifty-two days in the Pinellas County jail. A booking photograph taken on November 8, 1994, showed her scowling at the camera. She was wearing a powder blue top and had her hair in pigtails. Her forehead looked perfectly healed.

  * * *

  Despite Freiman’s report, Taylor’s lawyer, Craig Alldredge, wouldn’t concede his client’s mental competency. At a hearing on December 14, 1994, three defense witnesses—a clinical psychiatrist, a registered nurse, and Michael Gamache, the psychologist who’d examined Taylor seven months earlier—attested that “the defendant’s condition has deteriorated within the last three weeks.” In a ruling issued the following day, a judge wrote that “the defendant may be suffering from…brain damage, and an examination for that condition seems appropriate.” Taylor was again declared incompetent and sent away for four more months of treatment.

  Taylor would split that time between the Federal Medical Centers in Lexington and Fort Worth, Texas. In Kentucky, she said she’d seen visions of “green snakes.” In Texas, she described hallucinations of a “dog having puppies.” Personnel in both facilities said she was uninterested in social interaction and her own personal hygiene. “Attempted to stress need for bathing to patient but to no avail. Back to bed where she remained all day,” a nurse wrote on January 29, 1995. “Sleeping entire shift except to eat and pill line, have to awaken for both,” a staffer reported three weeks later.

  Again, Taylor obstructed most attempts at psychological testing, as she “was uncooperative and complained of needing corrective lenses.” Sandra Lang and Robert Gregg, a pair of psychologists in Fort Worth, noted just one specific result, reporting that Taylor “obtained a Full Scale IQ of 75” on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised, a score near the cutoff point for intellectual disability. But like their counterpart in Lexington, Lang and Gregg argued that Taylor had the mental capacity to go before a judge. “When asked about her desires for the outcome of her case,” the psychologists wrote, Taylor “adamantly stated [that] the case against her is ‘weak as water.’”

  * * *

  Taylor was in good spirits when she left the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth in April 1995. A nurse reported that her affect was “bright” and that she hadn’t complained of any physical discomfort. The U.S. Marshal charged with transporting her acknowledged receipt of both the prisoner and her personal funds: $13.13.

  Taylor’s attorney didn’t contest the findings in her latest prison medical report. Rather, Craig Alldredge made the case that his client had been mentally ill when she’d stolen Mildred Markham’s pension checks, and therefore hadn’t been responsible for her actions. Taylor’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity occasioned two more mental health assessments, one each by the defense and the prosecution. Both experts went to check on Taylor at Tampa’s Hillsborough County jail. Both were alarmed by what they saw.

  The government’s examiner, a psychiatrist named Arturo Gonzalez, described Taylor as disheveled and disoriented. She claimed to have visions of a man who may or may not have been her father, and she told the psychiatrist she was currently on trial for having killed her mother in 1934. “The report from the last federal facility indicates that she was competent to proceed,” Gonzalez wrote, “and I certainly don’t know how they arrived at that conclusion if they were looking at the same individual that we evaluated today.” He believed that Taylor had dementia, and that there was no way she’d ever be able to defend herself in court.

  The defense expert, Michael Gamache, agreed that Taylor was delusional and unstable. Gamache, who was assessing Taylor for a third time, wrote that she was “in the worst condition that I have seen.” Staffers at the jail told him “that they have had considerable difficulty in getting her to keep her clothes on. She disrobes for no apparent reason and then appears to be grossly confused.” Taylor had also been picking at her body incessantly, “which has apparently led to a very serious wound in the center of her forehead at the scalp line.”

  Gamache had long suspected that Taylor was suffering from a brain disease, and he’d suggested months earlier that she get a full neurological workup. That had never happened. Instead, she’d been passed from doctor to doctor, with no one getting a firm grasp on what, if anything, was ailing her. Gamache reported that he’d checked in with Taylor’s daughter, Sandra Smith, who’d told him that her mother had “been experiencing a deteriorating mental state for at least the last ten years.” If that was the case, Gamache decreed, Taylor “was not truly capable of appreciating the wrongfulness of her actions or the probable consequences.”

  With that, the federal courts were done with Linda Taylor. On July 5, 1995, Judge H. Dale Cook ruled that the “defendant remains mentally incompetent to proceed and that there is no likelihood that she will be returned to mental competency in the foreseeable future.” He ordered Taylor released from federal custody and involuntarily committed to a mental health facility under the care of the State of Florida. Eight months later, in March 1996, the federal government would dismiss its indictment against Taylor. She was seventy years old. She’d never be in trouble with the law again.

  * * *

  Mark Squeteri was sure it was all a con. Linda Taylor hadn’t been confused when she’d stolen Mildred Markham’s pension checks, and she hadn’t been out of it when he’d peppered her with questions outside that post office in Tampa. Squeteri thought she was just a liar, and that she’d lied to all those doctors just as she’d lied to everyone else.

  In the first few months after he arrested Taylor, the special agent from the Railroad Retirement Board had thought he was going to help convict her of murder. But when Taylor was first declared incompetent, Squeteri got assigned to other investigations. Over the next year, the case he thought might make his career would crumble into nothing.

  Throughout her life, Taylor preyed on people and systems that were ill-equipped to handle her deceptions. It’s possible that, in the mid-1990s, she got out of federal prison by pretending she was losing her mind. Her confusion and hallucinations also could’ve been the product of dementia. Squeteri was no mental health expert, but he didn’t trust the psychiatrists and psychologists who’d concluded that Taylor wasn’t accountable for what she’d done. And so the special agent decided he needed to pay her one more visit.

  If Taylor had conned the U.S. government, it didn’t look as though that scheme had redounded to her benefit. The judge in her criminal case had initially sent her to a crisis center for those deemed a threat to themselves or others. Patients’ shoelaces, combs, toothbrushes, and pens were confiscated upon admission, lest they be used to inflict harm. When Squeteri located Taylor, she was in a locked facility, a place where she couldn’t come and go as she pleased. Although the investigator wasn’t able to see Taylor himself, he did find the nurse responsible for her care. “Do you really think this lady is mentally ill,” he asked, “or do you think she’s faking it?”

  The nurse told him there was no question that Taylor was genuinely sick. Squeteri didn’t believe it, but
there was nothing he could do. She was somebody else’s problem now.

  * * *

  By the time Mark Squeteri went to check on Linda Taylor, it had been a decade since she’d been referenced by name in the Chicago Tribune and five years since she’d been mentioned in any major newspaper. To some degree, Taylor disappeared from public view because her story had run its course: She’d been arrested, tried, and locked up, and Ronald Reagan’s claims about her had been litigated, relitigated, and re-relitigated. But Reagan himself also did his part to turn the spotlight away from the woman in Chicago with the hundred different names.

  In the early days of his White House tenure, Reagan cited Taylor as the living embodiment of the supposed epidemic of welfare fraud. When he slashed the budgets for Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the food stamp program, the president’s critics said he was consigning millions of Americans to poverty. In Reagan’s telling, though, all he’d done was cut off a whole bunch of undeserving Linda Taylors. After he accomplished that mission, Reagan had little political use for Taylor’s story, and he stopped telling it in both public and private. During his second term, he focused on a new line of attack, one that characterized welfare recipients as shiftless rather than devious.

  At a meeting with congressional leaders in January 1986, Reagan explained that official unemployment statistics weren’t accurate because some people “don’t want to work.” By way of example, he described a “fellow on welfare” who hung up the phone when presented with a job offer. This tale enraged Democratic speaker of the house Tip O’Neill. “I thought you would have grown in five years,” O’Neill told Reagan, saying that this new, unsourced anecdote was just as absurd as “your story about the Chicago welfare queen.”