by Josh Levin
Copyright © 2019 by Josh Levin
Cover photograph © Bettmann/Getty Images
Author photograph by J. Seidman
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First Edition: May 2019
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ISBN 978-0-316-51327-2
E3-20190426-DA-NF-ORI
E3-20190415-DA-NF-ORI
E3-20190325-DA-NF-ORI
E3-20190114-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1: A New Victim
Chapter 2: Covert
Chapter 3: Page One
Chapter 4: Obtained by Deception
Chapter 5: Friend
Chapter 6: A Woman in Chicago
Chapter 7: Concerned Neighbors
Chapter 8: The Fashionably Dressed Mrs. Taylor
Chapter 9: She Couldn’t Stop
Chapter 10: She Knows About the Money
Chapter 11: Everything Is Fictitious
Chapter 12: Bottom Rats
Chapter 13: The Two Mrs. Harbaughs
Chapter 14: I’ll Sue the Hell out of Them
Chapter 15: A Helpless Child
Chapter 16: Clever, Conniving, Callous
Chapter 17: Beneficiary
Chapter 18: Deficits of Memory
Acknowledgments
Timeline of Linda Taylor’s Life
Bibliography
Notes
About the Author
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To Jess, for everything
Author’s Note
“How old was she?” John Parks asked me. We were sitting outside on a spring day in 2013, a little less than thirty-eight years since his ex-wife, Patricia, had died under suspicious circumstances. “Boy, you waited a long time to come,” the seventy-seven-year-old Parks said, struggling to remember details, such as Patricia’s age, that had once seemed unforgettable. “At first, it was just on the tip of my tongue. And nobody came.”
Patricia Parks had been thirty-seven when she was pronounced dead of a barbiturate overdose on the night of June 15, 1975. Patricia, who’d suffered from multiple sclerosis, had been treated at home by a friend who’d promised to make her feel better. Linda Taylor submerged Patricia in ice-cold water and fed her medications stored in unlabeled bottles. Taylor also took possession of the sick woman’s house on the South Side of Chicago and became the executor of her estate. John Parks believed then and remained certain decades later that Taylor murdered Patricia. But nobody had seen fit to charge Taylor with his ex-wife’s killing, and nobody in any position of authority, John told me, had bothered to ask him what he thought of Patricia’s friend. “All they said was, ‘That’s another black woman dead.’”
When I started digging into Linda Taylor’s life, I hadn’t imagined that I’d end up investigating a potential homicide. Taylor rose to prominence in the mid-1970s as a very different kind of villain: America’s original “welfare queen.” One of the first stories I ever read about her, a squib in Jet magazine from 1974, said that she’d stolen $154,000 in public aid money in a single year, “owned three apartment buildings, two luxury cars, and a station wagon,” and had been “busy preparing to open a medical office, posing as a doctor.” Another Jet article depicted her as a shape-shifting, fur-wearing con artist who could “change from black to white to Latin with a mere change of a wig.” But when Ronald Reagan expounded on Taylor during his 1976 presidential campaign, shocking audiences with the tale of “a woman in Chicago” who used eighty aliases to steal government checks, he didn’t treat her as an outlier. Instead, Reagan implied that Taylor was a stand-in for a whole class of people who were getting something they didn’t deserve.
The words used to malign Linda Taylor hardened into a stereotype, one that was deployed to chip away at benefits for the poor. The legend of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen ultimately overwhelmed Taylor’s own identity. After getting convicted of welfare fraud in 1977, Taylor disappeared from public view and public memory. No one seemed to know whether she’d really lived under eighty aliases, and nobody had any idea whether she was alive or dead.
I spent six years piecing together Taylor’s story and trying to comprehend why it got lost in the first place. The more I learned about her, the more the mythologized version of Linda Taylor fell apart, and not in the ways I expected. As a child and an adult, Taylor was victimized by racism and deprived of opportunity. She also victimized those even more vulnerable than she was.
Patricia Parks’s death was a blip for the Chicago Tribune; Linda Taylor’s public aid swindle was a years-long obsession. For journalists and politicians, the welfare queen was a potent figure, a character whose outlandish behavior reliably provoked outrage. Poor black women saw their character assailed by association with Taylor. At the same time, a woman whom Taylor had preyed on elicited no sympathy. Patricia Parks’s ex-husband, John, who died in 2016, believed that his family’s race was the reason that Patricia’s death wasn’t seen as a scandal or a tragedy. “I’d have to be somebody,” he told me, explaining why some Americans get justice and others don’t.
Linda Taylor did horrifying things. Horrifying things were also done in Linda Taylor’s name. No one’s life lends itself to simple lessons and easy answers, and Taylor’s was more complicated than most. I’ve tried my best to tell the whole truth about what Linda Taylor did, what she came to signify, and who got hurt along the way. That goal may be unattainable, but we do far more damage to the world and to ourselves when we don’t care to pursue it.
Chapter 1
A New Victim
Jack Sherwin tossed his day’s work on the front seat of his unmarked Chevy. He’d fished five or six burglary reports from his pigeonhole after roll call, enough to keep him and his partner occupied all morning and for a good chunk of the afternoon. Sherwin didn’t need any more assignments—he had at least a half-dozen more reports jammed inside his briefcase.
The Chicago burglary detective turned on the police scanner and peeled off his sport coat. August 12, 1974, was sunny, hot, and unbearably humid; the sky felt heavy but it wouldn’t rain all day. Sherwin headed east from his unit’s headquarters on Ninety-First Street and South Cottage Grove, past the Jewel Food Store where a group of armed men had recently made off with a $1,000 haul.
He parked his car in South Chicago, a working-class, mostly black and Latino neighborhood bordered on the west by the Skyway, a toll road that carried suburban commuters above a part of town they’d rather not drive through
. A month earlier, a sixty-six-year-old woman had been shot in the neck a short distance away in Calumet Heights, on the street outside St. Ailbe’s Catholic church. She’d died in her pastor’s arms. A couple of teenagers, both alleged members of the Blackstone Rangers gang, were charged with the killing. That was one of 970 murders in the city in 1974—more than four decades later, still the most homicides in a calendar year in the history of Chicago.
Sherwin wasn’t dealing with anything as messy as a murder case. This was a routine burglary, not a big enough deal to justify his partner, Jerry Kush, getting out of the car.
The two-story, six-unit brick building at 8221 South Clyde Avenue looked like a tiny castle, with a crenellated roof, an arch over the entryway, and limestone ornaments near the windows. Sherwin rang the bell and got buzzed inside. As he knocked on the door of a first-floor apartment, he looked down at his clipboard and rehearsed a sequence of well-worn questions: What’s missing? Did anyone see what happened? Is there anything you’d like to add to your original report?
When someone called about a smashed front window or a stolen jewelry box, uniformed officers went to the scene and wrote it up, getting a statement from the victim and enumerating the basic facts: the time, the location, what had been stolen. The burglary investigators followed up, often from a seated position. If you treated detective work like a desk job, occasionally exerting yourself by picking up the telephone, you could push a new report off your desk in less than an hour. Nobody ever solved a case by making a single phone call, but it hardly mattered given how rarely burglary detectives recovered people’s losses. There were nearly two hundred thousand burglaries, robberies, and thefts in Chicago in 1974, an increase of 18 percent over the previous year. Sherwin’s territory—what the department called Area 2, on Chicago’s Southeast Side—was the busiest in the city, with thirty-nine burglaries a day.
A big-picture thinker wouldn’t have lasted a week in Area 2. Those stats told a depressing story, one filled with the kind of hopeless characters who subsisted on the proceeds from petty crimes. But Sherwin knew it wasn’t on him to fix Chicago. He handled what he could see and what he could touch. He preferred to check out crime scenes himself, to imagine who’d been there and what they’d done. He broke down each new assignment into a series of predictable tasks, doing all the things a conscientious burglary detective was supposed to do: He talked to the right people, chased the right leads, and wrote everything up in clear, concise reports.
The door opened at 8221 South Clyde, and Sherwin took stock of the woman standing in front of him. Four days earlier, Linda Taylor had called Area 2 headquarters to say that her home had been burglarized. Taylor appeared to be in her late thirties. She was just over five feet tall, with olive skin and dark, heavy-lidded eyes. Her face, a long oval tapering to a sharply jutting chin, seemed vaguely elfin. Her eyebrows, plucked into thin arcs, made her look like an old-fashioned glamour girl. She had a pronounced Cupid’s bow in her upper lip, and when she talked, that lip curled back to reveal the glint of gold dental work. Taylor looked as though she was expecting company: Her makeup was pristine, her outfit fashionable and snug.
As he stepped into the apartment, Sherwin noticed that Taylor kept a tidy house. Sometimes, if he went out on a case right away, he could see where a burglar had barged in. But there were no signs of forced entry here. The bolt on Taylor’s front door appeared undamaged. Nothing was broken or scattered around. Sherwin glanced again at the uniformed officers’ original report. Could they go through that list of missing items one more time?
A large green refrigerator, complete with ice maker.
Yes, she told him. That was gone.
A gold stove.
Yes. Stolen.
It was a weird list. Hospital end tables. A grandfather clock. Two large Chinese lamps. Large elephant figurines. A pair of speakers that lit up to the beat of music. Thousands of dollars’ worth of household furnishings, every piece of it insured. Most burglars snatched whatever they could fit in their hands: a ring, a necklace, a stereo, a small TV set. Stealing a refrigerator and hospital end tables, bulky objects you couldn’t hustle out of an apartment without attracting attention, didn’t make much sense.
Sherwin went back to his clipboard and studied the report. He asked Taylor to explain, again, how the thieves had gotten away with her belongings. She pointed to a window in her kitchen, an opening no more than a couple of feet across. Taylor’s version of events was preposterous: To fit a double-door refrigerator through that narrow gap, you’d have to cut it in half. The detective didn’t press her for more details. He thanked Taylor for her cooperation, and he promised to come around again just as soon as he developed any leads.
On his way out, Sherwin rang some more doorbells, but he couldn’t find any neighbors who’d seen a mysterious stranger wander off with a large appliance. As he walked back to the car, he thought about the clean apartment, the tiny window, and the woman with the olive skin and the heavy-lidded eyes. There was something so familiar about Linda Taylor. He was sure he’d had this exact case, with this exact woman. He just couldn’t remember where or when.
* * *
Sherwin knew Linda Taylor’s street. He’d grown up just a few miles away, in an all-white neighborhood close to what was then the southern tip of the city’s “Black Belt.” Back then, in the 1940s, segregation had been enforced with covenants that forbade the sale of properties to, for instance, “every person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood.” The Black Belt’s borders expanded in 1948 when the Supreme Court struck down those covenants, but segregation didn’t end with the stroke of a pen. New public housing developments kept black people confined to black enclaves, as did violence perpetrated by whites against those brave enough to breach long-standing barriers. When civil rights activist and “Queen of Gospel” Mahalia Jackson moved to the South Side in 1956, her white neighbors shot BB pellets through the windows of her house. Other black newcomers had their homes ransacked and set on fire.
The Sherwins, like many white families, packed up and moved when Chicago’s racial boundaries shifted, settling in the area around Midway Airport. Thirty years later, the detective scoped out South Side neighborhoods that bore little resemblance to the one he’d lived in as a child. Some of the areas in his jurisdiction had changed from middle-class white enclaves to middle-class black ones—the city’s most beloved athlete, Cubs legend Ernie Banks, lived with his family on a tree-lined street in Chatham. On his daily rounds, Sherwin passed by black-owned banks; the headquarters of the Johnson Products Company, manufacturer of the hair straightener Ultra Sheen; and the office of R. Eugene Pincham, a renowned black defense attorney and advocate for the disenfranchised.
Sherwin also rolled through hollowed-out streets dotted with liquor stores and check-cashing operations. South Chicago, the part of town where Linda Taylor lived, had long been the city’s smoke-belching industrial corridor, home to U.S. Steel’s mammoth South Works and countless other plants, factories, and forges. But between 1967 and 1977, the number of people working in manufacturing in Chicago proper would plummet by 33 percent. White flight took both jobs and services to the suburbs, cutting off thousands of black Chicagoans from steady employment and weakening the foundations of once-stable communities.
Area 2 burglary detectives didn’t spend their days chasing after master criminals. They arrested juveniles and addicts, young men who were more desperate than cunning. Sherwin drove to Grand Crossing and South Shore and Pullman, stopping off at apartment buildings and restaurants to jot down notes about busted back doors and stolen cash.
He spent most days two feet to the left or right of Jerry Kush, with one man driving in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Kush was the best partner Sherwin had ever had, honest and reliable, but they weren’t close friends. While Kush wore flashy clothes, Sherwin looked and dressed like a standard-issue detective, with short hair and a daily uniform of a sport coat and tie. Kush never stopped talking—about his ki
ds, his marital woes, and anything else that came to mind. Sherwin didn’t want to probe too far below the surface. Sometimes they’d hit the bars after work, but Sherwin didn’t like to drink. He hated the sensation of losing control.
Sherwin felt most comfortable when he was by himself. In high school, he didn’t go to parties or dances—he was too self-conscious to look at girls, much less talk to them. He’d found his confidence in the Marine Corps. When he came home after basic training, Sherwin wore his dress blues everywhere, and he sat the way a Marine was supposed to sit, his spine not touching the back of his chair.
In 1962, after a stint as a tank commander on Okinawa, he joined up with the Chicago Police Department. As a beat cop assigned to neighborhoods on the West and Southeast Sides, he could go from helping a woman deliver a baby to disarming a man threatening his girlfriend with a butcher knife. Sherwin loved the unpredictability of police work, and he took pride in protecting Chicago and its citizens.
There were times, though, when he thought those citizens’ actions were indefensible. Sherwin watched the West Side ignite following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, and he was on duty a few months later during the clashes between protesters and cops at the Democratic convention. A study commissioned by Mayor Richard J. Daley found that the MLK riots stemmed from “pent-up aggressions” among black Chicagoans infuriated by poor schools, inadequate housing, and racially discriminatory policing, while a federal report on the Democratic convention documented “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence” in response to demonstrators’ provocations. Sherwin didn’t come to the same conclusions. He’d feared for his life during the West Side riots, and he’d seen protesters attack policemen at the convention. He was certain that he and his fellow officers were the good guys. No matter what was happening in Chicago, nobody had the right to tear up the city.