The Welfare Queen: Murderer, conwoman, Kidnapper?

[SirNitram]

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Ronald Reagan loved to tell stories. When he ran for president in 1976, many of Reagan’s anecdotes converged on a single point: The welfare state is broken, and I’m the man to fix it. On the trail, the Republican candidate told a tale about a fancy public housing complex with a gym and a swimming pool. There was also someone in California, he’d explain incredulously, who supported herself with food stamps while learning the art of witchcraft. And in stump speech after stump speech, Reagan regaled his supporters with the story of an Illinois woman whose feats of deception were too amazing to be believed.

“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” the former California governor declared at a campaign rally in January 1976. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” As soon as he quoted that dollar amount, the crowd gasped.

Four decades later, Reagan’s soliloquies on welfare fraud are often remembered as shameless demagoguery. Many accounts report that Reagan coined the term “welfare queen,” and that this woman in Chicago was a fictional character. In 2007, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote that “the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen [was] a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews says the whole thing is racist malarkey—a coded reference to black indolence and criminality designed to appeal to working-class whites.



Though Reagan was known to stretch the truth, he did not invent that woman in Chicago. Her name was Linda Taylor, and it was the Chicago Tribune, not the GOP politician, who dubbed her the “welfare queen.” It was the Tribune, too, that lavished attention on Taylor’s jewelry, furs, and Cadillac—all of which were real.

As of 1976, Taylor had yet to be convicted of anything. She was facing charges that she’d bilked the government out of $8,000 using four aliases. When the welfare queen stood trial the next year, reporters packed the courtroom. Rather than try to win sympathy, Taylor seemed to enjoy playing the scofflaw. As witnesses described her brazen pilfering from public coffers, she remained impassive, an unrepentant defendant bedecked in expensive clothes and oversize hats.

Linda Taylor, the haughty thief who drove her Cadillac to the public aid office, was the embodiment of a pernicious stereotype. With her story, Reagan marked millions of America’s poorest people as potential scoundrels and fostered the belief that welfare fraud was a nationwide epidemic that needed to be stamped out. This image of grand and rampant welfare fraud allowed Reagan to sell voters on his cuts to public assistance spending. The “welfare queen” became a convenient villain, a woman everyone could hate. She was a lazy black con artist, unashamed of cadging the money that honest folks worked so hard to earn.

After her welfare fraud trial in 1977, Taylor went to prison, and the newspapers moved on to covering the next outlandish villain. When her sentence was up, she changed her name and left Chicago, and the cops who had pursued her in Illinois lost track of her whereabouts. None of the police officers I talked to knew whether she was still alive.

When I set out in search of Linda Taylor, I hoped to find the real story of the woman who played such an outsize role in American politics—who she was, where she came from, and what her life was like before and after she became the national symbol of unearned prosperity. What I found was a woman who destroyed lives, someone far more depraved than even Ronald Reagan could have imagined. In the 1970s alone, Taylor was investigated for homicide, kidnapping, and baby trafficking. The detective who tried desperately to put her away believes she’s responsible for one of Chicago’s most legendary crimes, one that remains unsolved to this day. Welfare fraud was likely the least of the welfare queen’s offenses.

For those who knew her decades ago, Linda Taylor was a terrifying figure. On multiple occasions, I had potential sources tell me they didn’t think I was really a journalist. Maybe I was a cop. Maybe I was trying to kill them. As Lamar Jones tells me about his brief marriage to the welfare queen, he keeps asking how I’ve found him, and why I want to know all of these personal details. If I’m in cahoots with Linda, as he suspects I might be, he assures me that I won’t be able to find him again. He’s just going to disappear.

Those who crossed paths with Linda Taylor believe she’s capable of absolutely anything. They also hope she’s dead.

Jack Sherwin knew he’d seen her before. It was Aug. 8, 1974, and the Chicago burglary detective was working a case on the city’s South Side. Though her name and face didn’t look familiar, Sherwin recognized the victim’s manner, and her story. She’d been robbed, Linda Taylor explained, and she was sorry to report that the burglar had good taste: $14,000 in furs, jewelry, and cash were missing from her apartment. Thank heavens, most of it was insured.

After listening to her tale of woe, Sherwin asked Taylor if she’d mind getting him some water. When she returned, the detective kept the glass as evidence.



The fingerprints collected from Taylor’s kitchen helped jog Sherwin’s memory. Two years earlier, the same woman had been charged with making a bogus robbery claim—that time, the thieves had supposedly made off with $10,000 worth of valuables. Sherwin knew Linda Taylor because, out of pure happenstance, he’d been called on to investigate both of these alleged burglaries. She was living in a different part of town, using a different name, and sporting a different head of hair. But this was the same woman, pulling the same stunt.

Sherwin cited Taylor, again, for making a false report. But the 35-year-old police officer, a former Marine and a 12-year veteran of the force, didn’t stop there. “The more I dug into it, the more I found that just wasn’t right,” he remembers. First, he learned that she was getting welfare checks under multiple names. Then he discovered Taylor’s husbands—“Oh, I guess maybe seven men that I knew of,” Sherwin says. The detective and his partner, Jerry Kush, got to work tracking down this parade of grooms, and they found a few who were willing to talk. Sherwin’s hunch had been right: This woman was up to no good.

In late September 1974, seven weeks after Sherwin met Taylor for the second time, the detective’s findings made the Chicago Tribune. “Linda Taylor received Illinois welfare checks and food stamps, even tho[ugh] she was driving three 1974 autos—a Cadillac, a Lincoln, and a Chevrolet station wagon—claimed to own four South Side buildings, and was about to leave for a vacation in Hawaii,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winner George Bliss. The story detailed a 14-page report that Sherwin had put together illuminating “a lifestyle of false identities that seemed calculated to confuse our computerized, credit-oriented society.” There was evidence that the 47-year-old Taylor had used three Social Security cards, 27 names, 31 addresses, and 25 phone numbers to fuel her mischief, not to mention 30 different wigs.

As the Tribune and other outlets stayed on the story, those figures continued to rise. Reporters noted that Linda Taylor had used as many as 80 names, and that she’d received at least $150,000—in illicit welfare cash, the numbers that Ronald Reagan would cite on the campaign trail in 1976. (Though she used dozens of different identities, I’ve chosen to call her Linda Taylor in this story, as it’s how the public came to know her at the height of her infamy.) Taylor also gained a reputation as a master of disguise. "She is black, but is able to pass herself off as Spanish, Filipino, white, and black," the executive director of Illinois’ Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid told the Associated Press in November 1974. "And it appears she can be any age she wishes, from the early 20s to the early 50s.”

For Bliss and the Tribune, the scandal wasn’t just that Taylor had her hand in the till and had the seeming ability to shape-shift. The newspaper also directed its ire at the sclerotic bureaucracy that allowed her schemes to flourish. Bliss had been reporting on waste, fraud, and mismanagement in the Illinois Department of Public Aid for a long time prior to Taylor’s emergence. His stories—on doctors who billed Medicaid for fictitious procedures and overworked caseworkers who failed to purge ineligible recipients from the welfare rolls—showed an agency in disarray. That disarray didn’t make for an engaging read, though: “State orders probe of Medicaid” is not a headline that provokes shock and anger. Then the welfare queen came along and dressed the scandal up in a fur coat. This was a crime that people could comprehend, and Linda Taylor was the perfectly unsympathetic figure for outraged citizens to point a finger at.

Now that the Tribune had found the central character in this ongoing welfare drama, a story about large, dysfunctional institutions became a lot more personal. The failure—or worse, unwillingness—to ferret out Taylor’s dirty deeds revealed more about the flaws of state and county government than any balance sheet ever could. In his report to his superiors at the Chicago Police Department, Sherwin described ping-ponging from the Department of Public Aid to the state’s attorney’s office to the U.S. attorney, with none of the agencies expressing much interest in helping him out. The Tribune’s headline: “Cops find deceit—but no one cares.”

Sherwin eventually found a willing partner in the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid, a body put together by state legislators eager to take a stand against government waste. The detective also learned that Taylor was wanted on felony welfare fraud charges in Michigan. At the end of August 1974, she was arrested in Chicago, then released on bond in advance of an extradition hearing. A month later—and the day after the Tribune told her story for the first time—Linda Taylor didn’t answer when her name was called in Cook County Circuit Court. The most notorious woman in Illinois was on the lam.



On Aug. 12, 1974—four days after Linda Taylor told Jack Sherwin she’d been robbed—Lamar Jones met his future bride. The 21-year-old sailor was working in the dental clinic at Chicago’s Great Lakes Naval Training Center when a beautiful woman walked in to get her teeth cleaned. Something about her was totally fascinating, Jones remembers. “I met her because she was pretty and I was shooting game to her,” he says. “I guess her game must’ve been stronger than mine, because I met her that Monday and [got] married that Saturday.”

Jones thought he was lucky to get hitched to the 35-year-old Linda Sholvia. She was beautiful, with the smoothest skin he’d ever seen. She also gave him $1,000 as a wedding present, and he had his pick of fancy new cars. But Lamar and Linda’s marriage lasted only a little longer than their five-day courtship. A few weeks after they exchanged vows, Linda was arrested. When Jones paid her bond, his new wife fled the state. To make things worse, she stole his color TV.

The young Navy man realized that something was amiss with his new bride even before the television went missing. When she showed him a degree from a university in Haiti, he noticed that it said Linda Taylor, not Linda Sholvia. Jones says Linda had five mailboxes at her residence at 8221 S. Clyde Ave., and she’d get letters in all five, addressed to different names. He got a bit uneasy when Linda told him, after they were married, that he was her eighth husband. She also had a “sister” named Constance who seemed more like her adult daughter.

Her skin was so pale and smooth, he says, that she could look Asian, or like a light-skinned black woman, or even white. One night, though, he woke up before dawn and saw that his bride’s smooth skin wasn’t so perfect—she had “1,000 wrinkles on her face.” After he caught this illicit glimpse, Linda locked herself in the bathroom for an hour. When she came out, she looked like a whole new person.

Once Linda fled the state, that ended all hope of salvaging their three-week marriage. Jones says at that point he cooperated with authorities, who wiretapped his phone and traced one of the fugitive’s calls. On Oct. 9, “Constance Green” was apprehended in Tucson, Ariz., on behalf of Chicago police. Three days later, the Tribune’s George Bliss wrote that “the 47-year-old ‘welfare queen’ was being held in a [Tucson] jail.” It’s the first instance I’ve found of someone being branded a “welfare queen” in print.

A month after his wife was brought back from Arizona, Lamar Jones testified against her in front of a Cook County grand jury. Jones says that around the time of that proceeding, he was shuffled into a car with another witness and told they had something in common: They were both married to Linda (or maybe it was Connie) at the same time. That was a surprise to Jones. His wife had told him that husband No. 7 was dead.



On Nov. 13, Taylor was indicted on charges of theft, perjury, and bigamy. (The bigamy charges were later dropped.) In court records listing the counts of the indictment, the defendant’s name is recorded as Connie Walker, aka Linda Bennett, aka Linda Taylor, aka Linda Jones, aka Connie Jarvis. She was either 35, 39, 40, or 47 years old, depending on whose story you believed.

Given all the superlatives that attached themselves to Taylor—the executive director of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid told the Tribune, “She is without a doubt, the biggest welfare cheat of all time”—the charges against her weren’t all that impressive. One of the assistant state’s attorneys prosecuting Taylor told the UPI that all the rumors were “probably” true. “But what makes me angry about all the stories is that most of them are not indictable," she said. "We simply don't have the facts on all of those things.” The Tribune reported that Taylor was filching every form of public assistance imaginable: Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid, and Aid to Families With Dependent Children. But the hard evidence—canceled AFDC checks, and Medicaid ID cards under multiple names—allowed the state to charge her with stealing $8,000 from the public coffers, nothing more.

Taylor’s welfare fraud case stalled in the courts for long enough that her 1974 indictment remained campaign fodder for Ronald Reagan in 1976. The yawning chasm between “probable” and “indictable” was wide enough for Reagan to label Linda Taylor a public scourge, and for the candidate’s critics to claim she was a media myth. In October 1976, Reagan—who had lost that year’s GOP nomination to Gerald Ford—devoted one of his regular radio commentaries to updating the story of the “welfare queen, as she’s now called.” (While I haven’t found any examples of him saying “welfare queen” on the stump in 1976, he did use the term in this radio address.) According to Reagan, it had now been revealed that this woman (he still didn’t identify her by name) had operated in 14 states using 127 names, claimed to be the mother of 14 children, was using 50 addresses “in Chicago alone,” and had posed as an open heart surgeon. She also had “three new cars, a full-length mink coat, and her take is estimated at a million dollars.”



While Reagan sourced his report to “the chief investigative reporter of the Chicago Tribune,” I can’t find anything in the Tribune to support the claim that Taylor’s take reached $1 million. The bits about the new cars and the fur coat were accurate, though. And the part about her posing as a heart surgeon—that was probably true, too.

The Tribune printed so many incredible stories about Linda Taylor that it really wasn’t necessary for Reagan to exaggerate the figures. As he’d said, Taylor had posed in Michigan as a heart surgeon named Dr. Connie Walker and, in the Tribune’s telling, “drove a new Cadillac bearing the physicians’ staff and serpent on both doors and the word ‘Afri-med’ on the rear.” According to other accounts, she allegedly practiced voodoo and had traveled to Jamaica after being released from jail. In September 1975, Taylor’s son-in-law and her daughter Sandra were indicted for getting fraudulent Aid to Families With Dependent Children payments. A month later, with Taylor out on bond and awaiting trial for welfare fraud, she told police that two men with guns had barged into her apartment and stolen $17,000 in jewelry—a crime reminiscent of those phony burglaries that led the Chicago police to start digging into her tangled life.

In February 1976, Jack Sherwin dropped in on Taylor’s home to deal with yet another burglary case. This time, Chicago’s welfare queen was the alleged perpetrator, not the victim. Taylor allegedly had snatched $800 worth of items from a woman she’d been living with. The police found the victim’s electric can opener, color TV, and fur coat squirreled away in Taylor’s apartment building, though a three-piece polka-dot pantsuit was not recovered. The officers also found two small children living in squalid conditions. The boys, a white 7-year-old and a black 5-year-old, were taken into protective custody.

The subsequent news stories focused on Taylor’s car, which was impounded because she’d allegedly used it in the commission of the crime. The headline in the New York Times: “ ‘Welfare Queen’ Loses Her Cadillac Limousine.” The newspapers did not mention all the other evidence found in Taylor’s home. A partial rundown of the items seized, as listed in the police report:



phone bill carrying the name Mary Stevenson, c/o Willtrue Loyd
Chicago Motor Club document bearing the name Yepez Juventino
a Chicago Motor Club card for Linda C. Jones
an AMOCO Motor Club card for Linda C. Wakefield
Allstate Insurance Co. letter to Linda Bennett
a department store credit card in the name Patricia M. Parks
coroner’s death certificate for Frank Brown
business letter from Martin Fertal attorney at law to Mrs. Lillian McIntosh
Veterans Administration letter to Mrs. Constance Howard
auto insurance policy in the name of Linda C. Wakefield
Veterans Administration letter to Jessie L. Green
membership document of “Epsilon Delta Chi” certifying Connie R. Walker, Ph.D., M.D., as member
membership card for Epsilon Delta Chi in name Dr. Linda C. Wakefield
birth certificates for children named Willie and Hosey
a personal letter signed “Husband Ray”
a rent receipt from Mrs. Linda Ray to Everleana Brame
a mortgage receipt for J&P Parks
a mortgage notice, for the same address, for Linda C. Wakefield
a receipt for a safety deposit box in the name Linda C. Jones
a telephone bill addressed to Sherman F. Ray
envelope addressed to Linda Ray
two lottery tickets

In addition to this remarkable collection of documented pseudonyms, Taylor’s cache includes many other people’s names—on a credit card, a telephone bill, and all manner of documents. These are not aliases. They are possible victims.

For much of the 1970s, Taylor had consistent legal representation from celebrated black Chicago attorney R. Eugene Pincham. In the run-up to Taylor’s welfare fraud trial, Pincham—who managed to delay the proceedings for years, winning continuance after continuance—positioned his client as a victim of coldhearted, overreaching prosecutors. “It would be a pretty sorry situation if the state tried to prosecute and send to jail everybody from the South Side that took welfare money they didn't have coming," he told the Tribune in 1976. "There'd just be nowhere to put them.” Prosecutors, meanwhile, called Taylor a “parasitic growth,” a leech who gleefully extracted taxpayers’ money.

Taylor didn’t help her legal team sell the idea that she was a piteous victim. The AP described her courtroom attire as “brightly colored mod outfits with sparkling rings and bracelets,” a gaudy wardrobe that gave TV crews and newspaper photographers the perfect welfare queen action shot. Isaiah Gant, who eventually took over Taylor’s case from his colleague Pincham, says she’d position herself to be seen by the cameras but would not deign to speak. “Doing interviews would have made her commonplace,” Gant says.

The trial of the welfare queen finally began in March 1977, two-and-a-half years after Det. Jack Sherwin cited Taylor for making a false burglary report. Sherwin testified that he’d observed Taylor with green Medicaid ID cards carrying the names Connie Walker and Linda Bennett. An FBI handwriting expert, too, took the stand to say that 13 of the Walker and Bennett signatures on her monthly AFDC checks, which ranged in value from $249 to $464, were “definitely” written in Taylor’s hand.



It took the jury seven hours to find Taylor guilty. Judge Mark Jones sentenced her to two to six years for theft and one for perjury, with the terms to be served consecutively. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Taylor, always poker-faced in court, had tears in her eyes when she learned her fate.

Shedding a tear is a rational response to a felony conviction. Taylor’s behavior before, during, and after the trial, by contrast, was consistently bizarre and brazen. While Taylor was awaiting sentencing, Judge Jones revoked her bond when the home address she’d given a probation officer turned out to be a vacant lot. Though she’d been called Linda Taylor throughout the trial, she now told a different story: “They're looking for Linda Taylor, and I'm not Linda Taylor.” A few months later, she was released from custody briefly while her case was on appeal. According to Cook County prosecutor James Piper, she subsequently “applied for welfare, claiming she needed the money for medical purposes.” Piper told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that she was suspected of falsifying information on the application.

Was Taylor a cold and calculating grifter? Was she mentally ill? Isaiah Gant, who has been an attorney for nearly four decades, says his onetime client “was a scam artist like I have never run across since.” Gant, now an assistant federal public defender in Nashville, Tenn., says Taylor could change personalities in an instant. “If she wanted to be a ho, she could be a ho. If she wanted to be a princess, she could be a princess,” he says. “The woman was smooth.”

When she was preparing to stand trial for the 1976 theft of an electric can opener and fur coat, another of Taylor’s attorneys had asked the court to have her submit to a behavioral clinic examination. In that petition, her lawyer explained that Taylor’s former attorneys had informed him “that the Defendant was incapable of knowing whether or not she was telling the truth.” In addition, there were “reports of two psychiatrists who examined her which referred to her as being psychotic and unable to understand the nature of the proceedings.”

The petition for a medical examination was ultimately denied. In February 1978, the welfare queen entered Illinois’ Dwight Correctional Center. According to the Sun-Times, while incarcerated she worked cleaning her fellow inmates’ cottages. As of March 1979, she had a minor violation on her prison record, having “allegedly used state-owned materials to make cushions and sell them.”

After that, Linda Taylor disappeared from newsprint. By the end of the 1970s, Taylor had become a historical footnote. The welfare queen was forgotten before anyone figured out who she really was.



It took a crew of cops nearly 20 hours to count all the cash. There were coins and bills stuffed in the furniture, sheathed in piles of clothes, and stuffed inside laundry bags, pillowcases, cardboard boxes, and an old foot locker. A deputy superintendent said that it was the biggest haul he’d come across in 23 years on the force. The final tally: $763,223.30.

The Chicago police had gone to Lawrence Wakefield’s house on Feb. 18, 1964, after getting a report that he was deathly ill. When cops and firemen arrived on the scene, they spotted coin wrappers and betting slips—the calling cards of a gambling operation. Just hours after the authorities raided his living room, Wakefield died in the hospital of an intracranial hemorrhage. His death certificate identifies him as a 60-year-old “Negro.”



Everybody on the South Side of Chicago knew Wakefield was a hustler, but they didn’t think he was this good at it. Wakefield operated a policy racket, a kind of underground lottery that thrived in the Windy City until the 1970s. Neighborhood proprietors fished numbers out of a drum, and bettors won by matching the resulting combination—the UPI termed it “the poor man’s stock market.”

By the mid-1960s, the Italian mob had muscled most of the black kingpins out of the policy game, but they hadn’t hassled the shabby, modest-living Wakefield. Why bother? The guy was clearly small time.

It was probably true that Wakefield’s glory days were long gone—some of the greenbacks the cops uncovered were a half-century old. But the money was still real, even if he preferred hoarding it to spending it. Since he hadn’t been charged with any crime, the police didn’t confiscate Wakefield’s bounty. Now, it wasn’t clear how to disburse this windfall. Wakefield hadn’t made out a will, and he had no known living relatives.

When photos of all that cash hit the Chicago papers, more than a dozen alleged heirs emerged to grab for the money. One contender was Rose Kennedy, a 66-year-old white woman who said she was Wakefield’s common-law wife. According to Kennedy, she and her late husband—who had died 30 years earlier—had invested $160,000 to start their own policy operation in Chicago. When her husband passed away, Kennedy explained, Lawrence Wakefield had taken the reins of their operation, and she’d become his live-in companion.

Kennedy’s toughest competition for the loot was a woman named Constance Wakefield. On April 18, 1964, the city’s black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, splashed a headline across its front page: “Dead Policy King’s $763,000 Demanded By His ‘Daughter’: Has Papers To Prove Her Claim.” The first two paragraphs of the story read skeptically:

A 29-year-old woman who claims to be the daughter of the late policy king, Lawrence Wakefield, has unfolded a fantastic story of "plots" and intrigues which separated her from her "father."

The claimant, Constance Beverly Wakefield, who lives on Chicago's Northside, showed the DEFENDER an array of "documents" which, she claims, prove she is the daughter of Wakefield.



The Defender’s reporter described an unusual scene at Constance Wakefield’s home, which was protected by a bodyguard, decorated with “odd figurines,” and featured a myna bird that “constantly squawked the name ‘Lawrence.’ ” The 29-year-old Constance, who showed “signs of having been a beauty in her younger days,” produced a 1935 birth certificate listing her parents as Lawrence R. Wakefield and Edith L. Jarvis. Constance said she’d grown up in Blytheville, Ark., and had believed until recently that this Edith Jarvis was her grandmother.

It got stranger from there. Constance told the Defender that Rose Kennedy, Lawrence Wakefield’s purported common-law wife, was no such thing. She also accused Kennedy of trying to poison her, saying, “The doctors said I had swallowed enough strychnine to kill a dozen people.” And in just the last few weeks, she reported, police had captured two white men trying to break into her house; a “swarthy Italian” had threatened to kill her; and her bodyguard had narrowly thwarted an attempt to blow up her 1964 Cadillac. A few days after that, the Associated Negro Press wrote that Constance Wakefield Steinberg—she was a “light-skinned Negro woman with a ‘Jewish’ surname”—“reported to police that her 11-year-old son, John, had been kidnapped and that she had received a number of threatening calls.”

Whether she was going by Constance Wakefield, Linda Taylor, or any other name, the future welfare queen never went for subtlety. She was a woman of great ambition, and she conjured a universe in which the forces arrayed against her were equally extraordinary. Someone was always trying to kill her, or steal from her, or kidnap her, or take her children. These stories rarely checked out. Her son John, the Chicago Sun-Times would report, hadn’t been kidnapped. He was found by FBI agents wandering near his house, and explained that he’d run away after a fight with his sister. Census records and Lawrence Wakefield’s own death certificate reveal that Edith Jarvis was not Wakefield’s wife, as Taylor had asserted—she was his mother. When Taylor went to probate court to press her claim to the Wakefield fortune, even more of her story fell apart.



In this and many of her other battles, Linda Taylor’s weapons were documents, paperwork of uncertain provenance that buttressed her version of events. Though her birth to Lawrence and Edith did not appear in contemporaneous records, she procured a delayed birth certificate from the doctor who she claimed had delivered her. She also furnished a pair of Lawrence Wakefield’s heretofore-undiscovered wills. The first, which dated to 1943, included a description of Wakefield’s daughter that matched her own, “specifically describing a scar and a mole and their location on her body,” the Tribune reported. The second will, from 1962, indicated that Wakefield had $2 million, that the vast majority of that lucre should go to his daughter, and that Rose Kennedy—who Taylor maintained was Lawrence Wakefield’s housekeeper, not his common-law wife—was entitled to precisely $1. "She is no good and will try to take everything from my baby,” the will read, according to the Tribune. “She has stoled enough from me since the death of my Edith."

None of this evidence—the delayed birth certificate, the will that conveniently trashed her primary rival—convinced Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Gerald Mannix that he was dealing with Lawrence Wakefield’s real daughter. A long way from Chicago, he found someone who could help him prove it.

“A surprise witness testified in Probate court yesterday that Miss Constance Wakefield, who claims to be the illegitimate daughter of the late Lawrence Wakefield, policy king, and thus heir to his fortune, actually is Martha Louise White,” the Tribune reported on Nov. 10, 1964. Hubert Mooney, who claimed to be Martha’s uncle, explained that his niece was born in Summit, Ala., around 1926, making her about 38 years old—nine years older than she’d claimed to be in the guise of Constance Wakefield. Martha, Mooney said, was the daughter of his sister Lydie and a man named Marvin White. The court didn’t have to take his word for it. Hubert’s 84-year-old mother came from Tennessee to testify that she’d assisted in her granddaughter Martha’s birth.

Mooney said he’d seen his niece most recently in Arkansas—the state where “Constance Wakefield” had grown up, according to her interview with The Chicago Defender. He’d also run into her in Oakland, Calif. On that occasion, she’d asked her uncle to bail her out of jail. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the assistant state’s attorney produced fingerprints and “police records from Oakland, which he said were those of Miss Wakefield, listing arrests for prostitution, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and assault.” A police expert testified that those fingerprints matched those of Beverly Singleton, a woman who’d been arrested the year prior for assaulting a 12-year-old girl. Constance Wakefield, it seemed, was many people, but she probably wasn’t Constance Wakefield.

This dramatic testimony didn’t clear everything up. For her part, “Constance Wakefield” said she knew Hubert Mooney but that she was not Martha Louise White. She also denied that she was the woman identified in all those criminal records, though she did confess that she’d been charged with assault in Oakland.

Weighing all the evidence, Judge Anthony Kogut cited Taylor for contempt of court and sentenced her to six months in jail. She wouldn’t get any of Lawrence Wakefield’s money, the balance of which would go to Rose Kennedy, the policy king’s common-law wife.

For Hubert Mooney, who died in 2009, this was a jarring experience. His daughter Joan Shefferd says Mooney was from a different era, and that he was a very prejudiced man. Taylor’s behavior, she says, made her father angrier than she’d ever seen him. His niece’s lying and scheming were one thing, but there was something else he’d never understand. Why was Martha Louise White passing herself off as a black woman?

There's lots, LOTS more. But the gist seems to be: The 'welfare queen' was found, tried for that, and released after the sentence.. And then vanished, with all signs of killing, stealing, and kidnapping in her wake, tossed aside when they had the chance to pursue welfare cheat histeria.

[Patroklos]

A very interesting story.

I don't get your accusation at the end of your comment though. The prosecutors are quoted as clearly stating they wanted to throw the book at her but they had no evidence to do so, and this includes the vast majority of the welfare fraud.

[Edi]

A very interesting story.

I don't get your accusation at the end of your comment though. The prosecutors are quoted as clearly stating they wanted to throw the book at her but they had no evidence to do so, and this includes the vast majority of the welfare fraud.

You miss the point. The welfare queen is the stereotype peddled by the right wing, based entirely on this single instance and they always downplay or outright ignore the actual facts regarding its source.

A comparable example would be if somebody managed to force into the public consciousness a meme that all US military personnel are inhuman sadistic torture fans, based entirely on the single case of Charles Graner and Lynndie England (and the others who got caught on film in the Abu Ghraib scandal) and then always completely ignored every piece of evidence that they were an exceptional case, and continued peddling the false stereotype.

[Broomstick]

Not only that, but thirty years of public policy has been made based upon this one instance of welfare fraud. Stop and think about that for a minute.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Isn't that the case for so many things though? A small, sometimes tiny minority doing things so far out of line with society that vast amounts of policy are needed to deal with it.

[Elheru Aran]

Isn't that the case for so many things though? A small, sometimes tiny minority doing things so far out of line with society that vast amounts of policy are needed to deal with it.

Then you deal with those cases on an individual basis and you don't adjust the entire policy for everybody. That's an overreaction and causes extraordinary issues for those who are already dealing with enough to start with. The problem here is that this extremely high profile case ended up causing the guidelines for who receives welfare to be changed to a degree which prevents many people who actually need welfare from getting it. This woman should've just been prosecuted and the only change necessary to the existing policies (as far as cases of welfare fraud goes) was that the government needed to keep a better eye on welfare recipients and what they were doing with the money they were given. Part of the reason this woman succeeded was that she could commit identity fraud multiple times with ease. This is much more difficult now.

[Pelranius]

I wouldn't be surprised if Hollywood tries to make a movie out of this.

[Wing Commander MAD]

I'm not disagreeing about hysteria comment, but Patroklos has a point. Nitram makes it sound as if they tossed aside the other issues in favor of prosecuting only welfare fraud, which is a somewhat inaccurate take on the events in the article. The prosecutor said they didn't pursue at least one of the potential murders due to lack of evidence and a concern that it would jeopardize the welfare fraud case, which had strong evidence, by trying to sensationalize the incident further. That could be CYA, but it seems quite reasonable to me. The other issue being that the detectives collecting all the information were doing so without having been sanctioned by their superiors, something that blew up in their face spectacularly due to the Chicago Tribune leaking information, which probably poisoned the well regarding her other potential crimes and possibly also as a result of internal politics. In this case the detectives seem to have been correct and I think they did a mostly good job, but at the same time I can't help but feel uncomfortable in general about their course of action. In my view, and I believe that of most people, such actions by law enforcement are questionable at best, as it has the potential to cross over into vendetta territory which could jeopardize the legal process. Having read the article, I'd argue the Tribune bears most of the responsibility for the welfare fraud hysteria, though the various state and federal agencies not cooperating with the detectives certainly didn't help the situation and only helped fuel the fire.

All that said, I agree the truly sad thing is what happened not only to the direct victims of this woman, but all those she indirectly harmed by being a propaganda piece incarnate. None the less, it was a fascinating read and I thank SirNitram for posting it.