Who said welfare queen

I mean that's what some of the fascinating stuff around your reporting is that while she's officially arrested for welfare fraud, kidnapping and potential murder charges in her life are some things that we don't hear about. One of the more remarkable things that I found in my research was that she was arrested and indicted for welfare fraud in When she's out on bail she is suspected of homicide.

A woman that she was living with died of a drug overdose and there is very strong reason to believe that Taylor had been responsible for it and yet she isn't ultimately charged.

When the story of her life is told contemporaneously in the news on television in speeches by Ronald Reagan and others that just doesn't get mentioned at all. It's like it never even happened. What I've learned is that she went to prison for welfare fraud in the late s when she got out.

She eventually moved to Florida. And in the 90s she was hit with federal charges there ended up incarcerated. She was eventually released and her family took her back to Illinois where she died in , in total obscurity and under a different name. I wasn't aware that there had been a real life model for the welfare queen myth and stereotype.

When I learned about it back in that Linda Taylor had been really the first person to be given this nickname and that the image of the fur coats and the Cadillac came from her I was fascinated both by that fact and the idea that a myth and a stereotype could endure in a person's image but that person herself could be forgotten and erased was just so kind of transfixing to me and I became obsessed with trying to figure out who this person had been and why she had been forgotten.

Connie Kargbo has been working in the media field since producing content for television, radio, and the web. As a field producer at PBS NewsHour Weekend, she is involved in all aspects of the news production process from pitching story ideas to organizing field shoots to scripting feature pieces.

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Share on Facebook Share on Twitter. Transcript Audio. Megan Thompson: The stereotype of the so-called 'welfare queen' has been used to demonize those on public assistance for decades. Hari Sreenivasan: Josh there's this "welfare queen" moniker that's been used really to demonize entire groups of people. From the Tribune archives: Linda Taylor. In comparison, in , after rounds of shock treatments and time in a psychiatric facility, Bliss shot his wife to death and killed himself.

It just all feels strangely familiar. The event is free. Twitter borrelli. Skip to content. Taylor was to face charges of receiving illegal benefits from the government. According to old reports, she hated those nicknames. She fit an image. Letters from Abraham Lincoln written to Chicago Tribune leadership show the man at his angriest, and in a moment of deep gratitude for the newspaper. By Charles J. Jun 04, at PM.

Chicago Tribune. As well as that woman in Chicago? Ronald Reagan campaigned in a Lithuanian neighborhood in Chicago in September as he was making his bid to unseat Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

So did others. He learned a lot about Chicago. Linda Taylor, center, outside a home that she contends was willed to her by Patricia Parks, who died the week before, on June 22, Taylor was turned away, along with Ann Lewis, left, and their attorney Janet Nottingham. Few could have been. Holding her hat against the wind, Linda Taylor leaves court on Nov. Entertainment From the Tribune archives: Linda Taylor. Jun 07, at PM. One footnote to this:. Upon his return, he saw his case splashed across Page 3 of the Chicago Tribune.

Rather than heed that order, Sherwin and his partner gathered evidence off the clock. He believes the leak torpedoed his career. The welfare fraud, it seemed, was all that mattered. For the Chicago burglary detective, Linda Taylor was never really the welfare queen. He believed she was a kidnapper and a baby seller. Maybe something worse. P atricia Parks-Lee and her two little brothers went to Montessori school, and their mother took them shopping at the big department stores in downtown Chicago.

Parks, who was also named Patricia, earned her living as a schoolteacher. She believes her mother must have hired Taylor to keep house and watch the kids, nothing more. She says that Linda Taylor was the worst nanny they ever had. Taylor took up residence with the Parks family in At that point, Patricia Parks was a healthy woman with three young children. Less than a year later, she was dead. At the time, Taylor was out on bail, awaiting her welfare fraud trial.

Parks-Lee was 10 years old when Taylor moved in, and her brothers were 8 and 6. Before Linda Taylor moved in, Parks-Lee had her fill of home-cooked Trinidadian cuisine: fish, rice, and homemade bread. Now, with her mother getting sicker and increasingly confined to her bed, she and her brothers barely had anything to eat—it was the only time in her life, Parks-Lee says, that she went to bed hungry.

It got so bad that she found her brothers in the pantry with the door closed, trying to hide that they were eating dog biscuits. Parks-Lee had been raised to never question her mother, and now she felt completely lost. Taylor was pulling off a slow-motion home invasion, and the only witnesses to the crime were a few small children. And what did she want from them? Parks-Lee remembers that it was hard for her mom to talk. She would still smile, though, giving her children as much affection as she could muster.

Taylor kept saying that Parks was going to get better, but her health never improved. And then, she was gone. Patricia Marvel Parks passed away on June 15, She was The death certificate identified the informant as Linda C.

Taylor told the funeral director that Patricia Parks had cervical cancer. When her blood was drawn at the funeral home, however, the sample contained a high level of barbiturates.

She killed my mother. I just, I mean—she killed my mother. Parks that she would die in six months. Linda Taylor used to tell people that she got her spiritual training in her supposed home country of Haiti. Johnnie says he remembers his mother practicing voodoo—or, her version of voodoo—as far back as the s. Taylor used her charms to seduce Lamar Jones and her many other husbands. But her powers of persuasion worked on more than just marriageable men.

Patricia Parks-Lee says her mother was trusting and naive. It seems likely that Taylor convinced Parks that she had spiritual skills—and convinced her, somehow, to hand over her children, her property, and access to her bank accounts. As in the Fronczak kidnapping, Taylor was never charged with killing Patricia Parks. James Piper, the prosecutor in the welfare fraud case, also looked into the alleged Parks homicide.

For Jack Sherwin, this seemed backward. For Ronald Reagan, Taylor was a tool to convince voters that the government was in crisis. For Illinois politicians and prosecutors, the war against Linda Taylor and her ilk was a chance to vent some populist outrage and maybe launch a career. A murder in Chicago is mundane. A sumptuously attired woman stealing from John Q. Taxpayer is a menace, the kind of criminal who victimizes absolutely everyone.

In the s, it was possible for the Tribune , the Sun-Times , and the Defender to make Linda Taylor a national figure while her specific exploits remained local knowledge. This is how, in the days before the Web abetted the flow of information, Ronald Reagan could tell stories about a real woman and be accused of conjuring a fictional character.

In reality, the welfare queen was out of prison much sooner than that, and she had no trouble starting a new life, with a bushel of new names. It took more than a year for things to get back to normal, Parks-Lee says, at least as normal as they could possibly be. She remembers finding picked-over food, bones, and seeds that one of her brothers had secreted away underneath his bed—a precaution against future deprivation.

As she says those words, Patricia Parks-Lee starts to cry. When I first reached out to her, Parks-Lee explains, she was suspicious. Now she has a mission for me: She wants me to track down Linda Taylor, and she wants me to report back that the welfare queen is dead.

T aylor began serving time for welfare fraud on Feb. Though Illinois corrections officials say her prison records have been lost, she was a free woman by at the latest.

By the time Taylor won her release, she was closing in on 60 years old, and she was no longer the object of public fascination. Now, her name was Linda Ray. On Aug. All of a sudden, he said, Ray came up behind him and started grabbing at his gun. He was killed instantly. Taylor had married Sherman Ray, a former Marine, before she landed in prison. He was an older gentleman, a World War II veteran, and he was particularly devoted to Taylor—it was as though she had some kind of hold over him.

Johnnie and Carol say that Loyd and Ray were always scuffling, and that this mutual contempt was by design. They believe that Taylor pitted the two men against each other, then stepped back and watched the inevitable result.

After making his confession, Loyd was handcuffed and put in a squad car. The next day, he was released due to lack of evidence. Byron Keith Lassiter, who looked into the case on behalf of the insurance firm, says such a contestable death claim investigation would have been routine.

Linda Ray. Sherman Ray, the former Marine with emotional problems, was a man in uniform—a classic Taylor mark.

Lamar Jones, too, was in the Navy. He claims that when she filled out paperwork to become his dependent in , Linda indicated that another of her husbands had been killed in Vietnam. He thought he was lucky to find such a glamorous woman. F or Linda Taylor, people were consumable goods, objects to cultivate, manipulate, and discard. No matter her circumstances, and no matter her surroundings, there was always a new target.

What kind of person behaves this way? Of the 20 items on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Revised , nearly every one describes the welfare queen to some degree. She was mean. She was terrible. Lynch remembers her saying that her husband had been killed by mobsters in Chicago.

Reta Hunter, who lives in Live Oak, Fla. She was a slick talker. Sherman Ray took a shotgun blast to the chest. Taylor and Markham met in Chicago in the early s.

Markham went with Taylor to Momence, Ill. From there, they moved to Florida. And in , Mildred deeded away acres of Markham family land in Mississippi. The grantees were Linda Lynch and her son Clifford. For his part, Clifford says he had no idea that his name was on the deed, and that he played no part in this land deal.

Davis says she and her mother eventually saw evidence of their worst fears: Markham wrote them from Florida saying, without getting into specifics, that she was being mistreated. They tried to find Mildred, but all the addresses on her letters turned out to be phony. Johnnie and Carol Harbaugh say they saw that abuse firsthand.

Johnnie worked as a trucker back then, and he and his wife would see Taylor two or three times a year. She was living on a farm in Graceville, Fla. Once, when the Harbaughs were in Florida for a visit, Markham begged them to take her back to Chicago. Carol says Taylor was verbally abusive, and that she watched her lock Markham in a room.

They did not rescue Mildred Markham. Johnnie says that he was determined to take her but that she changed her mind at the last minute and decided to stay.

Mildred Markham died on Oct. The Graceville police department reported that her husband, Willtrue Loyd, found her body in bed. Carol Harbaugh says she thought Loyd and Markham had gotten married. Florida records suggest that was probably the case. The bride signed her supposed maiden name, Constance Wakefield, in a looping script.

Taylor always took something from her prey. But this marriage record, with the telltale Wakefield surname, shows that even as she sucked this older woman dry, Taylor was grafting parts of herself onto Mildred Markham. When Markham was still alive, Taylor made her believe that they were mother and daughter. In death, she slotted Markham into her long-running, fictional life story. On May 15, , Dr. On account of Dr. Regardless, Taylor probably collected on those life insurance policies—so long as there were no accusations of foul play, the companies more than likely paid up.

Theresa Davis does not believe her grandmother fell and hit her head. She is convinced that Mildred Markham was murdered, and that Linda Taylor is somehow responsible.

Another death, another check. A short time after Loyd passed away, Johnnie Harbaugh and his wife were on vacation in Florida. Taylor was living in Tampa. Johnnie wanted to leave Linda in Florida, but he brought her back to Chicago out of a sense of obligation.

She lived with Johnnie for a short while, then moved in with Sandra. For the next decade, their mother continued her mental and physical decline. In , she was hospitalized. The last thing she told her son was that she had a spider in her chest. She was pounding herself with her fist, Johnnie recalls, trying to kill this imaginary arachnid. It was a horrible, pathetic sight. His mother died later that day, April 18, , of a heart attack.

She was somewhere between 74 and 77 years old. For Linda Taylor, documents were never simple accountings of the truth. Pieces of paper always told a story—about her identity, her husbands, her children, her parentage, what was owed to her, and who owed it—and that story was usually self-serving, contradictory, and false.

Her death certificate, compiled from information provided by her daughter Sandra Smith, is a blend of truth, lies, and conjecture. Her date of birth is listed as Dec. Her race is white—the same as in the and census.

Among her itemized medical conditions is bipolar disorder. That may be true, or it may be a fabrication.