11 “I’ll Blow Your Head Off”
For Linda Taylor, people were consumable goods, objects to cultivate, manipulate, and discard. Once she’d extracted something of value—an identity, a check, a life insurance claim—she’d move on to someone else. No matter her circumstances, and no matter her surroundings, there was always a new target.
What kind of person behaves this way? In the 1970s, psychologist Robert Hare developed a checklist to assess a given subject’s personality. The symptoms on Hare’s list read like a catalog of Linda Taylor’s known behaviors and personal characteristics: glib and superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, frequent short-term relationships, and criminal versatility.
Of the 20 items on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised, nearly every one describes the welfare queen to some degree. Dr. Steve Band, a behavioral science consultant and an expert on criminal behavior, says “people with that personality know right from wrong.” Dr. James Fallon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California at Irvine and the author of The Psychopath Inside, says that Taylor “screams psychopathy.” Along with deriving pleasure from criminal behavior, he says, psychopaths “really like getting away with it”—that “the ones who have intelligence, they don’t want to get caught.”
Despite the striking synchronicity between this checklist and Taylor’s behavior, diagnosing someone as a psychopath isn’t as easy as ticking a set of boxes. As Dave Cullen wrote for Slate in 2004, it took an elite group of mental health experts to establish Columbine shooter Eric Harris’ psychopathic “pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority.”
If a similar team of psychologists scrutinized the welfare queen, Hare’s checklist would be a logical place to start. For her part, Taylor’s daughter-in-law Carol Harbaugh has a simpler list, one with just three points: “She was brutal. She was mean. She was terrible.”
Some of Taylor’s victims were spared her worst behavior—they just learned an expensive lesson and got on with their lives. Kenneth Lynch, who’s now in his early 80s, bought a property with Taylor in Holmes County, Fla. Lynch remembers her saying that her husband had been killed by mobsters in Chicago. He also says that Taylor never came up with her share of the money, though she did pilfer Lynch’s last name. Reta Hunter, who lives in Live Oak, Fla., says “Linda Lynch” led her to stop trusting people. Taylor told Hunter she was a psychic who’d descended from Caribbean royalty, and that she could help remedy her relationship with her daughter. “The last time I seen her it cost me $80 for about 20 minutes,” Hunter says. “She could take you, honey. She was a slick talker.”
Not all of Linda Taylor’s relationships ended so harmlessly. Sherman Ray took a shotgun blast to the chest. Patricia Parks’ life ended in her daughter’s bedroom with her body pumped full of phenobarbital. And an elderly African-American woman named Mildred Markham died in Graceville, Fla., far away from her home and loved ones.
Taylor and Markham met in Chicago in the early 1980s. Markham’s husband James, a retired Pullman porter, earned a good salary in his day. Soon after he passed away, Taylor convinced the railroad man’s widow that she was her long-lost daughter. “All [Mildred] used to do was talk about this Linda,” recalls Markham’s granddaughter, Theresa Davis, who is 75 and still lives in Chicago.
By the time she fell under the sway of her new “daughter,” Mildred Markham was well into her 70s. Davis and her mother tried to convince Markham that Taylor was a con artist, but she wouldn’t listen. Markham went with Taylor to Momence, Ill. From there, they moved to Florida. All the while, according to Davis, “my grandfather’s money was going out the bank.” She says that as much as $50,000 went missing, along with Markham’s furniture, sewing machine, jewelry, and mink coats. And in 1985, Mildred deeded away 185 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., along with Willtrue Loyd and Mildred Markham.
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. Markham also told them that she wasn’t being fed. “She was forced to be there against her will,” Carol says.
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. In Carol's recollection, Taylor told Johnnie, “You even think about it, and I’ll blow your head off.” She says her husband took the threat seriously, and he decided not to get involved.
Mildred Markham died on Oct. 5, 1986. Her death certificate says she passed away of “presumed natural causes,” and that she had previously suffered a stroke. 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. In March 1986, Loyd married a woman named “Constance Rayner” in Marianna, Fla. The marriage application says Constance’s home state is Louisiana; Theresa Davis says that’s where her grandmother, Mildred Markham, was born.
The bride signed her supposed maiden name, Constance Wakefield, in a looping script. It’s a shaky signature, one that doesn’t much resemble Linda Taylor’s tidy penmanship.
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.
Markham’s medical examiner’s file lists her name as Mildred Constance Raner Loyd. Her death certificate (which misspells her first name) indicates that she’s a citizen of Trinidad, and her parents’ names are Frank Raner and Edith Wakefield. According to her granddaughter, Mildred Markham’s maiden name was actually Hampton, and she was born in the United States. Markham’s mother was not Edith Wakefield—back in the 1960s, Linda had tried to convince a judge that Edith Jarvis Wakefield was her own mother. 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.
As in the cases of Patricia Parks and Sherman Ray, Taylor stood to gain financially from Mildred Markham’s death. Mildred’s medical examiner’s file includes letters from Union Fidelity Life Insurance and Gulf Life Insurance, both of which were looking to verify the claims of one “Linda Lynch,” the decedent’s daughter. The file also contains a note in which someone, presumably the medical examiner’s assistant, writes that Markham’s daughter “took out insurance policies at varied times using different names (marriages).” The daughter needed a letter to clear up this misunderstanding, and the medical examiner complied. “To the best of my knowledge Mildred Constance Raner Loyd, Constance Loyd, and Mildred Rayner are one in the same person,” he wrote.
That wasn’t the only confusion about Mildred Markham’s death. On May 15, 1987, Dr. D. Bruce Woodham sent a letter to the medical examiner’s office saying that his patient did not die of natural causes. Woodham, a neurological surgeon, wrote that Markham hadn’t suffered a stroke. Rather, she’d fallen and hit her head. “I believe that Ms. Loyd's death was the result of an injury, she fell, she sustained a subdural hematoma, and she herniated from this, and that caused her demise,” the doctor explained.
On account of Dr. Woodham’s letter, Markham’s death was reclassified as an accident. 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.
Dr. Woodham, who is still practicing, says that although he wrote that Mildred Markham fell and hit her head, there’s no way he can know with certainty. He’s not a forensic pathologist, and he doesn’t have the expertise to distinguish between injuries that are consistent with a fall or ones that might come from a car accident or a blunt instrument. Dr. Woodham says he doesn’t remember the particulars of this case, but in general he goes by what he’s told—information provided by a paramedic, or possibly a family member.
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.
Six years after Mildred Markham’s death, her widower Willtrue Loyd died in Florida at age 72. The medical examiner’s report says he succumbed naturally, to heart disease. Loyd’s next of kin is listed as Linda Lynch, his granddaughter. Taylor was only about seven years younger than her “grandfather.” Nevertheless, as Loyd’s supposed heir, she presumably stood to receive the World War II veteran’s benefits. Another death, another check.
A short time after Loyd passed away, Johnnie Harbaugh and his wife were on vacation in Florida. He says it was around 1994, and Johnnie’s sister Sandra called to say their mother was in bad shape. “She was a mess when we found her,” Carol Harbaugh says. Taylor was living in Tampa. She’d had several face lifts, and she was wearing raggedy clothes and shoes that were too big for her. She was also “making crazy things up,” clearly in the throes of dementia.
Johnnie wanted to leave Linda in Florida, but he brought her back to Chicago out of a sense of obligation. “She is my mother,” he says. 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 2002, she was hospitalized.
“I don’t know what made me go to the hospital the day that she passed away, but I went there [for] maybe 20 minutes,” Johnnie says. 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. Johnnie couldn’t stand to see it, so he left. His mother died later that day, April 18, 2002, 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. That didn’t change just because she was dead.
Her death certificate, compiled from information provided by her daughter Sandra Smith, is a blend of truth, lies, and conjecture. The welfare queen’s name is rendered as Constance Loyd, which it wasn’t. Her date of birth is listed as Dec. 25, 1934. It wasn’t. She’s described as a homemaker, which she wasn’t. Her father and mother are given as Lawrence Wakefield and Edith Elizabeth Jarvis. They weren’t. Her race is white—the same as in the 1930 and 1940 census. Among her itemized medical conditions is bipolar disorder. That may be true, or it may be a fabrication.
The welfare queen was cremated. She has no gravestone. For a few years in the 1970s, Linda Taylor’s name was synonymous with greed and sloth. Now she was dead, and nobody noticed.
Linda Taylor, America’s Original Welfare Queen
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Linda Taylor, America’s Original Welfare Queen
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Linda Taylor, America’s Original Welfare Queen
If Linda Taylor had been seen as a suspect rather than a scapegoat, lives may have been saved.
12 “She Beat the System”
Linda Taylor’s welfare fraud trial set off a tidal wave of prosecutions. After securing the welfare queen’s conviction, Assistant State’s Attorney James Piper was placed in charge of a special welfare fraud unit. In its first year, Piper’s crew indicted 241 people. “I think the welfare queen Linda Taylor brought about a change in thinking,” Piper told the Tribune. “Millions each year are being stolen and we decided to do something about it.”
With news of indictments streaming across the front pages of the Tribune and Sun-Times, Illinoisans increasingly saw welfare fraud as a public danger. In a 2007 paper in the Journal of Social History, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann reports that a 1978 poll of Illinois voters found “that 84 percent ranked controlling welfare and Medicaid fraud and abuses their highest legislative priority.” The Tribune encouraged its readers to hunt down welfare cheats, regularly promoting a fraud hotline set up by the Department of Public Aid. In 1977 alone, that hotline received 10,047 calls. In 1979, close to 2,000 cases of potential welfare fraud were referred to law enforcement in Illinois, an increase of 1,015 percent since 1971.
Illinois embodied a nationwide trend. According to Kohler-Hausmann, welfare fraud investigations increased 729 percent across the country between 1970 and 1979. This wasn’t because fraud was on the rise, she argues—it was because Illinois and other states criminalized welfare overpayments that had once been handled administratively. The rising level of prosecutions didn’t correspond to an increase in benefit levels either. In fact, monthly welfare benefits (that is, payments via Aid to Families With Dependent Children and, after President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) began a long, steady decline in real dollars around the time of Taylor’s trial, one that’s continued to the present day.
It’s impossible to define the exact scope of welfare fraud in America then or now. A 1983 publication sponsored by the Department of Justice, for example, estimated annual Aid to Families With Dependent Children overpayments at between $376 million and $3.2 billion—not exactly a precise range. What’s clear, though, is that Linda Taylor’s larger-than-life example created an indelible, inaccurate impression of public aid recipients.
The plural of anecdote is not data. The plural of the craziest anecdote you’ve ever heard is definitely not data. And yet, the story of the welfare queen instantly infected the policy debate over welfare reform. Sociologist Richard M. Coughlin notes that in 1979, AFDC families had a median of just 2.1 children and a very low standard of living compared to the average American. In 2013, Bureau of Labor Statistics data continue to bear out the stark economic gap between families on public assistance and those who are not. Linda Taylor showed that it was possible for a dedicated criminal to steal a healthy chunk of welfare money. Her case did not prove that, as a group, public aid recipients were fur-laden thieves bleeding the American economy dry.
If Linda Taylor had been seen as a suspect rather than a scapegoat, lives may have been saved.
Even so, Ronald Reagan regularly dusted off the welfare queen’s lurid misadventures, arguing that rampant fraud demanded decisive government action. In pushing for welfare reform as president in 1981, he told members of Congress that “in addition to collecting welfare under 123 different names, she also had 55 Social Security cards,” and that “there’s much more of [this type of fraud] than anyone realizes.” The recent debate over cuts to the federal food stamp program, too, has featured Republican claims that we can save $30 billion by “eliminating loopholes, waste, fraud, and abuse.”
In truth, Reagan wrung savings out of the federal welfare program by slashing benefit levels and raising eligibility requirements. And with regard to today’s food stamp cuts, as Eric Schnurer explains in the Atlantic, “none of the savings actually come from fraud, but rather from cutting funding and tightening benefits.”
If Linda Taylor had been seen as a suspect rather than a scapegoat, lives may have been saved. Prosecutors have great discretion in choosing what cases to bring—that’s how the rate of welfare indictments could shoot up so dramatically in a single decade. When politicians and journalists whip the public into a frenzy about welfare fraud, the limitations of municipal budgets and judicial resources dictate that less attention be paid to everything else. Linda Taylor’s story shows that there are real costs associated with this kind of panic, a moral climate in which stealing welfare money takes precedence over kidnapping and homicide.
Taylor was a hard woman to pin down. She was canny, incorrigible, and mobile in a relatively primitive technological era, one in which a determined lawbreaker could make it very difficult to follow her tracks. To gather enough evidence to convincingly tie Taylor to her most serious crimes, the Chicago Police Department would’ve needed to commit to the effort fully. Clearly, they did not. In preventing Jack Sherwin from devoting his abundant energy to stopping the Windy City’s most resourceful criminal, the Chicago police prioritized day-to-day bureaucratic expedience. Sherwin says he wanted to trace Taylor’s husbands and find out what happened to every one of them, but he couldn’t get the go-ahead. He says he “wasn’t given the leeway to do what I really wanted to do.”
When cops and prosecutors let Taylor slip through their grasp, they weren’t just setting a dangerous woman loose. They also tossed away their institutional memory of her past schemes. Given the confusion she intentionally sowed, her only match was someone like Sherwin, who’d spent countless hours puzzling out her methods and movements. If Sherman Ray or Mildred Markham had turned up dead in Chicago, then law enforcement hopefully would have been wise enough at that point to launch a full-blown investigation. But Taylor was too smart for that. Once she got her freedom, she relocated to Momence and Graceville, places where nobody knew her many names.
Jack Sherwin lost track of Linda Taylor a long time ago. When I tell him that his greatest antagonist died in Chicago in 2002, he says he doesn’t condone anything she did, but that “in her own way, she was a great person. She beat the system.”
Patricia Parks-Lee says she gets a small amount of comfort from knowing that Taylor is dead, but it doesn’t bring her any closure. “My mom is gone,” she says. “I’ll never get answers to my questions. I’ll never know why she did what she did.”
Chester and Dora Fronczak never found their son Paul Joseph. Two years after he was kidnapped from a Chicago hospital, the Fronczaks adopted a child who’d been found abandoned in New Jersey. They were certain this was their missing son, christening him Paul Joseph and raising him as if he were the baby that had been taken from them.
Just more than a year ago, the Fronczaks’ adopted son posted a short note on a message board called “Orphan Memories”:
Hi, I was identified by the FBI as Paul Joseph fronczak, the kidnapped baby from Michael Reese hospital in Chicago, IL. ... I was abandoned in newark nj on July 2, 1965, found in a stroller outside a variety store. I was placed in an orphanage. When the FBI found me, I was placed in a foster home and given the name "Scott McKinley." I have just found out that I am not Paul Joseph fronczak. I need help to find out who I am.
This ersatz Paul Joseph is now on a quest to find his true identity. He’s also trying to find the baby that was taken from his adoptive parents. The FBI says it’s pursuing new leads, and ABC’s Barbara Walters recently hosted a 20/20 special on the Fronczak mystery. The man raised as Paul Joseph Fronczak, who is 49 years old (he thinks) and lives in Nevada, tells me that he was not aware of Linda Taylor’s potential connection to the 1964 kidnapping. Special Agent Joan Hyde, the media coordinator for the FBI’s Chicago field office, says the bureau will not comment on an active investigation.
Johnnie Harbaugh says he left his criminal ways behind in the 1970s, and insists that he’s no longer the man his mother raised. But his life hasn't been easy. He’s most often unemployed, and he and his wife struggle to pay their bills with his granddaughter, his son, and his son’s girlfriend living under his roof. He’s got several cars in his garage in Chicago’s northwest suburbs: a truck, a PT Cruiser. He waits until he’s almost broke and then he sells one.
Johnnie believes that his mother was capable of almost anything—that for her, family was a means to an end. His wife Carol says that after Taylor got out of prison, they learned to put padlocks on their interior doors to protect their property and themselves. Johnnie tells me his mother tried to poison him with castor oil when he was 2 or 3 years old. His older brother Cliff told him that if he hadn’t taken Johnnie and run away, then he would’ve been dead.
Eleven years after his mother died, there’s one mystery that Johnnie isn’t sure he wants to solve. Johnnie Gilbert Harbaugh’s birth certificate says he was born on Jan. 7, 1950 in Blytheville, Ark. That document, though, wasn’t issued until May 29, 1957.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to file for a delayed birth certificate—it’s possible that Johnnie’s birth, in rural Arkansas, wasn’t recorded right away. Johnnie Harbaugh’s mother, though, once used just such a document as a means of deception: In the 1960s, she procured a delayed birth certificate to prove she was “Constance Wakefield,” Lawrence Wakefield’s daughter.
When he was a child, Johnnie says, he’d see birth certificates just lying around the house. Is his own birth record a phony?
“I might have even been somebody else’s kid,” he says. “She might have grabbed me when I was a baby.” He thinks it’s likely he was stolen, that he belongs to someone else. “I’ve always felt like that, even as a kid, even as far back as I can remember.”
Over the years, he says, he had several people back in Arkansas pull him aside and say they’d tell him his life story one day—who he is, and who his mother is. But those conversations have never happened. Now, most of the people who might know the truth are dead.
12 “She Beat the System”
Linda Taylor’s welfare fraud trial set off a tidal wave of prosecutions. After securing the welfare queen’s conviction, Assistant State’s Attorney James Piper was placed in charge of a special welfare fraud unit. In its first year, Piper’s crew indicted 241 people. “I think the welfare queen Linda Taylor brought about a change in thinking,” Piper told the Tribune. “Millions each year are being stolen and we decided to do something about it.”
With news of indictments streaming across the front pages of the Tribune and Sun-Times, Illinoisans increasingly saw welfare fraud as a public danger. In a 2007 paper in the Journal of Social History, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann reports that a 1978 poll of Illinois voters found “that 84 percent ranked controlling welfare and Medicaid fraud and abuses their highest legislative priority.” The Tribune encouraged its readers to hunt down welfare cheats, regularly promoting a fraud hotline set up by the Department of Public Aid. In 1977 alone, that hotline received 10,047 calls. In 1979, close to 2,000 cases of potential welfare fraud were referred to law enforcement in Illinois, an increase of 1,015 percent since 1971.
Illinois embodied a nationwide trend. According to Kohler-Hausmann, welfare fraud investigations increased 729 percent across the country between 1970 and 1979. This wasn’t because fraud was on the rise, she argues—it was because Illinois and other states criminalized welfare overpayments that had once been handled administratively. The rising level of prosecutions didn’t correspond to an increase in benefit levels either. In fact, monthly welfare benefits (that is, payments via Aid to Families With Dependent Children and, after President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) began a long, steady decline in real dollars around the time of Taylor’s trial, one that’s continued to the present day.
It’s impossible to define the exact scope of welfare fraud in America then or now. A 1983 publication sponsored by the Department of Justice, for example, estimated annual Aid to Families With Dependent Children overpayments at between $376 million and $3.2 billion—not exactly a precise range. What’s clear, though, is that Linda Taylor’s larger-than-life example created an indelible, inaccurate impression of public aid recipients.
The plural of anecdote is not data. The plural of the craziest anecdote you’ve ever heard is definitely not data. And yet, the story of the welfare queen instantly infected the policy debate over welfare reform. Sociologist Richard M. Coughlin notes that in 1979, AFDC families had a median of just 2.1 children and a very low standard of living compared to the average American. In 2013, Bureau of Labor Statistics data continue to bear out the stark economic gap between families on public assistance and those who are not. Linda Taylor showed that it was possible for a dedicated criminal to steal a healthy chunk of welfare money. Her case did not prove that, as a group, public aid recipients were fur-laden thieves bleeding the American economy dry.
If Linda Taylor had been seen as a suspect rather than a scapegoat, lives may have been saved.
Even so, Ronald Reagan regularly dusted off the welfare queen’s lurid misadventures, arguing that rampant fraud demanded decisive government action. In pushing for welfare reform as president in 1981, he told members of Congress that “in addition to collecting welfare under 123 different names, she also had 55 Social Security cards,” and that “there’s much more of [this type of fraud] than anyone realizes.” The recent debate over cuts to the federal food stamp program, too, has featured Republican claims that we can save $30 billion by “eliminating loopholes, waste, fraud, and abuse.”
In truth, Reagan wrung savings out of the federal welfare program by slashing benefit levels and raising eligibility requirements. And with regard to today’s food stamp cuts, as Eric Schnurer explains in the Atlantic, “none of the savings actually come from fraud, but rather from cutting funding and tightening benefits.”
If Linda Taylor had been seen as a suspect rather than a scapegoat, lives may have been saved. Prosecutors have great discretion in choosing what cases to bring—that’s how the rate of welfare indictments could shoot up so dramatically in a single decade. When politicians and journalists whip the public into a frenzy about welfare fraud, the limitations of municipal budgets and judicial resources dictate that less attention be paid to everything else. Linda Taylor’s story shows that there are real costs associated with this kind of panic, a moral climate in which stealing welfare money takes precedence over kidnapping and homicide.
Taylor was a hard woman to pin down. She was canny, incorrigible, and mobile in a relatively primitive technological era, one in which a determined lawbreaker could make it very difficult to follow her tracks. To gather enough evidence to convincingly tie Taylor to her most serious crimes, the Chicago Police Department would’ve needed to commit to the effort fully. Clearly, they did not. In preventing Jack Sherwin from devoting his abundant energy to stopping the Windy City’s most resourceful criminal, the Chicago police prioritized day-to-day bureaucratic expedience. Sherwin says he wanted to trace Taylor’s husbands and find out what happened to every one of them, but he couldn’t get the go-ahead. He says he “wasn’t given the leeway to do what I really wanted to do.”
When cops and prosecutors let Taylor slip through their grasp, they weren’t just setting a dangerous woman loose. They also tossed away their institutional memory of her past schemes. Given the confusion she intentionally sowed, her only match was someone like Sherwin, who’d spent countless hours puzzling out her methods and movements. If Sherman Ray or Mildred Markham had turned up dead in Chicago, then law enforcement hopefully would have been wise enough at that point to launch a full-blown investigation. But Taylor was too smart for that. Once she got her freedom, she relocated to Momence and Graceville, places where nobody knew her many names.
Jack Sherwin lost track of Linda Taylor a long time ago. When I tell him that his greatest antagonist died in Chicago in 2002, he says he doesn’t condone anything she did, but that “in her own way, she was a great person. She beat the system.”
Patricia Parks-Lee says she gets a small amount of comfort from knowing that Taylor is dead, but it doesn’t bring her any closure. “My mom is gone,” she says. “I’ll never get answers to my questions. I’ll never know why she did what she did.”
Chester and Dora Fronczak never found their son Paul Joseph. Two years after he was kidnapped from a Chicago hospital, the Fronczaks adopted a child who’d been found abandoned in New Jersey. They were certain this was their missing son, christening him Paul Joseph and raising him as if he were the baby that had been taken from them.
Just more than a year ago, the Fronczaks’ adopted son posted a short note on a message board called “Orphan Memories”:
Hi, I was identified by the FBI as Paul Joseph fronczak, the kidnapped baby from Michael Reese hospital in Chicago, IL. ... I was abandoned in newark nj on July 2, 1965, found in a stroller outside a variety store. I was placed in an orphanage. When the FBI found me, I was placed in a foster home and given the name "Scott McKinley." I have just found out that I am not Paul Joseph fronczak. I need help to find out who I am.
This ersatz Paul Joseph is now on a quest to find his true identity. He’s also trying to find the baby that was taken from his adoptive parents. The FBI says it’s pursuing new leads, and ABC’s Barbara Walters recently hosted a 20/20 special on the Fronczak mystery. The man raised as Paul Joseph Fronczak, who is 49 years old (he thinks) and lives in Nevada, tells me that he was not aware of Linda Taylor’s potential connection to the 1964 kidnapping. Special Agent Joan Hyde, the media coordinator for the FBI’s Chicago field office, says the bureau will not comment on an active investigation.
Johnnie Harbaugh says he left his criminal ways behind in the 1970s, and insists that he’s no longer the man his mother raised. But his life hasn't been easy. He’s most often unemployed, and he and his wife struggle to pay their bills with his granddaughter, his son, and his son’s girlfriend living under his roof. He’s got several cars in his garage in Chicago’s northwest suburbs: a truck, a PT Cruiser. He waits until he’s almost broke and then he sells one.
Johnnie believes that his mother was capable of almost anything—that for her, family was a means to an end. His wife Carol says that after Taylor got out of prison, they learned to put padlocks on their interior doors to protect their property and themselves. Johnnie tells me his mother tried to poison him with castor oil when he was 2 or 3 years old. His older brother Cliff told him that if he hadn’t taken Johnnie and run away, then he would’ve been dead.
Eleven years after his mother died, there’s one mystery that Johnnie isn’t sure he wants to solve. Johnnie Gilbert Harbaugh’s birth certificate says he was born on Jan. 7, 1950 in Blytheville, Ark. That document, though, wasn’t issued until May 29, 1957.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to file for a delayed birth certificate—it’s possible that Johnnie’s birth, in rural Arkansas, wasn’t recorded right away. Johnnie Harbaugh’s mother, though, once used just such a document as a means of deception: In the 1960s, she procured a delayed birth certificate to prove she was “Constance Wakefield,” Lawrence Wakefield’s daughter.
When he was a child, Johnnie says, he’d see birth certificates just lying around the house. Is his own birth record a phony?
“I might have even been somebody else’s kid,” he says. “She might have grabbed me when I was a baby.” He thinks it’s likely he was stolen, that he belongs to someone else. “I’ve always felt like that, even as a kid, even as far back as I can remember.”
Over the years, he says, he had several people back in Arkansas pull him aside and say they’d tell him his life story one day—who he is, and who his mother is. But those conversations have never happened. Now, most of the people who might know the truth are dead.
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