Before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that this podcast mini-series is a companion to my new book The Queen, the forgotten life behind an American myth. The Washington Post calls it a gripping investigation that reads like a detective story. The Queen is available wherever you buy books, and now onto the show. Previously on The Queen, Linda Taylor went on trial for Welfare Fraud in 1977. Her lawyers knew that both the facts of her case and public sentiment were working against her. She was being painted as this big-time crook, indicative of all black females on Welfare. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan kept touting Taylor's crimes, railing against welfare fraud helped him connect with voters. It's a way of channeling anxiety and frustration and rage around racial hierarchy without explicitly talking about race. Linda Taylor was ultimately convicted of fraud and perjury. When she went to prison, the press lost interest in her. Nobody bothered to figure out where she'd come from or what she'd been through. When I started researching Linda Taylor, I knew she'd been accused of doing outrageous things, and that was pretty much all I knew. Taylor was an important historical figure, the model for the welfare queen stereotype. I wanted to give a full accounting of her life, one that filled in the gaps in the historical record, and there were a lot of gaps. My reporting suggested that I could find some important clues about Taylor's early life in a court file in Chicago. That file contained the records from a 1964 case concerning the estate of Lawrence Wakefield. You'll learn more about Wakefield in a few minutes. First, I want to tell you how I got that file. Court cases are usually public records. To get the documents you want, you typically just ask a clerk and pay some copy fees. But for some unknown reason, this case was sealed. In 2015, I hired some lawyers to try to get the case unsealed. They soon told me there was another more fundamental problem. The probate court couldn't find the file. After a couple of months of silence, I got an email. It said the file was locked and evolved, so old that no one in the clerk's office knew the combination to open it. At this point, I thought the clerks were making a bogus excuse, so they didn't have to dig for a 50-year-old case. But that's not what was going on. These clerks weren't lazy. They were just as eager to find the file as I was. The next message I got was that they had tried, unsuccessfully, to blast open the vault. The next thing I heard after that was that they'd gotten a safe cracker to drill holes in the vault. And the next thing after that was, miracle of miracles, they'd managed to pry open the vault. Then they looked inside, and the file wasn't there. Two months later, I got another email. The subject line was found with an exclamation point. The case file had been located on a regular shelf. In regular storage, it had gone missing because someone had mislabeled it. After a couple of legal maneuvers in a flight to Chicago, I found myself sitting in an office, looking at hundreds of pages of records, testimony about who Linda Taylor was before she became known as the welfare queen. How she'd been born on a cold and rainy day in 1926. How she'd been denied an education. How her family had effectively disowned her because of the circumstances of her birth. Flipping through all those pages, I felt for the first time that I was getting to no lend a tailor and starting to understand the contours of her life. I recognized the tailor was a scammer,

and that she'd victimized a huge number of people.

But what I found in that court file

also made me feel sad for her and angry on her behalf.

This is The Queen, a show about the woman

behind the welfare queen myth. I'm Josh Levine. Episode three, Constance. I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put it on the top.

I'm going to put. Episode 3 Slate.com slash the Queen Plus to get access wherever you listen.

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