The Queen

"In the fall of 1974, the Chicago Tribune found a woman its readers were sure to hate. Linda Taylor had reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a scammer, a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. But nobody--not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not Ronald Reagan, who railed against Taylor during the 1976 presidential campaign--seemed to care about anything but her welfare…