Linda Weston admits to enslaving and abusing disabled people to steal their welfare money

THE smell emanating from the sub-basement level of the seven-storey apartment building was overwhelming.

But that’s not what first roused the suspicion of the building’s owner, Turgut Gozleveli. He was mystified by having found two dog bowls in the basement of his strictly no-pets-allowed building, and none of his tenants were owning up to putting them there.

Anticipating some hidden pets somewhere, Gozleveli ventured further downstairs into the building’s tiny sub-basement.

He opened the door to a tiny fuace room and was overcome by the putrid smell. But what his flashlight revealed was even more shocking.

Four adults, with mental disabilities, were huddled together in the cramped, squalid room, covered by stained blankets. One of the men was chained to the broken fuace. There was little else in the room besides a mayonnaise jar that served as their toilet.

Four adults were found locked up in this squalid boiler room, which became known as the Basement of Horrors. Picture: Ron Cortes / The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP Source: AP

Never mind illegal pets — Gozleveli had a bigger problem on his hands. He thought they were squatters and ordered them to leave until one of them meekly spoke.

“Linda brought us here,” the weak woman said.

Linda was Linda Weston, 55, who pleaded guilty in a Pennsylvania court yesterday to kidnapping adults with mental disabilities, stealing their welfare money and subjecting them to shocking and sometimes fatal abuse in a chilling case known as the Basement of Horrors.

THE DISCOVERIES

It was October in 2011 when Turgut Gozleveli discovered the four people in the filthy dungeon of his apartment block in Tacony, North Philadelphia, where Weston was living with one of her children.

The Tacony basement of horrors. Ron Cortes / AP Source: AP

Gozleveli immediately called the police, who described the four malnourished victims — aged between 29 and 41 — as having the mental capacity of 10-year-olds. Two of them had been reported missing by their families years earlier.

“They were tired, beat-up looking, thirsty and hungry,” Gozleveli told Reuters.

“They didn’t know what world they were living in.”

Police weren’t sure how long the captives had been there, but Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey said it appeared they had been secretly moved from place to place each time suspicions had been raised.

“I’m not sure horrific covers it,” Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter said at the time.

“This is sheer madness … I think this is quite possibly one of the most visible signs of man’s inhumanity to man.”

But officers investigating the gut-chuing scene in the sub-basement found evidence to suggest these four not Weston’s only victims.

The personal identification of at least 50 other people were found in the initial search. Police soon realised Weston was the mastermind of a multi-state kidnapping and fraud ring, for which she is now likely to spend the rest of her life behind bars.

According to an FBI report released yesterday, over the course of a decade, Weston and her co-conspirators — including her daughter — lured their victims into locations they rented in Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Florida.

The group “targeted mentally challenged individuals who were estranged from their families”, the FBI said.

They confined their victims, naked, in dark isolation and sedated them with drugs.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, when food supplies ran low, they were forced to eat their own and each other’s waste.

The FBI said when any of the captives tried to escape, stole food or protested their treatment, “Weston and others punished them by slapping, punching, kicking, stabbing, buing and hitting them with closed hands, belts, sticks, bats and hammers or other objects, including the butt of a pistol”.

The group shuttled their victims from Philadelphia to Texas, Virginia, Florida and back again to avoid detection.

The victims included six adults with mental disabilities and four children. Some victims endured abuse for years. Two died. And of those who did survive, one was Weston’s own niece.

Philadelphia police found 19-year-old Beatrice Weston in the upstairs closet of another home just days after they arrested Weston over the four adults in Gozleveli’s sub-basement.

Police said Weston had abducted Beatrice 10 years earlier, when she was nine. She had been forced into prostitution.

Beatrice was so badly beaten, bued and malnourished the police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, said he had never seen injuries like it in his 40-year career.

Philadelphia police spokesman Ray Evers said “no penalty is too harsh to the people who did this”.

“We’re going to prepare to prosecute this here or, without hyperbole, wherever the prisons are going to be the worst,” he said at the time.

“Federal prisons might be too nice. I’ve never seen anything like this before on a living person, that kind of cruelty over and over again.”

THE DEATHS

Two women described by US Department of Justice as “mentally challenged” died while being held captive.

In April 2005, Weston and one of her alleged co-conspirators brought Donna Spadea, 59, to a house in Philadelphia and locked her in a basement with other captives, according to the FBI.

Spadea died in the basement just two months later. Weste ordered other members of the household to move her body to a different location before calling the police. A medical examiner ruled Spadea had died of natural causes.

Three years later, a woman named Maxine Lee, 39, moved in with Weston and her family in Philadelphia, and was soon confined to the basement.

Like the others, Lee was bashed when she tried to escape or begged for food, and was denied medical attention for her many injuries.

Weston decided to move the enterprise to Virginia, taking all her captives with her, and there Lee was forced to live inside a kitchen cabinet and an attic for months.

She died of bacterial meningitis and starvation in November 2008. As with Spadea, Weston ordered other members of the household to move Lee’s body to a bedroom, prop her up on a bed with blankets, and make it appear she died while watching TV.

They called the police, who at the time found no link between Lee’s death and Weston.

There was a strong financial motive for the Weston Family’s cruelty — they sought to make money off their captives in any way they could.

According to court documents, the group stole more than $US200,000 in social security benefits from their captives by pressuring them to sign documents naming Weston their designated payee.

If one of the victims wasn’t receiving social security benefits, Weston took them to the social security office, instructed them on how to act, and made them apply. Weston then stole the funds.

“Through cunning, trickery force and coercion she took the benefits that were supposed to help them,” US Attoey Zane David Memeger said in 2013, adding Weston could face the death penalty.

Then-Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey said one of Weston’s victims had injuries more severe than he’d seen in his 40-year career. Picture: AP / Lolita Jones Source: News Limited

THE TRIALS

Weston was arrested a day after the discovery in the North Philadelphia basement and charged with a slew of offences that included kidnapping, forced human labour, hate crime, racketeering and sex trafficking. After further investigations by police, she was eventually also charged with two counts of murder.

Other members of the Weston Family were charged over their part in the scheme: Weston’s daughter Jean McIntosh and a homeless man, Eddie Wright, have already pleaded guilty, while co-defendents Gregory Thomas Sr, who is believed to be Weston’s boyfriend, and Nicklaus Woodard are awaiting trial.

Weston was known to police prior to these crimes. In the 1980s she was sentenced to eight years in jail for starving to death a man who got her sister pregnant. At the time she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. But this time around she was deemed fit to stand trial.

In court yesterday, Weston pleaded guilty in a plea deal that spared her a potential execution.

She agreed to accept a life term plus 80 years after admitting to all 196 federal counts filed against her.

A formal sentencing hearing will be held on November 5.

“Her decision was motivated largely by conce for her children, so there could be some sort of closure for them,” one of her lawyers, Patricia McKinney, said of the plea deal.

Weston appeared addled and confused during yesterday’s hearing, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. She answered the judge’s questions in a meek, childlike voice and was frequently coaxed by pats on the shoulder from her lawyers.

She told the judge she was on medication for schizophrenia and depression and struggled to read and write due to her fourth-grade education.

McKinney said Weston’s childhood was marked by physical and sexual abuse and blamed the media and local police for painting her client as a monster, reported The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Usually people are not bo with a ‘666’ on their heads,” McKinney said. “Nothing that Linda Weston did was not also done to her as a child.

“The safest place Linda Weston has ever lived is the place she is now.”