On November 5, 2015, a federal judge sentenced 55-year-old Linda Weston to serve life plus 80 years, according to a statement from Department of Justice spokesman David Jacobs. In September 2015, Weston, pleaded guilty to 196 charges against her, including murder.
According to the statement, Weston served as a caretaker for several disabled adults between 2001 and her arrest in 2011. Weston was detained after her landlord discovered a man chained to a boiler during a property inspection and called Philadelphia police. Two women in her care died.
Charging documents said Weston used “cunning, trickery, force and coercion” to illegally fleece her captives of more than $200,000 in Social Security payments.
Weston also admitted to physically forcing one of the disabled individuals into authorizing her as a Social Security payee, the DOJ statement says.
Among the charges to which Weston pleaded guilty in September were racketeering conspiracy, kidnapping resulting in the death of the victim, forced human labor, involuntary servitude, multiple counts of murder in aid of racketeering, hate crime, violent crime in aid of racketeering, sex trafficking, kidnapping, theft of government funds, wire fraud, mail fraud, use of a firearm in furtherance of a violent crime and false statements.
At her sentencing Thursday, she was also ordered to make restitution in the amount of $273,463.
Weston was arrested along with four other individuals who allegedly collaborated with Weston on the scheme in homes in Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Florida, the statement from Jacobs reads. Her co-defendants were her daughter, Jean McIntosh, and a man named Eddie Wright, Gregory Thomas Sr. and Nicklaus Woodard.
“While confined, the captives were often isolated in the dark and sedated with drugs that Weston and other defendants placed in their food and drink,” the statement from Jacobs reads.
“When the individuals tried to escape, stole food or otherwise protested their treatment, Weston and others punished them by slapping, punching, kicking, stabbing, burning and hitting them with closed hands, belts, sticks, bats and hammers or other objects, including the butt of a pistol. Some victims endured the abuse for years.”
In 2001, Linda Weston kidnapped Tamara Breeden, saying she was taking her to babysit, however she was instead dragged to a basement and chained to a boiler.
The conditions Weston’s victims lived in were truly horrifying. Prosecutors said, once under Weston’s control, the victims were “confined to locked rooms, basements, closets, attics, and apartments.”
Tamara testified that she was regularly beaten with weapons including chains, shot with a BB gun, forced to drink her own urine, and held in a trailer where Weston brought older men to have sex with her.
They were also drugged, and conditions were so horrific in the 15ft x 6ft basement, four victims had to use a shared bucket as a toilet.
Tamara had two children during her time living in such squalid conditions.
The statement further claims that in 2005, one woman in Weston’s care who wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom died in her Philadelphia home’s basement. According to the complaint, Weston then ordered the adults at the home to move the body out of the basement before calling the police.
Another woman died in the Virginia home in 2008 after being “beaten when she tried to escape or when she begged for food and never received medical attention for any of her injuries,” the statement says. The statement claims the woman was locked “inside a kitchen cabinet and an attic for several months and her body was also moved to a bedroom by Weston’s victims.”
Additionally, it later emerged Weston had already served time for the starvation of her sister’s boyfriend, Bernardo Ramos, who she locked in a wardrobe and fed just a handful of times in two months until he died weighing just 75lb.
38-year-old Jean McIntosh pleaded guilty in 2014 to racketeering, kidnapping, fraud and hate crimes. She was sentenced on August 22, 2018 to 40 years in federal prison.
Eddie Wright was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in the organized torture of people who were physically and intellectually handicapped on September 13, 2018. Nicklaus Woodard was also sentenced to 27 years on the same day.
There isn’t any information available for Weston’s boyfriend, Gregory Thomas, Jr. It’s not mentioned that he was ever sentenced.
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