INQUIRER: The woman charged with keeping four adults with mental disabilities locked in a squalid Tacony basement while collecting their Social Security checks may have victimized dozens of others, police said Monday. When Linda Ann Weston was arrested Sunday, she had identification records for as many as 50 people in her possession, including power of attorney paperwork, forms of identification, and Social Security numbers, according to Philadelphia Police Lt. Ray Evers. The documents suggest that Weston has been running a wide-ranging fraud operation, he said. “She might have been doing this for years, probably since she got out of prison,” Evers said. Weston, 51, served eight years in prison for killing a 25-year-old man who starved to death in her North Philadelphia apartment in 1981. She was sentenced in 1985. Investigators said they expect more charges will be filed as they piece together a timeline of the operation, which took place over at least a year and in several states. MORE
PREVIOUSLY: On Sunday, Gozleveli said he had checked the basement three times last week after a neighbor complained of suspicious people coming and going. He said that on Thursday, he noticed some furniture in the dank cellar had been moved. On Friday, he found a dog dish. On Saturday, the ceiling lights wouldn’t turn on because the bulbs were missing. He followed the sound of a barking dog down three steps to an old coal room, where he unwrapped a rusted chain from around the door handle and shined his flashlight into the tiny dirt-floor space. “There were two little dogs and blankets,” Gozleveli said. “And from the blankets, people’s faces just started coming up.” The malnourished adults – lying in their own filth in the 10-by-15-foot room – could not answer him, Gozleveli said. One man’s left ankle was chained to a boiler pipe, he said. There were bathroom buckets, but no food except a container of orange juice. MORE
PREVIOUSLY: Abusing The Disabled For Fun And Profit