Daughter 'was her mother's helper' in keeping Tacony captives, aunt says

Jean McIntosh's Tacony apartment was getting crowded.

By early October, she already had at least 10 people - adults, children, two toddlers, and a runaway teen - cramped inside her three-bedroom on Longshore Avenue.

And sometimes her 19-year-old cousin, Beatrice Weston, was locked inside a closet, police said.

So the four mentally handicapped adult captives her mother, Linda Ann Weston, had brought up from West Palm Beach, Fla., were going in the boiler room two floors below.

"They were going to have to put the handicapped people in the basement," Benita Rodriguez, a 15-year-old Florida runaway living in the apartment with McIntosh's 18-year-old brother, overheard Jean McIntosh say, according to a police report.

"She didn't want to have all those people in her house stinking it up," Rodriguez told police.

McIntosh, 32, charged with the same kidnapping and assault offenses as her mother, and two other suspects, is scheduled for an initial court hearing Wednesday.

McIntosh told investigators before her arrest that she knew her mother was stealing the Social Security checks of the four people found chained Oct. 15 inside the boiler room, according to investigators.

Some of her relatives say she was a longtime accomplice of Linda Ann Weston's.

"She was her mother's helper," said her aunt, Vicky Weston, the mother of Beatrice Weston, who police said was locked inside McIntosh's closet when they searched the boiler room.

Vicky Weston said in an interview with The Inquirer that her daughter told her that McIntosh, known by her middle name, Shay, "beat on her" for years.

"She said Shay beat on her worse than Linda Ann sometimes," Vicky Weston said.

McIntosh was born into a Philadelphia family where it was not strange to see human beings locked inside closets and basements.

McIntosh was 2 years old when her mother starved Bernardo Ramos, 25, to death in the coat closet of her North Philadelphia apartment. Linda Ann Weston was angry at Ramos for questioning whether he was the father of her sister's unborn child.

According to court papers from Linda Ann Weston's 1984 murder conviction, for which she served four years, McIntosh warned visitors, including her father, that Ramos was in the closet.

"My little girl's up. She tells me there's a man in the closet," Peppi McIntosh told the court. "He was in there tied up. I told him to get out the closet. I asked him what is he doing there anyway. I say, what is you doing in the closet?"

Her father began to untie the man, but then tired, and told one of Linda Ann Weston's sisters to do it.

Weeks later, according to court records, one of Jean McIntosh's aunts held her, as her mother and other relatives wrapped Ramos' body in plastic.

After Linda Ann Weston got out of prison in 1987, she regained custody of Jean McIntosh, who was about 8 at the time.

Jean McIntosh was abused by her mother, Weston relatives said.

"She told me she was hit a lot," one of Jean McIntosh's brothers told The Inquirer. "She was hit with cords and sticks."

She saw her mother chain her brothers in the basement, said the brother, who did not wish to be identified.

Still, she grew close to her mother, he said.

"She has the same traits as my mom," he added.

"Everything she does is the same way my mother is. Her personality, the way she talks. They have the same type of attitude toward people."

According to police, Jean McIntosh often visited her mother when she lived in Florida and Texas.

When she moved into Longshore Avenue, Jean McIntosh told her landlord she was an Army nurse, but the military has no records of her ever serving.

Details of Linda Ann Weston's other alleged accomplices are emerging as investigators pore over evidence from six states and perhaps as many as 50 victims.

Linda Ann Weston's boyfriend, Gregory Thomas, 47, is a convicted rapist and onetime supermiddleweight professional boxer who tasted fame briefly in Philadelphia in the 1990s by twice defeating a fighter who would go on to become world champion.

But during his years with Linda Ann Weston, Thomas turned his punches on the mentally handicapped men Linda Ann Weston starved and abused, Edwin Sanabria, one of the captives, told his brother Robert.

"He stone coldcocked him," Robert Sanabria said in an interview with The Inquirer.

In 1991 and 1992, Gregory "The Champ" Thomas defeated Charles Brewer, who went on to become IBF Super Middleweight Champ from 1997 to 1998.

It was the high point of Thomas' career that ended in 2000 with a 16-56-4 record.

After one of the fights, Thomas talked in a newspaper interview of his time in prison for rape.

"I just got to know myself better. I have a winning mentality now that I didn't have before," Thomas said at the time.

In 1985 Thomas was convicted of rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, and statutory rape with an underage girl. He was sentenced to four to 10 years.

One of Jean McIntosh's siblings later described how Thomas, after he began dating Linda Ann Weston, beat one of Linda Ann Weston's sons as a child.

"My brother told me that for his 13th birthday, my mom, sister, and Gregory Thomas took turns beating on him," said the sibling.

"He said they all just took turns beating on him. I guess that was his birthday present. They busted up his face."

Then there's Linda Ann Weston's other alleged accomplice. Eddie Ray Wright, a 50-year-old homeless, trench-coat-wearing thief from Killeen, Texas, who called himself a "pastor."

In recent years, he posted a false resumé online, boasting a master's degree and doctorate in business management from two junior colleges in Texas.

"Mr. Eddie Wright was the top of the classes with an A+," the resumé states.

In the resumé, Wright also said he won a "purple heart."

A search of military records turned up no such honor.

Starting in 1985, Wright bounced in and out of the Florida and Texas criminal-justice systems, for crimes ranging from passing bad checks to shoplifting to forgery.

Earlier this year in Florida, he was arrested for trying to steal a car battery.

The victims inside the Tacony basement said Wright helped Linda Ann Weston lock them in the basement at night.

Neighbors said he guarded the basement door at all hours, like a vagabond sentry.

"He was creepy, no one liked him being there," one man said.

Wright, according to investigators, said he "counseled" the victims during the captivity. The victims told police Wright emptied their bathroom bucket once a day.