By then, Brenda had already started hanging out with the wrong people and doing drugs, but her sister’s death really pushed her deeper into life on the street.
“Brenda was doing good,” said her stepdad, William Young Jr. “She had three daughters and she was raising them. She was doing good. Then she got in with the wrong crowd.”
When Brenda’s body was found, her family was devastated.
“It shocked me. I felt bad. I didn’t know what to think. My son called me. I was driving. I answered the cell phone. I went home, and the detectives came by the house to tell me what happened,” William said.
Laverne, who said she didn’t even know Brenda had been missing, called her brother one night just to talk. William told Laverne he and his girlfriend, now his wife, were just about to leave to go over to Brenda’s mom’s house.
“I said, ‘Is Lee worse?’” Laverne said. “He said, ‘It’s not her. It’s Brenda. She’s not with us anymore. And that’s the way I heard about it. It was terrible. I was abolutely shocked. It was like everything had been taken away from me. I was devastated for him, her, and her mother. And I started thinking back to when she was a little girl and wishing I had been able to be in her life more, and maybe things might have been different. I still think about her and miss her a lot. But it bothers me now when I think of Brenda. I have to put it out of my mind.”
Laverne said she didn’t even know Brenda was involved with drugs.
“After Brenda died, my brother told me she was into drugs, and he was upset about it,” she said. “I told him to try and understand, because she wouldn’t have chosen that way if she knew another way. She was trying to deal with what she went through in her life. I told him I still loved her.”
Like Brenda, Linda Neal faced a number of tragedies in her life. That doesn’t excuse the life she ultimately lived, it’s just a fact.
Linda grew up in Joliet, Illinois. She had two sisters and two brothers. She was the youngest girl—a tomboy. But when the kids were in grade school, her parents split, and her dad moved to Peoria. Her mom did everything in her power to raise her five young children the best way she could. The kids often spent summers with their dad in Peoria, a city Linda seemed to take to more than the rest of her siblings.
And it seemed to be working for Linda. She went to Joliet Central High School, where she excelled in sports. An athletic teen, she ran track and was on the gymnastics team. She was also a cheerleader. A great cook, Linda went to Joliet Junior College for a time and initially majored in culinary arts, but she later decided to take up stenography, instead. She dreamed of being a court reporter one day.
In 1982, her mom passed away, at forty. Her mother was the same age Linda was when she was murdered. She had suffered for years from a rare skin disease. At the end she lapsed into a coma and died in a Chicago hospital. All the kids were close to their mom, and it tore them all up.
For a while the family lived with their grandmother in Joliet. Linda eventually moved to Peoria with her boyfriend. They got a house, where he still lives. Things seemed to be going well, at first. She worked in a number of area restaurants. Then tragedy struck again when her twenty-three-year-old brother died. He suffered an epileptic seizure and died in his sleep.
Linda started hanging out with the wrong people, drinking and using drugs. She got into cocaine and started smoking crack. She and her boyfriend started fighting—he was clean and couldn’t stand the idea that Linda was using. They split up and Linda hooked up with a number of older men—men on Social Security. It was an easy way to support her habit.
Younger brother Mark, who lives in Missouri, was the first to admit that his big sister was no angel. But she was his hero. He was closer to Linda than he was to any of his siblings.
“We just had so much in common,” said Mark, who was four years younger than Linda. “We were so much alike. Instead of a brother following a brother, I followed her. If it came down to going somewhere, I always wanted to be behind her. I learned a lot from her. She wasn’t an angel, but she was kindhearted. If you knew her, you couldn’t do nothing but love her. She was affectionate toward people, but if you got on her bad side, she was like a rattlesnake. She’d get you.”
Mark learned a lot from Linda—more than he learned from any of his other siblings.
“Once I did something wrong to a friend, and [Linda] made me apologize, and I wasn’t used to apologizing to people,” he said. “And I remember crying, because I had to apologize. She taught me right from wrong in a lot of things. She’d say, ‘You don’t do this, you don’t do that.’ If you hurt someone’s feelings, she made you apologize.”
Linda also taught Mark about life on the street.
“We used to fight together,” he said. “I’ve seen her fight people four foot tall and six foot four. She held her own. She didn’t care how big or how small you were. If you got in her face, she was going to get you. She was going to fight you. I’ve seen her fight two or three girls at one time and whup all of them. That’s another thing she taught me—not to be afraid to stand up for myself. She said, ‘Don’t go running and crying, you fight.’”
Mark admitted things started to go downhill for his sister, once she moved to Peoria for good.
“Every time I’d be around her, there would be a fight with this girl or that girl,” Mark said. “People were jealous of her because she held her own. She didn’t take nothing from nobody. And a lot of people just didn’t like her.”
Then there were the drugs. In the beginning Linda didn’t want anything to do with drugs, but things changed.
“She was running with some of the wrong people,” Mark said. “I had some other cousins who were into drugs. It’s crazy, because she was always against it. I know she smoked marijuana, and drinking alcohol here and there at parties, but that was the extent of it. As far as crack cocaine—no way.”
Mark said he was totally shocked when he found out his sister was doing drugs. It didn’t make any sense, because she always told her family members who were using that it was wrong and they were going to kill themselves.
“She was so against it for so long,” he said. “When I found out the first time she was doing it, I couldn’t believe it. I thought no way, not my sister. She couldn’t stand the sight of people who did drugs. I couldn’t tell you what made her do [it]. I talked to her about why she did it. I wanted to know why she turned to drugs when she used to try and get family members off drugs. But an addict always makes excuses. She’d just say, ‘Oh, I only do it recreationally.’”
Beverly Broadway, Linda’s sister, who lives in the south suburbs of Chicago, remembered her sister as the life of the party, and as someone who looked out for her family.
“She was hilarious,” Beverly said. “We’d sit up and laugh all night, crack jokes with each other, talk about the past. Even when we had picnics or barbeques, she was always the life of the party. She was fun to hang with. But she wouldn’t let anyone mess with her family. When we went to a party, she’d say, ‘If anyone’s messing with you, you let me know.’ She’d have my back. She looked out for me.”
But Beverly knew Linda had her problems with drugs.
“I went through a lot with Linda with that,” she said. “When I was going through my divorce in the summer of 1998, I asked her to come here and stay with me. I knew she had a problem. Her addiction was pretty strong. But I thought if I got her away from there, we could work on some things. But bringing her into my house was kind of a mistake, because some things would come up missing. And it became more of a problem than a help to me. She stayed a month with me—then I had to send her back because she stole my cell phone and she pawned my car.”
Turns out Linda had given her dealer her sister’s car for the day in exchange