Girl in the Closet, the Lifetime true story movie, is possibly inspired by the Linda Ann Weston Philadelphia basement of horrors case and her real-life victims, Beatrice Weston and Tamara Breeden. Girl in the Closet synopsis tells us that 10-year-old Cameron disappears after she's placed in the custody of her aunt Mia when her mother falls ill. This Lifetime movie takes us on the mother's years-long hunt for her daughter. Lifetime's Girl in the Closet's cast includes Tammy Roman as Mia and Remy Ma as Patricia. Now the movie takes its direction from Jira Thomas and its true crime drama script is written by Sarah Jones. (transcript)
Now let's talk more about the movie's synopsis. In Girl in the Closet, the Lifetime movie, we meet 10-year-old Cameron, a beautiful black girl who is accidentally placed into the custody of her aunt Mia after her mother suffers. Now placing her with family seems like the right thing to do while her mother gets better. I mean, you should be safe with your family, right? But the problem in this Lifetime movie is her aunt Mia is a convicted murderer. Now Cameron's mother loses contact with her daughter Cameron and Mia at some point. Tired of the runaround, Patricia realizes her daughter has disappeared. So she sets out to find her. Now it's much worse than she could ever imagine. What she doesn't know is her daughter Cameron, she's undergoing severe mistreatment at the hands of her own aunt and cousin.
The Lifetime movie Girl in the Closet paints Mia as a cold-hearted woman who makes her living by stealing the benefits checks of the people she takes care of. Officially adopted by her aunt Mia, Cameron arrives at her new house and strange things start happening. She's hearing voices at night coming from that basement. The basement is locked and this is frightening to little Cameron. But what is she hearing? Are these ghosts? No, they are not. They are real people, real living people who are trapped in the basement. Meanwhile, Cameron's mother we see her recovering. She has contacted police and they are actively searching for her missing daughter. Cameron grows up in dire circumstances, moving around from place to place. She's given excuse after excuse as to her mother's whereabouts. But she's not there to solve a mystery. Cameron is there to do whatever her aunt Mia tells her to do. Before long, Cameron is thrown down into the basement with the others. For the next 10 years, she is trapped but relies on her faith to get her through this seemingly hopeless ordeal.
Now that's the synopsis plot for Lifetime's Girl in the Closet movie. You know, when I saw that Tammy Roman was in this movie, I knew, before I even looked at the cast, I knew that she was playing the real life Linda Weston. And I just knew it. I mean, Tammy Roman is a great bad girl actress. I knew she'd bring that fire to this role. Now Remy Ma, Remy Ma is excellent too. Remy Ma, Remy Ma is tough too. But she brings the right amount of motherly compassion to this role. It's very believable.
And now Lifetime changed the names of the people in this movie. The real events, the true story, or of what I think is the true story, doesn't have to be. But I believe that Girl in the Closet is based on Philadelphia's Linda Ann Weston. Linda Ann Weston was the leader of a benefits check identity theft ring. The case is known by many names, but it's mostly known as the Philadelphia basement of horrors case. Now in the early 2000s, Linda Weston held her niece and other individuals against their will and mistreated them severely if they tried to escape. If they fought back, she used, how can I word this? If they fought back, she mistreated Cameron, who was portrayed in the Lifetime movie, is a blending of Beatrice Weston and Tamera Breeden's stories, or that's how I look at it. Beatrice and Tamara were Linda Weston's victims. Beatrice was between the ages of 9 or 10 when she was first placed in her Aunt Linda's home. So she was placed in her custody after her mother Vicki was recovering from a head injury. So she was placed in Linda's custody after her mother fell ill. Her mother just didn't feel like she could take care of her anymore. And Beatrice is the youngest of her mother's five children.
Now, Beatrice's mother told social workers she could no longer take care of her little girl. And the other family member who was taking care of Beatrice originally, they were not doing a great job. They weren't sending her to school. So the recommendation was she would stay with Linda. Now the judge in the case said that he made the decision based on recommendations by the Department of Human Services. And there was an advocate there and the little girl's mother. So, you know, he got a lot of criticism for why he placed the little girl in the custody of a convicted killer. And so that was his answer, that he made the decision based on these recommendations and that the mother really never went into her sister's background.
Now, by the time Vicki tried to get her daughter Beatrice back, she couldn't. Linda told her she had legal custody and she wasn't getting her back. So the mother is going back and forth to hearings to try to regain custody of her little girl. Now, like I said before, in that earlier hearing, there was no mention of Linda Weston's criminal past. It was brought up at one of the last hearings. But by that time, Linda Weston and Vicki's daughter had disappeared.
Now a lot of people criticized the mother, you know, it was like, well, didn't you know or how did you not know? But, you know, the mother claims that she didn't know all of this was going on and she didn't know that that would happen to her daughter. So I think that she was just a mom that was kind of stuck without options. She had her own things going on. She was not well. And I think that she did the best that she could under the circumstances. So placing her with her sister, you know, would seem like it would be the right thing to do. But really, it led her daughter down an evil and dangerous path, one that I know that she probably did not mean to lead her down.
As depicted in the movie, you know, little Cameron is not living good at all. And Beatrice in real life, she lived in a kitchen cabinet for a while. They threw her in the cupboard for several months, you know, in this tight space while her own cousin taunted and teased her outside of the cupboard door. You know, taunting her, her own family did this to her. The Social Security office didn't catch on to what was going on. Linda Weston was really good at showing what she used the money for. And, you know, it seemed like the city wasn't carrying out the welfare checks. At some point, they were not carrying out the checks like they were supposed to. People made complaints over the years, but those complaints were basically ignored.
Now, in the beginning, DHS stated when they first went to check on the little girl, everything was fine. She was being taken care of. Linda Weston passed all of the checks during this monitoring process by DHS. But they say that all changed when she finally got custody. So the little girl went to stay with her temporarily. There was temporary custody, I think when she was around nine or 10. But it took a couple of years for her to get full custody. And after she got it, they stopped doing the checks.
Now, Linda Weston was a murderer. She killed her sister's boyfriend, Bernardo Ramos, back on a cold winter night in December of 1981. Now, Linda's little brother was in that house at the time. And he said they mistreated him too. That at one time, he had been in that same closet for days. And he remembered the night that Bernardo Ramoswalked in. He told CBS in an exclusive that he watched his older sister, Linda, wait until Bernardo Ramos turned his back and then she snuck up behind him and struck him. He was thrown into a closet and left there without food for two months until he finally expired. Linda's little brother said he saw them drag Bernardo out of the closet and wheel him out of the house in a baby stroller or a baby carriage. Now, think about how small his body has become by being in that closet in order for them to roll him out in a carriage. They discarded him in an abandoned building and he was found a couple of days later.
Linda's brother said she threatened them all. Told him he better not leave. He better not run and tell anybody. And he finally escaped that house while his sister was away. She used to kind of lock him up but one day he was able to get loose and he flew and did not come back. In fact, to this day he does not like to talk about her. He doesn't like to mention her. He said that he never wants to see her again and he definitely does not ever want his children or his family members to know about her or for her to come around them at all.
So Linda Weston didn't serve much time for that murder. And let me say this, the reason, the reason she murdered him, it was over money. I think he had not paid child support or something like that and they were upset with him. Bernado was dating her sister and when he didn't pay child support, you know, this is what they did to him. So she only served four years out of a sentence of about eight to 10 years for the crime against Bernado.
So after she's released, she absconds. They can't find her. She's no longer reporting. They can't monitor her. They find her and then they lose her again. She was supposed to be under supervision. She needed to take her psychiatric medications as well. All of that was part of the agreement for her early release. Okay, so she's living under the radar.
In or around 2001, she becomes a caretaker for adults who can't take care of themselves. Many of them had mental illnesses and had very childlike personalities where they were not able to take care of themselves. Now this is a convicted murderer, so how did she pass the background check? How did she pass it? How did she slip through the cracks? So this was Linda Weston's new way to make money, to steal people's money and their identities.
Okay, identity theft. She kidnapped them, would not allow them to leave, and then locked them away and mistreated them for years and years while her bank account swelled with their cash.
Now another one of Linda Weston's victims was a girl named Tamara Breeden. Now Tamara was 20 back in 2001 when Linda lured her with a false babysitting opportunity. So Tamara thinks she's going to get a babysitting job, but she ends up being dragged to the basement and held there. She said it was like a horror movie. There were no lights down there. It was pitch black and you could hear the voices of the other people who were living down there.
So I think that's where they took that part in the movie, in the Lifetime movie Girl in the Closet, where she's hearing these voices and it sounds like ghosts. That's the way it was in real life. When they first would get down there and their eyes were not acclimated to the dark, these voices sounded like ghosts, but they were real people. There was no room to move around, no beds, no bathrooms. They situated buckets around this tiny deplorable space and that replaced the bathroom. I'm trying to word this in a family friendly way. They were fed ramen noodles, beans, usually just once a day.
And Linda Weston laced their food and their drinks with substances that would alter their mind and make them weak. Plus they were hungry, which made them weaker, so they were not able to get a loose. They were not able to escape. Linda Weston was sort of named the head of this family, the Weston family. She ruled with her boyfriend and there wasanother guy with them, Eddie Wright, who was supposed to be a preacher or a minister. And of course, her daughter also was there. They made Tamara and Beatrice work without pay. They had to babysit the kids. They had to clean up. They had to do whatever Linda wanted them to do. They also had to have babies. She was sort of trying to build this empire where she was having babies and making these girls have babies so that she could steal their checks and pocket the cash. This story is so horrible, it kind of makes me mad. I'm not even gonna go through all of the details, but I am going to link some of the articles for you to look at because some of it I just can't say in this video. But Tamara Breeden said that she prayed and prayed for Jesus to save her, and he did.
So how did Linda Weston manage to lure so many people into her trap? Now remember, she's dealing with people who are very childlike, but she was also super convincing. She was very, very convincing. She seemed very nice at first. She would lure them into a trap that she had set for them. See, this is why you have to be careful meeting people that you don't know, or even people you know. Even people you know, you have to watch them. Co-workers, ex-co-workers, ex-friends, people you knew that you can't trust a lot of people. In this case, these were Beatrice's relatives. Now, her victims say she was nice at first, and the detectives say she was cunning. She'd come off as very motherly. She had this very motherly presence about her. She could be anything that you needed her to be. If you needed a mother, she could be your mother. If you needed a big sister, she could be your sister. She could be auntie. She could be whatever you needed her to be to get what she wanted, which was you and your money.
So Linda's background report said that, let's talk a little bit about Linda's background. So in the report, it said that she had brain damage, that there was possibly brain damage from epilepsy. She also had schizophrenia. So she targeted people who didn't have family. She liked to be around people who either didn't have family or their family was estranged from them. People who were having a hard time on their own. People who were not mentally capable of taking care of themselves. She preyed on people like that. Now, according to Linda Weston, she grew up the same way. She was mistreated. So basically, she was continuing the same generational pathology. When Linda was a teenager, her mother passed away and her first victims were her own siblings who were in her care. She learned at a very early age how to steal people's checks and commit identity theft. She became an expert at it.
Let's fast forward. So the case comes to the attention of the police when a landlord blows the lid off of this case. In 2011, a landlord received a barking dog's complaint. When he went to investigate, he found this door. The door is chained and he had to bust his way into this house where he found these people living in this house of horrors. Little Beatrice, the one portrayed as Cameron in the movie, Girl in the Closet, she was found in a kitchen cabinet or cupboard. There was also another girl named Benita Rodriguez. Now she is not considered one of the victims. Her mother was from West Palm Beach and she had placed a missing persons report or she filed, I should say, she filed a missing persons report with the police because she said her daughter ran away with these people. So how Benita Rodriguez ended up there, she was dating his son and so they went there, but it wasn't like she was one of the victims. She was able to leave. was able to leave. She didn't want to leave because she ran away with her boyfriend. I think that part in the movie too was added in, you know, where you have this mother really looking for her daughter. I know that in real life, Vicki was also looking for her daughter.
There are other mysteries surrounding this Weston family group. Linda Weston and her co-conspirators, they would move around from various states before they finally settled, you know, back in Philly. Two of her victims died in her custody. Two of the victims, there was a lady named Donna Spadea and Maxine Lee, they died while in Linda's custody and they both had mental issues. So Linda Weston and her band of bullies stole and misused over $200,000 and they stole people's lives and their identities because they wanted to be rich. Her victims will probably never ever forget the nightmare that they lived in that basement.
Now Tamera Breeden, she gave birth to some children while she was in that basement. After she was rescued, she attended school and she, you know, engaged in her creating her artwork. She said that it made her feel very happy, nice and happy is how she put it.
The survivors were named as:
Tamera Breeden
Edwin Sanabria
Derwin Mechlemire
Herbert Knowles
Those who were arrested were:
Linda Weston, age 51
Jean McIntosh, age 32 (Linda's daughter)
Gregory Thomas, age 47 (Linda's boyfriend)
Eddie White, age 50 (the preacher)
Linda Weston admitted her guilt and was handed life for her crimes. So that is the Linda Weston Philadelphia basement of horrors case. And you know, this movie, like I said, this movie does a great job of sort of dramatizing this entire story. But I know in real life, man, those people, oh my God, they would probably never ever forget what happened to them and I bet they still have dreams about that, you know.
So be careful out there, guys. Be careful who you're meeting, who you're meeting up with, who comes into your life. You know, just be very, very careful. Okay? So that's your movie, Girl in the Closet. That movie airs March 11th at 8, 7 central on the Lifetime Channel.
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