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.
The 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 cast includes Tammy Roman as Mia and Remy Ma as Patricia. The movie takes its direction from Jira Thomas, and the true crime drama script is written by Sarah Jones.
This is a partial transcript of my conversation from the 2023 video.
**Note: Some other outlets believed the movie was based on another case. However, if you watch the movie and read the article, I think you'll agree that the Linda Weston story is most likely the main inspiration.
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| Credit: movie poster (Lifetime), other graphics (Traciy Curry-Reyes) |
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 in the custody of her aunt Mia after her mother falls ill.
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 that her aunt Mia is a convicted murderer.
Cameron’s mother loses contact with her daughter 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 that her daughter, Cameron, is 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 hears voices at night coming from the 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, we see Cameron’s mother recovering. She has contacted the police, and they are actively searching for her missing daughter. Cameron grew up in dire circumstances, moving 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 Tami 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, Tami Roman is a great bad-girl actress. I knew she’d bring that fire to this role.
Now Remy Ma — Remy Ma is excellent and tough, too. But she brings the right amount of motherly compassion to this role. It’s very believable.
The real names and some of the events have been changed, and 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 them.
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 and 10 when she was first placed in her Aunt Linda’s home. She was placed in her custody after her mother, Vicki, was recovering from a head injury. 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 was not doing a great job. They weren’t sending her to school. So the recommendation was that 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. An advocate was there, and the little girl’s mother. He got a lot of criticism...Why would he place the little girl in the custody of a convicted killer? His answer was that he made the decision based on these recommendations and that the mother never looked into her sister’s background.
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 went back and forth to hearings to try to regain custody of her little girl.
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.
Her mother claimed that she didn’t know all of this was going on and had no idea this would happen to her daughter. Many people criticized her. It was like, well, didn’t you know? Or how did you not know?
It seems to me she was just a mom who was kind of stuck without options. She had her own things going on. She was not well. And I think she did the best she could under the circumstances. So, placing her with her sister seemed like the right thing to do. But really, it led her daughter down an evil and dangerous path—one that I know she probably did not mean to lead her down.
As depicted in the movie, little Cameron is not living well at all. And Beatrice, in real life, lived in a kitchen cabinet for a while. They threw her in the cupboard for several months—in this tight space, while her own cousin taunted and teased her outside the cupboard door.
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, it seemed like the city wasn’t properly carrying out the welfare checks. People made complaints over the years, but those complaints were basically ignored.
DHS stated that when they first went to check on the little girl, everything was fine. Linda Weston passed all the checks during the monitoring process by DHS. But they say that all changed when she finally got custody. After that, they stopped doing the checks.
Linda Weston was a murderer. She killed her sister's boyfriend, Bernardo Ramos, back on a cold winter night in December of 1981. Linda's little brother was in that house at the time. And he said they mistreated him, too. He had been in that same closet for days. And he remembered the night that Bernardo Ramos walked in. He told CBS in an exclusive that he watched his older sister, Linda, wait until 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'd better not “run and tell anybody.” 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 ran — never to come back.
In fact, to this day, he does not like to talk about her. He said he never wants to see her again, and he definitely does not want his children or any of 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 she murdered him 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, they killed him.
So she only served four years out of a sentence of about eight to ten years for the crime against Bernado.
After Weston was released, she absconded. 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. Now, she’s living under the radar.
In or around 2001, she became a caretaker for adults who were unable to live independently. Many of them had mental illnesses and very childlike personalities. This is a convicted murderer—so how did she pass the background check?
Seriously...How did she pass it?
How did she slip through the cracks?
Linda Weston had found a new scheme: 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.
Tamara Breeden was another victim of Linda Weston. Tamara was 20 back in 2001 when Linda lured her with a false babysitting opportunity. Tamara thought she was going to get a babysitting job, but she ended 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—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, which replaced the bathroom. I’m trying to word this in a family-friendly way: they were fed ramen noodles and beans, usually just once a day.
Linda Weston laced their food and drinks with substances that altered their minds and made them weak. Plus, they were hungry, which made them even weaker, so they were unable to escape.
Weston was sort of named the head of this family, the Weston family. She ruled with her boyfriend, and there was another guy with them, Eddie Wright, who was supposed to be a preacher or a minister. And, of course, her daughter was also 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 trying to build this empire — 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 going to go through all of the details, but I am going to link some of the articles for you to read 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 she said, “He did.”
So how did Linda Weston manage to lure so many people into her trap? Now, remember, she was dealing with people who were very childlike, but she was also super convincing. She was very, very convincing. She seemed 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 you don’t know—or even people you think you know. Even people you know, you have to watch them: co-workers, ex-co-workers, ex-friends, people you knew. You can’t trust a lot of people. In this case, these were Beatrice’s relatives.
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,” that cool auntie...
Right.
She could be whatever or whoever you needed her to be to get what she wanted...your money.
So let’s talk a little bit about Linda’s background. According to her background report, she had brain damage—possibly from epilepsy—and she also had schizophrenia. She targeted people who didn’t have family. She liked to be around people whose families were either estranged or absent. 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. The case came to the attention of the police when a landlord blew the lid off of it. In 2011, a landlord received a complaint about a barking dog. When he went to investigate, he found a door that was chained, and he had to bust his way into the house, where he found these people living in a house of horrors.
Little Beatrice, the one portrayed as Cameron in the movie Girl in the Closet, was found in a kitchen cabinet or cupboard. There was also another girl named Benita Rodriguez. She is not considered one of the victims. Her mother was from West Palm Beach, and she had filed a missing persons report with the police, saying her daughter had run away with these people.
So how did Benita Rodriguez end up there? She was dating his son, so they went there together. But it wasn’t like she was one of the victims. She had run away with her boyfriend, but she was free to leave. So that part in the movie where the mother is looking for her daughter, I believe, was inspired by this part of the real story.
There are other mysteries surrounding this Weston family group. Linda Weston and her co-conspirators would move around various states before they finally settled. Two of her victims died in her custody. There was a lady named Donna Spadea and Maxine Lee. They both died while in Linda’s care, and both had mental health 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 forget the nightmare they lived in that basement.
Now, Tamera Breeden gave birth to some children while she was in that basement. After she was rescued, she attended school and engaged in creating her artwork. She said that it made her feel “nice and happy.”
Survivors:
- Tamera Breeden
- Edwin Sanabria
- Derwin Mechlemire
- Herbert Knowles
Those who were arrested:
- 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, this movie does a great job of dramatizing this entire story. But I know that in real life, the real people this might be based on will probably never forget what happened to them, and I bet they still have dreams about it.
So be careful out there, guys. Be careful who you’re meeting up with and who comes into your life.
So that’s your movie: Girl in the Closet. It aired for the first time on March 11th at 8/7 Central on the Lifetime Channel.
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