Linda Goodman

From LoveToKnow Horoscopes

Linda Goodman, nee Mary Alice, is credited as being the premier force that brought the New Age movement to the masses.

Linda Goodman: The Early Years

Born on April 10, 1925, in Morgantown West Virginia, Linda Goodman had a fiery Aries Sun sign that served her well throughout her sometimes difficult life.

Mary Alice transformed into Linda during World War II, where she worked for a popular WCOM radio show called Love Letters from Linda. The premise of the show was that each week Linda would read the letters written between soldiers and their loved ones. After each letter, the station then played a popular love song of the day.

It was while working at WCOM that Linda met and married Sam O. Goodman. From there, Linda Goodman began her writing career by working for several newspapers in the United States. Amazingly, she even wrote speeches for black civil rights movement leader Whitney Young who served several years as the president for the National Urban League.

Goodman's Career

Penning speeches for Whitney Young and several newspaper columns proved one thing: This woman could write! Lucky for all everyone, she put that tremendous skill to good use by penning several astrology books:

Sun Signs (1968)
Love Signs (1989)
Venus Trines Midnight (1970)
Love Poems (1987)
Sun Signs: The Secret Codes of the Universe (1998)

Amazingly, Linda’s first book, Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, was the first astrology book to ever earn a spot on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Personal Tragedy

Unfortunately, Linda Goodman’s life was not all about wildly popular bestsellers. In fact, her daughter Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, affectionately nicknamed Sally by Linda, died in early December 1973.

The official explanation was suicide via a lethal cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates, but Linda always maintained that Sally was either kidnapped or killed. She may have had every reason to be suspicious. Several facts of the case contradict one another, including:

The time of death: Next to Sally’s body was a handwritten suicide note dated December 4th. The police were summoned to the New York City apartment on December 9th. One autopsy report stated that Sally had died six days prior, but another coroner states that she had already been dead for a minimum of three to four weeks.

Identification of the body: On December 10th, Sally’s birthday, Sam Goodman was called to identify the body, but he was in for quite a shock. Sam Goodman described that the young lady in question looked like a "West Indian woman", or a "young black woman with dyed blonde hair".

Sally was very Caucasian in appearance, with blonde hair. This is further supported by one of the three police reports that referred to the body as "that of a black female with gold-red hair"!

The scene of death: On December 21st, Sam Goodman returned to the apartment to collect Sally’s things, but was shocked and traumatized by the state of the room. The police had reported "neat and orderly rooms", but Sam witnessed blood everywhere, including the mattress and the telephone.

Unfortunately, the inconsistencies continue. Even though Sally was supposed to have committed suicide by drinking vast amounts of alcohol and swallowing copious amounts of barbiturates, nothing was ever found at the apartment. That is, no alcohol containers or drug paraphernalia was ever found in the apartment whatsoever.

Linda Goodman, after reflecting on several of the death threats that had been made against herself and her children that very same year, believed that her daughter had met with foul play. She maintained, all the way up to her death on October 21st, 1995, that her daughter had been kidnapped and that her death was staged.

Some Final Thoughts

Linda Goodman was an amazing woman with a talent for astrology that few of her peers could rival. She used her gift to help shed light on the mystical arts, but when it came to her own personal tragedy, she was unable to put the clues together. The death of a child is traumatic in the extreme, but when there are no or few answers to that death, it is even more heartbreaking.

To learn more, or to view picture of Linda’s vivacious and beautiful daughter, please visit: