Criminal - Baby Snatcher

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

Georgia Tann of Memphis, Tennessee bragged that she had a rigorous selection process that matched the perfect child with the perfect home. Barbara Raymond's book is The Baby Thief. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more.  We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series

worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. This episode may not be suitable for everyone.

Please use discretion. Alma was new to Memphis. She was a single mother. She had two small children, but one was particularly young. She was 10 months old. Very pretty child, blonde hair, green eyes, and Alma took her for a walk.

When she got back from the walk, there was a knock on her door, and the person knocking was Georgia Tann. And Georgia Tann said, I'm a social worker, and I noticed that your little baby is sick. And Alma said, well, she has a cold. And Georgia Tann said, I know a lot about children.

So she went over and she examined the baby. And she kept shaking her head. And she said, she's sick. She needs to see a doctor. Alma Sipple told Georgia Tann that she didn't have any money to take her baby to the doctor, especially for a little cold. This was 1946. We're hearing the story from Barbara Raymond. Georgia Tann said it was more serious than a cold, but told Alma Sippel not to worry. She explained that she had connections. She worked with the Tennessee Children's Home Society and could get the baby seen at the hospital for free. Alma Sippel agreed that the two of them could take the baby to the hospital to be checked out by a doctor.

But Georgia Tan said that Alma couldn't come. They'd need to pretend that the baby was an orphan in order to get the free care. So, reluctantly, Alma let Georgia Tan walk off with her 10-month-old baby. A day later, Alma snuck into the hospital. She looked in the room where Georgia Tann's wards were. She saw her baby bouncing in her bed, looking extremely healthy. She asked the nurse if she could hold her baby, and the nurse replied,

You don't have a baby in there. And the next day, she got a call from Georgia Tann and she said, I'm so sorry, but your baby died. And Alma started screaming. And she said, I know she's not dead. She only had a cold. And she went to Georgia Tann's orphanage, but she was not allowed in. A big man kept her out. She ran to the police station and no one would listen to her. She haunted graveyards. She tried to find death certificates. Nothing. Now Alma spent 45 years looking for her child. Barbara Raymond interviewed Alma Sippel in 1990. I realized there was a much bigger story behind Alma because Alma was not the only person

who had lost a child to Georgia Tann. As one of Georgia Tann's colleagues once said, she wanted to get her hands on every child she could. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Georgia Tann was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1891. Her family was wealthy. Her father, George Tann, was a lawyer and then became a judge. And he did something unusual for the time.

He let her read law. That had to have been extremely tantalizing. That is the way people became lawyers in those days. They read law with a lawyer. And she was the first woman in Mississippi to pass the Mississippi Bar Exam. But she told a reporter in the 1940s, her father wouldn't let her practice law because it wasn't the usual thing for a woman.

I don't know why she did not defy him, because she never listened to anyone else in her life, but she couldn't be a lawyer, in her mind. After passing the bar exam, Georgia Tann took a job as a social worker. The usual thing would be for a woman of Georgia's status, since her father was a judge, that Georgia would marry and have children and that she would, the power she would have would be involved with the marriage and with the raising of children. And as far as I could tell, Georgia never wanted to get married and she never wanted

to bear children. So that marked her as different, and a lot of the people who would describe Georgia Tann to me would say things like, well, I never knew how to take her. She reminded me of a man, that kind of thing. And she was not, obviously, the typical southern debutante type. She never attended the usual parties that would have been given. Instead, she wore her long black skirts and her white shirt, and she would visit the local poor.

When she was 15 years old, Georgia Tan's father had a case in which two siblings had been orphaned. He didn't know what to do with them. Georgia took it upon herself to go around and talk with the wealthiest people in the community and try to convince a family to adopt them. And she did. Georgia felt that the world was divided into two very different types. Poor people were incapable of proper parenting.

Other people, people of middle or upper class, were people of the higher type. And the children, in Georgia's mind, deserved better than being raised in poverty. In the beginning of the 20th century, social workers tried very hard to keep parents and children together, providing financial assistance to poor families to keep children from being

sent to orphanages, sometimes called homes for friendless children. Georgia Tann did not try to keep families together. She rearranged them, taking babies from poor families and giving them to rich ones. She stole a child off of a porch. There was a woman named Rose Harvey, and she was very poor and sleeping in her house. Her young child was playing on the back porch. Georgia Tann lured him into her car with the biggest candy cane he had ever seen and had him adopted by a local family. Later, she took his younger brother the same way, and the child was adopted into that same family. Now, Rose, the mother, was incensed, and she was very upset, obviously. She challenged this in court. She did not win. And most likely, George's father had influence over the decision.

But I was told by people in Hickory that George Tan was, quote-unquote, run out of town because of that. She made her way to Memphis, where she became the director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. The city was still recovering from a deadly yellow fever outbreak. More than half the city's population fled. Of the 19,000 people who stayed, 17,000 got sick. More than 5,000 died.

The city went bankrupt. A man named Edward Hull Crump, who was from Mississippi and whose own father had died in the yellow fever plague, came to Memphis, and he worked his way up to being mayor and essentially controlled the town. People were afraid of him. And how did this help Georgia Tann?

What was it about the new makeup of Memphis that was beneficial for her in her attempt to get children? Georgia was able to forge a relationship with Boss Crump. And once she had his protection, she was really untouchable. How did she find her victims, her children. So she took children who in the beginning were kind of already perhaps relinquished and adopted them out. But in those days, children in orphanages were quite frequently not orphans. People would put their children in an orphanage for what they thought would be a short period of time while they got on their own feet financially or recovered from an illness and so she took some of them. But as her business started booming, she couldn't satisfy the demand simply through children who were already relinquished or in orphanages.

And that's when Barbara Raymond says she just started stealing them. So because she had so much clout in Memphis, she was able to take children right from delivery rooms. I spoke with a doctor in the 1990s, who by then was in his 90s, and he told me about when he was an intern at a Memphis hospital witnessing things like this. Women dressed up like nurses who worked for Georgia TAN standing outside the door of a delivery room and the minute they heard a baby cry, they would go in and take the baby. A young mother would be told, Oh, honey, I'm so sorry, but your baby was born dead. And the mother would say, But I heard a baby cry.

And the nurse or the pretend nurse would say, Oh, no, no, that was another baby. And the mother would say, I want to see my baby. And they'd say, the state put the baby in the ground as if the baby had already been buried. And they got nowhere, these women. There were a lot of habeas corpus suits. People said, Georgia Tann stole my child. Not one was resolved in favor of the father or mother who had lost a child. And that was because Boss Crump had control of the town, and Georgia Tann had an in with Boss Crump. Georgia Tann was only interested in white children.

She paid people to keep their eyes open for blonde hair and blue eyes. One of her best allies was a juvenile court judge named Camille Kelly. If you were to be going through a divorce, or if you were very poor, you were having trouble, you might be told to appear before juvenile court judge Kelly. And she would, in the course of talking to you, write down the names and ages of your children. And Georgia would be given this information, and a few days later, you might get a knock on your door. She supplied Georgia Tann with 20% of the children she placed. One of the most complicated parts of Georgia Tann's story was that she was able to place children with new families at a time in the United States when adoption wasn't popular. Kids in orphanages usually stayed there.

Other children were sent to care for them. Some of them accepted or wanted an upfront fee for caring for these children. And once some of them had the money, they felt no incentive to keep the children alive. So there were articles in the New York Times of baby farmers who killed children with scalding water, by dashing their heads against walls. It was absolutely unbelievable to me to read this. Some baby farmers even took out life insurance policies on the children and then killed them to collect the money. There was an editorial in the New York Times in the mid-1920s that said that life insurance for children should be declared invalid because it was a temptation to inhuman crimes. Adoption had not been popular, in part, because of the thought that orphans came from unmarried women, and a pregnant unmarried woman suffered from moral abnormalities. A 1918 report titled The Unmarried Mother, a study of 500 cases,

describes them as repulsive, misshapen, depraved. People worried that the children would inherit their mother's weak moral character. So these children were considered tainted goods. And one interesting thing I found was, of course, there were always women who couldn't bear children, who wanted children. Even in those days when nobody wanted to adopt children, there were women who did want to adopt children, but they could not get their husbands to sign on to this. So faked pregnancies. One woman pretended to have born 11 children, and somehow the fathers believed this. What they would do is they would pretend to be pregnant and then they would wait until maybe the husband was out of town or away somewhere and they would pretend that they had collapsed in front of, coincidentally, a baby farmer's house, and they would be taken in.

And then the father would be called, and he would find his wife in bed with a newborn baby, which supposedly she had just given birth to. And so I think Georgia saw in her mind all these lovely, gorgeous, stereotypically blonde, blue-eyed, et cetera, children on baby farms, many of whom were dying. And also the death rates in orphanages in those days, on the whole, for the first year of life, were 50%. But I found one orphanage where in one year, 100% of those children died. So she found all these children just kind of vegetating or dying. And then on the other hand, there were people who wanted children. So tell me how Georgia Tann changed that idea of children being tainted. What did she say? She said that they were not children of sin. They were not genetically flawed. They were blank slates. They were born untainted, and if you surround them with beauty and culture, they will become

anything you want them to be." But she didn't believe that, so she went into the records and changed them so that people thought that they were adopting, say, a child whose father was a composer, whose mother was a debutante. And she also started placing children with very prominent people so that locally, at least, adopting more or less became the thing to do. Georgia Tann bragged that she had a rigorous selection process that matched the perfect child with the perfect home. But she wanted her customers to be happy, so sometimes she'd send three children to the same family and let them have a one-year trial to decide which, if any, they'd like to keep.

In correspondence with her attorney, children were referred to as merchandise, quote, in hand and in stock. She marketed children as luxury items, most notably by creating hundreds of actual advertisements for them. According to Georgia Tann, a baby was the perfect Christmas present. Her ads featured photographs of children dressed up with captions like Living Dolls for You and George wants to play catch,

but he needs a daddy to complete the team. Then, the ad said, put your orders in early. I'm going to go. worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series

about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think Georgia had reasons to do what she did beyond making money? She didn't want, I think, to bear children. But I think she must have wanted in some vicarious way to be involved in the birthing process because I was told of a man who strangely

was told to pick up his adopted daughter, baby, at Georgia Tien's residence, which is not the usual way she distributed her children. And he went to her house at night, and instead of a maid answering the door, Georgia Tann answered the door. Now, Georgia Tann usually wore very tailored clothes, but she was wearing like this sort of negligee. It was frilly, and he was taken aback. And she led him upstairs. It was frilly. He was taken aback. And she led him upstairs.

And the bed covering was white. And there was a little mound in the corner. And she folded back the cover. And there was a baby girl. And Georgia Tann said, this baby is perfect in every way. Now this man, who became the child's adoptive father, felt that Georgia Tann was kind of pretending that she had given birth to that child.

Celebrities all over the country asked Georgia Tann to find them a child. Joan Crawford, June Allison, and Dick Powell, Pearl Buck. Meanwhile, birth parents were desperately searching for their children, begging the police and judges to help them. One man searched for his little sister for 37 years, writing desperate letters to J. Edgar Hoover. Finally, in 1979, he got a letter from an employee of the Department of Vital Statistics that said, I could lose my job by giving you this information. Your sister was adopted by a Hollywood couple.

By 1935, George Tan had placed children in 48 states, along with Mexico, Panama, Canada, and England. Sending kids to wealthy families outside of the state of Tennessee let Georgia Tann increase her fees by a lot. She made her money by overcharging. She was supposedly charging travel fees and hotel fee, but she was charging maybe five, six adoptive families $750. Of course, the plane fare did not cost that much and neither did the hotel room.

I heard of people who paid $5,000 for a child. I think she asked what she thought she could get. Now, if she had operated legally, the fee would have been $15. So over time, you can see that she amassed an awful lot of money. She also extorted money from people who had already adopted children. Sometimes a year or two after the child had been placed, particularly if the child had been placed somewhere in her area,

she would ask for $1,000. And they'd say, well, you know, we don't have it. We're taking good care of little Susie and all this. And she would say that if she didn't get the money, she would take the baby back. George's own lifestyle got fancier. She bought another home back in Hickory, Mississippi, with servants' quarters, imported palm trees, fountains, and a room-sized refrigerator.

She took vacations in Cuba. There were big cars, furs. It was important to her business that she embody a certain kind of wealth, and this was reflected in her orphanage on Poplar Avenue in Memphis. So it no longer exists, but it had polished, beautiful floors. It had a lovely reception room. It had a room where Georgia Tann would meet with prospective adoptive parents. It had nurseries upstairs. For photo ops, there would be one baby per crib. But in reality, there were often four or five babies in a crib. By the mid-40s, Memphis doctors started to speak out,

going on record about signs of physical abuse and how they'd warned Georgia Tann not to remove infants from the hospital's care. In 1945, in one three-month period, a doctor, a pediatrician named Dr. Clyde Croswell, later said that 40 to 50 of her babies died in that one three-month period. And they died of, he called it infant dysentery, basically baby diarrhea. But babies, they weigh so little that they can dehydrate very quickly. And if they're not rehydrated, say in a hospital or something, they die. Now, Georgia Tan was a very proud woman. And I was told by another doctor who worked, volunteered his services for

her because he was desperately hoping to keep some of these kids alive, she felt she knew better than the doctors. He said, one time I prescribed an antibiotic for a baby, and she told the nurse not to give it to the baby, but to chart it as if the child had been given the antibiotic. So he said she would not take the children to the hospital, and they would die. Tennessee lawmakers attempted to pass legislation requiring children's boarding homes to be inspected and licensed,

but Georgia Tann somehow got an exemption from compliance. Her best political tool was babies themselves. She'd give them as gifts to lawmakers. She went relatively unchecked for decades. It wasn't as if the birth parents weren't speaking out against Georgia Tann, but it was like it didn't matter. They were always speaking out. And anybody who lived in Memphis and read the newspaper, and in those days, everybody read the newspapers because, you know, they didn't have television, they weren't online, they read the papers. I mean, one woman lost five children

to Georgia Tann, another woman lost five children to Georgia Tann. Another woman lost three children to Georgia Tann. A German immigrant father lost his daughter to Georgia Tann. It would take them a long time. They would finally, because nobody wanted to touch their cases, but they would finally find someone who would take their case. They never won. Barbara Raymond says she read case after case like this.

But one woman, Grace Gribble, has always stuck out. She was a widow with five children. One day, a woman who worked for Georgia Tann showed up at her house with papers to sign about free medical care. Grace signed them. And workers started carrying off the three youngest children. And as they carried them off,

one who was carrying off a little boy named Kirby, he was four years old, he had red hair, blue eyes, said, we have an order for a child of this age and type. Now, Grace ran to the courthouse and demanded to see her children, demanded her children back. And Georgia Tann said, you should thank me.

And Grace kept calling for her children and crying for her children. And Georgia Tann just said, go home and have some more. In September of 1950, Tennessee Governor Gordon Browning announced an investigation into Georgia Tann's operations with the Children's Home Society. Three days later, Georgia Tann died of cancer at age 59. Her death was reported alongside allegations that she ran a million-dollar baby black market. Governor Browning said he would sponsor whatever legislation was needed to, quote, prevent the sale of children.

As his investigation progressed, adoptive parents had to decide whether they wanted to know if their children had been stolen by Georgia Tann. Many chose not to. Barbara Raymond says that even as the details of Georgia Tann's practices came out, many still felt that the children were lucky to have been delivered into wealth. So the whole thing was just sort of allowed to fade away. And after Georgia Tann died, then, finally, her home was closed. You say that Georgia Tann invented modern American adoption. How? She popularized it. And I guess an argument could be made that by making adoption acceptable, in some ways,

she helped children. And I believe in some ways she might have if a child truly had nowhere to go. I imagine that's better than being raised in an orphanage. The problem was that many, many more adoptions were arranged than should ever have been arranged. My own daughter is adopted, not through Georgia Tann. And my daughter should not have been adopted. I love her. She is amazing. I cannot imagine my life without her. But when we found her birth family, they're wonderful people. And they had been told, you know, you're not married, you're young, you're going to have to relinquish this child.

And the reason why they were told that was instigated by Georgia Tann. After Georgia made adoption popular, potential grandparents sawn out, you know? No one now will have to know that my child is pregnant. I will send her off to Aunt Bertha's in California. At least that would be the story. But in reality, the young pregnant woman would go to a home for unwed mothers and relinquish the baby for adoption. And that was that. I kind of feel guilty for profiting from the pain of another woman. On the other hand, if I had not adopted my daughter,

who had been relinquished, someone else would have. But my daughter could easily. Her parents got married quickly. They raised three other boys. They're good people. They could have raised her. And she was their child. With Barbara Raymond's help, her daughter now knows her birth parents and her younger three brothers. She spent time with her four grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

As for Alma Sipple, the woman from the beginning of the story, it took more than 45 years for her to find her daughter. With the help of a Memphis volunteer agency called Tennessee Right to Know, she eventually got her daughter's new name and address. She sent flowers.

Her daughter called. They got to know each other. Alma Sipple said, I feel whole. Barbara Raymond spent 10 years researching Georgia Tann, tracking down victims and interviewing them. She was able to document 5,000 children placed by Georgia Tann. She suspects the number is closer to 6,000. Barbara Raymond's book about Georgia Tann

is called The Baby Thief. We've got a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com

or on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. And if you don't know, Radiotopia has a very special feed called Showcase, where we feature original podcast series of all stripes

from emerging and leading producers around the world. Right now on Showcase, there's an incredible four-part series called Space Bridge, which tells a largely forgotten story from nearly 40 years ago about technology, citizen diplomats, and the Cold War. Do you deserve this? This fantastic experience? Have you earned this in some way? Are you separated out to be touched by God to have some special experience here

that other men cannot have? And you know the answer to that is no. You know very well at that moment, and it comes through to you so powerfully that you're the sensing element for man. And that's a humbling feeling. Go listen. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia.

From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Thank you. asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com.

Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. This program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices and helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com.