Criminal - Melinda and Judy

Episode Date: October 21, 2016

When Melinda Dawson was seven years old, she learned that she was adopted under suspicious circumstances. As she got older and had children of her own, she tried to learn something about her biological parents. And when she went to the county courthouse and asked to see a copy of her birth certificate, she discovered that she was an unwitting participant in a traumatic history of a small town in Georgia where Dr. Thomas Hicks stole and sold babies to parents desperate for children of their own. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. 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

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Please use discretion. We took a little drive about a mile from our house, and she parked in this little park area, and she said, I'm not your birth mother, but I am your mother. And I love you as if you were my own daughter. But you came from a clinic in Georgia, and the doctor was selling babies, and so we paid money for you. I just didn't really understand what she was telling me,

except for the fact that she loved me, and I was her daughter, regardless. This is Melinda Dawson. Describe the conversation she had with her mother, Judy Johnson, in 1970, when Melinda was just seven years old. Had your mother had a hard time getting pregnant herself? Had she and your father been trying to get pregnant and not having any luck and so kind of came to adoption through that? Right. She was told that she was not able to have children because of an assault that she had endured at a young age. And, yes, they tried. And so she wanted a baby very badly,

and that's where I came in. Melinda says her mother and father had looked into adopting a baby through official channels, but it wasn't easy or cheap to meet the requirements. Back in the 60s, you could be turned down if you'd ever been divorced. You often needed to own your own home. And that's when they heard about a clinic in Georgia that didn't ask any questions. Like a lot of people in and around Akron, Ohio, Melinda's father and grandfather worked in the tire business. This is the home of Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone.

And someone at Goodrich was acting as an intermediary between the clinic and people looking to bring home a newborn. And let people know that if they wanted to get a baby, that they should call this number and talk to Dr. Thomas Hicks in McKaysville, Georgia. And I guess they made the decision to be put on the list and didn't know when they were going to get a call, just waited. And she told me that the instructions were to get to Georgia within 12 hours once they were called, come in the front door, sign the birth certificate, and head out the back door and get out of town as quickly as possible.

And that's exactly what Melinda's adoptive parents did in February of 1963. For a long time, Melinda's mother wouldn't tell her how much it cost. But eventually, when Melinda was an adult, her mother told her they'd paid Dr. Hicks $1,000. We had a discussion, and she said, we paid $1,000 for you, and back in the 1960s, that was a lot of money. And it didn't matter to me if they would have paid a dollar for me.

None of that made a difference to me, ever. As Melinda grew up, she asked more questions. Her mother did everything she could to answer them. They both assumed that Melinda was one of a few babies who couldn't, for one reason or another, be kept, and that when this happened, Dr. Hicks quietly paired them with couples who couldn't conceive. They had no reason to think otherwise until

Melinda went to the county courthouse in McKaysville, Georgia, and asked for a copy of her birth certificate. I noticed that the clerk of courts was very, almost like a movie. There was this big spotlight on her, and she was like, aha. There was an aha moment for her. And there was a whole list of birth certificates in this one particular file drawer. Because when I told her that I was born at the clinic, that aha moment came to her like, oh, this is one of the babies. And she gave me my birth certificate and asked if I could talk with the probate court judge, Linda Davis. Judge Davis had already noticed something very odd about the birth certificates coming out of the Hicks Clinic.

There's one telltale sign if you're a Hicks baby, and that is that your birth certificate says that you were born at the Hicks Clinic, and on the left side of it, it'll say non-resident. Like, you live in Akron and you're going to travel all the way down to McKaysville to this little, little clinic and give birth and then go all the way back to Akron. That's just absolutely ridiculous. So when they filed the birth certificates, they would put it as these people were at the clinic, gave birth, and they were a non-resident. That's the telltale sign that you're a Hicks baby. Talking with Judge Davis, Melinda discovered the scale of the operation she was a part of. She's one of at least 200 babies that were illegally sold to couples in six states from 1951 to 1964.

And when your very arrival in the world is marked with a fake birth certificate, you learn that you can't believe everything that you see. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Melinda says she grew up really happy. Her mother did everything in the world to make sure she felt like part of the family. I have natural red hair, and so she started dying her hair red. So, you know, she was very funny. I got to tell you, she was about five foot tall, maybe a hundred pounds, you know, and when I started growing up, I'm five foot ten, nowhere near a hundred pounds, but she never made me, none of my family ever made me feel like I was an outsider.

I mean, they were my family. She was my mom. I was her daughter. And proud of it. Her mother and father eventually divorced, and her mother later remarried. In the second marriage, her mother was actually able to become pregnant, in spite of what she'd been told, and she gave birth to Melinda's younger sister. In 1981, Melinda got married herself to a man named Clarence Elkins, and they had two

children. And when she had children of her own, she got curious about her biological family's medical history. There were some health issues that couldn't be explained. By this time, Dr. Hicks was dead. The clinic was long closed, and of course, there were no records. All anyone knew was what they'd been able to piece together with the help of Judge Davis. And the more questions they asked, the more complicated the story got. Some of the parents that purchased the babies were told that the mother had died, when in reality, the doctor was also telling the mother that the baby had died, and he would take care of the funeral, and then he would sell the baby.

Here's what we know about Dr. Hicks. Thomas J. Hicks got his medical degree from Emory in 1917 and opened the Hicks Community Clinic in McKaysville, Georgia in the 1940s after completing a federal sentence for selling drugs just over the border in Tennessee. That conviction cost him his medical license, but only in the state of Tennessee. So he just crossed the border into Georgia and opened a new practice. The Hicks Community Clinic became a thriving abortion facility during a time when abortion was illegal and birth control was basically non-existent. Many of his patients were wealthy out-of-towners, so much so that a private airstrip was built nearby so that the rich could fly in and out for their appointments. The locals knew about the abortions, too, but Dr. Hicks was regarded as an upstanding figure.

He was handsome and charming. His wife taught Sunday school at First Baptist Church. They were very well-liked in town. One woman even told the New York Times, quote, he gave the most terrific Halloween candy. He did a lot of good things for the town. And so the townspeople are very, they have, they hold him in a high regard. And you know, my mom did too, because she said, had he not given me you, I wouldn't have you. And so she held him in a really high regard. Now, we know a lot about Dr. Hicks over the years that we've been doing our research. And yeah, he was a very good guy. But he had a dark side as well. And once the practice of selling the baby and getting the money

became on a roll, as you can say, he profited big time on selling us to our parents. Melinda believes that Dr. Hicks was purely profit-driven, but the truth is, we just don't know. Some of the adoptive parents were told the $1,000 payment covered the cost of the biological mother's care. $1,000 back then comes out to about $8,000 today. But the only way for the Hicks babies to figure out whether their

biological mothers were helped or exploited by Dr. Hicks would be to find them and ask. In May of 1997, an article came out in the Akron Beacon Journal telling Melinda's story and describing the efforts by Judge Davis and another Hicks baby, Jane Blasio, to create a birth registry matching babies with biological mothers. The majority of the babies were sold to Akron couples because that was where the money was being made in the rubber industry. And so when this kind of like liaison between Dr. Hicks and the potential buyers, that's where it was targeted. And either from, you know, you worked at Goodrich, Goodyear, or Firestone, a lot of babies' parents worked in those industries. So when it came out in the Akron Beacon Journal, a lot of people still lived in the area. And some of those people were mad.

Judge Davis told the L.A. Times, quote, There are some people who are very opposed to this whole thing being brought to light. There's an air of protectiveness about Dr. Hicks. The Hicks babies around Akron tried to work as a group to manage the story, but eventually they splintered into two camps. Those who felt they should come up with one message and stick to it. That faction called itself Silent Legacy. And those like Melinda and her mother who said, hey, this is our story. We can talk about it however we like. Here they are in the Maury Povich Show in 1998.

Today, we are talking to women who were all told they were orphans. They were all adopted when they were babies. What they didn't know was that they may have been sold illegally on the black market. Judith is an adoptive mother who is here with her daughter, Melinda. Give us a picture of exactly what happened because you would go down to this small town in Georgia, right? We walked in and then they wrote out the birth certificate. They did not write it out in the mother's name. They wrote it out in my name. So the name on the birth certificate is yours? Yes. When it comes to parents? Like she'd ever had or I'd had her, you know, there's no way. And was your daughter being born then? Had she already been born? She had already been born. How old was she at the time? She wasn't even a day old when we got there and started back.

Right. So after the show, you know, the local news picked up on this and, you know, people would call my mom and say, are you the lady that was on the TV or were you, are you the lady that was on the news? And I got something to tell you. And, you know, how could you do something so illegal? And, you know, you should be punished for that. And we didn't know what that meant. I mean. And the threats were from people who were saying, how dare you do something like this? Yeah.

Primarily. Yeah. Or, you know, how dare you put Dr. Hicks in a bad light? And I think that maybe we were kind of a target because we were out there more and so accessible. And so that's, you know, when I told my mom, we need to, you know, have a watch put on our house. And, you know, that's what terrified me so much when I, I mean, that was my first thought when they told me she had been murdered, that it had something to do with the Hicks babies. On June 7th, 1998, Melinda was at home when her oldest son came to her and said that there were a lot of police cars outside their house.

And, you know, I'm screaming at them, what is going on? I mean, you can't imagine seeing police run out of the woods in full SWAT gear and running towards your house and you don't know where your husband and your oldest son are and then they're coming through the front door instructing you to come outside and he said, I'm going to tell you what's going on, but I don't want to tell you in front of your boy. My youngest son was 12 at that time, and my oldest son was 15. And the deputy asked me what my mother's name was, and I said, Judy. Why?

The deputy told Melinda that the police department had gotten a call early that morning that Judy had been fatally stabbed inside her home. And that, I mean, this is all in one sentence. And he says his six-year-old niece is saying that it was her Uncle Clarence. That's your husband? Yep. And I remember that feeling where you just kind of ball up into a fetal position because that pain was unbearable. And I just screamed. And you can't wrap your head around that you just cannot and I remember snapping too and saying you you guys are crazy he would never have done something like that

because you know they had him in handcuffs in the back of a patrol car um so at that point you know they took him and he never came back home. Not only was Melinda's husband, Clarence Elkins, charged with stabbing his mother-in-law to death, he was also charged with the rape, attempted murder, and assault of Melinda's six-year-old niece. My niece was staying the night with my mom on June 6th, Saturday night. And after the attack, my niece had made a phone call that was picked up by an answering machine. And her message to my mom's friend was that somebody had killed her mammal and she needed help. The six-year-old then went next door to ask for help and reportedly told the next-door neighbor

that the man who had assaulted her and killed her grandmother looked like her uncle Clarence. So not only was your mother stabbed, but your niece was, I mean, could have been killed as well. Yes, and I later come to find out that my mom was not stabbed, but she had been so brutally beaten that it appeared to be like stab wounds. Oh, that's hard. That's hard. That's hard to say. You know? I mean, how do you even split your brain enough at that moment

to be able to process the fact that your mother has been murdered and your husband is being taken away from her? How do you even function? Where does your mind go? I cannot even explain how that is because it's such a surreal, spiritual real spiritual event because you're back and forth. Oh my gosh, my mom. Oh my God, my husband. Oh my God, my niece. Oh my God, my mom. I mean, it was just, it was horrible and horrendous. And I mean, my first thought was that there's no way it's him. I wondered if it had something to do with the Hicks adoption because things were getting crazy. And, you know, once your life goes public, you're game, right? You're a sitting duck for some things.

And I really thought and was terrified that they would be coming after me next. It had only been two months since Melinda and her mother appeared on the Maury Povich show, and they'd been getting more and more angry phone calls. And so this is where Melinda's mind went as she tried to process what had happened to her mother and niece. She truly believed someone wanted to shut them up and tried to get the police to consider what she was saying. But there just wasn't evidence of any connection. It was a horrifying coincidence. And if it wasn't related to Hicks, who did do it and why? But what did you know about what your husband had been doing the night before the murder happened? Did you know? Was he with you?

Well, yes. Part of the night he was with me. The other part, he had a bonfire in our front yard. He went to one of the local watering holes with some of his friends. So he was never, you know, alone. You know, and I got to say, we were married for 17 years at that point, right? And I know that there are people in this world that can manipulate others to think that there are some way and they're really not. But, I mean, we were married at 18 years old. We basically grew up together.

And I knew him in and out, right? And we didn't have a great marriage, but he was not a violent, sadistic serial killer like they made him out to be. I mean, it was just ridiculous. I could not even – I think that that made me – what fueled my anger the most besides the fact that my mom had – someone had actually done that to my mom and my niece. The other part, you know, they're not out there looking for the true killer. They're trying to put their story together and make him guilty when he's not. Did they have anything to say that he was near your mother and niece? No, nothing.

No, we lived an hour away. There was no physical evidence. There was an eyewitness, and she was six years old, who said, it looked like him, but I only seen him in the dark. I only seen the back of his head. That was it. Yep. That was the evidence, the evidence.

That was it, she said. And she hadn't seen him for over a year, and she was six, and had been brutalized and traumatized. And you could tell that she wasn't sure because she kept saying, well, it was dark, and I only seen the back of his head. And the prosecutor was like, well, thank God she doesn't remember. This tore Melinda's family apart. Her sister wouldn't speak to her, and no one wanted her anywhere near her niece. Clarence Elkins was charged with aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, rape, and felonious assault.

Melinda's niece testified to what she'd seen, and Elkins' defense attorneys said he'd been in local bars until 2.30 a.m. and arrived home at 2.40 a.m., went for a walk with his wife, and then went to bed. When I got on the witness stand to testify for him, wow, I mean, they tried to make me look like the biggest liar and some dumb country hick that was standing by her man. The jury deliberated for three days, and on June 4, 1999, they reached a decision. And I watched the jury walk in

and I watched them look at Clarence and I knew that it wasn't good. How did you know that? They gave him, a lot of the men on the jury gave him a look like, you're disgusting, you freak, you're,, you're just hateful. And then a couple of the women jurors were crying, and the judge read the verdict, and he ultimately was sentenced to two life sentences, guilty on three counts of rape and two counts of assault. And so I remember the prosecutor telling me,

well, you're not going to see your husband for at least 54 years. And I remember looking into the news camera and I said, you want to bet? We'll have the rest of Melinda's story in our next episode. My niece had said that it was not Clarence that was there that night. She was just saying what everybody was telling her to say, what everybody was expecting her to say. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Alice Wilder is our intern.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at our website, thisiscriminal.com, and learn all about our fall tour. We'll be in D.C., Durham, New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Iowa City, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Toronto. All new stories told live and some surprises. We hope to see you. 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.

Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. And thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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