America’s Most Notorious Baby Thief: Georgia Tann
For 20 years in Tennessee, Georgia Tann ran American's biggest black market for children, trafficking over 5,000 kids. We cover how she built her business, and how some children eventually found their families.
TW: Kidnapping, child death, reference to sexual assault, reference to pedophilia
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SOURCES
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-20-vw-882-story.html
https://allthatsinteresting.com/georgia-tann
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-tennessean-series-1-tann/24013539/
https://www.nchgs.org/html/a_story_of_stolen_babies.html
https://www.newspapers.com/image/563194/?match=1&terms=georgia%2520tann
https://www.newspapers.com/image/109883002/?match=1&terms=%22Tann%20Tann%22%20%22Kenyon%22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNdC5pjFwVc
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh-XEjqj73c
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/daughter-origins-adoption-america/
https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionhistbrief.htm
https://www.britannica.com/topic/adoption-kinship
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/adult-adoptee-birth-cerficiate-legislation/
https://fundyouradoption.org/resources/cost-to-adopt-a-child/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/adult-adoptee-birth-cerficiate-legislation/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/secret-adoptions-right-to-know/677677/
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https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/use-morphine-and-scopolamine-induce-twilight-sleep
https://hekint.org/2017/01/27/changes-in-childbirth-in-the-united-states-1750-1950/
The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisantz Raymond
Before And After by Lisa Wingate and Judy Christie
TRANSCRIPT
In last week’s episode, I told you stories about a mysterious fake social worker who showed up on the doorsteps of poor mothers in Memphis, Tennessee in the 30’s and 40’s. She’d offer healthcare services for babies, or a place to stay for a while while the mother got back on her feet, and then the woman would whisk the child away in her signature black limousine, and the baby would never be seen again.
Today, I want to tell you who that woman was, and how she was able to make a black market adoption ring for 20 years in Tennessee. You don’t need to listen to last week's episode for this one to make sense, but I highly encourage you to check that one out. This is an incredibly dark mark on the history of adoption and I don’t think it gets talked about enough, so I can’t wait for you guys to hear all of the research we did on this one.
Before we dive in, I’d love to tell you about new podcast I’m doing with Pave Studios called CLUES, where I dive into the clues that lead to breakthroughs in cases throughout history with my cohost, Morgan Absher of Two Hot Takes. We have two episodes out now, including the story of Laci Peterson who seemed to vanish without a trace on Christmas eve of 2002. Her body was eventually found washed ashore in the same marina her husband said he was fishing in the day she went missing. We break down the clues that ultimately lead to a conviction in that case. You can listen to Clues wherever you get your podcasts and also on Youtube.
Now before we get into today’s episode, I’d like to give just a HUGE listener discretion warning. We are dealing with children, and while I will never graphically describe the abuse of children, it is really important to this story. I mention physical, mental and briefly sexual abuse towards the end. So if you need dip out until next week’s episode, which is on Brazilian Folklore, I totally understand.
Alright, let’s dive back in.
Georgia Tann was born in a rural Mississippi town in 1891. And Her family was best described as big fish in a small pond: Georgia’s father and namesake, George Clark Tann, was a well-respected judge, and he owned the biggest house in town. Judge Tann also had a reputation for being cocky and overbearing with a steamroller personality, something he would pass along to his children.
Georgia’s mother, Beulah, worked as a school teacher. At the time, it was almost unheard of for an upper class, married woman to work outside the home. But that was nothing compared to the rumors of a major scandal. According to one relative, Georgia’s older brother Rob Roy was adopted. It’s unclear if this was actually true There’s no paper trail to back that up- or if Rob Roy just didn’t resemble the rest of his family. But it was Georgia who was named after their father. It’s an unusual choice to bestow that honor on a second born daughter, rather than a firstborn son.
But this was never something the Tann’s would have addressed. No, they were all about keeping up appearances. Georgia was outfitted in nice dresses and expected to sit studiously at the piano each night. Adoption, at the time, was a huge dark mark on a family. It actually was typically looked at as a way to purchase cheap labor. Adopted children weren’t looked at as part of the family, but more like part of the staff, and they were considered nuisances. The unwanted children of the poor left to nag on their new families.
One night when Georgia finished practicing the piano, she went up to her fathers office and saw him hunched over paperwork, anxiously rubbing his temples. She knew what it was. Recently, her father’s courtroom had become overrun with orphaned and abandoned children. Most of his day to day was dealing with the minutia of these cases like tracking down relatives who could provide care, or finding an institution to house them. Georgia watched as the stress of it all ate at him each night.
But to Georgia, the options for these children were horrible. Asylums were meant for adults in some kind of distress, where the destitute did hard labor to pay off their debts. The conditions there were disgusting, and no place for a child, or infant. And the other option often involved the children being reunited with their poor families or single mothers, which to Georgia who had been raised with a silver spoon, honestly seemed worse. There had to be another way, Solving this problem would become Georgia’s life’s mission.
One day, when Georgia was 15, she went to work with her father at his courthouse. There, she saw a five year old boy and his three year old sister cowering in a corner. She approached the frightened children, and asked about their parents.
The children explained that they were there because their parents didn’t have enough money to care for them.
According to Georgia, the children were in danger of being institutionalized. So, she started asking around in her community. Eventually, she found a well-off family that was willing to take the children in. Somehow, Georgia convinced them to love the youngsters like their own, rather than sticking with the social norm of treating them like indentured servants. It was a stable placement, and they made a happy family.
This made Georgia feel like a saint. She felt like she had saved these children from the horrors of the asylum system. Or worse, a life of being POOR. She was addicted to this feeling, and couldn’t wait to do it again. And it wasn’t long before Georgia became known around town as the person to call about an abandoned infant or child. she had created a little business for herself, But Judge Tann didn’t approve of his daughter’s ambition.
One day, Georgia was carrying an abandoned infant into a courthouse. She passed by a group of men chatting outside – including her father. Judge Tann was embarrassed. His proper young daughter should be sitting up straight at the piano. Not conducting official business in this very male dominated setting.
He had a way to fix his daughter, he thought. When it was time for college, Judge Tann sent her to an all women’s college, where she was to study music. Being around this many women should teach Georgia a lesson about femininity and a woman’s place.
Well, I don’t know if he knew about what happens at women’s colleges, but that is NOT who was at Martha Washington College. Instead Georgia met women who wanted to dedicate their lives to a profession, rather than to marriage. Women who read books and wore pants. This way of life appealed to Georgia, who had never been interested in having a husband.
This is also where Georgia was introduced to the idea of a “Boston Marriage” by her female professors. That’s when two women lived together long term and never took husbands. These couples wore rings, and called each other “sister.” It was a very, “history will remember them as roommates” situation if you catch my drift. The general public viewed these relationships as pitiful, but harmless. At the time, the general consensus was that women were incapable of homosexuality.
But when Georgia saw Boston marriages, everything clicked. She wasn’t interested in hommakeing or husbands, she was far more interested in the company of women. It seemed like school was doing the exact opposite of what her father intended.
By the time she was done with school, she had made up her mind. She was going to pursue a career in the emerging field of social work. To continue her mission of saving children from poverty, single mothers, and institutions.
The general thoughts on adoption at the time hadn’t shifted much. Most people still wouldn’t consider adopting as a way to build their family. Georgia wanted to change that,
Georgia took her first job as a social worker with the Mississippi Home-Finding Society in 1916. Within a few years, she was in charge of what her agency called a Receiving Home. Today, we might call this a group home. It was state-funded, temporary housing for children waiting for either foster or adoption placement. We don’t have a lot of information about how Georgia conducted herself here, but it seems like she was already sidestepping protocols and legal processes to place children into adoptive homes. After all, she had her judge father there to bail her out if she ever got in trouble.
Sometime in 1922, Georgia drove her Model-T Ford out into the sticks She stopped outside a run down cabin of a really poor family. On the porch, a dirty toddler with black hair and brown eyes played with a few sticks. A two-year-old, named Onyx. It was just him, his three-year-old brother Clyde, and their mother, Rose who lived in the house. Their father had recently died.
When Onyx saw the shiny car pull up, he probably stared. Their little rural town likely didn’t see too many cars. And they certainly never stopped outside his house. His mother was taking a much needed nap inside. She was pregnant, diabetic, and grieving for her husband. She wasn’t there to tell Onyx to get away from the woman. To not accept the offer of a nice ride in a fancy car. If she had been, maybe Onyx wouldn’t have gotten in the car.
Rose didn’t know it, but Georgia had her father draw up the necessary paperwork to have her legally declared an unfit mother, and Onyx an abandoned child. Before Rose could locate her son, Georgia placed him in an adoptive home.
A few weeks later, Georgia repeated the process with Onyx’s brother Clyde. Rose never saw either of her children again.
But this was just the beginning for Georgia, because Once she saw how easy this process was , having her her father draw up the paperwork, luring kids into her car to find them new families, nothing was going to stop her.
After Georgia Tann kidnapped the two boys from the cabin, their mother Rose went to court to try and regain custody. She lost, probably because Georgia had her father pull some strings.
But Judge Tann couldn’t protect Georgia from everything. Although the adoptions held up in court, other locals did not appreciate Georgia’s tactics. She ended up getting fired from her job with the Mississippi Home-Finding Society, and found she was not welcome in her own community. But instead of taking a hard look at what she’d done, Georgia brought her scheme to a new town.
By that point, she was living in her own Boston Marriage with a woman named Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, and they had adopted a daughter named June. Georgia moved her little family north to Memphis, Tennessee. There, Georgia accepted a position as the executive secretary for the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. We’ll call it TCHS for short.
Georgia found the agency limited in scope, and lacking in funding compared to the Mississippi Home-Finding Society. There was only one other employee working in the tiny office she was assigned. Their work was completely administrative, overseeing the placement of children in various privately-run boarding homes. But Georgia was on a mission, she had a vision, and she got right to work.
The first issue Georgia tackled was her small budget. She drove that same Model-T around Memphis, building relationships with everyone from local business owners to heads of women’s clubs to judges. Georgia set her new friends up with TCHS board seats, which had two advantages: One, influential Memphians now had a vested interest in raising money for TCHS. And more importantly,, they felt indebted to Georgia. The board was supposed to supervise Georgia’s work, so Georgia stacked it with allies. She didn’t have daddy around to get her out of trouble anymore, so she needed friends in high places to do that instead.
Georgia’s biggest prize was a politician named EH Crump. He was known around town as “The Boss.” Crump’s hold on Memphis city politics was absolutely ironclad, and he had a decent hold on state-level politics, too. No one was elected in Memphis without his say-so. Georgia thought she’d had access to unbridled power through her father, but Crump was about to take things to a whole new level.
With a friendly board and the backing of Memphis’ most powerful politician, Georgia was able to decide how TCHS should be run, and what her job authorized her to do. She started barging into boarding houses for children around town, unannounced, and arranging adoptions. She’d analyze the children, prioritizing the ones that were more conventionally cute, and she’d go out and find them a family.
And on the surface, to her board and EH Crump, things seemed to be going really well. Georgia had an exceptionally high success rate with adoptions
But not just because she was exceptionally good at it. She was able to move so quickly because she was ignoring the law. Georgia failed to confirm that a family would be an appropriate fit for a child, or to disclose the medical history of the adoptee to adoptive parents, like if they suffered from seizures or needed specific medications. And Other social workers knew what was going on, they’d try to bar Georgia from entering their facilities to look at the children. But because Georgia had Boss Crump protecting her, no one could stop her.
And these adoptions are not free, they’re a business, and Georgia started taking home a lot of money for her “social work”. Eventually, she traded in her Model T for a Raven Black Limousine
But,Georgia wasn’t satisfied with adopting only children who were already wards of the state. Just like she spotted those kids in father’s courtroom, she wanted to scoop up any child she could. And by scoop, I mean kidnap.
In the middle of the day in Memphis, a not quite twenty one year old Josie Henderson felt ripping pain in her abdomen. Her baby was coming.
Her neighbor drove her to John Gaston hospital, the baby's father was at work and couldn’t leave, every penny helped this family, and so, he’d see Josie after his shift was done.
The delivery was swift, and the child arrived by the afternoon. Josie was out of it after birth, the cocktail of drugs they gave pregnant women back then made her loopy and tired. She closed her eyes, and awoke the next morning to a woman standing at the foot of her bed.
I’m so sorry, but your child has died, the nurse told her. What? Josie asked. Impossible, there must have been a mistake. But the nurse just shook her head and left the room, but not like she was giving Josie space to grieve, like she needed to run out of the room before she accidentally said more.
Devastated, Josie collected her things and was wheeled out of her hospital room. There in the hallway, was another woman. Young, like Josie. No husband to hold her while she cried, her shoes tattered and dirty from work as a sharecropper. Her child had also died.
Wow, what are the chances, Josie thought to herself. But then she looked around the hallway and saw multiple other women, all of them young, most of them without husbands, crying because they had just been told that their babies had died as well. And one by one each of them had paperwork shoved in their faces, and were told that the hospital would take care of everything as long as they just signed on the bottom line.
What they were actually signing, was paperwork that Georgia had drawn up by her Judge Friend, Camille Kelley, where the women would rescind all of their parental rights to the child. Yes, Georgia had arranged for the trafficking of all of the children born in the hospital that night. She was friends with the judge, she was friends with the hospital staff and owner, and so no one was around to help the women when they started to wonder if their babies really all had died that night.
And this became part of Georgia’s new MO. She expanded and refined her abduction methods. Rather than relying on her father to fix the paperwork on the back end, she began using a more streamlined method: tricking desperate and unsuspecting parents into signing their rights away. We heard some of these stories play out in Part 1. Georgia would find impoverished families, especially single women, when they were vulnerable early postpartum or when they were struggling due to lack of resources. She exploited her role as a social worker – someone who was supposed to be there to help a family in trouble – and used that trust to take away their children
In 1928, Georgia arranged 206 adoptions. That was a huge number. Another urban Children’s Aid Society averaged about five adoptions a year in the 1920s.
Georgia had so much success placing children because she considered the adoptive parents, rather than the children, the primary client she was servicing. She wanted to make adoption as accessible, streamlined and even fun for adoptive parents as possible. The process felt like a high-end shopping experience.
Georgia had prospective adoptees photographed in cute outfits, and printed their photos in sleekly designed brochures. Each photo would be captioned with the child’s name, age and any special characteristics, like a talent for singing or a high IQ. Usually, all that information was made up. Parents might ooh and ahh over a photo of a four year old named Glenn who could recite poetry. In reality, that child might be a six year old named Vernon who couldn’t tie his shoes. But Georgia didn’t care – she just wanted to make the sale.
Georgia offered other perks, too. Tennessee state law required her to vet adoptive families to make sure they could provide an adequate living environment for an adopted child. Georgia always executed this step, because she could charge parents for it. But it was purely for show. If a parent could pay, they passed inspection. That meant some of the children Georgia placed experienced terrible things in their new homes. Many were beaten. Some reported being ignored or denied food. One little boy worked 18 hours a day harvesting tomatoes. A little girl spent hours locked in a closet.
But Georgia felt like this didn’t matter, because she had a theory that children were “blank slates”.
One of the biggest hurdles for families was they didn’t want to deal with the emotional trauma an adopted child had to process. Georgia simply claimed that problem didn’t exist. She promised that the children she offered would retain no emotional attachment, or even memory of their birth parents. She claimed that even school-aged children wouldn’t retain any connection to their lives before adoption. They were ‘blank slates’ to be molded however adoptive parents wished. But children knew that wasn’t the case.
For one five year old named Elizabeth, the effects would follow her all the way into adulthood. Elizabeth came into Georgia’s care with her brother soon after their mother died. Without any warning, Elizabeth was separated from her brother and flown across the country to her adoptive parents. They greeted her by saying she was a new person now, with a new name: Carol.
Elizabeth was very confused, wondering where her brother was, and still deep in grief over losing her mother. When her new parents gave her a beautiful new doll, she named it Elizabeth. Anything to hold onto her old life.
But her new parents seemed frustrated by Elizabeth’s ongoing grief. Because of Georgia’s promise of a ‘blank slate,’ Elizabeth’s totally normal emotional response to all these changes made her seem defective. Elizabeth’s new mother kept saying, “Those things never happened. You’re ‘Carol.’”
This cognitive dissonance resulted in an identity crisis that required years of therapy to recover from. As a young adult, Elizabeth dropped the name Carol and returned to her birth name.
Georgia couldn’t actually erase a child’s memory of their past. But, she could erase the real evidence of it.
Aside from not wanting to deal with the emotional issues of adoptees, Adoptive parents also weren’t keen on the possibility of being superseded by their adopted child’s birth parents later in life. Georgia fixed that by offering forged birth certificates that listed adoptive parents as birth parents. Original documents were sealed, erasing the fact that any adoption ever took place. Again, Georgia prioritized adoptive parents over the children she was supposed to protect. Sealing original birth records made it very difficult – sometimes impossible – for adult adoptees to find information about their true origins.
All this bespoke service didn’t come cheap. In other jurisdictions, adoption was relatively inexpensive for parents. They might have needed to pay a nominal amount for court fees. But
In total, parents adopting from Georgia paid something between three and ten thousand dollars. In today’s money, that's anywhere from $70,000 to $200,000 dollars. For reference, In the US today, the cost of adopting a child ranges from $8,000 to $45,000.
All that cash was intoxicating. Georgia used it to buy her girlfriend Ann and herself expensive clothes and cars. She purchased commercial property, and even a vacation home where she and Ann rode horses. But if Georgia wanted to keep it up, she had to keep expanding. She drummed up business the way any entrepreneur would: with advertising.
She started publishing photographs of the children in her care in local Memphis newspapers. The pieces read like a disturbing cross between livestock classifieds and singles ads. Underneath a photo of three baby girls, Georgia wrote the caption: “Living dolls for YOU.” Or beneath a smiling toddler: “Are you in the market for a 14 month old boy?”
The ads were a roaring success. The first two children Georgia featured had dozens of interested families within 10 minutes of the paper’s publication. During the holiday season, printing a photo in the paper almost guaranteed an adoption. After running the ads locally for a few years, they became nationally syndicated in the 1930s. Once Georgia’s business was on a national stage, it exploded.
And so, Georgia became the go-to person for adoption across the United States. Donations to TCHS skyrocketed. And suddenly, Georgia had far more interested parents than she had children available to place.
To keep up with demand,. Georgia recruited other people to help her, called ‘spotters.’ Doctors and nurses would alert Georgia when a single mother was in labor. You probably remember Mary Reed, the single mother in Part 1 who was still under the influence of anesthesia when Georgia got her to sign paperwork to relinquish her son Steve. Mary was the patient of Georgia’s personal doctor. He likely alerted Georgia to show up in the delivery room that day.
Other social workers did the same. Social workers assigned to widows as they were getting back on their feet would alert Georgia when it was a good time to come take a baby. There were also contacts in Tennessee prisons and mental institutions too. They would let her know when residents were in labor.
All these people received a kickback for each child they delivered to Georgia.
Georgia’s growing popularity leveled up her ability to protect the growing operation. She schmoozed with politicians and legislators, and placed children with them. Georgia also made adoption deals with other social workers and state employees. These placements were all strategic. These were the people who might report or prosecute Georgia for her illegal activity. But if they had adopted children from her, they were more likely to turn a blind eye.
Georgia’s political connections were so strong, she had the ability to rewrite Tennessee state law. Every time Georgia faced a legal roadblock, she just rewrote the rules. For instance, In Tennessee, a judge was required to certify that a biological parent’s permission had been obtained before an adoption was performed. Obviously, Georgia often did not have a parent’s consent, But Georgia pushed through a law that only required a notary to confirm birth parent consent. And Georgia was a notary, and so were many of her employees. So she could sign off on her own illegal adoptions. She didn’t need anyone's permission to do what she was doing.
This ushered in an era of unstoppable trafficking on Georgia’s part. She was kidnapping hundreds of children at this time, from all over the south.
she would kidnap children by the bunch in what she called “a round-up.”
That’s when Georgia and the people she had working for her would pile into a few cars and drive off to whatever target Georgia had selected. It could be an apartment building, a rural farming community, or a poor residential area. When they arrived, she handed out paperwork prepared in advance by Judge Kelley, the juvenile court judge Georgia had looped into her scheme. That paperwork might say that the parents provided a poor home environment. It might say that the parents were alcoholics. It might say that the children lacked food, or clothing. The reason didn’t really matter – none of it was true. But Judge Kelley’s pre written signature gave Georgia and all her underlings the power to walk into a home, and walk out with the children inside.
The poor people and single mothers in the area couldn’t do anything. They watched in horror as their children were taken.
It was an incredibly dark time in history, but it was about to take an even darker turn.
So During the 1930s and 40s, adoption saw a sharp spike in popularity all over the United States. Much of that increase can be credited to Georgia Tann. Her nationally syndicated newspaper ads got the ball rolling, but what really changed the country’s perception of adoption was seeing famous celebrities take part. Georgia’s most recognizable client was hollywood actress Joan Crawford.
Seeing celebrities like Joan Crawford and powerful politicians adopt destigmatized the process – even made it seem fashionable. Georgia loved the news coverage of these kinds of placements. She knew they would only make her business grow.
It grew so much, in fact, that Georgia no longer had enough space inside of TCHS to keep the children. But she had a fix for this. She would loan them out.
Identical twins James and Thomas White were five when people working for Georgia Tann kidnapped them out of their bedroom. They spent some time in Georgia’s TCHS mansion before Georgia sent them to Hollywood, where they lived with a couple who drank constantly, and either ignored them, or beat them with an extension cord. Eventually, they took advantage of one of the periods of neglect, and escaped. A neighbor found them hiding in an empty swimming pool, and called the cops.
Unfortunately, the authorities decided that the best way to help these boys, now 7, was to ship them back to Georgia Tann. James and Thomas found their second stay with Georgia much more harrowing than the first. Because there was no more space for the boys, but Georgia believed she could still make money off of them, she would often pick them up from their boarding home, and bring them to her personal home, or the homes of strangers.
The twins would go on to recount this story on the Oprah Winfrey show in 1991, but they had memories of being in a home with a bunch of strange adults who had rented out the children for a time. It was at these kinds of events that the children were sexually abused.
These events happened too many times to count. On paper, Georgia claimed this was because her boarding home and others in her network were at capacity. But James and Thomas said this was a facade to cover up a child sex trafficking ring. But remember, Georgia was telling people about her Blank Slate theory, that anything that happened to children before a certain age would not be remembered. But as the twins sat on stage with Oprah on her talk show, they were liver spotted and gray haired. Despite their wrinkles they still looked like identical twins, and yet they remembered. They remembered all of it, 50 years later.
James and Thomas eventually escaped this horrifying cycle, and the brothers remained close as adults. When they told their story, they joked they barely knew what to call each other anymore. They moved so often, and had new caregivers change their names so many times, it was hard to remember the real ones.
James and Thomas were some of the lucky ones that escaped at this time, because many did not. There were too many children under Georgia’s care, she couldn’t keep track of them all. and even though she absolutely had the money too, she didn’t seem interested in keeping the TCHS repaired and safe.
She kept certain areas of the home clean for adoptive parents, but in reality the conditions were terrible.
There was no cooling system in the building. In the summertime the heat on the upper floors could be suffocating. Conditions were often described as clean, but unsanitary. Children were constantly sick, especially with GI viruses. For infants, a stomach bug can be deadly – and at the TCHS boarding house, they often were. In its 26 years of operation, investigators estimate that about 500 children died there.
Even though the city had a dedicated cemetery for minor wards of the state, Georgia often chose to bury children behind the boarding house, or burn their remains. That way, she didn’t have to report the deaths. But even with that very lax reporting, Georgia single-handedly gave Memphis one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country.
The rapid expansion of Georgia’s business, and Georgia’s increasingly brazen behavior had one silver lining: it seems like it became a little easier for kids to escape, or for parents to find ways to reclaim children who had been stolen.
Josie Stateler was a single mother to her 14 month old daughter. We don’t know how the toddler ended up in Georgia’s boarding house, but Josie showed up there determined to get her back. Somehow, she distracted one of Georgia’s staffers long enough to get her hands on the baby, and hightail it out of there. Josie was so afraid of retaliation, she moved to Massachusetts as quickly as she could.
Peggy was nine when she and her four siblings were kidnapped from their single mother. But Peggy refused to go down easy. She did everything she could to make life miserable for whoever was in charge of her: she wet the bed, she screamed nonstop, she stopped speaking coherently. Her siblings were adopted into homes across the country, but Peggy kept getting sent back to Georgia after being rejected by several foster homes. Finally, someone in Georgia’s organization gave up, they were spread too thin, and sent Peggy back to her desperate mother. Her siblings never returned.
In 1950, an investigative journalist put together an explosive exposé of Georgia’s scheme. The current mayor, Gordon Browning, was the first in forty years that wasn’t under Boss Crump’s thumb. Browning saw that Georgia’s scheme ran on corruption all over the city government, and announced his own investigation. It looked like Georgia finally had nowhere to run. But, she would still manage to evade prosecution.
Because Just a few days after Browning announced an investigation into the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and Georgia Tann, Georgia passed away from cancer. She was 59 years old.
Although the investigation immediately closed down Georgia’s deathtrap of a boarding home, they didn’t do much else of use. Even though there were still children living in the home when it closed, only two of them were allowed to resume life with their birth parents. The others were distributed to other state-run facilities.
Despite the best efforts of the lead investigator, birth parents looking for their kidnapped children received very few answers. Georgia’s powerful friends in city and state government weren’t interested in exposing her crimes, because they knew it would expose their own complicity. Rather than attempting to rectify any of the illegal kidnappings, legislators, many of them looking to protect their own Georgia-facilitated adoptions, went the exact opposite direction. They hastily passed a bill that retroactively legalized all of Georgia’s adoptions. So Nothing Georgia did could ever be considered against the law.
The investigation could only look into the financial fraud that allowed Georgia to use adoption to enrich herself. Although she was a millionaire at one point (which would be about twenty-two million today) there wasn’t much left when she died. Eventually a suit was filed against Georgia’s estate seeking $500,000 they claimed should have been funneled into TCHS instead of Georgia’s pocket, they ended up settling for about $55,000. The estate never had to disclose anything they had done. They never needed to provide a paper trail to any of the children, siblings, and parents looking for each other.
If any of the families Georgia tore apart wanted to be reunited, they would need to do it themselves. And it wasn’t easy. Georgia’s habit of rewriting birth certificates meant that often there were zero records remaining of a relationship between an adopted child and birth parent.
But People were not going to go gently. Many families were determined to find each other, and that fire only grew over the years. Children grew up and had flashbacks of Georgia taking them, they remembered having other parents, siblings.
So they used many different kinds of methods: other public records, word of mouth, even classified ads placed in newspapers. In the 1980s, a man from Memphis named Denny Glad founded Tennessee’s The Right To Know, an organization that helped reconnect the families that Georgia separated. In 1999, Tennessee unsealed all of their adoption records, and people were able to start piecing together their stories. And over time, genealogical DNA got better and cheaper and more accessible. If people didn’t have a piece of paper from the state telling them who their original family was, the DNA could tell them. And, slowly but surely, more and more of these families started finding each other.
Mary Reed, the single mother whose son Steven was stolen immediately after his birth, got the phone call she’d been dreaming of in the mid 1980s.
Steven always knew he was adopted, but assumed his parents voluntarily gave him up. He had no interest in knowing them. But when he learned that he came through TCHS, he wondered if perhaps he was one of the kidnapping victims. At 48 years old, he tracked down Mary, and was shocked to know that she’d been looking for him for his whole life. When they first spoke on the phone, she said “All my life, since the day you were born, I’ve been waiting for this day.” They met for the first time when Steven picked Mary up at the airport. They hugged instantly.
Alma Sipple, the mother in Part 1 who thought Georgia was taking her sick daughter Irma to the doctor, was watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries in 1989 when she saw a familiar face on the TV. it was the woman who stole her daughter, Georgia Tann. Alma wrote to the show immediately. Apparently the producers received over 600 letters after that episode aired, from people asking them to help find their families. They were able to help her track down Irma after searching for 45 years.
Some reunions came too late. An adoptee named Glenn learned in his 80’s he had a brother named Al who he was separated from at birth by Georgia. He hurried to make a trip from his home in Ohio to meet Al, only to learn that Al was dying. He was able to approach his brother and lean down by his side to tell him the only thing he’d get to say to him in person. “We didn’t get to play as children. But we can play in heaven”
many of the adoptees lucky enough to track down their original roots weren’t lucky enough to meet their birth parents. For many, they uncovered the truth too late, long after their parents were dead.
Georgia’s practice of revising birth certificates, or making the original documents inaccessible, continues to this day in many states. Proponents argue that it protects the privacy of birth parents and the sanctity of adoptive families, but the majority of adoptees find it inhumane to be cut off from information about their true origins. Adult adoptees and their advocates recently won more open access to their records in Utah, but 19 other states including California and New York still restrict it.
And I just wanted to say how sad I am at how many of you are still affected by this. I heard from so many listeners over the past week who were adopted, had friends and family who are adopted, who suffered from some of Georgia’s long term affects. It seems like this series really struck a chord. I also heard from a lot of single mothers, people who were raised by single moms, and even social workers who were appalled by this story. And in general i just wanted to say thank you for sharing your stories with me, it really is what makes this community so special, and it’s why we can’t ever forget stories like this.
If you’d like to hear a bit more, I’ll be over on footnotes on Patreon talking about the research that went into the episode and going through a bit more of the celebrity aspect of the cases, including Ric Flair who was trafficked by Georgia
This is a very big story, and if you’d like to read more about it, I really recommend the books Before and After by Judy Christi and Winsa Windgate, and The Baby Thief by Barbara Bisantz Raymond. Those were two of the main sources we used for this episode, and I can’t recommend them enough.
Ok, thank you so much for joining me over these last two episodes. This has been an incredibly dark journey but I’m glad we took it together. We are going back into the backwoods next week, to talk about some of the scariest creatures from Brazilian folklore. I’m talking the undead crawling out of their graves, creatures that try to kill you when you sleep, and a monster in the amazon that might be more real than anyone wants to admit. Join me here next week its going to be fun.
And until then, stay curious.