Baby Broker

Hey True Weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. It was June 12, 1940, and the Nazis had just captured France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. A pretty big news day, right? And yet, in Memphis, Tennessee, that news shared the front page with a grainy photo of a baby girl.

Cheeks split wide and a gummy smile. The headline read, Nancy, just 11 months old, needs a home. Can you say no? Underneath the photo of baby Nancy was this description. Curly brown hair with just a hint of gold. Big brown eyes with a merry sparkle and an excellent disposition. Can you resist Nancy? Award of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, Nancy is available for permanent adoption.

So are seven other infants and children, boys and girls up to six years old. Nancy is 11 months old. Anyone interested in adopting Nancy or another child is invited to get in touch with Miss Georgia Tan, Tennessee Children's Home Society, Durman Building. What a beautiful child. One of thousands of babies that Miss Georgia Tan helped place into loving homes.

Such a nice story. Such a sweet story. Until you know the truth. When the bell rang, the cradle will fall. The truth about Miss Georgia Tan. And down will come cradle, baby and all. And they got a small beam of light. It's a real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real. Adoption has been around forever.

It just used to be a private thing. It wasn't until 1851 that any law regulating the practice was passed in the U.S. Massachusetts was the first state to recognize that child welfare really ought to be a bigger priority when it came to adoption. Crazy as that sounds, like if not child welfare, what was the priority back then?

It's simple. The interests of the adults involved. It sounds like something out of a Dickens novel, but back in the day, you could snatch up an orphan or two and just put them to work on your farm or in your blacksmith shop. It was fairly common for an orphan in pre-industrial America to be made an indentured servant to a foster family room and board in exchange for labor.

Whatever. It was your business and yours alone. And that orphan was damn lucky you came along. That was the attitude then. But by the beginning of the 20th century, those attitudes were shifting. People were migrating from farm work to factory work, from rural areas to the cities. There was a big decrease in infant and childhood mortality.

Expectations about child labor and compulsory schooling were evolving. The idea of childhood itself was evolving. Could it be that these small creatures were not actually just pint-sized adults, but something else altogether? Something needing care and nurture? What a crazy idea, right? With this epiphany came huge changes in the way children were treated in almost every corner of life, starting with the orphanage.

An institution that basically warehouse children and fell out of favor. There was concern that children housed in orphanages were not developing properly emotionally or socially, that the lack of eye contact, physical attention and dedicated nurture was leaving them stunted and damaged. In the place of institutional care, smaller agencies sprang up, devoted to placing orphan children into foster and adoptive homes.

The Great Depression only accelerated that development. With funds scarce and resources strained, orphanages were forced to copy the foster and adopt model. Still, no one paid that much attention to adoption, not really. It took until 1920 for anyone to even start keeping track of who was being adopted by whom. That was limited to just a handful of places in the U.S. As it turns out, poor record keeping was a feature, not a bug.

Not that those records were accessible anyway. By the 1930s, most states had passed laws sealing adoption records to the public. The practice of issuing an amended birth certificate at the time of adoption was the frosting on the cupcake of official and permanent secrecy. An amended birth certificate replaced the names of the birth parents with the adoptive parents.

This worked like a promise to the adoptive family that no stranger would ever appear on their doorstep to snatch their beloved child. It was a huge selling point for the agencies involved in rehoming children. Big peace of mind for adoptive parents. And it created a handy little loophole that could be exploited. By someone unscrupulous enough to steal a child or sell a baby.

Someone like Georgia Tann. Georgia Tann was born on July 18th, 1891 in Mississippi, the daughter of a judge who dreamed of fathering a musical prodigy. He started his daughter on piano lessons at age five. He saw her growing up to be a concert pianist. She didn't share that dream. Even after graduating Martha Washington College in Virginia with a degree in music, what Georgia wanted was a career in law.

Highly unusual choice for a woman at that time. Georgia also wanted to remain unmarried. Another highly unusual choice. Determined to do it her way after college, Georgia spent two summers studying social work at Columbia University before finally making her way home to Mississippi. She landed a job as the receiving director at the Kate McWillie Powers Receiving Home for Children, which was part of the Mississippi Children's Home Society.

The job seemed to be a good fit for Georgia. She not only found her career, she found love. First, the career. Mississippi was a poor state and Georgia encountered the poorest of the poor in her work. It wasn't long before she began formulating her own ideas and theories about what was truly best for children. Her job was to place children for adoption.

And Georgia had clear ideas about that. She viewed the poor as little more than breeding stock. Fine for making babies, but not at all up to the task of raising them. The wealthy, in her view, were simply better, higher quality stock. And to see wealthy couples childless and desperate for a family, couples with so much to offer.

Well, it seemed to Georgia that those couples would do just about anything to become parents. Including paying for the privilege and poor people. What did they have to offer a child? Not much, in her view. Children benefit from being raised in homes belonging to people of a higher type. You already know that there were few regulations on adoption in the 1920s when Georgia got started.

It was almost too easy, too easy to persuade a poverty stricken young woman that she couldn't give her baby the things it needed. Too easy to gently lift the child from its mother's arms. Too easy to convince her she was doing the right thing. The loving thing. The most selfless thing any parent could ever do. And it was even easier to sit with the desperate childless.

To name a price. To dangle the promise of being a family with one hand, the other hand outstretched for the payment. And this is how Georgia Tann found her true calling. Baby broker. I don't care who you are or where you are. Selling babies is an extremely delicate criminal operation. Mississippi, as it turned out, was not the best place for it.

Georgia's father was a prominent member of the community that can only make it harder for her to conduct business under the radar. And uncomfortable questions were starting to be asked about her placement methods. It caused such concern that her position was terminated. She had it for Texas, but didn't last long in the Lone Star State.

She next set her sights on Memphis, Tennessee. But this time she wasn't alone. Georgia was accompanied by Ann Atwood, Atwood's son, Jack, and her own adopted daughter, June. The two women had known each other as children, though Anne was eight years younger than Georgia. They'd reconnected at the Mississippi Children's Home, where Anne was also employed as a housemother.

Anne claimed that she was widowed, but the gossips whispered that Jack was born out of wedlock. The way people are allergic to minding their own business is really something, isn't it? Like, leave this woman alone, you ghouls. Anyway, Georgia and Anne headed ever so slightly north to Tennessee. It wasn't considered all that unusual then for women of means to share a household.

So when the group appeared in Memphis, no eyebrows were raised. That would come later. But despite suspicion and homophobia, Georgia was with Anne until the day she died. In 1922, Georgia landed the position of Executive Secretary of the Memphis Chapter, Shelby County Division, of the Tennessee Children's Home Society.

This was the oldest child placement agency in the state, operating orphanages throughout Tennessee right up through the 1950s. It didn't take long for Georgia Tann to basically take over the entire operation. And she wasted no time endearing herself to the community. It seemed like everywhere you looked, there was Georgia Tann, her heart overflowing with concern for the children.

In July 1925, she helped send 16 teenage girls, all wards of the Tennessee Children's Home Aid Division, to a YWCA summer camp for girls in Arkansas. It isn't only that they will be given the chance for the fun and frolic that all girls love. But better than that, it is the knowledge that somebody cares enough about them to do things to make them happy.

Georgia was in the news quite a bit, but it was only in hindsight that some of the events she played a part in came to seem suspicious, even sinister. Like this report, published Tuesday, September 22nd, 1925, the headline turned out to be downright prophetic. Court today decides claim to sold baby. Four-year-old Martha had been sold in Arkansas two months earlier for a buck fifty, two car tires, five gallons of gas.

She'd been stolen from a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 24th. The kidnapper was arrested in Jasper, Alabama, and confessed to taking the girl and selling her. The couple who bought the child turned her over to the authorities, who then placed her at the Tennessee Children's Home. Georgia Tann placed the child with a family in Mississippi.

The distraught biological parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Horton, learned of their daughter's fate after reading in the newspapers that her kidnapper had confessed. They did their own legwork, tracing the child to Memphis and Georgia Tann's organization. A judge in Memphis listened to their story and ordered the child to be located.

Georgia arranged for the girl to be transferred from Mississippi to a foster family in Memphis. Reunited with their daughter, the Hortons were ecstatic. The child, who had clearly suffered significant trauma and undisclosed injuries at the hands of the man who kidnapped her, showed no sign of recognizing either parent.

It was a shocking, heartbreaking story, the first of many like it, that the name Georgia Tann would feature in. March 1929, a Memphis physician found himself in deep trouble for allegedly having advised a 17-year-old Arkansas girl to abandon her newborn on the steps of a home in Cordova, Tennessee. Child desertion at that time was punishable by prison and a steep fine, and Georgia Tann told the press that the doctor who'd advised this course of action was deserving of the same punishment as this poor girl mother.

I know that the doctor was to blame, but the girl was so pitifully young that she did not know what she was doing or what to do. The owners of the doorstep that newborn landed on, the Andrews, they wanted desperately to adopt the baby, but Georgia advised against it. Unless you have the consent of the parents, the adoption won't be legal.

The mother could appear at any time and take the child away. Let me say here that I'm not suggesting that Georgia was behind either of these cases. It's just fascinating to watch her calmly and reasonably weigh in on the exact kinds of cases that she herself was getting rich exploiting. Who better to know every angle, legal and otherwise, than the biggest perpetrator of all?

The one hiding in plain sight, her eyes warm and concerned behind her steel rim spectacles. The last person anyone would think to suspect. On December 20th, 1929, the newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, received a letter from a man in Brownsville, Tennessee, a letter that today would bring cops banging on your door. But it perfectly captures the vibe of the times.

And it brings us to Georgia's Christmas babies. Dear Sirs, I understand that you can give me some information concerning where I can find an orphan to adopt. I would like to have a girl with black hair between the ages of two and four years. We'd like to have her by Christmas, if possible. I can furnish best of references.

Please let me hear from you as soon as possible. Signed F.L. Morris. OK, what? What did we just hear? Sounds deeply worrying to us, but it was just another day at work for Georgia. What a question. It might be done. We'll see. We have a worker who knows everybody in Brownsville. And if she personally knows about this family and we can find a black haired baby girl from two to four years old, that will fit into their home.

We might be able to send her by Christmas. The reporter wasn't having it. He demanded to know what had become of the twenty five Christmas babies that the Tennessee Children's Home had advertised as available for adoption just in time for the holidays. All but nine have been placed in private homes and most of the others are just a few months old.

We do have a little girl eight years old and a boy nine. We had piles of applications for the Christmas babies. I love how the children are listed like inventory. Here's how that newspaper story ended. Mr. Morris doesn't know if the Tennessee Children's Home Society can find him a little girl or not. If any reader of the commercial appeal knows where there's a healthy, attractive baby girl from two to four years old with black hair that can be adopted.

Please write to Mr. Morris. Sweet baby Jesus locked up in a pervert's dungeon. The absolute matter of fact, horror of it all. And here's another horror. In the 1930s, the city of Memphis had the highest rate of infant mortality in the United States. A devastating statistic directly linked to Georgia Tann and the hundreds of children who died under her care.

Let's jump ahead to 1939. By this point, Georgia had been running the show at the Tennessee Children's Home for nearly 15 years. The walls of her office were plastered with photos of children she felt particular affection for. She explained the adoption process, saying that prospective parents had to meet certain standards, but so did the children.

She shared a sweet little anecdote about finding medical care for a baby girl named Jane who'd been born with crossed eyes. No one would want a child like that, not unless those eyes can be fixed. Poor baby Jane with her crossed eyes. To think of discarding a child for something so trivial. But remember, this was a period when eugenics was a very popular theory.

The idea was to improve society by controlling reproduction, by reducing or even eliminating so-called inferior and undesirable people. This mindset powerfully influenced the growing adoption industry, creating demand for quality babies. Quality being code for white, attractive, healthy children. If they have blonde hair and blue eyes, jackpot.

The word you're looking for here is Aryan. Oh, but white supremacy does run so very deep, doesn't it? An organization called the National Home Finding Society even ran ads boasting that adoption would. Reduce divorces, banditry, murder and control births. Fill all the churches and do real missionary work at home and abroad.

Exchanging immigrants for Americans and stopping some of the road leading to war. Oh, wait, wait. Did you hear that? Listen, listen. History echoing that line about exchanging immigrants for Americans, you know, for a country built on immigration. It seems like we sure do loathe and despise the very idea of ourselves.

Anyway, all these factors added up to a booming business opportunity for Georgia Tann, who knew full well just how valuable those attractive white children could be. Georgia never stole even one black child, which proved to be a kindness, even if that kindness was only an accidental byproduct of her deeply ingrained racism.

By 1940, Georgia was really cooking as a baby trafficker. The babies and children she trafficked weren't all foundlings left at the fire station or orphans or even kids willingly surrendered by a parent or parents that couldn't care for them. Keeping her adoption pipeline stuffed with children was a priority, and Georgia had zero scruples about how to do it.

She had an entire network of helpers on her payroll, cops, social workers, doctors, authority figures who had no difficulty persuading children to come along. Kids were snatched from playgrounds, from schools and even from churches. Sometimes Georgia's helpers would call and tell her that they'd spotted a good candidate playing outside or walking in a neighborhood.

Georgia would jump into her big, shiny black car and head that way, pulling up alongside the child and offering a ride home. Her warm smile. She seemed so grandmotherly. More often than not, that child will climb inside her car never to be seen again. Did they ask questions, these kids? Did they put up a fight? Did they not cry and plead to be returned to their parents?

Well, yeah, many did. And they were told that their mother and father had been killed in a car accident or had no money to take care of them any longer or just plain didn't want them anymore. In one case in January 1943, Georgia snatched six children from the front yard of their shanty home. She'd been tipped off by one of her sources that the children's mother was in the hospital.

Up she cruised in her glossy Packard. These kids had never even seen a car up close, had never ridden in one. And here was this sweet grandmother beaming at them and patting the seat next to her. Your mama asked me to come in and look in on you. I have a wonderful idea. Why don't you children come along for a little ride?

It'll be such fun. We can surprise your mama. It was that easy. Of course, Georgia didn't steal every child she trafficked right off the street. She had an ally at the courthouse, a co-conspirator named Camille Kelley, as in Judge Camille Kelley, who presided over the Shelby County Tennessee Juvenile Court for three decades.

Let's say a child appeared before Judge Kelley, a child who fit Georgia's criteria, a child with a widowed mother from an impoverished home. Judge Kelley could and did remove children from their homes and place them under the care of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, where Georgia TAM would eventually adopt them out for a price, of course.

Sometimes a parent would arrive at school to take their child home, only to be informed that their son or daughter was now in the custody of child welfare officials. They were free to petition the judge in the case, not knowing that Judge Kelley was on the take and that their child had been taken for good. The Western State Hospital in Tennessee, the kind of facility that used to be called an insane asylum, located about 60 miles outside of Memphis, was another source of babies for Georgia.

Any child born to a patient there was surrendered to the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an arrangement that went on for 30 years. There were rumors and allegations that patients were raped and forced into sex with both security guards and local men to keep that baby mill humming. Dismiss those rumors if you can't bear to even think about something this revolting.

But someone was impregnating those locked down psychiatric patients. Locked down in their all-female wards. And then there were the babies born to poor women, who might awaken in their hospital beds after delivering to the tragic news that their newborn had died. Best not to see the body. Best to accept God's will, ma'am.

There, there now. Dry those tears. You're young. You'll have more children. You'll see. These grieving mothers had no idea. That their newborn was alive and well and up for sale. One mother pushed back, saying her baby couldn't have been a stillbirth. She'd heard the baby crying. Your imagination, she was told. Grief can make a person hear and see things that just aren't there.

Naturally, a backstory would have to be manufactured for each of these children. Pure fiction in many cases, along with dramatically altered or downright falsified medical histories. Those files were pure creative writing. In the rare case where an adoptive parent would push back on their new baby's unlikely-seeming origin story, Georgia didn't hesitate to respond with the threat of legal action.

The kind of legal action that would result in the adopted child being removed from their custody. And of course, Georgia had Judge Kelley in her back pocket. But how exactly was Georgia's math, mathing? If $7 was the cost for an adoption in Tennessee, how was Georgia making so much money? The answer is simple. Private, out-of-state adoptions.

About 80-90% of those adoptions took place in New York and California. Her prices topped out at about $5,000. That was a fortune in 1940, worth almost $110,000 in today's money. The demand for babies was always higher than the supply. So Georgia was in the capitalist catbird seat, and she knew it. In one 10-year span, between 1940 and 1950, Georgia arranged for more than 3,000 children to be placed in New York and California alone.

And by placed, I mean sold. Georgia had help with this, like she had with every aspect of her baby business. Two women who worked for her named Regina Warner and Alma Walton. Walton handled the California side of the business. Warner covered New York. Every three weeks, the pair would load up anywhere from four to six babies apiece, and then hit the road.

From hotel rooms on each coast, Warner and Walton would meet with prospective parents. Almost always wealthy, prospective parents. None of whom knew that they were one of many potential customers. Georgia's hustle was carefully calibrated to avoid sticker shock. The stated adoption fee for out-of-state was $700. Of course, there are a few additional expenses.

Not that one can place a price on becoming a family. There were background checks with another fee, of course. Not that most of the background checks were ever done. That was an easy fee to pocket. And then there was the cost of the hotel and meals and incidentals for the baby. And don't forget air travel. Georgia marked that way, way up.

And then, should it all work out, there was the paperwork. So much paperwork. And you know that came with a fee, too. A fee that Georgia jacked up to five or more times the actual cost. It was easy to do. It was so easy. What person desperate for a child finally holding a child in their arms so close to taking that child home?

Who in that moment would nitpick a few more dollars here or there? What kind of miser would put a price on parenthood? It was all so incredibly emotional for her clients. And Georgia knew just how to exploit that. Now, spoiler alert. Walton, heading to California, might have gotten the better territory. Because she got to sell babies to celebrities.

It's Hollywood star Dick Powell. You don't hear much about him now, but he was a big deal back in the day. He had three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. One for movies, one for radio and one for television. It was during his last marriage to the actress and Golden Globe winner June Allyson, America's Girl Next Door, that Georgia Tann entered the picture.

The couple adopted two children through Georgia's operation, a daughter and a son. And they had no idea that their beloved babies were victims of human trafficking. Georgia sold babies to another movie star. And one of those babies grew up to make her famous mother infamous. That baby was Christina Crawford, adopted daughter of Academy Award winning actress Joan Crawford.

Christina's 1978 memoir, Mommy Dearest, was turned into a smash hit movie starring Faye Dunaway in a completely unhinged and unforgettable performance. No wire hangers! What's wire hangers doing in this closet? What I told you, no wire hangers ever! Work and work till I'm half dead and I hear people saying she's getting old.

What do I get? A daughter! Who cares as much about the beautiful dresses I give her as she cares about me! What's wire hangers doing in this closet? Answer me! I buy you beautiful dresses and you treat them like they were some dishrag. You do! Three hundred dollar dress on a wire hanger! We'll see how many you buy to eat in some here.

We'll see! We'll see! Get out of that business! All of this is coming out! Out! We're gonna see how many wire hangers you've got in your closet! Why, Christina, get out of that bed! Get out of that bed! You live in the most beautiful house in Brentwood and you don't care for clothes from wire hangers? And your room looks like a two-dollar-a-week tennis room in some stupid backstreet town!

Joan Crawford had adopted Christina in 1939 and then son Christopher in 1943 and then through Georgia Tann she adopted twin sisters Kathy and Cindy in 1947. Joan Crawford was happy to pay Georgia's exorbitant fees. In her mid-40s at that point she was considered too old for motherhood by reputable adoption agencies. As a divorced woman it was thought she could not provide an appropriate home for children and as a Hollywood star it was whispered that she was far too promiscuous to make any kind of decent role model for a child.

But her crisp green movie star money was all Georgia needed to approve the placement. Some of Georgia's babies grew up to be famous in their own right like pro wrestler Ric Flair aka The Nature Boy. You gotta be born a champion! You gotta have it inside! You gotta feel it! Live it! Breathe! Be prepared to die for it! You gotta face the assault on life itself! That's why some people say I've lost it!

I haven't! What I've done is I've let go! It's been mine! This is mine! It'll be mine for eternity! Georgia's baby selling went international too. She established a channel to the UK and babies just flowed across the Atlantic Ocean into England. Not all the loving homes. There were reports of children being sold into what can only be called slavery, factory and farm work. Some of Georgia's stolen kids were sold to pedophiles and you can fill in those blanks for yourself. All that filthy money flowed into a secret account like babies flowed into homes.

Georgia didn't report these transactions to the board of directors at the Tennessee Children's Home Society and certainly not to the IRS. But there were eyes on her. At least there were eyes on the Tennessee Children's Home Society which found itself in 1941 dropped from the Child Welfare League of America's list of qualifying institutions. Judge Samuel Bates ruled, Tennessee Children's Home Society had been dropped from the Child Welfare League of America because of its repeated failure to have homes of foster parents investigated prior to the placement of children for adoption, because the Tennessee Children's Home Society had failed to study the children and their heritage before placing them for adoption, because of the failure of the society to select proper homes for the children placed for adoption, because the foster parents had been permitted to select the child of their choice rather than placing the children in the home best suited for the child, because the home had been engaged in advertising children for adoption and had encouraged hasty placements and disregarded the children's right to protection from commercial advertising, and because the society had engaged in interstate placement of children at long distance from the situs of the society which prevented careful home findings and suitable supervision pending adoption. That was in 1941. If all of that was known in 1941 then why was Georgia allowed to keep going for so long? Sure there was another little investigation in 1945 after 40 to 50 babies died under her care when an epidemic of what was described as infectious diarrhea swept through the place. The physician who cared for the children, a volunteer named Dr. Clyde V. Crosswell, submitted a statement saying that Georgia disregarded his medical orders which contributed to the heavy death toll. Despite this, the Tennessee Children's Home Society remained open for business for another five years. We were placing children with people who wanted them desperately. Everything was for the children and what was best for them. The simple truth is black market baby selling wasn't even illegal back then. It was just unethical and distasteful.

There were concerns that black market adoptions didn't do an adequate job of screening prospective parents and with the ease of fabricating records for the children, how could adoptive parents be sure that their new baby's medical history was accurate? For example, people of that era considered anyone with a mental health diagnosis to be defective. Do you really think they'd drop a few thousand dollars on an infant born to a mother in a mental hospital? No. How about a newborn snatched from the maternity ward or a rosy-cheeked toddler grabbed from a playground? No. These would-be parents wanted babies born to young women from good families. Young women who found themselves in a bit of trouble. Georgia Tann cheerfully indulged that fantasy as she handed over each child and accepted each payment. She'd managed to rake in more than a million dollars. That's worth over 13 million in today's money. Then came September 11, 1950. The governor of Tennessee, Georgia Tann. Within 48 hours, it was headline news across America. It took almost no time for officials to uncover Georgia's operation, which makes you wonder again why it took so very long for the alarm to be raised. It was all right there in plain sight. If you bothered to look, one of the first red flags was the shockingly high number of out-of-state adoptions when there was a backlog of families in Tennessee who had been unsuccessful in adopting children from the Tennessee Children's Home Society. I was curious. And there was the paperwork. At least 50 children placed in New York and California for whom no adoption decree had ever been filed.

There were complaints filed against Judge Kelley's juvenile court. Complaints filed by parents who'd had their children taken from them and then adopted out by Georgia's agency. The attorney assigned to the investigation, Robert Taylor, reported that more than 90% of the adoptions processed by Georgia Tann had gone to California and New York and none of the adoptive parents had appeared in court for the required adoption hearings.

None. Taylor said that most, if not all, of those adoptions were legally invalid, but that it was unthinkable to remove the children at this point. He said that some other remedy must be found to legalize the adoptions. It's breathtaking when you learn that Georgia stole more than 5,000 children and not one of those adoptions was ever investigated.

Not one of those children was ever returned to his or her birth parents. Georgia Tann never faced legal consequences for her crimes. That's because she died on September 14, 1950, just three days after Governor Browning opened the state's investigation and three days before the state filed charges. Uterine cancer was the cause of death.

Apparently, Georgia was too ill to even take a phone call informing her that her million-dollar baby brokerage was busted. Uterine cancer. The uterus. The womb. That's what took the baby broker out. Judge Kelley was in trouble, too, under suspicion of having taken bribes from Georgia. She resigned almost immediately after the investigation began. The state ultimately found that Kelley had not profited from the adoptions but had failed on many occasions to aid destitute families and permitted family ties to be destroyed. Kelley died less than four years later in 1955. 19 of the children who died under Georgia's care were buried in one large plot at the Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. No headstones. It wasn't until 2015 that the raised enough money to erect a monument at that grave. A monument that reads, In memory of the 19 children who finally rest here unmarked, if not unknown, and all of the hundreds who died under the cold, hard hand of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Their final resting place unknown. Their final peace a blessing. The hard lesson of their fate changed adoption procedure and law nationwide. The children who survived Georgia's baby brokerage got a little help from the state of Tennessee. In 1979, a law was passed requiring the state to assist siblings who've been separated by Georgia TAN's illegal adoptions. Another law passed in 1996 opened all records of the Tennessee Children's Home Society to adoptees and their adopted and biological relatives. It's crushing to think how many of those adoptees hit a wall in their search. Where did the kidnapped, the stolen children even begin to look?

How about the children born to patients at Western State Hospital? The children born of rape for hire. Before she got caught, Georgia TAN was renowned for her work in adoption. She was even a bit of a celebrity in her own right. The author Pearl S. Buck invited her to collaborate on a book. Eleanor Roosevelt consulted her on matters of child welfare.

She was invited to the inauguration of President Harry S. Truman. When adoptive parents learned of Georgia's crimes, they were devastated and terrified, scared that if they looked at all into their child's background, they'd learn something terrible. Something with the power to utterly destroy their family. Governor Browning closed the Tennessee Children's Home Society forever in 1950.

The Tennessee Children's Home you'll find today, a residential care facility, bears no relationship to it. But the thousands of children who pass through its doors have to live forever with the knowledge that they were nothing more than little bundles of profit for Georgia TAN. Families broken, siblings separated, loss and pain and grief spreading like ripples across water, generation after generation. And no justice, no peace.

Not then, not ever. Next time on True Weird Stuff. You know, the most common fetish that people have is a foot fetish. Actually, the foot fetish is a gigantic industry online. There are people making like thousands of dollars every month selling pictures of their feet. Here's something I bet you didn't know. We've got a couple of serial killers with a foot fetish. And I'm not going to tell you right now what those boys did with some of those feet because I want your imagination to just do on it.

That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Stacey Robertson, Don Morgan and Kary "Doc" Bowser. Do you know, you know, there are some people that do things that are so awful that you say special place in hell. Well, special place in hell. Good Lord. It's shocking, isn't it? There are so many things about this story that shock me.

Maybe the most shocking part of all is how long it took for this to be stopped. And as it turns out, she died three days after the investigation. So it was destined to end anyway. But, you know, they looked in 1941 and then they looked again in 1945. Are you telling me that there was there wasn't enough evidence back then? And I know the black market baby selling wasn't a crime, you know, until much more recently. But that doesn't that part shock you?

Is it is it possible that people looked at it and said, well, you know, maybe some things, but, you know, people are getting children and they're getting adopted. And I don't know. I'm just wondering if people just didn't didn't put as much value on what the children and what was happening to them. Well, they sure didn't. I mean, they weren't children, weren't even like childhood wasn't even a concept, really. You know, these were you birthed them out as soon as they could walk and talk. You put them to work. I mean, you know how I feel about the puritans.

So much of this comes from our puritanical foundations. It took a long, long time for this country. And I can only speak about this one, but it took a really long time for this country to address the craziness and the illegality of the adoption industry. And adoption, you know, adoption is a very, very serious thing. It is hard on adoptees and on people who give their children up. We have my children's father was adopted and his story is pretty traumatic, really is traumatic for him, traumatic for his biological mother. A lot of trauma there. And, you know, people are very casual when they talk about and what was happening prior to and it's still happening in a lot of states.

What was happening prior to the 1950s? You know, if your baby was taken from you and George still five thousand children, OK, if your baby was taken from you and adopted out with an amended birth certificate, they cease to exist. You know, good luck tracking that child down. So there were so. And then, of course, the records were sealed. I mean, sealed, tight sealed, you know, so good luck to you. Right. And even today in some states as an adoptee, it's incredibly difficult to get access to the information that pertains to your birth in this world. I saw my children's father go through that. He had to work through an intermediary who basically had the whole file open on her desk, but she didn't disclose anything to or to his biological mother. We had to wait for the moment when the biological mother reached out to make contact and he had reached out to make contact and then the intermediary put them together. There's something maddening about that for the adoptee. Like you're like, that's my life. Like this is me. This is who I am. What do you mean I don't have access to the where I was born, who I was born to? And of course, it's all meant to protect adoptive parents and children and families. And there's a lot of good intentions in it.

But, you know, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And if you if you have adoption in your family, you know what I'm talking about, that it's there's a lot of pain and trauma, not always like in the case of Ric Flair, who we know personally, and I love the guy. He's, you know, he's been through it. Rick's biological brother reached out to make contact with him. And Rick was like, I don't I don't want that. My parents who adopted me. That's my mom and dad and I love them. And I'm going to leave it there. So every adopted person, every adoptive family, every birth parent has their own unique journey and experience. There's no one size fits all. But I think we can all agree that what Georgia Tann was doing was a racketeering crime operation. It was human trafficking.

I mean, if you're stealing people's children, you know, one of the things about adoptees and I have four nieces and nephews who were adopted, and then we have a mutual friend who does a podcast, you know, I'm talking about, yeah, it's adopted. And one of the things in he in support groups that adoptees have, despite the fact that you may have been adopted by a good and loving family, there is a lingering feeling of being rejected for whatever reason. You know, whether you can sort it out in your mind or not, there seems to be this underlying feeling of a rejection that a lot of them have. Can you imagine how awful it is that these children are adopted, find out they're adopted, feel like they have that, but they weren't they were stolen. I mean, what, what, what a minefield of damage this woman did, that was just had so many tentacles that that affected so many more thousands of people than just the 5000 children that she was involved with placing. The thing about so the thing about Georgia Tann is there were so many flavors of trauma. So there were and don't for any don't for a second think that there were not also fully above board and legal transactions happening at that time in the children's Tennessee Children's Home Society. Because of course, you know, they had to, they had to have some legal in state adoptions to Tennessee families. Otherwise, the audit would have caught them immediately, right? But you had you had children that were straight up kidnapped, like straight up snatched off the street. Then you had children where the birth mother was told that the baby had died. Right? Then you had children that were removed from the home by Judge Kelley. And then you had children that were coming out of the Western State Hospital baby mill, where they're the biological mothers were in they were psychiatric patients. And the fathers of those biological babies were whoever got his pants down fast enough. Those women were it's unthinkable of all her crimes. It is unthinkable to me that vulnerable women in a psychiatric hospital setting were systematically raped and bred like cattle. Wow. Like I said, special Wow, in hell, she's got a room of her own in hell, you know. And, and because and so you and I were in this conversation, we know what it is like to we know what it's like to have adoption in our families and to see the joy of of being able to be parents and I mean, you you saw that not one time but four times, right? So you know, we're not anti adoption.

But it's not simple. It's not simple. No, it's not. And, and Georgia, it's kind of like on the one hand, I say to myself, girl, there was justice, that was karmic justice. This woman who trafficked babies, who stole children, who who tormented biological parents, who basically picked the pockets of desperate people who yearn to be a family. She got cancer of the womb. If that's not like, hey, God, can you give me a sign? Like, really? Does that is not a Greek tragedy level? Yeah.

I mean, you if you wrote it that way, you would say all that's hokey. That's too much. Yeah. And there are there are, there are some books. Obviously, there are books, there's a lifetime movie. There's a novel called before we were yours. That's a fictional kind of telling of the Georgia Tann story. There's so much incredible information out there and people that are working with what they call the Georgia Tann babies, you know, all of whom my God, many are gone. Yeah, I mean, most of them right at this point, they're in there, like the youngest would be in their 70s. I mean, Ric Flair, thank goodness is still walking amongst us. But a lot of these children are gone. The birth parents are all gone. Right. So this effort for some sort of, you know, reconciliation in the in the records and the history and the data is it's not futile. You know, they're surviving family members a couple generations down.

But except for the, you know, the, the karmic justice of uterine cancer, which I hate to be that a woman got uterine cancer, like, when did I turn into this? But except for that karmic justice, what other justice was there? There was no justice. I mean, seriously, there wasn't. And what kind of person was Georgia Tann? I think that she was a sociopath, if not, if not meeting the criteria for psychopathy. And, and the reason that I think she may have met the criteria to be a psychopath is because there was blood all over her hands.

So many children died. And we don't know where they're buried, by the way. There's only like 19 at the Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. Where are the others? What, you know, what hole in the ground were they were they thrown into? And what does this remind you of the Florida Reform School? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a previous previous episode, we had a true weird stuff that unmarked graves, I believe, if you want to check that out that there are similarities with that.

Like, it's almost unbearable to think about this, the suffering that so many of these children, so there were the 5000 she sold, but there were the many, many other children who came through the door and were under her care. And so in the in 1945, when the illness swept through, because Tennessee Children's Home Society at that time was like, it was like an orphanage, or it was residential. And the sickness that swept through it could have been anything, it could have been norovirus. They called it infectious diarrhea. But what the technical clinical thing was, is lost the time the doctor didn't know. And he pleaded with Georgia Tann.

And he was a volunteer, like a member of the community volunteering his medical service for the sake of these orphaned children and children looking for foster care. He begged Georgia Tann to take the steps necessary to slow the spread of the infection, and to keep these children from becoming so sick that they died. And she was like, Yeah, I don't think so. And, and so dozens of babies died. And a horrible death, by the way. So you might say, well, she was just greedy. And that's why she did it. But she's truly this is, I mean, it's it's sinister behavior. I mean, to think about that.

It does feel like there's something more than greed. Yeah, at play here. There's an utter callous indifference to life. So there's that. And then there's greed. And there are plenty of greedy people with their handout. You heard what I said, like the people on her payroll were police officers and social workers and medical personnel. How do you think she'd know that the baby that a poor woman had just given birth? She got a phone call from the hospital.

You know, everybody was on the take it. It makes you wonder what kind of a mind devises some way to prey upon somebody in such a way as to go, Oh, well, if this is what the situation is, I'll bet I can personally profit in this way. What kind of a mind is wired like that? Because you and I, we're not, we're not wired that way.

I'm, I've spent a lot of time thinking about Georgia Tann. And I'm, I'm really glad that this is one equation I can't find my way through. You know, like, I've gone back and forth from well, you know, sociopath, devoid of empathy, other people are like, she's the main character, and other people are background scenery. They're not real to her in the way that she herself is real. But, but that only takes you so far. And I'll remind you, if you've already forgotten, in the midst of all this horror, that Georgia and her lover and partner and raised two children together, an adopted daughter named June that she adopted, I think in Mississippi, and, and son who, you know, who knows, who knows, having a baby out of wedlock was such a sin back then that, you know, people would would lie. So she did, she was a mother. But I don't think she was a mother.

You know what I'm saying? I think Ann was a mother. And Georgia was a present, was a presence. And that daughter, June, also died of cancer pretty young, like in her 40s. So there's just tragedy in all directions here. And of course, you can't find, you can't find a lot of the birth mothers because they were poor. And poor people don't have any clout, not now and not then. Nobody, the judge, they went to the police, cops on the take. They go to juvenile court, they petition the judge, the judge is part of this.

Like Georgia Tann, Mr. Collin, if she'd been born just a little bit sooner, she would have made a hell of a gangster during Prohibition. It does make you wonder that nobody in that chain there was, seemed to feel any conscience about this. I mean, she wasn't the only one. I mean, I, you know, I think it was greed and the fact that she's a complete psychopath or sociopath or whatever, in that way, were all the rest of these people sociopaths or were they just greedy? Well, let's look at the two women who handled the California adoptions, right? Those two women, the picture they had of what Georgia was doing is very different because they would take four to six babies at a time. And let's talk about Walton who worked in California. So she would get on the plane with a half a dozen babies.

Do not ask me how, I've flown with two. I can't believe I'm not in jail. They were bringing six babies in the car and I went, oh boy, I'm glad I wasn't in that car. Yeah. So she's got these six babies and she's posted up at a nice, because everything, when you're selling to wealthy, wealthy people and movie stars, they want to buy their version of events. So they don't want anything untoward or back alley or sketch in any way. So Walton would post up at a really, really lovely hotel in Los Angeles, really nice with these babies.

And the only baby that the prospective parents would see or meet was the one that Georgia had designated for them. They had no idea that there was inventory on hand. They could have shopped and browsed and maybe picked another baby. For Walton in that environment, here's what she sees. This baby born to a psychiatric patient, dirt poor, no prospects. There's no future for this child.

Or this child could be adopted by these movie stars and live a life beyond your wildest dreams. Isn't Georgia Tan a saint for giving this infant who comes from nothing, less than nothing, a chance to live in this world? That's how I think they slept at night. What do you think? There has to be some kind of a rationalization that you can find in that, that you can live with.

So perhaps that's what it is. But I find it difficult to believe that they didn't know where these babies were coming from. I mean, they're pretty close to her, unless she had woven some kind of a tail or something, but they had to have known something, you think? I think they knew. I think they knew. I mean, they knew enough to know that this precious infant in their arms came from nothing and had nothing.

And of course, all of the backstories and medical histories were fabricated because the wealthy, here's what they wanted to hear. The banker's daughter, right after she made her debut, oh, it was terrible. She had very poor judgment and she became pregnant and it could have been a scandal. So she went away to stay with her maiden aunt and she's giving the baby up for adoption. That's the baby they wanted to adopt. They wanted to adopt the debutante's baby, the banker's daughter, who made a poor decision one steamy night and got in trouble.

Do you think they wanted to hear, well, we've got an arrangement with the local insane asylum and the gardeners come in and rape the patients and here you go. It's appalling when you sit with it. It is appalling. It's evil. It's evil on a pretty big scale. I'm thinking about, you said she got into social work. I didn't know if I read this or you said this, that she got into social work because that's what unmarried women did at the time. Well, she wanted to be a lawyer. Yeah, but that pathway was closed, but social work was an option. So she did a couple of summers. As a social worker myself, let me say that there is no sharper knife in my heart than when I come upon a social worker committing crimes and atrocities.

It happens more than social workers like for it to happen. It's in the news frequently. When I meet a social worker who's bigoted or racist, I'm like, you have violated the oath of our people. Social work was an option. People who are social workers are seeing people at their most vulnerable. I always held social workers to a higher standard. They're not in it for the money. They're in it for the calling.

But it seems like what she did is since she couldn't become a lawyer or her father dissuaded her from becoming a lawyer, she could have become a lawyer. Since her father dissuaded her from doing that, she became a social worker. She got in there and went, oh, she probably rubbed her hands together and went, I figured out a scam here. Yeah. I mean, whatever else she was, she was smart as a whip. She had a head for business because she saw instantly how these babies and children could be turned into commodities and sold. Most decent human beings, that's not your first play. You can't go, I got a room full of parentless children here. I wonder what I can get for them. Most of us don't go there. But she did. Everything about her was so calculated, so, so calculated and so cunning and in such a violation in every way of the code of ethics that today modern social workers are held to, the NASW code of ethics. But let me say this, Max, because there's a, if you zoom, let's zoom way back on Georgia Tann's life because I want you to think about this. So she went to college and she didn't want to be a musician and couldn't be a lawyer. So she becomes a student, studies social work because that is a pathway for an unmarried woman back then. Then she comes home to Mississippi and a lot of things could have happened.

But what did happen was she was offered a position at a receiving home, a home for orphans and unwed mothers, right? If she had been offered another job somewhere else, let's say she got offered a job at the newspaper or maybe the fact that she wanted to be a lawyer, her dad had some connections, maybe she gets a job at a law firm and then history takes a completely different turn. But she got a job in an orphanage in the Mississippi Children's Home Society and that's where it all began. But I do believe, so this wouldn't have happened, but I do believe if she had become a lawyer that she would have, she's still who she is, she's still what she is, she's still going to find some sort of way to play the system in some sort of illegal way, taking advantage of vulnerable people, even in that situation.

It's not like if she became a lawyer, she would have been, you know, she is the way she is. I always wonder about this with people in drug cartels or the mob or something like that and they have all this elaborate business plan set up where you're paying all these people off and the thing that I always think is if you would have taken that doing something legal, you probably would have made as much or more money doing that rather than doing this.

You know, my father was a criminal, not a very good one because he got caught, but he was a criminal and he, because I used to say to him, because it finished the job of mentally unstable, but I used to say to him when I was like, when I was a teenager visiting him in jail, like why, if you could do all of that, why didn't you just like get a really great job?

And his attitude was mess for suckers. I suppose that was her attitude as well. Maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe this, you know, it's weird. Like this is again, one of those stories that you could do like six episodes and just work on a facet of her. And that's not what we do here, but there is, if you are so inclined and if this has made you curious, let me, let me give you some books that you might want to look at.

I really enjoyed the novel before we were yours. I thought sometimes, sometimes literature, sometimes fiction is the best way into a true story because you become the characters, you climb inside their footsteps and inside their shoes, and you, you get to feel and experience some of what they felt and experienced. So let me recommend the book before we were yours.

That's a novel by Lisa Wingate. An incredible book called The Baby Thief, which I think you would also enjoy. And that one is by Barbara Raymond. Um, and then you might want to read Taking at Birth, Taken at Birth by Jane Blasio. There's some movies too, based on this unspeakable true story. I don't know where you can necessarily watch these because stuff comes in and out of the streaming platforms.

But back in 1982, they made a movie called Missing Children, a mother story that was very loosely based on Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children's Home Society. If you're a fan of Unsolved Mysteries, they did an episode in December 1989 about Georgia Tann. In 1993, there was a made for TV movie called Stolen Babies. And I think if you have Google Play, I think you might be able to see that on Google Play.

And just remember that when you're when you're watching the movies, that they're lightly fictionalized. And, and so some, and of course, you know, it's hard to tell 5,000 children's story. So they, they kind of narrow in here and there in Stolen Babies, which was done in 1993. Do you know the actress Leah Thompson from Back to the Future?

Well, she's in that along with Mary Tyler Moore. I mean, this was a very well reviewed movie. So Mary Tyler Moore plays Georgia Tann in the movie Stolen Babies. And it's pretty, it's pretty intense. And Leah Thompson plays a character named Annie Beals. But if you want to see Georgia Tann, you want to see Mary Tyler Moore. And let me just say, if you saw the movie Ordinary People, this is not Mary Tyler Moore from the Mary Tyler Moore show. Like as a dramatic actress, she's she's pretty badass. So I recommend that one. I, I think my favorite of all of the things that have come out is the novel Before We Were Yours. That one was just such a gut punch.

So, um, yeah, I think that. And Ric Flair does does mention this in his book. He does. It's a chapter called Black Market Babies, or Black Market Baby. He's done some interviews about it later in life. He's done some interviews about it. And he's very clear that his mom and dad are his mom and dad. And that's the end of that. And you know, a lot of adoptees make that decision, right? A lot do. And a lot do what my children's father did. And they want to know who they are and who their people are and where they come from. And there's no right or wrong, right? Like your nieces and nephews who have who were adopted? Have any of pursued that finding out of who their biological families are?

Yes. So all of them know all of them know who their biological mothers are. And a couple of know their fathers as well. And the problem that you have when you have that, when you find somebody who is your biological, whatever, there's no guarantee of anything with that. And in fact, it can be more damaging to you. And so the it's with some trepidation that you go into that, because you don't know what the response is going to be. The friend that we have in common did find his biological mother. And he, he ended up having a relationship with her till till the end of her and had a good relationship with her. His father was long dead. But he had a sister who found her biological mother got in touch with her and she was still her mother's dirty little secret. And it threw her into a spin a tailspin. Because it made that feeling of not being wanted even worse.

So you don't know what's going to happen. Well, I'll share this only because I have shared it in the past on our one of our other podcasts for our radio show. But so my children's father was adopted, his mother got pregnant as a teenager in high school with her high school boyfriend, and her family just wasn't having it. And they sent her away to a home in another state for unwed mothers. And she gave birth there. And, and then she was not permitted to speak of it. She was not permitted to grieve it.

And she really struggled. It took her a decade after she after she grew up and got married, it took her a decade to tell her husband that she had given a baby up. And so here is where the invisible strings come in. This has always given me goosebumps. Because sometimes you think, man, you know, my life is a crazy clown car. But when I step back from it, in a weird way, like it makes sense, the connections, everything lines up. Like I may not love where I am, but it's obvious I'm where I'm supposed to be. And you can call that faith or you can call that karma or destiny or just blind luck or whatever. But here's something to know about my children's father. So when he reconnected with his birth mother, a beautiful relationship was formed between him and her and her family and our children and her and her husband. It was lovely.

It was very nice. His biological father was contacted and made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with this. He fully and completely rebuked the process, which to your point, Max, was incredibly painful, incredibly painful. But here we go. So this teenage girl is in this home for unwed mothers in another state hundreds and hundreds of miles from home alone. And she gives birth, they will not allow her to hold the baby. They won't even really allow her to see the baby.

But they do allow her to name the baby. And so she does. And about five days later, the adoptive parents come in and take custody of the infant. And they named the baby too. Now they don't know that the biological mother has named the baby. Okay, they're they are not aware of this, the secrecy around adoptions, and this would have been like many years ago.

So in all this secrecy and subterfuge and paperwork and everything, bio mom has named the baby. Five days later, the adoptive parents come and they named the baby. And what we found out many, many, many years later, is that his birth mom named him for his biological father. And just by the most wonderful goosebump, whatever chance his adoptive parents named him the same name.

What are the odds? There are a lot of boys names. Yeah, there are a lot of boys names. So he was basically destined to be that name and that person one way or the other, right? It was his father's biological father's name was the name his birth mother gave it was the name his adoptive parents gave him. That's his name. I always thought that was such an intriguing little detail. It is. Yeah. So it is hard to be a person is so complicated. It is so complicated. And even when we're trying our best, I swear we make such a mess of things. And Georgia Tann never lived one moment as an adult where she's trying her best. Yeah, so that wraps up this episode of True Weird Stuff.

And next week, we take a detour back into true crime land where we haven't been for a bit. We've been really focused on like, you know, the atomic age and all sorts of stuff. Um, so there's this guy that is shows up in my Instagram feed all the time. And he has a foot fetish, like nothing I've ever seen. Instagram might have kicked him off because I haven't seen his posts in about a week. What this man is into is wild. And it's not it's not pornographic. It's just foot foot foot foot foot foot foot. He likes a foot covered in bubbles. He likes a foot covered in baby oil. He likes a foot covered in sand. He likes a foot with blue nail polish with red nail polish with no nail polish. He loves a wrinkly foot. His favorite thing is a wrinkly foot.

Some people have more wrinkly feet than others. And I know you've probably never given this any thought. Yeah, this man, this man about explodes at the sight of a woman's wrinkly foot. And I was saying to my husband, I this guy, like, how does this guy ever leave the house? I mean, it's like, you know, a footathon over there. So that got me kind of looking around like, let me see what this whole foot fetish thing is about. And buddy, did I learn some stuff.

And we're going to profile a couple of foot fetish serial killers. And let me tell you, I don't know why these guys aren't household names in true crime world. Because what the foot is going on here? It is insane. And if you have a foot fetish, listen, no, come closer. Come here. There is no judgment. What consenting adults do is between consenting adults. And if you like a wrinkly foot covered in baby oil, you do you boo, right? There's no shame in it. It's the most common fetish there is. And about a third of the people who report having like a body part fetish have a foot fetish. You can buy pictures of feet online. You can you can go on Instagram and look at this guy's page. Do not feel in any kind of a way that you are being judged. Just so long as you're not a foot fetish serial killer. We'll see you next time on true weird stuff.

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True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeney. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin. Copyright 2024 Now! Media all rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.