Episode 110: Baby Snatcher

Mar 15, 2019

Georgia Tann bragged that she had a rigorous selection process that matched the perfect child with the perfect home.

Barbara Raymond's book is The Baby Thief.

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Play Episode

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this episode may not be suitable for everyone please use discretion

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Elmo was new to Memphis she was a single mother she had two small children but one was particularly young she was 10 months old very pretty child blond hair green eyes and Alma took her for a walk

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when she got back from the walk there was a knock on her door and the person knocking was Georgia Tann and Georgia Tann said I'm a social worker and I noticed that your little baby is sick and I said well she has a cold

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and Georgia Tann said I know a lot about children so she went over and she examined the baby

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and she kept shaking her head and she said she's sick she needs to see a doctor

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Alma simple told Georgia Tann that she didn't have any money to take her baby to the doctor especially for a little cold this was 1946 we're hearing the story from Barbara Raymond Georgia Tann said it was more serious than a cold but told Emma sippel not to worry she explained that she had connections she worked with the Tennessee Children's Home Society and could get the baby seen at the hospital for free Alma's

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but we agreed that the two of them could take the baby to the hospital to be checked out by a doctor but Georgia Tann said that Alma couldn't come they need to pretend that the baby was an orphan in order to get the free care

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so reluctantly

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Alma let Georgia Tann walk off with her 10 month old baby

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a day later Alma snuck into the hospital she looked in the room where Georgia Tans Wards were she saw her baby bouncing in her bed looking extremely healthy she asked the nurse if she could hold her baby and the nurse replied you don't have a baby in there and the next day she got a call from Georgia Tann and she said I'm so sorry but your baby died

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and Elmo started screaming and she said I know she's not dead she only had a cold and she went to Georgia tens orphanage but she was not allowed in a big man kept her out she ran to the police station and no one would listen to her she haunted graveyard she tried to find death certificates nothing now Alma spent 45 years looking for her child

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Barbara Raymond interviewed Alma sippel in 1990 I realized there was a much bigger story behind Alma because Alma was not the only person who had lost a child to Georgia Tann as one of Georgia Tans colleagues one said she wanted to get her hands on every child she could I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal

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Georgia Tann was born in Philadelphia Mississippi in 1891 her family was wealthy her father George Dan was a lawyer and then became a judge and he did something unusual for the time he let her read law that had to have been extremely tantalizing that is the way people became lawyers in those days they read law with a lawyer and she was the first woman in Mississippi to pass them

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sippy bar exam

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but she told reporter in the 1940s her father wouldn't let her practice law because it wasn't the usual thing for a woman

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I don't know why she did not defy him because she never listened to anyone else in her life but she couldn't be a lawyer in her mind after passing the bar exam Georgia Tann took a job as a social worker the usual thing would be for a woman of Georgia's status since her father was a judge that Georgia would marry and have children and that she would the power she would have

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would be involved with the marriage and with the raising of children and as far as I could tell Georgia never wanted to get married and she never wanted to Bear children

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so that marked her is different and a lot of the people who would describe Georgia Tann to me would say things like well I never knew how to take her she reminded me of a man that kind of thing and she was not obviously the typical Southern debutante type she never attended the usual parties that would have been given instead she

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wore her long black skirts and her white shirt and she would visit the local poor when she was 15 years old Georgia Tans father had a case in which two siblings had been orphaned he didn't know what to do with them Georgia took it upon herself to go around and talk with the wealthiest people in the community and try to convince a family to adopt them and she did

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Georgia felt that the world was divided into two very different types poor people were incapable of proper parenting other people people of middle or upper class were people of the higher type

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and the children

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in George's mind deserved better than being raised in poverty

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in the beginning of the 20th century social workers tried very hard to keep parents and children together providing financial assistance to poor families to keep children from being sent to orphanages sometimes called homes for friendless children

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Georgia Tann did not try to keep families together she rearranged them taking babies from poor families and giving them to rich ones she stole a child off of a porch

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there was a woman named Rose Harvey and she was very poor

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and sleeping in her house her young child was playing on the back porch Georgia Tann lured him into her car with the biggest candy cane he had ever seen and had him adopted by a local family later she took his younger brother

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same way and the child was adopted into that same family now Rose the mother was incensed and she was very upset obviously she challenged this in court she did not win and most likely George's father had influence over the decision and but I was told by people in Hickory that George tan was

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quote unquote run out of town because of that she made her way to Memphis where she became the director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society the city was still recovering from a deadly yellow fever outbreak more than half the City's population fled of the 19,000 people who stayed 17,000 got sick more than 5,000 died the city went bankrupt

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a man named Edward Hull Crump who was from Mississippi and whose own father had died in the yellow fever plague came to Memphis

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and he worked his way up to being mayor and essentially controlled the town people were afraid of him and how did this help Georgia Tann what what was it about the new makeup of Memphis that was beneficial for her in her attempt to get children Georgia was able to forge a relationship with

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boss Crump and once she had his protection she was really Untouchable how did she find her victims her children so she took children who in the beginning were kind of already perhaps relinquished and adapted them out but in those days

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Aaron and orphanages were quite frequently not orphans

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people would put their children in an orphanage for what they thought would be a short period of time while I got on their own feet financially or recovered from an illness and as though she took some of them but as her business

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started booming

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she couldn't satisfy the demand simply through children who were already relinquished or in orphanages and that's when Barbara Raymond says she just started stealing them so she because she had so much clout in Memphis she was able to take children right from delivery rooms I I spoke with a doctor

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in the 1990s who by then was in his 90s and he told me about when he was an intern at a Memphis Hospital witnessing things like this women dressed up like nurses who worked for Georgia Tann standing outside the door of a delivery room and the minute they heard a baby cry

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they would go in and take the baby

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a young mother would be told oh honey I'm so sorry but your baby was born dead and the mother would say but I heard a baby cry

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and the nurse or the pretend nurse would say oh no no that was another baby and the mother would say I want to see my baby and they'd say the state put the baby in the ground

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is if the baby had already been buried and they they got nowhere these women there were a lot of habeas corpus suits and people said Georgia Tann stole my child not one was resolved in favor of the father or mother who had lost a child and that was because boss Crump had control of the town and Georgia Tann had an in with boss Crump

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Georgia Tann was only interested in white children she paid people to keep their eyes open for blond hair and blue eyes one of her best allies was a juvenile court judge named Camille Kelly if you were to be going through a divorce or if you were very poor you were having trouble you might be told to appear before juvenile court judge Kelly and she would

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in the course of talking to you write down the names and ages of your children

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and Georgia would be given this information and a few days later you might get a knock on your on your door

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she supplied Georgia Tann with 20% of the children she placed one of the most complicated parts of Georgia Tann story was that she was able to place children with new families at a time in the United States when adoption wasn't popular kids in orphanages usually stayed there other children were sent to live with so-called baby Farmers baby farmers were usually uneducated

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hated middle-aged women who took children in and we're supposed to care for them some of them accepted or wanted an upfront fee for caring for these children

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and once some of them had the money they felt no incentive to keep the children alive so there were articles in the New York Times of

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baby farmers who killed children with scalding Water by dashing their heads against walls it was absolutely unbelievable to me to read this some baby Farmers even took out life insurance policies and the children and then killed them to collect the money there was an editorial in the New York Times in the mid-1920s that decree that said

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life insurance for children should be declared invalid because it was a temptation to inhuman crimes

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adoption had not been popular in part because of the thought that orphans came from unmarried women and a pregnant unmarried woman suffered from moral abnormalities a 1918 report titled the unmarried mother a study of 500 cases describes them as repulsive misshapen depraved people worried that the children would inherit their mothers week moral character

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so these children were considered tainted goods and one interesting thing I found was of course there were always women who couldn't bear children who wanted children even in those days when nobody wanted to adopt children there were women who did want to adapt children but they could not get their husbands to sign on to this so

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faked pregnancies one woman pretended to have born 11 children and somehow the fathers believed this what they would do is they would pretend to be pregnant and then they would wait until maybe the husband was out of town or away somewhere and they would pretend that they had collapsed in front of

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coincidentally a baby Farmer's house and they would be taken in and then the father would be called and he would find his wife in bed with a newborn baby which supposedly she had given just given birth to

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so

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I think George is saw in her mind all these

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lovely gorgeous stereotypically blond blue-eyed Etc children and baby Farms many of whom were dying and also the death rates in orphanages in those days on the hole for the first year of Life were 50% but I found one orphanage where in one year a hundred percent of those children died so she found all these children just kind of

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vegetating or dying and then on the other hand there were people who wanted children so tell me how Georgia Tann change that idea of children being tainted what did she say she said that they were not children of sin they were not genetically flawed they were blank slates they were born untainted

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and if you surround them with beauty and culture they will become anything you want them to be

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but she didn't believe that so she went into the records and changed

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change them so that people thought that they were adopting say a child who whose father was a composer whose mother was a debutante and she also started placing children with very prominent people so that locally at least adopting more or less became the thing to do

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Georgia Tann bragged that she had a rigorous selection process that match the perfect child with the perfect home but she wanted her customers to be happy so sometimes she'd send three children to the same family and let them have a one-year trial to decide which if any they'd like to keep

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in correspondence with her attorney children were referred to as merchandise quote in hand and in stock

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she marketed children as luxury items most notably by creating hundreds of actual advertisements for them according to Georgia Tann a baby was the perfect Christmas present her ads featured photographs of children dressed up with captions like living dolls for you and George wants to play catch but he needs a daddy to complete the team

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then the ad said put your orders in early

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do you think Georgia had reasons to do what she did Beyond making money

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she didn't want I think to Bear children but I think she must have wanted in some vicarious way to be involved in the birthing process because I was told of a man who strangely was told to pick up his

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adopted daughter baby at church attends residence which is not the usual way she distributed her children and he went to her house at night

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and instead of a maid answering the door Georgia Tann answered the door now Georgia Tann usually wore very tailored clothes but she was wearing like this sort of negligee it was freely he was taken aback and she let him upstairs and the bed the bed covering was white and there was a little mound in the corner

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and she folded back the cover

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and there was a baby girl

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and George attend said this baby is perfect in every way

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now this man who became the child adoptive father felt the Georgia Tann was kind of pretending that she had given birth to that child

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celebrities all over the country as Georgia Tann to find them a child Joan Crawford June Allyson and Dick Powell Pearl Buck meanwhile birth parents were desperately searching for their children begging the police and judges to help them one man search for his little sister for 37 years writing desperate letters to J Edgar Hoover

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finally in 1979 he got a letter from an employee of the Department of Vital Statistics that said I could lose my job by giving you this information your sister was adopted by a Hollywood couple by 1935 George tan had placed children in 48 states along with Mexico Panama Canada and England sending kids to wealthy families outside of the state of Tennessee

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e let Georgia Tann increase her fees by lawd she made her money by overcharging she was supposedly charging travel fees and hotel fee

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but she was charging maybe 5 6 adoptive families

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$750 so of course

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the playing fair to not cost that much and neither did the hotel room I heard of people who paid $5,000 for a child I think she she asked what she thought she could get now

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if she had operated legally the fee would have been $15 so over time you can see that she has amassed an awful lot of money she also extorted money from people who had already adopted children sometimes a year or two after the child had been placed particularly if the child had been placed somewhere in her area she would

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ask for a thousand dollars

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and they'd say well you know we don't have it we're taking good care of little Susie and all this and she would say that if she didn't get the money she would take the baby back George's on lifestyle got fancier she bought another home back in Hickory Mississippi with servants quarters imported palm trees fountains and a room sized refrigerator she took vacations in Cuba there were big cars furs

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it was important to her business that she embody a certain kind of wealth and this was reflected in her orphanage on Poplar Avenue in Memphis so it no longer exists but it had polished beautiful floors it had a lovely reception room it had a room where Georgia Tann would meet with prospective adoptive parents it had a nursery is

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errors for photo ops there would be one baby per crib

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but in reality there were often four or five babies in a crib by the mid 40s Memphis doctors started to speak out going on record about signs of physical abuse and how they'd worn Georgia Tann not to remove infants from the hospital's care in 1945 and one three month period

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a doctor a pediatrician named dr. Clyde Croswell later said that 40 to 50 of her babies died and that one three-month period and they died of he called it infant dysentery basically baby diarrhoea but babies are they waste so little that they can dehydrate very quickly and if they're not rehydrated say in a hospital or something

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die now Georgia Tann was a very proud woman and I was told by another doctor who worked volunteered his services for her because he was desperately hoping to keep some of these kids alive she felt she knew better than the doctors he said one time I prescribed an antibiotic for a baby and she told the nurse not to give it to the baby but to chart it as if she did

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the child had been given the antibiotic so he said she would not take she would not take the children to the hospital and and they would die

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Tennessee lawmakers attempted to pass legislation requiring children's boarding homes to be inspected and licensed but Georgia Tann somehow got an exemption from compliance her best political tool was babies themselves she'd give them as gifts to lawmakers

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she went relatively unchecked for decades it wasn't as if the birth parents weren't speaking out against Georgia Tann but it was like it didn't matter they were always speaking out and anybody who lived in Memphis and read the newspaper and in those days everybody read the newspapers because you know they didn't have television they weren't online the read the papers being one woman lost five children to Georgia Tann and other women lost three children who Georgia

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and a German immigrant father lost his daughter to Georgia Tann they would take them a long time they would finally because nobody wanted to touch their cases but they would finally find someone who would take their case they never won

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Barbara Raymond says she read case after case like this but one woman Grace Gribble has always stuck out she was a widow with five children one day a woman who worked for Georgia Tann showed up at her house with papers to sign about free medical care Greece Simon and workers started carrying off the three youngest children and

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as They carried them off one who was carrying off a little boy named Kirby he was four years old he had red hair blue eyes said we have an order for a child of this age and type now Grace ran to the courthouse and demanded to see her children demanded her children back

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and Georgia Tann said you should thank me and Grace kept calling for her children and crying for her children and Georgia Tann just said go home and have some more

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in September of 1950 Tennessee governor Gordon Browning announced an investigation into Georgia Tans operations with the Children's Home Society three days later Georgia Tann died of cancer at age 59 her death was reported alongside allegations that you ran a million-dollar baby black market Governor Browning said he would sponsor whatever legislation was needed to quote

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prevent the sale of children as investigation progressed adoptive parents had to decide whether they wanted to know if their children had been stolen by Georgia Tann

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many chose not to

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Barbara Raymond says that even as the details of Georgia Tans practices came out many still felt that the children were lucky to have been delivered into wealth so the whole thing was just sort of allowed to fade away and after Georgia Tann died then finally her home was closed

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you say that Georgia Tann invented modern American adoption how she popularized it and I guess an argument could be made that by making adoption acceptable

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in some ways she helped children and I believe in some ways she might have if a child truly had nowhere to go I imagine that's better than being raised in an orphanage for the problem was that many many more adoptions were arranged than should ever

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have been arranged my own daughter is adopted not through Georgia Tann and my my daughter should not have been adapted I love her she is amazing I could not imagine my life without her

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but when we found her birth family they're wonderful people and they had been told you know you're not married you're young you're going to have to relinquish this child and the reason why they were told that was instigated by George attend

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after Georgia made adoption popular

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potential grandparents sign out you know no one now will have to know that my child is pregnant I will send her off to Aunt Bertha's in California at least that would be the story but in reality the young pregnant woman would go to a home for unwed mothers and relinquish the baby for adoption

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and that was that so going back to my own daughters adoption I

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kind of feel guilty

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for profiting from the pain of another woman

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on the other hand if I had not adopted my daughter who had been relinquished someone else would have but my daughter could easily her parents got married quickly they raised three other boys they're good people they could have raised her and she was their child with Barbara Raymond's help her daughter now knows her birth parents and our younger Three Brothers

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she spent time with her for grandparents aunts uncles and cousins

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as for Alma sippel the woman from the beginning of the story it took more than 45 years for her to find her daughter with the help of a Memphis volunteer agency called Tennessee right to know she eventually got her daughter's new name and address she sent flowers her daughter called they got to know each other Alma sippel said I feel whole Barbara Raymond

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10 years researching Georgia Tann tracking down victims and interviewing them choose able to document 5,000 children placed by Georgia Tann she suspects the number is closer to 6,000

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Barbara Raymond's book about Georgia Tann is called the baby Thief we've got a link in the show notes

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criminal is created by Lawrence poor and me media Wilson is our senior producer audio mix by Rob buyers Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at this is criminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show Criminal is recorded in the Studio's of North Carolina public radio wnc we're proud member of radio topia from PRX

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Matt's and the Cold War do you deserve this this fantastic experience

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have you earned this in some way

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are you separated out to be touched by God to have some special experience here that other men cannot have and you know the answer to that is no

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you know very well at that moment and it comes through to you so powerfully that you're the sensing element for man and that's a humbling feeling

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go listen I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal

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