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This episode may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. Alma was new to Memphis. She was a
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single mother. She had two small children. But one was particularly young. She was
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10 months old. Very pretty child. Blonde 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
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[music] Tann. And Georgia Tann said, >> [music] >> "I'm a social worker. And I noticed that
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your little baby is sick." >> [music] >> And Alma said, "Well, she has a cold." And Georgia [music] Tann said, "I know a
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lot about children." So she went over and she examined the baby. [music] And she kept shaking her head.
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>> [music] >> And she said, "She's sick. She needs to see a doctor." Alma Sipple told Georgia Tann
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>> [music] >> that she didn't have any money to take her baby to the doctor, especially for a
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little cold. This was 1946. >> [music] >> We're hearing the story from Barbara Raymond.
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Georgia Tann said it was more serious [music] than a cold, but told Alma Sipple not to worry.
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She explained that she had connections. She worked with the Tennessee Children's
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Home Society [music] and could get the baby seen at the hospital for free. Alma Sipple agreed that the two of them
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could take the baby to the hospital to be checked out by a doctor. But >> [music]
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>> Georgia Tann said that Alma couldn't come. They need to pretend that the baby was
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an orphan >> [music] >> in order to get the free care. So reluctantly, Alma let Georgia Tann walk off with her
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[music] 10-month-old baby. A day later, Alma snuck into the hospital. She looked in the room where
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Georgia >> [music] >> Tann's wards were. She saw her baby bouncing in her bed, looking extremely
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healthy. She asked the nurse if she could hold her baby. And the nurse replied, "You don't have a baby in there."
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And the next day she got a call from Georgia Tann and she said, "I'm so sorry, [music] but your baby
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died." And Alma started screaming and she said, "I know she's not dead. She only had a
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cold." And she went to Georgia Tann's orphanage, but she was not allowed in. A big man kept her out. She ran to the
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police station and no one would listen to her. She haunted graveyards. She tried to
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find death certificates. Nothing. >> [music] >> Now Alma spent 45 years looking for her child.
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Barbara Raymond interviewed Alma Sipple in 1990. I realized there was a much bigger story behind Alma because Alma
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was not the only person who had lost a child to Georgia Tann. As one of Georgia Tann's colleagues once
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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.
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Her father, George Tann, was a lawyer and then became a judge. And he did something unusual for the
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time. He let her read law. Uh That had to have been extremely tantalizing. That is the way people became lawyers in
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those days. They read law with a lawyer. And she was the first woman in Mississippi
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to pass the Mississippi bar exam. But she told reporter in the 1940s, her father wouldn't let her practice law
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because it wasn't the usual thing for a woman. I don't know why she did not defy him.
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Because she never listened to anyone else in her life. But she couldn't be a lawyer
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in her mind. After passing the bar exam, Georgia Tann took a job as a social worker. The usual thing would be for a
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woman of Georgia's status, since her father was a judge, that Georgia would marry and have
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children and that she would the power she would have would be involved with the marriage and with the
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raising of children. And as far as I could tell, Georgia never wanted to get married and she
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never wanted to bear children. So that marked her as different and a lot of the people who would describe
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Georgia Tann to me would say things like, "Well, I never knew how to take her. She reminded me of a man."
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That kind of thing. And she was not obviously the typical Southern debutante type. She never
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attended the usual parties that would have been given. Instead, she wore her long black skirts and her white
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shirt and she would visit the local poor. When she was 15 years old, Georgia Tann's father had a case in which two
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siblings had been orphaned. He didn't know what to do with them. Georgia took it upon herself to go
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around and talk with the wealthiest people in the community and try to convince a family to adopt them.
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And she did. Georgia felt that the world was divided into two very different types.
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Poor people were incapable of proper parenting. Other people, people of middle or upper class, were
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people of the higher type. And the children, in Georgia'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,
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providing financial assistance to poor families to keep children from being sent to orphanages, sometimes called
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homes for friendless children. Georgia Tann did not try to keep families together.
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She rearranged them. >> [snorts] >> Taking babies from poor families and giving them to rich ones. She
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stole a child off of a a porch. Um there was a woman named Rose Harvey and she was very poor
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and sleeping in her house. Her young child >> [music] >> was playing on the back porch.
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Georgia Tann lured him into her car >> [music] >> with the biggest candy cane he had ever seen
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and had him adopted by a local family. Later, >> [music] >> she took his younger brother the same
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way and the child was adopted into that same family. Now Rose, the mother, was incensed and she was very upset,
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obviously. She challenged this in court. >> [music] >> She did not win. And most likely,
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>> [music] >> Georgia's father had influence over the decision. [music] And but I was told by people in Hickory that
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George Tann was quote unquote [music] run out of town because of that. She made her way to Memphis,
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where she became the director >> [music] >> of the Tennessee Children's Home Society.
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The city was still recovering from a deadly yellow fever outbreak. More than half the city's population
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fled. Of the 19,000 people who stayed, 17,000 got sick. More than 5,000 died. The city
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went bankrupt. [music] A man named Edward Hull Crump, who was from Mississippi and whose own
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father had [music] died in the yellow fever plague, came to [music] Memphis. And he [snorts]
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>> [music] >> worked his way up to being mayor and essentially controlled the town.
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People were afraid of him. And how did this help Georgia Tann? What What was it about the new makeup of
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Memphis that was beneficial for her in her attempt to get children? Georgia was able to
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forge a relationship with Boss Crump. And once she had his protection, she was really untouchable.
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How did she find her victims, her children? So she took children who, in the beginning,
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were kind of already perhaps relinquished and adopted them out. But in those days,
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children in orphanages were quite frequently not orphans. People would put their children in an
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orphanage for what they thought would be a short period of time while they got on their
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own feet financially or recovered from an illness. And so she took some of them.
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But as her business started booming, she couldn't satisfy the demand simply through
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children who were already relinquished or in orphanages. And that's when Barbara Raymond says
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she just started stealing them. So she because she had so much clout in Memphis,
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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
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at a Memphis hospital witnessing things like this. Women dressed up like nurses who worked
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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. A young mother would be told, "Oh honey, I'm so sorry,
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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."
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And the mother would say, "I want to see my baby." And they'd say, "The state put the baby in [music] the
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ground." As if the baby had already been buried. And they they got nowhere, these women.
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There were a lot of habeas corpus suits. People said, "Georgia Tann stole my child."
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Not one was resolved in favor of the father or mother who had lost a child and that was because Boss Crump had
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control of the town and Georgia Tann had an in with Boss Crump. Georgia Tann was only interested in
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white children. She paid people to keep their eyes open for blonde hair and blue eyes.
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One of her best allies was a juvenile court judge named Camille Kelley. If you were
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to be going through a divorce or if you were very poor, you were having trouble,
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you might be told to appear before juvenile court judge Kelley and she would in the course of talking
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to you, write down the names and ages of your children. And Georgia would be given this information
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and a few days later you might get a knock on your on your door. She supplied Georgia Tann with 20% of
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the children she placed. One of the most complicated parts of Georgia Tann's story
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was that she was able to place children with new families at a time in the United States when adoption wasn't
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popular. Kids in orphanages usually stayed there. Other children were sent to live with
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so-called baby farmers. Baby farmers were usually uneducated middle-aged women who took children in and were supposed
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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.
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So there were articles in the New York Times of baby farmers who killed children with
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scalding water, by dashing their heads against walls. It was absolutely unbelievable to me to read
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this. Some baby farmers even took out life insurance policies on the children and then killed them to collect the
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money. There was an editorial in the New York Times in the mid-1920s that that said that
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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.
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And a pregnant unmarried woman suffered from moral abnormalities. A 1918 report titled The Unmarried
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Mother, A Study of 500 Cases describes them as repulsive, misshapen, depraved. People worried that the children would
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inherit their mothers' weak moral character. So these children were considered tainted goods and one
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interesting thing I found was of course there were always women who couldn't bear children,
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>> [snorts] >> who wanted children. Even in those days when nobody wanted to adopt children,
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there were women who did want to adopt children. But they could not get their husbands to
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sign on to this. So faked pregnancies. One woman pretended to have born 11 children
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and somehow the fathers believed this. What they would do is they would pretend to be
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pregnant and then they would wait until maybe the husband was out of town or away
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somewhere and they would pretend that they had collapsed in front of coincidentally
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a baby farmer's house and they would be taken in. And then the father would be called
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and he would find his wife in bed with a newborn baby, which supposedly she had given just
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given birth to. So I think Georgia Tann saw in her mind all these lovely, gorgeous, stereotypically
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blonde, blue-eyed, etc. children on baby farms, many of whom were dying. And also the death rates in orphanages
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in those days on the whole for the first year of life were 50% but I found one orphanage where
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in one year 100% 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.
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So tell me how Georgia Tann changed that idea of children being tainted. What did she say? She
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said that they were not children of sin. They were not genetically flawed. They were blank slates.
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They were born untainted. And if you surround them with beauty and culture, they will become anything you want them
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to be. But she didn't believe that. So she went into the records and changed changed them
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so that people thought that they were adopting say a child who whose father was a composer, whose
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mother was a a debutante. And she also started placing children with very prominent people so that locally at
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least adopting more or less became the thing to do. Georgia Tann bragged that she had a
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rigorous selection process that matched the perfect child with the perfect home.
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But she wanted her customers to be happy. So sometimes she'd send three children
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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
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stock. She marketed children as luxury items, most notably by creating hundreds of
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actual advertisements for them. According to Georgia Tann, a baby was the perfect Christmas present.
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Her ads featured photographs of children dressed up with captions like living dolls for you and George wants to play
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catch, but he needs a daddy to complete the team. [music] Then the ad said, "Put your orders in early."
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>> [music] [music] >> 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
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vicarious way to be involved in the birthing process because I was told of a man who
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strangely was told to pick up his adopted daughter baby at Georgia Tann's residence, which is
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not the usual way she distributed her children. And he 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
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tailored clothes, but she was wearing like this sort of negligee. It was frilly.
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And he was taken aback. And she let him upstairs. And the bed the bed covering was white.
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And there was a little mound in the corner. And she folded back the cover. And there was a baby girl.
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And Georgia Tann said, "This baby is perfect in every way." Now, this man who be became the child's
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adopted father felt that Georgia Tann was kind of pretending that she had given birth [music]
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to that child. >> [music] >> Celebrities all over the country asked Georgia Tann to find them a child. Joan
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Crawford, June Allyson and Dick Powell, [music] Pearl Buck. Meanwhile, birth parents were
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desperately searching for their children, begging the police and judges to help them.
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One man searched 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 [music]
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that said, "I could lose my job by giving you this information. Your sister was adopted by a Hollywood
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couple." By 1935, Georgia Tann [music] had placed children in 48 states along with Mexico, Panama,
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Canada, and England. Sending kids to wealthy families outside of the state of Tennessee
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let Georgia Tann increase her fees by a lot. She made her money by overcharging.
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She was supposedly charging travel fees and hotel fee. But she was charging maybe five, six
00:22:52
adoptive families $750. So, of course, the plane fare did not cost that much and neither did the hotel room.
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I heard of people who paid $5,000 for a child. I think she she asked what she thought
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she could get. Now, if she had operated legally, the fee would have been $15. So, over time you can see that she
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amassed an awful lot of money. She also extorted money from people who had already adopted
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children. Sometimes a year or two after the child had been placed, particularly if the
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child had been placed somewhere in her area, she would ask for $1,000. And they'd say, "Well, you know, we
00:23:57
don't have it. We're taking good care of little Susie and all this." And she she
00:24:01
would say that if she didn't get the money, she would take the baby back. Georgia's own lifestyle got fancier.
00:24:09
She bought another home back in Hickory, Mississippi with servants' quarters, imported palm
00:24:14
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
00:24:32
on Poplar Avenue in Memphis. Her orphanage was an old kind of very nice-looking mansion that had been donated to her by
00:24:43
Fred Smith who founded Greyhound bus lines and which later became Federal Express. He had adopted through Georgia
00:24:52
Tann. So, it it no longer exists, but it had polished beautiful floors. It had a
00:25:01
a lovely reception room. It had a room where Georgia Tann would meet with prospective adoptive parents.
00:25:10
It had nurseries upstairs. Uh For photo ops, there would be one baby per crib. But in reality, there were often four or
00:25:24
five babies in a crib. By the mid-40s, Memphis doctors started to speak out going on record about signs
00:25:33
of physical abuse and how they'd warn Georgia Tann not to remove infants from the hospital's care.
00:25:40
In 1945 in one 3-month period, a doctor, pediatrician named Dr. Clyde Crosswell,
00:25:50
later said that 40 to 50 of her babies died in that one 3-month period. And they died of uh he called it infant
00:26:01
dysentery, basically baby diarrhea. But babies are they weigh so little that they can dehydrate very quickly. And if
00:26:11
they're not rehydrated, say in a hospital or something, [music] they die. Now, Georgia Tann was a very
00:26:19
proud woman. And I was told by another doctor who worked volunteered his services for her because he was
00:26:25
desperately hoping to keep some of these kids alive, she felt she knew better than the doctors.
00:26:33
He said one time I prescribed an antibiotic for a baby and she told the nurse not to give it to
00:26:39
the baby, but to chart it as if she the child had been given the antibiotic. So, he said she would not
00:26:49
take she would not take the children to the hospital. And and they would die. Tennessee lawmakers attempted to pass
00:27:00
legislation requiring children's boarding homes to be inspected and licensed. But Georgia Tann somehow got an
00:27:09
exemption from compliance. Her best political tool was babies themselves. She'd give them as gifts to lawmakers.
00:27:20
She went relatively unchecked for decades. It wasn't as if the birth parents weren't speaking out against Georgia
00:27:27
Tann, but it was like it didn't matter. They were always speaking out. And anybody who lived in Memphis and
00:27:34
read the newspaper, and in those days everybody read the newspapers because, you know, they didn't have television,
00:27:40
they weren't online, they read the [music] papers. I mean, one woman lost five children to
00:27:46
Georgia Tann. Another woman lost three children to Georgia Tann. A German immigrant father
00:27:52
lost his daughter to Georgia Tann. They they would take them a long time. They would finally because no nobody wanted
00:28:00
to touch their cases, but they would finally find someone who would take their case. They never won.
00:28:09
Barbara Raymond says she read case after case like this. But one woman, Grace Gribble, has always
00:28:17
stuck out. She was a widow with five children. One day, a woman who worked for Georgia
00:28:24
Tann showed up at her house with papers to sign about free medical care. Grace signed them.
00:28:31
And workers started carrying off the three youngest children. And as they carried them off, one who was
00:28:43
carrying off a little boy named Kirby, he was 4 years old, he had red hair, blue eyes,
00:28:49
said, "We have an order for a child of this age and type." Now, Grace ran to the courthouse
00:29:00
and demanded to see her children, demanded her children back. And Georgia Tann said,
00:29:08
"You should thank me." And Grace kept calling for her children and crying for her children.
00:29:15
And Georgia Tann just said, "Go home and have some more." In September of 1950, Tennessee Governor
00:29:26
Gordon Browning announced an investigation into Georgia Tann's operations with the Children's Home
00:29:32
Society. Three days later, Georgia Tann died of cancer at age 59. Her death was reported alongside
00:29:42
allegations that she ran a million-dollar baby black market. Governor Browning said he would sponsor
00:29:50
whatever legislation was needed to quote prevent the sale of children. As his investigation progressed,
00:29:58
adoptive parents had to decide whether they wanted to know if [music] their children had been stolen by Georgia
00:30:05
Tann. Many chose not [music] to. Barbara Raymond says that even as the details of Georgia Tann's practices came
00:30:15
out, >> [music] >> many still felt that the children were lucky to have been delivered into
00:30:21
wealth. So, the whole thing was just sort of allowed to fade away. And after Georgia
00:30:30
Tann died, then finally [music] her home was closed. You say that Georgia Tann invented
00:30:41
modern American adoption. How? She popularized it. And I guess an argument could be made
00:30:51
that by making adoption acceptable, in some ways, she helped children. And I believe
00:31:03
in some ways, she might have. If a child truly had nowhere to go, I imagine that's
00:31:11
better than being raised in an orphanage. The problem was that many, many more adoptions were
00:31:18
arranged than should ever have been arranged. Um my own daughter is adopted, not
00:31:26
through Georgia Tann. And my my daughter should not have been adopted. I love her. She is amazing. I
00:31:35
cannot imagine my life without her. But when we found her birth family, they're wonderful people.
00:31:45
And they had been told, you know, you're not married, you're young, you're going
00:31:50
to have to relinquish this child. And the reason why they were told that was instigated by Georgia Tann.
00:32:02
After Georgia made adoption popular, potential grandparents >> [music] >> signed out, you know, no one now will
00:32:14
have to know that my child is pregnant. I will send her off to Aunt Bertha's >> [music]
00:32:19
>> in California. At least that would be the story. But in reality, >> [music] >> the young pregnant woman would go to a
00:32:27
home for unwed mothers and [music] relinquish the baby for adoption. And that was that.
00:32:37
So, [music] going back to my own daughter's adoption, I kind of feel guilty >> [music]
00:32:47
>> for profiting from the pain of another [music] woman. On the other hand, if I had not adopted
00:32:56
my daughter, who had been relinquished, someone else would have. But my daughter could
00:33:02
easily Her parents [music] got married quickly. They raised three other boys. They're good people. They could have
00:33:10
raised [music] her. And she was their child. >> [music] >> With Barbara Raymond's help, her
00:33:20
daughter now knows her birth parents and her younger three brothers. She spent time with her four grandparents, aunts,
00:33:28
uncles, and cousins. As for Alma Sipple, the woman from the beginning of the story,
00:33:35
it took more than 45 years for her to find her daughter. With the help of a Memphis volunteer
00:33:41
agency called Tennessee Right to Know, she eventually got her daughter's new name and address.
00:33:48
She sent flowers. Her daughter called. They got to know each other. Alma Sipple said, "I feel whole."
00:33:57
>> [music] >> Barbara Raymond spent 10 years researching [music] Georgia Tann, tracking down victims, and
00:34:06
interviewing them. She was able to [music] document 5,000 children placed by Georgia Tann.
00:34:13
She suspects the number is closer to 6,000. >> [music] [music] >> Barbara Raymond's [music] book about
00:34:34
Georgia Tann is called The Baby Thief. We've got a link in the show notes. [music]
00:34:41
Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Lily Wilson is our senior producer. Audio [music] mix by Rob Byers.
00:34:49
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. >> [music]
00:34:54
>> You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at criminalshow.
00:35:00
Criminal >> [music] >> is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC.
00:35:06
We're proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around.
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And if you don't know, Radiotopia has a very special feed called Showcase, where we feature
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00:35:29
there's an incredible four-part series called Space Bridge, which tells a largely forgotten story from nearly 40
00:35:37
years ago about technology, citizen diplomats, and the Cold War. Do you deserve this?
00:35:44
This fantastic experience? Have you earned this in some way? Are you separated out to be touched by
00:35:55
God, to have some special experience here that other men cannot have? And you know the answer to that is no.
00:36:05
You know very well at that moment, and it comes through to you so powerfully, that you're
00:36:14
the sensing element for man. And that's a humbling feeling. Go listen. I'm Phoebe [music] Judge. This is
00:36:27
Criminal. >> [music] >> Radiotopia >> [music] >> from PRX.