Pod Insights Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries 117. America's Most Notorious Baby Thief: Georgia Tann About this episode For 20 years in Tennessee, Georgia Tann ran American's biggest black market for children, trafficking over 5,000 kids. We cover how she built her business, and how some children eventually found their families.
TW: Kidnapping, child death, reference to sexual assault, reference to pedophilia
Show Notes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/georgiatann
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:04 Kaelyn Moore? In last week's episode, I told you stories about a mysterious fake social worker who showed up on the doorsteps of poor mothers in Memphis, Tennessee in the 30s and 40s. She would offer healthcare services for babies or a place to stay for a while while the mother got back on her feet. And then the woman would whisk the child away in her signature black limousine, and the baby would never be seen again. Today, I want to tell you who that woman was and how she was able to run a black market adoption ring for 20 years in Tennessee. You don't need to listen to last week's episode for this one to make sense, but I highly encourage you to check that one out. This is an incredibly dark mark on the history of adoption, and I don't think it gets talked about enough.
2:46 Kaelyn Moore? So I cannot wait for you guys to hear all of the research we did for this one. But before we dive in, I want to tell you first about a new podcast I'm doing with Pave Studios called Clues, where I dive into the clues that led to breakthroughs in cases throughout history with my co-host, Morgan Abshire of Two Hot Takes. We have two episodes out now, wherever you get your podcasts, including the story of Lacy Peterson, who seemed to vanish without a trace on Christmas Eve of 2002. Her body was eventually found washed ashore in the same marina her husband said he was fishing in the day she went missing. We break down the clues that ultimately led to a conviction in that case. And again, you can listen to Clues wherever you get your podcasts, and it's also on YouTube. Now, before we get into today's episode,
3:30 Kaelyn Moore? I would just like to give a huge listener discretion warning. We're dealing with children, and while I will never graphically describe the abuse of a child, it's important to this story. I mention physical, mental, and briefly sexual abuse towards the end. So if you need to dip out until next week's episode, which is on Brazilian folklore and is very fun and very scary, I totally understand. Okay, let's dive back in.
3:57 Kaelyn Moore? Georgia Tan was born in a rural Mississippi town in 1891, and her family was best described as a big fish in a small pond. Georgia's father and her namesake, George Clark Tan, was a well-respected judge and owned the biggest house in town. Judge Tan also had a reputation for being cocky and overbearing, with a steamroller personality, something he would pass along to his children. Georgia's mother, Beulah, worked as a schoolteacher. At the time, it was almost unheard of for an upper-class married woman to work outside of the home. It definitely got the town to talk about the family, but it was nothing compared to the other rumors that were going around about the Tans. According to one relative,
4:39 Kaelyn Moore? Georgia's older brother, Rob Roy, was adopted. It's unclear if this was actually true. There's no paper trail that backs this up. It might just have been that Rob Roy didn't resemble anyone else in the family, but people found it strange that it was Georgia who was named after their father. It was an unusual choice to bestow that honor on a second-born daughter rather than a first-born son. But this was never something that the Tans would have addressed. No, they were all about keeping up appearances. Georgia was outfitted in nice dresses and expected to sit studiously at the piano each night. And adoption at the time was very taboo for a family to do. It actually was typically looked at as a way to purchase cheap labor.
5:23 Kaelyn Moore? Adopted children weren't seen as a part of the family, but more like part of the staff. And they were considered nuisances, the unwanted children of the poor left to nag on their new families.
5:38 Kaelyn Moore? One night, when Georgia finished practicing the piano, she went up to her father's office and saw him hunched over paperwork, anxiously rubbing his temples. She knew what he was dealing with. Recently, her father's courtroom had become overrun with orphaned and abandoned children. Most of his day-to-day was dealing with the minutia of these cases, like tracking down relatives who could provide care and finding an institution to house them. Georgia watched as the stress of it all ate at him each and every night. And to Georgia, the options for these children were terrible. Asylums were really meant for adults, usually ones that were in some kind of mental or financial distress. It was where the destitute did hard labor to pay off their debts.
6:23 Kaelyn Moore? The conditions of asylums were disgusting, and they were no place for a child or infant. And the other option for the children often involved them being reunited with their poor families or with their single mothers. And to Georgia, who had been raised with a silver spoon, honestly, that option seemed worse. There had to be another way, and solving this problem for those children would become Georgia's life's mission. One day, when Georgia was 15, she went to work with her father at his courthouse. And there, she saw a five-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister cowering in a corner. She approached the frightened children, and she asked them about their parents. The children explained that they were in the courthouse because their parents did not
7:07 Kaelyn Moore? have enough money to care for them. And according to Georgia, the children were in danger of being institutionalized. So she started asking around in her community if anyone wanted to take the children. And eventually, she found a well-off family that was willing to do so. Somehow, Georgia had convinced them to love the kids like their own, rather than sticking with the social norm and treating them like indentured servants. By all accounts, it was a pretty stable placement, and the family seemed happy afterwards. But this made Georgia feel like a saint. She felt like she had saved these children from the horrors of the asylum system, or worse, a life of being poor. She was addicted to the feeling, and she couldn't wait to do it again.
7:50 Kaelyn Moore? And so it wasn't long before Georgia became known around town as the person to call about an abandoned infant or child. She had created sort of a little business for herself. But her father, Judge Tan, did not approve of his daughter's ambition. One day, Georgia was carrying an abandoned infant into a courthouse, and she passed by a group of men chatting outside, including her father. Judge Tan seemed embarrassed. His proper young daughter should be sitting up straight at the piano, not conducting official business in this very male-dominated setting. He had a way to fix his daughter, though, he thought. When it was time for college, Judge Tan sent Georgia to an all-women's school, where she was supposed to study music.
8:35 Kaelyn Moore? Being around this many women should teach the girl a lesson about femininity and a woman's place. Well, I don't know if he knew about what happens at women's colleges, but that was not what Georgia was exposed to at Martha Washington College. Instead, she met women who wanted to dedicate their lives to a profession, rather than to a marriage. Women who read books and wore pants. And this way of life really appealed to Georgia. She had never really been interested in having a husband. And this is also where Georgia was introduced to the idea of a "Boston Marriage" by her female professors. That's when two women lived together long-term and never took husbands.
9:18 Kaelyn Moore? These couples wore rings, they called each other sister. It was a very, um, history will remember them as roommates situation, if you catch my drift. The general public viewed these relationships as pitiful, but ultimately harmless. And at the time, the general consensus was that women were incapable of homosexuality.
9:40 Kaelyn Moore? But when Georgia saw Boston marriages, everything clicked. She wasn't interested in homemaking or husbands. She was far more interested in the company of women. It seemed like school was doing the exact opposite of what her father intended. And by the time she was done with school, she had made up her mind. She was going to pursue a career in the emerging field of social work to continue her mission of saving children from poverty, single mothers, and institutions. The general thoughts on adoption at the time still hadn't shifted much. Most people still wouldn't consider adoption as a way to build their family, but Georgia wanted to change that.
10:22 Kaelyn Moore? She took her first job as a social worker with the Mississippi Home Finding Society in 1916, and within a few years, she was in charge of what the agency called a "receiving home." Today, we might call this a group home. It was state-funded temporary housing for children waiting either for fosters or adoption placement. We don't have a lot of information about how Georgia conducted herself here, but it seems like she was already sidestepping protocols and legal processes to place children into adoptive homes. After all, she had her judge father there to bail her out if she ever got in trouble.
11:03 Kaelyn Moore? Sometime in 1922, Georgia drove her Model T Ford out into the sticks. She stopped outside a rundown cabin of a really poor family. On the porch, a dirty toddler with black hair and brown eyes played with a few sticks, a two-year-old named Onyx. It was just him, his three-year-old brother Clyde, and their mother Rose, who lived in the house. Their father had recently passed away. When Onyx saw the shiny car pull up, he probably stared. Their little rural town likely didn't see many cars, and they certainly never stopped outside of his house. His mother, Rose, was inside taking a much-needed nap.
11:44 Kaelyn Moore? See, she was pregnant, diabetic, and grieving for her husband. She wasn't outside to tell Onyx to get away from the woman, to not accept the offer of a nice ride in a fancy car. If she had been, maybe Onyx wouldn't have left with Georgia. Rose didn't know it, but Georgia had her father draw up the necessary paperwork to have her legally declared an unfit mother and Onyx an abandoned child.
12:14 Kaelyn Moore? There was no reason behind this, other than the fact that Rose was a single mother, living in poverty. And before Rose could locate her son, Georgia placed him in an adoptive home with a new family. And a few weeks later, she would come back to repeat the process with Onyx's brother Clyde. Rose never saw either of her children ever again. But this was just the beginning for Georgia, because once she saw how easy this process was, having her father drop the paperwork and luring kids into her car to find them new families, nothing was going to stop her.
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14:59 Kaelyn Moore? After Georgia Tan kidnapped the two boys from the cabin, their mother Rose went to court to try and regain custody. She lost, probably because Georgia had her father pull some strings. But Judge Tan couldn't protect Georgia from everything. Although the adoptions held up in court, other locals did not appreciate Georgia's tactics. And she ended up getting fired from her job with the Mississippi Home Finding Society. She found out she was not really welcome in her community anymore. But instead of taking a long, hard look at what she'd done, Georgia just brought her scheme to a new town. By that point, she was living in her own Boston marriage with a woman named Ann Atwood Hollingsworth, and they had adopted a daughter named June.
15:41 Kaelyn Moore? Georgia moved her little family north to Memphis, Tennessee. And there, she accepted a position as the Executive Secretary for the Tennessee Children's Home Society. We'll call it TCHS for short.
15:56 Kaelyn Moore? Georgia found the agency to be limited in scope and lacking in funding compared to the Mississippi Home Finding Society. There was only one other employee working in the tiny little office she was assigned. Their work was completely administrative, overseeing the placement of children in various privately run boarding homes. But Georgia was on a mission, remember? She had a vision, and so she got right to work. The first issue that she wanted to tackle was the small budget. She drove that same Model T around Memphis, building relationships with everyone, from local business owners to the head of women's clubs to judges. Georgia set her new friends up with TCHS board seats, which had two advantages.
16:41 Kaelyn Moore? One, influential Memtheans now had a vested interest in raising money for TCHS. And more importantly, they felt indebted to Georgia. The board was supposed to supervise her work, so she stacked it with allies. Because remember, she didn't have daddy around anymore to get her out of trouble. So she needed friends in high places to do that instead. And Georgia's biggest prize was a politician named E. H. Crump. He was known around town as the boss. Crump's hold on Memphis city politics was absolutely ironclad. And he had a decent hold on state-level politics, too. No one was elected in Memphis without his say-so.
17:25 Kaelyn Moore? Georgia thought that she would have access to unbridled power through her father, but Crump was about to take things to a whole new level. With a friendly board and the backing of Memphis's most powerful politician, Georgia was able to decide how TCH should be run and what her job would authorize her to do. So she started barging into boarding houses around town, unannounced, and arranging adoptions. She would analyze the children, prioritizing the ones that were more conventionally cute, and she would go out and find them a family. And so on the surface, to her board and to E. H. Crump, things seemed to be going really well. And Georgia had an exceptionally high success rate with these adoptions,
18:10 Kaelyn Moore? but it wasn't really just because she was exceptionally good at it. She was able to move quickly because she was completely ignoring the law. Georgia wasn't confirming that a family would be a good fit for a child. And she also wasn't disclosing the medical history of the adoptee to the adoptive parents, like if they suffered from seizures or if they needed specific medications. And other social workers around town knew that this was going on. So they would try to bar Georgia from entering their boarding homes to look at the children. But because Georgia had boss Crump protecting her, no one could stop her. She could barge in at will and just decide the fate of any child.
18:52 Kaelyn Moore? Also, these adoptions were not free. They were her business, and Georgia started taking home a lot of money for the sales of these children. And that's when she traded in her Model T for her signature raven black limousine. And it seems like around this time, Georgia became dissatisfied with adopting only children who were already wards of the state. Just like how she spotted those kids in her father's courtroom, she wanted to scoop up any child she could. And by scoop, of course, I mean kidnap.
19:27 Kaelyn Moore? In the middle of the day in Memphis, a not-quite-21-year-old named Josie Henderson felt ripping pain in her abdomen. Her baby was coming. It was her neighbor who drove her to the John Gaston Hospital. The baby's father was at work and couldn't leave because every penny helps this family, and so he told Josie he would see her after his shift was done. Josie's delivery was swift, and the child arrived by the afternoon. She was completely out of it after she gave birth, though. The cocktail of drugs they gave pregnant women back then made her loopy and tired, so she closed her eyes, thinking she would take a brief nap, but she awoke the next morning to a woman standing at the foot of her bed.
20:12 Kaelyn Moore? "I'm so sorry, but your child has died," the nurse told her. "What?" Josie asked. "Impossible. There must have been a mistake." The nurse just shook her head and left the room. But not like she was giving Josie space to grieve. More like she needed to run out of the room before she accidentally said more. Devastated, Josie collected her things and was wheeled out of her hospital room. And there, in the hallway, was another woman. Young like Josie, no husband to hold her while she cried, her shoes tattered and dirty from her work as a sharecropper. She was told her child had also died. Wow, what are the chances, Josie thought to herself.
20:57 Kaelyn Moore? But then she looked around the hallway and saw multiple other women, all of them young, most of them without husbands, crying because they had also just been told that their babies had died. And one by one, each of them had paperwork shoved in their faces, and they were told that the hospital would take care of everything as long as they just signed on the bottom line.
21:23 Kaelyn Moore? What they were actually signing was paperwork that Georgia Tan had drawn up by her judge friend, Camille Kelly, where the woman would rescind all of their parental rights to the child. Yes, Georgia had arranged for the trafficking of all of the children born in the hospital that night. She was friends with the judge, she was friends with the hospital staff and the owner, and so no one was around to help the women when they started to wonder if their babies really all had died that night. And this became part of Georgia's new MO. She expanded and refined her abduction methods. Rather than relying on her father to fix the paperwork on the back end, she began using a more streamlined method,
22:04 Kaelyn Moore? tricking desperate and unsuspecting parents into signing their rights away. And we heard some of these stories play out in Part 1. Georgia would find impoverished families, especially single women, when they were vulnerable right after giving birth or when they were struggling due to lack of resources. She exploited her role as a social worker, someone who was supposed to be there to help a family in trouble, and used that to take away their children. In 1928, Georgia had arranged 206 adoptions. That was a huge number. Another urban children's aid society arranged about five adoptions a year in the 1920s. Georgia had so much success placing children
22:47 Kaelyn Moore? because she considered the adoptive parents, rather than the children, the primary client she was servicing. She wanted to make adoption as accessible, streamlined, and even fun for adoptive parents as possible. And the results were a little bizarre because the whole process Became like a high-end shopping experience for prospective parents. Georgia would have the orphans photographed in cute outfits and she printed their photos in sleekly designed brochures. Each photo would be captioned with the child's name, age, and any special characteristics like talent for singing or high IQ. Usually, all of that information was completely made up.
23:27 Kaelyn Moore? Parents might ogle over a photo of a four-year-old named Glenn who could recite poetry, but in reality, the child might be a six-year-old named Vernon who couldn't even tie his shoes. But Georgia didn't care, she just wanted to make the sale. Georgia offered other perks to parents as well. Tennessee state law required her to vet adoptive families to make sure that they could provide an adequate living environment for an adopted child. Georgia always would execute this step because she could charge parents for it. But it was purely for show. If a parent could pay, they would pass the inspection. That meant that some of the children Georgia was placing experienced terrible things in their new homes.
24:08 Kaelyn Moore? Many were abused, some reported being ignored or denied food. One little boy worked 18 hours a day harvesting tomatoes. One little girl said she spent hours locked in a closet. But to Georgia, she felt like this didn't matter. Because she had this theory, one that is completely unsubstantiated, that children were blank slates. What that basically meant was Georgia felt like children didn't remember anything and the things they experienced in childhood wouldn't affect them as adults. She promised prospective parents that the children she offered would retain no emotional attachment or even memory of their birth parents.
24:50 Kaelyn Moore? She claimed that even school-aged children wouldn't retain any connection to their lives before adoption. They were blank slates to be molded however adoptive parents wished.
25:02 Kaelyn Moore? But the children that were being adopted knew that wasn't the case. For one five-year-old named Elizabeth, the effects of this whole experience would follow her all the way into adulthood. Elizabeth came into Georgia's care with her brother soon after their mother died. Without any warning, Elizabeth was separated from her brother and flown across the country to her adoptive parents. They greeted her by saying that she was a new person now with a new name, Carol. Elizabeth was very confused. She wondered where her brother was. She was still deeply grieving the death of her mother. Her new parents gave her a beautiful doll to try to soothe her, and she named it Elizabeth, trying to do anything to hold on to her old life.
25:48 Kaelyn Moore? And eventually, her new parents seemed to be frustrated by Elizabeth's ongoing grief. They thought that Elizabeth's totally normal emotional response to all of these changes made her seem defective. Elizabeth's new mother kept telling her, "Those things never happened. You're Carol," just over and over and over again. This cognitive dissonance in childhood resulted in an identity crisis that required years of therapy to recover from. Eventually, she would go on to drop the name Carol and return to her birth name, to her new parents' dismay. So maybe Georgia couldn't actually erase a child's memory of their past, but she tried her hardest to erase the real evidence of it.
26:32 Kaelyn Moore? She went to extreme lengths to make sure that adoptive parents could never do anything to reclaim their children once they were with their new adoptive families. She would offer forged birth certificates that listed adoptive parents as birth parents. She would then seal the original documents, which would erase the fact that adoption had ever taken place. Again, Georgia prioritized the adoptive parents over the children that she was supposed to protect. Sealing the original birth records made it extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, for adult adoptees to find any information about their true origins. And this whole service that Georgia offered to adoptive parents did not come
27:13 Kaelyn Moore? cheap. In total, parents adopting from Georgia would pay something between $3,000 and $10,000. In today's money, that's anywhere from $70,000 to $200,000. And for reference, in the United States today, the cost of adopting a child ranges from $8,000 to $45,000. And all of that cash was intoxicating to Georgia. She used it to buy her girlfriend Anne and herself very expensive clothes and cars. She purchased commercial property and even a vacation home where she and Anne would ride horses. But if Georgia wanted to keep up this lifestyle, she was going to have to keep expanding her business. So she decided to
27:57 Kaelyn Moore? start advertising her business more in a way that would give her more clients. And one of the ways she did this was by publishing photographs of children in her care in local Memphis newspapers. I've read some of the advertisements, and they read like a disturbing cross between livestock classifieds and singles ads. So underneath one photo of three baby girls, Georgia wrote the caption, quote, "Living dolls for you." And then beneath another smiling toddler, she wrote, quote, "Are you in the market for a 14-month-old boy?" They sound disturbing and messed up now, but at the time, they were a huge success. The first two children that Georgia featured had dozens of interested families within 10
28:40 Kaelyn Moore? minutes of the paper's publication. During the holiday season, printing a photo in the paper almost guaranteed an adoption. And after running the ads locally for a few years, they became nationally syndicated in the 1930s. And once Georgia's business was on the national stage, it completely exploded.
29:01 Kaelyn Moore? So Georgia became the go-to person for adoption across the United States. Donations to TCHS skyrocketed, and suddenly, she had far more interested parents than she had children available to place. So to keep up with demand, she recruited other people to help her, and she called them "spotters." Doctors and nurses would alert Georgia when a single mother was in labor. You probably remember Mary Reid, the single mother in Part 1, who was still under the influence of anesthesia when Georgia got her to sign paperwork that relinquished her son Steve. Mary was the patient of Georgia's personal doctor, and he likely alerted her to show up in the delivery room that day. Other social workers would do the same for her.
29:44 Kaelyn Moore? Some were assigned to widows as they were getting back on their feet, and they would alert Georgia when it was a good time to come by and to take a baby. There were also contacts in Tennessee prisons and mental institutions, too, and they would let her know when residents were in labor. And all of these people received a kickback for each child they delivered to Georgia. And Georgia's growing popularity leveled up her ability to protect this growing operation. She schmoozed with politicians and legislators, and even placed some of the kids with them. Georgia also made adoption deals with other social workers and state employees, and these placements were all strategic on her end.
30:25 Kaelyn Moore? These were the people who might report her or prosecute her for illegal activity, but if they had an adopted child from her, they were more likely to turn a blind eye. And because Georgia's political connections were so strong, she now had the ability to rewrite Tennessee state law. Each time Georgia faced a legal roadblock, she just rewrote the rules. For instance, in Tennessee, a judge was required to certify that a biological parent's permission had been obtained before an adoption was performed. Obviously, Georgia often did not have the parents' consent, so she pushed through a new law that only required a notary to confirm birth parent consent.
31:08 Kaelyn Moore? And get this, Georgia was a notary, and so were many of her employees. So she could just sign off on her own illegal adoptions. She didn't need anyone else's permission to do what she was doing. And this ushered in an era of unstoppable trafficking on Georgia's part. She was kidnapping hundreds of children at this time, from all over the South. And she would kidnap children by the bunch in these things that she called "roundups." It was when Georgia and the people she had working for her would pile into a few cars and drive off to whatever target Georgia had selected. It could be an apartment building, a rural farming community, or a poor residential area.
31:51 Kaelyn Moore? When they arrived, she would hand out paperwork that was prepared in advance by Judge Kelly, the juvenile court judge that Georgia had looped into her scheme. And that paperwork might say that the parents provided a poor home environment. It might say that the parents were alcoholics. It might even say that the children lacked food or clothing. The reason didn't really matter, because none of it was true. But Judge Kelly's pre-written signature gave Georgia the power to walk into any home and take the children. And the poor people and single mothers in the area couldn't do anything about it. They just had to stand there and watch in horror as it happened. It was an incredibly dark time in history, don't get me wrong.
32:33 Kaelyn Moore? But it does get even darker from this point on. So during the 1930s and 40s, adoption saw a sharp spike in popularity all over the United States. And much of that increase can be credited to Georgia. Her nationally syndicated newspaper ads got the ball rolling. But what really changed the country's perception of adoption was seeing famous celebrities take part. Georgia's most recognizable client was Hollywood actress Joan Crawford. And seeing celebrities like Joan and powerful politicians adopt really destigmatized the process. It even made it seem fashionable. Georgia loved the news coverage of these kinds of placements, and she knew that it would only make her business grow.
33:18 Kaelyn Moore? And it grew so much, in fact, that at a certain point, Georgia no longer had enough space inside of TCHS to keep all of the children. But she had a fix for this. She would loan them out.
33:34 Kaelyn Moore? Identical twins James and Thomas White were five years old when people working for Georgia Tan kidnapped them out of their bedroom. They spent some time in Georgia's TCHS mansion before Georgia sent them to Hollywood, where they lived with a couple who drank constantly and ignored them, or sometimes would beat them with an extension cord. And eventually, the boys took advantage of one of the periods of neglect, and they escaped. But a neighbor found them hiding in an empty swimming pool and called the cops. Unfortunately, the authorities decided that the best way to help these boys, who were now seven, was to ship them back to Georgia Tan. James and Thomas found their second stay with Georgia much worse than the first, because
34:17 Kaelyn Moore? there was now no more space for the boys. But Georgia knew that she could still make money off of them, she knew she could still sell them in an adoption, so she wanted to find space for them. So sometimes she would pick them up and bring them to her personal home, or the homes of strangers. So the twins would go on to recount this story on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1991, but they had memories of being in a home with a bunch of strange adults that they did not know, who had rented out the children for some time. And it was at these kinds of events that the children were sexually abused. It happened too many times for the boys to count.
34:58 Kaelyn Moore? On paper, Georgia said she was doing this because she just didn't have space in TCHS, it was totally at capacity. But James and Thomas said that this was a facade to cover up a child sex trafficking ring that Georgia was part of. Remember, Georgia was telling people about her blank slate theory, that anything that happened to children before a certain age would not be remembered. But as the twins sat onstage with Oprah on her talk show, they were liver-spotted and gray-haired. Despite their wrinkles, they still looked like identical twins. And yet, they remembered. They remembered all of it, 50 years later.
35:40 Kaelyn Moore? Eventually, James and Thomas would escape this horrifying cycle, and they remained close as adults. When they told their story, they joked that they barely even knew what to call each other anymore because they moved so often and had so many caregivers that their names just changed a bunch of times. They said sometimes it was hard to remember the real ones. And those boys were some of the lucky ones that escaped at this time, because honestly, many did not. There were too many children under Georgia's care, and she really couldn't keep track of them all. Also, even though she absolutely had the money to do so, she didn't really seem interested in keeping TCHS repaired and safe. She would keep certain areas of the home clean for adoptive parents,
36:24 Kaelyn Moore? but in reality, the conditions were terrible, and children were dying as a result of it. There was no cooling system in the building. In the summertime, the heat on the upper floors was suffocating. Conditions were often described as unsanitary. Children were constantly sick, especially with GI viruses. For infants, a stomach bug can be deadly. And at the TCHS boarding house, they often were. In its 26 years of operation, investigators estimate that about 500 children died there. Even though the city had a dedicated cemetery for minor wards of the state, Georgia often chose to bury the children behind her boarding house, or she would burn their remains.
37:09 Kaelyn Moore? That way, she didn't have to report the deaths. But even with that very lax reporting, Georgia single-handedly gave Memphis one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country.
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38:08 Kaelyn Moore? She shared it with her friends and everyone kept talking about it. And all of those "Constant Comments" actually gave it its name. The recipe is still a Bigelow family secret over 80 years later. So this one is a mystery worth investigating for yourself. Bigelow Constant Comment. Curiously different, impossible to forget.
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40:29 Kaelyn Moore? The rapid expansion of Georgia's business and Georgia's increasingly brazen behavior did ultimately have one silver lining. It seems like it made it a little easier for kids to escape their circumstances, or for parents to find ways to reclaim children who had been stolen. Like Josie Stabler, who was a single mother to a 14-month-old daughter. We don't know how the toddler ended up in Georgia's boarding house, but Josie showed up there determined to get her back. Somehow, she distracted one of Georgia's staffers long enough to get her hands on her baby, and she ran out of there. Josie was so afraid of retaliation that she actually moved to Massachusetts as quickly as she could. Then
41:10 Kaelyn Moore? there was Peggy, who was nine when she and her four siblings were kidnapped from their single mother. But Peggy refused to go down easy. She did everything she could to make life miserable for whoever was in charge of her. She would wet the bed, she would scream nonstop, and she stopped speaking coherently. She wanted to make herself completely unadoptable. Her siblings were eventually adopted into homes across the country, but Peggy kept getting sent back to Georgia after being rejected by several foster homes. Finally, someone in Georgia's organization just gave up on Peggy completely because they were spread too thin, and they sent her back to her mother. But her siblings never returned.
41:52 Kaelyn Moore? In 1950, an investigative journalist put together an explosive expose on Georgia's scheme. The current mayor, Gordon Browning, was the first in 40 years that wasn't under Boss Crump's thumb. Browning saw that Georgia's scheme ran on corruption all over the city government, and he announced his own investigation. It looked like Georgia finally had nowhere to run. However, she would still manage to evade prosecution.
42:21 Kaelyn Moore? And that's because just a few days after Browning announced the investigation into Tennessee Children's Home Society, Georgia passed away from cancer. She was 59 years old. And although the investigation immediately closed down Georgia's death trap of a boarding home, they didn't really do much else. Even though there were still children living in the home when it was closed, only two of them were allowed to resume life with their birth parents. The others were distributed to other state-run facilities. And despite the best efforts of the investigators, birth parents looking for their kidnapped children received very few answers.
43:01 Kaelyn Moore? Georgia's powerful friends in city and state government were not interested in exposing her crimes because they knew it would expose their own complicity. And rather than attempt to rectify any of the illegal kidnappings, legislators, many of them looking to protect their own Georgia facilitated adoptions, went in the exact opposite direction. They actually passed a bill that retroactively legalized all of Georgia's adoptions. So nothing Georgia did could really ever be considered against the law. The investigation could ultimately only look into the financial fraud that allowed Georgia to get rich off of the adoptions.
43:42 Kaelyn Moore? And although she was a millionaire at one point, which today was around $22 million, there wasn't much left when she died. Eventually, a suit was filed against Georgia's estate, seeking $500,000, but they ended up settling for only $55,000. The estate never had to disclose anything that they had done. They never even needed to provide a paper trail to any of the children, siblings, or parents that were looking for each other. It seemed like if any of the families Georgia tore apart were going to be reunited, they would need to do it themselves. And it wasn't easy because Georgia had this habit of rewriting birth certificates.
44:22 Kaelyn Moore? And that meant that there were zero records remaining of a relationship between an adopted child and their birth parent. But people were not going to go gently. Families were determined to find each other, and that fire only grew over the coming years. Children eventually grew up, and they had flashbacks of Georgia taking them. They remembered having other parents and siblings. So they used a bunch of different kinds of methods, like public records, word of mouth, even classified ads in newspapers. And in the 1980s, a man from Memphis named Denny Glad founded Tennessee's The Right to Know, which was an organization that helped reconnect the families that Georgia separated.
45:07 Kaelyn Moore? And then, in 1999, Tennessee unsealed all of their adoption records, and people were finally able to start piecing together their stories. And then there was the fact that, over time, genealogical DNA got better and cheaper and more accessible. If people didn't have a piece of paper from the state telling them who their original family was, the DNA could tell them. And slowly but surely, more and more of these families started finding each other. Mary Reed, the single mother whose son Stephen was stolen immediately after his birth, got the phone call she had been dreaming of in the mid-1980s. Stephen always knew he was adopted, but he assumed that his parents voluntarily gave him up.
45:52 Kaelyn Moore? He had no interest in knowing them, but when he learned that he came through TCHS, he wondered if perhaps he was one of the kidnapping victims. At 48 years old, he tracked down his birth mother, Mary, and he was shocked to know that she had been looking for him his entire life. When they finally spoke on the phone, she said, quote, "All my life, since the day you were born, I've been waiting for this day." They met for the first time when Stephen picked Mary up at the airport. She was finally able to hold her son again at almost 70 years old. Alma Sipple, the mother in part one who thought that Georgia was taking her sick
46:32 Kaelyn Moore? daughter to the doctor, was watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries in 1989 when she saw a familiar face on the TV. It was the woman who stole her daughter, Georgia Tan. Alma wrote to the show immediately and apparently the producers received over 600 letters after that episode aired, all from people asking them to help find their families. And the producers of the show were actually able to help Alma track down Irma after searching for 45 years. Some reunions, however, came too late. An adoptee named Glenn learned in his 80s that he had a brother named Al who he was separated from at birth.
47:14 Kaelyn Moore? He hurried to make a trip from his home in Ohio to meet his brother, only to learn that he was dying. Glenn was still able to approach his brother and lean down by his side to tell him the only thing he would get to say to him in person. Quote, "We didn't get to play as children, but we can play in heaven." Many of the adoptees, lucky enough to track down their original roots, were not lucky enough to meet their birth parents. For many, they uncovered the truth too late, long after their parents had died. Georgia's practice of revising birth certificates or making original documents inaccessible does continue to this day in many states.
47:59 Kaelyn Moore? There's proponents that argue that it protects the privacy of birth parents and the sanctity of adoptive families, but the majority of adoptees find it inhumane to be cut off from information about their true origins. Adult adoptees and their advocates recently won more open access to their records in Utah, but 19 other states, including California and New York, still restrict it. And I just wanted to say how sad I am at how many of you are still affected by this. I heard from so many listeners over the past week who are adopted, or had friends and family who are adopted, and who have suffered from some of Georgia's long-term effects. It seems like this series really struck a chord with a lot of you. I also
48:42 Kaelyn Moore? heard from a lot of single mothers, people who were raised by single moms, and even social workers who were just appalled by this story. And in general, I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your stories with me. It's really what makes this community so special, and it's why we can't ever forget stories like this. If you'd like to hear a bit more, I'll be over on Footnotes on Patreon, talking about the research that went into this episode, and going through a bit more of the celebrity aspect of the cases, including Ric Flair, who was trafficked by Georgia. This is a very big story, and if you would like to read more about it, I really recommend the books Before and After by Judy Christie and Lisa Windgate, and The Baby Thief by Barbara Bazanz Raymond. Those were two of the main sources that we used for this episode,
49:26 Kaelyn Moore? and I cannot recommend them enough. Okay, thank you so much for joining me over these last two episodes. This has been an incredibly dark journey, but I'm glad we took it together. Next week, we are going to go back into the backwoods and talk about some of the scariest creatures from Brazilian folklore. I'm talking the undead crawling out of their graves, creatures that try to kill you when you sleep, and a monster in the Amazon that might actually be more real than anyone wants to admit. So join me here next week. We're gonna have fun with this one. And until then, stay curious.
50:02 Kaelyn Moore? This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Hannah McIntosh. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com.
50:23 Kaelyn Moore? This episode is brought to you by our partner, Vistaprint. If you run a small business, you know that there's a moment where you go from just doing the thing you love to realizing you need stuff, like physical stuff. Custom merch for an event, branded apparel for your team, business cards that actually look professional. That was definitely me with Heart Starts Pounding. What started as a podcast I made in my closet turned into something that had merch, had mugs, had stickers, had all of this stuff that I needed to get made. And Vistaprint made it so much less overwhelming. They are a true print expert. Premium quality products, fast turnaround, and design tools that actually make sense. I actually got custom mugs made from Vistaprint and they are gorgeous and very, very good quality. The quality feels expensive without having an expensive price tag.
51:08 Kaelyn Moore? There's a reason over 17 million businesses trust Vistaprint with their print needs. Vistaprint, print your possible. Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at Vistaprint.com. That's 20% off at Vistaprint.com using code NEW20. Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven-day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com/hartstartspounding. But whatever you do, stay curious.
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