Pod Insights The Binge Cases: Doctor Billions Baby Broker | 2. Three Babies About this episode A family from Chicago working with Tara Lee has agreed to adopt two babies when Tara Lee tries to rope them into adopting a third. They’re cornered, and they don’t feel like they have a choice.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
0:15 Speaker 01 Listen to all episodes of Baby Broker ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession.
0:44 Speaker 01 Before we begin, please be advised that this episode includes discussions of suicide and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
0:57 Speaker 01 In the previous episode, Teresa and Mike Matheny learned of a secret FBI investigation into Tara Lee and Always Hope. They packed their car with everything they needed to take care of a baby and set out from Atlanta to Detroit in a desperate attempt to rescue their adoption. Their heads were spinning. Did Tara Lee lie to them about Stephanie? Was the baby boy even real? It didn't even occur to them that their son might also have been promised to another couple in what the FBI would come to call a double match. But there was another couple who wanted their baby, Tammy and Nick Granath.
1:39 Speaker 01 When I met the Granathes at a recording studio near their home in Chicago last fall, Tammy told me she'd been thinking about adopting for a long time.
1:49 Speaker 02 To be honest, I always knew that likely I couldn't have my own children. I just knew it. So how I felt is I want to adopt.
1:59 Speaker 01 It's one thing saying it out loud and it's fine. It's a completely different undertaking when you're actually in it. What did you imagine it would be like? I have got to be honest, it wasn't this.
2:16 Speaker 01 Like most families trying to adopt, Nick and Tammy figured they'd sign up with a private adoption agency, which would match them with a birth mom. But they rejected that idea after visiting an agency in Chicago.
2:28 Speaker 02 And they flat out tell you, you know, are you looking for a Caucasian baby? Or are you looking for, you know, an ethnic or African American baby? And for us, we were open to any gender, any race. And they right away just made it very clear, oh, wow, okay, well, you guys are gonna, you're gonna match quicker. And also, if you go for an African American child, it is less money. And that really bothered us.
3:00 Speaker 03 We also asked the average waitlist for most of the families. They were saying creeping up to four to five years. And it's because they're waiting for essentially a blonde, blue eyed baby boy to drop out of the sky. Their specific clientele is more wealthy.
3:16 Speaker 01 So the Graniths took another route.
3:21 Speaker 01 They run a successful company doing hair and makeup for hundreds of weddings a year. Tammy is the creative visionary. Nick runs the business side. They work with a lot of wedding planners. And they wanted someone like that to help them with their adoption. Someone to connect them with adoption opportunities in different states and guide them along the way. So the Graniths hired an adoption consultant. And right away, she had a lead.
3:49 Speaker 02 The first person she told us about was Tara Lee. It's called Always Hope Adoption Agency out of Detroit, Michigan. She had reassured us there's so many babies coming out of this agency.
4:05 Speaker 01 Over the next few months, Tara Lee matched them with two different birth moms. It was like winning the adoption lottery. Incredibly, both women were set to deliver in this same hospital at the same time in early September. And Stephanie from the last episode was not one of them. Adoptions are expensive, ranging from $10,000 to more than 60. Tara Lee's cost was in the middle, which was another way she appealed to clients.
4:36 Speaker 01 To secure their two adoptions, the Graniths paid her about $20,000. About half would go toward the birth mother's living expenses. Another $25,000 or so was due at delivery, including legal fees. The Graniths had been saving for years and could afford it. By late August 2018, the Graniths had baby-proofed their house and decorated two nurseries. In just two weeks, they'd pack a car and drive to Detroit for both births. It was all set. But you know what they say about best laid plans.
5:13 Speaker 02 This is where it gets even more wild. And I can never forget it. It was a Saturday and I had done a wedding. I came home and he was mowing the lawn. And Tara Lee calls me. Immediately, your stomach just drops because you're thinking, oh, my gosh, something's going on with my match. And I answer the phone and she said, stop what you're doing. And I said, oh, Nick's mowing the lawn. Do you want me to stop him? Yep, stop what you're doing. And so I walk over and I could distinctly, I can even tell you like on my driveway where I stood and I signaled to him to stop. And I threw speakerphone on and then she's like, OK, Tammy, Nick,
5:57 Speaker 02 meet birth mother Stephanie. And all of a sudden, you just hear this voice that goes, hello? And you're thinking, what? She has me on the phone with another birth mom? Tara Lee starts telling us that she accidentally, and that's the word she used, she accidentally showed our profile to Stephanie.
6:20 Speaker 01 The same Stephanie, the Methanis matched with in the last episode.
6:27 Speaker 01 The Granit's had been working with Tara Lee for five roller coaster months. Their rose colored glasses had cleared. They were ready to be done with her. But they knew, no Tara Lee, no babies. They couldn't believe that Tara Lee would cold call them with an offer of a third baby, with the birth mother on the phone. Stephanie was begging them to take her baby.
6:51 Speaker 02 I knew it had to be you. This was God telling her that it was us.
6:56 Speaker 03 And she just fell in love with you guys. And we're completely silent on our end. We're like, we're getting matched now a third time with Tara Lee.
7:05 Speaker 02 She said, you'll be in the hospital at the same time.
7:09 Speaker 01 Did she really think they'd consider adopting a third baby?
7:13 Speaker 02 And we're just staring at each other like, there's no way this is real.
7:16 Speaker 01 And you feel like she's trying to get you to give an answer right there in the driveway?
7:20 Speaker 03 Right, exactly.
7:21 Speaker 02 She was.
7:22 Speaker 03 Oh, absolutely.
7:26 Speaker 01 From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Baby Broker. I'm Peter McDonnell. Episode two, Three Babies.
7:41 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
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8:43 Speaker 01 Tammy and Nick Granath stood dumbfounded in their driveway. At Tara Lee's urging, Stephanie was pleading with them to adopt her baby. Here's where the story gets a little more complicated.
8:56 Speaker 01 Because one of their two matches was in jeopardy. The faltering match was with a birth mom named Sabrina, who had a harrowing story. As Tara Lee was going on and on about Stephanie, all the Granathes could think about was Sabrina.
9:12 Speaker 03 And then Tammy does interject, like, "What about Sabrina?" And she wants to forget Sabrina. Forget, like blatantly, straight out, forget about Sabrina.
9:24 Speaker 01 The Granathes could no sooner forget about Sabrina than they could forget how desperately they wanted to be parents. She was etched into their lives. She was going to give them a child, and she'd been through hell to get pregnant. But in one fell swoop, Tara Lee wanted them to discard her like yesterday's fashion and try on a new birth mom in their life. For Tara Lee, it was like babies were interchangeable, like pawns on a chessboard. Sabrina was 19, and the Granathes had been matched with her for five months. It was a closed adoption, which meant Sabrina's identity was confidential. The Granathes had never seen a picture of her, didn't know her last name,
10:07 Speaker 01 and would never have any communication with her. I asked the Granathes to take me back to when they first heard Sabrina's story, months before Tara Lee's surprise phone call in August.
10:20 Speaker 02 So, we did, on March 30th, have a phone call with Tara Lee. And I distinctly remember, and I've now heard that this is kind of her spiel to everybody. She was like, "I cuss like a trucker. I'm extremely blunt. I'm not out here for the money. I'm doing this to help young women. There was nobody in Detroit helping them. I have so many birth moms." And basically, she told us the story of Sabrina.
10:50 Speaker 02 And Sabrina is a girl who loved makeup, loved doing hair, loved them all. She was Caucasian. She was blonde with blue eyes.
11:03 Speaker 01 So Sabrina, what's her living situation?
11:06 Speaker 02 She lived with her parents. They described it as that's their only daughter. Sabrina was raised in a town, a very little town. And this town had like 4,000 people. It was very small. And she said it was a fishing town. And we were told that birth mom was receiving daily therapy. We weren't allowed to see her picture and we couldn't receive any medical updates related to her or her future child. When she gives birth, we are to be at the hospital, but they're going to provide a room next door because she doesn't want us to meet her.
11:43 Speaker 01 The reason Sabrina wanted a closed adoption is upsetting.
11:48 Speaker 02 We were told that she was a victim of gang rape. She had been at this party. She was just 19, wild, having fun. And this horrible, horrible thing happened to her. I remember distinctly the story being so at a trap house. Like stairs were broken. She couldn't run. It was dark.
12:06 Speaker 03 This was a party that just happened.
12:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:07 Speaker 03 Exactly.
12:08 Speaker 02 Four men had committed the crime and they weren't caught. And that the identity of the birth father was unknown. And her parents right away told her, you're going to put the baby up for adoption. They did not believe in abortion.
12:21 Speaker 01 Tammy said she liked Sabrina because she could see herself in her.
12:25 Speaker 02 Like I just pictured this girl who was, you know, young and just living her life and just got into this horrible circumstance. And being that she loved to fish and she loved makeup and she loved shopping and she loved perfume and everything, I just pictured her almost as myself. Like I really connected to her.
12:44 Speaker 01 But Tara Lee said Sabrina was still weighing her options.
12:49 Speaker 02 It's between you and another family. But Sabrina wants to know, how are you going to tell this child that it was conceived? So I said, we're going to be honest. We'll have to cross that bridge when we get there as to how honest. And she was like, okay, great.
13:11 Speaker 01 By the way, it's abnormal and unprofessional for an adoption facilitator to pit families against one another to win a birth mother's favor. Lucky for Tammy and Nick, though, Tara Lee said that their answer was the one Sabrina wanted. And sometimes it's the little things that a birth mom sees in a couple that makes her choose them.
13:32 Speaker 02 So we were told by Tara Lee that she chose us because in our profile book, there's a sentence about, I love to fish. I grew up fishing.
13:41 Speaker 03 Like of all the things?
13:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, so of all the things.
13:47 Speaker 01 Nick, Tammy and I were sitting around a table in a basement recording studio in Chicago. As their story progressed, Nick kept shaking his head and sighing in exasperation as he remembered how Tara Lee manipulated them. Tammy sat very still, but I could sense her churning with emotion. I think one reason the Graniths are successful in their business is that they carefully weigh their decisions. They try to see where different outcomes will lead, but on the Tara Lee roller coaster to adoption, they couldn't see what was coming. They just knew there was a baby at the end of the ride. In the wedding business, they were used to working with people who were really good at their specialized jobs.
14:31 Speaker 01 Tara Lee was kind of a mess. They needed to talk to someone who had seen it all in the adoption world and could tell them it was okay to match with Sabrina. They needed their consultant.
14:43 Speaker 02 Just calling her, calling her, calling her. And finally, she answered her phone and she was like, you know, I'm going out to dinner. I'm going out to dinner. And I'm thinking, well, I need to know if I'm signing to adopt a child. We just felt so like, oh, my gosh, we're in, we're left alone, kind of. You feel left in the middle of a field.
15:03 Speaker 01 Had the consultant told Tammy and Nick that something about Sabrina's match seemed fishy? Had she cautioned them to reconsider? I think they would have turned Tara Lee down.
15:15 Speaker 01 But she didn't say that. They told me she said it sounded fine, that she'd heard of situations like Sabrina's. Then she went to dinner. Later that night, as Tammy and Nick wrestled with this big decision, they remembered something reassuring an instructor told them in an adoption class they'd taken a few months earlier.
15:35 Speaker 03 You're going to answer tough questions. You're going to have these weird scenarios that you completely don't conceive of.
15:41 Speaker 02 And I remember being like, no, we could totally do this.
15:43 Speaker 03 We were like, OK, we're in.
15:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:47 Speaker 01 They told Tara Lee, yes.
15:49 Speaker 02 And then March 31st, we were matched. Tara Lee said, I want to be very upfront, that you're matching with her at three months pregnant. And due to the fact that she's in therapy daily, your fees are going to be way higher than a normal match.
16:06 Speaker 01 To secure the adoption, Tammy and Nick told me they signed a contract with Always Hope and sent Tara Lee about $15,000 for Sabrina's living expenses and counseling services. Much more would be due upon delivery. They had six months to get everything ready.
16:24 Speaker 02 And I'm like, OK, I can start buying stuff. I could start getting clothes and doing the nursery. I loved our nursery. I love our nursery. Like, I just wanted it to look almost like a castle style, but all pure white. And I did the theme like Stars, because I love Coldplay. And so everything was themed after their song Yellow. Over the crib, it said, look at the stars. Look how they shine for you.
16:49 Speaker 01 Because it was a closed adoption, the Granathes weren't supposed to get any updates about Sabrina. But then they did, distressing updates that were full of details.
17:03 Speaker 02 Tara Lee would send very erratic text messages saying Sabrina's having a horrible day. Sabrina didn't show to her doctor.
17:12 Speaker 03 Right.
17:13 Speaker 01 Tara Lee made it seem as if that was just how it went with these birth moms she worked with in Detroit.
17:19 Speaker 02 She would act as if they had drug issues, had no moral values. They were in the situations that they were in because of themselves. You know how these girls are.
17:33 Speaker 01 That kind of talk didn't sit well with Tammy and Nick. Sabrina, for one, had been raped, and that wasn't her fault.
17:41 Speaker 01 Although the updates Tara Lee gave them were upsetting, there was one update they really wanted.
17:46 Speaker 02 One of the things I said to her is, would you be able to take her to an ultrasound to get the gender reveal? Supposedly, she was very skittish of the doctors and didn't want to do these things. And I said, could you please take her just so I could start prepping everything? I would love to know the gender of the baby. Oh, my goodness, I'm hoping it's a girl.
18:07 Speaker 01 Tara Lee sent them an ultrasound image with the word girl. The next day, the Granathes had a gender reveal party and decided to name the baby Avery.
18:18 Speaker 02 Avery was always a name that I absolutely loved.
18:21 Speaker 01 Naming the baby, revealing her gender, and decorating her nursery were the high points of the match with Sabrina. In late June, things took a dark turn.
18:33 Speaker 01 Tara Lee was coming to Chicago with one of her daughters for the pride parade and wanted to meet the Granathes for dinner to give them an update on Sabrina.
18:42 Speaker 02 It was a Saturday, and we just kept saying, hey, where are we meeting? Where are we meeting? I was waiting for this moment to be in person with her, to be able to find out all of the information about our child.
18:54 Speaker 01 But it was getting late. They were supposed to meet at 5:00, and they'd heard nothing.
18:59 Speaker 02 And our consultant ended up reaching out to us, and she said, so Tara Lee is not in town.
19:04 Speaker 01 Tara Lee had had a crisis with a birth mother in Detroit, so instead of dinner in Chicago, they'd have to do a video call on Skype. The Granathes were pissed, but Tara Lee held a trump card.
19:15 Speaker 02 And so she gets on the Skype with us, and she tells us that the reason she can't come is because this birth mom was shot in her car in a parking lot and lost the baby.
19:28 Speaker 01 Tara Lee said the murdered birth mother, Rashonda, had been matched with a couple, and they were devastated. She told the Granathes she was paying for Rashonda's funeral herself and was collecting donations if they wanted to contribute. Then Tara Lee gave them a grim update about Sabrina.
19:46 Speaker 02 She was taking entire bottles of pills. She tried to drown herself in a bathtub. They had to pump her stomach. She's saying that they had to bring her back to life multiple times. I was crying so intensely. It was just like a stab in the heart. I remember distinctly her saying that no matter what, the baby was going to be special needs. We turned off our cell phones that day and I just went on a drive. We just went and drove because we couldn't talk to our family. It was too heavy. We couldn't talk to anyone. We just drove.
20:22 Speaker 03 Because they have too many questions that we don't have answers to.
20:26 Speaker 01 In need of help, they called their adoption consultant.
20:30 Speaker 02 Our consultant says to us that we have two different options. She's like, you can back out. Your other option is that you stay matched. Because our concern was, we were told that Tara Lee made it clear that if we didn't stay matched, that it was very likely that Sabrina would kill herself and kill the baby.
20:50 Speaker 01 Sabrina's life is in your hands.
20:51 Speaker 02 Literally.
20:52 Speaker 01 And the baby's life is in your hands.
20:54 Speaker 02 Literally, yeah. So in that weekend, we made the decision to stay with Tara Lee and Always Hope and to stay with Sabrina.
21:04 Speaker 01 But the match with Sabrina had begun to feel less likely to happen. So because the Granit's were open to having two children, Tara Lee tried to match them with a second birth mom. And yes, this was all before that startling phone call in the driveway when Tara Lee introduced them to Stephanie, the third birth mother.
21:26 Speaker 03 So now at this point, she's actively searching for a second birth mother.
21:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:30 Speaker 03 For us, and then we do, we actually see said birth mother on a video call. And there she is, flesh and blood.
21:39 Speaker 02 She asked us a lot of questions, which I appreciated. She was very, you know, open about why she was going to be giving her baby up for adoption. She was having a baby girl. She has a son, she has a daughter.
21:53 Speaker 02 And then she's pregnant with another little girl. And the craziest part was that Sarah was due September 7th of 2018. I was like, wow, this is a baby girl who's literally due the same week.
22:07 Speaker 01 The same week as Sabrina's baby.
22:12 Speaker 01 So that was the complicated situation that Granath's were in when Tara Lee called them in August and introduced them to Stephanie. Remember, Tammy told Nick to stop mowing the lawn. And then they were both on speakerphone with Tara Lee.
22:27 Speaker 03 This phone call is completely bonkers and off the wall.
22:30 Speaker 02 She kept telling us, forget about Sabrina's baby. And she says to us, Sabrina's gonna raise that baby whether it lives or dies. And I'll never forget that.
22:41 Speaker 02 How did we go from being told we can't unmatch with Sabrina? We can't unmatch with this baby? And then being told, forget about her? And match to this new mom, Stephanie, and this new baby?
22:55 Speaker 01 Like a lot of complicated things, this all started really simply, with their wish to adopt a baby.
23:06 Speaker 01 Their first match had been brutal, but they stayed with it. The second match had been comparatively easy. It was like insurance, securing their dream. But Tammy and Nick wavered, for a good reason.
23:22 Speaker 03 If we're still matched with Sabrina and the potential child that comes from that, they would have put us with three kids.
23:29 Speaker 01 But they couldn't say no. And Tara Lee knew it. The pleading became more intense. Tara Lee turned up the heat. So Tammy and Nick thought of a way to stall for time, to put the burden back on Tara Lee. They said,
23:46 Speaker 03 We need to know the gender.
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24:58 Speaker 01 Even though Stephanie was due in a few weeks, she said she didn't know the gender of her baby. But that wasn't because she wanted to be surprised. It was because she hadn't had an ultrasound.
25:10 Speaker 01 An ultrasound would tell them a lot. First, it would give a snapshot of the baby's health. Second, it would confirm when Stephanie was probably due, although ultrasounds at a later stage are less accurate. And third, it would reveal the baby's gender. So the next day, the Granath's sent Tara Lee money for Stephanie to get her first ultrasound. They told Tara Lee they would strongly consider adopting Stephanie's baby if it was a girl. That might sound harsh, but they were thinking practically. They'd been expecting two girls. The nurseries were decorated accordingly, and it looked like Sabrina's match was not going to happen.
25:52 Speaker 01 A few days later, the Granath's took a road trip north to visit Tammy's brother and sister in Minneapolis and check out the Minnesota State Fair. It's called the Great Minnesota Get Together. Two million visitors. Live bands, farm animals, fireworks, carnival rides, beer, fried everything.
26:17 Speaker 03 I think we're in the alley with all the trinkets, like the vendor emporium, basically.
26:25 Speaker 01 When Tammy got a text from Tara Lee, it was a video of Stephanie's ultrasound.
26:34 Speaker 02 The video has the heartbeat and it has the picture up on the screen of the baby. It's a boy. It's a baby boy.
26:44 Speaker 01 There was a text message, too.
26:45 Speaker 02 "Did you see your baby?" And I remember just kind of tapping Nick with my phone and handing him the phone. "Did you see your baby?"
26:57 Speaker 02 It didn't feel like we were given a choice.
27:00 Speaker 01 More texts followed about Stephanie.
27:03 Speaker 02 She's crying. She wanted it to be a girl. She's so scared you're gonna say no.
27:10 Speaker 02 It's almost this guilt that you feel immediately, like you have to take this baby.
27:22 Speaker 01 The affair was in full swing around them.
27:25 Speaker 02 I said no. My answer was no. I basically left the decision to him. Nick's feeling was, let's do it.
27:34 Speaker 03 I gotta be honest, Tara Lee preyed on my bleeding heart for this match.
27:39 Speaker 02 Most couples wait years. We'd have both at the same time and we're done. We've already bought two of everything.
27:48 Speaker 01 Nick texted back and forth with Tara Lee. They talked on the phone, and then he told her, yes, they'd adopt Stephanie's son. When I met them in Chicago, Nick showed me their adoption contract for Stephanie's baby. It was just a handwritten paragraph in pen, jotted down at an angle on the back page of their contract for Sarah's baby.
28:09 Speaker 03 So this is Sarah's contract that we've already signed for. Then it says, "Per verbal conversation on 8/27/18, Nick and Tammy agreed to use this signature page to accept contract."
28:22 Speaker 01 Nick signed it at the state fair. Then they went shopping.
28:26 Speaker 03 We went to Buy Buy Baby and we bought
28:28 Speaker 02 A thousand dollars.
28:29 Speaker 03 A thousand dollars on baby boy clothes and it was straight up, no tax.
28:33 Speaker 01 Did you pick out a name?
28:34 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
28:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, we did.
28:36 Speaker 02 Atticus.
28:36 Speaker 01 Atticus?
28:37 Speaker 02 Atticus.
28:39 Speaker 01 When the Granathes got back home to Chicago, they had just one week before they needed to drive to Detroit for Sarah and Stephanie's births. They had two nurseries ready to go. They stashed the baby boy clothes in the one that was originally meant for Sabrina's daughter, Avery. But they couldn't forget Sabrina.
28:58 Speaker 02 I remember telling people, like, there's this crazy chance that there could be three. In the back of your mind, you're like, what if? Because you're so attached to Sabrina's child that you're thinking, well, if this baby's born and if this baby lives, how could we not take her home? If, of course, she didn't want to parent. Of course, we're gonna say yes.
29:24 Speaker 01 Despite never having met, seen, or heard from Sabrina, they knew her story. They'd taken the pencil outlines of her biography and imagined them into vivid, moving images. They'd seen an ultrasound of her baby girl, too. Her little body. Who would take care of her? Love her? They wondered. If it wasn't Sabrina, or Sabrina's parents, it would be them. If you're wondering why the Granathes hadn't started deeply questioning the veracity of what Tara Lee was telling them, I think it's because they didn't know nearly as much as you do about this story. They didn't know anyone else who was adopting from Tara Lee.
30:06 Speaker 01 And she was controlling the narrative of their adoptions. Tara Lee was a nimble storyteller, able to generate characters, plotlines, motivations, and details on the spot. But she didn't count on the Granathes sticking so hard to Sabrina's baby. And that became a problem for Tara Lee. Sometimes I noticed she underestimated how attached her clients would get to the babies she promised them. I think she too often saw the matches coldly, transactionally. When Tara Lee couldn't wrestle Nick and Tammy away from Sabrina and replace her with Stephanie, she reacted by saying something inhumane, but on-brand in its brutal directness.
30:49 Speaker 01 Sabrina will raise that baby whether it lives or dies. So Nick finished mowing the lawn. Tammy made sure their business was covered for the next month of weddings and events, and the Granathes hit the road for Detroit. What they couldn't know is that in a few weeks, the FBI would start secretly investigating Tara Lee for adoption fraud, a case unlike anything they'd seen before. It was also going to uncover something very disturbing about what Tara Lee had done to the Granathes. One month later, the couple from our first episode, Teresa and Mike Matheny, started their trip to Detroit.
31:32 Speaker 01 They knew the FBI was investigating Always Hope, but that was all they knew. Neither couple knew about the other, that they were both expecting to go home with Stephanie's son. When Mike and Teresa were three hours from Detroit, they asked Tara Lee for proof of life. So Teresa reaches out to Tara.
31:53 Speaker 02 Teresa just very gently asked her like, "Oh, is there, you know, an ultrasound?" And Tara ends up sending her ultrasound.
31:59 Speaker 07 Oh, she, not only does she send me the ultrasound, she follows it up with, "Yes, the baby is very real." So I'm like, "Oh, my God, it's real. It has her name on there, her birth mom's name, it's legit." And then I, I think I sent a picture to my cousin, and I'm like, "Oh, my God, look." She goes, "I don't want to alarm you," she said, "but if this due date on this ultrasound is correct, she would be 42 weeks." And Mike literally said, "Surely she wouldn't have us drive across the country if this wasn't real. Surely, she wouldn't do that."
32:41 Speaker 01 Next time on Baby Broker.
32:44 Speaker 02 In walks this lady who has jet black hair and is covered in tattoos. She has like her name brand jeans. She has her nails done.
32:55 Speaker 01 Tammy and Nick discovered their money wasn't going where it was supposed to.
32:59 Speaker 02 We knew we had given this money.
33:04 Speaker 01 And they went looking for Sabrina's baby.
33:07 Speaker 03 We're thinking that that baby's here somewhere.
33:10 Speaker 02 I knew the lawyers had to come, and so I wrote everything down, every red flag down.
33:20 Speaker 05 What's it take to be a mentor with big brothers, big sisters? It takes 30 minutes and a cup of coffee, a video game, best two out of three. It takes sharing thumbs up emojis, clapping emojis, and loaded nachos at halftime. That's how you make an impact on a young kid's life. So go on, share a few hours a month, because mentorship may sound huge, but the truth is, it takes little to be big. To learn more, volunteer, or donate, go to bbignow.org.
33:54 Speaker 01 Baby Broker is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. It was hosted and reported by me, Peter McDonald. I'm the executive producer, along with Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch of Sony Music Entertainment. Stephen George recorded the narration at the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood. We used music from Audio Network and a few tracks from Epidemic Sound. News clips are courtesy of WXYZ 7 in Detroit, Michigan. Our production managers are Tamika Balance-Kolosny and Sammy Allison. Our lawyers are Allison Sherry and Kathleen Farley. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rassik, and Jamie Myers.
34:48 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
Previous Baby Broker | 1. You Cannot Tell Anyone Next Baby Broker | 3. The Birth Mothers Page updated November 4, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated