Baby Snatcher | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

This episode may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. Alma was new to Memphis. She was a
single mother. She had two small children. But one was particularly young. She was
10 months old. Very pretty child. Blonde hair, green eyes. And Alma took her for a walk.
When she got back from the walk, there was a knock on her door. And the person knocking was Georgia
[music] Tann. And Georgia Tann said, >> [music] >> "I'm a social worker. And I noticed that
your little baby is sick." >> [music] >> And Alma said, "Well, she has a cold." And Georgia [music] Tann said, "I know a
lot about children." So she went over and she examined the baby. [music] And she kept shaking her head.
>> [music] >> And she said, "She's sick. She needs to see a doctor." Alma Sipple told Georgia Tann
>> [music] >> that she didn't have any money to take her baby to the doctor, especially for a
little cold. This was 1946. >> [music] >> We're hearing the story from Barbara Raymond.
Georgia Tann said it was more serious [music] than a cold, but told Alma Sipple not to worry.
She explained that she had connections. She worked with the Tennessee Children's
Home Society [music] and could get the baby seen at the hospital for free. Alma Sipple agreed that the two of them
could take the baby to the hospital to be checked out by a doctor. But >> [music]
>> Georgia Tann said that Alma couldn't come. They need to pretend that the baby was
an orphan >> [music] >> in order to get the free care. So reluctantly, Alma let Georgia Tann walk off with her
[music] 10-month-old baby. A day later, Alma snuck into the hospital. She looked in the room where
Georgia >> [music] >> Tann's wards were. She saw her baby bouncing in her bed, looking extremely
healthy. She asked the nurse if she could hold her baby. And the nurse replied, "You don't have a baby in there."
And the next day she got a call from Georgia Tann and she said, "I'm so sorry, [music] but your baby
died." And Alma started screaming and she said, "I know she's not dead. She only had a
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
police station and no one would listen to her. She haunted graveyards. She tried to
find death certificates. Nothing. >> [music] >> Now Alma spent 45 years looking for her child.
Barbara Raymond interviewed Alma Sipple in 1990. I realized there was a much bigger story behind Alma because Alma
was not the only person who had lost a child to Georgia Tann. As one of Georgia Tann's colleagues once
said, she wanted to get her hands on every child she could. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
Georgia Tann was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1891. Her family was wealthy.
Her father, George Tann, was a lawyer and then became a judge. And he did something unusual for the
time. He let her read law. Uh That had to have been extremely tantalizing. That is the way people became lawyers in
those days. They read law with a lawyer. And she was the first woman in Mississippi
to pass the Mississippi bar exam. But she told reporter in the 1940s, her father wouldn't let her practice law
because it wasn't the usual thing for a woman. I don't know why she did not defy him.
Because she never listened to anyone else in her life. But she couldn't be a lawyer
in her mind. After passing the bar exam, Georgia Tann took a job as a social worker. The usual thing would be for a
woman of Georgia's status, since her father was a judge, that Georgia would marry and have
children and that she would the power she would have would be involved with the marriage and with the
raising of children. And as far as I could tell, Georgia never wanted to get married and she
never wanted to bear children. So that marked her as different and a lot of the people who would describe
Georgia Tann to me would say things like, "Well, I never knew how to take her. She reminded me of a man."
That kind of thing. And she was not obviously the typical Southern debutante type. She never
attended the usual parties that would have been given. Instead, she wore her long black skirts and her white
shirt and she would visit the local poor. When she was 15 years old, Georgia Tann's father had a case in which two
siblings had been orphaned. He didn't know what to do with them. Georgia took it upon herself to go
around and talk with the wealthiest people in the community and try to convince a family to adopt them.
And she did. Georgia felt that the world was divided into two very different types.
Poor people were incapable of proper parenting. Other people, people of middle or upper class, were
people of the higher type. And the children, in Georgia's mind, deserved better than being raised in poverty.
In the beginning of the 20th century, social workers tried very hard to keep parents and children together,
providing financial assistance to poor families to keep children from being sent to orphanages, sometimes called
homes for friendless children. Georgia Tann did not try to keep families together.
She rearranged them. >> [snorts] >> Taking babies from poor families and giving them to rich ones. She
stole a child off of a a porch. Um there was a woman named Rose Harvey and she was very poor
and sleeping in her house. Her young child >> [music] >> was playing on the back porch.
Georgia Tann lured him into her car >> [music] >> with the biggest candy cane he had ever seen
and had him adopted by a local family. Later, >> [music] >> she took his younger brother the same
way and the child was adopted into that same family. Now Rose, the mother, was incensed and she was very upset,
obviously. She challenged this in court. >> [music] >> She did not win. And most likely,
>> [music] >> Georgia's father had influence over the decision. [music] And but I was told by people in Hickory that
George Tann was quote unquote [music] run out of town because of that. She made her way to Memphis,
where she became the director >> [music] >> of the Tennessee Children's Home Society.
The city was still recovering from a deadly yellow fever outbreak. More than half the city's population
fled. Of the 19,000 people who stayed, 17,000 got sick. More than 5,000 died. The city
went bankrupt. [music] A man named Edward Hull Crump, who was from Mississippi and whose own
father had [music] died in the yellow fever plague, came to [music] Memphis. And he [snorts]
>> [music] >> worked his way up to being mayor and essentially controlled the town.
People were afraid of him. And how did this help Georgia Tann? What What was it about the new makeup of
Memphis that was beneficial for her in her attempt to get children? Georgia was able to
forge a relationship with Boss Crump. And once she had his protection, she was really untouchable.
How did she find her victims, her children? So she took children who, in the beginning,
were kind of already perhaps relinquished and adopted them out. But in those days,
children in orphanages were quite frequently not orphans. People would put their children in an
orphanage for what they thought would be a short period of time while they got on their
own feet financially or recovered from an illness. And so she took some of them.
But as her business started booming, she couldn't satisfy the demand simply through
children who were already relinquished or in orphanages. And that's when Barbara Raymond says
she just started stealing them. So she because she had so much clout in Memphis,
she was able to take children right from delivery rooms. I I spoke with a doctor
in the 1990s who by then was in his 90s and he told me about when he was an intern
at a Memphis hospital witnessing things like this. Women dressed up like nurses who worked
for Georgia Tann standing outside the door of a delivery room and the minute they heard a baby cry,
they would go in and take the baby. A young mother would be told, "Oh honey, I'm so sorry,
but your baby was born dead." And the mother would say, "But I heard a baby cry."
And the nurse or the pretend nurse would say, "Oh no, no, that was another baby."
And the mother would say, "I want to see my baby." And they'd say, "The state put the baby in [music] the
ground." As if the baby had already been buried. And they they got nowhere, these women.
There were a lot of habeas corpus suits. People said, "Georgia Tann stole my child."
Not one was resolved in favor of the father or mother who had lost a child and that was because Boss Crump had
control of the town and Georgia Tann had an in with Boss Crump. Georgia Tann was only interested in
white children. She paid people to keep their eyes open for blonde hair and blue eyes.
One of her best allies was a juvenile court judge named Camille Kelley. If you were
to be going through a divorce or if you were very poor, you were having trouble,
you might be told to appear before juvenile court judge Kelley and she would in the course of talking
to you, write down the names and ages of your children. And Georgia would be given this information
and a few days later you might get a knock on your on your door. She supplied Georgia Tann with 20% of
the children she placed. One of the most complicated parts of Georgia Tann's story
was that she was able to place children with new families at a time in the United States when adoption wasn't
popular. Kids in orphanages usually stayed there. Other children were sent to live with
so-called baby farmers. Baby farmers were usually uneducated middle-aged women who took children in and were supposed
to care for them. Some of them accepted or wanted an upfront fee for caring for these children.
And once some of them had the money, they felt no incentive to keep the children alive.
So there were articles in the New York Times of baby farmers who killed children with
scalding water, by dashing their heads against walls. It was absolutely unbelievable to me to read
this. Some baby farmers even took out life insurance policies on the children and then killed them to collect the
money. There was an editorial in the New York Times in the mid-1920s that that said that
life insurance for children should be declared invalid because it was a temptation to inhuman crimes.
Adoption had not been popular in part because of the thought that orphans came from unmarried women.
And a pregnant unmarried woman suffered from moral abnormalities. A 1918 report titled The Unmarried
Mother, A Study of 500 Cases describes them as repulsive, misshapen, depraved. People worried that the children would
inherit their mothers' weak moral character. So these children were considered tainted goods and one
interesting thing I found was of course there were always women who couldn't bear children,
>> [snorts] >> who wanted children. Even in those days when nobody wanted to adopt children,
there were women who did want to adopt children. But they could not get their husbands to
sign on to this. So faked pregnancies. One woman pretended to have born 11 children
and somehow the fathers believed this. What they would do is they would pretend to be
pregnant and then they would wait until maybe the husband was out of town or away
somewhere and they would pretend that they had collapsed in front of coincidentally
a baby farmer's house and they would be taken in. And then the father would be called
and he would find his wife in bed with a newborn baby, which supposedly she had given just
given birth to. So I think Georgia Tann saw in her mind all these lovely, gorgeous, stereotypically
blonde, blue-eyed, etc. children on baby farms, many of whom were dying. And also the death rates in orphanages
in those days on the whole for the first year of life were 50% but I found one orphanage where
in one year 100% of those children died. So she found all these children just kind of
vegetating or dying. And then on the other hand, there were people who wanted children.
So tell me how Georgia Tann changed that idea of children being tainted. What did she say? She
said that they were not children of sin. They were not genetically flawed. They were blank slates.
They were born untainted. And if you surround them with beauty and culture, they will become anything you want them
to be. But she didn't believe that. So she went into the records and changed changed them
so that people thought that they were adopting say a child who whose father was a composer, whose
mother was a a debutante. And she also started placing children with very prominent people so that locally at
least adopting more or less became the thing to do. Georgia Tann bragged that she had a
rigorous selection process that matched the perfect child with the perfect home.
But she wanted her customers to be happy. So sometimes she'd send three children
to the same family and let them have a one-year trial to decide which, if any, they'd like to keep.
In correspondence with her attorney, children were referred to as merchandise, {quote} in hand and in
stock. She marketed children as luxury items, most notably by creating hundreds of
actual advertisements for them. According to Georgia Tann, a baby was the perfect Christmas present.
Her ads featured photographs of children dressed up with captions like living dolls for you and George wants to play
catch, but he needs a daddy to complete the team. [music] Then the ad said, "Put your orders in early."
>> [music] [music] >> Do you think Georgia had reasons to do what she did beyond making money.
She didn't want, I think, to bear children. But I think she must have wanted in some
vicarious way to be involved in the birthing process because I was told of a man who
strangely was told to pick up his adopted daughter baby at Georgia Tann's residence, which is
not the usual way she distributed her children. And he he went to her house at night.
And instead of a maid answering the door, Georgia Tann answered the door. Now, Georgia Tann usually wore very
tailored clothes, but she was wearing like this sort of negligee. It was frilly.
And he was taken aback. And she let him upstairs. And the bed the bed covering was white.
And there was a little mound in the corner. And she folded back the cover. And there was a baby girl.
And Georgia Tann said, "This baby is perfect in every way." Now, this man who be became the child's
adopted father felt that Georgia Tann was kind of pretending that she had given birth [music]
to that child. >> [music] >> Celebrities all over the country asked Georgia Tann to find them a child. Joan
Crawford, June Allyson and Dick Powell, [music] Pearl Buck. Meanwhile, birth parents were
desperately searching for their children, begging the police and judges to help them.
One man searched for his little sister for 37 years, writing desperate letters to J. Edgar Hoover.
Finally, in 1979, he got a letter from an employee of the Department of Vital Statistics [music]
that said, "I could lose my job by giving you this information. Your sister was adopted by a Hollywood
couple." By 1935, Georgia Tann [music] had placed children in 48 states along with Mexico, Panama,
Canada, and England. Sending kids to wealthy families outside of the state of Tennessee
let Georgia Tann increase her fees by a lot. She made her money by overcharging.
She was supposedly charging travel fees and hotel fee. But she was charging maybe five, six
adoptive families $750. So, of course, the plane fare did not cost that much and neither did the hotel room.
I heard of people who paid $5,000 for a child. I think she she asked what she thought
she could get. Now, if she had operated legally, the fee would have been $15. So, over time you can see that she
amassed an awful lot of money. She also extorted money from people who had already adopted
children. Sometimes a year or two after the child had been placed, particularly if the
child had been placed somewhere in her area, she would ask for $1,000. And they'd say, "Well, you know, we
don't have it. We're taking good care of little Susie and all this." And she she
would say that if she didn't get the money, she would take the baby back. Georgia's own lifestyle got fancier.
She bought another home back in Hickory, Mississippi with servants' quarters, imported palm
trees, fountains, and a room-sized refrigerator. She took vacations in Cuba. There were big cars, furs.
It was important to her business that she embody a certain kind of wealth. And this was reflected in her orphanage
on Poplar Avenue in Memphis. Her orphanage was an old kind of very nice-looking mansion that had been donated to her by
Fred Smith who founded Greyhound bus lines and which later became Federal Express. He had adopted through Georgia
Tann. So, it it no longer exists, but it had polished beautiful floors. It had a
a lovely reception room. It had a room where Georgia Tann would meet with prospective adoptive parents.
It had nurseries upstairs. Uh For photo ops, there would be one baby per crib. But in reality, there were often four or
five babies in a crib. By the mid-40s, Memphis doctors started to speak out going on record about signs
of physical abuse and how they'd warn Georgia Tann not to remove infants from the hospital's care.
In 1945 in one 3-month period, a doctor, pediatrician named Dr. Clyde Crosswell,
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
dysentery, basically baby diarrhea. But babies are they weigh so little that they can dehydrate very quickly. And if
they're not rehydrated, say in a hospital or something, [music] they die. Now, Georgia Tann was a very
proud woman. And I was told by another doctor who worked volunteered his services for her because he was
desperately hoping to keep some of these kids alive, she felt she knew better than the doctors.
He said one time I prescribed an antibiotic for a baby and she told the nurse not to give it to
the baby, but to chart it as if she the child had been given the antibiotic. So, he said she would not
take she would not take the children to the hospital. And and they would die. Tennessee lawmakers attempted to pass
legislation requiring children's boarding homes to be inspected and licensed. But Georgia Tann somehow got an
exemption from compliance. Her best political tool was babies themselves. She'd give them as gifts to lawmakers.
She went relatively unchecked for decades. It wasn't as if the birth parents weren't speaking out against Georgia
Tann, but it was like it didn't matter. They were always speaking out. And anybody who lived in Memphis and
read the newspaper, and in those days everybody read the newspapers because, you know, they didn't have television,
they weren't online, they read the [music] papers. I mean, one woman lost five children to
Georgia Tann. Another woman lost three children to Georgia Tann. A German immigrant father
lost his daughter to Georgia Tann. They they would take them a long time. They would finally because no nobody wanted
to touch their cases, but they would finally find someone who would take their case. They never won.
Barbara Raymond says she read case after case like this. But one woman, Grace Gribble, has always
stuck out. She was a widow with five children. One day, a woman who worked for Georgia
Tann showed up at her house with papers to sign about free medical care. Grace signed them.
And workers started carrying off the three youngest children. And as they carried them off, one who was
carrying off a little boy named Kirby, he was 4 years old, he had red hair, blue eyes,
said, "We have an order for a child of this age and type." Now, Grace ran to the courthouse
and demanded to see her children, demanded her children back. And Georgia Tann said,
"You should thank me." And Grace kept calling for her children and crying for her children.
And Georgia Tann just said, "Go home and have some more." In September of 1950, Tennessee Governor
Gordon Browning announced an investigation into Georgia Tann's operations with the Children's Home
Society. Three days later, Georgia Tann died of cancer at age 59. Her death was reported alongside
allegations that she ran a million-dollar baby black market. Governor Browning said he would sponsor
whatever legislation was needed to quote prevent the sale of children. As his investigation progressed,
adoptive parents had to decide whether they wanted to know if [music] their children had been stolen by Georgia
Tann. Many chose not [music] to. Barbara Raymond says that even as the details of Georgia Tann's practices came
out, >> [music] >> many still felt that the children were lucky to have been delivered into
wealth. So, the whole thing was just sort of allowed to fade away. And after Georgia
Tann died, then finally [music] her home was closed. You say that Georgia Tann invented
modern American adoption. How? She popularized it. And I guess an argument could be made
that by making adoption acceptable, in some ways, she helped children. And I believe
in some ways, she might have. If a child truly had nowhere to go, I imagine that's
better than being raised in an orphanage. The problem was that many, many more adoptions were
arranged than should ever have been arranged. Um my own daughter is adopted, not
through Georgia Tann. And my my daughter should not have been adopted. I love her. She is amazing. I
cannot imagine my life without her. But when we found her birth family, they're wonderful people.
And they had been told, you know, you're not married, you're young, you're going
to have to relinquish this child. And the reason why they were told that was instigated by Georgia Tann.
After Georgia made adoption popular, potential grandparents >> [music] >> signed out, you know, no one now will
have to know that my child is pregnant. I will send her off to Aunt Bertha's >> [music]
>> in California. At least that would be the story. But in reality, >> [music] >> the young pregnant woman would go to a
home for unwed mothers and [music] relinquish the baby for adoption. And that was that.
So, [music] going back to my own daughter's adoption, I kind of feel guilty >> [music]
>> for profiting from the pain of another [music] woman. On the other hand, if I had not adopted
my daughter, who had been relinquished, someone else would have. But my daughter could
easily Her parents [music] got married quickly. They raised three other boys. They're good people. They could have
raised [music] her. And she was their child. >> [music] >> With Barbara Raymond's help, her
daughter now knows her birth parents and her younger three brothers. She spent time with her four grandparents, aunts,
uncles, and cousins. As for Alma Sipple, the woman from the beginning of the story,
it took more than 45 years for her to find her daughter. With the help of a Memphis volunteer
agency called Tennessee Right to Know, she eventually got her daughter's new name and address.
She sent flowers. Her daughter called. They got to know each other. Alma Sipple said, "I feel whole."
>> [music] >> Barbara Raymond spent 10 years researching [music] Georgia Tann, tracking down victims, and
interviewing them. She was able to [music] document 5,000 children placed by Georgia Tann.
She suspects the number is closer to 6,000. >> [music] [music] >> Barbara Raymond's [music] book about
Georgia Tann is called The Baby Thief. We've got a link in the show notes. [music]
Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Lily Wilson is our senior producer. Audio [music] mix by Rob Byers.
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. >> [music]
>> You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at criminalshow.
Criminal >> [music] >> is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC.
We're proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around.
And if you don't know, Radiotopia has a very special feed called Showcase, where we feature
original podcast series of all stripes from emerging and leading producers around the world. Right now on Showcase,
there's an incredible four-part series called Space Bridge, which tells a largely forgotten story from nearly 40
years ago about technology, citizen diplomats, and the Cold War. Do you deserve this?
This fantastic experience? Have you earned this in some way? Are you separated out to be touched by
God, to have some special experience here that other men cannot have? And you know the answer to that is no.
You know very well at that moment, and it comes through to you so powerfully, that you're
the sensing element for man. And that's a humbling feeling. Go listen. I'm Phoebe [music] Judge. This is
Criminal. >> [music] >> Radiotopia >> [music] >> from PRX.

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

Barbara Raymond’s book is The Baby Thief (https://www.amazon.com/Baby-Thief-Georgia-Corrupted-Adoption/dp/1402758634).

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode 110 originally published March 15, 2019. https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-110-baby-snatcher-3-15-2019

Music in this episode: “Cascet” by David Szesztay “Terminal One” by Cory Gray “Tessalit” by Blue Dot Sessions “Ghost Limb” by Ben Carey “Xandre” by Blue Dot Sessions “Slimheart” by Blue Dot Sessions “So Go We” by Blue Dot Sessions “Scaffoldings” by Podington Bear “Naptime” by Blue Dot Sessions “Children of Lemuel” by Blue Dot Sessions

Brief Summary

Georgia Tann stole children from poor families in Memphis, impacting countless lives, including Alma Sipple's search for her daughter.

Key points

Alma's Heartbreak. Alma Sipple's life changes drastically when her baby is taken by Georgia Tann.
Georgia Tann's Manipulation. Georgia Tann deceives mothers and takes their children, claiming to help them.
Children as Merchandise. Georgia Tann marketed children as luxury items, treating them like products.
Georgia Tann's Manipulation. Georgia Tann used babies as political tools, gifting them to lawmakers to avoid scrutiny.
A Mother's Heartbreak. Grace Gribble's children were taken from her under false pretenses, leading to her desperate pleas.
The Investigation Begins. Tennessee Governor Gordon Browning announced an investigation into Georgia Tann's operations.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I know she's not dead. She only had a cold.

Alma's desperate denial after being told her baby died.

2:25WatchApr 14, 2026

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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