Georgia Tann

Hello, I want to take a moment right now to say how much The Secret Sits team appreciates you, today we are going to take a bit of a departure from the heavy cases we have been covering and I want to talk about a different type of monster, one who hides in plane sight, has a multitude of coconspirators and is truly evil to the very core. I’m John Dodson, welcome to The Secret Sits.

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Transcript

Hello, I want to take a moment right now to say how much The Secret Sits team appreciates you, today we are going to take a bit of a departure from the heavy cases we have been covering and I want to talk about a different type of monster, one who hides in plane sight, has a multitude of coconspirators and is truly evil to the very core. I’m John Dodson, welcome to The Secret Sits.

Our story today begins on an average sunny and warm day in Hickory, Mississippi.  Judge George Clark Tann and his wife Beulah Yates welcome their first child a small girl who they would name Georgia Tann.  In three years’, time the couple would welcome another baby into their family and they would name him Rob Roy Tann.  Beulah worked as a school teacher which went against the norms of society at this time and in this area of the country, because women typically did not work outside of their homes.  Judge Tann possessed a domineering personality and he pushed for everything to be his way, I’m not sure this is a great quality for a judge, but maybe that’s just me.  When Georgia turned five years old, her father decided that she would become a great concert pianist and so she was sent to piano lessons regularly.  Georgia would continue going to her piano lesson well into her adulthood, even though she had no ambition to become a famous concert pianist.

The Tann house became somewhat of a neighborhood gathering spot and it was always teeming with childhood energy.  Judge Tann would occasionally bring home abandoned and neglected children and he once said that they would need a minister, school teacher and a doctor to figure out what to do with all those children.

Georgia Tann graduated from school and went off to attend Martha Washington College which is located in Abingdon, Virginia.  She graduated with a degree in Music in 1913 and began to take courses in social work at Columbia University in New York during two summers.  Georgia’s dream was to become a lawyer like her father, however; at this time, it was extremely rare for females to practice law so her father was very unsupportive of this idea for his daughter.  Because Georgia had no interest in marriage, or having children, she turned to one of the most acceptable jobs for women at the time, Social Work.  After graduating she went to Texas for her first social work job, but she hated this job and quit only a short time after arriving for the appointment.

After leaving her job in Texas, Georgia moved back to Mississippi and began employment at the Mississippi Children’s Home Society.  Here her employment was as the Receiving Director for the Kate McWillie Powers Receiving Home for Children, they liked a lot of words in their company names back then.  Surprisingly, due to the aforementioned fact that Georgia Tann never planned on or wanted to have any children, she adopted an infant girl and named her June.  One of Georgia’s many family friends named Ann Atwood also worked at this home as one of the housemothers.  Ann was eight years younger than Georgia and she had a baby son called Jack.  Ann had given birth to this young boy out of wedlock, quite a scandal at the time, so she added Hollinsworth to the end of her name so she could pretend to be a widow and stave off some of the judgment from the townsfolk.

It is funny that Georgia and Ann were overly concerned about her having given birth out of wedlock, and being judged, but they were much less concerned that the townsfolk also started to get the picture that these two were actually a lesbian couple, in Mississippi, in the 1920’s.  At this time there was a term, “Boston Marriages” this term was used to describe two wealthy, independent women who had no financial support from a man, who lived together.  Some of these were romantic relationships, because, let’s face it, gay people have been around since people have existed, but some were not romantic and were simply a plutonic living arraignment.

After some time working at this receiving center Georgia was fired because she had begun using questionable practices when placing children into new homes.  In 1924, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with June (her daughter), Ann Atwood (her girlfriend) and Jack, Ann’s son.

When the happy family arrived in Memphis, Georgia received a job as the Executive Secretary at the Shelby County branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.  This was the largest society in the state and they had other branches in Jackson, Knoxville and Chattanooga.  On a quick side note, if you are ever in Chattanooga, you should eat at Bea’s restaurant, I highly suggest it.  That’s B-E-A’S, thank me later.  Anyway, Georgia quickly began using aggressive tactics to take over the entire Shelby branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.  After she had a vice like grip on the organization, Georgia Tann began one of the first and largest child trafficking rings, that has ever existed.

Human Trafficking is not a term that yet exists in the 1920’s and Tennessee law does permit agencies to place children with appropriate applicants, as an effort to stop people from selling their children, but to mitigate this, they are only allowed to charge a service fee, which at this time was around seven dollars per child and no body is getting rich off of that.  So, to make her endeavors more profitable, Georgia began arranging out-of-state adoptions.  These private adoptions were not holden to the Tennessee state rules and they allowed her to charge a premium for the babies taken out of state.  After Georgia figured this out, out-of-state adoptions soared to almost 80% of the adoptions happening at Georgia’s facility.  Most of the babies were sent to new families in either New York or California.  Between the years of 1940 and 1950, Georgia Tann placed approximately 3,000 children in just these two states alone.

Two of the dedicated women who worked for Georgia were Alma Walton and Regina Warner.  Every three weeks, like clockwork, these women would make their trips to deliver babies, Alma went to California and Regina to New York, each woman had 4 to 6 babies in tow for each trip.  When the women arrived in her destinations, they would rent a nice hotel room and prospective parents would go to the hotel to see the children and conduct an interview.  Almost all of these prospective parents were wealthy.  The couples would pay $700, by check, made out to Tennessee Children’s Home Society, actually I’m just kidding, the couples would make their $700 checks out directly to Georgia Tann.  On top of the 100% mark up on out-of-town babies, Georgia would also charge the couples additional fees; a background check fee (no backgrounds were actually checked), air travel costs (which were at least double what the trip actually costed) and adoption paperwork fees charged at five times the actual cost.  And the state of Tennessee was also sending money to the agency, they typically sent $61,000 per year with 31 percent of that money going to Georgia’s branch.

The profits made by this not-for-profit organization were squirreled away in a secret bank account named for a fake, shell corporation. For states closed to TN such as Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri the adoption fees would be a fixed $750.  Georgia Tann is believed to have pocketed 80 to 90 percent of the fees collected by her society.  She also, but not surprisingly, did not report the additional income to either the Society’s board or the IRS.

But how did Georgia get all of these kids?  Well, she had a multitude of different ways to attain these children, and most of them were terrible.  Georgia delt a lot with single mothers, who had no means to care for a baby.  She would use pressure tactics and threaten legal action against women to get them to hand over their babies.  One of Georgia’s victims was Alma Simple (do we miss the name Alma, I’m not sure) Alma described Georgia Tann as a stern-looking woman with close-cropped grey hair, round wireless glasses and an air of utter authority.”  Another way she procured children was through Tennessee mental institutions, she would just take any babies born to inmates at these facilities.  And one of the worse ways Georgia received babies for her adoption factory was by simply kidnapping them.  Single parents would drop their child off at nursery school and when they returned, they would be told that welfare agents had came and taken their baby while they were at work.  Children would be temporarily placed in orphanages, a routine action at the time when someone in the family was sick or had become unemployed.  And when I think about this now, it does make sense, instead of having additional children to feed when people were out of work, they would place them in an orphanage, so the child was still taken care of until the family was back on their feet. But Georgia would show up to these orphanages and just take the children, who’s parents were going to return for them.  She would also go to hospitals and take newly born children, explaining that they needed medical attention.  When the new mothers asked for their babies to be brought to them, they would be told that the child had died.

Of course, Georgia Tann could have never done all of this on her own, she had many accomplices, at the hospitals, mental institutions, orphanages and even in the court system.

All records for the children adopted through Georgia’s society were destroyed and as a result the Child Welfare League of America dropped Georgia’s Society from its qualified institutions in 1941.  When Georgia sent a child out for adoption the adopting family was given a fictionalized file for the child with everything just made up, so the family would have no idea what the child’s actual circumstances were. There were times when this ruse was found out by the adopting families, and they confronted Georgia with the information they had learned, not one to be threatened she would just threaten the adoptive parents with legal action that would make them give up their new bundle of joy.  You may be asking yourself how she could get away with this, if the courts were to be involved, well, Georgia did this by being completely insulated by Memphis Family Court Judge Camille Kelley, who used her position of authority to sanction Georgia Tann’s tactics and activities.

If Georgia was running low on babies to sell, I mean adopt, she would identify children from poor families, who she determined were underserved and Judge Kelley would legally remove the child from the home, and give the child to Georgia.  Judge Kelley also severed custody of divorced mothers and would place their children with Georgia so that she could place the child with a family with a better home to provide for the child’s care.  Or at least that was her excuse.  Some of the children adopted out by the agency actually went to homes where they were used as child labor on farms, or they would end up in abusive households.

Georgia also had connections with former Memphis, Tennessee, mayor E.H. Crump, who went by Boss, Crump had a lot of political influence and he was also pretty crooked, he took bribes from brothels and illegal gambling halls and Georgia knew this information and she took full advantage of it.  She was enjoying a lavish lifestyle and for some reason, she was highly respected in the community, her friends included prominent families, politicians and legislators.

While children were in her care, they were mistreated, there were reports of neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse and even murder.  In the 1930’s Memphis had the highest infant mortality rate in the entire United States and this was largely due to Georgia Tann.  In 1943 a wealthy businessman donated a mansion located at 1556 Poplar Avenue to the society as a new headquarters. The offices and intake rooms were on the ground floor and the nurseries were in the upstairs rooms.  The place was ran with an all-female staff, who wore start white nursing uniforms, despite the fact that none were trained nurses and some were women with substance abuse problems.  The women would sedate the children to keep them quiet and if a child was too difficult to place with a family, they baby would be left to die in its crib from malnutrition. Georgia also did not want to waste any of her money on the medical needs of these babies.  If a baby got sick, she would ignore any doctor’s recommendations for treatment and leave the baby to die, babies died from things as simple as diarrhea, because it was too much of a bother for her to spend money on even cheap medicines.  It is believed that around 500 babies died due to Georgia Tann’s mistreatment.

On August 2nd, 1943, in Dyer County, TN, Georgia Tann adopted Ann Hollingsworth, and you may be asking, why would a grown woman adopt another grown adult woman…well, this was a loop-hole that same-sex couples had figured out as a way to make sure their partner would inherit all of their property after death, it was the only way for same-sex couples to be united as a family.

At this time, black market adoptions, as they were called, were not illegal, just frowned upon.  The governor of Tennessee during this time, Gordon Browning, launched an investigation into the society on September 11th 1950, after he received reports that the agency was selling children for profit.  He assigned Memphis attorney Robert Taylor to the case.  Georgia Tann and her gang of baby stealing goons were accused of receiving almost one million dollars in profits from this child trafficking practice. The Tennessee Children’s Home Society then shuttered its doors in 1950.  It is believed that over 5,000 children were stolen in these 25 years.  The states of New York and California vowed to take legal action, but the children’s adoptions were never investigated and no children were restored to their proper homes. But at least Georgia Tann will pay for her crimes, or will she?  Just three days before the state filed charges against the society, Georgia Tann died of uterine cancer, thus escaping any form of prosecution.  Judge Kelley, who accepted bribes for her part in pushing many of these child abductions through the legal system, received a ruling in her own favor in 1951 a Tennessee Department of Public Welfare report stated that while Judge Kelley had “failed on many occasions to aid destitute families and permitted family ties to be destroyed” it could not be proven that she personally profited from her rulings. Shortly after the investigation, she chose to retire from the bench.  She died just 4 years later without ever having to pay for her part in this child trafficking ring.

Over several decades, 19 of the children who died at the Tennessee Children's Home Society, due to the abuse and neglect that Tann subjected them to, were buried in a 14 ft × 13 ft plot at the historic Elmwood Cemetery with no headstones. Georgia Tann had bought the lot sometime before 1923 and recorded the children there by their first names only, for example "Baby Estelle" and "Baby Joseph". In 2015, the cemetery raised $13,000 to erect a monument to these children’s memory. It reads, in part, "In memory of the 19 children who finally rest here unmarked if not unknown, and of all the hundreds who died under the cold, hard hand of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Their final resting place unknown. Their final peace a blessing. The hard lesson of their fate changed adoption procedure and law nationwide."

I would say that is a pretty scathing monument, but not unwarranted. Mazie Hough wrote a book based on this case entitled “Rural Unwed Mothers: An American Experience” in her book, Hough makes the argument that the state of Tennessee’s implementation of social work standards without the funding needed to hold up those standards is what contributed to the abuses of the system.  The Tennessee Children’s Home Society scandal did bring about some good.  It caused the state to make new laws to reform the adoption process in 1951.  And in 1979, the state adopted legislation requiring the state to assist siblings who were trying to find each other.  A similar bill that would have extended this provision to birth parents was not adopted into law.  In 1996, the State of Tennessee enacted Chapter 532 of the Tennessee Public Acts of 1996, which revised the process of obtaining adoption records by releasing them to adult adoptees of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, upon receiving permission from any living birth parents.

Prior to the 1920s, adoption in the United States was pretty rare, one of the largest adoption agencies located in Boston only placed around 5 children per year with new families.  By contrast in 1928, Georgia Tann placed 206 children with adoptive families.  She also believes in class distinctions and felt that children should be taken from poor families and placed with families of higher means. This did cause adoption to become associated with the rich, famous and influential.

Some notable people who used Georgia Tann’s adoption services include actress Joan Crawford, she received her twin daughters Cathy and Cynthia from Georgia Tann, her other children Christina and Christopher, who you may remember from Mommie Dearest, came to her from a different agency.  Actress June Allyson and her husband actor Dick Powell also adopted from Georgia and professional wrestler Ric Flair was actually one of the children stolen by Georgia and adopted out of her agency.

On December 13, 1989, the television show Unsolved Mysteries covered this story on their show.  You may think, what was unsolved, the bad people were all dead by this point.  But the show was focused on the aftermath of this situation and attempting to reunite the proper babies to their original birth families.  Cindy Lu Presto was featured on the show.  Cindy had been told that she was adopted from Memphis.  She asked her adoptive family many questions, but she was never provided any answers.  After her mother had passed away and Cindy was going through her things and packing them away, she found a correspondence from the Tennessee Children’s Home.  She used this as a catalyst and began searching for her birth family.  It took her two years of searching to find out her birth name.  Just two hours later she found her birth mother, Evelyn Bridgewater.  The two were soon reunited and Cindy was given the details of when she was separated from her family.  It was 1947 and Cindy was just two years old.  Her birth name had been Sandra Lee Bridgewater.  On the day Cindy had been separated from her family, she was playing out on a playground when a black limousine pulled up.  Out came Georgia Tann and she asked the little girl if she wanted to go for a car ride, and the excited little two-year-old said yes.  Cindy ran up to Georgia and her big fancy car, Georgia picked the girl up, put her in the car and just drove away.  Cindy, along with several other children were then taken to juvenile court and brought before Judge Camille Kelley.  The court called the girl’s mother, who was in complete shock, she did not even know that her daughter had been kidnapped yet.  The court asked her to sign papers to make Cindy eligible for adoption and Evelyn rightly refused, she had no intentions of giving up her baby girl, but Judge Kelley simply overruled the mother and Cindy was taken away.  Simple as that.  And get this Judge Kelley was such a well-respected citizen of Memphis, that in 1948, a national poll selected her as one of the six most wholesome women in the world, along with Queen Elizabeth.

Several of those who were victimized by the Tennessee Children's Home Society are still searching for missing loved ones:

·         Ginny Bond is looking for her brother. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee on February 17, 1939 and was originally given the name Mary Nell Long. Her brother's last name was either Hickman or Long. He was born in July 1936 and was put up for adoption in April 1939.

·         David Goldberg is looking for his mother. He was born on April 28, 1944. At the time, his mother was twenty-three and living in Cleveland, Mississippi. She had a brother and five sisters.

·         Alma Jo Davis is looking for her son, Billy Joe Woodbury, who was born in Memphis on January 25, 1945. Three days after his birth, he was sent to the Tennessee Children's Home Society. She never saw him again.

On December 19, 1989, thanks to the Unsolved Mysteries broadcast, Nancy Turner was able to locate her fifty-year-old sister, Evelyn Routh, who now lives in Winnemucca, Nevada.
 Alma Sipple saw the broadcast and, asked for help in locating her daughter Irma. Irma had been taken by Georgia Tann in 1946 after she took her to a hospital and she was never returned. Alma was then put in touch with Tennessee's Right to Know. Seven months later, Irma, now Sandra Kimbrell, was found living in Cincinnati. Soon after, she and Alma were joyfully reunited.

My hope for the victims of Georgia Tann, is that they all find whomever it is they are looking for, and that families who were torn asunder are reunited and get to live out the remainder of their lives as happy as they can possibly be.  I’m John Dodson, thank you for listening to The Secret Sits.  Audio Eng. by Gabriel Dodson.  Podcast Logo artwork provided by Tony Ley.