Of all the things that could be stolen in the world, children are probably the worst. Losing a child in such an incredible way would surely frighten any parent or caregiver, even if the child never knows that the people they think are parents aren’t always like that. This was the incredibly dark crime Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society committed for 26 years before they were finally caught.
From 1924 to 1950, Georgia Tann used the front ofThe Tennessee Children’s Home Society is an adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee that steals and sells an estimated 5,000 children. The children sold were often white with blond hair and blue eyes. She chose her victim pool from poor families who she believed would not notice their missing children and lacked the resources needed to search for them.
Who is Georgia Tann?
Georgia Tann was born Beulah GeorgiaTann on July 18, 1891. She grew up in a tiny town called Hickory and later ran a child trafficking ring in Tennessee. Records written about her describe her as ambitious and state that she identified as a lesbian, which made life extremely difficult for her in her youth. Some people who have studied her grim life have theorized that it was her inability to fit in and settle down with her own family that drove her into a grudge and a horrible kind of life in which she lived the took other people’s babies.
She can rightly be considered a criminal mastermind, but Georgia had plenty of help, including from a crooked judge and the state’s mayor, who was the most powerful politician of the time. It has also been alleged that she is a pedophile who would sometimes molest the young children she stole before being put up for sale. For 26 years she had gotten away with her crimes, and while the device was in operation, she died before she could face the verdicts for her crimes.
your crimes
Pressure, threats of legal action, and every other method available to Georgia Tann to carry out her sinister plans to take children away from their biological parents. She also took children from inmates of Tennessee’s mental institutions, as well as from inmates born into the state’s protection. Where these sources were insufficient, she kidnapped the children from the schools while posing as a social worker. Another source of children for her were single mothers, whom she would take away claiming they needed urgent medical attention, but then she would go back to the mothers claiming that their children had died.
Where the adoptive families were actually candid and discovered inconsistencies in the information about the child they were adopting, she would threaten them with legal action that would result in their children being taken from them, claiming they were unfit parents. Georgia Tann’s rates were consistently high, but she made her money from interstate adoptions, which required adopting parents to pay up to $5,000 for a child.
Another accomplice was Mayor EH Crump, who ensured that complaints received by the police were ignored. With the authority of the mayor, she sometimes got the help of the police to snatch the children from their parents.
To add insult to injury to Georgia Tann’s crimes, children also died under her care. It is estimated that nearly 500 children died while the Tennessee Children’s Home Society was still in operation. The children mostly died as a result of poor care, but there have been cases of alleged abuse. Just before 1923, Tann bought a lot at historic Elmwood Cemetery (Memphis, Tennessee). About nineteen of the children who died under her crime ring were buried there without headstones. She only accepted the children by their first names. The cemetery in 2015 raised $13,000 to create a memorial for the nineteen children and all other children who died as part of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.
The end of the road for Georgia Tann
The end of the road for the Tennessee Children’s Home Society came when Gordon Browning was elected mayor in place of EH Crump. He launched an investigation into Georgia Tann’s operations and all indications were that she was facing charges. However, Georgia Tann died of cancer a few days later. Two months after her death, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society closed.
The entire scandal led to the passage of reform legislation in Tennessee in 1951, which is often seen as the only positive result of such a horrible time caused by a horrible woman and her crooked friends.