The Baby Thief

How Georgia Tann turned the public adoption industry into a for-profit kidnapping scheme.

In December of 1990, Ms. Alma Sipple was scanning the TV dial and just so happened on NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries.” She sat forward on her chair, as Robert Stack told the story of an infamous Tennessee social worker who’d made a fortune running a black-market baby adoption ring for over 3 decades. A woman who Alma recognized immediately. A face she could never ever forget… not only because of the rimless glasses, or the air of authority, but because this woman named Georgia Tann was the one who stole and sold her baby girl.

Back in 1946, Alma and her two children settled into an oil-heated one-room apartment, where she shared a pullout sofa with her toddler son and a baby girl, Irma, a sweet dimpled child with reddish-blonde hair, sleeping nearby in her crib. Only a few weeks later, a woman from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society came to the apartment building, claiming that she was investigating an alleged child-abuse case involving a neighbor. The woman, who came in a black limousine, asked if there was a husband around and laid eyes on baby Irma, immediately honing in her runny nose. “Your baby’s sick, isn’t she? You should get her a checkup.” But Alma explained that she had no money for a doctor, so the woman, who identified herself as…