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. Binge all episodes of Baby Broker, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment & Perfect Cadence production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to Teresa and Mike Matheny's adoption?
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. When I met the Granaths at a recording studio near their home in Chicago last fall, Tammy told me she'd been thinking about adopting for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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 going to, you're going to match quicker. And also, if you go for an African-American child, it is less money.
And that really bothered us.
We also asked the average wait list 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.
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Chapter 2: Who is Tara Lee and what role does she play?
Stephanie was begging them to take her baby.
I knew it had to be you. This was God telling her that it was us.
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.
She said, you'll be in the hospital at the same time.
did she really think they'd consider adopting a third baby?
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Chapter 3: What are the financial implications of adoption?
And we're just staring at each other like, there's no way this is real.
And you feel like she's trying to get you to give an answer right there in the driveway.
Right, exactly. She was. Oh, absolutely.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Baby Broker. I'm Peter McDonald. Episode 2, Three Babies. 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. 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 Granaths could think about was Sabrina.
And then Tammy does interject like, what about Sabrina? And she wants to forget Sabrina. Forget like blatantly, straight out, forget about Sabrina.
The Graniths 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 Graniths had been matched with her for five months. It was a closed adoption, which meant Sabrina's identity was confidential. The Graniths had never seen a picture of her, didn't know her last name, and would never have any communication with her.
I asked the Graniths to take me back to when they first heard Sabrina's story, months before Tara Lee's surprise phone call in August.
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Chapter 4: How did the Granaths become matched with a third baby?
But Tara Lee said Sabrina was still weighing her options.
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.
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.
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. Like of all the things. Yeah, so of all the things.
Chapter 5: What was Sabrina's story and how did it affect the Granaths?
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
You're going to answer tough questions. You're going to have these weird scenarios that you completely don't conceive of.
And I remember being like, no, we could totally do this.
We were like, okay, we're in.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did the Granaths face during their adoption journey?
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.
And I'm like, okay, 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.
Because it was a closed adoption, the Graniths weren't supposed to get any updates about Sabrina. But then they did. Distressing updates that were full of details.
Tara Lee would send very erratic text messages saying, Sabrina's having a horrible day. Sabrina didn't show to her doctor.
Tara Lee made it seem as if that was just how it went with these birth moms she worked with in Detroit.
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.
That kind of talk didn't sit well with Tammy and Nick. Sabrina, for one, had been raped, and that wasn't her fault. Although the updates Tara Lee gave them were upsetting, there was one update they really wanted.
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.
Tara Lee sent them an ultrasound image with the word girl. The next day, the Graniths had a gender reveal party and decided to name the baby. Avery.
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Chapter 7: How did Tara Lee manipulate the Granaths' decisions?
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. Tara Lee was coming to Chicago with one of her daughters for the Pride Parade and wanted to meet the Graniths for dinner to give them an update on Sabrina.
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.
But it was getting late. They were supposed to meet at 5, and they'd heard nothing.
And our consultant ended up reaching out to us, and she said, so Tara Lee is not in town.
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 Graniths were pissed. But Tara Lee held a trump card.
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.
Tara Lee said the murdered birth mother, Roshanda, had been matched with a couple and they were devastated. She told the Granth she was paying for Roshanda's funeral herself and was collecting donations if they wanted to contribute. Then Tara Lee gave them a grim update about Sabrina.
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.
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