Baby Broker | 7. Gotcha Day

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Speaker 3 The way an out-of-state adoption works, at least in Michigan, is that the final paperwork goes to the desk of an official in the county where the baby was born, and it can take about three months for it to be approved.

Speaker 3 The final paperwork for Mae Granath, the baby girl Tammy and Nick adopted from Sarah, was just days, maybe hours from being stamped when Tara Lee was arrested and indicted on 18 counts of wire fraud.

Speaker 3 And just like that, Mae's adoption was flagged as possibly illegal.

Speaker 3 Talia Getting, their lawyer, had to call them and tell them the bad news.

Speaker 3 It was almost like telling someone who thought they'd beaten a serious illness that, no, actually, someone had misread the test results.

Speaker 4 I was sitting at the second chair of my island and she said to me, I have to tell you that you and a few other families may not be able to keep your babies.

Speaker 4 And I went into a straight panic attack. You're not taking my daughter back.

Speaker 3 Tammy fell apart.

Speaker 4 It was the worst call I've ever had in my entire life.

Speaker 3 In a few months, a judge in Michigan would decide if May's adoption was legal or if Tammy and Nick would have to give her back.

Speaker 3 The central concern was if Tara Lee had coerced Sarah into giving up her baby.

Speaker 3 May was almost four months old. Every night as they put her to bed, Tammy and Nick worried that their days with their daughter were numbered.

Speaker 4 And I just went through the motions and I didn't want to bond with her.

Speaker 4 I was so scared.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, doctors had been monitoring Mae for a potential problem with her spine.

Speaker 3 When Mae turned six months old, The Granis took her to the hospital for an MRI to determine if she needed surgery.

Speaker 3 Tammy and Nick watched as Mae, lying on a gurney, dressed in a tiny purple hospital gown and hooked to an IV, was wheeled down the hallway and into the room.

Speaker 4 My phone rings, and it's Maria, Sarah's lawyer who represents her. And she says, Are you sitting down?

Speaker 4 And without even taking a breath, she says, Sarah wants May back.

Speaker 3 From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Baby Broker. I'm Peter McDonnell.
Episode 7, Gotcha Day.

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Speaker 3 When Tammy heard that May's birth mother wanted her back, she broke down in tears in the hospital hallway.

Speaker 3 Nurses ran to her, thinking she was upset about her infant daughter being sedated, but it was much worse than that.

Speaker 3 They got off the phone with the lawyer and called Sarah.

Speaker 3 I say to Sarah, you know, what in the world do you want May back? We'll protect her. We'll do everything that we're meant to do as parents.
There was silence on the other end.

Speaker 3 The hearing to decide if May's adoption was legal was the very next day.

Speaker 3 But then Sarah said it was all just a misunderstanding. She wasn't really going to try to take May back.
She'd lashed out because she was so angry.

Speaker 3 Angry that Terra Lee took advantage of her, that her adoption experience had been so messed up.

Speaker 4 She said, Tammy, I love you guys. I want you to be her parents.
She's in the right place. I know that from my bottom of my heart.
Like, do not worry about this.

Speaker 3 Minutes later, May was wheeled out. She was fine.
She didn't need surgery.

Speaker 3 The next day, March 14th, Tammy and Nick had their day in court.

Speaker 3 The Michigan judge allowed them to appear on Zoom. Talia Getting and Tanya Corrado were there, and of course, the birth mother, Sarah.

Speaker 4 We were told not to get our hopes up and we were also told, do not think that your adoption is going going to go through today.

Speaker 3 Tammy and Nick gave me a transcript of the hearing and I discovered some things I didn't know.

Speaker 3 The judge asked Sarah how many expenses Tara Lee had covered for her from the $8,000 the Granits had provided. Under oath, Sarah said less than a quarter.

Speaker 3 After the birth, she'd asked Tara Lee for counseling sessions and Tara blocked her messages. left her high and dry.

Speaker 3 And during Sarah's pregnancy, the Granits had asked Tara Lee numerous times for a copy of her license to perform adoptions in Michigan, which of course she didn't have.

Speaker 3 She kept forgetting to give it to them. They hadn't mentioned that to me.

Speaker 3 Toward the end of the hearing, the judge asked Sarah if she'd been coerced. She said

Speaker 3 no.

Speaker 3 The only good thing that came out of Tara was Tammy and Nick, meeting them, and my daughter having a loving, caring family. The judge said, I'm going to confirm this adoption.

Speaker 3 Tammy and Nick signed off, hugged their daughter, and wept.

Speaker 4 March 14th, 2019, and to this day we celebrate her gotcha day.

Speaker 3 Gotcha day. In the Graneth household, it's a major holiday.
A party with balloons and cake.

Speaker 3 Tara Lee was a conspicuous no-show for the Granathis adoption hearing. She'd avoided jail by paying a $10,000 bond.

Speaker 3 But to remain free, she had to follow certain rules. Chief among them, avoid using cell phones, an important restriction for someone charged with wire fraud.

Speaker 3 But she broke the rule, and the person who caught her was investigative reporter Heather Catallo.

Speaker 8 Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to issue an arrest warrant for Tara Lee after seeing one of our recent stories, and now Lee could be locked up because of our video.

Speaker 3 The video showed Tara Lee sitting in her SUV in a parking lot, texting on a cell phone.

Speaker 3 Two days later, she was back in court.

Speaker 9 Good afternoon, Your Honor. Sarah Woodward, on behalf of the United States.
Thank you. Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Stanford Schoolman, appearing on behalf of Tara Lee.

Speaker 9 I think she stepped into the bathroom. She is here now.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 9 Thank you. Will the defendant state her name to the court, please? Tara Lynn Lee.

Speaker 3 Sarah Woodward reminded the judge that Tara Lee had already violated the conditions of her bond twice.

Speaker 3 She'd tampered with witnesses, called victims, and tried to twist the arm of a former client to write her a letter of support in exchange for a partial refund for a failed adoption.

Speaker 9 And that was on Friday. On Monday, Channel 7 News recorded the defendant using a cell phone in a car.

Speaker 3 The magistrate judge, Mona Mazjob, was exasperated.

Speaker 9 She clearly can't help herself.

Speaker 9 And the two, almost two months that she has been on bond, her behavior has been egregious. I'm going to grant the government's motion to revoke.
She's remanded.

Speaker 3 Tara Lee was taken to jail. She changed out of her luxury apparel and into a plain set of prison duds.

Speaker 3 Behind the scenes, the FBI was still investigating her. In July, they arrested a co-conspirator, Angelica Wiggins.

Speaker 3 Wiggins was a young woman Lee had roped into impersonating birth mothers in phone calls with adoptive parents.

Speaker 3 Sarah Woodward told me that they would have arrested her earlier, but they thought she was pregnant. But Wiggins' pregnancy was a hoax.

Speaker 3 She was indicted on three counts of wire fraud, and Tara Lee on six more, bringing her total to 24 counts.

Speaker 3 Here's Sarah Woodward.

Speaker 10 Probably every case that goes to trial here, most cases, we will have engaged in plea negotiations and we will send over a plea agreement.

Speaker 10 Because trial is inherently risky, you never know what 12 people are going to do. You never know if you're going to have a holdout, even when you think your evidence is incredibly strong.

Speaker 3 What's typical in a white-collar crime case with wire fraud?

Speaker 10 When we calculate wire fraud sentences under our sentencing guidelines, the most important factor is going to be the loss amount. We had one recently in our district that's some $40 million.

Speaker 3 FBI agent Matt Sluss, who has a background in accounting, determined the amount of money Terra Lee made from adoptions from 2016 through 2018 was more than $2 million.

Speaker 3 Many of those adoptions were fraudulent, but Woodward felt she could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that about half a million came through wire fraud.

Speaker 10 Now, she got enhancements on top of that because there were victims that suffered significant financial harm. She also obstructed justice.

Speaker 3 And it wasn't the first time Tera Lee had committed a crime. In 2005, she wrote over $22,000 in bad checks, including to two jewelry stores, and was arrested.

Speaker 3 She also tried to buy a snowmobile with a bad check.

Speaker 10 So when I was drafting that plea agreement, I was honestly trying to see how high I could get the guidelines while being stuck with that relatively low loss amount.

Speaker 3 Woodward sent the plea agreement to Tera Lee's defense attorney. It required Tera Lee to plead guilty to two charges of wire fraud and acknowledge the evidence against her and the other charges.

Speaker 3 Tera Lee accepted the deal. The next step would be sentencing.
And that's where this white-collar crime prosecution came with a twist.

Speaker 3 As Agent Matt Sless told me,

Speaker 3 This was not just a, I'm stealing your money case.

Speaker 3 Often in a fraud case, pain is only inflicted by, oh, I've lost my life savings. In this case, it was that, plus,

Speaker 3 I thought I was going to be able to adopt a baby, or now I've been coerced out of my baby.

Speaker 3 Sarah Woodward wanted to give the families and birth parents who were victims of Terra Lee's scam an opportunity to face her in court. And if they wanted, give what's called a victim impact statement.

Speaker 3 The judge, Bernard Friedman, scheduled Terra Lee's sentencing for the end of February 2020.

Speaker 3 Families, including Teresa and Mike Matheny, Nick Granath, Courtney Edmond, and dozens of others, traveled back to Detroit.

Speaker 3 The night before sentencing, a snowstorm descended. Schools throughout the city were closed, but the court stayed open.

Speaker 3 The next morning, Adam Bells Thomas got in his truck and drove through it to the federal courthouse downtown. His husband Kyle was with him.

Speaker 3 The defense was going to present the letter Adam wrote in support of Tara Lee as a reason for her to receive a light sentence. But that letter wasn't what Adam believed anymore.

Speaker 3 And Woodward wanted the court to know it. She'd asked Adam to speak first.

Speaker 3 When Adam and Kyle arrived at the courthouse, Woodward directed them into a separate building where dozens of couples and birth parents were waiting.

Speaker 3 We met Courtney, Julie, Teresa, all of them that day. Matt was there.

Speaker 3 Matt is FBI agent Matt Sluss. Tammy Graneth stayed home with her daughter May, but Nick was there.
Teresa and Mike had met Courtney the night before when they picked her up. from the airport.

Speaker 5 What's the mood in this room when you all meet for the first time? It was intense.

Speaker 3 A lot of people are on edge because again,

Speaker 3 none of us have talked to her or had any communication and this is all the first time we're going to see her.

Speaker 11 You could feel the tension.

Speaker 3 When it was time, Sarah Woodward led them outside.

Speaker 3 Here's Teresa Matheni.

Speaker 12 It's snowing.

Speaker 4 It's freezing.

Speaker 12 We walked in with all of the victims through the front door of the courthouse. In a line, we were all together.

Speaker 3 And we all sat in the juror's box. We crammed in there and they had a couple people still sitting outside of it, but there we filled that juror's box.

Speaker 3 And then they brought in Tara Lee.

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Speaker 9 Court now calls case number 19-30015, United States of America versus Tara Lynn.

Speaker 3 I could look straight at her the entire hearing because she needed to know. You messed be with my family, and that's not okay.

Speaker 3 After opening statements, Adam stepped out of the jury box and stood in front of Tara Lee.

Speaker 11 I'm standing here because I was one of those adoptive parents that wrote a letter of character for Tara Lee. Kyle and I considered getting a divorce because of all of this.

Speaker 11 There were nights we'd go to bed not talking to each other. I almost lost my family because of the lies that this woman wedged between me and my husband.

Speaker 13 I'm Courtney Edmond, and I've had two fails with Tara Lee.

Speaker 13 A failed adoption to me was holding a baby to lose them only hours later. To others in the group, failed adoption meant that their baby was deceased at birth.

Speaker 13 Others were matched with mothers that were never expecting. Others were matched with mothers that never even existed.

Speaker 3 Basically, drove from Atlanta to Michigan, not knowing whether our adoption was real, whether our birth mom was real.

Speaker 3 The manipulation damaged our relationship with our daughter's birth mother for Tara Lee's financial benefit. It made us feel mistrust and used and unsafe.

Speaker 13 Tara, you have managed to steal the purity and the gift of what adoption truly means and is.

Speaker 14 We trusted you to do the right thing by a woman who was making the hardest decision that would forever change her life. You promised us you were helping them, but you weren't.

Speaker 3 You lied.

Speaker 3 Somebody asked me yesterday what I would say to you if you were in front of me. And the only thing I kept coming back to was what if it was one of your children?

Speaker 3 What if it was your daughter that was pregnant or your daughter that couldn't have children who was trying to adopt and somebody came in, a predator and preyed on them?

Speaker 14 You treated our birth parents and their son like they were nothing, like they were scum.

Speaker 3 Tara,

Speaker 3 you did all of this. You are a criminal.

Speaker 11 You did this to me and you did this even more to my husband. You've done it to my family and people all over the place.
And I hate that this is going to be a chapter in my life forever.

Speaker 11 So please take this letter and replace it with the first one I wrote.

Speaker 3 Ask anyone who was at Terra Lee's sentencing that day, and there's one moment they will all remember. One of the victims, Amber Morey, spoke about her failed match with a birth mother named Stacey.

Speaker 3 Amber had flown from Arizona to Michigan. for the birth of Stacey's baby.
Except Stacy never showed up at the hospital. Terra Lee Lee couldn't find her.
She disappeared. The baby was gone.

Speaker 3 Years had passed, but Amber couldn't let it go. She still had the crib, still had the toys.
In court, she looked at Tera Lee and asked the question that haunted her. Did Stacy even exist?

Speaker 3 Tera Lee said, in my heart, she did.

Speaker 3 Teresa told me she cried a lot in court that day.

Speaker 3 But all the emotion was building to one moment, Terra Lee's sentence. There are no federal laws governing adoption.
Maybe there should be, because all the court had to work with were wire fraud laws.

Speaker 3 When Sarah Woodward got up to speak, she told the court that Tera Lee's fraud was so unimaginable, there were simply no laws to account for it.

Speaker 10 I think the harm here is about as egregious as we can imagine in a financial case. And so I think those guidelines are inadequate.
This is not a perfect system.

Speaker 10 But what we can do here today is we can also send an unequivocal message that what Tara Lee did was not right and it will not be tolerated.

Speaker 3 The last person to address the court was Tara Lee. Her mother, husband, and children watched from the gallery.
Tara Lee cried as she spoke and acknowledged what she'd done.

Speaker 3 She said, because of me, People's dreams of becoming parents were crushed. She said she'd spent the last 18 months in jail trying to make sense of where she went wrong.

Speaker 3 What she didn't say is that she spent the time thinking about the people she'd harmed, the families whose dreams she'd crushed. Instead, she confessed to having a shopping addiction.

Speaker 3 I shopped to fill a void, she said. I shopped to deal with all of the phone calls and all the texts and all the pressure coming from all sides.

Speaker 3 I asked Sarah Woodward if she thought Terra Lee's statement was heartfelt. She said, no.

Speaker 3 Those were crocodile tears. She called it a performance.

Speaker 3 I read what Tera Lee said that day, and her words are almost all about herself. How she felt, how she had gone astray, how she'd lost her family, her consequences.

Speaker 3 Judge Friedman seized on this immediately. He said, I listened to you with remorse, but everything was about you.

Speaker 3 Then he said of this case, you knew what you were doing exactly, and you picked your victims, and you preyed upon their vulnerability.

Speaker 3 Judge Friedman called it the worst case he'd ever seen. He compared it with a recent case where he'd given someone life in prison and said, I wish I could flip you.

Speaker 3 with the other person because you deserve life.

Speaker 3 He gave Terra Lee the maximum sentence allowed, 10 years and one month.

Speaker 3 And she'd have to pay more than $1 million in restitution to the families.

Speaker 3 When sentencing was over, night had fallen. The blizzard had stopped.
It was bitterly cold. There were no cameras allowed in the courtroom.
So Heather Catallo rushed outside in gloves and a coat.

Speaker 3 to go live with the WXYZ Channel 7 newsroom.

Speaker 8 This was just an extraordinary sentencing hearing here at federal district court. I've never seen anything like it.

Speaker 8 The judge called her disgusting and said if he could sentence her to life in prison, he would. Tara Lee said she was sorry.

Speaker 8 She made a very tearful plea for Judge Bernard Friedman to show her mercy, but he had the exact opposite of mercy for Lee, calling her evil, saying her crimes will have generational impact.

Speaker 3 Mike and Teresa stood on the sidewalk in the bitter cold, looking around for a blonde-haired guy from Chicago, Nick Graneth. But Nick had gone out the back door, looking for Mike.

Speaker 3 Hours earlier, in the middle of the sentencing hearing, Nick had realized who the Mathenis were.

Speaker 3 During a recess, he rushed out and found them in the hallway. It was just this, like, holy shit moment.
Oh my gosh, this is Nick. This is, this is the family.

Speaker 3 They stood in the middle of the hallway, speechless. Nick was choked up, trying to ask any one of a million questions about Stephanie, about her baby boy, before the courtroom doors closed again.

Speaker 3 When sentencing was over, it was crowded and they couldn't find each other. Nick drove home to Chicago in the snow to tell Tammy he'd met the couple who'd adopted Stephanie's baby.

Speaker 3 Teresa and Mike flew back to Atlanta hunting for Nick's phone number. The next day, they called one another and spent hours on the phone.
filling in all the holes on everything that had happened.

Speaker 3 Then, eventually, the Granaths, with May, flew to Atlanta to meet the Mathenis in person.

Speaker 12 Then they got to meet S for the first time. And it was amazing.
I know that it was scary, I think, for all of us because of this connection that we had had.

Speaker 4 And I call him Baby Boy because, like, obviously we had our name picked. But it was just so cathartic to know that

Speaker 4 Baby Boy was saved and he's with amazing parents.

Speaker 3 And so I think by connecting and meeting us and seeing how S was thriving, right, it also gave them that answer of like, okay, we did the right thing for us and he's where he's supposed to be.

Speaker 3 As the snow melted in Detroit, the pandemic took hold. Everything was canceled, people strapped on masks and video calls replaced seeing each other in person.

Speaker 3 The case had done long-lasting harm to everyone involved. But for a lot of the families reeling from Terra Lee's fraud, 2020 and the years after were also about renewal.

Speaker 3 Courtney went home to her family and a newly adopted baby. Adam and Kyle began working with another agency and successfully adopted a second child.
So did the Mathenis. So did the Granaths.

Speaker 3 And Julie Falkenberry got pregnant and had a girl.

Speaker 3 As Tammy and Nick's daughter Mae grew into a toddler, They kept in close touch with her birth mother, Sarah. They shared videos, photos, and phone calls.
They visited.

Speaker 3 They wanted Mae to grow up knowing her birth mother. They embraced that there's no one definition of family.

Speaker 3 But in the fall of 2023, Sarah's mom called Tammy and told her that Sarah had been hospitalized and was on life support.

Speaker 3 We got there as fast as we possibly could when we heard it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and we were there when she passed away.

Speaker 4 We were able to go to Detroit and we were able to say goodbye.

Speaker 4 And it was one of the hardest things I think we've ever done. But it was very important to me

Speaker 4 to be able to tell her thank you for making me a mom.

Speaker 3 Tammy told me she can't stop herself from thinking that if Tara Lee had acted in good faith through the adoption process, it might have saved Sarah's life.

Speaker 4 About a week before Sarah died, she sent a voice memo to May.

Speaker 15 But Sarah, I just wanted to say good morning and I hope you have a great day.

Speaker 4 We had a teddy bear made

Speaker 4 that, you know, she can click the paw and at any time she can hear Sarah's voice saying, good morning, I hope you have a great day.

Speaker 3 She cherishes that bear.

Speaker 4 I've noticed when May is happy or sad or, you know, having a moment, we can hear her click that bear and we can hear Sarah's voice go off in the other room.

Speaker 15 But Sarah, I just wanted to say good morning and I hope you have a great day.

Speaker 3 I spent almost a year investigating this story. And about halfway into my reporting, I felt I knew enough to reach out to Tara Lee.
I wanted to talk with her.

Speaker 16 LCI Edison, this is probably moving to a staffer inmate.

Speaker 16 Hey,

Speaker 16 I'm a reporter working on a story about one of your inmates. I called a few minutes ago and was transferred, and I got a voicemail, so I didn't leave a message, but maybe I should.

Speaker 16 Yes, sir.

Speaker 16 Can you verify her name personally?

Speaker 3 Yes. Tara Lee was incarcerated in Federal Correctional Institution.

Speaker 3 A women's prison in Alabama.

Speaker 3 I made calls,

Speaker 3 I wrote letters, but she turned me down.

Speaker 3 I'd hoped she wouldn't. I'd hoped that in the nearly five years since her sentencing, she'd had time to reflect on how much pain she'd caused.
But maybe that's just how it works in the movies.

Speaker 3 I'm not really surprised she declined, and neither are some of her former clients, like Courtney.

Speaker 3 Do you think she's capable of remorse?

Speaker 13 No,

Speaker 13 I truly believe to this day she still blames us. I think that she sits in jail every day.
And every night before she goes to bed, she's like, I can't believe this happened to me.

Speaker 13 Look at what they did to me.

Speaker 3 I keep circling back to the question of why Terra Lee did it.

Speaker 3 It caused people so much emotional pain, exploited people's desire to start a family, and took advantage of women making one of the hardest decisions of their lives.

Speaker 3 And this was not a crime of passion. It took an incredible amount of time, focus, deceit, and a staggering absence of empathy.

Speaker 3 Hunting for the right word to describe what Terale had done, Judge Friedman called her evil.

Speaker 3 A few days after this podcast releases, the Bureau of Prisons will transfer Tera Lee to a residential reentry center in Detroit.

Speaker 3 Due to credits she earned in prison, she'll be released in October of 2026, about three years early.

Speaker 3 And she's appealed for an even earlier release for medical reasons. She says she's pre-diabetic, takes medication for high blood pressure, and has an injured ankle.

Speaker 3 She attached medical records to back it up.

Speaker 3 Her latest appeal reminded me of her unsubstantiated claim to the Methenis that she had a concussion, to Courtney, that she had breast cancer, and to others that she'd had a heart attack.

Speaker 3 None of those past ailments appear in the medical history in her appeal, by the way.

Speaker 3 Reading her most recent appeal, I realized something simple and profound about Tara Lee.

Speaker 3 That she sees herself as the victim. A victim of too many texts to answer.

Speaker 3 Of a shopping addiction, of birth mothers not obeying her, of adoptive parents breaking her rules, of being compelled to lie and cheat and steal, of being taken away from her family and sent to prison, a victim of her own bad decisions.

Speaker 3 I don't know where that sense of victimhood comes from, but I believe it's at the root of her character and her crimes.

Speaker 3 I wonder if Terra Lee ever truly saw the women she was trying to help. Women who had so much less, who needed a ride to their doctor's appointments.

Speaker 3 who needed somewhere to live, who needed a bed, a refrigerator, and heat.

Speaker 3 Women like Stephanie and Sarah, who gave the Mathenis, the Granaths, the Bells-Thomases, and others what they wanted most in life-a baby-and got almost nothing in return.

Speaker 3 The irony in Terra Lee's fraud was that so many of the people she harmed persevered and are now raising families. And the family she destroyed most was her own.

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Speaker 3 Baby Broker is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. It was hosted and reported by me, Peter McDonald.
I'm the executive producer along with Catherine St.

Speaker 3 Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. of Sony Music Entertainment.
Stephen George recorded the narration at the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.

Speaker 3 We used music from Audio Network and a few tracks from Epidemic Sound.

Speaker 3 News clips are courtesy of WXYZ7 in Detroit, Michigan. Our production managers are Tamika Balance-Kalasny and Sammy Allison.
Our lawyers are Allison Sherry and Kathleen Farley.

Speaker 3 Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasick, and Jamie Myers.

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