Baby Broker | 2. Three Babies

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Speaker 2 Before we begin, please be advised that this episode includes discussions of suicide and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 In the previous episode, Teresa and Mike Matheny learned of a secret FBI investigation into Tara Lee and Always Hope.

Speaker 2 They packed their car with everything they needed to take care of a baby and set out from Atlanta to Detroit in a desperate attempt to rescue their adoption. Their heads heads were spinning.

Speaker 2 Did Tara Lee lie to them about Stephanie? Was the baby boy even real?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But there was another couple who wanted their baby, Tammy and Nick Graneth.

Speaker 2 When I met the Graneths at a recording studio near their home in Chicago last fall, Tammy told me she'd been thinking about adopting for a long time.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 It's one thing saying it out loud and it's fine. It's a completely different undertaking when you're actually in it.

Speaker 2 What did you imagine it would be like?

Speaker 4 I have got to be honest,

Speaker 4 it wasn't this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But they rejected that idea after visiting an agency in Chicago.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And they right away just made it very clear, oh, wow, okay. Well, you guys are gonna, you're gonna match quicker.
And also, if you go for an African-American child, it is less money.

Speaker 3 And that really bothered us.

Speaker 4 We also asked the average wait list for most of the families. They were saying creeping up to four to five years.

Speaker 4 And it's because they're waiting for essentially a blonde, blue-eyed baby boy to drop out of the sky. Their specifically Intel is more wealthy.

Speaker 2 So the Granits took another route.

Speaker 2 They run a successful company doing hair and makeup for hundreds of weddings a year. Tammy is the creative visionary.
Nick runs the business side. They work with a lot of wedding planners.

Speaker 2 And they wanted someone like that to help them with their adoption. Someone to connect them with adoption opportunities in different states and guide them along the way.

Speaker 2 So the Graneths hired an adoption consultant and right away she had a lead.

Speaker 3 The first person she told us about was Tara Lee. It's called Always Hope Adoption Agency out of Detroit, Michigan.
She had reassured us there's so many babies coming out of this agency.

Speaker 2 Over the next few months, Tara Lee matched them with two different birth moms. It was like winning the adoption lottery.

Speaker 2 Incredibly, both women were set to deliver in this same hospital at the same time in early September. And Stephanie from the last episode was not one of them.

Speaker 2 Adoptions are expensive, ranging from $10,000 to more than $60,000.

Speaker 2 Terra Lee's cost was in the middle, which was another way she appealed to clients.

Speaker 2 To secure their two adoptions, the Grannets paid her about $20,000. About half would go toward the birth mother's living expenses.
Another $25,000 or so was due at delivery, including legal fees.

Speaker 2 The Grannis had been saving for years and could afford it.

Speaker 2 By late August 2018, the Graniss had babyproofed their house and decorated two nurseries. In just two weeks, they'd pack a car and drive to Detroit for both births.
It was all set.

Speaker 2 But you know what they say about best-laid plans.

Speaker 3 This is where it gets even more wild. And I can never forget it.
It was a Saturday and I had done a wedding. I came home and he was mowing the lawn and Tara Lee calls me.

Speaker 3 Immediately your stomach just drops because you're thinking, oh my gosh, something's going on with my match. And I answer the phone and she said, stop what you're doing.

Speaker 3 And I said, oh, Nick's mowing the lawn. Do you want me to stop him? Yep, stop what you're doing.

Speaker 3 And so I walk over and I could distinctly, I can even tell you like on my driveway where I stood and I signaled to him to stop.

Speaker 3 And I threw speakerphone on and then she's like, okay, Tammy, Nick, meet birth mother, Stephanie.

Speaker 3 And all of a sudden you just hear this voice that goes, hello?

Speaker 3 And you're thinking, what? She has me on the phone with another birth mom?

Speaker 3 Tera Lee starts telling us that she accidentally, and that's the word she used, she accidentally showed our profile to Stephanie.

Speaker 2 The same Stephanie, the Mathinis matched with in the last episode.

Speaker 2 The Granits had been working with Tera Lee for five roller coaster months. Their rose-colored glasses had cleared.
They were ready to be done with her. But they knew.
No Tera Lee, no babies.

Speaker 2 They couldn't believe that Tera Lee would cold call them with an offer of a third baby with the birth mother on the phone. Stephanie was begging them to take her baby.

Speaker 3 I knew it had to be you. This was God telling her that it was us.

Speaker 4 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 Terra Lee.

Speaker 3 She said, you'll be in the hospital at the same time.

Speaker 2 Did she really think they'd consider adopting a third baby?

Speaker 3 And we're just staring at each other like, there's no way this is real.

Speaker 2 And you feel like she's trying to get you to give an answer right there in the driveway.

Speaker 4 Right, exactly. She was.

Speaker 3 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2 From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Baby Broker. I'm Peter McDonnell.
Episode 2.

Speaker 2 Three babies.

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Speaker 2 Tammy and Nick Graneth 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.

Speaker 2 Because one of their two matches was in jeopardy. The faltering match was with a birth mom named Sabrina, who had a harrowing story.

Speaker 2 As Tara Lee was going on and on about Stephanie, all the Graneths could think about was Sabrina.

Speaker 4 And then Tammy does interject, like, what about Sabrina? And she wants to forget Sabrina. Forget, like, blatantly, straight out, forget about Sabrina.

Speaker 2 The Granis could no sooner forget about Sabrina than they could forget how desperately they wanted to be parents. She was etched into their lives.

Speaker 2 She was going to give them a child, and she'd been through hell to get pregnant.

Speaker 2 But in one fell swoop, Terra Lee wanted them to discard her like yesterday's fashion and try on a new birth mom in their life.

Speaker 2 For Terra Lee, it was like babies were interchangeable, like pawns on a chessboard.

Speaker 2 Sabrina was 19 and the Grannetts had been matched with her for five months. It was a closed adoption, which meant Sabrina's identity was confidential.

Speaker 2 The Granaths had never seen a picture of her, didn't know her last name, and would never have any communication with her.

Speaker 2 I asked the Graneths to take me back to when they first heard Sabrina's story, months before Tara Lee's surprise phone call in August.

Speaker 3 So we did on March 30th have a phone call with Tara Lee. And I distinctly remember, and I've now heard that this is kind of her spiel to everybody.

Speaker 3 She was like, I cuss like a trucker. I'm extremely blunt.
I'm not out here for the money. I'm doing this to help young women.
There was nobody in Detroit helping them. I have so many birth moms.

Speaker 3 And basically, she told us the story of Sabrina.

Speaker 3 And Sabrina is a girl who loved makeup, loved doing hair, loved them all. She was Caucasian.
She was blonde with blue eyes.

Speaker 2 So Sabrina, what's her living situation?

Speaker 3 She lived with her parents. They described it as that's their only daughter.
Sabrina was raised in a town, a very little town. And this town had like 4,000 people.
It was very small.

Speaker 3 And she said it was a fishing town.

Speaker 3 And we were told that Birth Mom was receiving daily therapy. We weren't allowed to see her picture, and we couldn't receive any medical updates related to her or her future child.

Speaker 3 When she gives birth, we are to be at the hospital, but they're going to provide a room next door because she doesn't want us to meet her.

Speaker 2 The reason Sabrina wanted a closed adoption is upsetting.

Speaker 3 We were told that she was a victim of gang rape. She had been at this party.
She was just 19, wild, having fun, and this horrible, horrible thing happened to her.

Speaker 3 I remember distinctly the story being so at a trap house. Like stairs were broken.
She couldn't run.

Speaker 3 It was dark.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Four men had committed the crime and they weren't caught and that the identity of the birth father was unknown and her parents right away told her you're going to put the baby up for adoption they did not believe in abortion tammy said she liked sabrina because she could see herself in her like i just pictured this girl who was you know young and just living her life and just got into this horrible circumstance and being that she loved to fish and she loved makeup and she loved shopping and she loved perfume and everything i just pictured her almost as myself like i really connected to her but Terry Lee said Sabrina was still weighing her options.

Speaker 3 It's between you and another family, but Sabrina wants to know, how are you going to tell this child that it was conceived?

Speaker 3 So I said, we're going to be honest.

Speaker 3 We'll have to cross that bridge when we get there as to how honest.

Speaker 3 And she was like, okay, great.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Lucky for Tammy and Nick, though, Terra 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.

Speaker 3 So we were told by Tera Lee that she chose us because in her 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.

Speaker 2 Nick, Tammy, and I were sitting around a table in a basement recording studio in Chicago.

Speaker 2 As their story progressed, Nick kept shaking his head and sighing in exasperation as he remembered how Terra Lee manipulated them.

Speaker 2 Tammy sat very still, but I could sense her churning with emotion.

Speaker 2 I think one reason the Granaths are successful in their business is that they carefully weigh their decisions.

Speaker 2 They try to see where different outcomes will lead. But on the Terra Lee roller coaster to adoption, they couldn't see what was coming.

Speaker 2 They just knew there was a baby at the end of the ride.

Speaker 2 In the wedding business, they were used to working with people who were really good at their specialized jobs. Tera Lee was kind of a mess.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Had the consultant told Tammy and Nick that something about Sabrina's match seemed fishy?

Speaker 2 Had she cautioned them to reconsider? I think they would have turned Terra Lee down.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 You're going to answer tough questions. You're going to have these weird scenarios that you completely don't conceive of.

Speaker 3 And I remember being like, no, we could totally do this.

Speaker 3 We were like, okay we're in yeah they told tara lee yes and then march 31st we were matched tara lee said i want to be very upfront that you're matching with her at three months pregnant and due to the fact that she's in therapy daily your fees are going to be way higher than a normal match

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Much more would be due upon delivery. They had six months to get everything ready.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, okay, I can start buying stuff. I could start getting clothes and doing the nursery.

Speaker 3 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 cold play.

Speaker 3 And so everything was themed after their song yellow. over the crib it said look at the stars look how they shine for you

Speaker 2 because it was a closed adoption the granites weren't supposed to get any updates about sabrina but then they did

Speaker 2 distressing updates that were full of details

Speaker 3 tara lee would send very erratic text messages saying sabrina's having a horrible day

Speaker 2 sabrina didn't show to her doctor right tara lee made it seem as if that was just how it went with these birth moms she worked with in Detroit.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know how these girls are.

Speaker 2 That kind of talk didn't sit well with Tammy and Nick. Sabrina, for one, had been raped, and that wasn't her fault.

Speaker 2 Although the updates Terra Lee gave them were upsetting, there was one update they really wanted.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Tera Lee sent them an ultrasound image with the word, girl.

Speaker 2 The next day, the Granaths had a gender reveal party and decided to name the baby, Avery.

Speaker 3 Avery was always a name that I absolutely loved.

Speaker 2 Naming the baby, revealing her gender, and decorating her nursery were the high points of the match with Sabrina.

Speaker 2 In late June, things took a dark turn.

Speaker 2 Tara Lee was coming to Chicago with one of her daughters for the Pride Parade and wanted to meet the Granaths for dinner. to give them an update on Sabrina.

Speaker 3 It was a Saturday and we just just kept saying, hey, where are we meeting? Where are we meeting?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 But it was getting late. They were supposed to meet at five and they'd heard nothing.

Speaker 3 And our consultant ended up reaching out to us and she said, so Tara Lee is not in town.

Speaker 2 Tera 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 Grannets were pissed. But Tara Lee held a Trump Trump card.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Tera Lee said the murdered birth mother, Roshonda, had been matched with a couple and they were devastated. She told the Granaths she was paying for Roshonda's funeral herself.

Speaker 2 and was collecting donations if they wanted to contribute. Then, Tara Lee gave them a grim update about Sabrina.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I was crying so intensely.

Speaker 3 It was just like a stab in the heart.

Speaker 3 I remember distinctly her saying that no matter what, the baby was going to be special needs.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 Because they have too many questions that we don't have answers to.

Speaker 2 In need of help, they called their adoption consultant.

Speaker 3 Our consultant says to us that we have two different options. She's like, you can back out.
Your other option is that you stay matched.

Speaker 3 Because our concern was we were told that Tera Lee made it clear that if we didn't stay matched, that it was very likely that Sabrina would kill herself and kill the baby.

Speaker 2 Sabrina's life is in your hands. It literally.
And the baby's

Speaker 2 in your hands.

Speaker 3 Literally, yeah. So in that weekend, we made the decision to stay with Tara Lee and always hope and to stay with Sabrina.

Speaker 2 But the match with Sabrina had begun to feel less likely to happen. So because the Granits were open to having two children, Tara Lee tried to match them with a second birth mom.

Speaker 2 And yes, this was all before that startling phone call in the driveway when Tara Lee introduced them to Stephanie, the third birth mother.

Speaker 4 So now at this point, she's actively searching for a second birth mother for us. And then we do, we actually see said birth mother on a video call.
And there she is, flesh and blood.

Speaker 3 She asked us a lot of questions, which I appreciated. She was

Speaker 3 very, you know, open about why she was going to be giving her baby up for adoption. She was having a baby girl.
She has a son. She has a daughter.

Speaker 3 And then she's pregnant with another little girl. And the craziest part was that Sarah was due September 7th of 2018.
I was like, wow, this is a baby girl who's literally due the same week.

Speaker 2 The same week as Sabrina's baby.

Speaker 2 So that was the complicated situation the Granaths were in when Tara Lee called them in August and introduced them to Stephanie. Remember, Tammy told Nick to stop mowing the lawn.

Speaker 2 And then they were both on speakerphone with Tera Lee.

Speaker 4 This phone call is completely bonkers and off the wall.

Speaker 3 She kept telling us, forget about Sabrina's baby. And she says to us, Sabrina's going to raise that baby whether it lives or dies.
And I'll never forget that.

Speaker 3 How did we go from being told we can't unmatch with Sabrina, we can't unmatch with this baby, and then being told forget about her and match to this new mom, Stephanie, and this new baby?

Speaker 2 Like a lot of complicated things, this all started really simply, with their wish to adopt a baby.

Speaker 2 Their first match had been brutal, but they stayed with it. The second match had been comparatively easy.
It was like insurance, securing their dream. But Tammy and Nick wavered for a good reason.

Speaker 4 If we're still matched with Sabrina and the potential child that comes from that, that would have put us with three kids.

Speaker 2 But they couldn't say no, and Terra Lee knew it. The pleading became more intense.
Tera Lee turned up the heat.

Speaker 2 So, Tammy and Nick thought of a way to stall for time, to put the burden back on Terra Lee.

Speaker 2 They said,

Speaker 4 we need to know the gender.

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Speaker 2 Even though Stephanie was due in a few weeks, she said she didn't know the gender of her baby.

Speaker 2 But that wasn't because she wanted to be surprised. It was because she hadn't had an ultrasound.

Speaker 2 An ultrasound would tell them a lot. First, it would give a snapshot of the baby's health.

Speaker 2 Second, it would confirm when Stephanie was probably due, although ultrasounds at a later stage are less accurate. And third, it would reveal the baby's gender.

Speaker 2 So the next day, the Granaths sent Terra Lee money for Stephanie to get her first ultrasound.

Speaker 2 They told Teralee they would strongly consider adopting Stephanie's baby if it was a girl. That might sound harsh, but they were were thinking practically.
They'd been expecting two girls.

Speaker 2 The nurseries were decorated accordingly, and it looked like Sabrina's match was not going to happen.

Speaker 2 A few days later, the Grannetts took a road trip north to visit Tammy's brother and sister in Minneapolis and check out the Minnesota State Fair. It's called the Great Minnesota Get-Together.

Speaker 2 Two million visitors: live bands, farm animals, fireworks, carnival rides, beer, fried everything.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 we're in the alley with like all the trinkets, like the vendor emporium, basically. When Tammy got a text from Terra Lee, it was a video of Stephanie's ultrasound.

Speaker 3 The video has the heartbeats and it has the picture up on the screen of the baby. It's a boy.
It's a baby boy.

Speaker 2 There was a text message too.

Speaker 3 Did you see your baby?

Speaker 3 And I remember just kind of tapping Nick with my phone and handing him the phone. Did you see your baby?

Speaker 3 It didn't feel like we were given a choice.

Speaker 2 More texts followed about Stephanie.

Speaker 3 She's crying. She wanted it to be a girl.
She's so scared you're going to say no.

Speaker 3 It's almost this guilt that you feel immediately, like you have to take this baby.

Speaker 2 The fair was in full swing around them.

Speaker 3 I said no.

Speaker 3 My answer was no. I basically left the decision to him.

Speaker 3 Nick's feeling was,

Speaker 3 let's do it.

Speaker 4 I gotta be honest, Terra Lee prayed on my bleeding heart for this match.

Speaker 3 Most couples wait years. We'd have both at the same time and we're gone we've already bought two of everything

Speaker 2 nick texted back and forth with tara lee they talked on the phone and then he told her yes they'd adopt stephanie's son when i met them in chicago nick showed me their adoption contract for stephanie's baby it was just a handwritten paragraph in pen jotted down at an angle on the back page of their contract for Sarah's baby.

Speaker 4 So this is Sarah's contract that we've already signed for. Then it says per verbal conversation on 827-18, Nick and Tammy agreed to use this signature page to accept contract.

Speaker 2 Nick signed it at the state fair. Then they went shopping.

Speaker 4 We went to buy-buy baby and we bought

Speaker 4 $1,000 on baby boy clothes and it was straight up, no tax.

Speaker 2 Did you pick out a name? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Eticus.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Atticus? Eticus.

Speaker 2 When the Grannis got back home to Chicago, they had just one week before they needed to drive to Detroit for Sarah and Stephanie's births. They had two nurseries ready to go.

Speaker 2 They stashed the baby boy clothes in the one that was originally meant for Sabrina's daughter, Avery.

Speaker 2 But they couldn't forget Sabrina.

Speaker 3 I remember telling people, like, there's this crazy chance that there could be three.

Speaker 3 In the back of your mind, You're like, what if?

Speaker 3 Because you're so attached to Sabrina's child that you're thinking, well, if this baby's born and if this baby lives, how could we not take her home? If, of course, she didn't want a parent.

Speaker 3 Of course we're going to say yes.

Speaker 2 Despite never having met, seen, or heard from Sabrina, they knew her story. They'd taken the pencil outlines of her biography.
and imagined them into vivid, moving images.

Speaker 2 They'd seen an ultrasound of her baby girl, too. Her little body.

Speaker 2 Who would take care of her, love her, they wondered. If it wasn't Sabrina or Sabrina's parents, it would be them.

Speaker 2 If you're wondering why the Granaths hadn't started deeply questioning the veracity of what Terra Lee was telling them, I think it's because they didn't know nearly as much as you do about this story.

Speaker 2 They didn't know anyone else who was adopting from Terra Lee.

Speaker 2 And she was controlling the narrative of their adoptions. Tera Lee was a nimble storyteller, able to generate characters, plot lines, motivations, and details on the spot.

Speaker 2 But she didn't count on the Granith sticking so hard to Sabrina's baby. And that became a problem for Terra Lee.

Speaker 2 Sometimes I noticed, she underestimated how attached her clients would get to the babies she promised them. I think she too often saw the matches coldly.
transactionally.

Speaker 2 When Terra Lee couldn't wrestle Nick and Tammy away from Sabrina and replace her with Stephanie, she reacted by saying something inhumane, but on brand in its brutal directness.

Speaker 2 Sabrina will raise that baby whether it lives or dies.

Speaker 2 So, Nick finished mowing the lawn. Tammy made sure their business was covered for the next month of weddings and events, and the Granaths hit the road for Detroit.

Speaker 2 What they couldn't know is that in a few weeks, the FBI would start secretly investigating Tera Lee for adoption fraud, a case unlike anything they'd seen before.

Speaker 2 It was also going to uncover something very disturbing about what Tera Lee had done to the Granaths.

Speaker 2 One month later, the couple from our first episode, Teresa and Mike Matheny, started their trip to Detroit. They knew the FBI was investigating Always Hope.
But that was all they knew.

Speaker 2 Neither couple knew about the other, but they were both expecting to go home with Stephanie's son.

Speaker 2 When Mike and Teresa were three hours from Detroit, they asked Tara Lee for proof of life.

Speaker 4 So Teresa reaches out to Tara. Teresa just very gently asks her, like, oh, like, is there, you know, an ultrasound? And Tara ends up sending her ultrasound.

Speaker 3 Oh, she, not only does she send me the ultrasound, she follows it up with, yes, the baby is very real.

Speaker 3 So I'm like, oh my gosh, it's real. She has her name on there, her birth mom's name.
is legit.

Speaker 4 And then I

Speaker 3 think I sent a picture to my cousin, and I'm like, oh my God, look.

Speaker 3 She goes, I don't want to alarm you. She said, but if this due date on this ultrasound is correct, she would be 42 weeks.

Speaker 3 And Mike literally said, Surely she wouldn't have us drive across the country if this wasn't real.

Speaker 3 Surely she wouldn't do that.

Speaker 2 Next time on Baby Broker.

Speaker 3 In walks this lady who has jet black hair and is covered in tattoos. She has like her name brand jeans.
She has her nails done.

Speaker 2 Tammy and Nick discovered their money wasn't going where it was supposed to.

Speaker 3 We knew we had given this money.

Speaker 2 And they went looking for Sabrina's baby.

Speaker 4 We're thinking that that baby's here somewhere.

Speaker 3 I knew the lawyers had to come, and so I wrote everything down, every red flag down.

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Speaker 2 Baby Broker is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. It was hosted and reported by me, Peter McDonnell.

Speaker 2 I'm the executive producer, along with Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch of Sony Music Entertainment.
Steve and George recorded the narration at the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.

Speaker 2 We used music from Audio Network and a few tracks from Epidemic Sound.

Speaker 2 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 2 Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasick, and Jamie Myers.

Speaker 1 Nicole Ernest Pate was 21 years old when a predator assaulted her in her own home. He is kind of the boogeyman in the night that you are truly afraid of.
She went straight to the cops.

Speaker 3 She said, this sounds like some sort of movie plot.

Speaker 1 No one believed her until one day, the man who helped put the Golden State killer behind bars helped figure out the serial predator's pattern. This is a serious offender.

Speaker 1 He'd been hiding in plain sight.

Speaker 2 But even when the attacker was unmasked, Nicole still had questions.

Speaker 3 The why, the what, the why, me.

Speaker 7 She wanted to meet him.

Speaker 2 From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Hunting the Boogeyman. Available now on the binge.

Speaker 8 Search for Hunting the Boogeyman wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today.