DOCTOR STEALS & SELLS HUNDREDS OF BABIES | Baking + Story Time📖

Hi friends. Welcome back to another episode of, I'm not really sure what to call this. I thought baking a murder would be clever, you know, instead of making a murder, but not all of my stories are going to be murder stories. And I don't know if I'm always going to be baking like today, for example, this story is not a murder story, but today's story is an unbelievable story. So I'm excited to share it with you. We're also going to be baking two different pumpkin chocolate chip recipes today. So we're going to start with a bread. I'm going to just mix all of this together and then we're going to spend the remainder of the time because I figured this will take me about five seconds to mix this together. I needed something that was going to take me longer. Like last time I had to slice 11 apples and I think I only got through like three of them. So I got like almost 50 cookies that we're going to be frosting for the rest of the time. So we're going to start by making this pumpkin bread and then we will get to frosting. Last time I did this, I was on my knees the entire time. I don't know if you guys could tell, and my legs were in so much pain after, so I'm like, I got to figure something out. I need some kind of chair. It's just that this coffee table is a little too tall for me. Okay. Today's story is about hundreds of stolen babies, mausoleums, and a lot of secrets taken to the grave. It's about hundreds of babies that were sold for cash in one of the US's largest black market baby operations. This story doesn't really have a beginning because there's a lot of people involved. It's not just like one person, obviously, if it's an operation, but the story begins with a woman named Jane Blasio. So she is the person that kind of uncovered this story and this is making the grossest sound. Hold on. Jane Blasio, she grew up in Ohio and she always knew that she was adopted, but she thought there was some weird suspicion around her adoption because just the way her parents acted when she asked questions, she says she also remembers her parents never allowing her to go out front. Like she couldn't play in the front yard in fear that somebody would come back to get her. She always thought that was a little bit weird. What do you mean? Come back to get me? Do you know what I mean? One day Jane was going through her mom's drawers and she found a pillow that had an embroidered date. It was supposed to be her birthday. It said January 15th of 1965, but her birthday was December 6th of 1964. That's weird. So she confronts her mom and her mom says, well, honey, that's when we picked you up. I guess that the January 15th date or something like that. Anyway, her mom gave her a little bit of information, but was still pretty secretive about it. So when Jane was 19, she decided I'm going to find out once and for all where I came from. You know, just those typical questions a lot of kids that are adopted have. All she had to go by was that her dad told her she was passed out the back door of a clinic and on her birth certificate it said Thomas Hicks was her doctor. So that's all that she had to go by when searching. The other weird thing is her adopted mom and dad are on the birth certificate, which that's a little strange. So she drives down to McCaseville, Georgia, and she wants some answers. McCaseville, Georgia is where the Hicks clinic is located. She also said that every time she would ask questions to anybody in the town, it was like chasing a ghost. You could never get a straight answer. Anytime she brought up the Hicks clinic, people were pretty hush hush about it, which again just made her suspicious as she should be. This smells so good by the way. Oh my goodness. I better also let you guys know now before we continue, Thomas Hicks is the name of the doctor and he died long before she even was like discovering any of this information. He died in 1972 from leukemia and I believe he was 83 years old. One day Jane stops into a little shop in McCaseville, Georgia. She's asking the store owner if he knows anything and this is the first time she finally gets an answer. The guy tells her not to ask questions in here and hands her a little note with his address on it and says, come talk to me at my house. I don't want people to know that I'm talking to you. That's a little strange. So she meets up with him and he tells her that when he was a lot younger that he was an ambulance driver and he worked with Thomas Hicks all the time. Like he visited the clinic often. So he is finally giving some information to her. It was known around the town that Thomas Hicks was giving illegal abortions. He would advertise for them under bridges and in telephone booths. I'm assuming he probably would put like flyers or something up around the town and let people know like, Hey, if you want an abortion, just stop in at my clinic. But eventually he stopped performing illegal abortions and he instead was trying to convince the mothers to carry the baby till birth. He would get rid of the baby for them, like put it up for adoption, but he would make sure that it stayed a big secret. Nobody in the town would know that they were carrying a baby, that they had the baby. And so once the baby was born, he would just pass the baby out a back door. And that's really how this whole operation started. So people that were in the town that knew about this, they actually thought Dr. Hicks was doing something amazing. He was helping these women. He was helping other families get babies, but you know, there's always more to the story. And that's really what we are going to be talking about today. I'm also getting a pretty good arm pump because this table is still a little high for me. I just wish you guys could smell this because this is truly divine. So Jane returned to McKaysville several times over the next 14 years and she was still trying to find any information on her personal birth story. Like that's, that's what she wanted to find out was where did I come from and who was my birth family? She still just wanted those answers. So one day she makes a trip down to a courthouse in Georgia and she's looking up birth certificates and she has someone there helping her. She again, just trying to find her information. So this woman is helping her search and when they search for Dr. Hicks clinic with a date range between 1950 and 1960, there were over 200 babies that were placed into Akron, Ohio, like from this clinic. And that's when this case blew wide open. That's when she realized there were hundreds of babies involved and it was no longer just about her. This story made the news. It broke in 1997 and several people from Akron, Ohio checked their birth certificates. They too saw that they came from the Dr. Hicks clinic. And so now you have hundreds of people with questions, hundreds of people wondering where they came from. This is when Jane decided she was going to host some meetings. So she would call for the Hicks babies to come meet every so often and they would share any new details or information that maybe one of them had. But one interesting thing that came from meeting each other is they all discovered almost every single one of them had a really low birth weight between four and five pounds and even some that were three pounds. They also shared that when their parents would describe getting them, they all thought they were so sickly looking like all of them looked really sick and just small and some of them were even worried they wouldn't survive like the car drive home. That's how sick and small these babies looked. So this made Jane wonder if Dr. Hicks was inducing the mothers. She wasn't sure if there was like a demand that he was trying to keep up with. Like maybe there was a huge list of people that wanted these babies. Anyway, there was just more questions arising when these Hicks babies would meet and share any information. Now, unfortunately, because of the timeframe, this was back in the 1950s and the 1960s. So a lot of the birth parents are now deceased as well as a lot of the adoptive parents. So it was just really hard to get any answers because a lot of the people involved again were no longer living, including Dr. Hicks. This just looks and smells delicious. Let's get this in the oven and then we will get to frosting our cookies. Now like I was saying before, most of the parents were now deceased, but there was a woman named Cindy and she was one of the lucky ones that was able to find her birth mother and her birth mother's name was Lita. Now Lita's story actually held up with the rumor that it was babies that were going to be aborted and then Dr. Hicks saved their life and he adopted them out. So Lita said that when she was a teenager, she went to Dr. Hicks clinic for an abortion and he convinced her to have the baby and adopted out and he would just keep it hush hush. Nobody would have to know. And so she also said, I went in for an appointment. I know she still had quite a few weeks before her due date, but that night she went into labor at his clinic. So I'm assuming he did induce her. She had the baby. It was a little girl named Cindy. That's obviously her adoptive parents named her Cindy. Cindy's parents paid a thousand dollars for her from Dr. Hicks. Lita did not know about this transaction that he was selling the babies for a thousand dollars, but she said, I stayed at the clinic for two days and then Dr. Hicks gave me 25 bucks and told me to go buy myself a nice little dress. So it looks like he was raking in the dough, making a thousand dollars per baby. And then these women that were giving birth, I don't know if he paid all of them, but Lita said I got $25. Either way, this is all illegal. Diane was another woman who her adoptive mom was still living. And so they were able to get some answers from her. She was also really helpful with information because Diane's adopted mom was able to meet Dr. Hicks on two separate occasions. Once when they came to pick up Diane and the second time was to pick up the birth certificate. So like I mentioned before, Dr. Hicks would not put the birth mom and dad on the birth certificate, only the adoptive parents. And that's why it was so hard to track anybody down because he really erased all of the documents that you would need in order to find your birth family. So Diane's mom said back then it was really hard to adopt. There was a lot of loopholes, including you had to be debt free, which that's so weird. And so when she heard that there was a doctor in McKaysville that was offering adoptions and all you needed was a thousand dollars cash, she put her name on that list right away. This just made it possible for all of those moms and dads that were desperate for children. It was like they're saving grace. We could just put her name on a list, pay a thousand dollars and we get a baby. Now this is where Sally comes into the picture and Sally might be the person with the most information and that's because she is Dr. Hicks' granddaughter. So her father was Tommy Hicks, which was Thomas Hicks' son. Are you staying with me? Sally was also adopted. When Sally's adopted mother realizes that she cannot have children, this is when Thomas Hicks, the doctor decides, maybe I can convince these women that we're going to abort their babies to just have the baby and then I can adopt them out. So that was the thought process, I guess, of why he transitioned from abortions to adoptions, although both were illegal the way that he did them. He also thought that the first women that gave birth to a baby, he would give to his son and then have a grandchild. In 1952, Dr. Hicks tried to offer his son and daughter-in-law a baby, but Tommy's wife, okay, so the daughter-in-law said no and the reason being is because she said, that baby belongs to your dad. She knew that this baby was Dr. Hicks' illegitimate child. I don't know how she knew that, but anyway, she accused him of that and so they did not take the baby. I guess it was common knowledge back then that Dr. Hicks would have multiple affairs with his different housekeepers and this baby was one of his housekeeper's babies. So I think this is totally separate from the story of like women coming in to give birth. This was something on the side, but anyway, the mother said, no, I'm not taking this baby. Sally also said that growing up, people always commented how she looked exactly like her dad, which she does. It's crazy how much she looks like her dad, but that makes no sense if she's adopted. So she was like, I was always suspicious that I might be my dad's real child. Like he's also my birth dad, but maybe he had an affair with someone and then my mom and dad adopted me. So anyway, Sally was always suspicious of that because of how much she did look like her dad. I think I mentioned mausoleums earlier. Did I mention that? If I did, this is where that comes into play. So it's been said that all of the documents that Dr. Hicks had was buried in this mausoleum. So there's a mausoleum in the cemetery right beside where he's buried. And there's four crypts inside of the mausoleum. In 1997, there was a court order for them to open it up and see if there were documents inside. Well, the cops only opened up the two front doors and they did not touch any of the crypts, which was really weird. Like, why would you not check inside the crypts? Obviously these documents wouldn't be sitting in the front of the crypts. They'd be in the crypts. So this is when Sally decides, I'm going to get a locksmith and I'm going to look in the crypts myself. Because she's family, she can do stuff like that. So she gets a locksmith, they open up the crypts, and three of the four of them are completely empty, but one of them has the search warrant inside of it. Again, that's just a little strange. How did it get inside if no one ever opened the crypts? There's just a lot of weird things going on. Obviously, those documents were probably in there. Who came and took them and then stuck the warrant inside? Just a little weird. This is where Sally decides she wants to know once and for all if she is actually her father's child. So she wants to get his DNA and then all of these other Hicks babies, these babies that were sold out of the clinic, they also want to know if maybe they too are a literal Hicks baby. So she just wants to get the DNA from her dad and she thinks that's the best way that they can do that. So she decides she wants to exhume her dad's body. We're talking about exhuming bodies again. That's weird. That's two for two. Okay. So Sally's dad died 41 years ago. So he has been, you know, in the ground for quite some time. And so when they decide they want to exhume him and get some DNA, they're a little worried that he won't be in the best shape, if you know what I mean. But anyway, they dig him up, they get his DNA. And this is where I guess I was under the false impression that when you need to get DNA from any kind of body, you just swab them. That's not how it works. No, they had to take his femur bone, his big toe, his heel. They're just taking parts of him. So anyway, they get the DNA and they do find that Sally is not her father's child, which that blows my mind. I still, for some reason, can't believe that because she looks so much like her dad. But the DNA did prove that the housekeeper's daughter, who doesn't want to be named, but Sally knows who she is, that was Dr. Hicks' child. So that rumor turned out to be true, that he had some illegitimate children with housekeepers. They were able to prove that with at least one of the children that had his DNA. Now as far as some of the other Hicks babies, this is where a lot of twists and turns start happening. So one of the Hicks babies, Steven, he was known to be the first Hicks baby. He was adopted out into a family that he said treated him horribly. He said he had the worst childhood, he can't even think of a good positive memory, which is just sad. Like that's just so sad to hear. And he spent his entire life searching for his birth family. It's a different story if you are adopted and your adopted family loves you and adores you. But when you're treated like an outcast your entire life, like that's just so sad. Anyway, through DNA, they were able to find his sister. So he was really excited to finally meet someone. He's in his seventies and so he's been searching a very long time. But before he meets his sister, like when the news broke, they told the sister that they found her brother and they want to know if she wants to meet him. And she says, my mother gave birth to identical twin boys at the Hicks clinic and Dr. Hicks told her that they were both stillborn. So she was devastated. The mother was devastated that both of her babies had died and she never wanted to speak about it again. Like she was so sad her entire life. She kept that pretty much a secret, but her daughter was able to say how this really affected their mom. You know, like she had twin boys and they had passed away. So as you can imagine, Steven is devastated to learn this. He had a twin and Dr. Hicks took them and sold them and told the mother that they had died. Like that is just, that's next level. That might hit me different because I do have identical twins. I just can't even imagine. I can't even imagine. I can't imagine doing that not only to the mother, but also the twins, like separating them like that. And he never got to meet his twin. Another woman named Melinda. She was told that she was an illegitimate baby from a prominent person in the town. So she too always believed she might be a Hicks literal baby through DNA. She was able to find, she was the daughter of the mayor at the time. So this just kind of made everything make sense, like how Dr. Hicks got away with what he was doing because everybody was using Dr. Hicks services and so therefore keeping it under wraps. They didn't want people to know what was going on down at the Hicks clinic. They didn't want people to know that they were having babies and adopting them out. And you know, there was no proof tying them back to them personally because he would erase them off the birth certificate. But what they didn't know was DNA was going to come out and all of them would get caught. But I mean, most of them are now gone. So I mean, they did take this to the grave with them. Since I'm talking about Melinda, side note has nothing to do with this story, but she was also in another major headline story where her mother was actually murdered in her home and her husband was charged with the murder. But Melinda was able to prove that it wasn't her husband and she got him released from prison. I mean, this poor woman has been through some things in her life. Anyway, many other families have come forward and said that, you know, I had a family member that gave birth at the Hicks clinic and they were told that it was a stillborn baby. One mother even saying that she heard her baby crying and Dr. Hicks telling her that she was just hearing things. So again, many people have said that he stole their children and sold them for profit. And that is where this story to me is not okay. It's a different story if, you know, someone was willingly adopting out their child, even though this was still illegal the way he was doing it. It's a totally different story than stealing someone's child, telling the family that the child died and then you making a profit off of it. That to me is absolutely horrendous and just horrible. Well, that's the story of the Hicks babies. If you want more information, you could probably Google it, but there also is a TLC documentary. It's like three episodes you could go and watch if you want to see the full story. It's a crazy one, you guys. And because there are so many people involved, lots of new things have been coming out. At the end of the TLC documentary that I watched, Jane had still not found her biological family, but I believe as of right now she has been able to find them. So it's just good that because this was able to come out, a lot of these families were able to reunite. A lot of the siblings were at least able to meet because of DNA and through genealogy, which is amazing that we have resources like that today. So the rest of this video, I will be showing you guys me baking these cookies. These are literally the best cookies you're ever going to have. If you like pumpkin, chocolate chip, cream cheese, there is not a cookie on the planet that tastes better than these. I wish I could share them with you because I don't know what I'm going to do with 50 cookies. So I'm going to need to go doorbell ditch a few friends and leave some of these on their porch.