Woman Digging Into Her Mother's Passing Uncovers Her Family's Web Of Lies

Heather Robinson was only 15 years old when she uncovered the true nature of her existence. However, to understand the sordid series of events that led to her unusual predicament, she had to go back to the year 1984.

All those years ago, a young couple by the name of Lisa and Carl Stasi were in love. They got married, and Lisa soon gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. However, things soon took a turn for the worse.

In less than a year, frequent fights and general discontent had plagued the two lovers, leading them to divorce. Carl went back to the military, and Lisa took baby Tiffany with her to Hope House, a women's shelter.

While staying in the refuge, Lisa met a man named John Osborne. He took an interest in her and her infant child. Suddenly, things seemed to be looking up for the young mother.

John moved the pair into a hotel room, even picking up the entire tab. But it wasn't enough for him. He was determined to help out even more, and so that is exactly what he did.

John began making grand promises to Lisa, offering her not only housing but even a job, complete with daycare for Tiffany. He would pay for all of it. Some close to Lisa were suspicious of this strange caretaker's motives.

Lisa's sister-in-law was wary of John. She believed he had to have an ulterior agenda that he wasn't sharing. Medical professionals were also looking into him, suspecting that he may have been involved in a sinister scheme.

Alarm bells went off for staff at Truman Medical Center when John asked to be connected with young white mothers. He claimed to be affiliated with the church, but they suspected he was a baby broker, looking for infants to sell.

Adding to concern was the fact that John was only interested in finding white babies, a common characteristic of such schemes. Lisa had no idea that, at the very moment she was getting closer to this man, experts were accusing him of grave crimes.

On January 8th, 1985, Lisa paid a visit to her sister-in-law Kathy's house. The next day John arrived and took her, along with Tiffany, back to the hotel. This would be the last time the 19 year-old mom was seen.

She was heard from once more, though. A few hours after leaving Kathy's house, Lisa called her mother-in-law Betty in tears. Through sobs, she told her she was worried that she didn't trust her to parent Tiffany and was trying to gain custody of her.

Betty assured her this wasn't true. But what Lisa said next was even more alarming. She informed Betty that John had told her to sign blank documents. Then, settling down, Lisa said "here they come now..." and the line went dead.

And just like that, she was gone. Shortly after her disappearance, however, family members began receiving strange letters from Lisa, informing them that she'd run away to start a new life. Something was incredibly off, though...

People close to her noted that the letters were typed, not handwritten. This was suspicious, as Lisa was not a good enough typist to have been able to write them by herself.

Then, one of Lisa's relatives discovered something even more concerning. The hotel room Lisa stayed in had indeed been paid for by someone named John — but the benefactor's last name was Robinson, not Osborne as he had led everyone to believe.

The weeks stretched on, and still no one had heard from Lisa. Then finally, two months after her disappearance, John spoke to the police. He told them that Lisa was alive and well, and had found a babysitting job in an undisclosed location.

Lisa's family longed to know what had happened to her, but they wouldn't receive any closure until a break in the case years later. In 2000, John Robinson was convicted of sexual assault as well as of stealing a woman's sex toys.

This was enough to allow law enforcement to search John's house. What they uncovered was an unholy sight, straight out of a horror movie: hidden in the compound were the remains of two women.

Next they tackled the killer's storage unit. To their shock and horror, police found the bodies of three more women that John had murdered. However, there was still no sign of Lisa Stasi.

Unfortunately, although she was presumed dead, there would be no solid answers for Lisa's family in terms of what truly happened to her. They would, however, finally discover what had become of her daughter Tiffany.

For Tiffany's new identity was now Heather Robinson. After presumably killing her mother, John gave the infant to his brother and his wife, who had been looking to adopt a baby. The two had no idea the adoption wasn't completely legit.

While it was obviously heartbreaking to discover that her family was not at all who she thought they were, knowing the cruel fate that had befallen her biological mom also filled Heather/Tiffany with a sense of injustice. She knew she had to avenge her late mother.

This is why Robinson founded "The Lisa Stasi Effect," a group dedicated to helping others who survived trauma, violent crimes, or simply feel like they don't belong. She wanted to right the many wrongs committed in family law for generations.

She knew there were victims like herself who never got any justice. There was case of Georgia Tann, who was born in July of 1891 in rural Mississippi. She was fairly unusual as a child, as she wished to study law. But her powerful father was a lawyer, and she wanted to follow in his footsteps.

And with help from her dad, she ended up passing the bar exam. However, her father refused to allow her to actually work, as the position was traditionally reserved for men. Unmarried, she couldn't be a housewife like most women back then.

So she landed on social work and began at the Mississippi Children's Home Society, later moving to Tennessee to head up the Tennessee Children's Home Society. This is where her nontraditional "career" would take off.

Shortly after Georgia began work, a woman named Alma Sipple gave birth to her daughter Irma in August of 1945. Her boyfriend worked overseas, so she was a single mother living in a Memphis, Tennessee apartment, where she received a visitor — Georgia.

Social worker Georgia Tann observed that little Irma had a cold and offered to take her to the hospital, with promises to return the baby back home safely the next day. Because Alma couldn't afford healthcare, she agreed.

But Georgia Tann didn't return Irma the next day. When Alma tried to reach out, she was told that Irma belonged to the Tennessee Children's Home. The day after that, she was given the news that her baby had died of pneumonia.

Irma, however, was alive and well. Except, now her name was Sandra, and she belonged to another family in Cincinnati. Alma was powerless against Georgia Tann, who with her commanding, authoritative look, had just stolen her baby.

Alma described Tann in these terms, "a stern-looking woman with close-cropped grey hair, round wireless glasses and an air of utter authority." This helped her become one of the most prolific child traffickers in history.

Her motive was profit. Her victims were poor families in vulnerable situations. She would either persuade the parents that she was doing something good for the child, or she would outright steal them. Oftentimes she would tell mothers their babies were stillborn.

Tann hired a network of "spotters" to locate children. She would scope out churches and daycare centers to find possible victims. Often she would steal babies born to mothers with mental illness or disease.

To add to her crimes, the children in her care were often starved and neglected, "dropping like flies." Tann reportedly molested some of the kids she abducted and would routinely sell teenagers and preteens to single men with horrible intentions.

Perception was key to how she managed to steal and sell over 5,000 children in her lifetime. It is estimated she made close to a million dollars over those years. Some of her clients were even celebrities, like Joan Crawford for example.

Tann saw children as a commodity, so she sold the healthiest and most attractive to celebrity customers. Like Joan Crawford, Lana Turner and Mary Pickford and the Governor of New York purchased children from Georgia Tann as well.

She got away with such a large-scale operation under the guise of the Tennessee Children's Home because she had a lot of power. She used her experience with the law to circumvent the system to get what she wanted.

Worst of all, she would use her political connections, often forged through bribery, to completely disenfranchise the parents of children she stole. Cases like Alma Sipple's never made it to court.

It wasn't until 1989, when Alma was watching Unsolved Mysteries and saw a story on Tann that she knew her daughter was actually taken from her. She tracked her daughter down, and they reunited after years apart. She was one of the few "lucky" victims.

It seems inconceivable that Georgia Tann eluded authorities for over twenty years, but she did. In fact, her work was praised by people as high up as Eleanor Roosevelt. She even attended President Truman's inauguration.

All the while, in some twisted, reverse Robin Hood maneuver, Tann was stealing babies from the poor and giving (or sold) to the rich. She even placed ads in the newspaper advertising children for sale like toys or cars.

Advertisements like this one with captions like "Want a Real, Live Christmas Present?” had potential parents reach out to Tann to adopt a child. Of course, no one knew these children were stolen. The scale of her crimes was unimaginable.

In 1950, the governor of Tennessee began to take a look into Tann's work. It didn't take long for investigators to get the picture about what was really going on behind the front of the Tennessee Children's Home.

Before Georgia Tann could be convicted of any crimes, she died from uterine cancer. Her victims received no reparations and most of them were never returned to their biological parents.

The Tennessee Children's Home was closed down and victims never got proper justice, but the little ones that died under this woman's care at least have something. The cemetery in which they were buried now has a monument dedicated to them.

It reads, "In memory of the 19 children who finally rest here unmarked if not unknown, and of all the hundreds who died under the cold, hard hand of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. The hard lesson of their fate changed adoption procedure and law nationwide."

When people go to adopt a child today, they do a lot more due diligence than went on in the days of Georgia Tan's reign of cruelty. But that doesn't mean that the unexpected still doesn't happen in the process.

In 1997, Ron and Natalie Trecroce made the decision to adopt a child. The Canadian couple found themselves in Arad, Romania where they hoped to find the perfect addition for their family. When they saw this one-year-old girl, they knew she was the one!

Her name was Rodica Lavinia Farcas, and she was living in an orphanage where she had been left by her mother who couldn't care for her. She was also in shockingly poor health—that much was evident to Ron and Natalie as soon as they met her.

The sweet little girl was malnourished, which had caused a host of other issues. She was suffering from rickets, and her bones were weak thanks to a severe lack of vitamin D and other nutrients. Still, there was more the couple had yet to discover...

In the 1990s, the records of children in Romania were notoriously difficult to obtain. So, Ron and Natalie were in a bit of a bind when it came to getting ahold of everything they would need in the future for Rodica.

Due to the difficulty of obtaining her records, Ron and Natalie were at a bit of a loss when it came to understanding their new daughter's life up to that point. This was especially true when it came to her family history...

As Ron and Natalie continued to search for more information about their new baby girl, they eventually came upon a shocking discovery: Rodica wasn't an only child. In fact, she had an older sister! Only, they weren't sure where this sister was...

For unknown reasons, the sisters had been placed in separate orphanages. This made locating Rodica's older sister far more difficult. Still, Ron and Natalie knew they had to try. Following an exhaustive search, they discovered where Rodica's sister was being cared for. Not only that, but they learned her name was Gianina Farcas!

Gianina was born in 1995, making her a year older than Rodica. Once Ron and Natalie discovered where she was living, they made a serious decision: they were going to adopt her as well, and reunite her with her younger sister. Finally, they made it so. But that wasn't all...

After Ron and Natalie arrived back in Canada, the surprises just kept coming. As it turned out, Rodica and Gianina weren't the only two children in their family. They were simply two of eight!

Unfortunately, Ron and Natalie were unable to track down any of the other siblings. Not long after they were brought home, Gianina and Rodica were renamed Sophie and Danielle, respectively.

Ron and Natalie decided to keep the girls' birth names as their middle names so they could retain a piece of where they came from. It was a small gesture, but it was important for their baby girls to not lose their identities.

The tumultuous start to Sophie and Danielle's lives was not unusual in 1990s Romania. The country was then under the control of a dictator named Nicolae Ceauşescu, who forbade any form of contraception whatsoever. This resulted in countless cases similar to that of Sophie and Danielle.

Many of the parents in Romania at the time were forced to give up children who they could no longer care for. The luckiest ones would end up being adopted by other families who could support them—just like Sophie and Danielle.

A good bit of footage exists of these two girls; six years after they were adopted, a documentary filmmaker showed interest in telling their story. With Ron and Natalie's approval, the girls' journey from Arad to Canada was made into a film.

Years later, Sophie actually edited the full documentary into a short film, which she uploaded to YouTube. That allowed the film to reach more people, including a number of people with similar backgrounds to Sophie and Danielle.

For her part, Danielle says that she hopes to return to her home country, hopefully sometime in 2018. "I would love to go back to explore the country!" she said.

Both sisters would, understandably, love to learn more about their biological parents and siblings. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done, as poor documentation will make it very difficult to locate them.

Sophie, now 22, is studying to be a photographer, and Danielle, 21, is also in college. They live close by, and often think about how far they've come. Not everyone was as lucky as they were!

Had Ron and Natalie Trecroce never gone to Romania, they might have never located Sophie, and the sisters wouldn't have reunited. Luckily, they did, and the rest is history!