A mother is told her newborn has died, and she goes home to grieve. The baby is alive – and has just been sold.

In 2021, two young women in the country of Georgia learned they were twin sisters, separated at birth and raised apart. Their mother had been told both of her daughters died in the hospital. They hadn't. They had been taken and sold, and the paperwork was forged so she would never go looking.

Weird Darkness podcast host Darren Marlar started with that one case and kept finding it – in a dozen countries, across nearly a hundred years.

They Told Me My Newborn Died – They Lied follows the same crime around the world: the lie that a living child is dead, told to a mother by someone she trusts, so the baby can be handed to someone else. From the maternity wards of the countries of Georgia and Spain to a Memphis adoption empire, a small-town clinic on the Tennessee line, and hospitals in Mexico, India, China, and Sri Lanka, the places change but the lie never does: the baby didn't survive.

Every case in these pages is documented – a court record, a confession, a DNA match, a named perpetrator, or a mother reunited with the child she had already buried in her mind. The claims that can't be proven, from East Germany to the wartime Nazi programs, are set apart and labeled honestly rather than smuggled in as fact.

A few of the cases inside:

• Twin sisters in Tbilisi, raised apart, reunited by a TikTok video nineteen years after they were sold.
• Newborns found packed in cardboard biscuit boxes outside Kolkata, waiting to be moved.
• A mother handed a sealed box to bury. Opened decades later, it held grapevine branches.
• An obstetrician who told parents their babies were stillborn, then sold the living infants to traffickers.
• Two hundred children sold from one small clinic on the Tennessee line, now finding their birth families by DNA.

The history is hard, but the same cheek-swab DNA tests that first exposed the lie are now bringing these families back together, one match at a time.