There's a story out of Utah that's as, if not more, horrifying as Bridgegate. A deceased man who worked at a now-defunct fertility clinic may have secretly impregnated dozens of women with his own sperm.
According to genealogist CeCe Moore, a 21-year-old woman recently learned that her biological father was not the man who raised her — as both she and he had thought — but an employee at Midvale’s Reproductive Medical Technologies Inc.
The RMTI employee was also a part-time employee of the University of Utah from 1988 to 1993 and has been dead since 1999, according to a statement from the U., which contracted with RMTI and has been investigating the claim since April. Located at 1121 E. 3900 South, RMTI closed in February 1998 and was part-owned by three U. staff and faculty members.
Through DNA testing, the family concluded that the biological father of the 21-year-old woman is Thomas R. Lippert — whose widow confirmed that he worked for RMTI for nine years until its closure and spent two years in prison after pleading to reduced charges in the kidnapping of a female college student in 1974.
KUTV in Salt Lake City first broke this story.
Watch it here--if you can stand it.
The story begins when the family decided just for the fun of it to do a DNA test. The now-21-year-old "Ashley" had been conceived by artificial insemination at RMTI. But the test revealed that her mother, "Paula," hadn't been inseminated with the sperm "Jeff," of the man Ashley had known as her father.
Paula, who is a genealogist herself, thought that maybe someone at RMTI had inseminated her with the wrong sperm. What she found out was even worse. With Moore's help, Ashley had her DNA checked by the genetic testing company AncestryDNA. One of the people in AncestryDNA's database came up as a possible cousin. According to Moore, this woman, "Cheryl," revealed that Lippert had been her first cousin--and had been a sperm donor. A DNA test on Lippert's 99-year-old mother revealed that she was Ashley's biological grandmother--and therefore, Lippert was her biological father. Paula remembered that Lippert had a lot of pictures of babies behind his desk, claiming he'd helped their parents conceive them. This development, however, raised the horrifying possibility that he'd deliberately inseminated other women in Utah as well, particularly along the Wasatch Front. Lippert worked at the clinic from 1986 to 1995.
Now here's where this story gets hideous. It turns out that Lippert probably had no business working at that clinic in the first place. In 1974, Lippert, then a professor at Southwest Minnesota State College (now University), traveled to Purdue and kidnapped Sue Cochran. For a month, he subjected her to a bizarre experiment intended to make her love him.
However, when he was finally arrested, federal prosecutors in Minneapolis ran into a problem. They were planning to argue that Lippert used mind control on Cochran to make her come to him--but at the same time, their counterparts in San Francisco were saying that Patty Hearst still had free will when she "joined" the SLA. In a case of exceptionally bad timing, Hearst and Lippert had the same lawyer, F. Lee Bailey. Rather than risk Bailey tearing them to shreds, prosecutors offered him a plea deal that called for Lippert to plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy to kidnap. He was sentenced to six years in prison and was released after two years. Still, he was a convicted violent felon who had no business being anywhere near a fertility clinic.
U of U has been investigating the Lippert case since it came to light in April. While the school claims that there are no remaining records from that clinic, the close ties between it and the clinic have prompted U of U to offer free genetic testing to anyone who received insemination at RMTI from 1988 to 1993. Moore has also set up an informational site for anyone who may have been victimized by Lippert.