Wednesday Weirdness
Welcome to Wednesday Weirdness, a recurring theme where we post something truly weird and wacky in adoption or child welfare. A Utah mother learns that her daughter “was shockingly fathered by now-dead convicted kidnapper, Thomas Lippert.”
“The family who discovered their 21-year-old daughter was fathered by a convicted kidnapper who swapped his sperm with her would-have-been biological father’s sample at an IVF clinic in Utah have gone public for the first time since their horrific discovery.
And the shock is almost too much to bear for the young woman, Annie Branum, who now has to come to terms with the most existential question of all time – ‘who am I?’
‘I thought I was this person, you know, [a combination of] my mum and my dad. But now my dad is not my biological father,’ said Annie on Friday. ‘Who am I? Who am I?
Thomas R. Lippert, who is now dead, served two years in prison for kidnapping a student from Purdue University, Indiana in 1975 and performing ‘love experiments’ on her including electroshock therapy, threatening her family and locking her up in a black box over a three-week period.
Lippert went on to work at the Reproductive Medical Technologies clinic in Salt Lake City, Utah from 1988 to 1993.
The Branum’s lived in Park City from 1990 to 92 and had trouble conceiving.
The mother, Pam Branum, told KUTV on Friday that she and her husband went to the fertility clinic in 1992. The clinic had partnered with the University of Utah.
The procedure was a success and nine months later Annie was born. The family could never fathom that their daughter was in fact fathered by a technician at the clinic.
Lippert’s deception was finally revealed in a twist of fate after the Branums sent cheek swabs off for online genetic testing.
The results were shocking as Mrs Branum discovered that her 21-year-old was not related to her husband, John, but instead was Lippert’s child.
‘I thought, “Oh my God “,’ she told KUTV.
Mrs Branum had tracked down a cousin of Lippert’s who revealed the man’s past. A genetic test with Lippert’s 99-year-old mother revealed that Annie was his daughter.
‘In the beginning I was shocked,’ says Annie.
She says her mother told her that ‘it doesn’t match anything, there is no DNA that you share with your father. It took me a minute… I was like, “what do you mean?
According to reports, Lippert would keep a wall of portraits of children born through the clinic at his desk and seemed ‘proud’ of them, sparking fears he may have secretly fathered other children.
Mrs Branum said: ‘All those photos of the babies that he was so proud of I thought, ”Oh my God, how many of those are his biological children?”’
Information as to just what happened at the sperm bank is sketchy as Lippert died in 1999 and the clinic closed in 1998.
But the Branums have unanswered questions that they want to be settled.
‘My husband wants to know where his sample is. Is there a child out there we don’t know about? I don’t think we are the only ones. I think we are one of many,’ Mrs Branum told KUTV.
Appeals are being made for anyone who received a sperm donation at this time and may have doubts to come forward.
CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, has set up a site Was Your Child Fathered by Thomas Lippert? as she is concerned that there may be more children fathered by Lippert in the Salt Lake City area.
Lippert’s widow, who did not have any children with the kidnapper said she was not surprised by the revelations, telling KUTV: ‘I think, because Tom didn’t have any kids, he wanted to have a lot of kids out there.’
Mrs Lippert said that she tried to leave her husband but that he had threatened to kill her.
Lippert was found guilty of the abduction of fine-arts student Susan Wells Cochran, 21, when he was a 25-year-old law professor at Southwest State College in Marshall, Minnesota.
The professor, who was a friend of Miss Cochran, tried to ‘brainwash her into falling in love with him’ with the help of a student assistant Harold Ross Tenneson, 21.
The kidnappers drove Miss Cochran through several states after abducting her when she posted an ad for a ride to Boston to visit her boyfriend.
Miss Cochran told People: ‘We got 30 miles out of town. And, well, that was it.’
She was forced to strip and endure electroshock therapy confined in a ‘black box’. She was also forced to sleep in the same bed as Lippert but was not raped by him.
The student was found three weeks later at the Southwest State Library by FBI after a lengthy search for the missing woman.
Lippert accepted a plea bargain for the government and served two years in jail along with undergoing psychiatric treatment for 90 days.
‘I understand that this happened to me, and there is nothing I can do to change it. So, why should I live my life any differently knowing this has happened?’
Annie studies astrophysics at the University of San Antonio and plays several instruments. According to KUTV, Lippert was also very musical, so the family believe their daughter got his best genetic qualities.
‘We have really strong faith and we believe that God is going to work everything for good,’ says Mrs Branum. ‘And he has because we have her.’
he University of Utah is responding to the story and offered 2News the following statement; here it is in its entirety:
According to a statement from the University of Utah, they have been investigating the incident since April 2013.
‘The University of Utah has been investigating credible information regarding the possible mislabeling or tampering of a semen sample at RMTI (Reproductive Medical Technologies, Inc.), a private andrology lab owned by a University faculty member (now deceased).
‘The facility was a private laboratory located in Midvale, Utah. While not owned or operated by the University, the University contracted with RMTI for specimen preparation and semen analysis. Additionally, RMTI prepared semen samples for private physician offices throughout the community, not University physicians,’ according to the statement published by KUTV.
‘Through genetic testing, a woman who received artificial insemination (AI) in 1991 discovered the biological father of her child was not her husband, as she had assumed. She traced the genetics of her child to a man who was a former employee of the now-defunct RMTI, which may have prepared the AI sample. The man in question was also a part-time employee of the University from 1988-94.
The Branums are encouraging families to do testing with the website 23andme.com because Annie’s DNA is already in their data base, which means they can determine matches quickly.
Was Your Child Fathered by Thomas Lippert? Information here: lippertschildren.blogspot.com”
My dad’s a convicted kidnapper: Woman’s horror as she learns sperm bank worker who swapped his own semen with samples is her real father [Daily Mail 1/11/14 By Marie-louise Olson and Louise Boyle]
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