Transcript from “Lone Ranger”
Colver: You'd have a new crop of residents come in and those doctors would come up to you and say, hey, Bob, would you be interested in being a sperm donor? So here's how it works. I give you a call and tell you that Mrs. Jones was going to need an insemination at 3 on Tuesday. You take a cup, collect it, and my nurse will meet you at the at the doors of the hospital. She'll hand you an envelope with $50. And great, thanks, thank you very much.
Bavis: It sounds simple enough. But Cline said he would find donors that looked like patients’ husbands. For a doctor in demand, that could get tricky.
Colver: Because you'd have to find a blond-haired guy and a dark-haired guy and, you know, tall, short, whatever. If you put that much of an effort into it. Maybe places did. I think, in general, they just found a handful of guys that were willing to be a sperm donor and great.
Let's face it, you have X number of guys. And I do wonder how diligent, truly diligent, you’re looking for … say the husband was 6’2 and blond haired. Are you really gonna find that, you know? I don't know. It was more important to find sperm.
Bavis: The timing was tricky, too. These days, there are plenty of tools to track when you’re most likely to get pregnant. Apps, bracelets, test strips to pee on. In the ‘70s, doctors only had something called a basal body temperature chart. A patient would take her temperature every day to find out when she ovulated. When the temperature went up a bit, that meant it was time for insemination.
So imagine coordinating that for multiple patients. And the residents were probably busy. They couldn’t always drop what they were doing to collect a sample.
Colver: And because, basically, you could call Johnny and Johnny said, I can't. I’ve got a surgery that day. I cannot do that. Then you call Billy. Billy, can you come in and do a specimen? Billy said, oh yeah, cool, we can do that. And so that's how it worked. That's exactly how it worked. That's always how it worked.
Harper: Do you think he ever used donor sperm?
Jacoba: I don't know.
Harper: Years later, Jacoba and some of the other siblings still question whether Cline ever used donors at all.
Jacoba: I think every one of my siblings would answer this differently. I don't think so. I mean, I do, I wonder. And honestly I don't know if we'll ever know. I hope to know someday. Obviously, he's not going to tell the truth.
Harper: At that dinner in Greencastle, Cline had said he used other donors. Was there a Johnny or Billy? We wanted to find out. So we found someone who knew.
Jan Shore: I respected him as a surgeon. He was a good surgeon. He knew what he wanted to do. He got in there, he did it and got out.
Harper: In 1981, Jan Shore was a nurse at St. Vincent hospital when Cline hired her to work in his practice across the street. At that point he’d been using his own sperm for at least nine years. But, of course, Jan knew nothing about that.
Jan: So I thought, oh great. You know, I like working with him. I thought it was a good opportunity to go out and work with him.
Bavis: You respected him, did he have that kind of reputation? Or what was his reputation at the hospital?
Jan: He had a very good reputation among staff. He was not buddy-buddy or somebody that would come up and put his arm around you. He just was always the doctor. He never came across as anything else. That was in the office, that was in surgery, that was anywhere. He was the doctor.
Harper: By this time, Cline had struck out on his own, so his practice would focus exclusively on fertility treatment. In those early days, his office had a small staff. Jan remembers about 5 or 6 people worked there.
Jan: You know we had a receptionist we had a nurse practitioner we had people that worked at the office and all of us filled in. if you were there and he needed you, you did whatever needed to be done
Bavis: Jan wasn’t just a nurse. She argued with insurance companies. She made appointments. And she performed some of the inseminations.
Harper: You would just put it at the cervix.
Jan: You kind of bathe the cervix.
Harper: And then swims up from there?
Jan: And then it swims up, just like it normally would. Essentially that would probably be where it would normally start, would be around the cervix. So basically you were just doing it the way it would normally occur.
Harper: Did you think at all about, this is gonna get someone pregnant? This is going to lead to someone having a baby?
Jan: Oh yeah. Hey, we used to keep track once in a while. Oh, I'm a daddy. Because you did the insemination. We'd laugh. Oh, we're daddies.
Bavis: So back to that big question some of the siblings have.
Harper: Some of the kids have even been like, were there ever any sperm donors? What you're saying is yes, there were.
Jan: Yes, there were other sperm donors. I mean, I can vouch for that fact. That there were others.
Bavis: More than anyone else we talked to, Jan understood how it worked. How Cline got his donor sperm.
Jan: There were times I went over and handed over the money and took the specimen.
Harper: Do you basically walk up to the intern after they've gotten their sample? Or you say, like, hey, we need a sample and then they go to the bathroom?
Jan: No. It’s all set up. And they know where I'm meeting them. And they already have the specimen.
Bavis: Was it in like a brown paper bag or anything?
Jan: No. Because you have to keep it warm. So it has to be next to the body.
Harper: So he hands you, like, a cup?
Jan: Test tube.
Harper: A test tube, OK. And then you put that where?
Jan: In my bra. It has to be warm, has to be next to the body. Because you have to keep that viable until you can get it to the insemination.
Harper: It’s kind of awkward, handing over a test tube of recently collected semen. And the residents collected their samples at St. Vincent, a Catholic hospital. Which meant nuns, actual nuns, walking around in their habits.
Jan: I had one intern. I was in the process of handing him the money he was handing me the specimen and a nun walked past.
Harper: How did you guys react?
Jan: I was fine, but he was gonna go through the floor.
Harper: OK, so you put the sample in your bra, you drive back across the street. Then what happens to it?
Jan: Then I would hand it to Dr. Cline. Or if somebody else was doing the insemination, which could be, then you would give it to them.
Harper: So Jan disproved this idea that there were no donors. Still, though, in her time doing this work for Cline, Jan said she could really only remember three donors in a five or six year period. And it’s possible that sometimes that donor sperm wasn’t even used.
Harper: Before it gets put inside a woman, are there any times where you don’t see it? Where it’s out of your sight?
Jan: It would usually be out of my sight. Because more often than not if he was in the office, I would give it to him.
Harper: I guess what I'm wondering is there a time where he could have slipped in his own, essentially?
Jan: Possibly.
Harper: Why do you think he did this?
Colver: Well, I think … I don't know.
Harper: This is Dr. Colver again.
Colver: I think it could have started out with logistics. It's much easier to, you know, collect your own specimen. You don't have to give up 50 bucks and you don’t have to plan ahead. You wonder – I think there's been some conjecture – the first time it happened was, oh my gosh, Mrs. Jones, I forgot about her! Now what am I gonna do? I called a couple guys and they're not available. Ah heck, I'll just do it myself. Maybe. And then it just kept growing. I don't, who knows? I don't know what was in his head. But those other concerns, it's almost like you don't want to go there. You know, God complex. There's the sexual aspect of that. There's a lot of really dark factors that could be involved that are awful to think about. And to think about that with a patient, I just can't even imagine.