On the sixth of September, 2019, Mark Vandersteeg received a phone call from his wife, Debra. She asked Mark to drive to her sister Sherry’s house in Crete Township, Illinois, three hours from the family’s home in Rockford, Michigan. Sherry’s husband George had died a few days earlier, and the overwhelmed, grieving widow needed help cleaning out their garage and house. In life George had been an osteopathic surgeon, car enthusiast and hoarder–the house was stacked so high with boxes that there was barely room for a chair. In the thirty-five years that Sherry and George had lived there, Mark had never been invited over by his in-laws.

Mark Vandersteeg: “We began to clear the clutter from the home, and opened up the garage door to find a wall of everything he had saved…car parts, empty dog food containers…he never discarded a container. So, as we were digging through the second day, it was the evening. I opened up a cardboard box, and found some bags in there with liquid in it. And as I lifted the third bag out I realized what I was looking at. I almost collapsed. It was beyond anything I ever thought. My son was with me and came and saw it and he immediately wanted to leave and never come back.” 

As Mark moved into damage control mode, stray possibilities crossed his mind—could they push the boxes to the back of the garage and leave dealing with them until the end of the clean-up? Could they bury George’s secret in the backyard? He was keenly aware that he and the rest of the family had walked into the house as law-abiding citizens, and he wished them to walk out of it the same. He knew the firestorm that would come down upon his family–in particular his sister-in-law Sherry–once what they had found was inevitably made public. He called Debra and told her what they had found. His shocked and horrified wife immediately began to pray.

The family contacted local law enforcement through an attorney, and investigators from both the Will County Sheriff and Coroner’s Offices came out to start meticulously going through the garage and house. The investigation that followed crossed state lines, garnering national attention and universal disgust and outrage. Had the boxes in his garage been discovered when he was still alive, George would have faced criminal charges in the thousands. It would not have been his first tussle with law enforcement or the court of public opinion. George had been in and out of court for decades in Indiana, where he had been a fixture of local news coverage. 

In the weeks that followed, armed guards were hired by the family to stay with Sherry at her house, the center of both a large-scale investigation and media circus. As news coverage ramped up, bolstered by George’s complicated legal history and controversial reputation, one question continued to come up, over and over again, demanding an answer from the man whose grieving family was left to speculate like all the rest: why?

Why did Mark’s brother-in-law keep a secret stash of over two thousand fetal remains in his garage for nearly two decades?

Podcast Intro:

You’re listening to Conceiving Crime, the podcast dedicated to investigating crimes past and present involving sex, procreation, pregnancy, birth, and all things human reproduction. I’m your host, Sami Parker. See the full show notes & links to resources from this episode at ConceivingCrime.com.

Act I: - The Discovery

The fact that Mark and his son immediately recognized what they were looking at, despite the degraded condition of the remains, is not surprising. The man they knew as “George” was Ulrich “George” Klopfer, one of the most prolific–and controversial–abortionists in the history of the state of Indiana. 

No one in his family, including his wife, had any idea of George Klopfer’s gruesome secret. Though Klopfer had lost his medical license in the state of Indiana in 2016, at the time of his death in September 2019, he still owned three shuttered abortion facilities in Fort Wayne, Gary, and South Bend which he would regularly visit, as well as a few storage units and properties in Indiana and Illinois. Klopfer’s family cooperated with law enforcement in the coming weeks as they traveled around Illinois and Indiana to the abortionist’s various properties, searching for evidence and any additional fetal remains. A few days after the initial discovery of the remains in the garage, additional fetuses were found in the trunk of an old Mercedes in an outdoor lot in Dolton, Illinois. Will County authorities determined that all of the aborted human remains were from Indiana, which meant that Klopfer had not only broken the law by carrying them across state lines, but that Allen County authorities would need to take possession of the aborted children. At his house and in the clinics themselves law enforcement found thousands of abandoned and improperly stored medical records, which the State of Indiana seized, as it had the statutory obligation to dispose of and secure sensitive identifying medical information.   

Local news affiliates reported on the unprecedented investigation, which required massive manpower and was so shocking that the CBS affiliate news anchors issued sensitive content warnings before the segments.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill: “Grisly is probably not the right word for it. It was just a very troubling scenario. Tissue that could not be identified, to remains that were very clearly fingers, feet, toes, that kind of thing. It was very traumatic for some of our folks.”

Sergeant Jeremey Zinicki: “Some of the bags you could see hands, arms, legs, heads, of fetuses in the bags….it was disturbing. I mean, obviously we all take it differently in this profession…it affected some members of the department more than others.”

Hill: “We had some folks who were very happy to volunteer the first time, but asked not to go back, and we respected that.” 

All totaled, 2,411 bodies were discovered. The remains were stored in old cardboard boxes and styrofoam coolers, preserved in a formaldehyde derivative called formalin. The final report that the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Indiana released in late 2020 laid out the facts     in as much as law enforcement could determine them. Investigators estimated the remains to be from abortions performed in the Indiana clinics between just three years- 2000 to 2003. Personal health information was written on the bags that contained each fetus, but the state of the bags had deteriorated and much of the information was no longer legible. Much of what could be read the state’s investigators determined was improbable or incorrect. 

The discovery that Ulrich George Klopfer had illegally stored fetal remains from his abortion facilities in his garage would cement a reputation he had garnered in life. Klopfer had been in and out of court for years and was accused of a number of crimes, including endangering his patients with poor sanitation and lack of anesthetic, low safety standards, and disregarding basic rules of medical record-keeping. Other physicians in the area reported that his patients had a high number of abortion-related medical complications and that they suspected his surgical standards were lax. Geoffrey Cly, a doctor who worked with Klopfer, testified that he treated a patient who had a life-threatening uterine infection after Klopfer left parts of a fetus in her womb. Klopfer’s license to practice medicine in the State of Indiana was permanently suspended in 2016. When asked, he often used the example of an underage rape victim whose parents had brought her in for an abortion but had no intention of reporting the crime as justification for the importance of what he did.

Kelli Stopczynski: “And so the work you do you feel is important?”

Ulrich Klopfer: “Does a ten year old girl who was raped by her father, does she deserve to have the pregnancy terminated, or should she have the child?”

The local chapter of Allen County Right to Life, a pro-life nonprofit organization, had studied the publicly available records of Klopfer’s patients and noticed he had not notified the authorities of more than one underage patient’s sexual abuse for several months after he had performed the abortion on her. In an ironic twist, it was his failure to report abortions of patients under the age of fourteen within three days of performing them (as mandated by law in Indiana) that got Klopfer’s medical license revoked and all three of his Indiana offices shut down. 

The story of the fetuses in the garage broke and sparked outrage from several quarters: including Klopfer’s former patients and his colleagues in the medical profession. Speculation immediately turned to his motive–for what reason had Klopfer done this? Some pro-life advocates and the angered former patients believed that Klopfer was akin to a serial killer, keeping the remains of his victims as “trophies.” Geoffrey Cly, the doctor who testified about Klopfer’s patients being injured and worked with Klopfer for a number of years as a back-up physician, publicly speculated about his reasons in a CBS Chicago interview:

Chris Tye: “Do we read anything into that? The fact that he didn’t just bring them home, he kept them, and bagged them, put them in formaldehyde, and boxed them.” 

Geoffrey Cly: “So here’s a guy who is not trying to do the proper technique on a basic procedure, but yet, can save fetal tissue in a very methodical, scientific, tracking way.”

Tye: “Would you classify these as ‘trophies’?”

Cly: “Especially with the documentation and the putting in formaldehyde, putting in a box, absolutely some trophy aspect. The way he saved them it’s something he wanted to preserve as a memory for some reason. He left them in his garage…I think there’s a sign that he wants more to be discovered.”

The story drew attention from pro-life legislators in Washington, D.C., as well. On September 26th, 2019, a few weeks after Klopfer’s death and the discovery of the fetuses in his garage, the Dignity for Aborted Children Act was introduced in the Senate, a proposed measure for a federal law requiring fetal burial across all fifty states. The law was modeled on the Indiana law and has yet to be passed, though it was reintroduced to the United States Senate in 2023.

As the authorities combed through the evidence, which included thousands of abandoned health records at his house and in his shuttered clinics across the state, more questions popped up.

Curtis Hill: “These remains had been there for twenty years…there was a big mystery behind how they got there, why they got there…there was a starting point and a stopping point. What we found was they were all from a three to four year period…what was special about those years? Was there something going on in that time period that made significance to him?”

An Associated Press article profiling Klopfer suggested more sympathetic reasons for him illegally storing the fetal remains–including suggesting that he might’ve been wracked with debts from fighting his various legal battles in Indiana against his ideological opponents and that keeping the fetuses in his garage illegally would have saved on disposal costs. It was even suggested that this was the natural consequence of Klopfer’s pathological hoarding, or that he had done it as a final act of spite towards his embittered enemies in the pro-life movement. Kevin Bolger, the widow’s attorney, was unconvinced that “pathological issues” were the explanation for him “hoarding body parts.” The lead investigator had a more prosaic theory. 

Sergeant Jeremey Zinicki: “I personally just think he had a bad encounter with an activist…and then he was trying to keep the remains from being broken into and being buried and used for propaganda…so I think he was just a few years bringing them home to avoid all that stuff.”

The discovery of Klopfer’s remains is not the first or the largest discovery of this kind—in 1982 a shipping container in Los Angeles that had been repossessed by a leasing company was discovered with over 16,000 fetal remains inside of it. The incident garnered national attention at the time—then President Ronald Reagan called it a “national tragedy”, and singer Pat Boone wrote a song immortalizing the children. The California case led to a lawsuit between the ACLU and pro-life organizations in California over how the human remains should be “classified” and therefore treated regarding their “disposal”. These stories are noteworthy for drawing attention to a little-discussed aspect of the abortion industry: where a preborn child’s remains end up after he or she is aborted. 

Act II: - Background

Laws for the disposal of aborted fetal remains vary from state to state. Like hospitals or morgues, abortion clinics must follow rules for the disposal of human remains, though the exact definition varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction–there are some states (Michigan) where the gestational age of the fetus changes the requirements for disposal, for example. The State of Indiana passed a law in 2016 called HEA 1337 which requires medical facilities to bury or cremate fetal remains, rather than dispose of them as medical waste. A 2016 lawsuit argued that it created an unconstitutional burden on abortion, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the provision in 2019. The injunction preventing the law from being enforced was lifted on September 3rd, 2019 - the very day Ulrich Klopfer died. Before HEA 1337 was passed, Indiana state law did not specify any distinction between aborted fetuses and other medical waste, and there had been public controversy over the state becoming a destination for abortion disposal companies when nearby states had more stringent laws.

His death and the subsequent media firestorm around his callous treatment of the remains caused an increase in scrutiny of Klopfer himself, and interest in his life and career in totality. People wondered- what kind of person chooses to do this? 

Ulrich George Klopfer was born into a family of seven children, and emigrated from Germany to Michigan with his family as a small child. He began his medical career in the State of Illinois, where he worked at a facility in downtown Chicago that was featured in an ongoing Chicago Sun Times series called “The Abortion Profiteers”. The series detailed allegations of women being pushed through abortion facilities at high speeds with little concern for medical complications or physical trauma. A nurse who worked at the facility claimed Klopfer would compete with another abortionist to see who could perform the most abortions on a given work day. Klopfer would abandon his morning coffee if he thought his rival, Dr. Ming Kow Haw, was “beating” him.

Klopfer got his medical license in the state of Indiana in 1979. He was one of the few abortionists in the largely pro-life state in the 1980s and 90s, likely the reason he opened up three separate practices across Indiana. He had a publicly contentious relationship with pro-life activists–in South Bend a chapel for would-be mothers was built right next to his abortion facility. The idea that Klopfer may not have been entirely above-board in how he treated the bodies of the children he aborted occurred to some of the interested parties long before his death. Shawn Sullivan, the lawyer in charge of the chapel, had a window built to monitor the parking lot. He stated that security cameras pointed towards this parking lot captured Klopfer loading boxes into the trunk of his car after dark. Sullivan thought it seemed strange, particularly because it didn’t seem as though Klopfer utilized a medical waste disposal company, and his staff issued a complaint to the St. Joseph County Health Department which “never went anywhere”, according to an interview given after Klopfer’s death. 

Klopfer estimated that he performed around 30,000 abortions over the course of his forty-year medical career, This naturally left him with many former patients, some of whom had come to him multiple times. After his death, many of the untold stories of his attitude and treatment of these women came out. He had a reputation for being cold and impersonal—not to mention careless in committing the abortions themselves.

Jessica Bowen: “It was excruciating, it was so painful.” 

Kelly Bowker: “He didn’t want to know your name, he didn’t want to offer any advice.”

Abby Whitt: “He told me to shut up and stop crying.”

Jessica Bowen: “I begged him–I asked to stop. I started screaming and crying, and I said please stop, I don’t want to do this anymore. And he looked at the nurse and told her to keep me quiet because I was going to scare the other patients.” 

The discovery of the remains left many of the women he had treated, already scarred from his infamous bedside manner, horrified to think he might’ve kept their aborted children as trophies. A lawsuit spearheaded by former patients to sue the Klopfer estate for DNA testing of the remains was raised within weeks of his death. Ultimately all 2,411 fetuses were buried together in an ecumenical service in South Bend, Indiana, on February 12th, 2020. Attorney General Curtis Hill spoke at the interment.

Curtis Hill: “We have gathered here at this site…keeping them together in rest, each of them connected by their common fate.”

Though the babies whose remains Klopfer stored at his property for nearly two decades are now buried in a cemetery, the conclusion of the investigation left more questions than answers. Klopfer’s former patients who wanted to know if it was their children who had been kept in plastic bags for decades were left with no satisfaction. The remains had so deteriorated and the records were so unreliable that no attempt to reunite the women with their babies could be made. Attorney General Hill’s investigation found no evidence that anyone helped Klopfer transport the remains from his facilities to his house, and his death means that no one will stand trial for any crimes. 

Act III: - Motive

Kevin Bolger, the attorney who represented Klopfer’s widow, was quoted in the Chicago Sun Times as saying, “you can speculate till hell freezes over. You’re not going to know the answer. He took it with him.”

Mark Archer, the documentary filmmaker and pro-life activist responsible for Inglewood Drive, a film about Klopfer’s life and career, believed that Klopfer used a variety of what he called “twisted justifications for spending his life as an abortionist.” He was familiar with a story about the abortionist’s childhood in Germany that he didn’t believe until he heard it directly from Klopfer himself.

Ulrich Klopfer: “Let me put it this way, in 1945 I was with my aunt, in the suburbs of Dresden. In February of 1945, in between the Americans and the English, they firebombed Dresden for three days and two nights…After the Berlin Wall fell down and Germany reunited, in 1994, they decided to rebuild the women's church, in the basement, they found dead bodies from World War II, OK?...The effects of the war probably may have not had a positive inspect on my perception... Of human beings; what they do to each other."

It is almost impossible to credit any action of a human being with a single cause. Whether his experiences as a child in Dresden during World War Two was the “reason” Klopfer kept the bodies of 2,411 children for twenty years or not, it is obvious from the many reports of people who tried to understand his perspective that the event weighed heavily on his mind. Geoffrey Cly, the doctor who worked with Klopfer as his backup physician, recalled him bringing up the bombings when discussing his concerns about Klopfer’s patients. Klopfer compared the suffering felt by Germans at that time to the suffering of women with unwanted children. Quite the claim. 

Don Page also asked Klopfer directly why he did what he did–and got a different answer. A sidewalk counselor and pro-life activist who worked with local right-to-life groups in Fort Wayne, Don was an unlikely friend to Klopfer. He prayed outside Klopfer’s abortion center every week, occasionally getting in verbal altercations with the abortionist. Five years into his stint as a sidewalk advocate, Don’s pastor challenged him to befriend the person he detested most in the world. Don immediately thought of Ulrich Klopfer, and reached out to him. To his surprise, Klopfer accepted the overture of friendship immediately. The two men had coffee in Don’s car every Thursday morning for five years–right up until George Klopfer’s death. Don said, in spite of his profound misgivings about what Klopfer had done, that he grew to see George as a friend.

Kyle Heimann: “And, so, when his abortion clinic was closed, and he was continuing to come back into town, seemingly for no apparent reason, because he wasn't seeing women for abortions, do you think he was coming to see you?”

Don Page: “Well, I'll tell you what he said. I asked him the same question.I said, ‘My gosh.’ I say, you have three facilities. One in Gary, South Bend, and here. And you've gotta pay utilities. You've gotta pay taxes, you've gotta pay its upkeep. Why do you still do this? And his only answer was a force of habit. I didn't think that was a very good answer, but that was his story, too.”

Don brought the pastor of the parish he attended, Father Daniel Scheidt, to a few of these car meetings. In a sermon Fr. Scheidt made to his congregation after Klopfer’s death, he recounted one of these meetings. Klopfer greeted the priest with an accusation connecting him to the grave abuse of children perpetrated in the Catholic church by some bishops and priests in the church to which he belonged.

Father Daniel Scheidt:  “...And in that accusation was actually a revelation of his heart. He was a man who knew suffering from within. As I asked him about his childhood, he said that he grew up in World War II, and saw the war firsthand, dead bodies. The neglect of human beings for each other. He had the memory seared in his mind of the Russian troops machine-gunning small animals, not for food, but just to be cruel. I asked him what prompted him to get into medicine. And the first thing that he recounted was a failure of a heart operation that he was assisting in, and the patient died.

Another abortionist, Bernard Nathanson, who ran the largest facility in the world in '70s, and who later converted, was baptized on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. He was the founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League. Dr. Nathanson said that for many abortionists their failure in other areas of medicine leads them into a type of bottom-feeding in the profession, because the procedure, medically speaking, is actually pretty simple. The ending of a human life is less complicated, medically, than trying to save it. Doctors at that level go into surgeries in the womb that save, rather than the alternative. And it was clear when I asked Dr. Klopfer more questions about his medical practice, if he has any colleagues who are friends. He said, "No." It became clear in our conversation that we were his only friends. It's what prompted him to drive the distance and to want to meet with the priest.”

Don and George Klopfer spoke for many hours over the course of their five-year friendship. Conversations including Klopfer’s past and what had ultimately informed a worldview that Don could not understand and tried to gently challenge. 

Kyle Heimann: “But do you think some of his ideas of right and wrong, and how human beings should be treated was skewed by some of the trauma in his life?”

Don Page: “I do, I do, yes. He often talked about how terrible it was. The firebombing of Dresden, and how it affected him, and how it killed some of his family, obviously. We all are affected by our lives, what we experience. I think that had something to do with it. But speaking of the abortions, I said, "Well, why do you do this?" He says, well, I'll tell you. He says, I do it as a service. He says, if a mother comes and wants to have an abortion, and if that mother does not have an abortion, in most cases that child will not be taken care of properly. And he would, in fact, say every child deserves a loving home. He said that. And a loving mother and father. And he says, if their idea of not keeping this child, and they end up keeping the child, it could not be good for the child. So, I do it as a service. And at that point and time, he says, they're not babies. And I said, "Yes, they are. "They are little children. Our Lord knew them before they were in the womb. "It is a baby, it is a child." And we never had any heated arguments, ever. Not one cross word at all. Even when I would counter him with his thinking, but that's the way he felt about it.”

Don never gave up on trying to bring his friend George around to his way of thinking–that he was not saving a would-be single mother from a difficult life or a potential child from less than ideal circumstances, but killing the innocent human child of a mother. After all, the so-called “fear of future suffering” could be used as a justification to kill any human being- born or unborn. The Thursday meeting before he died, Don felt that he had gotten through to his friend as he never had before. 

Father Scheidt: “As I shared last week, this St. Vincent parishioner in his last conversation with George, said, ‘George, it's not too late. You're like the thief on the cross next to Jesus. You belong to Jesus, George. Accept that. Even in the last hour, accept that.’ And the parishioner who so many times left the Thursday meeting with frustration at the progress, he left that meeting believing that he had actually reached George's heart. Only God knows the last hour.”

Conclusion

The question we’re left with is – why does this discovery matter to so many people, many of whom would not describe themselves as pro-life or interested in abortion as an issue? Why did it cause a media circus and garner the horror and interest of people across the political spectrum? Why did the authorities insist that the investigation of the fetal remains had nothing to do with being pro-life?

As horrifying, illegal, and callous as Ulrich Klopfer’s actions were, he inadvertently revealed something–by not disposing of the infants he killed in the “proper” manner that he was obligated to under state law, he drew attention to their humanity. 

Mark Vandersteeg: “This happens on a daily basis in this country, two-thousand abortions, and then you find two thousand in a garage and it’s a big deal.”

Is being stored in a bag with your mother’s name attached in a garage for twenty years any worse than having your body sent to a lab for testing or incinerated with other medical waste? The Klopfer tragedy forced the American people to look this issue in the face and see the victims not as a statistic or an idea, but instead as real human children with bodies deserving of proper burial and the dignity afforded all human beings–in death, at least, if not in life. 

As to why he did it, it’s difficult to say whether a man as full of contradictions as Klopfer himself would have had a good explanation for his behavior had the discovery been made while he was still alive. Perhaps he did not know himself.

Fetal disposal continues to be a contentious political issue in the post-Roe world. Fetal disposal requirements are one of the great cost barriers to profitability in the abortion industry, and as there is still no federal law requiring they be treated as human remains across all fifty states, not all of the victims of abortion will be guaranteed a final resting place as dignified as the 2,411 children Klopfer aborted–a mere fraction of the total he committed. These 2,411 were given recognition of their humanity with a funeral and a place in a cemetery. For those who believe aborted children deserve to be treated like any other person who has died before his or her time, this bare minimum standard of justice is something they live in hope of. 

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