165 aborted babies found in trunk of Ulrich Klopfer’s Mercedes Benz
UPDATE 12 p.m. Oct. 11: Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill said Friday that 165 aborted babies' remains were recovered from inside the trunk of Ulrich Klopfer's Mercedes Benz that police searched through on Wednesday. The number of babies found so far in this investigation is 2,411.
Original report:
Additional aborted babies’ remains were found Wednesday at a property rented by the late abortionist Ulrich Klopfer. The Will County Sheriff’s Office didn’t release the exact number of bodies recovered but said they believe there are “less than 100.”
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Detectives searched eight vehicles owned by Klopfer that have been stored in an outdoor gated lot for more than six years at a business in Dolton, Illinois. The remains were found inside the trunk of a 1990s Mercedes Benz.
Authorities discovered “five plastic bags and one box that contained numerous medically preserved fetal remains,” the Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Wednesday.
“The remains recovered were preserved, packaged, and marked similarly to the previous [2,246] fetal remains discovered at the Klopfer residence on Sept. 12. All of the items and information observed by detectives and crime scene investigators today, coincide with the previously known information that the fetal remains were from the time period of 2000-2002 when Dr. Klopfer was performing abortions in the state of Indiana,” the statement added.
During a search of Klopfer’s residence in the unincorporated Crete Township, the family informed detectives about other properties he rented and owned, including the vehicles. After the family found the keys to the vehicles the sheriff’s office conducted its search. “There was no indication that additional personal property was either stored or visible inside of the vehicles that would have contained additional fetal remains,” the Will County Sheriff’s Office said.
In response to the discovery, Susan B. Anthony List’s State Policy Director Sue Swayze Liebel, an Indiana native, said the pro-life organization is “calling on Congress to pass the Dignity for Aborted Children Act.” The legislation would require abortion providers to have the remains buried or cremated instead of disposing of them as medical waste.
The bill was sponsored by U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., following the discovery of 2,246 aborted babies’ remains inside Klopfer’s garage. Those remains have since been transferred to the Indiana Attorney General’s office where the bodies are being held as evidence as the investigation continues.
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law requiring that the remains of aborted babies be buried or cremated. The legislation was signed into law in 2016 by then-Gov. Mike Pence.
Klopfer is believed to have performed around 30,000 abortions during his 43 years in practice before his medical license was indefinitely suspended in 2016 by the Indiana Medical Licensing Board.
Recently, he has been compared to former West Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell who kept the remains of aborted babies “in the [clinic’s] basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs,” a Grand Jury report said.
Decades before “medically preserved” aborted babies were found at Klopfer’s home, a similar discovery was made at a house in Woodland Hills, California.
In 1982, the remains of 16,433 aborted babies were found inside a storage container rented by a man who ran a medical laboratory. The bodies were found only after he had stopped making payments and the steel container was repossessed from the man's home.
At a Sept. 19 news conference, Will County Sheriff Mike Kelley said the remains recovered from Klopfer’s garage were found individually sealed in plastic bags and stored inside 70 cardboard boxes stacked from the floor to the ceiling.
Each bag was filled with a preservative called Formalin. The bags were also labeled but investigators did not reveal what was written on the labels, except to say the dates indicate the babies were aborted from 2000 to 2002. Klopfer’s clinics in South Bend, Fort Wayne and Gary were all operating at that time.
A doctor who volunteered to be the backup physician for Klopfer at his Fort Wayne clinic, in an effort to save a 2010 Patient Safety Ordinance in Allen County, recently described him as “pathological” and compared him to the fictional character Hannibal Lecter.
Dr. Geoffrey Cly, an OBGYN, said he worked alongside pro-life advocates to create the ordinance because he had been treating an alarming number of women who were suffering emergency complications from botched abortions performed by Klopfer.
Cly went on to call Klopfer “deranged,” and said he felt “there’s an element of trophies” in his decision to keep the babies’ remains.
A documentary film about Klopfer’s Fort Wayne abortion clinic titled “Inwood Drive” finished production in July but is now being updated following the recent discoveries and will be released in 2020.
Filmmakers Mark and Amber Archer interviewed Klopfer in November 2018 for their documentary. In their book, Interview With the Abortionist, they describe him as a sad and lost man who argued that he never killed babies because inside the womb it’s not a baby, “it's a fetus.”
Follow Melissa Barnhart on Twitter: @MelBarnhart
