Chapter 3

It isn’t clear which of Cline’s many biological daughters Audrey was referring to, but those who know the case believe it must have been Jacoba Ballard, one of the most outspoken Cline children in the case. In 2014, Ballard logged on to 23andMe, the genomics and biotech website that offers users a peek at their ancestry. The 34-year-old long knew she hadn’t been conceived by her father, a fact she learned when she was 10. She was at a point in her life when she wanted to know more about her biological father. She didn’t expect she’d be able to find him. At the least, she thought, she could build relationships with her half-siblings—if there were any. When her results showed up, she was stunned to learn that she had seven of them.

Ballard was flummoxed. Her mother was 20 years old when she first went to see her fertility doctor in the fall of 1979. The doctor had reassured her mother that he used fresh sperm from medical residents, and that a donor would only be used three times to create life. Her child, he told her, would resemble her father. Ballard was born August 26, 1980.

She shared the discovery of her seven half-siblings with her mom. What was the name of the fertility doctor? Donald Cline, her mother reminded her. Ballard began to reach out to her half-siblings, whose birthdays stretched across seven years. Surprisingly, they, too, were all in the medical fields. The half-siblings had something else in common, too: Their birth mothers had all gone to Cline.

Ballard filed a report with the Indiana attorney general’s office. Ballard and one of her newfound half-siblings, Kristy Killion, were interviewed by the office, as well as a Marion County grand jury. Killion had also taken a genetic test in 2014, learning she had five half-siblings. She double-checked her results on Ancestry.com. Killion and Ballard had met when they had both signed up for amfor.net, a registry for donor offspring, parents, and siblings. Each had uploaded her name, age, and facility her parents used to conceive. Then Killion and her sister took a DNA test and convinced Ballard to as well, revealing their relationship.

“I think as humans, we have the need and want to know where we have come from, where we fit in, where we belong.”

One of the half-siblings who lived in Arizona wrote Cline, seeking answers. Cline wrote her back, explaining that he did not keep a record of the donors’ identities. “We used fresh samples collected approximately one hour prior to the insemination,” Cline lied. “I matched the blood type of the donor to that of my patient’s husband and also his general physical characteristics. I almost always used resident physicians and most were married with children of their own. Also, their family history was entirely negative for any familial illnesses. This many years later, I could not possibly remember anything else.”

Based on separate complaints from Ballard and Killion, the Indiana attorney general’s office sent Cline two letters in January 2015 that indicated he was under investigation. Cline, who had been retired for five years, had 20 days to respond to the letter.

In his response, Cline claimed not to remember either person, and cited an Indiana statute that held that doctors only had to keep records on patients for seven years after their last treatment. Those records had long been destroyed. Cline said that he had performed artificial inseminations from 1971 to 1981 using fresh sperm. He reaffirmed what he had told all of his patients: that he did not use the same donor for more than three pregnancies. He said that sometime in the 1980s he stopped using fresh semen, and started using frozen samples from Follas Laboratories in Indianapolis, a new standard of care that started around the same time by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. “I never knew the name of the frozen donors,” he told the AG. “I can emphatically say that at no time did I ever use my own sample for insemination nor was I a donor at Follas Laboratories.” Cline accused both women of slander and libel. In the meantime, the AG’s office continued its investigation, sending a subpoena to Follas Laboratories. No records there showed them working with Cline.

Later, in May 2015, one of the half-siblings who identified herself only as “Carrie” took her story to the media. Fox 59’s Angela Ganote interviewed Carrie and two others. The reporter referred the case to the Marion County prosecutor’s office. “I went from being an only child to having at least eight siblings overnight,” Carrie told Ganote. “I think as humans, we have the need and want to know where we have come from, where we fit in, where we belong.”

As the AG’s inquiry unfolded, Ballard and Killion mounted their own investigation. Using 23andMe, they built their own family tree. The sisters discovered they were genetically related to more than 70 of Cline’s relatives. Their closest match was a first cousin of Cline. Their suspicion started to narrow to two possibilities: Either Cline must have used a sample from one of his family members, or he had used his own. Both ideas sickened the donor children.

Eventually, Ballard and Killion arranged a meeting with two of Cline’s adult children, Doug and Donna, at a church in Brazil, Indiana. The Cline children took notes as Ballard and Killion shared their findings. Doug and Donna relayed what they had coaxed out of their father: He claimed to have donated his own samples to a sperm bank, but not on more than eight occasions. He claimed to have done so to Follas Laboratories, despite the attorney general finding no evidence of it.

Ballard and Killion knew his statement wasn’t true, based on what they were hearing from an investigator with the AG’s office. Doug confronted his father with the facts, and Cline changed his story. He had other children out there, Cline told his son.

Not long after the meeting, Ballard spoke with Doug by phone. According to an affidavit, Doug asked her to keep the story a secret. That didn’t sit well with Ballard, who demanded a meeting with Cline.

In spring 2016, Ballard, Killion, and four others met their biological father for the first time at a restaurant in Greencastle. There, Cline confessed to using his own sample as many as 50 times, court documents say. He was helping women who really wanted a baby, and his wife supported his efforts. In fact, he had never used a sperm bank. Cline also said he wasn’t sure when he stopped using his own sperm, though the youngest known Cline offspring was born in 1986.