A personal history genetics testing for fun became a quest for information about what happened at a University of Utah Fertility Clinic, where it seems one man’s sample was switched with that of someone who was a convicted felon.

After 371 boxes of documents and more than 170,000 microfilm sheets of evidence, all Pamela Branum got was an apology.

Branum, a San Antonio resident , is “disappointed” by the response from the U. She had hoped for a little more from the U’s investigation after a discrepancy resulted in a convicted felon becoming the biological father of her child.

She began using a clinic, which she knew as the University of Utah Fertility Clinic, in 1990 with her husband John. The couple were having trouble conceiving.

But two years later it seemed their luck had changed. They had their daughter Annie in May of 1992. Annie was supposed to be conceived through John’s sperm, but Thomas Lippert, an employee of the clinic, replaced the sample with his own sperm. And the U is unsure whether the swap was intentional or accidental.

Branum discovered this switch 21 years later when she was studying her family’s genealogy. She thought it would be fun to have her daughter and husband’s DNA tested with 23andMe, a major genealogical database. When she received the results in the mail, however, Annie showed a zero percent correlation with her father.

She had Annie tested with another DNA database that found a match with Lippert’s first cousin. They pieced together the puzzle and reported the incident to the U in April 2013.

“What happened to us was wrong, and we’re still concerned that [Lippert] did it to other people, but balancing that out, we have a beautiful daughter and we love her so much,” Branum said.

The U’s analysis, performed internally by three of the university’s physicians and Alta Charo , a medical ethicist from the University of Wisconsin, began in January/February of 2014 and took about 90 days to complete.

…The analysis found that two clinics, Reproduction Medical Technologies, Inc. and the University of Utah 3900 South Community Laboratory, both defunct, were owned and shared by U employees and were, in some regards, indistinguishable. The clinics split office spaces and were “basically the same thing,” Nelson said.

The investigation states Lippert worked at both of the fertility clinics as a laboratory technician from August 1988 to July 1993, maybe 1994 at the latest; reports indicate he was an “effective” employee. Others, such as Lippert’s widow Jean Lippert, said he worked there between 1986 and 1995.