It's been a little over a week since Ulrich Klopfer's wife made a shocking discovery about her husband's secret obsession. Nothing, family members say, prepared her for the grisly scene she stumbled on when she went to his garage to clean out his belongings. What she found, family members say, is the stuff of nightmares: cardboard boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling, of tiny lifeless bodies -- a hidden collection of 2,246 victims no one ever knew he had.
"I can tell you, in the 31 years I've been doing this job, I have never seen anything like this," Will County Sheriff Mike Kelley said. "Ever." Attorneys, prosecutors, county investigators, they've all been combing the property -- looking for other places where cadavers may be stashed. His wife, Sherry, the family attorney says, is in "total shock." "She had no idea he was doing this." Together with her sister, she counted more than 70 boxes of dead babies and baby parts -- inside small, sealed plastic bags. Some, she realized from the markings, had been there for almost 20 years.
The idea that any couple was living next to a warehouse of aborted babies is like the plot to a horror movie. And yet, for all of the parallels to abortionist Kermit Gosnell, the lack of media attention is the one pro-lifers object to most. Like the Pennsylvania serial killer, who joked about snipping babies' necks and is responsible for at least one woman's death (probably more), Klopfer's sick trophy collection has gotten barely a passing mention from the mainstream press.
I have my own opinions about why the media is silent each time the curtain is pulled back on the abortion industry. These scenes, which even Hollywood would be pressed to outdo, begs the question: How did our culture became so coarsened? Obviously, a lot of people would like to avoid the answer.
But I'm not the only one wondering why the press is AWOL. David Mastio, a deputy editor at USA Today, was so disturbed by it that he wrote an entire column about the radio silence surrounding Klopfer.
"At my request, the conservative Media Research Center looked into coverage of Klopfer and found little interest. No coverage on the nightly broadcast news. Nothing on MSNBC. A story on CNN, and a few on Fox News. National newspapers each handled it with one or two stories." And yet, he points out, "there's a lot to be curious about. How does a doctor get in trouble in five states and yet remain an abortionist in other states that claim to care about women? Why would Planned Parenthood fire a 15-year employee rather than address concerns for patient safety? How does a doctor amass enough dead bodies in his garage to do a passable imitation of a World War II mass grave? Didn't his employees notice he was taking home baby parts?"
"How does a story this sensational -- that happens to have partly taken place in presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg's hometown, where he's the mayor -- not get more than cursory attention from the national news media? Now there's a question."
Thursday, on "Washington Watch," Congressman Jim Banks (R-Ind.) was also in disbelief that this wasn't a major headline, given the South Bend mayor's involvement. "There's nothing funny about this story," he reiterated, "but it was hilarious to hear Mayor Pete's response about not making this political. It very much is political. Mayor Pete himself vetoed an ordinance that would have allowed a health care option for women -- a pro-life health care option -- to be set up right next to the Legacy Abortion Clinic of Dr. Klopfer... So far, he has yet to clarify why he vetoed that measure, but it was on the eve of him becoming a presidential candidate. So we can assume that actually, in fact, it is all about politics, right?"
