How a DNA test solved a medical mystery – and revealed a doctor’s decades of deception

A technician loads patient samples into a machine for testing at Myriad Genetics Friday, May 31, 2002, in Salt Lake City. (AP / Douglas C. Pizac)

Summer McKesson struggled to breathe for years. Doctors told her it was because her blood would not stop clotting – and they couldn’t figure out why.

A single clot alone can be lethal; but the recurring and unexplained clots that formed in McKesson’s heart and lungs were a medical mystery.

After multiple surgeries to remove clots and scar tissue, McKesson traveled to the Mayo Clinic, where she sat in a conference room while renowned physicians and specialists worked through her case on a whiteboard.

But even they were baffled.

“To hear that even they had never seen it before,” she told CNN through tears, “I came back (home) just crushed at that point.”

Desperate for answers, McKesson said she turned to 23andMe, hoping the DNA analysis service, which claims to offer insights into its clients’ genetic health history, might unlock some clues to her condition.

But her quest for answers would unearth a family secret – and a doctor’s decades-old deception that has ensnared multiple families across the country.

Ask your parents about Dr. Peete

McKesson never questioned her genetics – or considered 23andMe – until a team of surgeons performed an urgent, open-heart procedure in 2022 to remove clots from her heart and lungs.

As she recovered, McKesson said her surgeon dropped another bomb.

While operating, he’d noticed the connective tissue that supports her organs was stretchy and unusually fragile. He told her the complication – coupled with McKesson’s willowy build and Amazonian height – could be a sign of an inherited disorder called Marfan syndrome.

His suspicions were correct. A geneticist confirmed McKesson’s diagnosis, and said her clotting disorder was also genetic, which ushered in a host of lifelong health challenges.

Her heart would now need to be constantly monitored, and she will eventually need at least one more major heart surgery.

But the diagnosis was puzzling for another reason: both of her conditions are genetic and, as far as she knew, no one else in her family had them.

McKesson, 43, said she didn’t have a full picture of her family’s health history because her father died when she was a teenager. So, she signed up for 23andMe, submitted a DNA sample, and waited.

The results arrived in her inbox in October 2023.

“I was just sitting on my couch after work, and kind of quickly pulled up the results on my phone,” McKesson recalled. At first, she said, she was curious to learn more about her family’s ethnic background.

“Growing up, I always was like … ‘I don’t look like any of y’all. No one has my nose. I’m a foot taller than everyone,’” she said, adding her family used to joke that she was adopted.

While there weren’t many surprises in her family’s ancestry, McKesson said when she navigated to the “family members” section of the site, she drew up short:

The test showed she had seven half-siblings.

“I just remember being shocked and my mind just swirling,” she said. “I’m like, how is this possible? … Did my dad have another family or something?”

Was she actually adopted? None of what she was learning made sense.

She sent screenshots of the results to a trusted group of friends, and they discussed different theories. Then, later that night, she sent a message to her newly discovered half-siblings through the 23andMe website.

“Humor has really gotten me through a lot of this,” McKesson said, so she opted for a lighter tone in her first note.

She sent the same message to each name listed on the site. And then, she waited. It would take more than a month for anyone to respond.

“I don’t want to cause any conflict,” one of them finally wrote, “but if you want to dig into this, I’d ask your parents if they went to see Dr. Peete.”

A doctor’s decades of deception

In 1980, Laurie Kruppa and her husband, Doug, found themselves waiting for a fertility specialist named Dr. Charles Peete in a sterile exam room at Duke University Hospital.

The couple wanted children, Laurie told CNN, but Doug had a vasectomy during a previous marriage, so her OB-GYN referred them to the physicians at Duke for fertility treatment.

The 1980s and ‘90s would prove to be a time of innovation in the fields of genetics and assisted reproductive technology. In 1978, a woman gave birth to a baby named Louise in the United Kingdom through in vitro fertilization, or IVF, making her the first child to be born through the novel procedure.

But the Kruppas opted to use intrauterine insemination, or IUI, a procedure that had been around in some form for centuries but had only recently become common thanks to advances in freezing and banking sperm.

During the procedure, a doctor places donor sperm directly into the patient’s uterus during ovulation, to increase the chances of conception.

The Kruppas were instructed to bring $50 to each visit and, Laurie stressed, they were told the donor sperm would come from a resident in the university’s medical school.

At each visit, Kruppa said she laid back on the table, placed her feet in the stirrups, and waited. And then, Peete would walk into the room.

“He seemed nice enough and concerned, but we didn’t have a lot of interaction,” Kruppa recalled decades later.

I would “wait 10 or 15 minutes, and then he’d come back and insert the sperm.”

Kruppa said it took the couple seven attempts to conceive their eldest daughter. Two visits, less than a year later, to conceive their second daughter. And a single visit in 1984 to conceive their son.

And for each child, Peete used his own sperm without her knowledge or consent.

Revelations and revulsion

It would be decades before the Kruppas would learn the truth about their children’s paternity.

During those years, Kruppa said she and her husband had moved their family from North Carolina to Ohio and debated whether they should even tell their kids they were donor-conceived.

“We thought maybe the two girls were definitely related because they came 16 months apart. So, we just thought maybe it was a resident that was still there,” Kruppa said.

“My son was born two and a half years later, so we thought it had to be somebody different.”

After years of keeping their secret, Kruppa said the rising popularity of consumer DNA products eventually forced their hand. They revealed the news to their children during a family vacation.

“They all reacted very well,” Kruppa said of her kids. “They’ve never not thought that (Doug) was their dad.”

But they also joined 23andMe and began doing their own research. Kruppa said her middle child was the first to discover their connection to Peete. Out of the blue, her daughter asked what hospital her parents used and if Kruppa remembered the name of her doctor.

Then, the kids called another family meeting and revealed what Peete had done to their parents. Initially, Kruppa said, “I was really glad they were all true siblings.”

It took her months to fully process what Peete’s actions meant for her – and over time, she became angry.

“When I started thinking, I got much more upset about the ethics of it,” she said. “I’m pretty sure he was my father’s age … This is like getting raped by your father.”

As the Kruppas’ children were grappling with the truth about their paternity, Jim Harris was in North Carolina exchanging emails with a newfound half-sibling on 23andMe.

Less than a year after his father died from cancer, Harris said his mom called and insisted they meet to discuss something important.

“She drops this bomb that, my dad never wanted to tell me this, but they couldn’t conceive at the time, and they went to a fertility clinic at Duke University.

“It was early 1977,” he said, “and they got a sperm donor.”

Coming so soon on the heels of his father’s death, Harris said the confession caused him to spiral. He was raised as an only child, but 23andMe revealed he had multiple half-siblings.

And Harris said his conversations with one sibling in particular stood out.

At first, the woman was confused about their shared genetics, then curious. Maybe she was also donor-conceived, and their parents had used the same donor, she suggested.

But when Harris started researching the woman’s maiden name, he discovered her father was Dr. Peete. He sent her a message.

To Harris, the conclusion was clear: His mom’s doctor had used his own sperm instead of a donor’s.

It took Peete’s daughter days to respond to the revelation, and when she did, she admitted to being “stunned, shocked and completely baffled.”

“It didn’t even cross my mind that my dad would’ve been the donor, because my dad was the most honorable human being,” she wrote, “… being a part of whatever or however this happened just doesn’t add up.”

But as they continued to exchange messages, she later noted how Jim looked a lot like her father.

“I think there is more to this story we may never really know,” she said.

The country doctor

Dr. Charles Henry Peete Jr. died in 2013 at the age of 89. CNN reached out to his immediate family multiple times during the reporting of this story, but did not hear back.

A public obituary posted online describes Peete as a “compassionate country doctor,” who discovered his passion for medicine by observing his father, the town physician.

Peete graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1947 and, according to the obituary, he completed a residency in obstetrics, gynecology and endocrinology before accepting a position as an assistant professor and physician at Duke in 1956.

Decades later, in the late 1970s, Peete would become one of Dr. Ken Fortier’s attending physicians and his mentor during his gynecology and gynecological surgery residency at Duke.

“He was very calm and composed,” Fortier recalled. “He was superb technically as a surgeon. He made things look easy that others might struggle with.”

Peete, he said, was the type of person who was “quietly there in the background, but they’re always there when you need (them).”

At the time, Fortier told CNN, it was widely known that residents and medical students – especially those specializing in obstetrics and gynecology – were often tapped to donate sperm.

“There wasn’t anything taboo about it,” he said. “There were people in the department who specialized in infertility that tended to have a kind of cadre of donors, and they usually were the best people that were generally healthy.”

But when he learned, through CNN, that his mentor and colleague had fathered the children of some of his patients, Fortier searched for the right words.

“The idea … the thought of using one’s own sperm … that surprised me,” he said.

When fertility treatment becomes fraud

Among the earliest publicized cases of intrauterine insemination (IUI) in the United States was an act of what’s come to be known as “fertility fraud” – when a physician deliberately misrepresents the origin of donor sperm or eggs, oftentimes using his own sample instead to impregnate a patient.

In 1909, a physician in Minnesota wrote a letter to the editor of a medical publication describing an “artificial impregnation” he said he’d witnessed 25 years earlier – in 1884 – while attending medical school in Philadelphia.

“At the time the procedure was so novel, so peculiar in its human ethics, that the six young men of the senior class who (witnessed) the operation were pledged to absolute secrecy,” author A.D. Hard wrote.

A wealthy couple had visited the hospital to learn why they were struggling to conceive. Hard said the husband was deemed sterile and one of the medical students joked that the only way his wife could get pregnant was with “a hired man.”

“The woman was chloroformed and with a hard rubber syringe some fresh semen from the best-looking member of the class was deposited in the uterus, and the cervix slightly plugged with gauze,” Hard wrote.

The professor, he said, later confessed his actions to the woman’s husband.

“Strange as it may seem, the man was delighted with the idea,” Hard wrote.

Both the doctor and the professor agreed to never tell the man’s wife, he said.

Today, these actions – and those of Dr. Peete – would be deemed not only unethical, but an act of medical malpractice.

Informed consent – or the idea patients have the right to make independent and informed decisions about their own bodies and healthcare outcomes – is a cornerstone of modern medicine.

In using his own sperm without his patients’ knowledge, experts told CNN, Peete violated that central covenant.

“If he said, ‘we’re using a resident’s sperm,’ and it was his own sperm, that’s very problematic,” said Dr. Robert Klitzman, director of Columbia University’s Masters of Bioethics program and author of the book “Designing Babies.”

“The standard (of care) should be to tell people where the sperm is coming from,” he said, “Even back then.”

But Peete is far from the only doctor to have committed this type of deception. In 1992, Cecil Jacobson was convicted of 52 counts of fraud and perjury for inseminating his patients with his own sperm and was sent to prison. And the advent of consumer DNA products has led to numerous claims of fertility fraud over the years.

For all its focus on creating life, the U.S. fertility industry remains underregulated, Klitzman said. While many countries have pushed to limit or outright prohibit anonymous sperm donations, Klitzman noted the U.S. does not have similar laws.

“There are many things that we look at now with an ethical understanding of the full harms, risks, benefits … and think – what were they thinking back then?” Klitzman said.

Peete ‘forever changed my life’

That question haunts Peete’s progeny. Did he use his own sperm because there was a shortage? Or was this ego? Some kind of God complex that drove him to essentially commit medical fraud?

For McKesson, the rationale for Peete’s actions is secondary to their repercussions. Learning the truth of her paternity has sparked something of an existential crisis, she said.

“Ultimately, the hardest thing to process once you started putting the pieces together was that I was a product of a crime, that I was the product of medical rape,” she said.

Both McKesson’s clotting disorder and Marfan syndrome are genetic, meaning one of her biological parents either passed on the traits, or it’s what scientists describe as a “new mutation.”

Our DNA consists of billions of letters that combine to form a unique word: You. But sometimes, as the genetic code from each parent divides and replicates, changes are made. Scientists call these mutations.

“Most mutations have no meaning,” Klitzman said, “but occasionally one does and that’s the so-called ‘de novo,’ – a new mutation.”

These mutations can be spontaneous, but the paternal age of a sperm donor can also be a factor. A study published earlier this month in Nature revealed genetic risks for children increase as fathers age.

Peete would have been approaching 60 at the time McKesson was conceived.

When she learned Peete was her biological father, McKesson said she reached out to his family for more information on his health but did not hear back.

“I’ve never blamed his family for anything, I mean, they didn’t ask for any of this either,” McKesson said.” But “let’s just say (Marfan syndrome) doesn’t run in his family – it could also come from the fact that he was older.”

Without further insights into her paternal health history, McKesson admitted she doesn’t have a way to be sure.

“I’ve just had to accept that this chapter is never going to be closed,” she said. “It’s just forever changed my life.”

Still, McKesson said, because genetic impacts can span generations, she’s been vocal about her conditions with her half-siblings, encouraging anyone she meets to get themselves – and their children – tested.

At McKesson’s insistence, Harris, who is 6’7”, was also tested for Marfan syndrome, but he was negative.

Thus far, McKesson said Peete is believed to have fathered at least 12 children outside of his immediate family over more than 20 years.

But, she added, that number is solely based on those who have submitted DNA samples to consumer DNA sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.

And with 23andMe filing for bankruptcy earlier this year, her chances of finding any additional siblings may be dwindling.

A matter of life and death

Since learning the truth of what happened, both Kruppa and McKesson said they have separately been in contact with Duke University, where Peete was employed.

In emails reviewed by CNN, the university appeared initially to be responsive. A lawyer was hired to contact Peete’s previous clients and investigate his actions, and, at Kruppa’s instigation, the university now also offers an ethics course that addresses fertility fraud.

For a time, McKesson said, the university also appeared to be mediating conversations between Peete’s victims and his immediate family.

But when she continued to insist the Peete family provide more insight into the doctor’s genetic and medical history, they stopped responding.

When reached for comment on this story, Duke Health officials said in a statement its program is built on a “commitment to operating within the highest ethical and legal standards in the field.”

“We have been made aware of unacceptable actions by an individual that occurred in our program in the early days of fertility care during the late 1970s and early 1980s,” the statement said. “The unacceptable actions could not happen today at Duke Health and should never have happened.”

CNN also reached out to the legal team that investigated Peete’s actions but did not receive a response.

In the U.S., 14 states have passed laws against so-called fertility fraud. North Carolina, where Dr. Peete was employed, does not yet have a statute against it.

Both McKesson and Kruppa said they have separately considered lawsuits. But, given the lack of regulation over the U.S. fertility industry, and the fact that Peete has died, they feel their options are limited.

McKesson said it’s “pretty impossible for the victims to have any sort of justice in this situation.”

Still, she told CNN, she was most disappointed by how both the Peete family and Duke University have responded to the situation – especially considering that, at least in her case, it could be a matter of life and death.

“I felt like this was a chance for them to step up and be involved in doing the right thing, and they’ve chosen not to,” she said.

“The patients that were impacted and their families deserve to know that they may have had a crime committed against them and be acknowledged – and to know their family medical history to the extent that that’s possible.”

For a while, McKesson said, she would research her newfound siblings to see what traits they have in common. She has the same smile as one of Peete’s daughters, she said. And both McKesson and Harris are slim and tall.

But she said she’s decided to speak out now because she’s concerned other siblings might also unknowingly be living with a life-threatening genetic disorder.

With treatment, a person diagnosed with Marfan syndrome can expect to live as long as someone without the disease.

But left untreated, the average life expectancy is 45 years.

“My hope in sharing my story is that if I have any other half-siblings out there, that I could save their life by knowing my medical history,” she said.

“I’m trying to do the right thing.”

By Chelsea Bailey, CNN

CNN’s Ryan Young and Meridith Edwards contributed to this report.