Courtney Crowder

5 days ago | desmoinesregister.com | Courtney Crowder

This is the second installment in the Register's three-part serial, "Doctor Deception."Dr. John H. Randall told the woman to come to the clinic after hours for her procedure. When she arrived, he was alone. No nurse. No residents. No one else. The woman was having trouble conceiving, she said in a deposition taken five decades after this appointment, and Dr. Randall was well-known in the community for helping women who hadn’t been able to get pregnant. Women like her. He was beloved, really.

5 days ago | desmoinesregister.com | Courtney Crowder

This is the final installment in the Register's three-part serial, "Doctor Deception."Bert Jay Miller checked his Ancestry profile regularly in the months that followed his discovery that his biological father wasn’t the man he’d grown up calling Dad. His network of half-siblings — the scions who all discovered late in life they shared the genes of Dr. John H. Randall, their mother’s fertility doctor — regularly checked their profiles, too.

5 days ago | desmoinesregister.com | Courtney Crowder

This is the first installment in the Register's three-part serial, "Doctor Deception."Liz Bright wasn’t going to sleep until she found their connection, the one she knew would unquestionably link her to him. She meant this literally. She was in her fifth hour of searching, skipping from family tree to family tree, the blue screen of her computer playing nightlight in the darkness of morning’s wee hours. No letting up, she told herself, until this was done.

5 days ago | desmoinesregister.com | Courtney Crowder

Barbara and Warren Steinkraus desperately wanted to have a baby. So did Marlys and Clyde Stoughton. And Donna and Bert Miller Sr., too. The couples weren’t acquainted. They lived in different Iowa towns and grappled as if in bell jars with the persistent companions of grief and hope inherent in infertility. But their stories collided at the University of Iowa’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, bound together by the doctor who helped them conceive: Dr. John H. Randall.

3 weeks ago | desmoinesregister.com | Courtney Crowder

Heart-pounding stock car races. Action-packed demolition derbies. Vibrant Charros performances. Stunning tractor pulls. And gravity-defying linemen going head-to-head in a utilities rodeo for the ages. All these events and even more dirt, speed and agility are set to return to the Elwell Family Park during this year's Iowa State Fair.