The Secret World of Sperm

The husband called first, in a tizzy. While cleaning out a waste bin full of dirty Q-Tips, his wife had come across a used condom. She freaked.

Confronted with the desiccated, slightly bloody evidence, he told her he was certain it wasn’t his. And keep the condom, he said. I’m gonna prove it.

It didn’t take long for his mind to start working. Had his wife cheated? Did the baby sitter do it? He ended up calling Fidelity Test, a Fort Worth-based service that provides confidential DNA and drug tests to the general public. Type “adultery” or “infidelity” into a search engine, and you might find www.fidelitytest.com, which was launched two years ago by Ron Fazio, a forensic scientist who works at a police crime lab. Staffed by four scientists today, the company has seen its business take off in recent months after running a series of catchy “Who’s Your Daddy?” ads in local newspapers, including the Dallas Observer.

The case of the used condom was Fidelity Test’s first big DNA case. Fazio approached it methodically, testing the semen residue and comparing it with the husband’s DNA. “I felt really upset when the results came back and it was his condom,” Fazio says. “He was just so positive it wasn’t his.”

The case was confusing to Fidelity and upsetting to the couple, who were still swearing their loyalty to each other. Fazio gently suggested a final option. “I theorized to the wife, that before she makes any decisions, she might want to have the outside of the condom tested,” Fazio says.

The woman agreed. And after $800 of tests, the mystery was solved and the marriage saved. Turns out the condom was their own, mistakenly tossed into the Q-Tip receptacle some months or years ago. “If it’s kept dry and out of direct sunlight,” Fazio says of the DNA evidence in the condom, “it’ll last for a very long time.”

Case closed, with two satisfied customers who presumably lived happily ever after. Fazio was relieved. “I don’t like giving good people bad news,” he says.

That, however, happens often enough at Fidelity Test. “It’s so entertaining. The dirty world of semen and sperm,” says Jennifer Rieck, a crime-lab chemist and one of Fazio’s partners. Like Fazio, she moonlights for Fidelity Test, talking to customers on the phone, conducting tests and serving as an expert witness in paternity disputes. Pretty soon, she says, Fidelity will be busy enough to hire full-time staff.

Fazio started the company with an idealistic aim: He wanted to offer impartial, quality forensic testing for free to small police departments that might handle just a few rapes a year, a typical crime for which DNA testing is required. While Fazio isn’t there yet, the idea was to use the police work to drive in moneymaking business from private customers. As crime-lab scientists, they knew the demand was there. “We get so many calls at the crime lab, people saying can you do DNA testing on this, and obviously that’s not our job,” says Rieck, who, like Fazio, will not identify publicly the lab where she works. “We can’t do it for the private citizen. But Fidelity Test can.”

The company offers several procedures, ranging in price from $65 for “stain elimination” to $495 for a court-ready DNA paternity test. The simplest procedures, which aren’t intended for use in court, are conducted in Fidelity’s home laboratories. The DNA cases are sent to a certified lab. Fidelity’s customers can do the math themselves: “Paying $495 for a paternity test is a lot cheaper than 18 years of child support,” Rieck says.

While paternity cases yield the biggest proportion of Fidelity’s business, Rieck says–with about 75 percent of the male clients turning out to be the fathers–suspicious husbands and wives are the other most frequent type of client. And roughly half the time, Rieck says, their fears are borne out. Men and women will ship bundles of dirty sheets and undergarments for Fidelity’s stain elimination tests, in which, for example, a suspicious stain on your wife’s underwear is tested to see whether it’s of biological origin. (One female customer sent an entire hotel mattress pad.) Many times, the stain is just undissolved laundry detergent. If it tests positive for biological matter, however, it can also be tested for the presence of sperm and semen. Fidelity Test looks for a specific protein found only in human male semen, Fazio says, and if it turns up, he can prepare a slide and visually identify sperm cells, then send the client a picture of the sperm cells. With further testing–and additional costs–the sperm cells can be compared with the husband’s DNA. If it isn’t his, well, gotcha.

Rieck says men take advantage of the service all the time to see whether their wives or girlfriends are cheating, and some of them get downright obsessive, sending in as many as 10 items for testing. They just know they’re right. The great majority of Fidelity Test’s customers, in fact, are men, something that surprised Rieck when the business started taking off. “It’s men that are mad as hell,” she says. “It’s shocking. I did not believe it. They want to know.”

Her typical male client, she says, is “40 to 50 years old, middle-income, going through a divorce, they’ve had questions from the beginning. Now things have gotten ugly, and they want to know.

“To be honest,” she adds, “I don’t think they’re smart enough to bust their wives. Women are pretty smart about cheating. They’ve watched Oprah, they’ve seen the signs”–for those unfamiliar with daytime television or girl talk, that’s a new wardrobe, a sudden interest in working out, late nights at the office, etc.–“their husband has 10 of them, and they’re gonna bust him.

“Men, they’re busy. They don’t have time for this.”

While numerous laboratories around the country offer DNA and drug testing, Fazio says Fidelity gets its edge through one-on-one service and competitive rates. Some of the bigger labs aren’t geared toward individual clients, and some online services charge exorbitant rates for tests that are far from conclusive, Fazio says. For evidence that will be used in court, Fidelity’s court-qualified scientists personally gather the DNA sample, thereby establishing a chain of custody. Unlike some online testers, they offer “confirmational” tests, which establish whether there’s a match with a specific individual’s DNA. And they promise confidentiality, delivering test results whichever way their clients demand–via e-mail, fax, a friend’s cell phone, whatever. Nervous customers can handle all of their communications online and through the mail. “They never even have to speak to us,” Rieck says.

Fidelity’s two years of business have yielded some strange requests, as well as a nutcase or two. “We get a lot of people wanting to test the babies in utero,” Rieck says. “No doctor will do it, and there’s no reason to do it. Child support doesn’t start till they’re born, anyway.” Other men want Fidelity Test to actually be present the moment the baby is born–“the second it comes out,” Rieck says–ready to collect a DNA sample. Fidelity declines, of course.

Then there was the anonymous dude from a New York area code who called, cussing and fuming. “He kept saying, ‘I want to make this bitch pay. I want to make this bitch pay.’ Over and over,” Rieck says. “We refused to do the testing on it. It was very troubling.”

Through her part-time work, Rieck has learned at least one truth about the state of fidelity in America. “People are just totally out of control with their affairs,” she says. “Oh, yeah. There’s just such a business for it.

“People want to know,” she adds. “And if you’re married, you have the right to know. Absolutely.”