Mm, Mm Good

"She said, 'I work for Rajanna, and he's going to fire me because I'm pregnant. He says he can't have pregnant girls working at an abortion clinic. I feel he's doing me wrong,'" Frye tells the Pitch. Frye says Garcia complained that Rajanna sometimes shorted his employees on their paychecks. "She was pretty upset with him," Frye says.

But Frye says Garcia seemed almost apologetic when she told him that she and other employees suspected Rajanna was eating fetuses. "She said, 'I can't prove it, but we all think that's what he's doing.'"

After telling Frye about some of the problems at the clinic -- that Rajanna disposed of medical waste in regular trash bags, which he left with each night, and that he also rushed half-sedated women out the door -- she left.

The next day, Garcia came back to the Pregnancy Resource Center. This time, Frye says, Garcia offered to take photographs of Rajanna's clinic. She said she had no money, so Frye gave her $20 to buy a disposable camera. The following day, she brought the camera to Frye, who had the photos developed at a Wal-Mart.

One photo showed that a bathroom used by patients and staff doubled as an instrument-sterilization room. The toilet had a brown stain smeared across the seat, and Styrofoam soda cups were stacked next to and on top of it. A pile of clutter and a broom sat next to the toilet, and a bottle of Always Save bleach sat on a dingy, peeling linoleum floor near full, open trash bags. A rubber hose ran from a sink over the toilet and into a dishwasher used for sterilizing surgical instruments, and a tray of instruments sat atop the dishwasher.

In a photo of the break room, every flat surface seemed crammed with clutter -- an open box of Cheez-Its, a bottle of soda, papers, cleaning products. A photo of the interior of the break-room refrigerator showed several cups containing pre-drawn syringes of drugs for patients along with a cake and a bottle of Dr Pepper and a bag of Kraft cheese cubes. In another photo, an orange garbage bag was held open, revealing a Styrofoam cup that appeared to contain a blob of bloody tissue.

Four months before Garcia took the photos, in April 2003, the Kansas Legislature passed a bill that would create special licensing for abortion clinics. Abortion doctors were already subject to investigation and discipline by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts, a body made up of physicians that can suspend or revoke the license of a doctor who is found to be out of compliance with state standards. But for the second year in a row, anti-abortion legislators tried to pass stricter rules.

Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, however, vetoed the bill.

As the 2004 legislative session began the following January, Frye approached Kansans for Life's legislative director, Kathy Ostrowski, and told her that he had photos depicting dirty conditions at Rajanna's clinic. Ostrowski urged him to file an official complaint with the Board of Healing Arts so that an investigation could be launched. On February 17, 2004, Frye did so, turning over the photos with a notarized statement about how he had obtained them.

In March, the board's director, Larry Buening, said he expected the Rajanna matter to be resolved only a couple of months later, by May 2004.

Instead, the board did not take action for a full year, and its glacial pace became a rallying point for abortion foes attempting again to pass licensing legislation.

Ostrowski says that, until Frye approached her, Kansans for Life had not planned to put much effort into an attempt to resurrect the licensing bill for the 2004 session, which would be spearheaded for the third consecutive year by state Rep. Peggy Mast of Emporia. "We just figured she'd veto it again," Ostrowski says of Sebelius.

But then Ostrowski saw the Rajanna pictures and convinced Frye to file his complaint. Though several legislators asked to see copies of the pictures, Ostrowski says she refused, in order to avoid interfering with the board's investigation.

The following month, in March, Ostrowski bumped into Tomasic, who was in Topeka to testify at a hearing about another bill. Through Tomasic, Ostrowski learned about the detectives' visit to Rajanna's clinic and obtained Howard's name and phone number. Ostrowski called Howard and asked him for a statement about the conditions he saw at the clinic.

Without the photos, the detective's testimony gave Mast, the bill's sponsor, something to help sway her undecided colleagues. "Then she could say the clinic was so filthy that a cop didn't want to sit down in it. That gave her some oomph on the House floor," Ostrowski says.

Howard's statement was full of disturbing details. When Howard and his partner visited the clinic, Rajanna's white coat appeared rumpled and stained, and his hands looked dirty, Howard wrote. Howard's partner, Mansaw, later told Howard that he had seen dried blood on the floor of the surgery room, which was covered in old plaid carpet, and that the room looked "nasty."

"The clinic was filthy. It was disgusting. It was repulsive," Howard tells the Pitch. "To think that there was invasive surgery going on in that clinic was not a comforting thought. It might remind you of a clinic you'd run into in a Third World country."