The World's Most Bizarre Murders

by James Marrison

  To begin with, Milat seemed pleasant and chatted affably enough, but he soon turned nasty and pulled over to the side of the road, where he produced a gun. Onions fled for his life as Milat attempted to shoot him down. Luckily, Onions managed to pull over another car for help and later reported the incident at the local Bowral police station. Shortly afterwards, Onions returned home and soon discovered that several bodies had been discovered just five miles away from where he had been attacked. He immediately phoned the police in New South Wales; he was flown back to Australia and made a positive ID. When police raided Milat’s home, they found possessions belonging to his victims, such as a sleeping bag and items of clothing. In 1996, he was found guilty of murder and handed down multiple life sentences, to be served consecutively, for the slayings of seven backpackers. In June 2006, he threatened suicide when his TV and toasted-sandwich maker were taken away from him and when he’s not on hunger strike he spends his time whinging about his lack of rights in the high-security wing of the Gouldburn jail in New South Wales.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘BUTCHER BROWN’ AND THE DEADLY DOCTORS

  In May 1998, stump lover Philip Bondy paid ten thousand dollars to get his perfectly healthy leg amputated in Tijuana. Because no one else would do it he chose renegade surgeon Dr John ‘Butcher Brown’.

  For his entire adult life, Philip Bondy had been looking for a doctor to amputate his leg. Bondy suffered from a rare mental disorder called apotemnophilia; bizarrely, he had despised his leg throughout his life and, for reasons that he had never been able to adequately explain, he had wanted to be an amputee for as long as he could remember. He also felt a strong sexual attraction to amputees. He was 79 years old now, though, and because his leg was perfectly healthy no qualified surgeon in the country would ever agree to remove it.

  Like many apotemnophiliacs, Bondy was prepared to go to extreme lengths in order to rid himself of his hated limb. Unlike many fellow sufferers, however, he was not prepared simply to maim himself and hope that his leg would later be amputated in hospital. He wanted a qualified surgeon who would do a clean, painless job and then make sure that he recovered in comfort and in safety.

  He had heard about someone who might do it, too. That person was Dr Brown, whom he had been told about by a close friend and fellow apotemnophiliac, Gregg Furth; Furth had travelled to Mexico only three weeks previously for a similar operation, though he had backed out at the very last minute when he saw one of Brown’s assistants wielding a butcher’s knife. So Furth had proposed a swap and phoned his friend Bondy. The latter had jumped at the chance to get his long-awaited amputation and almost immediately booked a flight from New York to San Diego.

  There were risks, though. He was retired, a septuagenarian and not exactly in great shape. Actually he was in much worse shape than he knew. He was emaciated, had a very weak heart and was suffering from pneumonia when he finally decided to go through with the operation. To a qualified surgeon, any one of these factors would have instantly ruled Bondy out of undergoing a major operation. Not to Dr Brown, though, who instantly agreed to the swap, with no questions asked. All Bondy had to do was to come up with $10,000 and then get down to Tijuana, where Brown ran a clinic.

  So why would someone like Bondy want to take the risk? Why, for that matter, would anyone want their own perfectly healthy limb removed? According to amputee and apotemnophilia expert Alex Mensaert, for people like Philip Bondy it is an unavoidable need, a need that they have had since birth. ‘They are born with this feeling,’ Alex told me. ‘The day they find out that there are amputees in this world they know that they want to become an amputee too. Most discover that they have this desire very young – at the age of five to seven. The people I know who are now amputees are completely happy – much more happy than before, when they still had all their limbs.

  ‘Some of them start with a toe or a finger and end up amputating a whole leg. The majority of them want to have a leg removed, but I know some people who even want to have two arms and two legs removed. There is even a 19-year-old girl I heard about from the Netherlands who wants to have all of her limbs removed!’

  Needless to say, there are risks attached: ‘There are always a few deaths – certainly when you see how far some people are prepared to go sometimes. The only problem is that the medical world doesn’t want to help them. Some of them cut off their own toes or fingers. They do it mostly with the use of xylocaine, a local anaesthetic. I know a woman who is legless after she froze her legs with dry ice. I also know a doctor who is now a left below-the-knee amputee. He injected his leg with xylocaine and hooked his foot off with a hammer. He then told the hospital that he had had a motorcycle accident. I also know a woman who cut off her own arm with a circular saw.’

  Amputations were a new field for Dr Brown, but already seemed like a potentially lucrative sideline. Almost all his work until then had revolved around sex changes and plastic surgery. Back in 1973, Brown had first begun to make a name for himself as a sex-change specialist in Los Angeles. In order to obtain gender-reassignment surgery, transsexuals usually have to undergo three months of strict psychotherapy at the very least, but Brown cut through all the red tape and offered sex changes for as little as $2,500 dollars on a walk-in basis.

  To begin with, his rock-bottom sex-change business got rave reviews from his transsexual patients and his office soon became known as ‘the House of Dreams’. But Brown only spent five years practising in LA, because in 1977 he lost his licence owing to gross negligence. So he moved – and subsequently managed to get himself banned from ever practising medicine again in Alaska, Hawaii and St Lucia.

  During his career, Brown carried out an estimated 600 sex-reassignment surgeries. The fact that he was not a qualified surgeon (he had failed the general surgeon’s exam twice and the plastic surgeon’s exam three times) hadn’t deterred him for a moment. Despite his lack of qualifications, Brown had created a revolutionary new process that he called ‘miniaturisation’, which involved reducing the penis and turning it into a pleasure-sensitive clitoris. He also regularly carried out vaginoplastys – an extremely delicate operation that involves splitting the penis open and turning it into a vagina.

  Brown also dabbled in facial reconstructive surgery, breast augmentation and penis enlargement. Unable to work out of a proper surgery, he carried out the majority of his operations in garages and hotel rooms. According to one report, he once carried out a sex change on a kitchen table, which promptly collapsed halfway through the operation. His absent-minded manner and scruffy appearance went hand in hand with his often primitive surgical techniques.

  Along with tales of horribly botched breast jobs and gaping surgical wounds super-glued shut, there were also disturbing reports of patients regaining consciousness midway through his operations. Brown, it appeared, was causing absolute havoc in the surgery room. In fact, the catalogue of blunders had become so bad so quickly that Brown’s popularity in Los Angeles didn’t last long. Among LA’s transsexual community, he had swiftly become known as ‘Butcher Brown’.

  It seemed that nothing, however, could stop Brown from putting his scalpel to bad use. Even after he was finally arrested in 1996 and spent 19 months in jail for a botched sex-change operation, he carried on regardless; he simply moved to San Diego and opened up a surgery across the border in Mexico, where he offered cut-rate plastic and sex-change surgery at even lower prices. The medical mayhem continued.

  According to court records, in 1995 a patient who had undergone transsexual surgery in Europe contacted Brown concerning reconstructive surgery on her labia. Brown performed the surgery in Tijuana but failed to examine the medical reports on her operation in Europe, nor did he take a medical history. He also failed to give her any pain medication, antibiotics or post-operative instructions. In fact, the reconstruction was a total failure and like many of his patients the woman was sent on her way to fend for herself. Brown messed up again two years later on another genetic female undergoing trans
sexual surgery. On returning home, she developed complications and required urgent surgery to correct serious problems caused by Brown’s surgical errors. This time, his patient very nearly died.

  Seemingly indifferent to the mounting complaints against him, Brown continued to advertise a full list of procedures. His self-proclaimed revolutionary penis-enlargement technique seemed particularly popular and had men from all over the United States hopping across the border into Mexico; but, as he continued his work, the list of complaints grew, including some truly harrowing accounts of plastic surgery gone hideously wrong.

  According to a report in LA Weekly, when Brown inserted breast implants into one of his patients, the breasts rotted, went black and began to smell of ‘cat piss’. When he castrated a transsexual, the patient got a wound ‘the size of a softball’. Brown also made one transsexual’s vaginal walls so thin that they tore wide open during intercourse and made another transsexual’s vaginal entrance too small.

  Once, when he removed a rib in order to narrow a transsexual’s waist she developed a huge abscess ‘the size of a baseball’ that nearly killed her. In another instance, after a botched vaginoplasty, he created a recto-vaginal fistula, which caused faeces to pour out of his patient’s vagina. The unfortunate individual was found six days later covered in her own faeces and she very nearly died too. (The grisly details were revealed in Paul Ciotti’s LA Weekly article ‘Why Did He Cut Off That Man’s Leg?’)

  So, by the time Philip Bondy travelled to California for his surgery, Dr Brown had very nearly killed four people at the very least. He didn’t seem to have learned from his mistakes, though. He knew full well that his new patient had a heart condition, but as usual he didn’t bother to carry out a medical assessment when Bondy arrived in San Diego. Instead, the pair went to a medical-supply store in Chula Vista, where Brown helped the would-be amputee pick out a pair of brand-new crutches. The next day, they travelled across the border into Mexico.

  The idea was that Brown would perform the operation in his private clinic in Tijuana and then drive Bondy back across to a hotel in the suburbs of San Diego, where he could recover. It was less risky to perform the operation in Mexico because Brown didn’t have a licence to practise in the States, and if complications did set in Brown could always claim that the act had been committed outside America’s borders.

  The operation went according to plan: Brown sawed through Bondy’s leg just below the knee. Then, before driving his patient to the National City Holiday Inn in San Diego, he drove into the desert and buried the leg. According to court records on the day’s events, after the surgery, Bondy called Furth from his hotel. He was apparently ‘delighted’ that his leg had been amputated, but said that he was having difficulty using the crutches and had fallen several times. Furth also noticed that his friend did not sound well, and so he decided to fly to San Diego and check up on him.

  In the early morning of the next day, hotel security was called to Bondy’s room; he was naked, on the floor, leaning against the bed. As he helped Bondy on to the bed, the guard noticed that one of the man’s legs was missing and the stump was bloody. Later the same day, Bondy phoned Brown and complained of pain and bleeding. According to court transcripts, Brown ‘examined the wound, noted it was bleeding but not profusely’ and saw ‘a blue tint, which he associated with gangrene’. Brown told Bondy to increase the amount of medication he was taking. It seemed to work. When Furth arrived at the hotel, Bondy seemed to be doing much better.

  The next morning, however, when Furth went to check up on Bondy again, he found his friend dead. The phone had been tipped over, Bondy was lying half on the bed and blood was dripping from the stump. The room was in chaos.

  When Brown found out, he sounded as if he had been half-expecting it. After all, he told Furth over the phone, Bondy was ‘brittle’. He didn’t seem to think that he would ever be prosecuted, though, as he had carried out the operation in Mexico and had only been doing his sworn duty as a doctor. But the coroner ruled that Bondy had died of gas gangrene – a condition associated with dirty surgical conditions and improper wound care that is lethal unless treated within 24 hours.

  Dr Brown’s long career was finally at an end. Despite carrying out the operation in Mexico, he was convicted by a Californian court of second-degree murder and was handed down a sentence of 15 years to life. In a decision that was to be later upheld by the California Court of Appeals, the court ruled that Brown had known full well the risks he was taking. Brown had acted in a criminally negligent manner with conscious disregard for human life; as a result, his patient had, in all likelihood, died a slow and very painful death.

  A year after his friend’s death, Furth was still looking for a surgeon willing to amputate his right leg. He found one who had already carried out two voluntary amputations on patients. When the media got wind of them, the surgeon immediately found himself in the spotlight.

  According to an interview he gave in January 2000, both of his patients had been convinced that surgery had been ‘the only possible redress for this quite seriously disabling condition’. He also said that those with the disorder faced great risk of injuring or even killing themselves in attempts to rid themselves of their hated limbs. ‘The one concern is that many of these individuals will, in fact, injure themselves,’ he said. ‘There are quite a lot of anecdotal reports, largely from the States, of people taking the law into their own hands, lying on a railway line or shooting their legs off with a shotgun.’

  However, the hospital ordered that no more voluntary amputations be carried out and Furth did not get his amputation.

  EVEN WORSE THAN BROWN? REINALDO SILVESTRE

  Although Cuban Reinaldo Silvestre had absolutely no training as a plastic surgeon, or even a licence to practise medicine in the United States, it didn’t stop him from offering cut-price nose and breast jobs on South Beach, Florida. Often using the animal tranquilliser ketamine instead of a general anaesthetic, he sliced into the flesh of his unsuspecting patients in a hit-and-miss ‘learn on the job’ approach to plastic surgery.

  When Silvestre was finally investigated, even hardened detectives were shocked at the mess the smooth-talking con man had left behind him. As part of the investigation, one of the investigators in the case had to watch a videotape of Sylvester operating, which made for painful viewing: ‘It was a butcher job you wouldn’t want to have happen to your dog,’ he told the New York Times.

  Operations scheduled to last for a relatively short time would drag on for up to eight hours as the hapless doctor struggled to figure out the best way to insert breast implants. As he did so, he blithely severed muscle tissue as he went along, before crudely stitching up the mess and hoping vainly that the wounds wouldn’t become infected.

  One female patient, while tripping out on the ketamine anaesthetic, remembered Silvestre literally putting his hand inside her breast to try to correct an already horribly botched breast job before stapling it shut. In another case, a Mexican bodybuilder, who had come in for a simple pectoral enhancement, ended up with a woman’s implants, becoming overnight the not-so-proud owner of two female breasts. As Spencer Aronfeld, a lawyer for the alleged victims of Silvestre, told the press, ‘So this big bodybuilder from Mexico wakes up from this surgery expecting to look like Tarzan and instead he looks like Pamela Anderson Lee and Dolly Parton.’

  When the complaints against him started mounting, the Cuban doctor simply upped sticks and disappeared, leaving a trail of misery and permanently scarred people behind him. He was finally spotted in Belize in October 2004 thanks to someone who had recognised him from the TV show America’s Most Wanted; at the time he was teaching classes to medical students at a private university. Silvestre was extradited to the States, where he was charged with aggravated battery and practising medicine without a licence. He was found guilty and sent to jail for seven years.

  SURGICAL SLAUGHTER: AMADO CARRILLO FUENTES

  People recovering from the effects of surgery are vulnerab
le and the surgeon’s recovery room has been the scene of more than one murder – including that of one of the most dangerous people on the planet.

  Multi-billionaire drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes died hours after going under the plastic surgeon’s knife. The founder of the Juárez cartel – the most powerful Mexican drug cartel in the 1990s – Fuentes smuggled thousands of tonnes of cocaine into the States with his own private fleet of jet planes while enjoying the protection of corrupt, high-ranking members of the Mexican police and military.

  When a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1997, Fuentes opted for plastic surgery before a planned emigration to Cuba. After an eight-hour-long operation designed to utterly transform his face and body, he was given a deadly mixture of anaesthetics and the sleeping potion Dormicum by his doctors and died in a recovery room in a Santa Monica hospital on 4 July 1997.

  According to some newspaper reports at the time, Fuentes had recently struck a deal with drug-enforcement officials to rat out his associates and the surgeons had been paid to make sure that Fuentes told no tales. But had the death been simply a mistake, or was it a carefully planned hit? Authorities believed it was the latter and immediately charged the three surgeons who had operated on Fuentes with murder one.

  Predictably, police never got the chance to question them. On 2 November, three bodies were found stuffed into oil barrels and dumped beside the side of a Mexican highway. All three of the surgeons had been bound, gagged and tortured for the ‘longest time possible.’ Two of them had been strangled and the third had been shot.

  Since then, other rumours about the case have surfaced, though. Today, many journalists in Mexico are still convinced that Fuentes faked his own death and that it’s not his body buried there in the family mausoleum in his hometown of Guamuchilito. According to some reports, Fuentes himself had the surgeons killed – as they were the only people who knew what he now looked like – and continues to pull the strings of his $25 billion-a-year drug-smuggling business.