SAN DIEGO — A 77-year-old former doctor has been convicted of murder for fatally botching the surgery of a New York man who wanted his healthy leg amputated to satisfy a bizarre fetish.
The story gave the name of the fetish as apotemnophilia — “sexual gratification from limb removal.” It said that “only 200 worldwide are known to suffer the fetish.” It reported that the victim, 79-year-old Philip Bondy, had paid $10,000 for the operation, after which he died in a “suburban San Diego hotel” from “gangrene poisoning.” It said that the unlicensed doctor who performed the surgery could get “life imprisonment for second-degree murder.” Although the story gave the doctor’s name as John Ronald Brown, at first it didn’t ring a bell. But after downloading additional stories, I found myself looking at a photograph of a heavyset, pink-complexioned man with thinning, disheveled hair, and suddenly I realized, Hey, I know this man.
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Although I find it hard to hear Brown (a man in the adjacent visitor’s chair is reading religious tracts into the phone), eventually I’m able to get to the heart of the matter: Why, against state law, the Hippocratic oath and, in my opinion, basic common sense, did he cut off that man’s leg?
Brown replies that he was simply doing what doctors are supposed to do — meet the patient’s needs. “In cosmetic surgery we do things all the time for which there is no need. We are constantly rearranging what God gave us.”
“But what about your own liability?” I ask. The patient, I point out, was a frail old man, still recovering from pneumonia, with a history of heart disease and bypass surgery. Even in ideal circumstances, his post-operative prospects were far from great. “Weren’t you worried that people would ask questions if he died?”
Brown shrugs. “I didn’t spend much time thinking about it,” he says.
Someone who did think about it was Gary Stovall, a homicide detective for the San Diego suburb of National City, who on May 11, 1998, was assigned to investigate the death of an elderly New York City resident found in Room 609 of the local Holiday Inn with his left leg missing and blood oozing from the stump.
Despite the bizarre circumstances, at first it wasn’t completely clear to Stovall that a crime had been committed. A friend of Philip Bondy’s had initially told the police that Bondy had been in a “taxi accident” in Mexico and had required immediate surgery in a clinic there.
But to Stovall that story didn’t make sense. If Bondy had been in an accident, why didn’t his body have any other injuries? If an American citizen had been badly injured in a traffic accident, why didn’t the Tijuana police know anything about it? And strangest of all, why did Bondy have two $5,000 receipts in his room, one for “surgery” and the other for “hospitalization,” both signed by a local man named John Brown?
Because Stovall was working on another murder case at the time, he couldn’t immediately go see Brown in person. And besides, says Stovall, a baby-cheeked detective with a deceptively mild manner, “I was still under the impression that he was a good Samaritan.”
But when Brown still hadn’t returned any of Stovall’s three phone messages by Wednesday morning, May 20, Stovall drove to Brown’s San Ysidro apartment and ã banged on the door.
“Do you know why I’m here?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered Brown, who had come to the door wearing a robe. “It’s because of the man who died in the hotel room in National City.”
Although Brown was “nonthreatening, polite, well-spoken and obviously well-educated,” says Stovall, it was also clear to him that Brown was not someone for whom “personal appearance was a high priority.” When Stovall asked him to come down to the station, he put on a wrinkled shirt and a stained jacket. Not only did his apartment smell like “garbage,” but the couch was bloodstained and the stuffing was falling out. The stove was “filthy” and the sink was stacked with dirty dishes. There were books, professional journals, travel bags and medical supplies scattered about the floor. “If a child had been living there,” Stovall says, “I’d have put him in a foster home.”