A doctor who lost his medical license over questionable sex-change operations has been sentenced to 15-to-life behind bars in a case involving an unusual sexual fetish amputation which resulted in the death of an elderly man.
John Ronald Brown was sentenced last Friday. He was convicted of second degree murder in October in the death of 79-year-old Philip Bondy, who died two days after Brown amputated his healthy leg to satisfy his apotemnophilia - a fetish which involves sexual gratification from removal of a limb.
Bondy contracted gangrene after the operation, which was performed in Mexico, and died in San Diego. He had paid Brown $10,000 to amputate the leg.
Brown was already unlicensed and, prior to his trial in the Bondy case, pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license, involving seven shoddy sex change operations or related treatment, says the Associated Press. He lost his medical license in 1977.
At Brown's trial, a New York psychologist, Gregg Furth, testified that he and Bondy had contacted Brown as a last resort to fulfill lifelong desires to amputate their legs. Furth apparently changed his mind, in part because he saw a Mexican doctor scheduled to assist walking into the clinic carrying a butcher knife, the AP says.
Prosecutors said Brown "just chopped off" Bondy's leg below the knee, then brought him to San Diego to leave him alone at a hotel to recuperate. The AP says the doctor buried the leg in the desert to hide evidence from Mexican medical inspectors.
