Doctors Who Kill

by Davis, Carol Anne; Davis, Carol Anne

  Chante parked in her garage and left the conscious man in considerable pain. She later said that she looked in on him several times and apologised as he pleaded for medical assistance – but, months later, she allegedly told a friend that she had gone into the house and had sex with her boyfriend. Her friends also alleged that she had boasted, ‘I ran over a white man.’ (Chante Mallard is black.)

  Gregory died within hours of shock and loss of blood, after which the nurse’s aide phoned two male friends and asked them to dispose of the body. They duly did so, dumping the blood-spattered victim in a local park. He was found with glass splinters in his face and one of his legs was nearly amputated, but medics ascertained that he would have lived if he’d been treated promptly. The case became a homicide, though detectives had no idea who the perpetrator was.

  Meanwhile, Chante removed the car seats from her car and burnt one that was bloodstained, although she left the charred seat in her front garden. She also removed most of the interior from her car. She told friends that she had wrecked the vehicle but was scared to tell her father as he hadn’t quite finished paying for it.

  No one at Mariner Health, the nursing home where she worked, noticed any change in her demeanour. She was always smiling and was well liked both by co-workers and residents.

  The months passed and then police received a tip about one of the men who had dumped the body. Their investigation led them to Chante Mallard and she told them about the events of that night, claiming that she wasn’t a bad person, that she acted out of fear.

  Trial

  Her trial began on 23rd June 2003 and gained widespread media coverage. The public were understandably scathing of Chante’s actions, pointing out that she had let a man die a horrible death rather than save him and serve a sentence for driving under the influence. Many of them were particularly alarmed that she’d been working in the healthcare field yet was showing the traits of a sociopath.

  The defence alleged that their client had accidentally struck a man and had panicked and made the wrong choice. They argued that this didn’t amount to murder but the prosecution pointed out that Chante’s actions meant that medics weren’t given the opportunity to save Gregory Biggs’s life.

  On 27th June, after deliberating for less than an hour, the jury returned with a guilty verdict and Chante was sentenced to fifty years in prison. She wept and apologised repeatedly to Gregory’s son, Brandon, who made a victim impact statement in court, offering his forgiveness. The Religious Studies student was widely praised by other religious individuals and groups for his magnanimous gesture.

  Two of Chante’s friends were sentenced to nine and ten years respectively for disposing of Gregory’s body. An independent company later made a TV movie about the case, with Stephen Rea in the role of the victim, called Stuck.

  PART SIX

  PAPER MASKS

  The bogus doctor is every patient’s worst nightmare, especially when they are undergoing surgery in a private clinic, away from genuine healthcare professionals. Dr John Brown operated on patients in dirty garages and in the basement of his house. Only when carrying out surgical procedures did he feel free of his demons, so he was motivated to continue even when the authorities made strenuous efforts to close him down. Dean Faiello was a beautician yet he injected his patients with a local anaesthetic, in one instance fatally, whilst trying to improve his finances. In contrast, John Christie’s lust drove him to pretend to be a doctor, and he subdued his patients with gas before sexually assaulting and murdering them.

  27 John Brown

  This GP failed his plastic surgery exams but decided to practise surgery regardless, with ultimately fatal results.

  A strict childhood

  John Ronald Brown was born into a strict Mormon family on 4th July 1922 and followed his physician father into the medical field, graduating from the University of Utah in 1947. For thirteen years he worked as a GP in California before deciding to train as a plastic surgeon. He sailed through the written exams but went to pieces during the oral assessment as authority figures reminded him of his father, whom he deeply feared.

  A normal man would have said Que sera, sera and returned to his GP practice, but John decided to go ahead and perform surgery anyway, driven by an almost pathological desire to operate. He found his patients in the transgender community, taking on distraught males who had been turned down as unsuitable candidates by legitimate surgeons. Word soon got around that some of his patients fared better than others, but he was inexpensive and a last resort so he always had a waiting list.

  John carried out sex reassignment surgery in his workplace rather than in a fully equipped hospital and lacked the back-up staff a hospital could provide. He couldn’t match professional hygiene standards, and, when a patient almost died of a subsequent infection, his medical licence was revoked. He had now lost the right to work as a GP.

  The bogus surgeon’s first marriage failed when his wife ran off with his best friend. He remarried but his second wife died of cancer. In 1981, he married for a third time, going through an arranged marriage in the Caribbean. He was fifty-nine but his wife, who did not speak English, was only seventeen. The former doctor taught her his language and how to read and write, and they had two sons together. He was a good husband and a loving father, but he was still determined to operate on as many people as possible, even if his makeshift surgery was dirty and unkempt.

  John attempted to practise medicine in various American states but he was barred, in time, from each of them. By the 1980s he was living in San Diego but working in Mexico, performing surgery on males in which he removed most of the penis but fashioned the remainder into a clitoris. Some were delighted with their new genitalia, whereas others were left disfigured, suffering from severe infections and in constant pain. One woman had to wear nappies for the rest of her life after he punctured her rectum, causing faeces to leak into her vagina on a daily basis. She eventually died in agony. Word of his failures spread, and the transgender community nicknamed him Butcher Brown.

  By the late 1980s he was offering penis enlargements to heterosexual males and agreed to let a television company make a film about his operative techniques. They were perturbed to hear his patients screaming as the anaesthetic wore off during surgery, but John reassured them that this was normal and nothing to worry about. The FBI weren’t convinced and, in 1990, he was sentenced to three years in prison for practising medicine illegally. His wife now divorced him, aware that he was incapable of changing.

  Released after a year and a half, the maverick became a taxi driver. Sadly, by 1993 the lure of surgery became too great and he started operating again. He would operate in basement rooms and in garages, often using medically unqualified former patients as his assistants – they paid retrospectively for their operations by working for him.

  By now, the former doctor was suffering from acute depression and told acquaintances that he was haunted by demons. He added that he only felt sane whilst carrying out surgery.

  A murder charge

  In 1998, John Brown was contacted by 79-year-old Philip Bondy from New York, who had an amputee fetish and wanted to have a leg removed. No reputable surgeon would have agreed to remove the healthy limb, but John promised to carry out the operation. John had previously arranged to amputate the left leg of one of Mr Bondy’s friends, but the friend had sensibly backed out when the surgeon murmured something about buying a saw. By now the former doctor was both living and working in Tijuana, Mexico, in the hope of evading the authorities.

  Philip Bondy travelled to San Diego on 7th May and Dr Brown met him at the airport. Shortly afterwards, he performed the surgery, stitched a flap of skin back over the cut surface and applied bandages, but the clock was ticking: he had stretched the flap too tightly over the bone, causing the tissue to die. The wound became gangrenous and Mr Bondy, who had been driven back to his hotel room and left to convalesce in bed, endured an agonising death. John had, as usual, been totally fixated on the opera
tion and had failed to offer any kind of post-operative care.

  John Brown was consequently prosecuted in California for second-degree murder. The jury returned with a unanimous guilty verdict and he was sentenced to fifteen years to life.

  Unremorseful, John said that God wanted him to take care of people, and that he planned to work on a cure for cancer from his prison cell. He will be ninety-one before he is released and possibly too frail to wield a surgical knife.

  28 Dean Faiello

  Greed motivated this beautician to pretend that he had the qualifications to carry out cosmetic surgery, with fatal results…

  A difficult start

  Dean Faiello was born on the 31st August 1959 to Carmel and Sam Faiello in New Jersey. Three years later the couple had a baby girl. Carmel was a loving stay-at-home mother but Sam was often abusive and the Faiellos separated when Dean was twelve.

  Although his father often called him stupid, Dean did well at school and was voted Most Likely to Succeed. With his olive complexion and dark good looks he was very attractive to girls, though it soon became obvious he preferred boys.

  He graduated from school and began to study engineering at a New York college but, without his mother’s encouragement, he fell behind in his studies and soon dropped out. He began to drift from one job to another, finding his main enjoyment from partying in the gay scene.

  Dean didn’t develop a strong personality, perhaps because he simply didn’t have to: men, women and transsexuals fell heavily for his face and lithe figure and were desperate to spend time in his company. He was also an excellent dancer who sometimes danced professionally at go-go bars.

  HIV positive

  By the mid-Eighties, Dean was HIV positive. Perhaps realising that he had to take responsibility for his life, he began to take work more seriously, setting up a small construction company and buying a run-down mansion house. However, he soon turned the place into Party Central and was often drunk or high on cocaine.

  Fortunately, he entered into an exclusive relationship with a more stable man – also HIV positive – who ran a beauty salon. His new lover encouraged him to train as an electrologist – removing excess hair from men and women – after which Dean went on to learn laser hair removal and built up a substantial client list.

  Unfortunately the good times were about to end as his lover died of Aids in November 1995, after which Dean consoled himself by getting drunk and returning to heavy cocaine use. He moved his electrology business into a room in a medical practice and began to abuse a prescription nasal spray that contained opiates, telling a friend that he was only truly happy whilst taking drugs.

  Later, he set up a new business in a medical complex close to Park Avenue, offering laser hair removal. His calm manner and the surgical whites he wore convinced everyone that he was a qualified doctor, and he told patients with skin problems that he was a dermatologist. He began to remove brown marks with laser technology, despite the fact that he didn’t know the difference between a benign lesion and a cancerous one.

  Desperate to increase his drug use, Dean stole a prescription pad from a doctor and forged her name. The forgery was discovered and, in October 1998, he was arrested. His father posted bail. The beautician pleaded guilty the following month and was sentenced to three years’ probation plus a spell on a drug rehabilitation programme. It should have been a second chance, but he continued to offer laser removal of lesions – a job for a licensed physician rather than a cosmetologist – and, unknown to him, the medical authorities began to investigate.

  Dean’s life became even more complicated when his beloved mother died of cancer in August the following year. He now drank even more heavily than he had before and soon spent his inheritance, then maxed out on credit card after credit card. He also had to pay over $3,000 to a patient who took him to court, claiming that the hair removal on his back hadn’t worked.

  A downward path

  The beautician was so broke that he had to rent out his palatial apartment and move into cheaper premises. By now he was openly lying to his patients, telling them that he’d graduated from medical school.

  In October 2002 he was arraigned for badly scarring a patient whom he’d removed a tattoo from. Bailed by a friend, he went straight back to work. He also arranged to sell his house as, by now, he was half a million dollars in debt. Dean had always procured drugs through his more sophisticated club contacts but now he was reduced to buying from dealers on the street and, by 2003, was forced to put his house on the market in the hope of paying off some of his creditors.

  When he was charged with deception, Dean admitted that he’d been falsely referring to himself as Dr Faiello. Yet, out on bail, he treated 35-year-old Maria Pilar Cruz, who suffered from black hairy tongue syndrome and had to have the hairs scraped off at the doctor’s office, a procedure that caused her pain. She had found Dean via the Internet and was initially impressed by his professionalism as he injected her tongue with a local anaesthetic before painlessly removing the hairs via laser surgery.

  However, Maria felt ill after her first visit and phoned Dean to complain of dizziness and sickness. To a physician, these were warning signs that she was reacting badly to the medication, but Dean told her that it was nothing to worry about, to just take an over-the-counter antidote.

  Manslaughter

  On the evening of 13th April 2003, he welcomed Maria back to his office – really just a room in a friend’s apartment. Maria had been to Mass that morning and was in good spirits. At the doctor’s urging, she paid cash.

  As with her previous visit, Dean injected lidocaine into her tongue to anaesthetise the area. Maria flushed heavily, a sign that she’d reacted badly to the medicine, but Dean either didn’t notice her change of colour or didn’t know that it meant she was in serious danger. As he got ready to start the procedure, Maria lost consciousness and began to fit.

  The charlatan phoned a friend, who urged him to call an ambulance, but Dean knew that this would result in his arrest. Instead, he did nothing and, at some stage, Maria died. He then decided to conceal the death. Folding her body into a suitcase (she was a small, slender woman) he drove it to his former home and mixed up a big batch of concrete, using some to make a platform in the garage’s storage cupboard before setting down the suitcase with its grisly cargo and pouring more concrete on top of it.

  Maria’s co-workers were alarmed when she didn’t show up for work or phone in sick so they visited her apartment and found that her mail and newspapers were piling up. They, and her relatives, reported her missing and police began to investigate.

  Shortly afterwards, the house sale went through and Dean moved in with another friend. It looked like he had literally got away with murder, although he was getting closer to his court date of 5th September, when he’d be sentenced for practising medicine without a licence.

  The fugitive

  Dean fretted about going to jail and decided that he couldn’t face it. Instead, he jetted off to Costa Rica, living off the money he’d made from the sale of his house. Callous as ever, he let down the friend who had trustingly posted his bail.

  The net was closing in, however, as detectives had accessed Maria’s email account and found that she’d gone to see someone calling himself Dr Faiello on 13th April. Indeed, he was apparently the last person to see her alive. They visited the house he’d sold and saw the odd concrete structure. Breaking it open, they found Maria Cruz’s corpse.

  Dean was arrested at a hotel and at first fought extradition, but his health deteriorated in the Costa Rican jail as HIV-inhibiting medication wasn’t freely available. He returned to New York where he decided to plead guilty to avoid going to trial. In 2005, he was sentenced to twenty years. He spends his days reading and doing crossword puzzles and has gained a significant amount of weight.

  A similar case

  Sadly, others have failed to learn from Dean Faiello’s mistakes. Luiz Carlos Ribeiro had qualified as a doctor in his native Brazil but did not h
ave a licence to practise medicine in the United States. Unfortunately he did so regardless of the law, performing cosmetic surgery on Brazilian immigrants.

  Dr Ribeiro’s operating theatre was the basement of a house in Framingham, Massachusetts, and instead of a surgical bed he had a massage couch. To cut costs, he didn’t employ a qualified professional to monitor his patients’ vital signs.

  On 27th July 2006, he operated on 24-year-old Fabiola DePaula, reshaping her nose. She went back three days later for liposuction and this time the procedure went horribly wrong. There were complications and fat travelled to her lungs, causing a pulmonary embolism, whereupon she lost consciousness. Her friend rushed her to hospital in a car and doctors worked on her for twenty minutes but she died.

  Dr Ribeiro, by now aged 51, was sentenced to two-and-a-half to three years in prison, after which he would face deportation. The woman who owned the house where he carried out the illegal procedures was charged with being an accessory and deported, whilst Dr Ribeiro’s wife, who had acted as his assistant, was sentenced to one year.

  29 John Christie

  British true crime aficionados will probably remember John Christie, of 10 Rillington Place fame, for his failure to tell the authorities that Timothy Evans was innocent of the murders that he was subsequently hanged for. So great – and understandable – was the outcry at this miscarriage of justice that the fact that he pretended to be a qualified medic in order to subdue his victims has been largely forgotten over time.