North Carolina Shuts Down Sadomasochistic Castration Dungeon
Three men arrested on charges of voluntary castrations without malice, maiming without malice and practicing medicine without a license in what was described as a sadomasochistic dungeon.. " Is maining without malice a crime in North Carolina?
WAYNESVILLE:Three Haywood County men are now in jail on felony charges of
castration without malice and practicing medicine without a license.
Emily
Kurtz, who lives below the house the three men rented at 541 Peace
Mountain Road off Allens Creek Road, said she noticed men in cars with
out-of-state plates visiting the home off and on since she moved to the
neighborhood in January.
Sheriff Tom Alexander and District Attorney Michael Bonfoey this
morning announced the arrests of the men in connection with the illegal
castrations. The sheriff and prosecutor said the victims were willing
participants.
The victims met the men through a locally produced
Web site that published photographs of men engaging in sadomasochistic
behavior. Yahoo! shut down the site in December 2004. The castrations
took place last year beginning in March and continued through November,
according to police documents.
The case is the first involving willing castration in the county and could be the first in North Carolina.
"This right here beats everything I have ever seen," the sheriff said.
Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University
and a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, said
voluntary castration appears to be a very rare phenomenon.
"The
people who I have seen who have undergone voluntary castration have
been psychotic and often in the grip of a delusion that their sexual
organs were causing them to behave in evil ways," Appelbaum said. "And
they felt that to rid themselves of that evil, it was necessary to rid
themselves of their sexual organs."
During a search of the home on Wednesday, investigators found DVD recordings of the castrations.
Mendez
and Sciara moved to Western North Carolina from Topeka, Kan. Reeves
moved to the area from Atlanta, Alexander said. Mendez and Reeves
worked together at Harrah's Cherokee Casino on the Cherokee Indian
Reservation, where Mendez was honored early this year for his work.
Mendez
received $1,000 and a commemorative crystal award for being named one
of the 2005 "Shining Stars of the Year," according to a news release
sent to area media outlets in February. Mendez worked at the casino as
a Total Rewards representative, providing incentives for guests.
Mendez's ex-wife, Anne Moriarty, said she and her former husband had a son and daughter together.
"This
sounds highly unlikely," Moriarty, who has not kept in touch with
Mendez since he moved to Haywood County. "I mean, this guy is as gentle
as a child - the guy I know. "The idea that he could be involved in anything like what youâre talking about is unimaginable. Totally unimaginable."
Neighbors
who live along the wooded and private Peace Mountain Road, who did not
know the men, were shocked by the news of the arrests.
Investigators used the informant's information to gain a search
warrant Wednesday, and found inside the house grizzly evidence of
homemade surgeries. In the first-floor room called the dungeon,
they found a coffee can with bloody scalpels, a silver tin marked "used
instruments," intravenous supplies, syringes, needles, bandages, an
electric shock paddle and a video camera and tripod.
In another first-floor room, the investigators found a Physician's Desk Reference book along with stacks of CDs and a computer.
An invoice for lidocaine, topical pain relief medicine, was in the kitchen.
A plastic container in a freezer contained what one of the suspects said was human testicles. The equipment, according to court papers, was used for removing testicles in castrations and at least one penis removal.
The
informant told investigators a man from Chile had his testicles replace
with artificial ones called "neuticles." He later traveled back to the
house to have them removed because "they were too large."
DVDs discovered listed Peace Mountain Enterprises as the production company and surgeries performed by "Master Rick."
Robert McDonald, an Asheville psychologist with 21 years'
experience, said he's never heard of voluntary castration as part of
sadomasochism, and that it doesnât seem to fit because S&M behavior
tends to be an ongoing lifestyle.
"I can't imagine an experience
that's relatively this brief and that would change one's being and
behavior for such a long time being worth it," said McDonald, who also
serves as the vice chair of the N.C. Association for the Management and
Treatment of Sexual Offenders.
"That's a remarkably unwise and
difficult to understand behavior. Even if they did get off on the
surgery, how long is it going to take? And then it's going to affect
the rest of their lives." Some men do have a syndrome known as gender dysphoria disorder.
"There
are men who have very negative gender images," McDonald said. "They
hate the manifestation of their masculinity. They detest their
genitals." Some men have some past behavior that drives them to believe they should remove their genitals, he said.
The
Internet, McDonald said, allows relatively small groups of fetish
practitioners to get together and receive social reinforcement from one
another. "One thing we're finding is through the Internet, people
who have the rarest and most bizarre needs are able to find each
other," he said.
Because it eliminates the sources of masculine
hormones, orchiectomy - surgical removal of the testicles - is a form
of sex change for some people. The surgery can be a less
expensive alternative or intermediate step to a vaginoplasty procedure,
which involves the creation of a vagina.
"Castration without malice". Fascinating. Still trying to figure it out myself. An educated guess: a law put on the books a few hundred years ago to
prevent the proliferation of "castrati" (ex: the old-style Vienna Boys
Choir)?
It looks like the "if it feels good, do it", no-standards fringe is
getting bolder by the day, but this seems here it was more like "if it feels bad, really BAD, then do it."
