LEFLORE COUNTY, OK – Two men who described themselves as cannibals were arrested and charged for performing unlicensed surgery, maiming and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon after traveling from Virginia to Oklahoma to perform a gender modification operation.
After the roughly two hour surgery, the victim claims his surgeon joked about being a cannibal and said he was going to eat the man’s testicles.
According to LeFlore County Sheriff Rodney Derryberry, on October 14th, the department’s 9-1-1 dispatch received a call from the staff at McAlister Hospital in Pittsburgh County about a patient that had some sort of medical procedure done on him. Hospital officials notified Sheriff Derryberry’s dispatchers that it did not appear that the individuals who performed the surgery did not have a license. The patient went to the hospital after the surgery because he was bleeding.
The hospital staff notified Sheriff Derryberry that the two men were identified as Bob Lee Allen, 53 and Thomas Gates, 42, both of Virginia.
After acquiring a search warrant for their residence, his officers, the Oklahoma Sheriff’s Department of Narcotics and the District Attorney’s office entered the home and found evidence that the surgery was performed there. At the time of the executed warrant, the suspects were in Pittsburgh County trying to visit the patient in the hospital, Derryberry said.
McAlister Police officers detained Allen and Gates at the hospital and they were arrested by responding sheriff’s deputies.
“They were performing some type of sex change operation,” Derryberry said. “I would say they were performing some type of surgery that they had no license to perform…I can’t say it’s cult activity…it is something that we’ve never in my career run across in this part of the country.”
On the way to the hospital, Allen, the victim claims tried to get him to participate in cannibalism. According to the police report, Allen told the man they kept human body parts in their freezer and had six other clients lined up. When asked if the crime was similar to the ones committed by Jeffrey Dahmer, Derryberry said he wasn’t sure.
“Well, we don’t know that’s why we still got to process a lot of the evidence that we have we got to go through all the digital you know stuff that is stored on the hard drives the laptops that we received,” he said. “There were multiple storage devices with photos, computers, documents, but that’s what we got to wait to retrieve we have to get search warrants for all that and get sent off to the forensic labs and wait for them to get it back to us.”
Derryberry said authorities are now searching for other victims.
Both men were held on $295,000 bail.
Derryberry was just elected sheriff of LeFlore County in August and said the job was pretty routine until this incident.
“Well, I’ll say this…it ain’t what you expect,” Derryberry said. “But, you never know you know. I’ve done this for almost 30 years and every day is a learning experience, so you never know what to expect, but thank goodness we got good people out there.”