Dr Graeme Reeves was a respected doctor. Behind closed doors, he was 'butchering' his female patients.

Content warning: This post includes discussion of stillbirth, obstetric and domestic violence that may be distressing to some readers.

Mother-of-two Margaret Russell had always dreamt of having a big family, and was over the moon to be expecting a third son – a baby boy she'd already named Langdon Frances. Throughout the pregnancy, her obstetrician, Dr Graeme Reeves, assured her that all was well, and Langdon would be born at the average 8 or 9lb.

But on September 1, 1996, Margaret's unimaginable nightmare began. Four excruciating hours into her labour, the baby boy's head became stuck in the birthing canal, where he stayed for 40 minutes in total. Throughout her ordeal, Dr Reeves never once suggested the logical path of having an emergency caesarean section, but rather pushed on Margaret's stomach in a bid to force the baby out and yelled at her to "shut up". Then the doctor uttered the most shocking words to the traumatised mother: "Shut up, stop f**king screaming, your baby is dead – just push."

Langdon was registered as a stillbirth, weighing a huge 14lb – far bigger than what Dr Reeves had estimated. Still grieving her loss, a week later Margaret filed a formal complaint to the Health Care Complaints Commission about her horrifying experience with Dr Reeves, hoping to stop him from ever putting another woman through a similar hell.

Shockingly, Margaret was just one of many women who suffered immense pain at the hands of the "cruel" gynaecologist who allegedly sexually assaulted and mutilated his patients over the course of nearly two decades.

The grieving mother and eight other former female patients bravely came forward to have the sadistic doctor banned from practicing obstetrics in 1997, but that didn't stop Reeves from practicing illegally over the years to come - the twisted doctor inflicting such pain and suffering on women that he earned the nickname, The Butcher of Bega.

Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC fought to put Reeves behind bars for his heinous crimes and in 2011 he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years prison for mutilating one patient's genitals, indecently assaulting two other patients and ignoring a ban on practising obstetrics. But despite his later – unforgivable - actions, Cunneen tells Mamamia in the latest episode of True Crime Conversations that Reeves started out his career as an esteemed professional in the '80s.

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"He was well regarded and thought to be kind and proficient for at least a decade," Cunneen said, recalling how broadcaster Ray Hadley had told her that Reeves had delivered two of his children in the '80s and that he and his then-wife had been "absolutely thrilled" with their experience with the doctor.

"I tried to work out what could have gone wrong with him," Cunneen said, explaining how she'd been told that Dr Reeves had been an extreme yo-yo dieter, which led to him developing diabetes and other serious physical health problems. 

"One just had to wonder if that also took a toll on his mind and his brain. It always seemed to me, having heard so many people speak highly of the first part of Dr Reeves' career, that something must have happened to him to change the way he was," Cunneen said. "You would think if he was a narcissistic psychopath, for example, that that would be a condition that would always be manifest."

It was only months before Margaret Russell's painful ordeal that Sydney mother Kerry McAllister had died as a direct result of Reeves' negligence. Days after giving birth, Kerry began to get a fever, which nurses brought to Reeves' attention. He dismissed their concerns, and made the fatal error of not treating what quickly turned into bacterial sepsis.

Cunneen said, "Nursing staff saw what was going on but were a bit powerless because Graeme Reeves was imperious and condescending, I heard a lot, to the nursing staff. He knew best and he wouldn't respond to their concerns. Somehow he just got away with it."

Reeves stood trial in 2017 for manslaughter over Kerry's death but was acquitted, despite admitting that his medical failures were to blame. The disgraced doctor showed no such remorse after her death in 1996, and after being banned from practicing obstetrics the following year, he continued practicing gynaecology until 2000, when concerned nurses refused to continue working with him over his mistreatment of women.

Cunneen explained, "He was creepy and cruel. I developed the idea that he had a different bedside manner with women depending on whether he liked them, whether they were attractive to him, whether they were bossy with him. If they were attractive, they were at risk of sexual types of misconduct during gynaecological examinations – women could feel an erect penis against their arms, but they worried that they were imagining it. 

"Or for some women, if they were rather outspoken women or women who knew their rights, he'd be very cruel in the application of a speculum, for example. Some women described how rough and terribly painful it was when he examined them and how it seemed to them that he was enjoying hurting them.

"Some nurses, and receptionists, started to hear screaming and women leaving in tears – it just wasn't normal at all."

Seemingly above the law, Reeves ignored the medical restrictions placed upon him and began working unregistered in the small towns of Bega and Pambula, as a specialist obstetrician and gynaecologist for the Greater Southern Area Health Service. While illegally working on the NSW South Coast in 2002, he did the unthinkable to 58-year-old widow, Carolyn DeWaegeneire.

Carolyn DeWaegeneire. Image: The Daily Telegraph.

"She's a wonderful lady - she's very matter of fact, very smart, and I can imagine that when she goes to this doctor, she's very business-like and not someone to be trifled with," Cunneen said. "I think she's the type of woman who Graeme Reeves, by that time in his life, didn't like... he wanted to put such a woman in her place."

Carolyn had sought treatment of a small lesion on her labia, which Reeves said he could operate on with no issues. But while she was on the operating table and unable to move, Reeves whispered to her, "I'm going to take your clitoris too." He then removed her external genitalia, later giving the justification: "Her husband's dead so it doesn't matter."

"I woke up in the ward and I'd lost one-and-a-half litres of blood," Carolyn told news.com.au. 

It wasn't until 15 years later that Carolyn saw any form of justice for her pain, which Cunneen describes as "diabolical".

Carolyn with the other victims of The Butcher of Bega. Image: news.com.au.

"[It] was the type of thing that no woman, having heard it, could ever get out of one's mind," she said. "[Carolyn] explained it so eloquently that she doesn't feel like a woman at all now, that she feels like a nothing. And she was given no choice about that."

If you or someone you know is at risk of violence, contact: 1800 RESPECT.

If this has raised any issues for you or if you would like to speak with someone, please contact the Sands Australia 24-hour support line on 1300 072 637.

You can download Never Forgotten: Stories of love, loss and healing after miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death for free here.

Feature Image: Getty.