Original subtitles

Those who knew him thought it was a remarkable story.

He went from being the one who performed amputations

to the one having the operation.

In fact, the story turned out

to be so dark, mind-boggling and bizarre,

I would not have believed you if you had said that this is a novel.

We all have our own vision in our heads of what a criminal is.

Neil Hopper didn't fit that bill.

An NHS vascular surgeon who'd performed hundreds of amputations…

He was quite a sort of local celebrity.

We're very lucky today to have, uh, Mr Neil Hopper.

And he's gonna be talking…

But the Neil Hopper that we saw in the public eye

was hiding a dark secret.

He was an active member in an underworld community.

And he realised there was a whole world out there of people like him.

People performing these horrific procedures.

It's like a Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde thing.

It put this thought in his mind, and then it just grew

until it just became irresistible.

This web of deceit started to be exposed.

I believed what he said because he was a doctor.

It was very shocking.

It's a story of greed, deception

and the very dark side of humanity.

Truro is a small city.

It's only about 20,000 people. So it's a nice, little place.

There's all the history,

and there's a river and lovely walks you can do.

And it is quite close-knit.

There is a strong sense of Cornishness and pride.

Truro is also my home.

My name is Olivier Vergnault. I'm a senior reporter with Cornwall Live.

And I'm French. I was born in Paris.

I came to England in 2007.

I've been a journalist for 26 years.

I'm a general news reporter,

so I cover everything from What's On to court to business to car crashes.

Or maybe, um, interview somebody who has lost their home in a flood.

You know, everything.

In the summer, it's more fun

because some people park their cars on the beach,

and that's really funny.

Especially when the tide comes in.

Cornwall is a beautiful holiday destination.

But looks can be deceiving.

Like anywhere, there are dark secrets that lie just below the surface.

And sometimes as journalists, we report on that darker side of life.

Some of these cases stay in my mind and in my head more than others,

and the Hopper case is one of those.

I'd first heard of him through a documentary

that followed him around at work.

Hi, how are you guys?

So who have we got first?

So Neil Hopper,

he was a well-regarded vascular surgeon and consultant

at the Royal Cornwall Hospital that's known as Treliske.

Hello. How are you?

Um, how are your legs doing? How are they feeling?

He was one of these people that really helped others

and put himself 100% for his patients.

Ouch. That's pretty nasty, isn't it?

Up here, you know, in people's esteem as a professional.

Hi. How are you doing?

I remember Neil had a very sensitive and patient-centred approach.

How much sleep did you get last night?

I thought that was fairly touching actually,

that he would be, you know, quite so caring about his patients.

I'm Harvey Chant.

I was a consultant vascular surgeon in Royal Cornwall Hospital.

I first met Neil Hopper when he came down to Cornwall in 2013.

I probably worked with him for ten years.

He was the sort of guy that just wanted to get on with the job

and didn't want to set the world alight,

and I kind of rather took to him because of that.

My first day working with Neil, walking down one of the corridors of Treliske,

and again, just being friendly and saying,

"Let's go have a cup of coffee."

And we're chatting away about things, and he said, "Well, to be fair,

you've got to be slightly mad to do this job."

And I completely agreed. Really, you know, it's absolutely…

You do have to be slightly mad to do the job

if you think about what is expected of a vascular surgeon.

Probably 95% of amputations are done by vascular surgeons.

And you could see Neil was particularly competent.

Okay, pointy stick.

- Crikey, look at that. - Hmm.

And one of the things I noted about Neil particularly

was that he was very keen on anatomy,

and I was always struck by his level of knowledge in anatomy.

- Well, check in her vein. - Okay.

And Neil was very good at knowing

exactly where a blood vessel would be during an operation,

where the nerves would be in an operation, and how to get to them.

So, I rapidly developed a lot of confidence in his practice

from the surgical point of view.

- That's done it, isn't it? - Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, just a little tiny bit of tidying up, but…

Yeah, thanks, hon.

He was well-liked by the theatre team.

I would say that we… we got on pretty well as colleagues.

He just came over as a very dedicated family man

with an interest in camper vanning and, uh, watching films when he could.

Life was going pretty well for Neil.

But on a camping trip over Easter in 2019,

a turn of events would lead to Neil Hopper's life being changed forever.

So, I went on a camping holiday with my family.

We went to the River Dart.

Um, the first night we were there, um, my daughter and I became unwell,

feeling a bit sick, um, and decided to abandon the camping trip.

And over the next couple of days,

we sort of lingered around and felt a bit fluey and achy.

Um, and then, um, one night, I went to bed a bit early,

having had a hot toddy and a couple of paracetamol.

He was on his own at home, not feeling too well.

A friend came to check in on him,

and that's when they found him very, very unwell and ill,

and he had to be rushed to hospital.

And that's when his own colleagues here in Truro,

from his very own team,

worked their hardest to-to help him.

I have some flashbacks of being in the emergency department.

I got better pretty quickly with fluids and antibiotics,

but my… my feet were quite painful and quite blue.

I first knew about Neil and his leg problems

when I was on a sabbatical in Preston.

I knew that he had been ill and he had developed sepsis,

and his feet had lost their blood supply.

It was a very strange situation

that his colleagues in Royal Cornwall Hospital

had to go and see him in intensive care and look at his feet

and work out what they could do about the damage.

Seeing your own, uh, colleague that you know well

with two black feet,

almost certainly a very troubling experience.

Sepsis is basically the body's response to a severe infection.

If sepsis does develop,

one of the responses the body has is to start losing blood pressure.

And when you lose blood pressure,

your blood supply to the tissues around the body starts dropping.

Your fingers and toes, uh, can have so little blood supply

that they start to die off

and cause your fingers or toes to start looking black

and look a little bit like they've been damaged by frostbite.

I was transferred across to Derriford Hospital

for some hyperbaric oxygen therapy,

where they put you in the… um, the tube,

the chamber that they use to treat the bends in divers

to try and boost the amount of oxygen getting down to my feet.

So I had that for a couple of weeks, which was pretty horrendous.

That was three hours a day sat in a metal tube.

They tried for days to-to save his legs,

and a lot of, um, skills and personnel and equipment.

I think there was no stone unturned

in terms of, uh, making sure every bit of treatment was offered to him.

But eventually the decision was taken

to undergo amputation, and he dealt with that very well.

I was relieved when it finally happened

because I was finally gonna get better.

I was finally out of the woods. I was not feeling ill anymore.

In my career, I think I've only ever done one bilateral amputation,

removing both legs at the same time.

So for that to be happening to a vascular surgeon

is, of course, um, beyond the realms of usual.

You can imagine how upset people felt for Neil

and the family and everybody else around.

It was a very difficult process to go through

and difficult to put someone through.

I went home and just felt like I'd fallen off a cliff

because I'd gone from being fussed around and people looking after me all the time,

you know, always somebody to chat to.

There was always a nurse coming in and out,

one of the health care assistants, to being at home on my own with no legs.

It was… It was pretty awful.

But I also remember him saying that,

you know, "I'm not gonna go into the hospital in a wheelchair.

When I go back to work, it will be walking."

And, you know, true to his word,

he really was very keen and determined to do so.

He started recording his own personal journey,

and he posted it online.

I've just been discharged from hospital,

um, and I was admitted unwell with sepsis of unknown cause.

Um, thankfully, six weeks later, I'm okay,

um, but there were some complications of my, um, hospital treatment

and I lost both my legs below the knees,

which is quite ironic, given my job.

Here I've got shrinkers on. You know, it's incredibly weird.

I'm currently, um, just killing time,

waiting to be fitted with prosthetics

so that I can get back to living as normal a life as possible.

I met Neil after he had lost both his legs.

He wanted to get back to work,

so he wanted to get rehabbed as fast as possible.

He seemed a little bit reserved, a little bit quiet,

but the more he'd done, the more his confidence grew.

We started off with weights.

So lifting heavier and heavier weights.

We got on a spinning bike.

To start off with, when he was in the wheelchair,

he didn't want anybody to see him, so we used to sneak him into the gym,

get him on the equipment and do the exercise.

Compared to other patients, he didn't…

He did not grieve his legs.

It was very, very unusual

because a lot of amputees are very sad after it's happened

because it's a big shock.

But he never… he never was.

He was always happy-go-lucky. He took everything as an adventure.

He wanted to try new things.

I always said to him, "You need to slow down

because you need to grieve about that."

And, "No, no, it's fine. It's fine."

Um, he was very, very different from everybody else that I dealt with.

Everybody that met him through the gym, they all followed him because he was…

If you like, he was the superstar of the… of the gym at the time.

I'm feeling quite strong. I am getting fitter every day.

Uh, down the gym quite a lot and doing a lot of aerobic exercise.

So, I'm in about as good a position to start with legs as I think I can be.

I think if you, um, aim for the stars and hit the moon, that's fine,

and that's what my feeling about it is.

What really, really was amazing was

he went from a wheelchair to prosthetics with no stick.

Oh, that's… that's fine, actually. Let's do the other one, then.

He walked straight away.

I think he was an hour or two with the physios, and he was walking.

Nobody does that.

See, that's when he's just… See how well he walks?

So he's on new test sockets, and he is just walking.

He's not even using the bars.

He's not using anything to help him walk.

He's just walking.

Oh, that's him on his blades.

Once he got his blades sorted, he never held on once.

He just ran. So it was quite amazing.

With the blades, you have to run because they bounce.

So you'd fall over.

For a lot of amputees, that's a really, really hard thing to do,

but Neil was fine.

He lost a lot of weight as well,

doing the gym work and doing the running.

That's actually me filming him.

He always used to say to me he was a doctor that, um,

never used to do anything.

Drank a lot, didn't exercise, used to smoke years before.

Um, and then when he had his prosthetics, it sort of changed.

You could see,

he seemed to have a new excitement to life.

We've just run and walked almost 4k.

Um, which is the first time I've properly run on my new legs.

It's brilliant to be able to run, something I've never really done before.

Yeah, chuffed. I can run. Yay!

He was, um, getting on a bike.

He was doing exercise. He was getting into the water.

He went kayaking.

So, yeah, I'm doing stuff now that I never really did before.

I started working with him in May, June time,

and he was back at work in October.

So Neil got back to work really, really quick.

And because he was a vascular surgeon with amputations, he was on TV.

So, we're gonna do a left carotid endarterectomy.

Um, technically, should be reasonably straightforward.

Neil was lauded as a hero when he got back to work.

So, he got back quickly.

He was the go-to person for amputation experience.

At any one time on our ward,

there would be one or two people with an amputation,

or looking at having an amputation,

and we would feel, Neil's the chap to talk to.

And he was using his status to talk about his experiences with patients.

One of the questions I get from them in general

is what it feels like.

What are the kind of sensations that happen after having an amputation?

And it's nice just to talk to them and tell them that at the moment it feels odd.

Suddenly, people were like, "Oh, wow," you know?

"Well done you for coming back."

And, you know, "We wouldn't have expected you to.

But you did, and that's amazing."

So there was that sense of, "I'm a hero.

And I'm helping others by putting it out there on social media."

I'm a double amputee, and I'm coping.

And, you know, I just hope that if there's somebody out there

I can help along get through this

to-to make people realise that it's not great,

but it's not that bad either.

He was championing being able to come back to work,

being able to fight and carry on, and…

So it was kind of like helping others

who may have had similar things happen to them.

Despite everything that happened to him, it was absolutely inspirational.

And suddenly, it's kind of a feel-good story.

And the label of "hero" was also put on him by the media.

Now, a surgeon who's amputated thousands of limbs during his career

has returned to work after having both of his own legs removed.

It made national news.

He was on the BBC.

Well, Neil joins us now. I'm so delighted to say, "Morning."

- Good morning. - He was on ITV.

Because it was, um… It was a good story.

And also, he was charismatic.

It was meant to take about four to six months to get walking,

and I did it in three hours.

- Did you? - Yeah.

I think he thought he was doing the right thing

by talking about his experience really openly.

I ended up having an operation where they took all my toes off,

um, and then when they did that

they realised that everything was a lot worse than they expected.

He accepted, like, the glare of the media. He wanted it in that sense.

So I've developed a squeak in my leg

that happens after I've been wearing it for too long.

So I'm going to the office now to put on another sock to get rid of the squeak.

He was an advocate for people with amputations.

We're very lucky today to have, uh, Mr Neil Hopper.

And he's gonna be talking to us…

He got more and more confident

with being able to talk to people about it,

being able to help people with it.

So, I started thinking about amputations in a different way.

It's not the end of things, it's the beginning of things.

It's an opportunity to… to start afresh.

Thank you.

He inspired a lot of people through what he did.

He always came across as, he wanted to help others

in the same situation that were worse off than him.

I think it did make him feel better to help other people.

I think it gave him confidence.

Is there anything about the experience

where you actually feel it's benefited your life

as opposed to damaging it?

Um, yeah, I-- Well…

It reinforced my place in the universe in a… in a weird way.

The Neil Hopper before the operation and the Neil Hopper now,

you know, we're the same person but quite… quite different.

After the amputations,

he thought, "I wonder if there's a bit of money,

almost like a compensation thing, from the insurance I could get."

Things are going okay.

I've even managed… …to sort out some insurance claims

and personal independent payment claims.

I can afford to live without the payments,

um, but then there's the other half of me going, "It's there. It's…

I'm entitled to it. I've paid my taxes."

Um, so, yeah,

I don't think I'm morally strong enough not to take the free stuff.

So, he looked into it, thinking he might get ten grand, 20, 15.

Not much.

But suddenly the money was life-changing.

I saw on his social media that he got the new car,

he got the adaptions, he got the bike.

He got his private legs.

NHS legs are very, very different to private legs.

He was a doctor, so I thought he was earning a lot of money.

So I thought he could afford to get all these adaptions.

So Neil Hopper

had two life insurance policies.

And having lost his legs through sepsis, he was entitled to being paid out.

He claimed nearly half a million pounds

from the two insurance policies that he had.

And when you look at his Instagram account,

you can see what he was spending his money on.

Some of the money was used for making adaptations to his home,

repaying his debts,

camper van, goodies like a hot tub and Jacuzzi.

Nearly half a million pounds is a lot of money.

He was enjoying his life.

After everything that happened, he seemed happy having lost his legs,

which is bizarre because most people would be devastated losing a limb.

Weirdly, I'm doing better than I thought.

Um, actually, I'm worried about the fact that I'm not worried.

I don't know if there's some cloud gonna hit me at some point

or whether this is as bad as it gets.

That's when I think it started to go wrong for him.

The Neil Hopper that we saw in the public eye

was hiding a dark secret.

So I was working for the Press Association

as a court reporter.

I had a sort of tip-off

that something was going on at Westminster Magistrates Court.

So I went down there without really knowing much about what to expect.

We were warned that, you know,

there was gonna be some particularly gruesome details.

As soon as I walked into court, I saw this big guy in the dock

and was handed a long charge sheet with the name Marius Gustavson on.

Marius Gustavson's originally from Norway,

where he used to work as a postman before coming to the UK.

And then he set up this website called the Eunuch Maker,

where he'd advertise what were described as extreme body modification videos,

which included cutting the genitals,

the penis and testicles off men, to literally make them eunuchs.

When the case got to the Old Bailey,

there were nine codefendants he was sentenced alongside.

But Gustavson was the ringleader of this group of men

apparently willingly having bits of their body removed.

And these procedures were going on in Marius Gustavson's basement flat

in a residential part of London.

It wasn't in a medical setting, and, you know, they'd often go wrong.

It would result in them needing to call an ambulance

and people rushed to hospital and patched up with the NHS.

The nature of the evidence, it was so extreme.

You know, a lot of it was, uh, difficult to listen to.

And especially when they showed the video of Marius Gustavson

having his penis removed by one of his codefendants, who was an escort.

Quite strangely, after he'd cut it off,

he actually said on this video that, you know,

"That's one for the bucket list," which, you know, is very strange.

Puts it on a par with, you know,

swimming with dolphins or something like that.

It was apparently quite a lucrative enterprise,

and Gustavson made around £300,000 in profits off this site

over about four years.

It was accepted that every one of these people

who had procedures done to them was consenting,

but it was a degree to how informed that consent was.

One 16-year-old boy was involved,

and some of the other people were also vulnerable in different ways.

Drug users and, you know, mental health problems.

The judge was quite forthright

in his sentencing remarks about this operation.

He called it "little short of human butchery"

and was adamant there was no defence in law to these crimes.

So, the evidence in the case against Marius Gustavson was overwhelming.

And he was sentenced to life imprisonment

with a minimum term of 22 years for what he'd done.

His codefendants got fairly lengthy prison terms.

So in court, we heard that a victim came forward, Michael,

and alerted police to what was going on.

The judge even praised the bravery of the victim,

saying, you know, this would still be going on if it wasn't for him.

After the court hearing,

I received an email from somebody I didn't know

who referred to himself as Michael.

That's not his real name.

And Michael said,

"Do you want to find out how I brought down the Eunuch Maker?"

He said he was a victim

and he had been castrated by Gustavson on the website.

And he wanted his story to be told.

And I was intrigued, I've got to admit.

And Michael lived in West Cornwall,

so I went to see him.

And it was the most unbelievable story.

And also by coming forward,

he helped shine a light on Neil Hopper's involvement.

I met Gustavson through a mutual friend.

He said his name was Theo.

I now know that Theo is Greek for "god",

and, um, made sense, as he was playing God.

He was charming, friendly,

seemed like a genuine enough guy.

Seemed relatable.

Didn't seem like a monster.

We had extensive chats on WhatsApp.

I was… …grieving a couple of very close friends,

and we had pretty deep conversations for casual hookups.

I certainly felt I could trust him.

Gustavson was into some pretty extreme BDSM,

but he seemed relatively safe.

Gustavson showed me his website that he ran

and told me I should join it.

The website was the Eunuch Maker.

It was very extreme, to say the least.

Michael told me about the Eunuch Maker,

and I thought, "Oh, my God. Wow."

I didn't know this world existed.

People having amputations done to them, castrating themselves, streamed live.

This is incredible. This is madness.

The website looked professional enough.

It was just a dot-com website address.

You didn't have to… It wasn't on the dark web at all.

And I just thought, "Well, if… if he's running that sort of website,

then obviously it hasn't caused any alarm bells to ring

with any authorities, so fine."

On that website, there was a very active community,

and they were very encouraging to new people.

They were very supportive.

And there are more than 20,000 members on that website,

which is probably as many people live in Truro.

So it's like the whole of Truro on a weird website.

These paying members, they bought videos, they downloaded them.

The more extreme the amputation,

the higher up the ranks you went up in the little league table.

I was shocked, but equally fascinated.

The world that Gustavson created

was in many ways like a cult.

Um, he was the main ringleader,

and then you had a lot of very devoted followers.

They were his members.

They were his foot soldiers.

The community on that website was predominantly gay men.

They weren't degenerates.

They were upstanding members of society,

um, holding down regular jobs

with high responsibility.

There were rumours on the website that there was actual surgeons on there.

I had it very clearly on my profile

that I didn't want any permanent damage done,

but at that time, I was in a very dark place mentally,

and I wanted to feel pain at that time.

And then Gustavson started putting the idea in my head

that, "Oh, maybe I should just castrate you."

My initial reaction was, "Fuck no."

Then he told me that there was a considerable amount of money in it for me.

Gustavson sent a tariff over,

and a castration was coming in at £15,000.

To my… my life at that point, it was a life-changing amount of money.

And I stupidly believed him.

I never saw a single penny.

And I talked to people on the website,

and they'd go, "Yeah, you should do it. That'd be a good idea."

The seeds had been planted, and they had been nurtured

over the course of a couple of months

not just by Gustavson, but by every single member of that website.

So I agreed to the unthinkable.

He was agreeing

to have a castration procedure done to him

live on the Internet

with people paying through that Eunuch Maker website to watch it.

When he was recounting what was happening to him,

at the time, I certainly squirmed in my chair.

I wish I could go back through time

and shake myself vigorously by the neck.

It was insanity. It was complete insanity.

The whole thing had been filmed.

It was content for his website.

It's all it was.

It was just another update for his website.

I was utterly broken.

I thought my life was in ruins.

Michael was a victim.

He agreed to it, but it wasn't, like, 100% his own will in that sense.

He said that he was in a bad place mentally

because his friends had died.

And Michael mentioned it to me himself.

He said was groomed. This is grooming.

This is nurturing you

into doing something illegal, dangerous… uh, sick.

He was groomed by… by Gustavson, absolutely.

You cannot consent to being tortured or… or castrated or mutilated.

There's no consent in law for that.

My pride doesn't want me to admit that I was being taken advantage of,

but… yes.

Yes.

Looking back, there was a lot of manipulation going on.

I finally saw Gustavson for what he was.

I saw him as a monster.

He was just a butcher.

It's disgusting what happened to Michael.

But he had the strength,

despite what happened to him,

to go to the police.

No other victim came forward.

But Michael did.

I knew in my heart of hearts that this had to stop,

because people would soon be dying with what was going on on that website.

I decided that I would talk to the police.

They couldn't do anything unless I made a formal complaint.

So I rang up the Met and said, "Go for it. I'll give you everything."

And that phone call from Michael

led to the Met's serious crime squad raiding Gustavson's basement flat.

There was so much stuff in there, so much evidence,

that the police ended up searching the flat for days.

When the police raided Gustavson's flat,

they obviously seized all his devices…

and his hard drives with a huge amount of data on it.

There was a large amount of video evidence,

a large amount of photographic evidence,

along with what I understand is thousands of pages of messages

that were sent between him, the victims and his co-conspirators.

The Met then investigated Marius Gustavson

and several other suspects.

They realised fairly soon on it was a very unusual case.

Uh, this was something very, very different.

My name is Richard Parkhouse. I'm a senior crown prosecutor,

and I work for the Crown Court unit for the South West CPS.

We tend to deal with the more serious offences

that end up in the Crown Court.

I wasn't involved in the investigation in relation to Mr Gustavson,

but Marius Gustavson is an important person in our case.

So what we did rely on was overview statements from the Met Police

just to give a background about the investigation.

And there were videos of extreme body procedures.

And one of the definitions of an extreme image

is an act which could seriously injure someone's genitals,

so this clearly met the definition of extreme images.

And there appears to be

an international market for this kind of fetish.

During the course of the Met Police investigation,

thousands of messages and a lot of computers were examined.

There was over 10,000 emails,

because he was notified every time someone purchased one of his videos.

So it's a huge amount of material to go through.

Marius Gustavson was eventually charged.

When police examined all of his devices,

they see that he's been messaging with another person.

There are 5,177 messages between them.

They were talking about further videos that Mr Gustavson was going to make

about cutting off further body parts

and a keen interest in viewing them and purchasing them.

So this person was one of his customers,

someone who'd been accessing his videos,

was an email address,

and that email address was subscribed to the website.

He was using "Admirodoc" as his profile name.

Following further investigation,

the Met police discovered that the email address that was being used

was registered to someone living in Cornwall.

And also, the telephone number that was communicating with Mr Gustavson

was registered to Neil Hopper.

Neil Hopper's carrying on as normal.

Hero consultant who has come back from his own amputations.

And he doesn't know that he's now been linked

to the Eunuch Maker website…

through the discovery of, like, hundreds and hundreds of messages.

So you've got the two parallel worlds and… and suddenly they met.

And that led to Neil Hopper's world collapsing.