Original subtitles

[gulls squawking]

[Chant] I came to work on a Monday morning

to be told by our service lead at the time,

who's one of the other consultants, that Neil was suspended.

It's not an uncommon situation for doctors to be suspended at any one time,

and we just assumed it'd all blow over within weeks.

At some point, after a couple of months,

the vascular consultants were asked to give a statement to the police.

Is there anything about Neil's practise that I thought was abnormal?

Was there anything he'd done

that was a wrong operation or an ill-advised operation?

I just didn't think there'd be an issue that was of any relevance whatsoever.

But as things turned out…

I was wrong to assume that.

[Vergnault] In 2019, Neil Hopper caught sepsis,

and he became a double-leg amputee.

But after six months, he was back at work,

and he was operating on patients.

He was like a superhero surgeon. You know, nothing could stop him.

Until one day, in March 2023, he just didn't come to work again.

This is the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. It's known as Treliske.

And it's Cornwall's main hospital.

It's where Dr Neil Hopper used to work as a vascular surgeon.

At first, his colleagues were told that he had been suspended,

but nobody really knew what was going on.

As a journalist, we do try to keep our ears to the ground as much as possible.

A lot of people contact us via social media, Facebook.

Um, they might have ideas, they might have tip-offs.

And that's when you start hearing things about him.

People questioning, colleagues questioning,

"Why is he not here? What's going on?"

There were rumours that he was involved with the Eunuch Maker website,

and the person behind it, Marius Gustavson.

There were also rumours of police involvement.

And I was kind of intrigued.

What did he do?

[Parkhouse] During the investigation in relation to Marius Gustavson,

who had been running a website called the Eunuch Maker,

the Met police discovered thousands of messages

between Neil Hopper and Mr Gustavson.

So it was the Met police who handed over these messages

to Devon and Cornwall police to investigate.

CPS were contacted soon after this for early advice

about the direction of the investigation looking at Mr Hopper.

During the conversations, they get pretty graphic--

quite disturbing, some of the chats--

and it's quite often difficult to tell what's fantasy and what isn't fantasy.

From looking at these conversations,

it appeared Mr Hopper had watched some of these extreme videos.

So the police were seeking charges of possessing of extreme images.

Mr Hopper was arrested in March 2023, and his property was searched.

The police seized a significant number of items, including computers,

and the police examined his devices,

looking for things like messages with Mr Gustavson

and of course extreme images that may or may not be on his computer.

In his police interview, he would have been asked

about his connections with Mr Gustavson,

whether he had been speaking to him.

And for all these questions, he made no comment.

And he is then bailed, pending further enquiries.

When someone makes no comment, we've got to have a very tight case.

If he puts forward a defence, you can then build a case to disprove that defence.

But because he made no comment,

we had to prove every single element before any charges would be authorised.

Normally when you charge extreme images,

they are found in an accessible area of someone's computer or phone.

This case was unusual

because the police never found the extreme images on any of his devices.

And because we never recovered the images,

I had concerns about being able to prove possession of extreme images.

The messages on their own weren't enough.

So we asked the police to do further work

before I felt I was in a position to charge the case.

[Chant] I think all of us were being fed snippets of information slowly but surely.

The police had been involved, and he didn't think there was a problem.

And he told me about his hard drives in his house,

and he said he'd willingly given them to the police,

and there was nothing to see on them anyway.

When I saw Neil the last time, when I bumped into him in Sainsbury's,

he was very… very downtrodden, if you like, and depressed and sad.

And I thought, "That's perfectly normal. That's it.

He's now grieving for his legs." So it wasn't a shock.

That wasn't a shock.

[Chant] I remember sitting in his garden

and him looking at the house extension he'd had built and the wheelchair ramp,

and he said, "I could lose all of this."

And he said, "Well, somebody's suggested

that the insurance claim is wrong

and shouldn't have gone through."

I didn't think anything more of it,

because I trusted Neil's version of events implicitly.

[Spary] I was following him on social media,

then all of a sudden it just… it dried up.

I didn't think anything of it.

Just people come and go off of social media.

[gulls squawking]

The police needed to obtain production orders from the court

for things like his banks to obtain financial transactions.

And police were able to tell from looking at these financial transactions

that Mr Hopper had purchased three of these extreme videos.

He'd purchased one that was £10.

There were two other videos purchased for £35.

And during the conversations with Mr Gustavson,

Mr Hopper says that he's purchased the videos.

He even names them and names the males involved.

He says he's watched them thousands of times and how hot they are.

So we know that he purchased these videos to view them.

November 2023, he's arrested again, and again he makes no comment.

We were satisfied that the offence of possessing extreme image could be proven,

but there was other evidence found for fraud.

The police therefore carried out a fraud investigation.

What was apparent from the messages with Mr Gustavson

was that Mr Hopper had deliberately amputated his own legs.

I authorised the charges on 25 June, 2025,

and he appeared in the Crown Court in September.

It got a lot of media attention.

[Vergnault] We got this tip-off saying, "Oh, watch out for Neil Hopper at court."

And then I looked into it and was like,

"Oh, but it's the hero surgeon with no legs.

Wow. Why is he in court for?"

So came up to the Crown Court at Truro, and there was everybody.

This has to be one of the most extraordinary cases

to ever come before this court.

BBC, ITV, The Sun, The Telegraph, The Guardian, everyone was there.

Mr Hopper was brought up into the docks in court and the charges were read to him:

two frauds and three counts of possessing of extreme images.

You could tell from the way he looked physically in the dock, he was broken.

You know, head in his hand, in tears, sobbing.

He was meek. His voice was weak.

And then he listened to everything that was said about him.

On the weird scale of things, this was quite high.

This was an 11 out of ten.

[Parkhouse] There were three counts representing

three individual videos that we know that he bought.

They were labelled, and the Met police

provided a summary of what each video showed.

The first one he purchased for £10,

which showed a male having his testicles clamped.

The second one, purchased for £35,

showed Mr Gustafson tying down a male,

throwing a dice to decide which body parts to cut off.

He then proceeds to castrate this male.

He then panics because of the amount of blood coming out of this male

and calls an ambulance, and you can hear him calling an ambulance in the video.

And the final one, that he purchased for £35,

was footage of a male castrating himself.

And on one video, a gentleman was using a scalpel

to cut out his penis

and brandished it to the camera, live.

All of us were stunned by what we heard.

This guy is an esteemed NHS consultant,

who had a sense of care and duty to his patients and to his colleagues,

and then when you flip that, you had this darkness.

Paying to watch videos of people castrating themselves…

Made you feel a bit "ugh".

[Parkhouse] It's shocking, because these videos that he was watching

were clearly dangerous.

They were being carried out in dangerous circumstances.

They wouldn't have been sanitary.

People were not medically qualified, and there's a risk of people bleeding out.

And obviously, these are permanent, irreversible, lifelong injuries to people,

and he has a duty as a doctor to help protect people from medical harm.

He takes an oath to protect them.

[Vergnault] So what was said in court was that when he got in touch

with the Eunuch Maker, Gustavson,

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

Hopper was not just a paying member.

He was a contributor, active contributor.

[message chimes]

As text messages showed,

Neil Hopper was in direct contact with Gustavson.

About Eunuch Maker, about product, about new videos,

even to the point where he would say,

"When you've got new videos out, I'll buy them from you."

[Parkhouse] And then we presented the evidence that Mr Hopper

had deliberately frozen his own legs.

And as a result, he had to have them amputated.

It's like, "Oh, what? What did you mean, he may have done it himself? How?"

And what was said in court was that Neil Hopper

decided to have his own legs amputated for his own personal gratification.

And while Gustavson was more into people cutting their own genitals off,

Neil Hopper asked Gustavson for advice

on how to go through a procedure of amputating his own legs.

[Parkhouse] So the messages start with Mr Gustavson saying, "I'm happy to help."

And the response from Mr Hopper is excitement. "Oh, wow. Thank you."

Mr Gustavson clearly has done this before,

because he provides Mr Hopper a how-to guide on how to freeze your legs…

which is very detailed, surprisingly detailed.

It looks like an instruction manual.

Even with pictures in it on where to place your legs and how to place them.

Gustavson said, "Well, this is the process.

You've got to purchase medical-grade dry ice."

[Parkhouse] The police obtained financial transactions

that Mr Hopper had made at the same time on these dates

of him buying 20 kilogrammes of dry ice.

[Vergnault] You've got to get some crypto money like Bitcoin.

You go on the dark web, which is known for criminal activity.

Then you purchase high-grade painkillers,

opioids, that you would need to sustain the level of pain.

Because when you immerse yourself for eight hours in dry ice,

you will be in agony.

Even dipping your fingers burns. It hurts.

So eight hours for your legs, without painkillers, he would have died of shock.

[Parkhouse] So he helps him buy the drugs

and he talks him through the whole process of how to freeze his legs.

And that starts on the evening of the 15th of April.

He knew that his family were going to be away then.

He spent eight hours, eight hours in dry ice,

pumped to the eyeballs on, like, you know,

morphine, basically, or strong painkillers.

[Parkhouse] You can see through the conversation,

Dr Hopper telling him what he's doing.

"I've now submerged my feet. Checking the temperature.

I can't feel my legs anymore. This is amazing."

[Vergnault] He even sent Gustavson some pictures

of him immersed in the dry ice,

going, "Hey, look. Soon, no legs."

[Parkhouse] He's very prepared.

He knows exactly what he's doing and what steps to follow.

And he's supported throughout this by Mr Gustavson.

The conversation ends eventually,

and then the following day, Mr Hopper's wife has concerns about him.

And that's when they found him.

[siren wailing]

- [monitors beeping] - And his own colleagues here in Truro

worked their hardest to help him, to save his legs.

They did what they could, and then they took the decision to amputate him.

And on the back of that, he effectively achieved what he had hoped to do.

It was clear from the communications

that this was a long-standing fantasy of Dr Hopper.

So he was in hospital for about six weeks.

Not once did he ever tell the medical staff or his colleagues

that it was self-inflicted, so none of them knew.

[Vergnault] When Hopper had the operation done,

he took pictures of his own stumps

and sent a photo of his stumps to Gustavson.

[Parkhouse] He's very happy with the results.

And he told everyone-- friends, family, members of the public, everyone--

that he had contracted a sickness.

[Skentelbery] How did you contract the sepsis?

[Hopper] I think it was food poisoning.

[Skentelbery] Food poisoning? Actually, you can get sepsis from food poisoning?

[Hopper] Yeah, I think it was, um, because my daughter had it as well,

um, the same sort of bug, so, um, yeah, it was probably my bad camping cooking.

[Skentelbery laughing] No!

Everybody trusted him. He's the expert. He knows what sepsis is.

His job is to deal with sepsis on a daily basis, so everybody trusted him.

I had the story of, he felt a little bit off.

He had a glass of whisky, took a couple of paracetamols.

He went to bed, and his wife couldn't get hold of him,

so she sent his registrar around, and they found him in bed.

That's the story he told me.

[Chant] With the benefit of hindsight, Neil Hopper's feet were black

because they had been exposed to extreme cold

and not because of sepsis.

To suddenly find that the whole thing was a real fabrication

was a real, yeah, quite a surprise, should we say.

Yeah. Staggering, really.

[Spary] When it'd actually come out, I couldn't believe it.

How can somebody actually do that to themselves?

It's very hard to think about, to be quite honest with you,

because what on earth was his mental state?

To actually put your feet in dry ice, it must have been so painful.

How can you actually put yourself through that?

How did he keep that hidden for so long?

From his wife, from his colleagues. I mean, these are all professional people.

How did they miss it? How did we all miss it?

I don't know. He just seemed normal.

I find it very troubling that he has strung along

so many intelligent people and so many people he loves.

I find it troubling that I could be quite so well duped.

After he's released from hospital, on the 4th of June,

he contacts his insurance companies

and explains that he contracted a mysterious illness,

which developed into sepsis, and he had to have his legs removed.

The Aviva policy specifically says any acts of self-harm

would mean that you aren't covered, for very obvious reasons.

People can't be allowed to go and cut their body parts off

and then claim hundreds of thousands of pounds.

As was said in court, he didn't think it would be hundreds of thousands.

He thought, "Mmm, I'd get ten grand, five grand, something like that."

When Neil Hopper made the two claims against insurance policies,

they trusted his expertise.

He knows about sepsis. That's his job.

So they didn't question it, and it went through.

There was that intention of "milking it for my amputation."

"How far can I go? How much can I get for my amputations?"

[Parkhouse] He was paid the money in June by Aviva.

Old Mutual Wealth paid him in July 2019.

Quite a lot of money. It's £466,000.

And the most… the biggest purchases, if you like,

were prosthetic legs.

He spent £30,000 on that.

There was a purchase of a hot tub for about £15,000.

The biggest purchase was £250,000 towards work to his house.

And then a lot of it was just spent on smaller things.

And by November 2022, it had all been spent.

For him to have done what he did, freezing his own legs, in itself is not illegal.

But the act that made that illegal

was then making a false representation to his insurance company

that he'd contracted sepsis and hadn't done this deliberately to himself.

That's when he broke the law.

So half a million pounds of greed, effectively.

And that was his downfall.

[Parkhouse] Because the evidence was overwhelming,

the defence will do what's called a plea and mitigation.

He was a man of good character.

He was a vascular surgeon, a 49-year-old married man.

No previous record of offending, children, family support,

and clearly was struggling with his mental health.

[Vergnault] In his defence, the barrister said that Hopper had body issues,

in that he didn't accept his limbs as fully part of his body,

like they didn't belong to him.

This is a transcript of what was read out in court.

"And he suffered body dysphoria

and a particular distaste or loathing for his feet,

and he felt that they were not part of him."

[First] Body Integrity Dysphoria

is a condition where people want to have an amputation

because they believe that some part of their body, when they look at it,

it just feels like it's foreign, it shouldn't be there.

In this particular case with Mr Hopper,

so much of his presentation is just classic.

The word "dysphoria" means it gives you a bad feeling.

It's dysphoria, so gender dysphoria means your gender makes you feel bad.

So the same thing is here.

The way your body is configured makes you feel bad, so Body Integrity Dysphoria.

Your having four limbs makes you feel bad.

So the solution for them is to remove the limb.

The body without the limb is the way they feel like they should have been born.

So it's really like an obsession.

You're obsessed with this thing you can't get.

And it's extremely rare, but the patients who have it suffer tremendously.

So what happens with those people is the idea is you make the leg unviable,

so when you go to the hospital,

the only treatment that's available for someone like that is to do the amputation.

So they basically do something that could force the amputation.

There was a case of a guy who wanted to lay down on a train track

and wanted the train to run over his leg.

I mean, really serious stuff like that.

In this case, you call up a dry-ice place, order a ton of it,

you follow whatever you read about what people do, and you do it yourself,

and at least, however horrible it is to do that,

it's more likely than not that you'll come out of it alive.

What's interesting about this condition,

you look at them and you go, "Looks normal to me."

They can have this one very totally weird thing

and be totally normal in every other way.

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

They're like a different person when they're in this mode.

You can see it doesn't bleed over into the other part of their lives.

In Neil's case, he was able to successfully keep it

under wraps for years, which is incredible.

It's not a coincidence that he chose to be a vascular surgeon,

because vascular surgeons do amputations, and that was his obsession.

So his obsession turned into something very positive for him.

He was an excellent, well-respected vascular surgeon, very, very skilled.

Given my experience of these cases, to get what he wanted with his legs,

I think it would have cured his BID,

meaning that he would no longer be thinking and obsessing

about this idea of wanting to be an amputee.

He would come to some degree of peace with himself.

His barristers explained to court, in his defence,

Neil Hopper regretted the hurt he caused his family, his loved ones,

he regretted the loss of his career,

but he never regretted the actual loss of his legs,

because that's what he had always wanted.

It's almost like he had been looking forward

to having no legs for such a long time

that when finally he had no legs, he was ironically complete.

But that does not explain the extreme pornographic videos

he downloaded from the Eunuch Maker.

That doesn't explain or excuse

his involvement with the Eunuch Maker and Gustavson,

considering that people were being hurt.

Absolutely not.

The sexual angle and how extreme it is is not typical for somebody with BID.

I suspect he had this… the wanting to be an amputee, going all the way back,

and then somewhere, maybe in adolescence, he developed this sexual element.

The idea of seeing somebody made to be a eunuch was his kink.

Now, why these things develop is another mystery.

We have no idea why it is that people develop a kink.

I mean, usually there's something that happens in childhood very early on

that becomes sexualised.

So I'm sure when he heard about the Eunuch Maker

and then heard that he sold videos,

it was probably irresistible to him not to order one.

Not only is Gustavson dealing in castration videos,

but Gustavson has the same interest

in amputation to the degree that he did it himself.

So I'm sure for Neil that was like a gold mine…

the ability to be able to share that secret

with someone who wasn't horrified by it.

I mean, that's gotta be hugely helpful to him.

I'm sure that was a big facilitating factor for Neil to go through.

So I think Gustavson is a serious accomplice in that part of the story.

[Parkhouse] The evidence was overwhelming,

but because he'd made no comment, I had no idea what he was going to do in this case.

What issues was he going to take?

Were we going to have legal arguments about the fact

that the images were never actually recovered from his laptop?

I didn't know.

And I frankly was pleasantly surprised when he pleaded guilty.

And he was sentenced there and then.

And he was sentenced to 22 months for the frauds,

and ten months concurrent on the possession of the extreme images,

and a sexual harm prevention order was made.

Neil Hopper was today jailed for more than two and a half years

after admitting he had a sexual interest in amputation.

[reporter] His downfall from hero doctor now complete,

he's been jailed for two and a half years.

[birds chirping]

[Vergnault] There is that sense amongst his colleagues that he betrayed them.

The resources that were used to try to save his legs

when those resources-- NHS staff, equipment, time--

could have been used to try and save someone else's legs.

And I think there was that sense of,

"What a waste. That could have been used to save someone's life.

Instead, we helped you achieve your weird fantasy."

[Chant] I suppose the thing that worries me in some respects about the whole affair

is that there are a lot of patients out there

who are possibly believing that maybe they were treated by him in good faith

and had the wrong operation

or had the wrong treatment or the wrong advice.

Some of the patients' concerns touched on

whether Neil Hopper operated on them

for his own sexual gratification.

That was a concern.

[machines whirring, beeping]

Did he cut my leg off because it was necessary

or because it was a weird fetish?

Did he amputate my limb because I needed it to save my life or because he's a perv?

[First] Any patient of his once this came out would be, I would worry too.

"Is he competent as a doctor? Was he getting excited by doing the surgery?"

It's an obvious thing to think.

[Bird] I had dialed into the Crown Court hearing,

and to hear that a respected consultant vascular surgeon in Cornwall

was somehow connected with that kind of world was a bizarre thing to hear.

I'm a solicitor. We specialise in clinical and medical claims.

Because obviously Mr Hopper was a vascular surgeon whose job is to amputate legs,

the question was, well, what has he been doing?

How might had it impacted his patients?

Are there going to be patients who are going to be looking for answers

or asking questions about their own treatment?

And there was quite a flurry of patients who've contacted us,

and they have almost all said,

"We feel very uncomfortable

that the treatment that we received may not have been motivated by clinical need.

It may have been motivated by sexual gratification.

What was going on in his head when he had me on the operating table

if he was going to be amputating my leg?"

Like anybody else, I was pretty surprised

to see the nature of the charges that were being brought against him,

because Mr Hopper was quite a sort of local celebrity.

He'd done quite a lot of local news.

I'm a nightmare patient, really.

- Because I know I'm the mystery shopper. - [interviewer] Yeah, exactly.

[Bird] He was an inspirational character to many people,

but he deceived his family, his friends,

his medical colleagues at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

When he was first admitted there, he didn't tell them what he'd done.

And so what else might he have deceived people about?

It is my job to ask questions,

but we may never get those questions answered.

[Vergnault] Neil Hopper may still be an active surgeon at Treliske

if it hadn't been for Michael…

who was castrated by the Eunuch Maker.

But there's still another twist in Michael's story.

So Michael told me, after he was castrated, he went to Treliske…

which is obviously where Neil Hopper worked.

He's going to hospital

because obviously, he's had cattle clamps put to his testicles,

and he's in pain and he needs treatment, needs help.

So you've got the two Eunuch Maker worlds,

one a victim, one a participant, colliding,

coming together at the same hospital in Cornwall.

[Michael] I believe Gustavson's modus operandi

was always to cause the injury to such a degree

and then send the person to the NHS

and have them deal with the damage.

Treliske Hospital is the nearest, biggest hospital to me

that has a urology department.

At the time, I didn't know Mr Hopper was a consultant surgeon

at the same hospital I went to.

When I was sent up to Treliske,

I said to the urologist, "I had a one-night stand with a sadist."

And he said,

"I'll go and have a look at the report, go back

and go and have a consult with some colleagues, and I'll be back."

For all I know, he could have gone and had coffee with Neil Hopper.

Because Neil Hopper was a vascular surgeon. This involves blood flow.

So, in my head, there's always going to be the question of:

Did the vascular team get consulted on this?

It's certainly suspicious to me

that one of the users of that website and friend of Gustavson

was also a consultant surgeon at the same hospital I went to.

[Vergnault] For Michael, I think that's the mental Rubik's Cube, you know,

of, he went to hospital for something horrific

that happened to him at the hand of the Eunuch Maker,

and he found out that one of the Eunuch Maker enthusiasts

was a consultant at the same hospital here in Cornwall,

which is quite a small world,

and I think he had troubles reconciling the two.

[Chant] We do work closely together,

and, you know, urologists and vascular surgeons will do operations together,

so I guess if there was a blood vessel problem,

then, yeah, Neil may well have been asked.

But I think it's exceedingly unlikely.

But as things turned out, unlikely things happen.

Yeah.

[Bird] The Royal Cornwall Hospital's trust

said there's been an internal investigation done.

They indicated that as part of that internal review,

one of their own consultants

who had had experience of working

for the police in another matter had been involved.

But my understanding is that the analysis

was done by the trust's own employees,

their own clinicians, not external.

It doesn't reassure a concerned patient

who's just heard that the person who amputated their leg

has admitted charges of extreme pornography and fraud.

That's a huge, huge issue,

because he's lied, and because it strikes at that relationship,

that confidence that one places in a doctor

to be doing the right thing for the right reasons.

[gulls squawking]

Had he not committed the fraud,

he might have got away with it.

He might still be doing interviews and being a TV consultant as well.

Radio, TV, Internet, podcast, everything.

He might have got his own book.

But he got done

because something else bigger than him came apart.

And it's almost like two separate people, almost, two separate minds.

Himself the professional…

Well, there's no surgery to be done. There's no bypass.

…leading his normal life,

and himself, the fetishist…

on the dark side of humanity.

[Chant] In my more generous moments,

I just feel very sorry for him being dragged along by it.

You know, you could forgive him for injuring himself.

But I think the Eunuch Maker website…

I'm amazed Neil didn't have the common sense to stop

before he went across that line.

[Parkhouse] The biggest impact for Mr Hopper in this case

is clearly going to be the fact that he's completely lost his reputation.

Losing your reputation in criminal cases

can quite often be worse than the punishment you receive.

[Spary] A lot of people are shocked. A lot of people are disgusted.

Was he helping people because he knew he was doing something fraudulently?

Was that his way of trying to right a wrong that he'd done?

That has to be why he recovered so fast: because he got what he wanted.

He got what he thought he wanted.

I don't know. It's a strange sort of story, really.

[gulls squawking]

All right. Come on.

Come here. Come, come, come. Come on.

Up. All right, sit. No, sit. Come on. Sit! There we go.

I don't really know how I feel about Neil Hopper.

He betrayed everybody.

His family, his friends,

his colleagues, his own patients,

but he also betrayed himself.

But had he been more open,

had he talked to somebody about his mental health issues,

maybe none of this would have happened.

In Truro, which is a small city,

the ripple effects of the Neil Hopper saga are still being felt.

There are people who still have questions to which they may never get an answer.

And ultimately, it is a really sad story.

I've heard some crazy stuff in 25 years.

I've interviewed prime ministers, pop stars,

but this was so strange.

The dark side of the human mind.

As interesting as it was, and as exciting as for a reporter it was,

I don't want that shit in my head.

No thanks.