Featured Image Credit: Crime+Investigation
Topics: True Crime, Crime, UK News, Documentaries
Joe Harker
Topics: True Crime, Crime, UK News, Documentaries
Warning: this article discusses graphic violence and cannibalism which some readers may find distressing.
A harrowing new documentary opens up the world of the 'Eunuch Maker' Marius Gustavson, a man who for several years ran a website where he would castrate men and livestream the procedure to a paying audience.
Over the course of several years, he is thought to have earned over £300,000 from his actions, with his website amassing over 22,000 users and creating a community where being castrated by Gustavson was a way of amassing status on there.
When police raided his home, they found ample evidence, including human body parts such as testicles kept in his freezer in takeaway tubs, while a court heard that there had been 'clear evidence of cannibalism' too.
Gustavson's own amputated penis was found in a drawer in his home, with it having been cut off four years before police found it.
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Documentary filmmaker Marcel Theroux, who presented The Eunuch Maker, spoke to LADbible about the grisly story and the world Gustavson created where he could find people who wanted him to castrate them along with a paying audience to watch.
While plenty of people could find his website he was able to go undetected by the authorities for years and The Eunuch Maker documentary also notes that there were a number of incidents where the emergency services had to be called but the alarm wasn't raised further.
In conversation with LADbible, Theroux said: “How did it go under the radar? It's bizarre, isn't it?
“What about the fact that people were turning up in A&E with their penises cut off, and saying, ‘you know, I had some kind of accident’. And no one thought, 'well, we should flag this'.
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"It feels like the timing of a lot of this must have been around lockdown, that the hospitals must have been just chocka, A&E was swamped.
"If you ever had the misfortune to be in A&E people are going on and off shift, there's no follow up. No one saw a pattern."
One such incident covered in the documentary, where an ambulance is called after a castration has gone wrong, has Gustavson telling people that a kitchen knife had been dropped.
When he was eventually arrested and appeared before a court, officials were played several recordings of 999 calls where the 'Eunuch Maker' lied to authorities and claimed that the men he'd mutilated had injured themselves.
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While those he castrated suffered greatly at his hands, they had seemingly volunteered to go under Gustavson's knife, with Theroux saying the website created a 'self-reinforcing silo where people’s extreme belief kind of hardens and doesn't get challenged', resulting in people becoming part of a community that praised them for going through with it.
He added that in the course of putting together The Eunuch Maker he'd spoken to a number of 'voluntary eunuchs', people who had chosen to have their genitals removed, saying he found they were people who had 'terrible dysphoria who experience parts of their body as not their own, and are willing to go through a very extreme procedure to get rid of it'.
Gustavson was jailed for life with a minimum term of 22 years, while six others were also imprisoned.
A judge said that what the Norwegian had done was 'little short of human butchery', and that he was getting 'a mix of sexual gratification as well as financial reward' out of it.
According to the BBC at the time of his sentencing, court documents showed that Gustavson also sold human tissue that was taken from his amputations.
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The Eunuch Maker is available to watch on Crime+Investigation and Crime+Investigation Play.