There's not much that shocks us these days. We're Twitchy after all, and we cover weird daily. But every once in a while, a story comes along that is so cringeworthy that even we have to do a double-take.
The latest such story comes to us from across the pond. A doctor in jolly old England pleaded guilty to fraud, duping two insurance companies for the equivalent of $600K.
In and of itself, a doctor committing insurance fraud is barely newsworthy, much less cringeworthy, until you get to the how and why.
It seems the (not so) good doctor has a sexual fetish for amputations and had his own legs amputated to satisfy his creepy desires.
The once respected Dr. Hopper (you can't make this stuff up) pulled off, or in this case, cut off his scheme by soaking his legs in ice water and dry ice, and then fraudulently claiming the damage was caused by sepsis.
A surgeon with a “sexual obsession” for cutting off parts of his body had his own legs amputated as part of an insurance scam, officials in the UK said on Thursday.
Doctor Neil Hopper, 49, submerged his own legs for eight hours in a combination of ice and dry ice so they would have to be removed, while falsely claiming to his insurers that he had sepsis, prosecutor Nicholas Lee said.
He admitted two counts of insurance fraud and three of possessing extreme pornography at Truro Crown Court, southwest England, BBC News reported.
To make the creepy even creepier, the disturbed doctor was a vascular surgeon and regularly performed amputations on patients.
The vascular surgeon had carried out hundreds of amputation operations on patients while working for the state-run National Health Service before having his own legs removed in 2019.
Hopper’s scam was motivated both by his “sexual interest in amputation” and “greed,” prosecutor Lee said.
“His motivations were a combination of obsession with removing parts of his own body and a sexual interest in doing so,” he told the judge.
The icing on Dr (used to be a) Hopper's creepy cake was how he was caught. A man by the name of Marius Gustavson was convicted of operating an illegal extreme porn site called EunuchMaker, and guess who was buying amputation porn from that website?
His extreme pornography offenses were connected to the videos he had purchased online, none of which included children, the judge was told.
Marius Gustavson, who ran the EunuchMaker website, was sentenced to at least 22 years in prison at the Old Bailey in London last year for leading an extreme body modification ring.
Keep in mind, this guy was a practicing surgeon who was entrusted with the lives of sick people.
We're sure there are plenty of his former patients who have some questions after finding out about the freak show that operated on them.
The case was in the UK, where that defense strategy may have worked.
His defense team argued that the doctor's issues stemmed from a lifelong problem with body dysphoria, but in the end, they entered a guilty plea. Dr. Hopper just didn't have a leg to stand on.
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