Tag: castration

“Eunuch Maker” jailed for life – he cooked testicles for lunch

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

The mastermind of a “grisly and gruesome” extreme body modification network who streamed mutilations on his “eunuch maker” website has been jailed for life, with a minimum term of 22 years.

Marius Gustavson, 46, was accused of being the “arch manipulator” of vulnerable victims and purportedly took part in at least 29 procedures, which were “little short of human butchery”, the Old Bailey in London heard.

The “large-scale, dangerous and extremely disturbing” four-year enterprise included castrations, the use of clamps to crush testicles, penis removals, the freezing of limbs and administering electric shocks to a 16-year-old boy, procedures which were streamed on Gustavson’s website.

The “busy and lucrative” business earned more than £300,000 from its global base of 22,841 paying subscribers between 2017 and 2021.

Gustavson, who had previously admitted charges including conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, appeared for sentence via video link alongside six other men who had all admitted their involvement. The charges relate to thirteen victims who are under police guard.

Judge Mark Lucraft, the recorder of London and most senior judge at the Old Bailey, said as he announced the sentence:

“Gustavson, you are very much the mastermind behind this grisly and gruesome enterprise. The business you set up was one that was both busy and lucrative. As with all the others involved, you have no medical qualifications. The footage uploaded was extremely explicit and made available to paying subscribers no doubt so they could watch it for their sexual gratification […] Like-minded individuals were recruited by you, Gustavson, to assist in what became a large-scale, dangerous, and extremely disturbing enterprise.”

The prosecutor, Caroline Carberry KC, told the three-day sentencing hearing that there was “clear evidence” of cannibalism and that Gustavson, who had two previous fraud convictions in Norway, had “cooked testicles for lunch in an artfully arranged salad platter”. He also kept numerous body parts as “trophies” in a fridge at his home in Harringay, north London and offered to sell the severed penis of one of his victims for hundreds of pounds. Penisectomy, the removal of the penis and emasculation of the subject, is a popular topic in cannibalism texts, signifying the loss of the dominance of the virile carnivore, eaten by others who are closer to nature, more adventurous in their carnivory, and so more savage. Think of Lenzi’s film Cannibal Ferox, where we have not one but two penisectomies, one by the white invader and the other by the enraged natives.

The court heard the procedures were carried out in “amateur and dangerous” ways with kitchen knives, surgical scalpels and farm or slaughterhouse implements designed to be used on slave animals, leaving victims in agony and often needing medical attention.

The judge said, “They are permanent and irreversible procedures and will have a long-term, lifetime effect on the ability of the victim to carry out their day-to-day activities.”

Gustavson’s film-production techniques seemed to have become more professional as the number of procedures increased. The videos were uploaded to the website and subscribers were offered varying levels of membership from “free” to “VIP”, which cost £100, the court heard.

The scale of the operation run by Gustavson, a Norwegian national, and others was “without precedent”, Carberry said, adding that it was “impossible to know” the full scale of the offending.

The court previously heard that the procedures are linked to a subculture where men become “nullos”, short for nulloplasty or genital nullification, by having their penis and testicles removed. More details are available on the Queerdoc site.

In a video of one incident, which was played in court, one of the group’s victims was branded with the letters “EM”, for eunuch maker, on the back of his calf. The man later complained to police about Gustavson and his “circle of acolytes”, leading to the investigation and arrests in London, Scotland and South Wales. In his victim impact statement, the branded man described Gustavson as a “lunatic” running a “slick, professional website”.

The other six defendants admitted conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm. The judge ruled that “I am entirely satisfied that the motivation of all those involved were a mix of sexual gratification as well as financial reward.”

Gustavson pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit grievous bodily harm, five counts of grievous bodily harm with intent, making and distributing an indecent photograph of a child, and possession of criminal property.

Peter Wates, 67, of Purley, Surrey, a retired former member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Forensic officers found a scrotum and two penile shafts inside a tub of butter marked with the instruction “do not defrost” at his home address.

Janus Atkin, 38, of Newport, Gwent, who had been completing a veterinary course, was jailed for 12 years.

Ion Ciucur, 30, of Gretna, Scotland, received five years and eight months’ imprisonment, and Stefan Scharf, 61, of no fixed address, was sentenced to four and a half years in jail.

David Carruthers, 61, and Ashley Williams, 32, of Newport, Gwent, were jailed for 11 years and four years, six months respectively.

This was not just a business venture, but an expression of nullo ideology. In January, three men were sentenced after admitting causing grievous bodily harm to Gustavson.

Damien Byrnes, 36, from north London, was jailed for five years for removing Gustavson’s penis with a kitchen knife on video at his home on 18 February 2017. Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 23, from Epsom in Surrey, was jailed for three years and eight months for freezing Gustavson’s leg leading to the need for it to be amputated in February 2019. Nathan Arnold, 48, from South Kensington, west London, received a two-year suspended sentence for the partial removal of Gustavson’s nipple with a scalpel in the summer of 2019.

In mitigation, defence barrister Rashvinderjeet Panesar said the breakdown of Gustavson’s marriage was the “trigger” for his offending.

 “He had a desire to be the architect of his own body. His modification led him to feelings of empowerment. It appears at face value to be something that’s become an addiction for him.”

Kate Mulholland, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said, “Whilst the victims in this case all seemingly consented to surgeries and amputations, the victim who bravely reported his assault to the police expressed serious regret regarding his procedure and the lasting impact it has had upon him. This clearly emphasises why such practices are unlawful.”

Detective Inspector Amanda Greig, from the Metropolitan Police’s specialist crime command, thanked the victims for their bravery, adding, “I would like to highlight the excellent work of the Met’s investigation team, who have examined thousands of hours of horrific material seized from the suspects. Their diligence and professionalism have ensured no one else will suffer at the hands of these men.”

The Met said a search of Gustavson’s flat had uncovered boxes of medical needles and syringes, local anaesthetic packs, surgical tools, a wooden chopping board and a mallet, a body board with leg and arm restraints attached, disposable skin staplers, and numerous medical procedure videos.

Body modifications are not unusual; we see men and women proudly displaying tattoos and piercings in public now, although within living memory they were considered only for sailors and members of criminal gangs. Nor is it new; from about 1550 CE to the late 19th century, young boys were castrated, often quite brutally, before puberty, simply to ensure that their voices would not deepen, and they would become “castrati”, with the lung capacity and muscular strength of an adult male, and the vocal range of a prepubescent boy. Before that, since pre-Biblical times, young boys (and in many places girls) have undergone genital mutilations as part of religious or cultural rituals.

News stories about cases like the Eunuch Maker tend to start with warnings to sensitive readers that they may find the details disturbing. But there is also an intriguing ethical question that is largely ignored in all the coverage.

When the issue of modification and mutilation is related to other species, it bizarrely becomes innocuous. Companion animals are usually desexed to ensure they remain docile. Farmed animals such as bulls and boars are routinely castrated when babies, usually without any anaesthetics, so that their taste is not affected by puberty, which gives the meat an unpleasant “taint”. Like most anthropocentric ethics, whatever we choose to do to “animals” is functional, advantageous (to humans only), and considered unremarkable and inculpable, while doing the same things to humans, even consenting ones, is considered (to quote the Judge) “grisly and gruesome”. The exact same baffling and discombobulating shift of perspective happens when portraying the difference between the eating of animal “meat” and human “flesh”. Gustavson ate the flesh of the human animals he castrated, the difference being they had asked for the operation. If one occurrence is repulsive, surely so is the other?

The website is no longer available, but this is what it looked like:

“You draw the line there?”: DOLORES ROACH episodes 7 & 8

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibals on TV1 Comment

The climax. The denouement. The final two episodes of this quite brilliant podcast that became a Broadway show that became a television series about an untrue true crime, and includes podcasts and Broadway shows. If you need to catch up on the earlier episodes, I would suggest watching them, but if you can’t wait, here are my earlier blogs.

Episode 1

Episode 2 & 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

And here is the very brief synopsis.

  • In episode 1, Dolores has just been released from prison after 16 years – she took the fall for her boyfriend, who has since disappeared. She heads back to Washington Heights New York. but it’s all gentrified now, except for Empanada Loca, the shop of her old friend Luis, who offers her a room and sets her up as a masseuse, a skill she learnt in jail.
  • In episodes 2 and 3, Dolores kills the landlord who has been harassing Luis for his overdue rent, which he can’t afford because the neighbourhood is now fancy, and people don’t buy empanadas much. Luis creates a new empanada, MUY LOCO. It is hugely successful, because it contains, yep, human flesh, in this case, the landlord, Mr Pearlman, whose son, Jonah, appears in the shop at the end of episode 3, with two cops behind him.
  • In episode 4, Dolores is shocked to find what Luis has done with the body of the landlord she murdered, and disgusted by the secret contents of the muy loco empanadas—Mr Pearlman. She is particularly horrified when Luis offers Jonah an empanada to try, a muy loco, which she knows is a “mouthful of daddy”. Meanwhile, the local drug dealer, Marcie, has pissed off Dolores, and now she is also in Luis’ fridge, and bits of her are now in the empanadas.
  • In episode 5, Dolores hires a private eye called Ruthie, played by Cyndi Lauper, to trace her ex, who cheated on her and let her take the fall in a drug bust. Ruthie’s motto (or perhaps mission statement) is I NEVER DON’T FIND THEM. But the last thing Dolores wants is for Ruthie to find Mr Pearlman.
  • In episode 6, we see cannibalism as a business. Luis has been clear-eyed about this all along – he gets rid of the annoying landlord, he thoroughly destroys the evidence (in customers’ stomachs) and he makes money from the meat, which is apparently delicious and hugely popular, while saving money by not buying the flesh of other animals from the food-services man, Jeremiah, the only sympathetic character in the story so far.

Not a lot of human flesh being eaten in these final two episodes, because everything is turning to shit, largely due to the impulsive plans of Luis, and the tendency of Dolores to snap the neck of anyone who annoys her. Police are looking for the drug dealer Dolores killed back in episode 4, and threatening to call in the DEA. Luis is still chopping up the bodies of Dolores’ victims to fill his empanadas, but he doesn’t want anyone to find the marijuana he is growing. THAT would be incriminating. Dolores points out that his fridge and apartment are full of chopped up bodies, and asks him the question that defines all ethical discussions.

 She’s much more upset about the cannibalism than the increasing number of corpses she is leaving all over the shop. Odd that. Luis sees meat as his business, and Dolores’ steady body count as his (very reasonably priced) supplier. He’s not too fussed about all the killing, as long as he doesn’t have to do it – like customers in a butcher shop. When he finally kills a man, he is upset: “Look what you made me do!”

Luis cracks some of the best jokes in this show, in the middle of the street (much to Dolores’ fury) about the “fat fuck” she killed last episode, and how he is going to use the body fat in his pastry.

And some of the worst.

Lots of interesting Freudian things going on here – in earlier episodes, they discussed the difference between edible and Oedipal, and then there’s the whole thing with Luis only wanting to give Dolores cunnilingus, not penetrative sex, even though she has her period. She considers that eating her menstrual blood makes him a cannibal, even though he has been snacking on human empanadas all through the show, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise.

And his pet name is Mami. It’s apparently the Spanish equivalent of “baby” or “darling”, but is also used for, yep, mother. Freud said the two primary taboos are incest and cannibalism, and Luis definitely has an edible complex.

We find out why Luis doesn’t want sex – he fell in love with his father’s girlfriend when he was 12, had sex with her (so now we have another taboo covered) and then tried to castrate himself in punishment. He couldn’t cut through his penis (Meiwes and Brandes found it was much harder than you might think) and poured hot oil on the wound, leaving him horribly disfigured. Yes, Dr Freud, the threat of castration can be as big a motivation for mental illness as you thought.

Dolores just thinks she is a monster. But one of the fascinating things about cannibalism is that unlike other horror movie tropes, they are not supernatural or even particularly superhuman. And they really exist.

“I’m a monster. Worse, I’m real.”

Luis ends up “deep fried, like everybody else” in one of the most dramatic scenes, and Dolores escapes:

She goes looking for the showrunner of the play, a nice piece of postmodern complication as he clearly represents the creator of the show we are watching, Aaron Mark.

He is accused of humanising a serial killer, but hey, Dolores is very human, just like Macbeth and Oedipus and every tragic protagonist in literature. She’s not even a cannibal; in the whole eight episodes, we have not even seen her eat a human empanada! She’s just a misunderstood serial killer.

As she says, you have to draw a line somewhere.

She forces the showrunner to take her to a house where, he says, someone knows the whereabouts of the man who betrayed her and left her to rot in jail. When the door opens, she roars with laughter, and then pounces, but at whom? All we know is that, like Georgina in The Cook, The Thief, she is directing her invective at us, the audience! We may not know where her ex is living. But we do know that cannibalism starts at home.

CANNIBALISM NEWS January 2022 – German killer who had ‘cannibalism fantasies’ jailed for life

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News3 Comments

‘Cannibal teacher’ hid his victim’s penis to avoid being outed

A man dubbed by the press a ‘cannibal teacher’ has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. The judge said the murder was carried out as part of his “cannibalism fantasies”. The 42-year-old, identified only as Stefan R, was also convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead, after a trial that opened in August 2021 and concluded this week.

German prosecutors described evidence of cannibalism in the killing of 44-year-old high-voltage technician, Stefan Trogisch, on 6 September 2020.

Stefan R. allegedly ate parts of his lover after sex, and subsequently concealed somehow the victim’s penis, so he wouldn’t be “outed” as gay. German police arrested the 41-year-old maths and chemistry teacher in November 2020 on suspicion of “sado-cannibalism for sexual gratification” after they found human bones stripped completely of flesh in a Berlin suburb. Under German law, the man’s surname cannot be revealed, yet there are pictures of him everywhere, so I’m guessing this is not a serious privacy issue.

A Berlin prosecutor’s office spokesperson said

“The suspect had an interest in cannibalism. He searched online for the topic.”

Well, hello! So do I, and maybe you, dear reader. I also look up COVID and cricket, but that doesn’t mean I caught one or played the other. Maybe he was writing a PhD thesis?

No one knows whether the victim, the other Stefan, had an interest in cannibalism, but we know that the two men were communicating on a gay dating website called Planet Romeo, according to a report in Der Spiegel. Stefan R. called himself “Spieltrieb1976” (roughly translated as “instinct to play”) and Stefan T. (now deceased) was “Dosenöffner79” (tin opener). Stefan R. also used the handle “Masterbutcher79” which prosecutors claimed was a reference to Armin Meiwes, who was dubbed the “Master Butcher of Rotenberg.”

The bones of Trogisch were found a couple of months after the murder, and showed signs of bite marks, although having been out in a field for a couple of months, it’s hard to say what species of animal had been biting them. A police officer told the newspaper Bild:

“Based on the bones found, which were completely stripped of flesh, and further evidence, we strongly suspect that Stefan T was the victim of a cannibal.”

Sniffer dogs led police to the apartment of the suspect, where they discovered knives, a medical bone saw, and a large freezer. Investigators also discovered 25kg of sodium hydroxide, a reagent that can be used to dissolve bodily tissue. It can also be used to make soap, which the accused claimed he bought it for. Traces of blood were discovered in the hallway of the suspect’s flat. The defendant had previously erected a sex swing in the living room and had a sign on the window ledge that read: “Instructions for emasculating and slaughtering a person.” He reportedly searched terms associated with cannibalism on the dark web such as “long pig” and “fatten and slaughter people” before Trogisch arrived at his residence. According to German newspaper Bild, he had also previously searched whether or not a person could survive after having their penis cut off.

Stefan R. told the court that Trogisch had died in his sleep on the sofa after a (presumably vigorous) sexual tryst. He claimed that Trogisch had consumed a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, and that he tried to revive him, but did not call emergency services “because it would have come out that I am homosexual”, according to Bild.

He said he decided to dispose of the body, and opted to separate Trogisch’s genitals “since my DNA could still have possibly been present due to the oral sex I performed”. But hours after the death, he logged back into the human slaughter forum where he proudly told a man from the city of Bremen: “I have it [the penis] now!”

In the sensitive style that we have come to expect from British news media, The Sun wrote

“the victim’s manhood has not yet been found.”

Judge Schertz said that, in 30 years as a judge, “nothing like this has come across my desk before”. He added that the defendant’s version of events was “unbelievable from start to finish”, noting the “very careful separation of testicles and penis” as evidence of a cannibalistic ritual.

The trial began in August 8 2021 and heard an autopsy report which revealed that the cause of death was a fatal loss of blood from the pelvic area due to a severed artery. This would seem to indicate that Trogisch bled to death after his penis was chopped off. The autopsy also ruled out the defendant’s claim that the victim was affected by alcohol or drugs, causing his death.

It’s a sensitive subject in Germany, where cannibalism was not uncommon between the world wars and was made into the subject of Fritz Lang’s masterpiece – “M – EINE STADT SUCHT EINEN MÖRDER” one of my favourite cannibalism movies. More recently, Armin Meiwes in 2001 met Bernd Jürgen Brandes on a site called Cannibal Café, and after a romantic interlude, agreed to Brandes’ request to kill him and eat him. The first act of the killing (all captured on video) was Meiwes cutting off Brandes’ penis, which he then cooked and the two men attempted to eat, very unsuccessfully. Meiwes subsequently killed Brandes and ate an estimated 45-65 pounds of flesh (20-30kg) from him.  Meiwes is still in jail, and Brandes is still in Meiwes (well, only in spirit, unless he has a very slow digestive tract). Unlike Brandes, there is no evidence that Trogisch had “consented” to his killing.

Then in 2013, Detlev Guenzel, a German police forensic specialist (you couldn’t make this stuff up), chopped up a man he met on a cannibalism fetish website and buried the pieces in the garden, taking a picture of himself standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe, wearing nothing but socks and sandals. There is little evidence to show that Guenzel ate any of the victim, although the victim’s penis and one testicle were not found in the flowerbed where the other pieces of the puzzle were unearthed.

There is probably another thesis to be written on the proportion of cannibalism reports that involve queer sexuality. Meiwes, of course, and Jeffrey Dahmer, who collected young men and killed them to keep them close. The film The Silence of the Lambs was heavily criticised when it was released for showing the serial killer Jame Gumb (“Buffalo Bill”) as a transsexual, although the plot was all about how he wasn’t authentically trans, and was killing women because he was rejected for gender reassignment surgery, and so was making himself a woman suit out of the skin of his victims. The film’s cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, was not gay in that series of films and books (he fancied the hell out of Clarice Starling), although Krendler, the nasty dude from the Justice Department in the book Hannibal, said he “figured he [Hannibal] was a homosexual” because, you know, he had good taste in food and wine and music – “artsy-fartsy stuff”. Krendler’s brain is later eaten by Hannibal and Clarice, so we have no reason to take him too seriously. But there was certainly plenty of homoerotic interaction in the twenty-first century reboot of Hannibal on TV, particularly when Hannibal is holding Will tenderly while cutting him up.

Is this tendency to depict cannibals as queer a reflection on the traumas experienced by gay youths and where they may lead behaviourally, or simply a noxious reaction against the lifting of restrictions on gay couples? Someone will write a paper on that one day. They probably already have.

The other issue raised by this case if of course the persistent theme (Meiwes and Guenzel again) of the chopping off and consumption of the male penis. Stefan R. discussed on one forum whether it was possible to survive a genital amputation – saying that some people desired it in order to feel like women, or else take masochistic pleasure in it. Prosecutors argued that Stefan R. had cut off the victim’s genitals with the intention of eating them, and the judge agreed, but it could not be established whether he had carried out that plan.

Freud had a lot to say about this! When little boys discover that their mothers or sisters have no penis, they assume the women were castrated, and as a result fear their own castration by their father (whom they suspect of the act). This is supposed to be the basis of the repression that eats away at the male mind and drives us to our various deviant behaviours.

Subsequent psychological studies as well as feminist analyses have demolished much of Freud’s speculative theories, but there is one thing we still don’t know – where is Stefan Trogisch’s penis?

The presiding judge, Matthias Schertz, told Stefan R. “What you did was inhuman”. But another German, Friedrich Nietzsche, might have called it “Human, all too human”.

“Egoism is not evil, for the idea of one’s “neighbour” (the word has a Christian origin and does not reflect the truth) is very weak in us; and we feel toward him almost as free and irresponsible as toward plants and stones. That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely.”

“An army of pissed-off man-hating feminist cannibals” DOGHOUSE (Jake West, 2009)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films2 Comments

Doghouse is a British slapstick / splatter movie. The danger of mixing genres like that is that sometimes neither one will work, and this is a good example of just that. A bunch of young men head off for a weekend to cheer up one of their friends who has just been divorced. The film introduces them one by one with a placard showing their name (hoping vainly that we will thereafter remember them). They are all being verbally abused by their partners for leaving them, a condition sometimes known as being “in the doghouse”. They diagnose their situation as suffering from what they call “social gender anxiety” and plan to do male things like, you know, drink and smoke and piss on trees. They think they are recapturing their animal essences, whereas in fact they are just being dicks.

They head for a little town where, they have heard, the women outnumber the men four to one. Their minibus driver tells them that it is the middle of nowhere, and hey, there are worse things than divorce.

They are expecting

“an entire village of man-hungry women, waiting to jump the first band of desperadoes rolling up from London.”

Turns out that’s exactly what they get (yes, such subtle irony) because the women have all been infected with a virus in a biological warfare trial intended to turn one half of an enemy population against the other, and isn’t that a decent summary of human history? This virus turns them into what these guys call

“an army of pissed-off man-hating feminist cannibals”

Each woman is a caricature of her womanly role – a bride, a hairdresser, a grandma, etc.

While this is a remarkably silly film, it does illustrate quite nicely the themes of abjection and the monstrous feminine. Monsters are by definition outsiders, but more so when their appearance and violent activities are in a female form, because we are reminded of the archaic mother – the authority figure of early childhood who toilet trained us, dominated us, exemplified adult sexuality and offered us both nurturing and the threat of Oedipal competition with the father and ultimately castration or reabsorption. Just so, the women of the town represent female roles: the crone (one of the men’s gran), the bride (in virginal white), the hairdresser, the barmaid, the traffic warden. Freud might have enjoyed this film – the women carry castrating weapons – knives, scissors, axes, teeth, a dental drill. Even stilettos. One woman represents voracious appetite and therefore body dysmorphia (obesity) – she has an electric carving knife and kneels in front of her victim in a recreation of every fellatio-gone-wrong castration nightmare, cutting off his, well, his finger. But you know, symbolism.

In case the symbolism is still not clear, the local shop, with a mummified penis in the display case, is called

The men plan a violent exit, declaring “Today is not the day to stop objectifying women”. This gives the film an excuse to answer the women’s cannibalistic violence against the men with some very nasty misogynistic attacks by the surviving men, the ones who were the most obdurate male chauvinists, using ‘male’ weapons like fire and vehicles and sporting equipment, resulting in women being variously burnt, having their teeth knocked out, beheaded and beaten to death with golf clubs. At the climax, one of the surviving men growls “give me a wood” – yeah, you get the picture. There would be a certain section of the audience cheering those scenes, I suspect.

The movie managed to stumble to a surprising 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the Guardian reviewer summing it up as:

“misogyny and creative bankruptcy in Jake West’s Brit gender-wars comedy horror about a bunch of hen-pecked blokes stuck in a village of cannibalistic women”

If I still haven’t dissuaded you, the full movie can be watched (when I last checked) on YouTube.