The Eunuch Maker
The Castration and Cannibalism of Marius Gustavson
During November of 2020, a rather innocuous looking gentleman walked into a North London police station, and politely informed an officer that he wished to file a report.
When asked for a brief description of the crime, the man told the officer he’d been assaulted, then after a short wait, he was ushered into an interview room to give a statement.
Established almost two hundred years ago, London’s Metropolitan police endeavor to maintain law and order in one of the largest, wealthiest and most storied cities on earth; and needless to say, it is no easy task.
In just the past two decades, London has endured terror attacks, multi-million-pound diamond heists, and fiery incidents of rioting which left many areas of the city scorched and scarred. So, as you can imagine, it’s police officers have just about seen everything.
But what that innocuous looking gentleman told police officers, in that Tottenham police station back in November of 2020, was perhaps the most singularly horrifying thing that either of them had ever heard.
The victim explained that, in September of 2019, he’d visited the home of a forty-six-year-old Norwegian man named Marius Gustavson, who lived in a nearby apartment building.
The pair began consuming narcotics together, then once inebriated, Gustavson coerced his hapless houseguest into taking off his clothes – before using a razor-sharp scalpel to slice open his scrotum.
The victim then told the pair of horrified officers that, instead of rushing to a hospital to receive treatment for the wound, the victim had simply returned home in the hopes it would heal on its own.
Yet the shallow but excruciating scrotal schism did not heal on its own, and over time, it became painfully and perilously infected.
The two officers were aghast as the victim described how, instead of visiting a hospital, he had returned to Gustavson’s apartment in December of 2019 - for the purpose of having his testicles removed entirely.
Gustavson had invited an acquaintance to join them, a fifty-seven-year-old former surgical assistant named David Carruthers, who had apparently offered to help amputate the victim’s genitals.
But unbeknownst to the victim, Carruthers was not there to help.
When asked what kind of anesthetic he would be given, the victim was informed that no such sedative would be administered.
Anesthesiology was a very exact science, he was told, and given the wrong dosage, he might never wake up again.
The victim believed this was an indicator that his companions had his best interests at heart. When in reality, they wanted him to experience as much pain as possible.
After setting up one their smartphones to videotape the proceedings, Gustavson directed the victim to imbibe a vast quantity of alcohol, in order to dull as much of the oncoming pain as possible.
Having drank as much as he could stomach, the victim was tied down and restrained, yet no amount of alcohol would’ve been sufficient to stifle his screams in the moment a metal livestock clamp was applied to his testicles.
The victim explained that, following the agonizing clamping, they expected the next painful sensation to be their amputation.
But instead of removing the victim’s gonads, Marius Gustavson took a red-hot branding iron, and burned the letters ‘E’ and ‘M’ onto the rear of this thigh.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!” the victim reportedly cried out.
But instead of answering his question, Marius Gustavson ordered the victim to declare their undying servitude to him, and that the procedure would not continue unless he did so.
Desperate to put an end to his intolerable suffering, the victim cried out in submission, declaring Gustavson to be his lifelong lord and master. But the man himself was far from satisfied.
He forced the victim to repeatedly proclaim his subjugation, until finally, Gustavson directed the waiting surgical assistant to begin his gruesome work.
Enthralled by the stocky Scandinavian, Carruthers stepped forward with a sharpened scalpel, then on Gustavson’s command - he sliced deep into the victim’s genitals.
Yet in the process of removing the first of the victim’s two testes, Carruthers seemed to reverse his intended course of action.
Instead of removing the victim’s testicles, he forced them back into his open scrotum, then sewed the wound shut with several jagged stitches.
Horrified, the victim demanded that the surgical assistant complete the procedure, but he was told that “the operation had started to go wrong”.
It’s unclear whether this is the truth, or if Gustavson had directed Carruthers to lie to their terrified victim.
But what’s certain - is that the victim was soon ordered to leave Gustavson’s apartment; and for good reason, he obeyed.
When asked why he’d returned to Gustavson’s apartment, instead of seeking medical attention, the victim explained that the Norwegian was both intensely charismatic, and shrewdly manipulative.
Having first met him while suffering from extreme depression, Gustavson was said to have captivated the victim, much in the way a cult leader might enrapture a potential follower.
Then, once the victim was safely under his spell, Gustavson introduced him to the world of so-called “body modification”.
The victim went on to meet with several of Gustavson’s inner circle, men who shared his sickening fascination with amateur surgeries. But above all, the men’s interests seemed to focus on one particular procedure – male castration.
“[At first], the group of people he introduced me to was welcoming and pleasant”, the victim said, “but in hindsight, I can see how manipulative and coercive it truly was”.
Over the course of several months, Gustavson and his followers convinced the victim that he’d be happier following the removal of his genitals.
“They focused on issues I had with my gender identity”, the victim told police, “I was told castration would fix me, that it was a lifestyle choice; and that if my therapist asked, I was to say it was my idea, no one else’s”.
The victim was then said to have broken down into tears as he described his genitals as being “mangled”, how he desperately needed the help of a trained urologist, and how he had been wrestling with the urge to murder Marius Gustavson for quite some time.
When asked why he hadn’t contacted the police sooner, the victim explained that he had legitimate concerns for his safety.
He claimed Gustavson’s followers numbered in the tens of thousands, and that he ran some kind of online castration cult from the comfort of his Tottenham apartment.
Shortly after the victim signed his statement, Metropolitan police officers paid Gustavson a visit, and following a search of his apartment, they found a variety of deeply concerning paraphernalia.
Several steel clamps known as ‘elastrators’, the kind traditionally used to geld livestock, were found at his property, along with a variety of other suspicious items, including forceps, electrodes, catheters and scalpels.
Gustavson was arrested, but upon being taken into custody, officers observed that he was missing one of his legs. Certain provisions are made for disabled prisoners, and the Tottenham police officers attempted to make him as comfortable as possible during his detention.
But during a brief investigation into how Gustavson lost his leg, officers discovered something horrifying.
The vast majority of limb amputations in the UK are the result of car accidents.
Yet according to his medical history, Gustavson’s leg was amputated after he reported to hospital with severe frostbite.
Once all of the living tissue in his leg was dead, Gustavson contacted emergency services, and was rushed to the Royal Free Hospital in neighboring Camden.
It was there that his leg was swiftly amputated, after which he remained in the hospital, receiving round-the-clock care, for a full two months.
Following his discharge, Gustavson was bound to a wheelchair; and since he was no longer able to work as frequently, or as intensely as he’d like, he went onto claim almost twenty-thousand-pounds in disability checks between July of 2019, and October of 2021.
Yet this wasn’t the only act of self-mutilation that Gustavson subjected himself to.
Shortly after his arrest, Gustavson was charged with five counts of grievous bodily harm with intent and one count of making an indecent photograph of a child.
At first, Gustavson denied all charges, but as the investigation into his nocturnal activities deepened, police discovered a litany of gruesome criminality.
On February 18th of 2017, Gustavson contacted twenty-nine-year-old male escort by the name of Damien Byrnes.
Just a few months prior, the pair had met via an online dating app, and in the process of discussing one another’s deepest, darkest fantasies, Gustavson confessed a desire to castrate himself.
But not only that, he wanted Byrnes to help him do it.
Byrnes later said he was initially hesitant to assist in the procedure.
“I have no issue with it”, he told Gustavson via a text message, “but won’t you [lose] a lot of blood, and like, nearly die?”
Gustavson then explained that he had studied several safe methods of castration, and had successfully performed the procedure on no less than twenty-six different men.
But now - it was his turn to become what he described as a ‘nullo’, a word derived from the term ‘genital nullification’.
To secure his assistance, Byrnes was offered the equivalent of seven-hundred-and-fifty US dollars.
However, it was later established that this merely constituted an initial payment, and Byrnes was promised a far larger amount of money in exchange for his participation.
Gustavson explained that he would be taping the entire castration process, and that the edited video would be uploaded onto a website he owned and operated.
When Byrnes asked what the website was called, he was given a name that will forever live in infamy...
The video that was later uploaded to the site is perhaps some of the most graphically disturbing footage you are ever likely to witness.
Not only is the video intensely gruesome, but the distinctly erotic overtones (which stand in stark contrast to the reality of the situation) make the footage even more difficult to view.
Following the completion of the grisly procedure, in which a red vegetable knife was used, Byrnes looks directly into the watching camera, and says “well that’s one for the bucket list!”
Gustavson then contacted emergency services, telling the operator “I tried to do some surgery, [and it is] a little bit more than a circumcision”.
He was rushed to hospital, then referred to a psychiatric unit for assessment, where he told doctors that he’d been a willing participant in his own castration, and that he was perfectly sane.
Despite the reservations of NHS doctors, Gustavson was released after just seventy-two hours; at which point, he almost immediately reached out to Damien Byrnes.
Byrnes, who confessed to having thrown up as he departed Gustavson’s apartment, was told that several additional castrations had been arranged, before being invited back to assist as, and I quote, “a sexy, kinky helper”.
Over the next two years, Byrnes was reportedly paid over two thousand US dollars for participating in several other acts of wanton mutilation.
But he wasn’t Gustavson’s only maniacal minion.
Following his arrest in November of 2020, police discovered that Gustavson had been communicating with a young man named Jacob Crimi-Appleby.
He and Gustavson first met in September of 2018, when Jacob was just seventeen years old, and after establishing both a mutual attraction, as well as a twisted kind of paternal relationship, Gustavson began to introduce young Jacob to the world of ‘body mods’.
At one point, Gustavson boasted that he kept the testicles of his willing victims in jars of preservative fluid, to which Jacob responded - “that’s awesome!”
Then, after ensuring that Jacob would willingly participate in his fiendish schemes, Gustavson invited him to aid in the process of amputating his own leg.
In what is frankly a jaw dropping exchange of text messages, Jacob seemed delighted at the prospect of aiding in the removal of his new friend’s limb.
He believed that witnessing such a process would be, quote, “amazing”, and that he couldn’t wait to see what Gustavson would look like following the amputation of his leg.
They began to discuss the safest possible methods by which Gustavson could remove his own appendage without bleeding to death; and after months of discission, they came up with a diabolically ingenious plan.
On February 21st of 2019, a now eighteen-year-old Jacob Crimi-Appleby travelled from his home in the London suburb of Epsom, to Marius Gustavson’s apartment in Tottenham.
Gustavson welcomed the young man inside, then ushered him into his kitchen, where Jacob observed that a large plastic trashcan had been filled with a mixture of water – and ice.
Over the next eight hours, Gustavson kept his leg submerged in the freezing fluid, with Jacob adding more and more ice to ensure the water remained frigid.
Much like many of the other procedures he oversaw or took part in, Gustavson made a video recording of the process.
The footage begins fairly innocuously, and has the air of a mid-2010's viral challenge video, but as the hours tick by, the proceedings take on a deeply sinister air.
At one point, Jacob and Gustavson share a chuckle as the former dumps vast quantities of ice into the trashcan. At another, the pair celebrate when Gustavson announces that he can no longer feel his leg.
When the extent of Gustavson’s activities became evident, coordinated police raids throughout London, Scotland and South Wales resulted in the arrest of no less than ten of his alleged accomplices.
Gustavson’s apartment was searched extensively for a second time, and during an in-depth search of his bedroom, police officers located his severed but preserved phallus, in a cubby hole behind a chest of drawers.
Police also discovered child exploitation material on Gustavson’s laptop computer, as well as images of bestiality that he’d shared with several other men online.
Others arrested on suspicion of producing videos for EunuchMaker.com included a thirty-year-old Romanian man named Ion Ciucur, of Gretna in Scotland, who is said to have been involved in two procedures.
Sixty-four-year-old Peter Wates, a retired former member of the Royal Society of Chemists, was arrested at his home in Surrey, on February 2nd of 2022.
He admitted to taking part in a grand total of nine back-alley castrations, as well as supplying Gustavson with scalpels and suturing kits. It was also discovered that Wates kept genitalia in a Clover butter box labelled ‘Bolete Mushrooms’.
Sixty-one-year-old David Carruthers was involved in four incidents of complete castration, including the deliberately botched procedure that resulted in the group’s undoing.
For eleven years, he held a position as ‘domestic assistant’ in the Welsh National Health Service, but possessed no formal medical training.
Thirty-nine-year-old Janus Atkin had briefly studied veterinary medicine, and used what little he’d learned in the removal of eight men’s genitals.
A sixty-one-year-old German man, named Stefan Scharf, was also arrested in connection with the castrations, as was David Carruthers’ thirty-two-year-old boyfriend, Ashley Williams.
Damien Byrnes and Jacob Crimi-Appleby were also arrested, with each giving a detailed description of how the ‘Eunuch Maker’ website operated.
Although Gustavson would regularly reach out to potential victims via the so-called Deep Web, EunuchMaker.com hid itself in plain sight, on the easily accessed ‘surface-web’.
The website had multi-tiered membership plans, with basic, premium and VIP options, the latter of which cost users upwards of £100 per year.
One of the VIP videos included footage of Gustavson subjecting a sixteen-year-old boy to genital torture.
Electrodes were attached to the boy’s privates, and while administering low voltage, but highly painful shocks, Gustavson made the boy declare his undying servitude to him.
In another upload, Gustavson encouraged a Swedish man to amputate different parts of himself, in two FaceTime recordings filmed three days apart.
In the first video, Gustavson can be heard saying “you know what to do”, encouraging the man as he hesitates for a moment, before eventually commencing the act of gory self-mutilation.
In the second video, Gustavson is seen sipping an alcoholic drink, before telling the victim to fully castrate himself. When the man hesitates for a second time, Gustavson seems to sense his fear – and laughs.
The man is repeatedly goaded into going through with the act, then with a skin crawling yelp of pain, he does so.
Gustavson then tells the man to place his severed appendages into a freezer, and instructs him to contact emergency services in order to save his own life.
In another castration video Gustavson can be heard saying “that was a lot quicker than the last one” and “such a nice cut”. He then displays the removed testicle to the camera, as thousands of his most loyal subscribers watched on via a livestream.
Following this particular procedure, Gustavson added the victim’s severed appendages to a salad he prepared, all for the benefit of his live audience, then ate them – raw.
At Gustavson’s trial, the Crown’s chief prosecutor in the case, Caroline Carberry, said that -
“It is an incredible feature of this case that the website operated in plain sight, not on the dark web, but accessible to anyone who stumbled upon it, or had the inclination to [seek it out]”.
“The footage contained on the website”, Carberry continued, “is extremely explicit, and users could pay to subscribe or buy individual videos. [We also have evidence that the defendant] made nearly 300,000 pounds during the four-year plot, from exactly 22,841 global subscribers”.
Gustavson’s defense lawyer, Rashvinderjeet Panesar, told court that the “trigger” for his client’s descent into the macabre was enduring a bitter divorce back in 2016.
“The marriage kept him stable”, Mr Panesar said, “whenit came to an end, it sent him into a spiral. 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.”
Mr. Panesar also told the court that his client had been diagnosed with a rare psychological condition known as ‘body identity integrity disorder’, and it was this that accounted for his desire to have body parts removed.
At his trial’s conclusion, Gustavson admitted to committing five counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, possessing criminal property, and distributing two indecent videos of a child between January 2017 and January 2020.
Damien Byrnes, the escort who aided Gustavson with his own castration back in early 2017, was jailed for five years back in January of this year on a charge of causing Grevious Bodily Harm with intent.
Gustavsson’s much younger boyfriend, a now twenty-three-year-old Jacob Crimi-Appleby, was jailed for three years and eight months.
While forty-eight-year-old Nathaniel Arnold, who is believed to have severed one of Gustavson’s nipples back in 2019, was given a suspended prison sentence of just two years.
These judgments were handed down from the bench on the 4th and 5th of this month, but Marius Gustavson’s sentence will be read before the court on Thursday, May 9th.
That means, by the time this video is published, a British judge will have condemned Gustavson to what they believe – is a fitting punishment – for a masterful but malevolent manipulator...
...of the lowest order.