Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Creepy Doctor Finally Got Caught - The Neil Hopper Story

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

Neil Hopper, a 49-year-old former NHS vascular surgeon from Truro, Cornwall, was sentenced to 32 months in prison after admitting to self-inflicting injuries that led to the amputation of both his legs. In 2019 Hopper used dry ice to damage his legs, necessitating their removal. He then falsely claimed to insurers that his amputations were due to sepsis, resulting in fraudulent payouts.

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And it all starts with this guy, Neil. And Neil is 43 when the story starts living in England, and Neil is a vascular surgeon. But Neil is also a really weird guy. He's very into amputation, but not just because of his own job. He has always wanted to amputate his own body parts, because allegedly he secretly finds the idea of amputation

hot? Yeah, this is very bizarre. Anyway, one day in 2019, Neil comes up with a plan to have his lower legs amputated and along with that scam the insurance company out of a bunch of money. And so Neil gets to work on this plan. First, he either has some sort of insurance policy or he gets one in the private sector. Either way, he makes sure he's insured. Then he gets a bunch of dry ice and he Soaks his lower legs in it, like just the part below his knees, so that that part of his legs freezes. And he has to soak them for like hours, and the dry ice hurts. Like this is not a fun time that he has to do this, but it works. He successfully does a lot of damage to his legs. Then I assume he calls an ambulance for himself and is like, my legs are messed up. Come get me. And so

I guess an ambulance rushes him to the hospital and when the doctors ask what happened, he comes up with this whole story about how he was on a camping trip with his family and he hurt his leg and then when he got home he developed sepsis or something. And the doctors examine his legs and they're like, yep, you got a sepsis infection and they conclude that there's nothing they can do for him and that they have to remove his legs. And I guess secretly Neil is like, sweet, because you know this is all part of his plan because I guess he thinks amputation is super hot like it gets him going. And of course the doctors, they don't know this, they think he has sepsis. And so Neil, he goes

into surgery and the surgeons remove his legs right below the knee. Seven weeks later, after recovering in the hospital, they send him home. So he goes home and he starts, of all things, a YouTube channel and there he starts vlogging a little about his amputation journey. So I'm now a bilateral baloney amputee. And so now he doesn't have legs and I assume he's happy because he bloke he thinks amputation is hot and he's getting all sorts of sympathy. from the people around him because his accident was so tragic and unexpected.

Meanwhile, he goes and he quietly cashes in his insurance claim and he's awarded more than 466,000 pounds or around 630,000 US dollars. And from there, Neil has to recover for a few months and he gets prosthetic legs and he learns to start walking on those and he vlogs the process a little bit. And about six months later, he goes back to work at the hospital as a vascular. surgeon. Here's a picture of him. You can see he's got the prosthetic legs on. Now, throughout his recovery, he's been getting all sorts of media attention. And this dude, he's playing it up. Probably being the tough issue of my life last. It's been a very strange year. Yeah.

Even the BBC does a little special segment on him and they interview him. And he's like telling the media and people how all this has changed his outlook on life now. And you know, he had taken things for granted like walking the dog or playing football with his kid, but he'll never be able to do that again. Bitch, it's your fault. Anyway, in 2020, he ends up winning some kind of award for bravery in his fight to return back to a normal life, I guess. Meanwhile, he's also working on the side as a lecturer at a local university. And in 2021, he applies for the European Space Agency's Para-Astronaut Feasibility Project, where they're seeing if people with a physical disability could go into space. And so he applies for a spot and his story is so inspiring that he ends up on the short

list for the program. Like the way he is getting away with all this is insane. Now, remember how I said you aren't ready for this one? Well, here's where it all gets really weird. At some point, Neil connects with this guy, who will just call creepy. Here's a real life picture of creepy if you want to see it. Now, creepy, he runs a website and I just recently learned the this is a real thing, it's some kind of website where people will pay him to amputate their body parts with consent, but it's like a sexual thing for them. So creepy will then film these amputations and he will put those videos on his website and people can then purchase them and watch the videos. Or he will perform the whole procedure for people to watch on live stream. I guess there's a

whole subsection of people out there who are not only into that, who are willing to pay money for it. Now, at some point, Neil stumbles upon creepy's website and he's like, oh snap, this site is fine, because you know, amputations are his thing. And so he signs up for it and, you know, he loves it. Like, he has found his people. Now, coincidentally, one of the services creepy advertises is having limbs frozen off. I guess he does that for his clients. Like, if you want your limbs frozen off, he's the guy you go to. So at some point, Neil visits the site so much that he gets in touch.

with Creepy, because they share a mutual interest. And they become friendly and they start chatting and messaging back and forth. And in their conversations, Neil opens up to him like, I guess what I did. And he starts telling him about how he concocted this whole scheme to freeze off his own legs and how he tricked everyone. And he basically confesses his crime to him. And of course, Creepie's like, jolly good show or whatever. But it doesn't matter that he confessed because creepy, he's never going to leak that information

to the police or to the public? Until. Until 2020. One of Creepy's clients comes to Creepy one day, and he has like a bunch of gruesome back-alley operations and amputations done to him. Things I won't go into too much detail about on this app. But, you know, just so you know, he basically had him cut his junk up. Yeah, I know.

But afterwards, this junkless guy, he starts claiming that it wasn't consensual, that the whole time, Creepy had been manipulating him into participating in these back alley amputations. So he goes to the police, and he gives them all kinds of details and information on Creepy and the weird operation he's running. And it turns out that what creepy's doing is illegal. And so the guy gives police images and videos and screenshots and messages and all kinds of evidence. And so police, they start investigating Creepy. And they track him down and bam, Creepy is arrested. Here's his mugshot.

Now, in the course of their investigation, police shut his website down, and they start going through all the information they find in order to identify other victims or perpetrators, and that is when they run across Neil's messages. And so they start looking into him. And they find out that he had bought three of creepy's weird amputation videos from the website,

showing some pretty gruesome stuff, and that they had exchanged about 1,500 messages about his own amputations, which in the end ends up being evidence against him. So in 2023, bam, Neil gets arrested. Here's his mugshot. And eventually he pleads guilty and he gets sentenced to 32 months in prison. While creepy also pleads guilty and he's sentenced to a minimum of 22 years in prison. Oh, and there's one more thing that makes all this even that much more awful.

Neil was a surgeon, so he had a bunch of former patients who are now seeking legal advice because they're thinking that maybe Neil had recommended that they get something amputated when they didn't really need it just because he finds the whole procedure hot. Get the fuck out of here. Oh, my, imagine that. Imagine if that had happened to you.