A Dutch dentist practising in France has been charged with aggravated assault as well as fraud over claims that he mutilated patients’ mouths and tried to rip off patients and insurance companies.
Jacobus “Mark” van Nierop, 51, faces up to 10 years in prison and a 150,000 euro fine if found guilty.
Dubbed the “dentist of horror” or “the butcher, van Nierop ripped out healthy teeth and left dozens of patients in a remote French village with broken jaws, recurrent abscesses and septicaemia.
One patient, Sylviane Boulesteix, said she was unexpectedly summoned to van Nierop’s dental surgery in central-eastern France in May 2012. Without warning, the dentist pulled eight of her teeth out and immediately fixed dentures on her raw gums.
In the following days, she says van Nierop refused to relieve her pain. A judicial expert later described a “cruel and perverse” man whose incompetence made Ms Boulesteix lose several healthy teeth, go through a trauma and suffer irreversible damage to her mouth.
Eighty-year-old Bernard Hugon said the dentist left “pieces of flesh hanging everywhere” after tearing out a tooth.
“Every time, he would give us what he called ‘a little prick’ and we were asleep, knocked out,” said Nicole Martin, a retired teacher who lost several teeth to abscesses caused by horrific operations.
“When it was over, we would find a Post-it note saying to come back for an appointment the next day or the day after,” she added.
And it was Martin who set up a victims’ group in early 2013 to press charges. Little did she know that the group would soon swell to 120 members.
In June of that year, police arrested van Nierop but left him free pending trial. He fled the country the following December, but was eventually tracked down to a small Canadian town in New Brunswick and arrested under an international warrant in September 2014. Local media reported that he tried to slit his throat when police arrested him.
Van Nierop tried to block his extradition, first to the Netherlands and then France, claiming to suffer from “psychological problems” including gender identity issues and suicidal tendencies. But he was eventually placed in a prison psychiatric unit in the Loiret department, south of Paris.
“He claimed to have killed his first wife, he played crazy, he said he was trans-sexual. He tried everything” to avoid extradition, Martin said.
Detained in a French prison since January 2015, he staged several hunger and thirst strikes, and once swallowed razor blades before he was to be questioned by the investigating judge.
Questioned about the alleged mutilations suffered by his patients, Van Neirop said: “It does not affect me.”
“I’m totally blocked from the inside and I don’t want to explain it all,” he told the investigating judge, according to court documents. “You can lock me up for years … it will not change.”
Investigators said van Nierop provided false documents to be allowed to practise dentistry in France, gaining tax and economic benefits, and concealed that he was the subject of disciplinary proceedings in his own country. He allegedly also overcharged his patients, billed them for imaginary dental care or intentionally did bad work which required further appointments and payments, according to court documents.
Van Nierop, who lived in a luxurious suburban home, had debts of nearly €1m, officials said.
