He didn't have surgical tools or a sterile lab. He had a rusty staple gun, a roll of duct tape, a set of dull kitchen knives, and a stolen wheelchair.

He didn't connect mouths to anuses. That was Dr. Heiter’s primitive method. Martin, in his twisted logic, connected mouths to colostomy wounds he carved directly into the stomachs, creating a shorter, more acidic route. He called it "The Centipede 2: Direct Bypass."

His mother, a monstrously obese woman, spent her days screaming at him from the top of the stairs. His only comfort was a battered DVD of The Human Centipede . He watched it every night, rewinding the surgery scene, memorizing the sutures. For Martin, the film wasn't grotesque; it was beautiful . But he felt it lacked ambition. Three segments were a joke. A real centipede needed length. Twelve, he decided. Twelve made a "Full Sequence."

The second was his neighbor, a noisy gossip who always complained about the smell from his basement. The third was a security guard who caught Martin sleeping on the job. Martin didn't choose randomly; he chose people who had humiliated him. Each kidnapping was a petty revenge, a stitch in his masterpiece.

One victim, a bodybuilder named Ashley, tried to fight. He tore his restraints. But his mouth was fused to the stomach of a woman in front of him. When he pulled back, he ripped her flesh. He collapsed in a spray of bile, and Martin calmly re-stapled him, humming a nursery rhyme.

He converted the garage’s disused sub-level into his operating theater. He tied his victims to stained mattresses on the floor. There were no anesthetics. Martin believed pain was "the adhesive of the soul."