One of the enduring mysteries surrounding the death of Seattle kinkster Jack Chapman (aka Tank Hafertepen) is who injected his genitals with the silicone that killed him.
Dylan Hafertepen, Jack's surviving "master," has denied involvement (even though, according to a contract Jack shared online, Master Dylan controlled every aspect of his life). Dylan told Buzzfeed recently: "I did not make him inject silicone" and "This was his fetish." On Australian TV, Jack's mother, Linda, wanted to know who had injected her son with silicone, and Dylan said: "I have never done that for him. I forbid him from doing silicone."
But Facebook messages between Jack and his best friend in Australia, Kevin Reader, suggest that Dylan was directly involved with Jack's silicone use. In a message dated March 18, 2017, during a brief breakup with Master Dylan, Jack mentions that Dylan "invoiced me the value of the gifts he had given me in our relationship... it wasn't for everything, probably about $4,000... including the silicone."
Meanwhile, The Stranger has obtained direct messages between Dylan and a silicone enthusiast going back a few years that contradict Dylan's recent statements to the media. It appears from these messages that Dylan confirmed that he had silicone injected into his own body, and that he performed some of those injections himself and may have injected other people.
In May of 2016, after the silicone enthusiast posted photos of his genital modifications online, Dylan wrote to him: "Welcome to the silicone club! Your results are awesome."
The silicone enthusiast responded that he wanted to get even more silicone, adding, "Bigger is always better, right?"
Dylan replied, "Yes, always bigger," followed by a smiley face emoticon. "Unless you want to top, then there's a hard limit. And that's why I had to stop." Dylan said to the silicone enthusiast that he had 200 cc of silicone in his own genitals. "Completely soft here, it's about the size of a soda can," Dylan divulged. "Balls are like large lemons."
Dylan then asked the silicone enthusiast who had performed his injections: "Did you do it yourself or Dr. E?" According to the silicone enthusiast, "Dr E" is a reference to a person in Mexico who performs silicone injections.
The silicone enthusiast responded that his first round of silicone was done by Dr. E, and a friend did his second round. And then the silicone enthusiast asked: "What about yourself?"
Dylan responded, "Dr. E did me first, then I did the rest myself." It is unclear from the messages how many injections he's referring to here.
"Did you do all of Tank's?" the silicone enthusiast asked, referring to Jack Chapman by his "pup" name. Photos of Jack appeared often on Master Dylan's now defunct Instagram page, where Dylan's handle was Noodles and Beef.
"Ahhh, I'm not comfortable talking about the work I've done for other folks," Dylan said. This may or may not be an admission that Dylan injected others with silicone, a procedure that is not legal in the United States. (In May of 2017, a Florida resident named Deanna Roberts was sentenced to 11 years in prison after she lethally injected an Atlanta drag performer with liquid silicone.)
"Oh no worries! If you did, it looks excellent," the silicone enthusiast said.
"I think it looks pretty good; of course he wants to go much bigger," Dylan said.
After the silicone enthusiast explained he hadn't injected himself yet because he wasn't confident about his own accuracy, Dylan advised: "If you are not confident in your subdermal injections, don't do it." And then, confirming he was well aware of the risks of the illegal procedure, Dylan added: "Get a little silicone in your bloodstream and you die."
The silicone enthusiast provided these messages to The Stranger on the condition of anonymity. He said he was coming forward out of a sense of justice for Jack, after seeing Dylan making statements to the media that contradicted Dylan's own statements over private message.
These messages between Dylan and the silicone enthusiast are being reported here for the first time.
It isn't just Dylan's online conversations with the silicone enthusiast over the last few years that contradict his recent characterizations of Jack. Despite Dylan's recent statements that silicone was a fetish of Jack's that he forbade and had nothing to do with, on Jack's own Tumblr page, before he died, someone once asked him, "How will you know when you have added enough bulk to your balls and dick?" Jack answered: "Master will decide when enough is enough. I trust his judgment and I think we're on the same page."
Jack's death certificate (on which his name is listed as Tank Hafertepen, after he legally changed it in 2016) lists his manner of death as an "accident." According to the document, the injury occurred at 3 a.m. on October 9, 2018. It lists the "place of injury" as Dylan Hafertepen's residence in Seattle. However, the lead investigator at the King County Medical Examiner's Office, James Sosik Jr., told The Stranger that the "place of injury" can refer to the location and time when the deceased person's fatal symptoms began; it doesn't necessarily mean that the injection that killed him occurred at Dylan's residence.
Dylan has not responded to The Stranger's repeated attempts to contact him since Jack's death on October 15. The Stranger sent e-mails to Dylan seeking comment on October 18, October 25, and October 29, none of which Dylan responded to. On November 30, we sent another e-mail with 11 questions pertaining to the new information we are reporting here. The e-mailed questions bounced back, with a message saying: "Your recipient's address might not work or exist anymore."
The Stranger also reached out by phone to three of the other pups in Dylan's polyamorous family, using contact information made available in public documents when Dylan filed a motion requesting a restraining order against a Buzzfeed reporter who was trying to reach him for comment. None of the three pups have responded to our voice mails. The Stranger printed out and mailed our 11 new questions to Dylan at the home address listed on public documents, granting him a week to respond to our questions. We have not heard back from him.
On October 17, two days after Jack's death, Graham Kolbeins, a documentary filmmaker who was a friend of Jack's, wrote, "Jack had gotten [the injections] to please his master." He also said, "Jack expressed regret over those injections to me."
After Jack died, the content on Master Dylan's personal website, NoodlesAndBeef.com, was taken offline and replaced with noodles and beef recipes that appeared to be copied and pasted from other sources. That material has since been taken offline as well, and the URL now redirects to TankHafertepen.com, a web memorial for Jack that contains an FAQ providing Dylan's version of events.
Under the question "Did you make him inject silicone?" Dylan writes: "No. Tank first had silicone injected on a trip to San Diego on November 26th, 2014, where he crossed the border into Mexico to visit a doctor who performed the procedure. This was his idea, he arranged everything, and even went alone. I was upset that he did it, especially by himself." Dylan adds: "After we broke up in 2016, Tank wrote about getting more silicone done by someone from Sacramento. His behavior when he was single shows clear personal motivation to pursue silicone."
Under the question "Why did he do silicone?" Dylan writes: "This was his fetish," and goes on to describe Jack "relishing" people's reaction to his engorged genitals.
The FAQ omits any mention of Dylan's own use of silicone, although numerous photos on Dylan's now-deleted Instagram page showed Dylan's own engorged genitals.
Meanwhile, people who have been friends of Dylan and Jack over the last few years say the dates in Dylan's FAQ are not accurate. Arman Ellis (whom Jack went to live with during a brief attempt to break up with Dylan) and Kevin Reader (Jack's best friend in Australia who regularly chatted with Jack online) say the couple didn't break up in 2016, they broke up in 2017.
This is corroborated by Dylan's direct messages with the anonymous silicone enthusiast. Dylan wrote that he was "going through a difficult breakup" in April 2017. In reference to his new goals about his body size, he added, "I will win this breakup."
A month later, in May of 2017, Dylan asked the anonymous silicone enthusiast [sic]: "You go to the fella in so cal right?"
"Yes. I do."
"Mind if I ask what his rate is?" Dylan asked.
"$180 per 50 cc. Is it time to take the team in for upgrades?" The anonymous silicone enthusiast told The Stranger that by saying "the team," he was referring to the other men in Master Dylan's polyamorous family of pups.
"Oh. About twice as expensive as lebulge," Dylan wrote. According to the silicone enthusiast, LeBulge is a silicone kit supplier from France that used to mail people medical-grade silicone and instructions for self-injection.
As The Stranger previously reported, during Dylan and Jack's brief breakup, Dylan shared pictures online of a new pup named Angus, whom many people noticed physically resembled Jack. "At the rate Angus is growing, I'll run out of my reserves by January," Dylan wrote to the silicone enthusiast, apparently referencing "reserves" of silicone from LeBulge that were in Dylan's personal possession.
In March 2017, Dylan's newsletter included a picture of Angus's enlarged cock, with a puncture mark bleeding through a piece of medical tape on its shaft, possibly from a silicone injection. (The Stranger has attempted to contact Angus via direct messages on Tumblr and Facebook, but has received no reply.)
In November of 2017, a young man named Peter Dovak flew to Southern California and died after being injected with silicone by a facilities manager in Orange County named Joe Quader. As The Stranger has reported, Quader had no medical credentials, but he did have a black-market hookup for medical-grade silicone. After Dovak's death, Quader killed himself. Dovak's surviving partner, Robert Waltman, told The Stranger that Dovak knew Dylan online and went to Quader at Dylan's suggestion.
In his popular Noodles and Beef newsletter, Dylan referred to what was going on with Dovak, writing that a friend of his was in the hospital following a silicone injection. On November 15, the same day Dovak was pronounced dead, the anonymous silicone enthusiast (who subscribed to Dylan's e-mail newsletter) messaged Dylan: "Oh man, I hope our silicone brother from your email is ok."
Dylan responded: "Ugh I feel horrible. He was getting cold feet and I egged him on to go bigger." In other words, Dylan's message suggests that Dovak may not have gotten the silicone injection that killed him if Dylan had not persuaded him to "go bigger."
As for Jack, Dylan has called speculation that he had anything to do with Jack's silicone injections one of many "conspiracy theories" against him.
Reached for comment in Australia, Jack's mother told The Stranger, "I can't believe one word that [Dylan] says... He has lied about just about everything." When informed about private messages of Dylan's that contradict his public statements about his own involvement with silicone, she said, "He said that he didn't have any knowledge of Jack doing the silicone, and I find that unbelievably..." Her voice trailed off. "That's just a total lie."
She added, "You only have to look at pictures of them to know that they're all doing it... I mean, Blind Freddy could see that they were injecting their genitals. They don't get that big by natural causes, do they?"
On December 10, The Stranger contacted the King County Medical Examiner's Office to ask whether this new information might compel them to open an investigation into Jack's death or Dylan's potential involvement in it. The King County Medical Examiner's Office said they'll get back to us.
