I’ve gone down a lot of rabbit holes when it comes to messed-up Star Wars characters, but none of them come close to Doctor Cornelius Evazan. This guy wasn’t some Sith or warlord. He was just a surgeon – at least, that’s how it started. But what he did later? It made both the Rebellion and the Empire want him gone. He didn’t just have a bounty on his head. He had death sentences in over a dozen systems. And honestly, once I found out what he’d done, I get why they were all after him.
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Evazan Used To Be A Normal Doctor… Until He Lost It
Evazan started off as a pretty skilled cosmetic surgeon. He actually helped people look better for a while. But something changed. Maybe it was always in him, or maybe he just snapped – but he started doing experiments. Not just on volunteers. He’d take in people and “rearrange” them. Sometimes he’d swap their limbs around or remove body parts just to see what would happen. Some of them didn’t survive. The ones that did were never the same.
And the worst part? He didn’t care who they were. Some victims were rich and well-connected. That’s when authorities really started paying attention. One bounty hunter nearly caught him, blasting half his face off. Evazan would’ve been done right there if not for a thug named Ponda Baba who pulled him out of it.
The Start Of Something Worse: Evazan And Baba
After that, the two of them became partners. Baba saw how smart Evazan was and figured they could make money together. And they did – for a while. They smuggled, killed, and made a name for themselves in the criminal underworld. But what Evazan wanted wasn’t just profit. He was obsessed with pushing his experiments further.
And that’s how the Decraniated came into existence.
He started kidnapping people – sometimes soldiers, sometimes med bay patients – and turning them into something else. He removed parts of their brains and replaced them with control chips. These people weren’t dead, but they weren’t themselves anymore either. Just walking shells, sold as obedient slaves to whoever could afford them. I read that some of his early victims were from Jedha, taken right out of the chaos during the war.
Eventually, Evazan became so infamous that he had to disappear. He started going by names like “Roofoo” or “Lopset Yas.” Sometimes he’d even change his own face using this creature called a pluripleq, which let him shapeshift into other forms. It helped him stay ahead of bounty hunters like Tam Posla, who’d been chasing him since Jedha. Posla even ended up with Baba’s severed arm after their fight in Mos Eisley. That’s how personal this hunt got.
That Cantina Scene? Just One Moment In A Long Nightmare
Everyone remembers that scene in A New Hope – Evazan picking a fight with Luke in the cantina and getting slashed across the chest by Obi-Wan. But by the time that happened, Evazan already had a dozen death sentences. He was practically bragging about it: “I have the death sentence in twelve systems.” Baba got his arm cut off. Evazan tried to reattach it later but failed and nearly killed him in the process.
Somehow, the two patched things up later. And they kept going.
Things Only Got More Twisted After That
Later on, Evazan was caught by the Empire and sent to Accresker Jail, a space prison made out of scrap. That’s where he met Chelli Aphra and pretended to be someone else. He was part of a squad of prisoners fitted with bombs that would go off if they left a certain range. Eventually, he revealed who he really was and captured both Aphra and her droid companion, 0-0-0. Then he forced them into a survival game – linking their lives together with proximity bombs and streaming their every move to the planet Milvayne.
He called it a “study into evil.”
What Legends Told Us – He Was Even Worse
In the old Legends stories, things went even deeper. Evazan was already crazy from the beginning. He kept jumping from planet to planet, setting up sketchy “clinics” and performing surgery on unwilling people. He even opened a fake medical center on Tatooine called the Cutting Edge Clinic and used droid parts from Jawas.
There was one point where he got into something called Project Starscream, where he tried to bring people back from the dead. That’s not a figure of speech – he literally made zombies. Boba Fett tracked him to a planet called Necropolis, blasted him, and left him for dead.
But Evazan had already injected himself with a reanimation serum.
He came back. Sort of. His body was half-dead, but he kept going. He tried to transfer minds from one body to another and thought that was the key to immortality. He even trapped a young man to be his next host, but it turned out the guy was actually a bounty hunter in disguise, seeking revenge. After all that chaos, Evazan barely escaped.
And if that wasn’t enough, even after dying again – people still claimed they saw him around nine years after Yavin. No one really knows if he finally died or just found another way to come back.
Final Tally? Death Sentences In Over 20 Systems
Across Canon and Legends, the pattern’s the same. Wherever Evazan went, he left bodies behind. Sometimes they were chopped up, sometimes they were stitched back together wrong, and sometimes they were still alive – but not really “there.” He was a surgeon who turned people into experiments, and no law or syndicate could stop him for long. He wasn’t out for power. He was out to test what he could do to a body – and how far he could go before someone finally stopped him.
