Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (22 page)

Nilsen’s manuscript makes some additional confessions. He says that he would shave any body hair from the bodies to make them conform to his physical ideal. He elaborates on the thrill of dressing them up. Sometimes, he wished he’d had lipstick. He did have talcum powder and this he used to make them smell nicer and, ironically, to make them look more
alive. When he picked up the limp bodies, he would become extremely aroused and have to masturbate.

When he talks about what he did with the dead bodies, he wonders again if this excitement at holding the dead, limp bodies derived from being carried and washed by his mother and grandmother. Nilsen, however, has no definitive explanation as to how these ‘infantile connections’ worked their way into his sexual composition.

He is much clearer about what he isn’t than what he is. He is not a ‘lust murderer’, like Paul Kürten, the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’ to whom he was compared in
Killing for Company
. He says he never derived a direct, sexual thrill from the actual act of murder. Time and time again, Nilsen repeats the purpose of the attacks – to acquire a lifeless body. To illustrate this, he says that to find the bodies attractive he would pretend he had stumbled upon the scenario, and ignore the fact that he had killed them. He even claims that if he had had access to a ‘knock-out drug’, he mightn’t have killed them at all. But, of course, we know that most of his victims were already significantly incapacitated through alcohol.

Besides, common definitions of ‘lust murder’ do match Nilsen’s activities. They include deriving satisfaction from playing with dead bodies, and a fascination with dead genitalia. Nilsen clearly enjoyed interacting physically with dead bodies.
History of a Drowning Boy
also reveals for the first time that Nilsen would have liked to have kept some of the body parts as trophies. He says he would have particularly liked to keep the genitals, if he’d had a suitable liquid in which to preserve them.

‘Lust murder’ is closely related to necrophilia. Nilsen again, specifically denies being a necrophiliac. Other than on one
occasion where he confesses to have had sex between a corpse’s buttocks, he denies ever having had penetrative intercourse with any of the bodies. He does, however, say he would occasionally sexually abuse men who had passed out drunk in his flat. Interfering with a limp, unconscious body, however, was not sufficient to fulfil the main fantasy. That still required a dead body.

Finally, Nilsen is adamant he never ate any of the bodies of those he did kill. He thought about feeding some chunks to the dog as they looked strikingly like beef, but he didn’t trust that the bodies didn’t carry disease. Indeed, one of the corpses in the flat was later found to be carrying the Hepatitis virus.

In Hornsey Police Station, Nilsen confessed he’d killed 12 men in Melrose Avenue; he now claims the real figure was nine. His says he felt pressured by Jay and Chambers, and exaggerated as a result. When I told Peter Jay that Nilsen was now denying three of his victims, Jay shrugged his shoulders and replied that he ‘seemed pretty sure about them at the time’. He then retrieved the list of victims the police had compiled from Nilsen’s interviews. The list of those murdered at Melrose Avenue was as follows:

1. Irish youth
   (between 17 and 19 years old). 5ft 6in. Met Nilsen 29 Dec 1978. (Now known to be Stephen Holmes.)
   
2. Kenneth Ockendon
   (23). 5ft 8in. Met Nilsen 3 Dec 1979.
   
3. Martyn Duffey
   (16). 6ft 1in. Met Nilsen 17 May 1980.
   
4. Billy Sutherland
   (26). 5ft 9in. Met Nilsen Aug 1980.
   
5. ‘
   Irish labourer
   ’ (between 27 and 30 years old). 5ft 9in. Met Nilsen October 1980 in the Cricklewood Arms. He was tall with rough hands, and wore an old suit. Now denied.
   
6. ‘
   Mexican or Filipino
   ’ (20s). 5ft 10in. Met Nilsen November 1980 in the Salisbury Arms in St Martin’s Lane. Slim and looked like a gypsy. Possibly a rent boy.
   
7. ‘
   Vagrant
   ’ (20s). Met Nilsen late autumn 1980, at closing time at the top of Charing Cross Road. He was emaciated, with a pale complexion, and had many teeth missing. He wore a trench coat and outsize trousers. They took a taxi back to Melrose, where Nilsen strangled him in his sleep with a tie. He told police: ‘I felt exhilarated on some kind of high. I put a tie around his neck and pulled it tight. His legs were like he was riding a bicycle. It was as easy as taking candy from a baby. I thought I was doing him a favour. I had the impression his life had been one of long suffering.’
   
8. ‘
   Starving Hippy
   ’ (late 20s). 5ft 11in. Met Nilsen October or November 1980 in the West End around closing time. He wore bleached jeans and was strangled with a rope. Interestingly, Nilsen later wrote the following to Brian Masters: ‘Long-haired hippy, why did I bring you back? I tremble at your death and permanent presence. I brush the hair from your eyes. I try to shake you alive. I want to say that I’m sorry and see you walk away. I try to
   inflate your lungs, hopelessly, but nothing of you is working at all.’ Now denied.
   
9. ‘
   18-year-old, blue-eyed Scot
   ’ (18). Met Nilsen January 1981 in the Golden Lion in Soho. He wore a green tracksuit top and trainers. Nilsen told police he’d challenged him to an end-of-night drinking contest. He commented, ‘End of night … end of drinking … end of person.’
   
10. ‘
    Belfast boy
    ’ (early 20s). 5ft 9in. Met Nilsen February 1981 somewhere in the West End. He was slim.
    
11. ‘
    Skinhead
    ’ (about 20). 5ft 5in. Met Nilsen April or May 1981 at a street food stall in Leicester Square. He was muscular, with tattoos on his arm and ‘Cut Here’ beside dotted lines on his neck. He wore a black leather jacket, a studded belt, boots and a
    T-shirt
    . Nilsen told police he hung his torso up for 24 hours. Now denied.
    
12.  
    Malcolm Barlow
    (23). 5ft 7in. Met Nilsen 18 December 1981.
    

Malcolm Barlow was the last victim to die in Melrose Avenue. Like Sinclair, his troubled life epitomised the tragedy of many of the victims. Barlow was the kind of vulnerable youth whose problems caused him to slip through every net. He was born in 1957 in Rotherham near Sheffield, and from an early age he suffered from epilepsy. He was 11 when his mother died; afterwards, he was looked after by his sister Doreen. She soon found him unmanageable. He would lie, steal and, occasionally, sleep with men and then try to blackmail them. When he became too much for his sister to
cope with, he started to move from squat to hostel, funding himself through benefits.

On Thursday, 17 September 1981, when Nilsen left the house on his way to work, he found Barlow slumped against a garden wall a few houses down from his own. He asked him what was up. Barlow said his epilepsy pills had made him feel faint. ‘You should have someone professional look at you,’ said Nilsen. He insisted Barlow come back to 195 Melrose to sit down. After some time, Barlow still looked ill, so Nilsen walked down the road to the phone box – his own phone was disconnected – and called an ambulance.

The following evening, when Nilsen returned from work, Barlow was sitting on his doorstep. Barlow said he’d been discharged and had nowhere to go. Nilsen thought this was a nuisance but still invited him in. He cooked some food, and plonked himself in front of the TV with a Bacardi and Coke. Barlow asked if he could have one, too. Nilsen says he questioned whether he should really be drinking whilst taking pills, but Barlow, apparently, insisted.

After a couple of drinks, Barlow fell unconscious. Nilsen was both annoyed to think he might have to go out to the phone box and get another ambulance, and concerned that the police might become involved. He thought about his options for about 20 minutes, and then killed him. He doesn’t remember it well nor talks about it in his manuscript.

The murder of Barlow provided Nilsen with the last body to dispose of at Melrose Avenue. This was September 1981. Ever since the summer of 1980, Nilsen had been getting rid of the evidence in a series of unthinkably gruesome ceremonies.
Three rotting bodies under the floorboards had been causing flies to buzz all around the house. Even with deodorants under the boards and insecticide sprayed twice a day, it was like a scene from a horror film.

Initially, Nilsen was content to simply get the bodies out of the house. He wanted to re-inter them in the garden shed he had built for Bleep. To do this, he decided he should cut them up and then transport them piece by piece in old suitcases left by a previous tenant. It was a warm summer Sunday afternoon when he started. He placed the bodies on the small stone floor between the cooker and the fridge. The sight in front of him was so disgusting he wasn’t clear what needed to be done next. The smell was atrocious; some heads had maggots crawling out of eye sockets and mouths. He says he began quickly to knock back some Bacardi and Coke. He is keen for the world to appreciate how unpleasant he found the act of dismemberment.

In truth, however, despite what he says, the drinking didn’t quite come first. Before he could start, he needed to masturbate next to the victims. We know this from interviews with psychiatrists before his trial. He told them that masturbating was his way of saying ‘goodbye’. After the symbolic gesture, he then poured his drink, put Bleep outside, and fetched his sharpest kitchen knives and some bin liners.

He then stripped off. Naked and drunk, with plastic sheets all over the floor, he hacked away at the corpses using the techniques he had learnt as a chef. He pulled flesh off the bones, snapped joints and severed spines. Even with a butcher’s training, this was a difficult, physical process. Every so often, he says, he would be sick in the sink.
Occasionally, he would cut himself. The French windows in the living room provided a draught of fresh air but he didn’t walk out to them to avoid treading any human remains around the living room.

Heads were put in the large cooking pot (the same that had been used at the Christmas party) and, when the job was done, the foul-smelling viscera were put in plastic bags in a space between the double fencing for what he would later call the ‘wee beasties of the night’. Soon, they rotted away to nothing. The suitcases were put in the shed with a number of deodorants. Eventually, a low wall was built around it, and more bricks and debris piled on the cases.

Between August and November 1980, Nilsen killed three more men. With the other bodies now in the shed, he had room to place these under the floorboards. He did so in a very chaotic manner. In fact, apparently, on one occasion he forgot about a body in a cupboard and was only reminded when he opened the door.

In December, Nilsen decided to draw a line under his activities by lighting another massive bonfire. On a freezing Saturday, he set about building a 5ft-high pyre. Between the end of Nilsen’s garden and the next street was a small patch of waste ground. He found some discarded furniture there and carried it over. Nilsen broke up the furniture and wood and then arranged the pieces into a 2ft-deep base. Then he made another 3ft ring out of other timber he’d collected. When he was sure that the bodies would fit in the middle, he went out to the pub.

The next morning, he got up at 6.30am. He went outside
to check there was no one around. As the garden was not particularly private, Nilsen had to rely on the neighbours keeping themselves to themselves. He prised the floorboards up and the bodies wrapped in carpets were taken outside. It took all his strength to lift them. Even though it was freezing cold, he was sweating. Next, he pulled the door off the shed and shone his torch in there. The cold had caused most of the flies to die; their bodies lay like a carpet on the cases. Elsewhere, there was a sticky fluid. The cases at the top were intact but those below had started to disintegrate.

By dawn, the bodies were within the makeshift wooden pyre which was now covered with tyres, and doused with paraffin. He lit it and then spent the day watching it burn. Throughout the day, he had the French windows open and played Mike Oldfield’s
Tubular Bells
. From time to time, he would go out to inspect the bonfire. In a letter to Brian Masters, he said it was like a Viking ship going to Valhalla. He told the police: ‘The fire burned extraordinarily fiercely. There were spurts, bangs, crackles and hisses. This I took to be the fat in the bodies burning.’ Nilsen also says that children prodded the fire, but although there was a playground nearby, it’s unlikely they could have got that close.

By burning all evidence, Nilsen claims to have felt able to start over. If there was no evidence, how could he even be sure that it had really happened? There was nothing but ash. In truth, however, he hadn’t really eradicated all the signs. The other reminders – such as medallions, bracelets, watches and tobacco tins – just didn’t bother him as much. He would happily wear or give away items from the dead, whom he considered, before their bodies were destroyed at least, to be
‘part of the household’. Some items were found by police in 23 Cranley Gardens.

After the fire, Nilsen brought back a ‘pick-up’ from a pub in St Martin’s Lane. They had some sexual contact, and later he left. This encounter made him feel he was capable of normal, spontaneous activity. Such moments may even have been partly what he had in mind when he told me in a letter: ‘[Masters] writes me as cold and seemingly indifferent as his own prose style. I had, in my life, days of sun, colour and laughter, but you will search long and hard without spotting them in a tome constructed to describe my monstrosity and never the humanity along the road of events.’

There were no other ‘rays of sunlight’ in 1981. Between January and April of that year, he killed an Irishman, a Scotsman and, probably, an English skinhead. And yet, even with this prolific murder rate, he only occasionally missed work. He had an extraordinarily hardy constitution. Hunter-Craig told me that around this period Nilsen would happily drink all night, and then get up to go to work
without
trouble.

When he reached the office, he simply got on with the task in hand. But now he did so increasingly begrudgingly. He was unhappy about an ongoing problem he had with the promotion panel. Nilsen had, around this time, been told in a letter from the panel that he was not eligible to work for the Overseas Workers Section at Denmark Street because his manner with colleagues was ‘usually outspoken and often overbearing’. His superiors were concerned this might also manifest itself with the public.