Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (26 page)

Ruling out ‘sex, blood, lust and sadism’ as if he
wished
it could be that easy would have sounded to many in the jury as excuses clothed in fake sincerity. As for the idea he might have been acting out of a perverted sense of kindness, it was repulsive. But yet, as a whole, the statement did help to establish a gap between confessor and the crimes. As always, the author wrote like someone surprised by his actions:

The final paragraph sounded as if it could almost have been drafted by a solicitor: ‘My remorse is of a deep and personal kind which will eat away inside me for the rest of my life. I am a tragically private person, not given to public tears. The enormity of these acts has left me in permanent shock … The evil was short-lived and it cannot live or breathe for long inside the conscience.’

The prosecution hoped the jury would find Nilsen’s statements both cowardly and brazen. The defence argued it showed Nilsen really had been overwhelmed by his alter ego. Otherwise, why had he admitted
everything
? Jay, himself, agreed he had hardly known anyone co-operate so much.

But admitting everything didn’t necessarily mean Nilsen was sorry or confused. It might also have meant he was simply revelling in what he had done. DCS Geoffrey Chambers read out all of Nilsen’s murder confessions. They included lines already reproduced in this book, such as: ‘On the floor was a piece of string with a tie attached to it … I know I must have killed him … I must have made up the piece of string that night …’ and ‘… I looped the material round his neck again, pulled it as tight as I could and held on for what must have been two or three minutes. When I released my grip, he had stopped breathing.’

Green then brought out the cooking pot in which three heads had been boiled, the cutting board used to dissect pieces of John the Guardsman, and Martyn Duffey’s knives. One person felt a profound sense of abhorrence more acutely than many others. Lesley Mead, Graham Allen’s partner, had come to the trial to try to understand something of what had happened. She would tell me that watching Nilsen calmly ‘play with an empty Marlboro packet, like a bored court official’ simply confused her more. When she saw the cooking pot her partner’s head had been boiled in, she walked out of the court.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 6 October, Ivan Lawrence opened the case for the defence. His objective was not to dispute any of the facts that had been given but to show that Nilsen had been suffering from ‘abnormality of mind’ every time he had killed. This would mean he couldn’t have formed the ‘specific intention of murder’, and therefore couldn’t be held fully responsible. He told the jury that, for them to return such a verdict of manslaughter by diminished responsibility, the law merely required that he
may
have been suffering from such an abnormality. They simply had to consider him not
definitely
sane.

The three psychiatrists at the Old Bailey had a particularly unenviable task. Diagnosing Nilsen was hard enough, but guiding a jury about his state of mind when committing a crime went far beyond their usual remit. Nilsen says, ‘Not to appear fully blank on the subject, they fell back on standard labels of psychiatry: “psychopath”; “explosive”; “schizoid”; “paranoid”; “psychotic”; “sociopathic”; “dissociative”;
“borderline personality disorder”; “necrophilia”; “alcoholic”; “grandiosity”; and a partridge in a pear tree …’

In truth, however, these doctors went to great lengths to express the uniqueness of this case. First in the witness box was Dr James Mackeith of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Normally a cheerful-looking man with thick hair and a wide smile, he appeared initially subdued. He started by explaining who he was, what he did and his experience of the accused. Based on his interviews, he said he was in no doubt that Nilsen suffered from an ‘unspecified’ severe personality disorder. He clarified this by saying that rather than falling outside the spectrum of known disorders, he suffered from many of them.

The disorders Mackeith referred to came from the
International Classification of Diseases
. The
ICD
codifies all illnesses, and in the UK is the standard reference for mental conditions. In 1983, it was on its ninth revision, and in this version ‘psychotic behaviour-types’ caused by schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and drug addiction had been separated from the range of so-called ‘personality disorders’. The types of mental condition had been listed on two ‘axes’. Nilsen certainly wasn’t on axis one, the ‘psychotic’ one. He wasn’t
bipolar
, nor was he schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are marked by a more severe breakdown of function, such as voices in the head and bizarre delusions. They can’t operate in society the way Nilsen had. And neither did his drinking affect him, for example, in the way that large amounts of LSD might have.

Many of the traits on axis two, however, sounded just like him. According to the most recent iteration of the
ICD
, the
criteria for a personality disorder are as follows: ‘(1) Markedly disharmonious attitudes and behavior, generally involving several areas of functioning; (2) that the abnormal behavior pattern is enduring, of long standing, and not limited to episodes of mental illness; (3) that the abnormal behavior pattern is pervasive and clearly maladaptive to a broad range of personal and social situations; (4) that the above manifestations always appear during childhood or adolescence and continue into adulthood; that the disorder leads to considerable personal distress but this may only become apparent late in its course; (5) that the disorder is usually, but not invariably, associated with significant problems in occupational and social performance.’

Since 1983, courts have arguably become attuned to the varieties of mental condition that might affect a defendant. They might, for instance, be evaluated on scales like the Hare Psychopath checklist (the first items are glibness, superficial charm and callousness), and prospects for treatability are then assessed. There is also more inclination to take the findings of personality disorders seriously and not regard them merely as descriptions of character traits. Psychiatrists are now generally more inclined to attribute more than one category of a personality disorder to a patient.

James Mackeith had a reputation for being a very competent and up-to-date psychiatrist. After interviewing Nilsen for several hours, he had diagnosed Nilsen’s personality as showing schizoid, explosive, psychopathic and borderline disorders. The last needs more explanation than the others.

Borderline Personality Disorder is characterised by ‘
black-and
-white thinking, emotional instability and interpersonal
relationships that flit between idealisation and devaluation, poor self-esteem, bouts of impulsivity, anger and dissociation.’ It was initially called ‘borderline’ as psychiatrists thought such people were somewhere between neurotic and psychotic. Now the defining characteristic is seen as instability. Mackeith’s pre-trial report described Nilsen as having unstable moods, impaired impulse control, sudden anger, disturbed identity, sudden need for company when alone, and futility. Interestingly, long before he knew of such psychological concepts, in his essay entitled
The Monochrome Man
, Nilsen describes himself as a man whose moods were all black and white.

Mackeith analysed his problems as starting in childhood, where he thought he had developed ‘maladaptive patterns of behaviour’. These included an inability to express feelings other than through anger, which came suddenly and forcefully. This lack of emotional development meant that when Nilsen felt anxious about a failing relationship, such as that with Gallichan, he would run away – both literally and metaphorically. Mackeith had noticed in his own interviews that Nilsen’s anxiety might cause him to jump to conclusions about what others were thinking.

None of this, in itself, though, was more than neurotic. Something else in Nilsen’s mental development was much more disturbing. Mackeith related two stories that demonstrated how Nilsen had expressly associated unconsciousness with sex. Both stories are mentioned in Nilsen’s autobiography, and have appeared in the narrative of this book. The first was walking into the sea at the age of 10 and being rescued by an older boy who masturbated over him.
The other was the story of the Arab taxi driver he claimed to have killed in Aden in self-defence. Mackeith said that these stories demonstrated an ‘extraordinary’ interest in the concept of unconsciousness in a sexual context.

The psychiatrist proceeded to talk about how he’d heard Nilsen would masturbate with mirrors and beside corpses prior to dismemberment. He believed this was more than simple sexual deviance. It was part of the repeated instances of Nilsen’s personality breaking down.

Mackeith thought Nilsen’s personality breakdowns were far more significant to the crimes than the massive quantities of drink that had also been consumed. He explained how they had come about. First, there was the so-called ‘compartmentalisation’ – what Mackeith described as Nilsen’s ability to separate out his psychological functions ‘in an exceptional way’. He thought this split in his personality, in combination with a reduced sense of identity, made him prone to bouts of ‘depersonalisation’, or ‘dissociation’. In these states, Nilsen would have felt ‘removed’ from himself, as if watching someone else. These instances are strikingly similar to the ‘trance-like ritual’, and ‘dreamlike states’ which Nilsen describes.

Another constant character trait in Nilsen that Mackeith perceived was his aggression. He considered it to be especially pronounced when his point of view wasn’t being met. It seemed to Mackeith that, in interpersonal situations, Nilsen was suspicious, paranoid, grandiose and craved attention. Mackeith even suggested that some killings might have been triggered when people didn’t listen closely enough to him. In a written report, he said that were Nilsen to go to prison, if
he didn’t get enough attention he might develop a florid, psychotic mental illness or become extremely depressed.

Alan Green’s strategy was to try to make Mackeith’s opinions seem like imprecise waffle. He asked the jury to consider whether by attributing to Nilsen almost every disorder in the book, it actually showed that Mackeith was undecided. More to the point, Mackeith’s account didn’t explain
precisely
was going on when Nilsen killed. He seemed undecided, for instance, as to whether it was in blackouts or fits of rage.

Green then asked Mackeith how he knew everything he claimed to about Nilsen’s past. Mackeith admitted that all he had had to work on were Nilsen’s own self-reports. Green wanted to know what literal truth he ascribed to these, in particular Nilsen’s drowning and Aden stories. Mackeith replied that their literal truth was beside the point; Nilsen was capable of believing quite contradictory things at different levels of functioning. What always mattered was
his
truth.

The question still remained of how one could actually believe
anything
generated by Nilsen. Green claimed he was an inveterate liar whose talking was designed just to deceive. He reminded the court how, for instance, Nilsen had told guests he was married or had seen active service in Northern Ireland. Green added that it stood to reason that, if Nilsen hadn’t been so deceptive, he would not have managed to kill 15 men before being caught.