Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (3 page)

That ‘ordinary day’ at work was as an executive officer at the nearby Kentish Town Job Centre. Nilsen had been in the job for less than a year. For the previous seven years, he had worked in a junior role at the Denmark Street Job Centre. Prior to that he had been a security guard, a policeman (for eight months) and a cook in the Army. But although he had joined the Army aged 15, he still seemed highly educated. This is what had struck many of his colleagues when they first met him. He was quiet and bookish until the conversation turned to one of his pet subjects, like left-wing politics. Then he would quickly become verbose and, sometimes, domineering.

Nilsen’s extensive knowledge could also make him interesting. But his inability to know when to stop talking meant that, more often than not, he was a bit of a bore. Still, Nilsen often made his workmates laugh. He had a sharp, dry wit and never missed a copy of the satirical magazine,
Private Eye.
He still subscribes to it in prison.

For the fortnight between murdering Stephen Sinclair and his arrest, Nilsen continued normally at work. He interviewed applicants and complained about Margaret Thatcher. But
although for the first week he was his usual businesslike self, after that he started to become fractious.

Nilsen’s most vivid recollections of the last week before his arrest are not to be found in
History of a Drowning Boy
but in essays he wrote for author Brian Masters, and which were later quoted in
Killing for Company
– the result of an extraordinary relationship of trust between subject and writer. The project began when Masters wrote to Nilsen while he was awaiting trial asking for co-operation in studying his case. He was one of two writers who did so. The other, ex-ITN newscaster Gordon Honeycombe, had recently written about some of the Met Police’s most famous cases in
Murders of the Black Museum
. That, clearly, made him well qualified on the subject. Masters, however, had a CV ranging from biographies on Sartre to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Nilsen apparently felt that a man of such sensibilities would be better suited to understand him.

Over the next year, Nilsen filled 55 prison-issue exercise books with thoughts and feelings for Masters. He wrote in incredible detail, and with apparent candour. He began by speaking about was what had happened at his first flat – how he had burnt bones on bonfires and put flesh out by the fence for the rats. He then proceeded to explain how the problems of getting rid of the bodies at the second flat led to his arrest.

From all available sources, this is what happened in the last seven days leading up to Dennis Nilsen’s arrest: Jim Allcock, a builder, lived on the ground floor of 23 Cranley Gardens with his girlfriend, a local barmaid. Two other girls lived on the same floor and the middle storey of the building was unoccupied. On Thursday, 3 February, Allcock noticed that
his toilet didn’t work. He tried removing the blockage but it wouldn’t clear. The next day, he decided to call the management agents.

Early on the morning of 4 February, Allcock noticed his other toilet didn’t work either. When he spoke to the agents, he requested to be put directly in touch with a plumber. But now he also wondered if it was just his flat. So when his girlfriend, Fiona Bridges, bumped into Nilsen, she asked if he was also having a problem with his toilet. He replied he wasn’t. Bridges also noticed that he had been drinking. That wasn’t unusual.

Nilsen had actually gone to the pub to prepare himself for the process of getting rid of the ‘problem’ he had in his flat. He says this was a practice he found distressing and his solution was to get drunk and force himself to do what was necessary. First, Sinclair’s body was removed from one of the wardrobes. Then he made sheets from bin liners and put them down on the narrow kitchen floor. Finally, while still drinking Bacardi and Coke, Nilsen set about cutting up the body with a set of sharp chef’s knives.

On the hob sat a huge, steel cooking pot, similar to those he’d used in the Army Catering Corps. Its purpose was to soften the tissue sufficiently to enable it to be flushed down the loo. The water took a full half-hour to come to the boil, by which time Nilsen had got the head off and started to remove the innards. The organs smelt terrible, but the body, thankfully, wasn’t particularly messy. Nilsen says he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, and was always relieved how little there was after a body had settled for a few days. By midnight, he was too drunk to finish.

When he went to bed, he still hadn’t made any connection between him and the drainage problems his neighbours were complaining about.

The following Saturday morning – 5 February – suffering from a bad hangover, Nilsen decided to lie in. Meanwhile, the plumber had started inspecting the toilets and drains outside. He concluded that the blockage was a job for specialists. A call was put through to Dyno-Rod, but they informed him that they couldn’t send an engineer around until the following Monday. When Bridges and Allcock saw Nilsen leaving the house in the early afternoon, they told him it might be better if he didn’t use the toilet in his flat.

Now Nilsen started to worry that his activities were causing the blockage. He decided to do something about the mess and bought cleaning products and air fresheners before returning home.

That afternoon, by chance, Nilsen’s sometime friend, Martyn Hunter-Craig, popped round. He says Nilsen looked more agitated than ever before. When Nilsen opened his door a fraction, Hunter-Craig could see his friend’s face was a ghostly white.

‘You can’t come in, Skip,’ Nilsen said, ‘I’m tied up with someone.’

Hunter-Craig describes smelling what he calls an unusual ‘lavatorial’ smell which he thought might be vomit. He assumed Nilsen was drunk and probably in a complex sexual situation. As a former male prostitute, Hunter-Craig was used to seeing all kinds of things, and discreetly ignoring them.

Nilsen devoted the whole of Sunday to cleaning up. He finished cutting up the body, and put the parts in bin liners.
Then these and the partially boiled head were covered with newspapers and stick deodorants.

On Monday, 7 February, Nilsen went to work feeling on edge. He was irritable and curt with his colleagues. He was resigned to the distinct possibility that when he came home the police would be waiting for him. But Dyno-Rod had failed to turn up and matters hadn’t escalated. Nilsen went to bed that night wondering if he might yet be able to escape detection.

The following morning, Nilsen again went to work in a tense mood. When he returned, it was sleeting. Mike Cattran, a 30- year-old engineer from Dyno-Rod had just arrived. Nilsen went straight up to his flat. Cattran went down to a manhole cover at the side of the building along with Jim Allcock. Cattran looked down, looked back up at Jim Allcock, and said, ‘I haven’t been in this job for long but I know this isn’t shit.’ He suspected the matter was from a rotting animal, but couldn’t be sure what, or how it had come to be there in such quantities. At 7.00pm he phoned his manager, Gary Wheeler.

His manager’s first reaction, as reported, sounded like it may have come from a 1970s TV show. He asked if there were Pakistanis in the building. Cattran replied that there weren’t but that he had concerns that someone was doing something untoward. They agreed to leave it until the next day.

By now Nilsen had come down to see what was going on. Along with the occupants of the ground floor – Allcock, Bridges and two more – they listened to the engineers discuss what they had seen. Allcock said he wanted to know exactly what was causing the blockage. Cattran replied that he needed to look in daylight, and not to worry – there was probably a
perfectly innocent explanation. He turned to Nilsen and asked him, ‘Do you flush dog food down the pan?’ Nilsen replied that he didn’t.

Nilsen went back to his flat and wrote a letter to the agents complaining about the state of the building, including the drains. He asked that ‘routine upkeep and maintenance’ of the house be attended to, to keep ‘living standards at a tolerable level’. He moaned about the lights in the communal areas before arriving at the important issue: ‘When I flush my toilet, the lavatory pans in the lower flats overflow (since Friday, 4 February). Obviously the drains are blocked and unpleasant odours permeate the building.’

This wasn’t the first time that he had written such a letter. Complaining was part of his nature. His real intention here, however, isn’t clear. Maybe by complaining he could deflect attention. Or maybe, as he told me, he really was ‘inviting the end’ of his career as a murderer.

After writing his letter, Nilsen came down to find that Cattran was still there. Before he left, the three men at the house all took a look down the manhole together. Seeing how much the matter looked like flesh, Cattran remarked, ‘Looks like one for the Old Bill’.

‘It looks more to me like someone has been flushing down their Kentucky Fried Chicken,’ Nilsen replied. Again, he returned to his flat to consider his options.

When Nilsen later told the police about his thoughts that night, his words were carefully chosen. He said he had first wondered if he should run. But where could he go? As a former policeman he knew that he wouldn’t get very far. Besides, he claims to have thought it cowardly. Then, he says
he contemplated suicide, but this scared him. He paused for a moment. Then he continued to say that he was concerned that if he wrote a suicide note, no one would believe what he would have to say. Besides, he wanted to face the music because he ‘owed it’ to ‘all the others’ to let their families know what had happened.

Nilsen was also worried about his little, one-eyed mongrel. Although he says he possesses a lifelong ‘genius’ for being isolated from others, it was different with animals. He told the police he didn’t want to let her down. Sadly for Nilsen, Bleep was eventually put down after contracting an illness while waiting to be re-homed by Battersea Dogs Home.

Whatever Nilsen was thinking, his thoughts would have been seriously affected by the rum and Coke he was knocking back. Around midnight, Dennis Nilsen decided to deal with the drain problem at its source. He went down to the manhole cover and cleared some of the ‘particles of white flesh’, disposing of them over the hedge in the back garden. Then he remembered what he’d said to Cattran about the chicken pieces. In the morning, he would go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and replace what he had removed with thighs and wings. Surely, he thought, everyone would lose interest?

When Wednesday, 8 February came, Nilsen never did buy that chicken. He had been spotted that night going outside by Jim Allcock, who questioned him. Nilsen said he’d been outside for a pee. Allcock didn’t believe him. He and Bridges had listened to their neighbour bang and clatter with the manhole cover for ten minutes. All the time, Allcock held a large spanner in his hand. Later, they heard Nilsen repeatedly trying to flush the toilet on the landing.

In the morning, they heard him leave at approximately 7.30am. Cattran arrived with his boss Wheeler about an hour later. The only tenant left in the building now was Fiona Bridges. Cattran took his boss over to the manhole, lifted the cover and shone a torch down. The flesh had gone.

Cattran was bewildered. He told Wheeler that he was in no doubt about what he had seen the night before. The men walked over to the front of the house where Bridges was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown. When they told her about the mysterious disappearance, she explained what she and Allcock had seen the night before. All three of them went back to the drain and Cattran reached in. He pulled out what looked like a human knuckle, and then three more pieces of flesh and bone. Then they called the police.

Nilsen was now sure this was going to be his last day at work. He placed a note in his desk. It said that if he were to be reported to have committed suicide, it should not be believed – someone would have killed him. Despite having been a police constable, Nilsen was paranoid about authority. Then he suddenly became quite cheerful. He would tell Masters that it felt like a burden had been lifted; he was ‘tired and prepared for what lay ahead,’ and also ‘sickened by the past, the present, and a doubtful future’. As he left the office, he put on his new, bright-blue-and-white scarf. Some colleagues commented on it. It, in fact, had belonged to Stephen Sinclair.

A brief summary of the events preceding the arrest appears in
History of a Drowning Boy
. In the main, however, Nilsen seems satisfied with how the events of those five drama-filled days have
already been told. It’s hardly surprising, as much of the commonly-told story actually derives from his own confessions. Now, Nilsen doesn’t seem particularly interested in adding more to his thoughts and feelings. Significantly, he doesn’t complain, as he does so frequently, that he has been misrepresented.

The reason soon becomes clear. Nilsen’s priority in writing his book seems not to re-write the well-known stories about him, but to ‘correct’ what he believes to be the misconceptions about the overview of his life. In letters he told me how he wanted to demonstrate the ‘human’ aspect of his past and to show how a potentially ‘viable human being’ developed a desire to kill.

He says he needs to do so because he believes that, despite the quantity of material that has been written on the case, no one has actually understood his psychological make-up. Most of the analysis he has read in the press he dismisses as sensationalist nonsense. Of greater concern to him is his belief that the one ‘serious’ study on his case, Brian Masters’
Killing for Company
, published in 1995, missed ‘so many insightful clues’.

If Masters had indeed missed certain ‘clues’ it was not for a lack of possible material. During the project, he had got to know his subject personally in the way that a documentary maker or anthropologist might have done. For a further eight years after publication Masters continued to visit Nilsen out of both a sense of obligation and professional interest. During this period, Nilsen gave him the impression he had welcomed his insights. But towards the end of this period, Nilsen began to feel Masters was exploiting his life story.