Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (6 page)

Nilsen’s relationship with animals recurs throughout his writing. He calls himself a ‘critter person’ and said to Matthew Malekos: ‘I like them, and they like me.’ Even as he wrote those lines, he was being kept company by budgies in his cell. But the dynamic between Nilsen and animals is more
complicated than simple affection on his part. From his manuscript, we now learn that that, when younger, there were occasions when he wanted to be cruel to animals.

The act of deriving sexual pleasure from hurting creatures – known as ‘zoosadism’ – has been observed in a number of serial killers. It’s often seen as a precursor to violent sex attacks. Nilsen’s new confessions about these moments of cruelty, however, don’t sound as though he’s trying to copy something he’s read. He writes with the same detached confusion as with his murders, as if he simply can’t explain his actions. What his behaviour shows, though, is that as early as the age of nine, Nilsen’s ability to empathise with any other creature was badly malfunctioning.

In
History of a Drowning Boy
, he says: ‘In 1955, I did something which thoroughly ashamed [sic] me, then as now. I slipped a wire around a friendly cat’s neck [in a disused toilet]. I pulled up the cat by the wire attached to the cistern pipe. It struggled briefly under the wire. After it was dead, I prodded it and turned away disgusted by my own cruel behaviour. I wanted to see the reality and process of killing and death. I was not excited by the act.’

Shortly after the cat incident, Nilsen finally escaped the harsh atmosphere of Fraserburgh. The family moved into a larger council flat in the village of Strichen, a small village about eight miles inland from Fraserburgh. There is a short main street with a few streets running parallel to it. The focal points are a couple of pubs and a village store and, like Fraserbugh, most of the buildings are in the granite style.

The family’s new address was 16 Baird Road, and it was where Nilsen spent what many would assume to be the most
formative years of his childhood. Nestling at the foot of Mormond Hill, Baird Road is one of Strichen’s nicest streets. Its houses stand out by being faced with red stone and are generously sized. Although Nilsen never says so, one imagines it would have been a comfortable place to grow up. And, most importantly, although the village was dull, it was not hard like Fraserburgh.

Nilsen, however, gives the impression of disliking both the village and his school. The teachers weren’t much better than those ‘schoolmarm spinsters’ in Fraserburgh who would bully him with mental arithmetic or make him feel like a ‘scruffy urchin’. He resented the way his mother spoke to them. Nilsen claims she would kowtow to any figure in authority. Others simply remember Betty Scott just conscientiously trying to make everyone understand their financial circumstances. One teacher, Melita Lee, said that when there was a school trip to Belmont Camp in Perthshire, Nilsen’s mother offered all she could afford – 10 shillings – and even though it fell short, the school accepted it.

Melita Lee was one of the locals who remembered Nilsen best at the time of the arrest. She considered him
hard-working
, able, very good at art, but with no interest in sport of any kind. Academically, she thought he was probably B stream. Nilsen’s mother thought he was mainly in the C class – the lowest. Still, she was proud of his artistic talents, especially the day he managed to get higher marks than Bruce Rankin, who went on to teach art in a local school.

Other than art, Nilsen enjoyed English and history the best. But, looking back on his schooldays, he talks more about
receiving six strokes on the palm of the hand than about those who introduced him to ideas. Judging by the testimony of others the punishments he talks about probably reflect feelings more than actual events. And these feelings were increasingly hidden. While the schoolteachers thought him simply solitary and introverted, the young boy thought he was alien. ‘Nature’, he would tell Brian Masters, had ‘mismatched’ him from ‘the flock’.

Nilsen’s memoirs now show that, within a year, he was processing reality in an abnormal and dangerous fashion. Increasingly, he talks in terms of experiencing life as an internal ‘film’, a term he uses for his constant fantasising. This was considerably more than a bad case of Walter Mitty-style daydreaming; it was a pathological way of interpreting reality. Maybe it would have been more benign if the ingredients to hand had been different. But Nilsen believes he was still dogged by his memories of Fraserburgh – the unhappy home life, the raging North Sea and a series of stories of fishermen dying by drowning that the adults would tell.

During these early years in Strichen, these memories combined to produce a fixation with death and water. As puberty approached, such thoughts became increasingly confused with sex. Or, at least, as an adult, looking back on his childhood, Nilsen was unable to distinguish between his erotic imagination and things that had happened during walks on the beach.

A psychiatric report, written before the trial, discusses a story that, at the time, he claimed was literally true. Nilsen had said that when he was about 11 or 12 while visiting Fraserburgh Bay, he decided to walk into the North Sea –
fully clothed. As he was wading, knee-deep, he lost his footing and started to drown. The next thing he remembered was being in the sand dunes by the beach. His clothes had been removed and lay in a neatly folded pile next to him. On his stomach was some sticky fluid. He thinks he saw a
16-year
-old boy staring at him. Nilsen concluded that the boy had fished him out of the water and then masturbated on his torso.

The psychiatrist, James Mackeith, who quoted the story, considered it bizarre. Nilsen now concedes in
History of a Drowning Boy
that what he had said was fantasy. But when trying to recall the actual events behind it, the results again sound just like his sex dreams: ‘On the crowded holiday beach one day in summer I saw the lifeguards rescue a young man swimmer. I was fascinated to see this seemingly strong young man being carried from the sea, limp and almost naked, and given artificial respiration. My eyes opened in wonder as he later ‘came alive’. My fascination increased as my eyes travelled over his nakedness and became fixed on the bulge under his swimming briefs.’

The other drowning stories in the manuscript, the
non-sexual
ones, are more likely to be literally true. One involves Mr Ironside, a senile old man, who had gone wandering off. A group of volunteers searched for him all day long. As the summer evening drew on, Dennis joined in. He says he saw a ‘bundle’ down by the river, and pointed it out. The rescue Land Rover was summoned with its ropes and ladders. Nilsen describes seeing them haul up the body of the old man dressed in a cap, pyjamas and Wellington boots. It reminded him of what had happened to his grandfather.

The final ‘water’ story involved a friend of his brother’s called Billy Skinner. This one, however, also demonstrates a disturbing hostility that Nilsen was quietly harbouring towards some of his contemporaries. Nilsen seems to have been jealous of Skinner and the ‘insider’ types. Whereas he felt he was on life’s sidelines, Skinner was playing in the same ‘tough-kid’ gang as his brother Olav. On the day he drowned, Skinner had been showing off on the rocks near the lighthouse museum. He’d knocked his head and fallen into the water. Despite efforts to rescue him, he couldn’t be revived. ‘The sea doesn’t care how tough you think you are,’ Nilsen remarks. He then wonders what Skinner, in life, would have made of the indignity of an old nurse washing his dead, naked body.

Nilsen felt similar resentment towards his brother Olav, the ‘normal’ son who seemed to get all the attention. Nilsen’s older brother was gregarious and manly. He enjoyed football, billiards, snooker, cards, horse racing and, when old enough, chasing girls. Despite Dennis’s bitterness towards him, he was also fascinated by him. When he was 10 or 11, and his brother 13 or 14, Nilsen says he would grope his brother’s penis in their shared bed. To Dennis, this was part of natural development. He also feels sure Olav derived some pleasure from the experience. But shortly after, he remembers Olav calling him ‘hen’ in public, a local Buchan dialect term for woman. Others just thought it a funny name – he seemed to prefer being with the girls after all – but Dennis says he knew his brother was trying to humiliate him, and why.

As part of his further sexual experimentation, he thinks he might also have groped his sister, Sylvia, the sibling he liked
the most. He thinks he touched her mainly because he was curious about developing bodies. But he also wonders if it was his fondness for Sylvia that caused him later to be attracted to boys who looked like her. That, in turn, prompts him to classify the incident as an example of his potential bisexuality.

The prose in
History of a Drowning Boy
becomes more urgent when he recalls the ‘embryonic’ sex games he remembers in the ‘parks’ – little more than small play areas – of Strichen. He calls these ‘sightings’. They were occasions where boys would pin down girls and feel under their clothes. One summer afternoon in the park, the young Dennis saw his brother pin down a girl and put his hand up her skirt. Nilsen says he was upset to see that his brother was such a bully. But sometimes older boys would pin down younger boys, and Nilsen found this exciting. Once, he says, he was pinned down and fondled. He didn’t find it unpleasant but he was annoyed that the boy was bigger and stronger. And in his autobiography, he cites other occasions when he did the same to another boy:

Nilsen writes this passage as though he feels some romantic understanding existed between him and the boy. The reader, however, is again left wondering whether this was just Nilsen’s imagination. Some of his fancies were even odder. For a while, he had a crush on a drawing of a boy who was on the cover of his French text book. He also remembers being attracted to two ‘special’ effeminate boys at school. Apparently, they made him feel like a girl who would faint if they spoke to him. Nilsen says he would watch others and imagine things he would like to do. He was aroused when he saw another boy masturbate for the first time behind some sheds near the park.

Although the knowledge that he was attracted to boys made Nilsen feel ashamed, he was proud of the creativity he thinks is tied up with his sexuality. One evening in particular sticks in Nilsen’s memory. It exemplified the gap between his burgeoning identity as a ‘creative homosexual’ and the lack of imagination around him. He describes the family sitting down to watch television. Around him, he saw ‘kitschness’ in the decorations, low aspirations in the literature and repression in the religion. On the small black-and-white TV a modern ballet was being shown. When he saw the male dancers in their tights, Nilsen said he was excited. The feeling was cultural as well as sexual. His mother just shouted, ‘Get
this filth off!’ Hostility welled up in him. Why couldn’t she understand his world?

Nilsen cites the low cultural ambitions of 16 Baird Road as another example of how he felt his differences were rejected. He thinks it was damaging for him not to have had any of his talents and sensibilities nurtured. Later, he and Matthew Malekos discussed whether such low cultural aspirations in the house may have denied him ‘the building blocks of human need’. In his thesis, Malekos conjectures whether Nilsen’s claims of emotional impoverishment match existing theories of how psychopaths are created. He finds some evidence to suggest that they are.

Whether or not the atmosphere in 16 Baird Road really damaged Nilsen psychologically, he certainly resented it. It encouraged him to retreat further into his private world of the imagination. He says that he liked to feed this with movies, and this seems to have made him try to format his fantasies to make them more like films he had seen. Strichen was much too small to have a movie theatre, however every so often a projector would be set up in the town hall. Nilsen would go as often as he could.

Retreating to the world of make-believe, he found he could replace the world-as-it-was with the world-he-
wanted-it
-to-be. Up on the silver screen, he saw father figures in actors like James Stewart and Gary Cooper. With James Stewart, Nilsen felt a sexual as well as parental attraction. ‘Life looked better through the oblong frame of the movie screen,’ he writes. When on his own, he imagined he was in a movie, which he considered a great improvement on ‘the drab dullness of real life’. Only one person in his family
seemed to understand the power of the imagination like he did, and that was his Uncle Robert.

Aunt Lily’s husband, Robert Ritchie, was a design engineer by trade, but also a man of ideas and culture. His pride and joy was an expensive hi-fi system on which he would play Dennis the great symphonies. While the music was playing, he would regale the boy with tales of the left-wing struggle. These stories may have opened up the welcome possibility that Uncle Robert and his kind could be right and most of the world wrong. They may have been the primary reason that socialism later became so attractive to him.

Then, at the age of 14, despite the influence of Uncle Robert, Dennis did something that took everyone by surprise: he joined the Army Cadet Force. We hear that, despite being physically weak and disliking authority, he found firing guns and, more particularly, the other boys, thrilling. That last point is made at great length. Nilsen spends paragraph after paragraph detailing how thrilling he found seeing them in their PT kit.