Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer

by Russ Coffey

  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:

  There was no violence as such, just wrestling him to the ground and putting my hand up his short pants to feel him. I only did this on two occasions and it seemed to be a passing phase. It was a need to feel a surge of power over another person. It was an embryonic sex act … perhaps a rehearsal. On another occasion I had a wrestling match with a beautiful, almost delicate boy who lived next door.

  He was about a year younger than me and his build and features had a feminine quality about them. Like me, he was no ‘football type’. I soon overpowered him and was astride him, pinning him down by his arms held down on the grass. I held him there looking down at his close, handsome face … I held him there and we gazed into each other’s faces. We did not speak … only the language of our eye contact.

  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 a
mbitions 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.

  But although much of what he says is merely sexual, Nilsen also seems to want readers of his book to join in his youthful enthusiasm for the Army. Nilsen knew that, as much as he would have liked to have been able to develop his artistic side, in the general area of the Broch there were limited prospects to do so. Given his realistic options, the idea of adventure and male camaraderie certainly seemed more interesting than joining Uncle Robert in the Consolidated Pneumatic Tool Company. Above all, Nilsen had had enough of Aberdeenshire. He knew that in the Army there were all sorts of roles he could try. His favourite idea was to try to be a cook. After a very brief spell in a fish canning factory, he went down to Aberdeen to the Army Recruiting Office and took the exams. He passed them with ease. He then signed up for a period of nine years.

  One July morning in 1960, Adam Scott took Dennis Nilsen to the station to catch a steam train to London. The lad had high hopes of his new life. He would be able to see the world and have great adventures, far from the small-town attitudes of Strichen. He had, however, misjudged his ability to fit in with young, ‘normal’, heterosexual men. It would take a further 22 years and the lives of at least 12 young men before Nilsen could really start to accept his sexuality and background. Being frank with himself began with his nine months awaiting trial on remand.

  3

  PRISON LIFE – BRIXTON

  I seek only to reach out to engage with the human dimension which is anathema to rigid officials of the retribution machine.’

  DENNIS NILSEN, IN A LETTER TO THE AUTHOR

  The nine months Nilsen spent on remand were filled with conflict and confrontation. His crimes and odd personality caused him to be shunned by fellow inmates. Worse were the constant arguments he got into with warders. On occasion, these led to his being detained in solitary confinement. But by the end of his time on remand, Nilsen had begun to stabilise. He was helped both by the lack of destructive stimuli – sex and alcohol – and by the fact that, for the first time in years, he was no longer isolated.

  Not only were there people surrounding him, but there were also others interested in him. Nilsen no longer felt invisible and it encouraged him to record his thoughts. Once he had started to write, a pen rarely left his hand. Every scrap of paper in his cell became covered in his dense, spidery handwriting. He was on a search for anything in his past – such as the death of his grandfather – that might provide him with a reason why he had become a killer.

  In History of a Drowning Boy, however, rather than recall his intense introspection, Nilsen chooses to concentrate on what he considered to be the awful regime of Brixton Prison and the injustices he felt were heaped upon him. The chapter he writes about the period before the trial is fascinating, frustrating and frequently unpleasant. Nothing in what he says is straightforward. Nilsen constantly seeks to cast himself in a better light by putting others down. Petty grumbles are given as much space as his reflections on how he had become ‘addicted to murder’.

  Nilsen’s description of the day of his arrest is a case in point. Immediately after the arrest, the police had driven Nilsen over to Hornsey, a smallish police station two miles east of where he had himself been a probationary police officer. Nilsen says that Peter Jay, Geoff Chambers, Steve McCusker and Jeff Butler didn’t know what to expect from him. Jay, for his part, says Nilsen seemed ‘extremely odd’ and he knew he would need to be played carefully.

  In particular, Jay suspected that, as a union man, Nilsen would be noticing whether the regulations were being followed. He was right. It shows in Nilsen’s description of Chambers as ‘having forgotten a lot of the basic principles of police evidence gathering despite his exalted rank,’ and his statement that he was pleased his treatment was ‘correct and amiable.’ Indeed Jay’s friendly, light-hearted and efficient manner created an environment in which Nilsen felt comfortable enough to talk freely.

  When Nilsen set about unburdening himself, his manner seemed relaxed and his words informative. Internally, however, Nilsen says he felt very differently. He says that ‘playing the part of a villain was new to me’ and being ‘absolutely isolated and friendless I entered into a spirit of bonhomie with my captors’. His conscience, he adds, was ‘in desperate need for relief’.

  Jay remembers Nilsen as being quietly spoken but with a strange swagger. During the interviews, he drank endless cups of coffee, chain-smoked cigarettes and his words were peppered with his black humour. It resulted in many infamous remarks, such as: ‘I don’t know how many bodies I had under the floorboards at any one time. I didn’t do a stock check.’

  Nilsen’s book makes no apology, however, for his black humour. He does claim, though, that that he talked more freely than he felt he should have. ‘Previous commentators,’ he says, ‘have grossly underplayed this … element of fear.’ Despite being photographed daily to minimise any threat of being beaten, Nilsen says he was worried ‘the police might hang [him] up in a cell and call it suicide’. But given his first-hand knowledge of police practice this is hardly convincing. Similarly, when he says that, on his second day in custody, he turned away a solicitor because he didn’t want to be told to remain silent, it as if he really wanted to appear in as good a light as possible to himself.

  Soon, the detectives started to worry that, despite such behaviour, their prisoner might stop co-operating. Jay effectively led the investigation. He is 6ft 3in with a tough ‘old school’ manner. His boss, DCS Geoff Chambers, was nicknamed ‘Fag Ash and Confusion’. Jay told me how aware they were of the time pressure they were working under. Without an extension they only had 48 hours to charge Nilsen and, even
though he was talking constantly, there was still the task of corroborating what he said.

  With the body of Stephen Sinclair reassembled on the mortuary slab, they decided to concentrate on his murder. Once Nilsen was detained on one charge, they would be able to question him about others at their leisure. But before this, Chambers and Jay had the press to deal with. The newspapers had first learnt about the goings on in Cranley Gardens after Mike Cattran had contacted a local reporter from Muswell Hill who then tipped off Fleet Street. Because of this, Jay and Chambers had to quickly call a press conference. The reporters were all looking for a quote for their front page. ‘How long,’ one journalist asked, ‘has Nilsen had this unusual habit?’

  Chambers and Jay were conscious that if the papers reported too much it might hinder their investigation. They needed to act quickly. So at 5.00pm on Friday, 11 February 1983, Dennis Andrew Nilsen was charged with the murder of Stephen Sinclair. The case was now placed sub judice, with reporting forbidden until the trial.

  Meanwhile, Nilsen was now starting to prove a difficult client for his solicitor, a cheerful man called Ronald Moss. At his first court hearing at Highbury Magistrates’ Court on the Saturday, 12 February, Nilsen forewent the customary blanket over the head and walked out in the full glare of the press. Images of him in his large spectacles and neat side-parted hair made the front pages of the tabloids, pictures which are still often shown today.

  Nilsen’s behaviour may or may not have been a case of him trying to stage-manage his image. It was also down to the fact that once he got it into his head to do something a certain way, that was how it had to be. After unburdening himself of his crimes, he wanted to believe he had rejoined the world of decent, morally upstanding people. He says in his book that that morning he didn’t want to hide away like a common criminal. In a letter to me some years later, he wrote: ‘On my arrest, I regained the moral high ground. My commitment was clear. To assist in every possible way to bring lawful justice to the past, present and future … I am still firmly wedded to the moral code with the added degree of maturity which comes from the enlightenment of experience.’