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

by Russ Coffey

  Nilsen also gives two others reasons for leaving the Army. The first was homophobia; second, he says he was ashamed of the conduct of the British Army in the Bloody Sunday Massacre, where 13 civilians had been shot dead in Londonderry in January 1972. Rob Ferrier remembers another incident which he says was the real reason Nilsen didn’t re-enlist. It involved his mud turtle, Napoleon XIV. In an email to me, he says:

  Eventually, Napoleon XIV was his downfall. His roommate became more and more angry and frustrated over the smell and filth in his room. This escalated into a full-scale row one night. The offended person had gone out drinking and had returned spoiling for a fight. I was awakened by the altercation and slamming of doors.

  When I went into the corridor, Nilsen was charging down the corridor from the kitchens brandishing two large boning knives (his tools). I ordered him to put down the weapons. He refused, waving them in my face. I repeated the order, qualifying it with the threat that, if I had to take them off him, I’d break his damned arms and then put him under arrest. That gave him pause and he dropped the knives and ran away. Meanwhile, his drunken roommate had clambered out his room window and disappeared.

  I thought, ‘Bloody great, another bloody hero!’ That was when I heard the sounds of a fight from the vicinity of the common room. The roommate had actually nipped around the outside of our quarters to tackle him from the rear. Having had enough, I decided to root the RSM out of his quarters and leave him to sort it all out.

  At the time, Nilsen was applying for extension of service beyond 12 years. His poor personal hygiene and the attendant disciplinary problems affected that application. I was personally consulted as to what disciplinary action should be taken against him. I suggested – and his Cook Sgt concurred – that the application for extension of service could be refused with no need for further action. He was gone within the month.

  Before Nilsen left the Islands, he says he had one last drinking session which ended in his burning all his films. He couldn’t, however, bring himself to burn the footage he had taken of Terry, and just before he left he gave Terry his personal projector and all the footage of him. Rob Ferrier is dubious that the fire could have been of any size or he would have remembered it.

  As for Nilsen’s ‘exemplary’ record, Ferrier suggests it was the Army’s custom to send people out with a generous reference wherever possible. In truth, Nilsen’s career had been blighted with more than just never making it past the rank of Corporal. Nilsen had frequently got into trouble, just never so seriously as to be formally disciplined. Still, Nilsen had got through, and now had a General Service Medal and life membership of the Army Catering Corps regimental association to show for the 11 years and three months he’d served. Those institutional skills were never more useful to him than in his first years in prison.

  5

  PRISON LIFE – THE FIRST DECADE

  ‘We are dead men locked in a tomb; the living dead, privileged by selective animation. We are required to be neither seen nor heard.’

  DENNIS NILSEN, IN A LETTER TO THE AUTHOR

  Dennis Nilsen likes to tell people that, including the time he spent in the Army, and the police force as well as his prison sentence, he has spent most of his life in the service of Her Majesty. He is now fully institutionalised, having been in prison for over 30 years, with no prospect of release. Prisoner B62006 (Nilsen’s original prisoner number – his current number is A6191AC) started his life sentence started on 4 November 1983 in Wormwood Scrubs.

  After the trial, Nilsen was first taken to the reception area in the medical unit. When he got up the next morning, he would have seen that the Scrubs looked like a bigger version of Brixton. It was almost as cold and just as noisy. After a couple of days, Nilsen was taken from the hospital and brought to C-Wing. When he arrived in the exercise yard, he says the ‘throng parted like the Red Sea’.

  Settling into the new regime was, again, something he found particularly difficult. On remand, Nilsen had spoken of the need for his crimes to be punished. He even seemed to welcome jail as a way of cleansing his conscience. Now, the reality hit home. In Nilsen’s literal and logical world, he had been prescribed a simple denial of liberty, not a hard, meaningless, negative life. When it came to it, he didn’t welcome his punishment one bit.

  Many inmates considered him a ‘nonce’ – slang for sex criminal – and felt free to give him as hard a time as they liked. He didn’t fare much better among the others. Stories leaked to newspapers suggest Nilsen’s intellectual pretensions made him seem arrogant. One of the first was ‘JAIL MEN HATE NILSEN THE BRAGGER’. Nilsen cut it out and put it in a folder. Subsequently, he would keep scrapbooks of every mention of him in the press along with comments about inaccuracies and the outrageous ‘monsterisation’ of him.

  Nilsen was immediately designated a Category A prisoner – the highest security level, and one from which he has never been downgraded. His single cell measured approximately 6ft by 8ft. Inside the cold walls were an iron-framed bed and a desk. In 1983, Victorian prisons such as the Scrubs had not yet been converted to have in-cell toilets and sinks. Prisoners used buckets and bowls. Nilsen’s prison uniform was plain grey, like the bare painted walls. He was permitted a small amount of cell association – the time a prisoner is allowed to socialise in other inmate’s cells. Mainly, however, he chose to mix in the evenings in the TV room. There was also socialising at meals, exercise periods and work time. To begin with, however, Nilsen didn’t speak to many others.

  If new friends were hard to come by, Nilsen was equally disappointed by people he used to know. Janet Leaman – the manager at the Kentish Town job centre who once offered support – had stopped writing after one letter. Then there was Martyn Hunter-Craig, the man who had almost walked in when Nilsen was dismembering Stephen Sinclair. After the trial, Nilsen had been puzzled that Hunter-Craig had paid him a visit in the cells. Now, he believed the reason was that he had been looking for stories to sell. It annoyed him intensely.

  Nilsen and Hunter-Craig had first met in 1978 in the Crystal Room amusement arcade in Leicester Square. Hunter-Craig had been about 18 and Nilsen 32. The young drifter with a handlebar moustache hardly looked younger than the man who stood behind him. ‘You won’t win much on that,’ Nilsen had said with friendly cynicism. They got chatting, went for a drink and a pizza and eventually Nilsen invited Hunter-Craig back to his flat in Melrose Avenue. The evening went well. Over the next few years, Hunter-Craig became a frequent visitor.

  When in March 1983 the police tracked Hunter-Craig down they asked him if he remembered anything suspicious in Nilsen’s behaviour during the time they had been friends. Hunter-Craig immediately remembered an incident which clearly suggested his friend had once tried to kill him. It was one morning in 195 Melrose Avenue when he had woken up to find the room filled with smoke. Nilsen had told him he’d been trying to dry a towel. Now, however, he admits, in fact, he had been trying to knock his friend out before strangling him. This was one story Nilsen didn’t mind him selling. Other stories, like the Sunday People’s ‘HITLER FANTASY OF THE BEAST OF CRANLEY GARDENS’, he deemed outrageous.

  If such inaccuracies infuriated Nilsen, at least he could take comfort from the fact that people were talking about him. Although he relentlessly complains about their treatment (one section of his memoirs is subtitled ‘The Monsterisation of a Multiple Killer: the Media Treatment of My Case’), the pages he devotes to analysing what was said about him are a sure indication that, without the infamy the papers gave him, he would have found it hard to be simply prisoner B62006.

  During the day Nilsen liked to divert himself productively. In Wormwood Scrubs, all prisoners other than those on ‘full-time education’ were required to work. For a full week, Nilsen could earn a little over £20. He found life in the workshop cathartic. Five days before Christmas 1983, he recalls going in one morning to pack video games into boxes. The Flying Pickets’ ‘Only You’ was playing on the radio in the background. Nilsen had previousl
y only seen video games before in the Piccadilly arcades. He was impressed that people could now have them at home.

  Nilsen left work that lunchtime in a good mood, feeling satisfied with himself. He was also looking forward to receiving a visitor that day. In the afternoon, Brian Masters – still writing Killing for Company – drove over to see him. He was still Nilsen’s only visitor. Sitting opposite each other, surrounded by wives and kids, a small boy approached Nilsen with a half-eaten Mars Bar. ‘Do you want a bit, mister?’ he enquired.

  With Masters in front of him, Nilsen couldn’t resist the performance opportunity. Masters remembers him saying, ‘No thank you. My mother taught me never to take sweets from strange kids.’

  That afternoon was cold and turning windy. As the sun was going down, Nilsen remembers someone in the exercise yard whispering, ‘You’d better watch your back, mate.’ He went to sleep that night feeling uneasy, and trying to put the comment out of his mind. It occurred to him that people probably said that kind of thing a lot in prison.

  The following afternoon, at the same time, Nilsen took his customary walk. Again the weather was foul. As Nilsen was sheltering by a wall rolling a cigarette, a figure came over to join him. He looked up. Suddenly there was a soft blow to his left cheek. A metal object clattered to the ground. With blood dripping on to his shirt and his cigarette in his mouth, Nilsen realised that he’d been slashed across the cheek with a razor.

  Later that day, and after giving the matter quite some thought, Nilsen identified the assailant as Albert Moffat, a small-time gangster, typical of the ‘little men’ who thought prison life could make them into big shots. But, despite his disdain, Nilsen had refused to let a prison warder take a Polaroid picture of his injuries. He says he didn’t want to be seen cosying up to the police or prison service, or getting their help. He wanted everyone to know that, ultimately, he was still in charge.

  The next day he read a story in the Daily Mirror, whose headline was ‘RAZOR ATTACK ON KILLER NILSEN’. That afternoon he was summoned to the governor’s office, to discuss segregating him off for his own safety. Nilsen resisted the idea, and eventually won. Showing potential aggressors that he would not be cowed was only part of his rationale. Nilsen had another reason for his ‘strong man’ behaviour. He explains he was still trying to impress David Martin from afar and didn’t want rumours reaching the object of his former infatuation that Dennis Nilsen was a grass.

  Martin had other things on his mind. The thought of returning to prison had plunged him into a deep depression. He soon started to feel suicidal. On 15 March, after receiving a 25-year sentence, he hanged himself in his cell in Parkhurst. Nilsen wrote to Brian Masters to say he felt he needed to do something. As he wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral, he asked if Masters would go on his behalf.

  Masters contemplated what he should do. By committing himself to such a serious project, he concluded he had entered into a series of obligations to the people involved – so he agreed. He delivered the single white and red roses Nilsen had ordered, along with the message that read ‘In fondest love, Des’. In his media scrapbook, Nilsen noted that the Sun wrote a piece the next day headlined ‘MONSTER’S TWO RED ROSES FOR HOUDINI’. They’d called him a monster and got the colour of the flowers wrong.

  Some months later, when Moffat was brought to trial for the razor attack, Nilsen was still determined to carry on acting tough, despite no longer having Martin to impress. On 18 June 1984, he was ordered to testify. Dressed in his suit and with his newly-grown moustache he again looked every inch the civil servant he’d once been. He hardly needed to give evidence; Moffat openly admitted to the attack.

  His defence was that Nilsen had made homosexual advances and the incident had been prompted by a knife threat on him. After several hours’ deliberation, the jury decided that there was insufficient evidence for a conviction. As he left the court, Moffat bragged Nilsen would be attacked again for being so arrogant.

  In the autumn of 1984, Nilsen was transferred to Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire, a mixture of Victorian and new buildings; it now specialises in sex offenders. In 1984, it was a hard place full of hard men. Nilsen expected life to become increasingly bleak. He feared more attacks and resigned himself to longer periods spent in solitary confinement. Instead, in Christmas 1984, Nilsen started the most enduring romantic relationship of his life.

  The ‘romance’ was with an armed robber called Jimmy Butler. He was from Yorkshire with a broad accent and gauche manners. Of medium height and build, he also looked remarkably like Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones. The armed robbery had initially landed him a life sentence but it was reduced to nine years on appeal.

  Nilsen’s manuscript describes being attracted both to Butler’s left-wing leanings, and his naïveté. Despite his crimes, Nilsen saw in him a wounded, almost child-like 28-year-old. They soon started to refer to each other as ‘brother’, and would describe the regime and the government as ‘the bastards’.

  Butler also had abundant energy. He encouraged Nilsen to practise his chef’s skills again, and the two of them ran a small curry business during recreation periods in the common room kitchenette. The facilities were intended for the preparation of food bought from the prison shop. In reality, the small electric oven was used more for food smuggled out of the kitchens.

  Nilsen revels in his description of the black-market economy in prison. He also seems surprised to find that things really did seem to fit the stereotype of the prison movies he’d seen. The unofficial ‘currency’ was ‘tobacco, cannabis and any saleable commodity from the prison canteen’. Allegedly, there was a ‘bookie on every wing’, eager to relieve inmates of whatever was being used for money and, in turn, that ‘money’ could be spent on anything from pastries to having one’s laundry done. Nilsen also says that Butler deliberately courted the attention of men who were attracted to him. There was one in particular who had formed an especial attachment, a paunchy Scotsman whom we’ll call Graeme.

  Nilsen and Butler’s romance started like teenagers hanging around in the dorms, and Graeme would invariably be found frequenting Butler’s cell. Butler would send notes to Nilsen asking him over. The three of them would sit there looking awkward and not knowing what to do. Triumphantly, Nilsen says that Jimmy eventually publically ‘dumped’ Graeme and started ‘going out’ with Des.

  Nilsen’s descriptions of their early liaisons, significantly show what seems, for him, to be an unusual interest in someone’s character and not just their body. When they first met, Nilsen had just bought a new budgie, Hamish, which had fallen seriously ill. Butler wandered in and warmed the bird in his mouth, bringing it back to life. Nilsen saw this as an inner sensitivity, which, he says, he found appealing. What follows next, however, is a fairly graphic description of a homosexual affair. Like many such passages in the book, it is hard to decipher Nilsen’s primary aim: to prove a functioning sexuality – at the time of the trial he indicated that outside of his imagination he was asexual – or just to enjoy thinking about sex. Still, letters exchanged between Nilsen and Butler do show this was a genuine, two-way affair.

  A little over four years later, in 1989, Butler would also corroborate their relationship in an interview with the Sunday Mirror: ‘To everyone else he is a monster, but I know the man. I am proud to have known him,’ he said. ‘No one else has been more special … he is the most caring person I have ever known.’

  Butler and Nilsen offer different accounts of the end of their relationship. Butler says that Nilsen’s constant questioning about his unhappy childhood led to frequent arguments and eventually caused him to punch Des in the face. Such events were eventually too much for the governor, who had Butler transferred. Nilsen’s descriptions of their arguments – over Butler’s dislike of Nilsen’s cannabis and classical music, and Nilsen’s low tolerance of Butler’s Bob Marley Legend album – sound more like an infatuation coming to an end.

  By the end of 1984, with Butler gone and more time on his hands,
Nilsen again started to brood about what he had done with his life. He decided – possibly quite sincerely – that he should atone for his past actions by living his prison life as constructively as possible, starting by developing his existing talents. Ideally he says he would have liked to have swapped his job in the workshop for the option of ‘full-time education’. But this was over-subscribed, so he asked instead to apply to join an Open University course. The education department informed him that he could be eligible as long as he avoided psychology. He plumped for social sciences.

  In the end, Nilsen’s OU efforts came to an end after only three months. If, as seems likely, it was down to his own limited ability to stick at something, he won’t admit so. Instead, he complains it was all down to the lousy way Wakefield Prison ran its education department. For example, he complains that they only provided one old black-and-white TV to watch the educational programmes. And if he wanted a tape player to listen to other lessons, he was told he would have to give up his record player. And there was no way, he says, he was going to let that happen.

  Having failed with the OU, Nilsen decided to educate himself by listening to Radio 4, a habit that would become a permanent part of his prison life. But in Nilsen’s scheme of personal rehabilitation, self-education wasn’t sufficient. He also wanted to become politically active again. He felt there could be almost no end to the issues he might champion in prison. Nilsen the ‘union man’ was reborn. Prisoner B62006 started by dispensing practical advice to other inmates. Some, later, even wrote to him from their new prisons to thank him for his help. Such feedback was extremely important in helping Nilsen to believe that there was more to him than the murders. But, now, more than anything else, Nilsen wanted to know what Brian Masters had made of him.