by Russ Coffey
Nilsen sounded like he was writing more about himself than Mary Bell. He seemed insistent that his voice was that of others. The subtext was that he wanted people to know he still existed and to hear it from him. Most importantly for me, at the time, was that he seemed prepared to give me a privileged insight into what he had to say. I started to ask around for a publication interested in a piece on Nilsen. Several were keen, but I needed more material. I wrote back to Whitemoor Prison. Over the next seven months, Nilsen wrote me nearly 30,000 words of autobiography, politics, poetry and chat.
At the outset, dealing with Nilsen felt less unnerving than I had feared. In the main, he seemed quite charming and eccentric. Despite his constant complaining, he was also interesting. It wasn’t just his crimes and prison life he spoke about – he had well-considered cynical opinions on current affairs. He was also funny. ‘Functioning under prison management isn’t only punishing,’ he once told me, ‘it’s embarrassing.’
Reading Nilsen’s letters could also, quite literally, be educational. He was so keen to show off his learning, sometimes it seemed like he was copying things out of an encyclopaedia. He would quote people like Edward Gibbons and Henri Amiel. Sometimes, I wondered if this might also be because he was slightly autistic. If he spoke about a typewriter or cassette player, there would always be the exact make and model number. And he would also become a little vexed if I forgot to acknowledge the exact date of his last letter, as if you had broken a rule of protocol that was very important to him.
Nilsen’s adherence to his etiquette meant he would always reply by return of post. And he never sent unsolicited letters; he thought that inappropriate. Sometimes, there seemed something almost quaint about exchanging letters in this way. I could often forget this was a man who had repeatedly killed. Despite his intensity, he seemed like many other fastidious, nerdy oddballs I’d known. He was fixated with details, and creating arguments that defended his world view. When I later saw his cartoons, drawings and tape recordings, it struck me that, if this had been the only side to his character, he might have made a reasonable schoolteacher.
When Nilsen spoke of his crimes, his lack of perspective was quite terrifying. He could talk about squeezing the life out of someone in one sentence and the confiscation of his spider plant in the next. His proclamations of remorse always felt like he was saying what he thought were the ‘right things’. He told me, ‘Just because I do not make demonstrative expressions of remorse does not rule out that I can and do feel great personal remorse for the damage my actions have caused. Weeping and pain is a very personal circumstance not open to exhibition at official interviews. Remorse is not just saying it, it is doing it.’
Despite his protestations that he was living the most positive, constructive life he could through his hobbies, I remained unconvinced that Nilsen was actually doing anything that he didn’t like. Soon, I started to notice that for all he said, he never actually seemed ‘sad’. He neither seemed to want to shed tears nor listen to others. He wrote as if he felt he was a guru dispensing wisdom. This superior demeanour made me feel reluctant to challenge him. Later, I wondered if I was being manipulated or just being hesitant? I thought maybe I was frightened of whether he might be able do something unpleasant if I upset him. Maybe he had some nasty friends on the outside.
At the end of the year, I had a pile of letters but no real story. I started to wonder why exactly I was writing all these letters, and decided to stop.
It was several years before another newspaper article prompted me to write to Nilsen again. During that time, I would sometimes wonder who else wrote to Nilsen, and how he spoke to them. Later, when I saw examples, I discovered my correspondence was not atypical. He dispensed the same empty-sounding words to everyone, and had written Matthew Malekos an almost identical letter to one he had written me: ‘If I had been really strong morally I should have called the police that morning I killed Stephen Holmes. I did not and many others died as I clung selfishly to self-preservation and remained subservient to a selfish power of the ritual. So I am fully culpable for my results and that is that: I guess I will have to resist complaining about length of sentence.’
8
FROM FANTASY TO MURDER
‘In 1978, I entered a personal pit of imbalances which scored 10 out of 10, and this became unbearable to the point of acute desperation. In the past, I had had always a couple of points in my favour. Now I had nothing: I drank and became a murderer to begin the cycle. More drinking at the despair I was a murderer and more murders. It was a downward spiral. There was no one I had trust in to turn to but a small dog who could offer no solutions.’
DENNIS NILSEN, IN A LETTER TO THE AUTHOR
Dennis Nilsen’s calm recollections of how he strangled up to 15 men are horrific. Moreover, despite being true, they are so stylised they barely seem real. The most graphic accounts were written in 1983. Later confessions are, thankfully, more about reasons than acts – in History of a Drowning Boy he mainly directs the reader to things he has said previously for the details. Still, those earlier words show how little he saw his victims as real people. Fifteen young men were described simply in terms of their appearance. Their deaths were written about almost like fantasies. Among all the minutiae and florid prose there is no believable sense of the physicality of killing, nor mention of the terror in the victim’s eyes.
Nilsen’s first murder was the day before New Year’s Eve 1978. He was now 33 and had spent Christmas alone with his dog. He told Masters that his loneliness had become ‘a long, unbearable pain’. His manuscript underscores that disconnection to the world around him. It was the bitterly cold ‘Winter of Discontent’; misery engulfed London. Sex fantasies, drinking and isolation had got the better of Dennis Nilsen. By the time New Years’ Eve was looming, his self-pitying desolation was coming to a head. He sat at home drinking and listening to music. In a letter to me, he said: ‘Man knows not what alienation is until he has experienced the severity of absolute detachment I was feeling on the morning of 30 December ’78.’
That evening, he felt he had to get out of the house. It was a quiet day in town. People were either relaxing after Christmas or gearing up for the New Year celebrations. Only one pub near Melrose Avenue was full. It was the Cricklewood Arms on Cricklewood Broadway, known for its rough Republican Irish crowd. It was not the sort of place that Nilsen usually frequented. The same was true of the young man he met by the bar, but at least he was Irish. Nilsen hoped he might also be homosexually inclined.
Nilsen told police: ‘He was much shorter than I was. About 5ft 6in. He was southern Irish and had short, dark-brown, curly hair. His hands were rough. At closing time he indicated to me that he had too far to travel. We went back to Melrose Avenue and started drinking. We had a damn good old drink and, later on, I remember thinking, “He’ll probably be going soon – another ship passing in the night”.
‘The next morning, I had a corpse on my hands. He was dead … I wanted company over the New Year. There was desperation for company. My tie was around his neck.’
Nilsen talks as if his actions took him totally by surprise; the facts suggest otherwise. We now know from History of a Drowning Boy that he had long been used to taking advantage of unconscious bodies and masturbating to scenarios that involved death. Furthermore, can we really believe he spontaneously came up with the method of strangulation using a tie? Surely, if he had strangled the boy without having ever imagined the scenario, he would have done so with his bare hands? Instead, he used the far more efficent and certain method of wrapping a tie aroud his neck and pulling with all his might.
Nilsen will never, however, allow any suggestion that his crimes were premeditated. Instead, he simply tells us that depression, alcohol and a deviant sex drive came together that night. In his pseudo-psychological language, murder then became ‘a cruel medicine to sedate encroaching insanity’. He says ‘fantasy exploded into reality’, and that, ‘loosened by alcohol’, he lost all control. The explan
ations he gives are, nearly all, very hazy.
Comparing what he has written at different times helps fill in the picture. The description he gave at Hornsey Police Station was brief. But another account of the same event, this time written much later for Brian Masters’ Killing for Company, is much more elaborate. It also gives a much clearer sense of how fantasy and the opportunity came together.
Nilsen says he ‘snuggled up to him and put my arm around him. He was still fast asleep … I pulled the blanket off us and halfway down our bodies. He was on his side turned away from me. I ran my hand over him, exploring him. I remember thinking that because it was morning he would wake and leave me. I became extremely aroused and I could feel my heart pounding and I began to sweat. He was still sound asleep. I looked down on the floor where our clothes lay and my eyes fixed on my tie. I remember thinking that I wanted him to stay with me over the New Year whether he wanted to or not. I reached out and got the neck tie. I raised myself and slipped it on under his neck.’
Still, he is vague about what was so arousing. Was this a scene that he had recently used in masturbation? Or was it that he had really become physically excited at the prospect of attacking his victim? In History of a Drowning Boy, however, Nilsen does, finally, attempt a psychological explanation of the emotional subtext. After he got the youth back to the flat, he says he started to have flashbacks to the boy in the cabin from his adolescent dreams. Simultaneously, he both wanted that moment not to end, and for the body of the young man to be part of his ‘old man’ mirror fantasy. Specifically, he wanted to become the old man, and for the boy’s body to represent himself. He describes his murder rituals as a ‘dualism’ and a ‘perverted sort of mating’ with himself: ‘The whole conundrum is alive with Narcissusia [sic] – this almost total attachment to self. When eventually the body is put out of sight and changes into decay, it reappears as something new: i.e. putrefying dead meat to be disposed of. The paradox about my fantasy view of these bodies is that the primary aim while they were in use was to make them look as pure and alive as possible.’
In other words, he believes that when he obtained a body, it was really a way of having sex with himself. And, as soon as that body started to decay, he no longer saw it as connected to the living person it had once been. It was something ‘other’ – an object to be disposed of.
It took 23 years for the ‘Irish youth’ to be identified as 14-year-old Stephen Holmes. Holmes was not a runaway, nor was there any sign he had had gay tendencies. On the contrary, he was popular and liked loud music and football. The night he disappeared, he had just been to see a local rock band. Full of rebellious energy, he may have dropped into the pub in Cricklewood on his way home to see if he could get served and to keep warm before getting the bus home. Just as seeing a band had seemed a grown-up thing to do, being in a bar with an adult would have flattered him. Holmes would also probably have soon become too intoxicated to make sensible judgements about whom he was talking to.
The boy’s mother, Kathleen, a waitress, reported her son missing soon after his disappearance, and continued to campaign to find him until her death in 2002. With few good photographs of Stephen, she failed to make headway. Holmes’ remaining relatives have found it too painful to talk about his death.
After killing Holmes, Nilsen washed his body and lay him down on his bed. The sexual possibilities of having him there were offset by the immediate shock of the situation. Nilsen’s confessions, however, sound more confused than horrified. He was sure the police would soon turn up. And yet, instead of hiding the evidence, he wrapped the body in a curtain and went to bed for the rest of the day to sleep off his hangover.
The next day was New Year’s Day. Now, with a clearer head, Nilsen started to panic and tried to put the body under the floorboards. But rigor mortis had set in and it wouldn’t fit.
He waited another day. Now the body was less stiff, so he pulled the boards up again. The cat, Deedee, got in there, and it took several minutes to coax her out. Nilsen was pleased, however, to see how wide the spaces were between the beams supporting the floorboards. Once removed, there was plenty of room to put the body in.
He ripped up Holmes’ clothing and put it with his shoes into the dustbin. A week later, he wondered if the body had started to decompose. He disinterred it, and then stripped himself naked before taking the body up to the bathroom, washing and inspecting it. The body was still intact. He admired Holmes’ corpse for a while, then he contemplated buying an electric carving knife to cut it into smaller pieces. After some moments, he dismissed the idea as ludicrous. Finally, he placed the body back under the floorboards where it stayed for a little over seven months.
It wasn’t until 11 August 1979 that Nilsen decided to get rid of the remains. Still wrapped in the curtain, he placed the body on a large bonfire. The fences around the garden were about 6ft high, but the scene was still clearly visible from neighbours’ windows. Nilsen didn’t, however, go to any great lengths to hide the pyre. In various declarations of loneliness, he says he no longer believed anyone really cared what went on in his flat.
The most obvious psychological effect becoming a murderer had on Nilsen was simply to increase his general sense of depression. After the arrest, Nilsen would tell DCI Jay that it ‘amazed’ him that he had no tears for the victims. His later writings make references to his extreme unhappiness, but he says it was a private matter and didn’t change his behaviour at work. It didn’t stop him paying his bills, or writing letters to his mother. He did, however, do one thing to try to try to stop it happening again.
In the period of a little more than seven months between killing and burning Holmes, Nilsen made a concerted effort to reduce and change the pattern of his drinking. To begin with, he says he thought he must have committed the murder because he had been blind drunk and lost control. There is no particular reason to doubt that he really believed this – especially as he now went to some effort to change his behaviour. He didn’t give up drinking altogether – he would see occasional friends or sometimes go for a drink after work – but he avoided drinking heavily in gay bars and inviting young men back.
Although Nilsen made modest efforts to avoid committing another murder, he had no interest in handing himself in. For four years, he says his main instinct was for what he called ‘self-preservation’. Thoughts of suicide even came before walking into a police station. He couldn’t see what purpose turning himself in would serve anyway. Surely it would be better, he reasoned, just to make sure he started to live a more productive life?
Nilsen’s solution for how to live with himself was to ‘become a workaholic’, throwing himself into his trade union work at the civil service union, the CSPA. By the end of 1979, he had now been the Denmark Street Branch Secretary for over a year and, in meetings, Nilsen felt energised by the socialist idealists.
On 12 August 1979, after disposing of Holmes’ body, Nilsen felt back in control. He started going back to the West End bars, getting drunk and talking to strangers. One Saturday in October, he met Andrew Ho, a young Chinese student. They met outside an arcade in Leicester Square near where Nilsen first met Hunter-Craig. After a couple of drinks in a pub, they returned to Melrose Avenue. They drank some more and then the young man initiated a conversation about bondage.
Nilsen claims Ho soon made it clear he wanted money, but that he wasn’t interested in paying for sex. Another idea began to form in his mind; he told Ho to sit still while he bound his feet together. With his feet immobile, Nilsen went to his cupboard and produced a tie. Ho started to scream, and struggle. He broke loose, picked up his clothes and ran out of the house. Later, he called the police.
When they arrived at Nilsen’s flat, he knew how to convince them that this had just been part and parcel of a lively homosexual encounter. In his memoirs, though, the confession is very casual: ‘He was quite right – I did try to strangle him – but I was too sober to give it unbounded immoral force and he escaped the effort. Naturally, he didn’t wa
nt to make a written statement or attend court.’
Despite the matter-of-fact way he talks about it, Nilsen claims to have been very concerned by the incident. Still, the shock wasn’t enough to go make him abstain from alcohol again.
Much more alarming to him, though, seems to have been what happened just before Christmas – the murder of a young, bright, middle-class, apparently heterosexual tourist, with whom Nilsen had spent a friendly afternoon.
The killing of Kenneth Ockendon was an anomaly within Nilsen’s overall pattern of victims. Other than the fact he would not have been immediately missed, everything else about the murder was an apparent departure from the normal modus operandi. Not only was Ockendon close to his family but, during the afternoon they had spent together, he made Nilsen feel good about himself by being interested in him. Whether it was this or, simply, because he feels it is expected of him, Nilsen makes more of a show of being upset by this murder than any other.
Kenneth Ockendon was a young Canadian on holiday. His parents, Ken senior, and wife Audrey, however, originally came from Croydon. Kenneth junior was born in February 1956, and was 14 when the family emigrated to the Toronto suburb Burlington in Canada. Ockendon’s father soon found a job as a janitor; his son trained to be a welder.
