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

by Russ Coffey

  ‘Vagrant’ (20s). Met Nilsen late autumn 1980, at closing time at the top of Charing Cross Road. He was emaciated, with a pale complexion, and had many teeth missing. He wore a trench coat and outsize trousers. They took a taxi back to Melrose, where Nilsen strangled him in his sleep with a tie. He told police: ‘I felt exhilarated on some kind of high. I put a tie around his neck and pulled it tight. His legs were like he was riding a bicycle. It was as easy as taking candy from a baby. I thought I was doing him a favour. I had the impression his life had been one of long suffering.’

  ‘Starving Hippy’ (late 20s). 5ft 11in. Met Nilsen October or November 1980 in the West End around closing time. He wore bleached jeans and was strangled with a rope. Interestingly, Nilsen later wrote the following to Brian Masters: ‘Long-haired hippy, why did I bring you back? I tremble at your death and permanent presence. I brush the hair from your eyes. I try to shake you alive. I want to say that I’m sorry and see you walk away. I try to inflate your lungs, hopelessly, but nothing of you is working at all.’ Now denied.

  ‘18-year-old, blue-eyed Scot’ (18). Met Nilsen January 1981 in the Golden Lion in Soho. He wore a green tracksuit top and trainers. Nilsen told police he’d challenged him to an end-of-night drinking contest. He commented, ‘End of night … end of drinking … end of person.’

  ‘Belfast boy’ (early 20s). 5ft 9in. Met Nilsen February 1981 somewhere in the West End. He was slim.

  ‘Skinhead’ (about 20). 5ft 5in. Met Nilsen April or May 1981 at a street food stall in Leicester Square. He was muscular, with tattoos on his arm and ‘Cut Here’ beside dotted lines on his neck. He wore a black leather jacket, a studded belt, boots and a T-shirt. Nilsen told police he hung his torso up for 24 hours. Now denied.

  Malcolm Barlow (23). 5ft 7in. Met Nilsen 18 December 1981.

  Malcolm Barlow was the last victim to die in Melrose Avenue. Like Sinclair, his troubled life epitomised the tragedy of many of the victims. Barlow was the kind of vulnerable youth whose problems caused him to slip through every net. He was born in 1957 in Rotherham near Sheffield, and from an early age he suffered from epilepsy. He was 11 when his mother died; afterwards, he was looked after by his sister Doreen. She soon found him unmanageable. He would lie, steal and, occasionally, sleep with men and then try to blackmail them. When he became too much for his sister to cope with, he started to move from squat to hostel, funding himself through benefits.

  On Thursday, 17 September 1981, when Nilsen left the house on his way to work, he found Barlow slumped against a garden wall a few houses down from his own. He asked him what was up. Barlow said his epilepsy pills had made him feel faint. ‘You should have someone professional look at you,’ said Nilsen. He insisted Barlow come back to 195 Melrose to sit down. After some time, Barlow still looked ill, so Nilsen walked down the road to the phone box – his own phone was disconnected – and called an ambulance.

  The following evening, when Nilsen returned from work, Barlow was sitting on his doorstep. Barlow said he’d been discharged and had nowhere to go. Nilsen thought this was a nuisance but still invited him in. He cooked some food, and plonked himself in front of the TV with a Bacardi and Coke. Barlow asked if he could have one, too. Nilsen says he questioned whether he should really be drinking whilst taking pills, but Barlow, apparently, insisted.

  After a couple of drinks, Barlow fell unconscious. Nilsen was both annoyed to think he might have to go out to the phone box and get another ambulance, and concerned that the police might become involved. He thought about his options for about 20 minutes, and then killed him. He doesn’t remember it well nor talks about it in his manuscript.

  The murder of Barlow provided Nilsen with the last body to dispose of at Melrose Avenue. This was September 1981. Ever since the summer of 1980, Nilsen had been getting rid of the evidence in a series of unthinkably gruesome ceremonies. Three rotting bodies under the floorboards had been causing flies to buzz all around the house. Even with deodorants under the boards and insecticide sprayed twice a day, it was like a scene from a horror film.

  Initially, Nilsen was content to simply get the bodies out of the house. He wanted to re-inter them in the garden shed he had built for Bleep. To do this, he decided he should cut them up and then transport them piece by piece in old suitcases left by a previous tenant. It was a warm summer Sunday afternoon when he started. He placed the bodies on the small stone floor between the cooker and the fridge. The sight in front of him was so disgusting he wasn’t clear what needed to be done next. The smell was atrocious; some heads had maggots crawling out of eye sockets and mouths. He says he began quickly to knock back some Bacardi and Coke. He is keen for the world to appreciate how unpleasant he found the act of dismemberment.

  In truth, however, despite what he says, the drinking didn’t quite come first. Before he could start, he needed to masturbate next to the victims. We know this from interviews with psychiatrists before his trial. He told them that masturbating was his way of saying ‘goodbye’. After the symbolic gesture, he then poured his drink, put Bleep outside, and fetched his sharpest kitchen knives and some bin liners.

  He then stripped off. Naked and drunk, with plastic sheets all over the floor, he hacked away at the corpses using the techniques he had learnt as a chef. He pulled flesh off the bones, snapped joints and severed spines. Even with a butcher’s training, this was a difficult, physical process. Every so often, he says, he would be sick in the sink. Occasionally, he would cut himself. The French windows in the living room provided a draught of fresh air but he didn’t walk out to them to avoid treading any human remains around the living room.

  Heads were put in the large cooking pot (the same that had been used at the Christmas party) and, when the job was done, the foul-smelling viscera were put in plastic bags in a space between the double fencing for what he would later call the ‘wee beasties of the night’. Soon, they rotted away to nothing. The suitcases were put in the shed with a number of deodorants. Eventually, a low wall was built around it, and more bricks and debris piled on the cases.

  Between August and November 1980, Nilsen killed three more men. With the other bodies now in the shed, he had room to place these under the floorboards. He did so in a very chaotic manner. In fact, apparently, on one occasion he forgot about a body in a cupboard and was only reminded when he opened the door.

  In December, Nilsen decided to draw a line under his activities by lighting another massive bonfire. On a freezing Saturday, he set about building a 5ft-high pyre. Between the end of Nilsen’s garden and the next street was a small patch of waste ground. He found some discarded furniture there and carried it over. Nilsen broke up the furniture and wood and then arranged the pieces into a 2ft-deep base. Then he made another 3ft ring out of other timber he’d collected. When he was sure that the bodies would fit in the middle, he went out to the pub.

  The next morning, he got up at 6.30am. He went outside to check there was no one around. As the garden was not particularly private, Nilsen had to rely on the neighbours keeping themselves to themselves. He prised the floorboards up and the bodies wrapped in carpets were taken outside. It took all his strength to lift them. Even though it was freezing cold, he was sweating. Next, he pulled the door off the shed and shone his torch in there. The cold had caused most of the flies to die; their bodies lay like a carpet on the cases. Elsewhere, there was a sticky fluid. The cases at the top were intact but those below had started to disintegrate.

  By dawn, the bodies were within the makeshift wooden pyre which was now covered with tyres, and doused with paraffin. He lit it and then spent the day watching it burn. Throughout the day, he had the French windows open and played Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. From time to time, he would go out to inspect the bonfire. In a letter to Brian Masters, he said it was like a Viking ship going to Valhalla. He told the police: ‘The fire burned extraordinarily fiercely. There were spurts, bangs, crackles and hisses. This I took to be the fat in the bodies burning.’ Nilsen also says that child
ren prodded the fire, but although there was a playground nearby, it’s unlikely they could have got that close.

  By burning all evidence, Nilsen claims to have felt able to start over. If there was no evidence, how could he even be sure that it had really happened? There was nothing but ash. In truth, however, he hadn’t really eradicated all the signs. The other reminders – such as medallions, bracelets, watches and tobacco tins – just didn’t bother him as much. He would happily wear or give away items from the dead, whom he considered, before their bodies were destroyed at least, to be ‘part of the household’. Some items were found by police in 23 Cranley Gardens.

  After the fire, Nilsen brought back a ‘pick-up’ from a pub in St Martin’s Lane. They had some sexual contact, and later he left. This encounter made him feel he was capable of normal, spontaneous activity. Such moments may even have been partly what he had in mind when he told me in a letter: ‘[Masters] writes me as cold and seemingly indifferent as his own prose style. I had, in my life, days of sun, colour and laughter, but you will search long and hard without spotting them in a tome constructed to describe my monstrosity and never the humanity along the road of events.’

  There were no other ‘rays of sunlight’ in 1981. Between January and April of that year, he killed an Irishman, a Scotsman and, probably, an English skinhead. And yet, even with this prolific murder rate, he only occasionally missed work. He had an extraordinarily hardy constitution. Hunter-Craig told me that around this period Nilsen would happily drink all night, and then get up to go to work without trouble.

  When he reached the office, he simply got on with the task in hand. But now he did so increasingly begrudgingly. He was unhappy about an ongoing problem he had with the promotion panel. Nilsen had, around this time, been told in a letter from the panel that he was not eligible to work for the Overseas Workers Section at Denmark Street because his manner with colleagues was ‘usually outspoken and often overbearing’. His superiors were concerned this might also manifest itself with the public.

  He felt the letter constituted a smear on his name. But it was more a sign that the disturbance just beneath the surface was beginning to show. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1981 that his emotional problems really started to take over. The drinking became increasingly reckless and, during stupors, he would invite opportunist thieves back. He says he was also ‘gay-bashed’ which, undoubtedly, would have further soured him against the world. This culminated one night in Nilsen walking back from the Cricklewood Arms and then being mugged. His best jacket, shoes and wallet were taken. The wallet contained £300, a month’s wages to Nilsen. In other incidents, Nilsen lost his beloved movie camera and projector.

  Finally, the stress came to a head and the civil servant collapsed at the end of Melrose Avenue. He thought he may be having a heart-attack and staggered to a phone box and called an ambulance which took him to Park Royal Hospital. He was kept under observation for a day. The doctors told him, however, that that there was nothing physically wrong with him. He was simply suffering from extreme stress and exhaustion.

  In the end, however, it was simple disagreement with the landlord that caused Nilsen to leave Melrose Avenue. The landlord was fed up with the electricity meters being constantly forced – the acts of Nilsen’s ‘guests’ – with no explanations given. The rent was often late, and there were complaints about the awful smells coming from his flat. Nilsen had already had an inkling that there was a plan to evict him. On two occasions, he says he came back to find foreign-looking men outside, who said they had instructions from the landlord to inspect the flat. Nilsen took this as intimidation, and said so in a letter to Leon Roberts of Ellis and Co.

  One day in June, Nilsen returned from work to find that the entire flat had been vandalised. Almost everything he owned, including his music collection and his record player, was either smashed or covered in creosote. The same thing had happened in the flat upstairs. Bizarrely, Nilsen called in the police. The culprit was never found. Now left with only the suit he wore and with no one else to complain to, Nilsen told his colleagues about what had happened. They had had a whip round and, two weeks later, presented him with a cheque for £85. Nilsen was overwhelmed. He wrote a letter saying how a cynic such as he ‘seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing’. The letter ended with a quote: ‘Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we all unfold easily and well.’

  In August, the heat had brought the smell and the flies back. Nilsen knew he needed to act soon – he decided on another bonfire. As before, he dismembered the bodies first. The process was even more revolting than before. There were more maggots and more effluent. The bags of viscera were put into the same gaps in the fence. He boiled the flesh off the skulls in the pot he’d used before. This time, he couldn’t use the shed as a storage facility as he’d burnt the door hoping he’d never have to use it again. Instead, he packed the other body parts with soil and deodorants and placed them back under the floorboards, waiting for the right moment.

  It was approximately a month later that Nilsen killed Malcolm Barlow. That created another problem of storage – there was no longer any room under the floorboards. He stuffed the body in a space under the sink. Shortly afterwards, a letter from the landlord’s agent arrived on the doormat saying that they needed to take possession of the flat. They could offer him a place in Cranley Gardens and £1,000 compensation.

  Nilsen started to build his last fire two days before he was due to move. The next day, it burned brightly. In the morning, the removals van arrived. For the second time, he could try to start again as if none of this had ever happened.

  9

  CRANLEY GARDENS

  That awful, never-to-be-forgotten smell of decomposing human flesh was obvious. I looked at Nilsen and said. ‘Your drains were blocked with human remains,’ and with a deadpan face he said, ‘Oh my God, how awful!’

  DCI PETER JAY

  On a misty autumn day, Dennis Nilsen climbed into the cab of a small removals van and, no doubt, with a few overbearing words of advice about the route, travelled the few short miles over to Muswell Hill. ‘Driving away,’ he told Jay and Chambers, ‘was a great relief.’ The destination, Cranley Gardens, mainly comprised respectable family houses. It was situated on a steep slope with grand views at the top. Number 23 was, however, for short-term renters with low horizons. According to the neighbours, from time to time there had even been virtual down-and-outs and squatters on the middle floor.

  This would be Nilsen’s home for 16 months. During that time, Nilsen murdered three young men, and attempted to kill at least five others. When he arrived on 5 October 1981, though, he appears to have hoped that a change of scenery could cure him of his ‘addiction’ to murder. It was not blind optimism. He was now living somewhere where the disposal of bodies would prove very difficult. Not only was there a shared garden, but even to get a body that far involved two flights of stairs. And, as Nilsen had never learnt to drive, there was no means of easily transporting the remains of victims away from the area.

  The other tenants living in Number 23 found Nilsen eccentric but not out of keeping with the sort of people you might expect for that house. The occasional guests that Nilsen would receive, such as Hunter-Craig, noticed the new flat seemed a bit more Spartan than the last. But they also knew about the robbery at Melrose Avenue and that he was still replacing his possessions. And at least this new flat was bigger with a much better kitchen.

  As with Melrose Avenue, the flat comprised two main rooms – a bedroom and a living room. Off these were a galley kitchen and a bathroom. Both were built into the eaves and had prominent, sloping ceilings. Initially, Nilsen decided to live in the bedroom and sleep in the front. Later, he would do most of his living and sleeping in the back room. He soon replaced the stereo that had been stolen with a cassette player and bought a black-and-white TV. Along with his record collection, some posters (oddly including a page-three pin-up) and a couple of house plants, it soon became s
omewhere not entirely out of keeping with how one might expect a bachelor on a limited income to live.

  The new flat was also in a much more genteel part of town than Cricklewood. If the weather was nice, it was just a 10-minute walk down to the Tube in Highgate. On cold winter days, or if Nilsen had had too much to drink, there was also a bus that could take him up the steep hill home. Without the depressing memories and smells of Melrose, he started to become more comfortable again about encouraging guests. Hunter-Craig remembers him saying, ‘I like having you around Skip; it stops me doing naughty things.’

  During the first few months at Cranley Gardens, Nilsen talks about experiencing varying levels of control over his urges. Without any actual killings, he still felt he was essentially winning the battle. But there were some near-misses.

  In November, in Soho’s Golden Lion, Nilsen approached an earnest young man called Paul Nobbs. He was a London University undergraduate reading Slavic studies, with thick, curly hair. At about 6.00pm, Nilsen had noticed Nobbs being aggressively chatted up at the bar, and intervened. Nobbs thought it a gracious thing to do. After a couple of drinks, they went back to Cranley Gardens to drink Bacardi, eat snacks and watch Panorama.

  After watching the Nine O’Clock News, Nobbs phoned his mum from the payphone in the hall and said he’d be back later. An hour later, the Bacardi had started to take effect. Nobbs phoned again and said he’d now be back the next day. The pair went to bed. Nobbs says he tried to initiate sex, but Nilsen said he didn’t ‘do’ penetration.

  In the middle of the night, Nobbs awoke with a terrible pain in his neck and throat. In the bathroom, he saw his eyes were severely bloodshot. Nobbs was shocked and disorientated, but still had no idea he’d been attacked.