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

by Russ Coffey

  Simpson was fed up and went to sleep. At about 1.00am, he found the room filling with smoke. He ran out into the kitchen. Nilsen was nonchalantly drinking a glass of water. Back in the living room was a smouldering pair of jeans on the fire. Nilsen told Simpson he must have dropped a cigarette on it.

  Nilsen’s manuscript describes Simpson as the man he ‘lusted over’. He goes over the thought processes by which he decided to try and asphyxiate him with the burning jeans: ‘I thought of bashing him over the head with a blunt object but could not do it,’ he says. ‘I thought about stabbing him with a kitchen knife but couldn’t do that either.’ Nilsen then contemplated tying his legs together and then strangling him. But whether from cowardice or some other restraining impulse, he couldn’t bring himself to attack Simpson physically. That was when he came up with the idea of the fire. Simpson stayed for another day and, when he left, Nilsen said he must come again.

  Once Simpson had departed, Nilsen continued to drink heavily. It was now almost four years since the first murder. On New Year’s Eve 1982, he started on the rum at lunchtime in a pub down the road. When the pub closed for the afternoon, he came home and by 8.00pm he was so drunk that he decided to invite Vivienne and Monique from downstairs to join him. Nilsen banged on their door, and slurred the invitation. The two girls politely but firmly declined.

  Nilsen left, looking angry. He went upstairs and then out. Shortly after midnight, he returned. Ten minutes later, there was a commotion on the stairs. Downstairs, the front door slammed. It was a young Japanese chef called Toshimitsu Ozawa. Nilsen thinks he met him at the Green Man pub down the road just before last orders. Ozawa told police later that night that, once in the flat, Nilsen had calmly approached him with his arms outstretched and a tie in between them. Nilsen’s most vivid memory was of being kicked hard in the groin. In the end, no more was made of the incident.

  It was another example of how recklessly out of control Nilsen was now becoming. In his manuscript, Nilsen lists several occasions when he came within a whisker of being arrested. The closest he had come to being discovered had actually been a year-and-a-half before, at Melrose Avenue, just after the last ‘mass dissection’. Because of the ‘revolting nature’ of the task, Nilsen says he’d got ‘practically legless’ on Bacardi. He then went for a drunken walk to find somewhere to put the body parts:

  I put as much of the viscera as could fit in a space between a board and the fence near the end of the garden. The other main fleshy parts of the bodies I wrapped into smaller packages and put back under the floorboards. The stench of decaying flesh was still, even while pissed out of my mind, bad enough to cause me to throw up periodically. When recalling what I had had to go through, the reader will think it odd that I can’t stand the sight of human blood (which might explain why I could not use a knife on anyone).

  In this muddled haze of booze, I took it into my mind to take Bleep up to Gladstone Park for her daily romp. There I was with the mutt on a lead tottering over to the park with a plastic carrier bag with all the surplus entrails stinking to high heavens. I left the bag, in broad daylight, by the side of a road adjacent to the park.

  The bag was found by a biology student called Robert Wilson, who called the police. The remains were seen to be in an advanced state of decay and, then, there was no easy way to determine what exactly they had been. Nilsen still, however, wants to have a dig at the police. ‘Had it been subjected to a closer examination by a qualified pathologist,’ he says, ‘then the alarm bells would have rang loud and clear to a death probably caused by foul play. My bloody fingerprints were all over the carrier bag and these could have been matched with mine on file in a relatively short time. This omission prolonged my arrest by eighteen months and four deaths later.’

  When Nilsen met Stephen Sinclair on Wednesday, 26 January, he says his ‘addiction’ to murder was all-consuming. Although he doesn’t admit he targeted Sinclair, he cannot deny there was planning involved. A ligature made out of a tie and a piece of string was found in his flat. Nilsen says such preparation was just like an alcoholic planning his next drink. He felt powerless to resist.

  After the arrest, Nilsen had said, ‘I sometimes feel my sole reason for existence was the killing.’ Now, he says, the ‘fantasy ritual’ was ‘everything’ to him. Even after killing Sinclair, he was finding new permutations on the same theme. He would place him on the bed and watch him slowly fall on to cushions.

  A fortnight after Nilsen had been playing with the body of the young man whose life he had just taken, DCI Peter Jay, Inspector Steve McCusker and DC Jeff Butler were waiting out in the cold for him to return from work. The Duty Officer had said something ‘odd’ had been discovered in a drain. When he got there, Jay says, two things particularly concerned him – the discovery of what looked like pieces of human hand, and that the blockage seemed to go up the soil pipe to Nilsen’s toilet.

  Jay called in the Scenes of Crime Officer. He packaged up the findings and had them sent over to Professor David Bowen, a Home Office pathologist at Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith. At 2.00pm, Jay drove across town to Charing Cross. Bowen had not only established these were human body parts, but had also found a piece of neck bone with clear ligature marks on it. The victim had been strangled with great force. They drove back to the flat to await Nilsen. Jay told me:

  When he finally walked through that door, I walked up to this smartly-dressed man in his thirties, noted his grey suit, metal-rimmed spectacles and scarf round his neck and said, ‘Hello, I’m Detective Chief Inspector Jay from Hornsey CID. I’ve come about your drains.’

  I was almost pleased to see a wry smile appear on his face and he said, ‘Since when have police been interested in blocked drains?’

  I told him I would tell him more once we got into his flat and he led the way. Glancing back at me once simply to ask about the identity of my two colleagues. ‘Health Inspectors?’ asked Nilsen.

  ‘No … detectives,’ I replied. [Then Nilsen opened the door.]

  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!’

  That was his only expression of innocence because when I then said, ‘Don’t mess me about. Where’s the rest of the body?’ he immediately said, ‘In plastic bags in the other room.’

  That was it as far as I was concerned. I left Jeff Butler at the other door of Nilsen’s flat and I drove the CID car back to Hornsey with Nilsen and Steve McCusker sitting in the bock. Steve suddenly popped a question to Nilsen out of the blue: ‘Are we talking one body here, or two?’ he asked.

  ‘Neither,’ said Nilsen. ‘It’s 16!’ Nilsen then offered to tell us all about it back at the station.

  Looking back at that bizarre encounter, both Steve McCusker and I would say that for some odd reason we automatically accepted that he was being truthful, incredible though it was. There was an honesty about the way he spoke to us.

  Nilsen carried on talking in a calm, matter-of-fact, way. He seemed totally without remorse. He told the officers that if he hadn’t been caught, he might have killed hundreds. He said that when the trigger in him was pulled, a bomb blast couldn’t have stopped him. Peter Jay never thought he particularly look like he cared.

  The police processed Nilsen as politely and efficiently as possible. A doctor and a photographer were ordered so that there could be no suggestion of ill treatment. Then the prisoner was brought a warm meal and a hot drink. Only then, with Professor Bowen in tow, did they return to Cranley Gardens.

  It was now 9.00pm. The smell seemed worse than they’d remembered – a sweet, rotten stench made sharper by the cold. Two large, black bin bags were found in the wardrobe, and in one were four smaller bags. Peeking into them, they could see two contained left and right sections of a man’s torso, with the arm still attached. In the third bag was a much decomposed headless and arm
less torso. Finally, there was a Sainsbury’s bag containing internal organs in a soup of body fluids. While it was all being bagged up, Jay stood by the door for air.

  Back at the mortuary, the second large, black bag was seen to contain a man’s head, boiled but with most of the hair and flesh still remaining. Another skull was found with most of the flesh removed, and another torso. Inside a tea chest, a curtain was wrapped around more bones, hands, feet and another skull. Behind plywood boxing in the bathroom was the lower half of Stephen Sinclair, clean cut from just above the waist and still intact.

  Jay remembers the flat being extremely damp. Sleet was coming in the open windows, and electric fires were brought in to dry the place out. The damp made it impossible to dust for fingerprints for several days. Meanwhile, a crew was sent to Melrose Avenue. The floorboards were taken up and a tent erected in the garden. Soon, they found smashed skulls and pieces of bone. All that Forensics could determine at that stage, though, was whether the fragments were human or animal.

  The police wanted as much information as they could get before making their initial charge: that of Sinclair’s murder. After that, they could interview Nilsen at their leisure about the other murders. Although Nilsen says he remembers the police doing their job well enough, the more one reads his account, however, the stranger it seems. He says that, from the outset, he knew the police would ‘require him to write their script’. This odd sentence seems not to be just a reference to the confessions he would give but also to how the story of the arrest would be told – that he would need to help create a story that would be told for posterity.

  Nilsen also seems concerned to assert his superiority and let us know he wouldn’t have made any mistakes. He finishes this section with an allegation that, before he was sent to Brixton, some junior officers asked for his autograph. He says he obliged, along with one of his ‘one-liners’, such as ‘I don’t have nightmares … I give nightmares’.

  The police visited Nilsen in Brixton twice for further interviews. In total, they interviewed him 16 times for a total of over 31 hours, with 165 pages of questions and answers recorded in longhand. A word processor – the latest thing at the time – had been asked for and refused; complete sets of notes would have to be written out by hand. Each interview was between two and two-and-a-half hours and all but the first couple conducted in the presence of Ronald Moss, Nilsen’s first solicitor.

  From the evidence gathered in these interviews, the team set about finding the victims. Without advanced forensics, CCTV and sophisticated computer databases, the police had to rely on personal items, fingerprints and dental records. Ironically, without DNA technology, the skeletal remains of Howlett and Allen found in the flat proved two of the hardest bodies to identify.

  As in television dramas, the operations room was full of pin boards with photos and blackboards with leads scrawled over them. On one poster-sized piece of paper the investigating officers tried to fill in as many details about the victims as possible. The top row read: name; last known address; description; date missing; date of death; last seen by; how identified; exhibit numbers; statement numbers; and remarks.

  Kenneth Ockendon was identified by a composite fingerprint created by the partial prints found on his A-Z London streetguide, and a camera light meter found in his hotel. Nilsen also recognised him from a photo. Sinclair was formally identified by fingerprints found on his leather jacket, his syringes, a tobacco tin and by his blue-and-white scarf. Billy Sutherland was identified by a photograph after his family had contacted police after seeing the news. Some of the personal items found in Nilsen’s flat belonging to Martyn Duffey, such as kitchen knives, bore his name. The existence of missing boy called Martyn Duffey was soon established, but he turned out to be a different height from the one they were looking for and the search resumed.

  The legwork involved in finding some victims seemed almost endless. In the case of John Howlett, the police first looked for all ‘Johns’ who had been in the Grenadier Guards, and then, when they realised that he might not have been in the Army, every John they could find in High Wycombe. Eventually, they narrowed their search down by finding his blood type in a strip of muscle tissue.

  By the time of the trial, only seven names were filled out on the chart. The others were simply referred to by Nilsen’s descriptions, such as ‘the starving hippy’ or ‘the skinhead with the tattoo around his neck’.

  10

  THE TRIAL

  At 4.25 pm on Friday, 4 November 1983, the state through the agency of the judicial system made its pronouncement on me. The anonymous jury, having gained its thrills and shocks from this theatre of the absurd, had finally, by a majority of 10-2, agreed with the prosecution’s and judge’s view of me and my past actions. The media would take up the clarion call of me as ‘evil beyond belief’. The flashbulbs flashed and the wolves howled and in the universal public consciousness I joined the ranks of the damned alongside Crippen, Haigh, Brady, Hindley and Sutcliffe.

  DENNIS NILSEN, IN HISTORY OF A DROWNING BOY

  The trial of Dennis Andrew Nilsen started on the morning of Monday, 24 October 1983 at London’s Central Criminal Court, otherwise known as the Old Bailey. It is an austere stone building topped with a statue of Justice with her scales and sword. As the court opened for its day’s business, the clerk of the court read out eight charges against the 37-year-old defendant. These were the murder of Kenneth Ockendon, Malcolm Barlow, Martyn Duffey, John Howlett, Billy Sutherland and Stephen Sinclair, and the attempted murder of Douglas Stewart and Paul Nobbs.

  Two charges were conspicuously absent – the crimes against Graham Allen and Carl Stottor. In 1983, the media reported that the details about these offences had come in after the court indictment papers had already been drawn up and evidence gathered. The judge had, therefore, ruled that it wasn’t possible to include them. But both Stottor and Allen’s wife, Lesley, remain incredulous that there wasn’t still time to make some provision. They feel strongly that justice was denied them. Still, the attacks were included as general evidence of Nilsen’s modus operandi and Stottor would have the opportunity to tell his story from the witness box.

  The courtroom was packed to overflowing. When the press benches filled up, journalists moved to the public gallery. At the front sat Mr and Mrs Ockendon; just beneath them stood the man who had butchered their son. He was dressed neatly in a grey sports jacket, light-blue shirt, and blue tie, which he had been loaned. Each time he was asked how he pleaded, he responded, ‘Not guilty’.

  Nilsen had eventually decided on this plea after reading through psychiatric reports arranged by his solicitor at the time, Ralph Haeems. He told me that, after his initial scepticism, he became persuaded that his earlier ideas of pleading guilty were naïve. ‘There was a real diminishment of total responsibility,’ he wrote, due to the ‘personality dysfunction mechanisms to which I had slowly evolved from the bleakness of an emotionless child and early manhood.’

  To support their plea of ‘diminished responsibility’, the defence produced two psychiatrists: James Mackeith and Patrick Gallwey. Mackeith had a reputation for being a reasonable and balanced man; he thought Nilsen suffered ‘severely’ from a number of personality disorders. He was also convinced they were, probably, untreatable, and that his grandiosity and inflated ego would render future psychological therapy futile. Gallwey agreed that Nilsen had a personality disorder, but he thought it was slightly different. He diagnosed Nilsen with a rare type of ‘borderline’ disorder which meant Nilsen’s mind moved between a seemingly normal position and a heavily ‘schizoid’ state, bordering on psychosis.

  The prosecution said it was murder, pure and simple. Their psychiatrist, Paul Bowden, had met Nilsen in his first week in Brixton, and visited him regularly over the subsequent months. During that time, he concluded Nilsen was a plausible, cunning murderer who had been in full control of himself at the time of all the offences.

  The prosecution case was led by Alan Green, QC. In Histor
y of a Drowning Boy, Nilsen is pleased to point out that Green would later become the Director of Public Prosecutions and then resign when accused of kerb-crawling in 1991. Green opened his case by outlining the day of Nilsen’s arrest and showing the jury photographs of the scene at the flat. He then explained more about the case they were about to hear. There would be six witnesses; the first three, he said – Stewart, Nobbs and Stottor – had all had first-hand experience of Nilsen trying to kill them. Next, there would be detectives Jay and Chambers, who had arrested and interviewed Nilsen. Finally, he said, they would hear from psychiatrist Dr Paul Bowden.

  Green, wearing outsized, horn-rimmed glasses, spoke in a softly authoritative, theatrically understated manner. He began to outline Nilsen’s modus operandi. He explained how he had killed men he met in public houses. They would go back to Nilsen’s flat for more drink and then, at some point, Nilsen would squeeze the life out of them. He explained most of the victims were homosexual – some, in fact, male prostitutes – yet none had been killed because they were homosexual or had resisted Nilsen’s advances. They were, he said, nearly all from the fringes of society and from outside of London; the kind of people whom Nilsen might feel would probably not be missed.

  The murders were described one by one. The violence of the killings and indifference of the disposal were both emphasised. Particular attention was given to Malcolm Barlow – killed, apparently, because Nilsen didn’t want to call an ambulance – and John the Guardsman who was strangled three times and then drowned. Green also made sure the jury knew about Nilsen’s extraordinarily casual manner with the police.