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

by Russ Coffey

  The following day, the papers delighted in reporting some of Nilsen’s idiosyncratic quips, such as ‘I started out with 15 ties and now all I’m left with is a clip-on …’ or his reply to Jay’s question of how many bodies he’d had under the floorboards: ‘I don’t know, I didn’t do a stock check.’

  Nilsen’s History of a Drowning Boy doesn’t say more about the events of the trial than can be found in the press cuttings. It does tell us, however, a significant amount about Nilsen’s attitude to confronting justice. One sketch he draws is full of disgust at the offensive intrusion into those aspects of his life that he had kept most private: ‘The courtroom twitched nervously,’ he says, ‘to the sweaty gasps of guilt-ridden voyeurs hating and loving the dirt-filled revelations.’ He then speculates how much more startled they might have been by the sight of 12 naked men appearing in front of them, as if he felt he’d actually experienced such a vision during the proceedings. Later, he mocks the way journalists jumped on a ‘throwaway psychological cliché’ he gave about assuming ‘a quasi-God role’. He feels he was the only one who really understood what the trial was all about.

  He was also highly irritated by the testimony of the first witness, Douglas Stewart, the man whom Gordon Honeycombe had met in Soho. Stewart, a 29-year-old Scotsman with thick, curly hair, took the stand looking tall and confident. In his version of events, Stewart said he had met Nilsen one November in 1980, in the Golden Lion in Soho. He had gone there, he said, not because of its gay reputation but rather because it served his favourite Scottish beer.

  On the night in question, he had been one of a group chatting at the end of the bar. When Nilsen had suggested that they go back to his flat, he’d thought the invite was for the whole group, and once in the street he thought it rude not to continue on to Melrose Avenue.

  Back in Nilsen’s flat, they started by drinking lager. ‘Dennis’, Stewart told the court, then offered him vodka which he refused. ‘Suit yourself,’ Nilsen replied, ‘I am off to bed; you’re welcome to join me.’ Stewart explained he ‘didn’t do that sort of thing’. He then went to sleep in a chair. Approximately two hours later, he woke to find his feet tied to the legs with a neck tie. There was another around his neck and Nilsen’s knee was pushed hard against his chest. Stewart said he started shouting and fighting. Nilsen shouted back, ‘Take my money,’ as if trying to suggest that there was a robbery was going on.

  Nilsen then calmly told Stewart he could kill him, even though by now Stewart was in charge. After the struggle, things calmed down. They sat in silence. Then Nilsen went to the kitchen and came back with a large knife which he held calmly, unthreateningly. Eventually, the conversation started up again, the two men shared a drink together and Stewart left. Once at a safe distance down the road, Stewart called the police. They sent a squad car over. After speaking to both parties, they concluded that it had been a lovers’ tiff, made some notes, apologised to Nilsen, and then left. All the time Stewart spoke, Nilsen made notes of all the little inaccuracies in his account. Pedantically, he noted he referred to ‘Dennis’ and not ‘Des’, and mentioned vodka, not rum.

  The next day, Tuesday, 5 October, the jury heard from two young men Nilsen had attacked. The first was Paul Nobbs, who had met Nilsen almost exactly a year after Stewart, again in the Golden Lion in Soho. Nobbs described how grateful he was when Nilsen stepped in and saved him from the attention of a predatory older man. He explained how, during the evening, he had called his mother twice. Having decided to stay, there was more drinking, kissing and fondling but Nilsen had declined the offer of sex.

  Nobbs then described waking up after the attack. After looking at himself in the mirror, he had gone back to the bedroom. Nilsen had remarked he looked awful. ‘Oh, thanks very much,’ said Nobbs sarcastically.

  When Ivan Lawrence, cross-examining, asked whether there’d been anything strange about Nilsen’s manner during the evening, Nobbs replied that nothing in particular had worried him. The jury were left wondering if Nilsen was so out of control he could risk an attack on a man whose mother knew he was there, or whether, in fact, he was so in control that he could turn his violence on and off at will.

  Similar testimony would come from Carl Stottor that afternoon. He told me when I met with him later that he had found the prospect of giving evidence an enormous ordeal. On the morning prior to his appearance in the witness box, he said that he sat in a friend’s living room looking at himself in the mirror. What he saw displeased him. Having just dyed his blond hair black, he now felt he looked pale and washed out. Staring at his reflected image, he decided to apply a small amount of make-up. When he arrived in the court at 2.00pm, in an open-necked shirt with a medallion underneath, he said that he became extremely self-conscious. Suddenly, he felt very nervous. When Alan Green referred to him as ‘slightly pathetic’, he shrank further into himself. It was a hard job getting his evidence out.

  Taking a deep breath, Stottor told the room the facts as he remembered them. When he faltered, Green helped him out: ‘Is it true you told Nilsen that you weren’t in touch with your family?’ … ‘Did it strike you as odd that Nilsen suggested you might get caught up in that loose zip?’

  Stottor told the court how he had met Nilsen in Camden’s Black Cap. Stottor had come down to London to escape from an unhappy relationship. Nilsen had seemed kind and sympathetic. Despite the cut on Stottor’s face, Nilsen told him how lovely he looked. Then, some drinks later, at closing time, he suggested they go back to Cranley Gardens. He wasn’t pushy, and promised not to try anything on. They took a cab back to Nilsen’s flat, where Stottor became more and more depressed.

  When he started to feel ill from the alcohol, they both went to bed. In the middle of the night, he remembered being in a semi-conscious state and unable to breathe. As Nilsen had warned about getting caught up in the loose zip, Stottor thought the hand he felt on his neck was Nilsen trying to help. He heard Nilsen’s voice saying, ‘Stay still.’ Then he passed out again.

  Then he remembered hearing the sound of water, like a tap running. Next, he was underwater. He started to panic before passing out again. Sometime later, he woke up to find Bleep the dog licking his face. Nilsen was now beside the animal and fussing over him. He told Stottor he had got caught in the zip and probably had a nightmare as a result. Nilsen explained the water on his head was from a jug he’d poured over him to bring him to. He comforted him some more. Later, they cuddled in bed and, in the morning, Nilsen helped him to the Tube.

  Stottor could only remember the evening in snapshots, but he had said enough for the prosecution to indicate that Nilsen deliberately and consciously ‘chose’ his victims. Counsel for the defence, however, wanted to know how Nilsen had seemed after the attack. Stottor said he seemed genuinely concerned. Lawrence suggested that this was evidence that Nilsen was moving in and out of abnormal states of mind. To emphasise the point, he told the jury how, when Chambers and Jay had asked about his manner after attacking Stottor, he’d replied, ‘I hoped that these uncontrollable events would not affect our relationship.’

  Now it was time for the court to hear more of what Nilsen himself had to say about his crimes and why he may have committed them. DCI Peter Jay rose to the stand with a statement Nilsen had written for them called ‘Unscrambling Behaviour’:

  I guess that I may be a creature – a creative psychopath – who, when in a loss of rationality situation, lapses into temporarily a destructive psychopath, a condition induced by rapid and heavy ingestion of alcohol. At the subconscious root lies a sense of total isolation and a desperate search for a sexual identity. I have experienced transitionary [sic] sexual relationships with both males and females before my first killing. After this event, I was incapable of any intercourse. I felt repelled by myself and, as stated, I have had no experience of sexual penetration for some years.

  In a society of labels, it is convenient for me to let others believe that I am a homosexual. I enjoy the social company of both men and women, but prefe
r to drink socially with men. I am not in sympathy with the state of women who are the worse for drink.

  Nilsen was keen to downplay his sexual orientation, and made it sound as ambiguous as possible. His statement continued with a self-consciously confused tone:

  God only knows what thoughts go through my mind when it is captive within a destructive mood. Maybe the cunning, stalking killer instinct is the only single concentration released from a mind which, in that state, knows no morality. It may be the perverted overkill of my need to help people – victims who I decide to release quickly from the slings and arrows of their outrageous fortune, pain and suffering.

  There is no disputing the fact that I am a violent killer under certain circumstance … The victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing up is a clinical, ordinary task. It would be better if my reason for killing could be clinically defined – i.e. robbery, jealousy, hate, revenge, sex, blood, lust or sadism.

  But it’s none of these. Or it could be the subcon scious outpouring of all the primitive instincts of primeval man. Could it be the case of individual exaltation of beating the system and the need to beat and confound it time and time again?

  Ruling out ‘sex, blood, lust and sadism’ as if he wished it could be that easy would have sounded to many in the jury as excuses clothed in fake sincerity. As for the idea he might have been acting out of a perverted sense of kindness, it was repulsive. But yet, as a whole, the statement did help to establish a gap between confessor and the crimes. As always, the author wrote like someone surprised by his actions:

  It amazes me that I have no tears for these victims. I have no tears for myself or those bereaved by my actions. Am I a wicked person, constantly under pressure, who just cannot cope with it, who escapes to reap revenge against society through a haze of a bottle of spirits? But maybe it’s because I was just born an evil man.

  Living with so much violence and death, I’ve not been haunted by the souls and ghosts of the dead, leading me to believe that no such fictional phenomena, does or will ever exist. Memories of man’s best friend, i.e. my dog, are already a little faded.

  In the normal course of my life, I feel I had abnormal powers of mental rationality and morality. When under pressure of work and extreme pain of social loneliness and utter misery, I am drawn compulsively to a means of temporary escape from reality. This is achieved by taking increased draughts of alcohol and plugging into stereo music which mentally removes me to a high plane of ecstasy, joy and tears. This is a totally emotional experience.

  This glorious experience and feeling is conjured up in this manner. I relive experiences from childhood to present – taking out the bad bits. When I take alcohol, I see myself drawn along and moved out of my isolated, prison flat. I bring [with me] people who are not always allowed to leave because I want them to share my experiences and high feeling. I still do not know the engine of my performance. The one single piece of music that I get the greatest aural alcoholic high from is ‘Oh Superman’ by Laurie Anderson from the Big Science album. It has a hypnotic, trancelike effect on me. I listened to the eight-minute track ten times one night. I was compelled by it – I could not stop myself.

  In order to enlarge on [my experiences at] Melrose Avenue and Cranley Gardens, I have made several attempts to strangle men. In some cases, the attempts were foiled by the struggle or escape of the subject. In others, I did not have the heart or desire to carry through the task. In all of the latter cases, the subject was already unconscious.

  The final paragraph sounded as if it could almost have been drafted by a solicitor: ‘My remorse is of a deep and personal kind which will eat away inside me for the rest of my life. I am a tragically private person, not given to public tears. The enormity of these acts has left me in permanent shock … The evil was short-lived and it cannot live or breathe for long inside the conscience.’

  The prosecution hoped the jury would find Nilsen’s statements both cowardly and brazen. The defence argued it showed Nilsen really had been overwhelmed by his alter ego. Otherwise, why had he admitted everything? Jay, himself, agreed he had hardly known anyone co-operate so much.

  But admitting everything didn’t necessarily mean Nilsen was sorry or confused. It might also have meant he was simply revelling in what he had done. DCS Geoffrey Chambers read out all of Nilsen’s murder confessions. They included lines already reproduced in this book, such as: ‘On the floor was a piece of string with a tie attached to it … I know I must have killed him … I must have made up the piece of string that night …’ and ‘… I looped the material round his neck again, pulled it as tight as I could and held on for what must have been two or three minutes. When I released my grip, he had stopped breathing.’

  Green then brought out the cooking pot in which three heads had been boiled, the cutting board used to dissect pieces of John the Guardsman, and Martyn Duffey’s knives. One person felt a profound sense of abhorrence more acutely than many others. Lesley Mead, Graham Allen’s partner, had come to the trial to try to understand something of what had happened. She would tell me that watching Nilsen calmly ‘play with an empty Marlboro packet, like a bored court official’ simply confused her more. When she saw the cooking pot her partner’s head had been boiled in, she walked out of the court.

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, 6 October, Ivan Lawrence opened the case for the defence. His objective was not to dispute any of the facts that had been given but to show that Nilsen had been suffering from ‘abnormality of mind’ every time he had killed. This would mean he couldn’t have formed the ‘specific intention of murder’, and therefore couldn’t be held fully responsible. He told the jury that, for them to return such a verdict of manslaughter by diminished responsibility, the law merely required that he may have been suffering from such an abnormality. They simply had to consider him not definitely sane.

  The three psychiatrists at the Old Bailey had a particularly unenviable task. Diagnosing Nilsen was hard enough, but guiding a jury about his state of mind when committing a crime went far beyond their usual remit. Nilsen says, ‘Not to appear fully blank on the subject, they fell back on standard labels of psychiatry: “psychopath”; “explosive”; “schizoid”; “paranoid”; “psychotic”; “sociopathic”; “dissociative”; “borderline personality disorder”; “necrophilia”; “alcoholic”; “grandiosity”; and a partridge in a pear tree …’

  In truth, however, these doctors went to great lengths to express the uniqueness of this case. First in the witness box was Dr James Mackeith of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Normally a cheerful-looking man with thick hair and a wide smile, he appeared initially subdued. He started by explaining who he was, what he did and his experience of the accused. Based on his interviews, he said he was in no doubt that Nilsen suffered from an ‘unspecified’ severe personality disorder. He clarified this by saying that rather than falling outside the spectrum of known disorders, he suffered from many of them.

  The disorders Mackeith referred to came from the International Classification of Diseases. The ICD codifies all illnesses, and in the UK is the standard reference for mental conditions. In 1983, it was on its ninth revision, and in this version ‘psychotic behaviour-types’ caused by schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and drug addiction had been separated from the range of so-called ‘personality disorders’. The types of mental condition had been listed on two ‘axes’. Nilsen certainly wasn’t on axis one, the ‘psychotic’ one. He wasn’t bipolar, nor was he schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are marked by a more severe breakdown of function, such as voices in the head and bizarre delusions. They can’t operate in society the way Nilsen had. And neither did his drinking affect him, for example, in the way that large amounts of LSD might have.

  Many of the traits on axis two, however, sounded just like him. According to the most recent iteration of the ICD, the criteria for a personality disorder are as follows: ‘(1) Markedly disharmonious attitudes and behavior, generally involving several areas of functioning; (2) that
the abnormal behavior pattern is enduring, of long standing, and not limited to episodes of mental illness; (3) that the abnormal behavior pattern is pervasive and clearly maladaptive to a broad range of personal and social situations; (4) that the above manifestations always appear during childhood or adolescence and continue into adulthood; that the disorder leads to considerable personal distress but this may only become apparent late in its course; (5) that the disorder is usually, but not invariably, associated with significant problems in occupational and social performance.’

  Since 1983, courts have arguably become attuned to the varieties of mental condition that might affect a defendant. They might, for instance, be evaluated on scales like the Hare Psychopath checklist (the first items are glibness, superficial charm and callousness), and prospects for treatability are then assessed. There is also more inclination to take the findings of personality disorders seriously and not regard them merely as descriptions of character traits. Psychiatrists are now generally more inclined to attribute more than one category of a personality disorder to a patient.

  James Mackeith had a reputation for being a very competent and up-to-date psychiatrist. After interviewing Nilsen for several hours, he had diagnosed Nilsen’s personality as showing schizoid, explosive, psychopathic and borderline disorders. The last needs more explanation than the others.

  Borderline Personality Disorder is characterised by ‘black-and-white thinking, emotional instability and interpersonal relationships that flit between idealisation and devaluation, poor self-esteem, bouts of impulsivity, anger and dissociation.’ It was initially called ‘borderline’ as psychiatrists thought such people were somewhere between neurotic and psychotic. Now the defining characteristic is seen as instability. Mackeith’s pre-trial report described Nilsen as having unstable moods, impaired impulse control, sudden anger, disturbed identity, sudden need for company when alone, and futility. Interestingly, long before he knew of such psychological concepts, in his essay entitled The Monochrome Man, Nilsen describes himself as a man whose moods were all black and white.