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

by Russ Coffey

  The ECHR decision was the end of the line for Nick Wells, Nilsen’s lawyer for over 12 years. During that time, he had proved himself an innovative legal thinker. Changing the law in favour of a serial killer’s rights, however, eventually proved too much for his abilities. Shortly after hearing the ECHR’s judgment, the lawyer and his client parted company.

  Nilsen and Wells’ journey through the courts had started back in October 2001 with another ‘rights’ case. On this occasion it was Nilsen’s unsuccessful attempt to get access to the gay ‘pin-up’ magazine, Vulcan. Although the bid failed Nilsen thought he had found something useful whilst preparing it – the ability to use ‘legally privileged’ envelopes to communicate with his lawyer. This practice made him wonder if he might also be allowed to use similar envelopes to bring in a copy of his draft manuscript.

  Nilsen asked Wells about this who, in turn, asked the governor. The governor replied that as History of a Drowning Boy was not a legal document, it would still need to be read and approved. Some months later, however, in 2002 Nilsen asked Wells to send the manuscript in anyway.

  When he did so, the book was confiscated and a letter delivered to Nilsen’s cell:

  The Prison Service has now read the manuscript and considered this request. It has decided not to allow the manuscript to be passed to Mr Nilsen … The offences are an integral part of the manuscript. The manuscript does not consist of serious representations about conviction or form part of serious comment about crime, the processes of justice or the penal system. Rather it is a platform for Mr Nilsen to denigrate people he dislikes … The withholding of the manuscript pursues a legitimate aim, namely the protection of morals, the protection of the reputation and rights of others, and the protection of information received in confidence …

  Nilsen was furious. He would later write to me: ‘I understand that many of the prison revelations in the book (including the Central TV thing) will be embarrassing to the HO. I care not about this. I do not play politics, I merely write testimony of a personal life … Although my body is imprisoned, they will not succeed in controlling the positive expressions from my mind.’

  The following year – 2003 – Nilsen’s lawyers decided on another tack. It was now reported in the media that Nilsen was going to take the Prison Service to Judicial Review on the grounds that certain prison rules violated his basic freedom of expression. The idea that a mass killer could take on an agent of the government on the grounds that his rights were being infringed sounded like the sort of thing you couldn’t make up. I had almost forgotten about Nilsen’s book. Now, again, I was intrigued.

  I wondered if it was just attention he was looking for, or whether there was more to this mission to have his book published. But I couldn’t judge what he was up to until I had finally read History of a Drowning Boy. After some deliberation I decided my best chance might simply be to write a letter and ask Nilsen, straight out, how we could make this happen. That is what I did.

  Two days later, I received a reply written on his new electric typewriter and sent from Full Sutton Prison. He appeared happy to hear from me, and said he would soon put me in touch with Jonny Marling, who had a copy. On the strength of what I was going to be given access to – both History of a Drowning Boy and a series of essays, letters, pictures and tapes, the Sunday Times magazine commissioned a 5,000 word feature.

  On a fresh and sunny day in May, I drove out west to see Jonny Marling in the offices of his travel business in Bath, situated at the edge of town. Marling, now in his thirties, seemed friendly and slightly intense. As he brought me a cup of tea, it was hard not to miss the large Nilsen painting by the desk.

  ‘You must think I am very, very odd,’ he said.

  I changed the subject. ‘How did your friendship with Des begin?’ I asked.

  He said he had chanced upon Killing for Company while browsing in a bookshop. The dust jacket revealed that Nilsen used to live in Cricklewood, where Marling, too, had lived. The coincidence intrigued him and he decided to buy it. After reading the book, Marling said he then started to become fixated with wanting to know what had made this ‘apparently ordinary bloke’ do what he did. He first wrote to Masters and then to Nilsen himself. The letters went well and soon they were writing weekly. Marling would visit whenever he could.

  It was all very confusing. The man in front of me seemed intelligent and well balanced with a nice life. It was hard to see what place such a dark hobby might have in it. And it wasn’t just criminological curiosity that had taken root in him: Marling appeared to really want Des’s friendship. More than anything I was mystified why he was so ready to believe Nilsen’s versions of events. Sometimes, he seemed to want to excuse Nilsen even more than Nilsen himself had done. When I asked him why he thought his friend had killed so many people, there was no hesitation – he was convinced it was the booze.

  A couple of hours later, we travelled across town to collect a missing document from his home. Marling’s petite wife opened the door. She welcomed me into their clean, white kitchen. After chatting about their pets and children, the conversation moved on to how she had spent weeks over the past year typing up the manuscript I was being loaned. The killer’s place in this gentle domestic set-up now seemed even more perplexing than before.

  In the following months, Nilsen replied to my letters in a prompt and business-like way. On request he supplied me with a list of reasons why he believed his book should be published and gave the various legal arguments that were going to be used. He told me his lawyers were looking to challenge clause ‘5b’ of the Prison Rules, which prohibited prisoners ‘sending out any material for publication if it is about their own crime or past offences.’ The only exception was when such correspondence consisted of ‘serious representations about conviction or sentence’.

  Nilsen not only believed his was a serious work, but also that his ability to express himself was a human right. He wrote to me saying, ‘A prisoner recognises that he loses his liberty as a result of a just prison sentence, but the law never recognises that he loses his basic “freedom of expression”.’

  But when it came to the Judicial Review it only took two days in October for Judge Maurice Kay to hear the case, and rule that the Human Rights Act had not been infringed and that he could see no other reason for the manuscript to be returned.

  Despite the adverse outcome, Nilsen was pleased what I had written about the episode and the fairness of my approach. Afterwards, we kept up an ad hoc correspondence. Over a period of time, the hard-edged tone of Nilsen’s letters started to soften and I begun to wonder if more than 20 years in prison was actually ‘normalising’ him. The continued complaints about the general state of the world were still there, but the letters were becoming more self-aware. I speculated if this might indicate psychological improvement.

  While writing my magazine piece, I had asked many experts what emotional development they thought would ever be possible. Most felt his emotions and personality would probably remain fairly static. Brian Masters even told me that Nilsen only understood remorse like a ‘mathematical equation’. He said ‘attention-seeking’ was Nilsen’s ‘equivalent of love’ and worried that he sought to ‘intellectually seduce’ others’ minds. But Masters hadn’t seen Nilsen in more than 10 years; how could he really know?

  One person who believes Nilsen has grown emotionally is Matthew Malekos. In his thesis ‘The Birth of Psychopathy: the Psychology of a Serial Killer’, he argues that Nilsen’s creativity in prison indicates the restoration of fully-functioning emotions. He believes the murders provided an impetus for Nilsen to look into himself, and that subsequent emotional development has taken place in prison. His thesis states: ‘The use of criminal actions, perversely, has made Dennis Nilsen far stronger and more optimistic than he was at the point before carrying out his homicidal actions … he has undergone a positive personal transformation while he has been incarcerated … not because of prison, but in spite of it.’

  Malekos’s reaso
ns for believing this theory start conventionally enough, but they invariably end up in very esoteric arguments. His theories encompass spiritual and mystical thinking. In particular, Malekos uses the term ‘self-actualisation’ – a term originally invented by the twentieth-century American humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow – to explain Nilsen’s change. He describes it as a state ‘in which an individual strives to be the best that they can be having resolved their past traumas and “inner demons”’…and says that such people ‘[experience] an overwhelming sense of joy from books, music and the arts’.

  Whatever one makes of Malekos’s theories, the question of whether Nilsen – and those like him – can change remains an important one. Prisons are meant to try to rehabilitate all prisoners. Social and religious reformers alike will tell you that whatever punishment may be required to serve justice, society must never stop caring about the state of prisoners’ souls and minds. Even when rehabilitation serves no practical end – for the whole-life prisoner – a moral society should aspire towards it. This had been uppermost in the mind of Lord Longford throughout his visiting periods with Nilsen.

  What, though, if change might come, not through therapy or religion, but simply through growing older? Medical literature does indicate some people with personality disorders do, indeed, find their condition subsides with time. Could this be what was happening with Nilsen? His increased self-awareness seemed to indicate so and yet a question remained of how we could trust such evidence.

  Short of using lie detectors or PPGs, all we can ever go on is what people say. People like Nilsen are, however, extremely deceptive. And even though I thought I could detect signs of a changing character, every so often I would read something of Nilsen’s that would frighten me. On page 312 of Malekos’s thesis, for instance, Nilsen was quoted as having written in a letter: ‘Yes, I am obsessed with remembering and enjoying the frisson of my sexual rituals … what else is there [to do] but to caress [my] memories in my present social wasteland … I do not fantasise about other prisoners, but about the past.’

  Since 2003, Nilsen has remained in Full Sutton Prison. He gets up at around 7.00am and starts working at 8.30am in the workshop where he translates books into Braille. At lunchtime he eats a sandwich and work finishes at 3.00pm. His wages are about £17 a week, and with this money, he rents a portable television. He no longer has a keyboard or a budgie in his room. Nearly all his spare time is still spent on his typewriter. His autobiographical reflections on prison life now amount to 4,500 pages.

  Nilsen remains on cordial terms with the other inmates on the Vulnerable Prisoner Unit, but feels little in common with them socially or intellectually. He does, however, seem to have reached an equilibrium with his surroundings. This is despite a judge having ruled in 2006, when the Home Office system of whole-life tariffs had been abandoned, that he would never be eligible for parole.

  Letters I have received during the period 2003 to 2012 have continued to be written in an increasingly ‘normal’ manner. His favourite topic eventually moved away from prison conditions to current affairs. The last letter he sent me was about the Jimmy Savile case, which was all over the newspapers after the former TV presenter was accused posthumously of perpetrating a huge number of sex attacks over several decades. Nilsen vividly described him as ‘garishly attired with long blond hair, appendages festooned with chunky gold bangles, chains, shades, and topped off by the omnipresent huge cigar, which, as well as being subliminally phallic, showed Jimmy shaking his huge cock at the world …’

  Nilsen called this Savile’s ‘false persona’ which covered up for his stunted emotional development. In adulthood, he opined that all of Savile’s ‘emotional interactions’ were ‘transacted entirely on his terms and under his control’. Then, one sentence jumped out. Nilsen wrote: ‘As Savile’s MO was established, he grew in confidence. Of course, he never viewed himself as “studiously evil”.’ Not being ‘studiously evil’ was the exact expression Nilsen had used when referring to himself in one of his earliest letters to me.

  I wondered if this meant he, Nilsen, was about to admit the extent to which he might have enjoyed his crimes? But the letter just fizzled out. Then I remembered the emotionally inert response he had given when confronted with the full extent of the evil of his first murder. In 2005, two policemen arrived at HMP Full Sutton to show him new photographs of someone he might have killed. By the time they left, Nilsen’s first victim was finally identified as 14-year-old Stephen Holmes. Nilsen casually spoke about the matter a year later in a letter to the Evening Standard:

  In 1983, I made a full confession at Hornsey Police Station on the matter of the youth I had encountered and killed … while I was in a drunken state near the end of December 1978 … while I was ‘bingeing’ in the Cricklewood Arms pub …

  Afterwards, at Melrose Avenue, I had no idea who this youth was … as he had nothing on him at all … no money or other means of identification … except, maybe, a latch key … which was disposed of.

  After my trial … police inquiries went more or less cold. Then, in 1990, out of the blue … while I was, coincidentally, in this prison on my first visit, (until 1991), detectives from the Metropolitan Police visited me … for the purposes of identifying this victim.

  All they had was … a small blurred ‘passport-type’ 1980s photocopy of a photocopy of a small photograph … which, for the purposes of identification … could have been anyone … from this scant material I was unable to make any kind of positive ID … they departed as swiftly as they had arrived … then, last year, a new (police) team arrived.

  Carl Stottor’s reaction when I reminded him about Nilsen’s letter to the Evening Standard about the identification of Stephen Holmes was that it was a sign of his ‘incredible arrogance’. He told me, ‘Nilsen, is just a nasty, nasty man … he’s a nobody who enjoys the notoriety that being a serial killer has brought him.’ When I told him about the full extent of Nilsen’s legal battles, he rolled his eyes and said he found it outrageous he could get legal aid for his human rights case when he himself was denied victim compensation for the attack.

  Stottor’s appearances in numerous ‘real-crime’ documentaries have always shown him to be, to varying degrees, troubled. His weight has fluctuated, and frequently his voice has trembled. When I met him at his home in 2012, however, he appeared much more at peace. To draw a line under ‘Stottor the victim’, he now calls himself ‘Kha-Ra Willis’. The name reflects his love of ancient Egypt, as does his seaside flat, which looked like cross between a museum and a bohemian hang-out. In the corner is an up-ended sarcophagus that opens up to reveal itself as a DVD rack. During our interview, a black cat called Cleopatra wandered among all the Egyptobilia and Kha-Ra’s artwork.

  At 51, Kha-Ra has diabetes and is HIV-positive. But still he remains optimistic about life. One of his favourite words is ‘survivor’. During my afternoon with him, he used it almost continuously. He talked about how he’d survived Nilsen, drink and depression, and he intended to do the same with HIV. To put his life into perspective and to keep positive, he told me he was writing a memoir. He was keen to emphasise how Nilsen was only going to be allocated as much space as he deserved. It was clear, however, that he found just talking about him upsetting.

  Nilsen’s book was a particularly sore subject. Kha-Ra said he had learnt about it in 1998 from the same article that I had read. His reaction was an immediate rush of blood and panic – a sense that he just wasn’t being allowed to forget about the man who had tried to kill him. Then Kha-Ra decided to do something practical. He printed up a petition and went out into the street asking for signatures. When all the sheets were full, he sent them to the Home Office.

  He told me, ‘This book [History of a Drowning Boy] is just about his desire for attention and publicity, that’s all it is. Nilsen wants to cater for his monster, ego, image. He’s just a monster and we shouldn’t pay attention to him. We should be thinking about the victims and the ripple effect on other vic
tims.’

  Kha-Ra asked me what Nilsen had said about him. I explained how he had said that he thought he might be attributing all his problems to one night in 1982. Kha-Ra couldn’t believe that, after all Nilsen had done, he could be that presumptuous. The next day, he sent me an email: ‘Talk about pot … kettle! Nilsen likes to pass his victims over like they are worth nothing, just vulnerable people, waifs and strays. Nilsen’s victims were blameless and innocent, something the press at the time were never kind to. The same goes for the judicial system. I think it is a great miscarriage of justice that Nilsen was never charged with my attempted murder and that I was never compensated as a victim, but that is justice for you, affordable only to those with money. All any victim seeks is justice.’

  The following week, I went to see Graham Allen’s former partner, Lesley Mead. Although now in her sixties, it wasn’t hard to imagine her as the short, attractive barmaid her son Shane had described her as once being. But she had clearly had a hard life. Her build was now heavy and her eyes twitched nervously when she spoke. Like Kha-Ra, Mead shares her living space with a cat, a stray she found outside the community centre where she helps out.

  I was here at the suggestion of Shane. I had told him I was impressed by the way he had written about his father. He suggested it might help my research to see those events through her eyes. For over two hours, I listened to Mead speaking plainly, without any artifice. She said she knew Puggy hadn’t been perfect; neither had she, for that matter. But she had been enormously hurt by the way the papers had generalised about Nilsen’s victims and their families. I drove home with a sick feeling in my stomach. Back in my study, I decided to re-read Shane’s account of how his mother had taken the news of his father’s murder: ‘It all started with a scream. I heard it from the top of the road as I made my way home from school. Somehow, I knew it was my mother’s pain. It was a scream from nowhere and of unbearable suffering. And it didn’t stop. It was 1983 and my mother had just been informed that her lover, my father, missing for over a year, had been discovered – murdered and dismembered and stuffed in two black bin bags in the flat of serial killer Dennis Nilsen. I was seven, and Hell was on its way.’