Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  Evans was given a posthumous pardon in 1966 and his remains were moved from Pentonville Prison and reburied in St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone. In 2003, his sister and half-sister were given ex gratia payments in compensation for the miscarriage of justice.

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  BONFIRES AND BEASTIES

  Dennis Nilsen was famous for ‘killing for company’ – which was also the title of a book about him by Brian Masters. He would keep the body of his victims in his flat until the smell of decomposition grew too much for him. He was eventually caught because he cooked up their flesh and flushed the remains down the lavatory, blocking the drains.

  But that is not the whole story. Nilsen disposed of his first 12 victims by scattering their organs in the back garden for what he called the ‘wee beasties of the night’ to eat; the remains of others were burned on bonfires and the bones buried. In the garden of his flat in Melrose Avenue, north London, numerous fragments of bone were found. Of the twelve men he killed there, eight have never been identified.

  Nilsen was born in Fraserburgh, a small town on the bleak north-east coast of Scotland, on 23 November 1945. His father was a Norwegian soldier who had escaped to Scotland after the German invasion of his homeland in 1940. He had married Betty Whyte, a local girl, in 1942. The marriage did not work out and Betty continued to live with her parents. A few years later, the Nilsens were divorced.

  Dennis grew up with his mother, elder brother and younger sister, but the strongest influences on his young life were his stern and pious grandparents. Their Christian faith was so strict that they banned alcohol from the house, and the radio and the cinema were considered instruments of the Devil. Nilsen’s grandmother would not even cook on the Lord’s day and their Sunday dinner had to be prepared on Saturday.

  As a boy, Dennis Nilsen was sullen and intensely withdrawn. The only person who could penetrate his private world was his grandfather, Andrew Whyte. A fisherman, he was Nilsen’s hero. He would regale the little boy with tales of the sea and his ancestors lost beneath its churning waves.

  When Andrew Whyte died of a heart attack at sea in 1951, he was brought home and laid out on the dining-room table. Dennis was invited to come and see his grandad’s body. At the age of six, he got his first glimpse of a corpse. From that moment, the images of death and love fused in his mind.

  He left school at 15 and joined the Army. After basic training, he was sent to the catering corps. There he was taught how to sharpen knives – and how to dissect a carcass. During his life in the Army, Nilsen only had one close friend, whom he would persuade to pose for photographs, sprawled on the ground as if he had just been killed in battle.

  One night in Aden, Nilsen was drunk and fell asleep in the back of a cab. When he awoke, he found himself naked, locked in the boot. When the Arab cab driver returned, Nilsen played dead. Then, as the driver manhandled him out of the boot, Nilsen grabbed a car jack and beat him around the head. Nilsen never knew whether he had killed the man or not, but the incident had a profound effect on him.

  ‘The next morning I was full of horror at what had happened to me,’ he said. ‘I had nightmares afterwards of being raped, tortured and mutilated.’

  After 11 years in the Army, Nilsen left and joined the police force. His training included a mortuary visit, where recently qualified constables were initiated in the gruesome habit of viewing the dead. But Nilsen was not repelled. He found the partially dissected corpses fascinating.

  Nilsen did well in the police, but his private life was gradually disintegrating. Death became an obsession. He would pretend to be a corpse himself, masturbating in front of a mirror with blue paint smeared on his lips and his skin whitened with talcum powder.

  Since his teens, he had been aware of his attraction towards other men, but in the Army and in the police force he had somehow managed to repress it. Then, 11 months after he had joined the police, he was on the beat when he caught two men committing an act of gross indecency in a parked car. Aware of his own inclinations, he could not bring himself to arrest them and he decided to resign.

  He went to work interviewing applicants at the Jobcentre in London’s Charing Cross Road. There he became branch secretary of the civil service union and developed increasingly radical political views. Nevertheless, his work was good enough to earn him promotion to executive officer at the Jobcentre in Kentish Town, north London.

  Despite his professional progress, Nilsen was lonely. In 1975, he met a young man called David Gallichen outside a pub. They moved into a flat at 195 Melrose Avenue together, with a cat and a dog called Bleep. Gallichen, or ‘Twinkle’ as Nilsen called him, stayed at home and decorated the flat while Nilsen went to work. They made home movies together and spent a lot of time drinking and talking. Gallichen moved out in 1977 and Nilsen was plunged back into a life of loneliness.

  On New Year’s Eve 1978, Nilsen met a teenage Irish boy in a pub and invited him back to Melrose Avenue. They were too drunk to have sex. When Nilsen woke in the morning, the boy was lying fast asleep beside him. He was afraid that when the boy woke up he would leave – and Nilsen wanted him to stay. Their clothes were thrown together in a heap on the floor. Nilsen leant over and grabbed his tie, which he then put around the boy’s neck and pulled. The boy woke immediately and began to struggle. They rolled on to the floor, but Nilsen kept pulling on the tie.

  After about a minute, the boy’s body went limp but he was still breathing. Nilsen went to the kitchen and filled a bucket with water. He brought the bucket back and held the boy’s head underwater until he drowned. Now he had to stay.

  Nilsen carried the dead boy into the bathroom and gave him a bath. He dried the corpse lovingly, then dressed it in clean socks and underpants. For a while, he just lay in bed holding the dead boy, then he put him on the floor and he went to sleep.

  The following day, he planned to hide the body under the floor, but rigor mortis had stiffened the joints, making the corpse hard to handle. So he left the body out while he went to work. When the corpse had loosened up, Nilsen undressed it again and washed it. This time he masturbated beside it and found he could not stop playing with it and admiring it.

  The Killer expected to be arrested at any moment, even while he played with the corpse. But no one came. It seemed no one had missed the dead boy. After a week living happily with the corpse, Nilsen hid it under the floorboards. Seven months later, he cut the body up and burnt it in the back garden. The victim was later identified as 14-year-old Stephen Dean Holmes.

  Nilsen’s first experience of murder frightened him. He was determined it would not happen again and decided to give up drinking. But Nilsen was lonely; he liked to go to pubs to meet people and talk to them. Soon he slipped off the wagon.

  Nearly a year later, on 3 December 1979, Nilsen met Kenneth Ockenden, a Canadian tourist, in a pub in Soho. Nilsen had taken leave from work that afternoon and took Ockenden on a sightseeing tour of London. Ockenden agreed to go back to Nilsen’s flat for something to eat. After a visit to the off-licence, they sat in front of the television eating ham, eggs and chips and drinking beer, whisky and rum.

  As the evening wore on, disturbing feelings began to grow inside Nilsen. He liked Ockenden, but realised that he would soon be leaving and going back to Canada. A feeling of desolation crept over him. It was the same feeling he had had when he killed the Irish boy.

  Late that night, when they were both very drunk, Ockenden was listening to music through earphones. Nilsen put the flex of the earphones around Ockenden’s neck and dragged him struggling across the floor. When he was dead, Nilsen took the earphones off and put them on himself. He poured himself another drink and listened to records.

  In the early hours, he stripped the corpse and carried it over his shoulder into the bathroom, where he washed it. When the body was clean and dry, he put it on the bed and went to sleep next to it.

  In the morning, he put the body in a cupboard and went to work. That evening, he took the body out
and dressed it in clean socks, underpants and vest. He took some photographs of it, then lay it next to him on the bed. For the next two weeks, Nilsen would watch TV in the evening with Ockenden’s body propped up in an armchair next to him. Last thing at night, he would undress it, wrap it in some curtains and place the body under the floorboards.

  As Ockenden had gone missing from a hotel, his disappearance made the news for a few days. Again, Nilsen was convinced that he was about to be arrested at any moment. Several people in the pub, on the bus, at the sights they had visited and even in the local off-licence had seen them together. But still there was no knock on the door. From then on, Nilsen felt that he could pursue his murderous hobby unfettered.

  Although plenty of people visited the flat in Melrose Avenue and emerged alive, Nilsen now began deliberately to seek out victims. He would go to pubs where lonely young homosexuals hung out. He would buy them drinks, offer advice and invite them back to his flat for something to eat. Many accepted.

  One of them was Martin Duffey. After a disturbed childhood, he ran away from home and ended up in London, sleeping in railway stations. He went back to Nilsen’s flat and, after two cans of beer, crawled into bed. When he was asleep, Nilsen strangled him. While he was still barely alive, Nilsen dragged his unconscious body into the kitchen, filled the sink with water and held his head under for four minutes.

  Nilsen then went through the standard procedure of stripping and bathing the corpse, then he took it to bed. He talked to it, complimenting Duffey on his body. He kissed it all over and masturbated over it. Nilsen kept the body in a cupboard for a few days. When it started to swell up, he put it under the floorboards.

  In the summer of 1980, the bodies of Ockenden and Duffey were producing a smell that was hard to disguise. Nilsen decided that he must get rid of them. He lifted the floorboards and lifted out the putrefying corpses. Laying them on the kitchen floor, he cut them up and stuffed the pieces into bags. There were some old suitcases in the cupboard under the stairs. He put the bags in them and carried them out to the back garden. He put them in the garden shed that he had originally built for the dog, Bleep. He covered them with newspapers and bricks, after adding some deodorant sticks to the gruesome pile.

  The next victim was 27-year-old Billy Sutherland. He died because he was a nuisance. Nilsen didn’t fancy him but, after meeting him on a pub crawl, Sutherland followed him home. Nilsen vaguely remembered strangling him. There was certainly a dead body in the flat in the morning.

  Nilsen did not even know some of his victims by name. He was not much interested in them, only their bodies − their dead bodies. The murder routine was always much the same, that part was mechanical. But once they were dead, they really turned him on. Touching the corpse would give him an erection.

  In fact Nilsen would never think of his victims’ bodies lying around his flat while he was out at work. But in the evening when he got home, he could not help playing with them. He was thrilled to own their beautiful bodies and was fascinated by the mystery of death. He would hold the corpse in a passionate embrace and talk to it and, when he was finished with it, he would stuff it back under the floorboards.

  By the end of 1980, he had six more corpses of identified victims on his hands, along with the body parts in the garden shed. Three were under the floorboards; others were decapitated and the heads and torsos were shoved in suitcases. One would not fit, so he cut off the arms and hands, and left them under a bush outside the French windows. The arms and hands lay there for over a year.

  With flies buzzing around the house, it reached the point when Nilsen decided that he had to get rid of some of the remains. The procedure was grisly. First, he prised up the floorboards and uncovered the body. Then he took it by the ankles, pulled it up through the gap in the floor and along the ground into the kitchen onto a piece of plastic sheeting.

  Before he began, he had to knock back a Bacardi and Coke, then masturbate beside the body. It was, he said, his way of saying goodbye. He stripped naked to avoid soiling his clothes. Then he prepared a small bowl of water, a kitchen knife, some paper tissues and plastic bags. He needed a couple more drinks before he could start. He removed the vest and underpants from the body. With the knife, he cut off the head. There was very little blood. He put the head in the kitchen sink, washed it and put it in a carrier bag. He then cut off the hands, then the feet. He washed them in the sink and dried them, wrapping each one in paper towelling and put them in plastic carrier bags.

  He cut the corpses from the navel to the breastbone and removed the intestines, stomach, kidneys and liver. From there, he would break through the diaphragm and remove the heart and lungs. He put all these organs into a plastic carrier bag.

  Then he cut the remains in two, separating the top half of the body from the bottom half. He removed the arms and then the legs below the knee, putting the parts in black carrier bags. The chest and ribcage went into a large bag; the thighs, buttocks and private parts – still in one piece – in another. These packages went back under the floorboards, although he would leave the bag containing the entrails and organs out.

  Every so often, he stopped to be sick in the sink. There was a cooling breeze from the French windows, but he would not walk over to them, because he wanted to avoid treading on the body parts that were spread around the living room.

  After the first body had been dissected, he uncovered the next body which had been there longer. Again, he pulled it out by the ankles and into the kitchen. There were maggots on the surface of the skin. He poured salt on these and brushed them off. The corpse was discoloured. He was violently sick and steadied himself with a few more glasses of spirits before repeating the process of dissection. Everything was done with a kitchen knife; he had no saws or power tools.

  When the task was complete, he replaced the packages under the floorboards and had a bath. Afterwards, he would listen to music on the headphones and get really drunk, then take the dog out for a walk in Gladstone Park.

  ‘Bleep always got a bit apprehensive and stayed in the garden while I carried out these tasks,’ said Nilsen.

  While removing the internal organs was the messiest part of the procedure – it involved vile fluids and stomach-churning smells – these were the easiest to dispose of. He dumped them between the double fence at the side of the garden for rats, birds and insects to feast upon.

  He had two bonfires in the back garden at Melrose Avenue for burning body parts. When that caused no complaint, one cold day at the beginning of December 1980, he built a huge bonfire on the wasteland just beyond the garden fence, pulling off a couple of palings to gain access. Early the following morning, he pulled up the floorboards again, wrapped the body parts in carpets and dragged them across the garden to the bonfire. He pushed them deep under the timber and some discarded furniture he had collected.

  The garden shed was close to the gap in the fence and the door obscured the view from the house. Nilsen then started shifting the body parts he had stored there. The suitcases on top were still intact and he pushed them through the gap in the fence. Those at the bottom of the pile were crushed and rotten. As he moved them, they split apart, spilling decomposing flesh and bone along the path.

  The heads were now unrecognisable. He shoved them into the middle of the bonfire. Once everything was hidden from sight, he began cleaning up the shed, which was full of maggots and flies. Then he stuffed newspapers and magazines around the fire, sprinkled them with lighter fuel and set light to it. He chucked an old car tyre on top to disguise the smell of burning flesh.

  All day, Nilsen kept an eye on the fire, throwing more wood on to it when necessary. The fire attracted local kids who wanted to dance around it. He warned them to keep back.

  Nilsen was mesmerised by the flames. He could not believe what he had done and now thought that he might awake from a bad dream or, at least, be able to forget about what had happened for ever.

  As the flames died down, a charred skull appeared in the middle
of the cinders. Nilsen crushed it with a rake. Once everything had been reduced to ashes, he covered them over with bricks from the shed. After he had bathed and dressed, he took the Tube to the West End, where he picked up a young man and took him back to Melrose Avenue in a taxi. In the morning, he walked him to Willesden Underground station and Nilsen began to believe that his days of killing for company were behind him.

  But his killing spree was far from over. Within a month, he had picked up his eighth victim in the West End after the pubs closed and took him home. This person’s dissected remains went under the floorboards. He was soon joined by three more. By August, there were four bodies under the floorboards and the smell was overpowering even though he was spraying disinfectant around every day.

  One Friday, he decided that he must do something about the problem, as he later explained in detail to the police:

  I sat and deliberated this task reluctantly. I fortified myself with about half a bottle of drink before lifting up the floorboards. I removed the intact bundles one at a time, placed them on the kitchen stone floor and unwrapped the bundles one at a time. I put the wrapping to one side. I removed the clothing from the bodies and set about dissecting them. The smell was grossly unpleasant and, in some cases, there existed large colonies of maggots. I dissected the bodies and wrapped the parts in white kitchen towel, rolls of which I had an adequate supply. I tightly re-wrapped the parts in smaller compact bundles and put them to one side. I treated the three bodies in this fashion until all was complete and a number of bundles lay on the kitchen floor. I re-packed the bundles in the space under the floorboards, packed them with earth and deodorant tablets.