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

by Cawthorne Nigel

  Again, the internal organs had been put in separate bags and had not been returned under the floorboards. As before, these were taken out into the back garden and dumped in the gap between the two fences where they would be eaten by scavenging animals.

  Some of his murders were terrifyingly casual. Nilsen found his 12th victim, 24-year-old Malcolm Barlow, collapsed on the pavement in Melrose Avenue. Barlow was an epileptic and said that the pills he was taking made his legs give way. Nilsen carried him home and called an ambulance. When he was released from hospital the next day, Barlow returned to the Melrose Avenue flat where Nilsen prepared a meal. Barlow began drinking, even though Nilsen warned him not to mix alcohol with the new pills he had been prescribed. When Barlow collapsed, Nilsen could not be bothered to call an ambulance again and strangled him, then carried on drinking until bedtime. The space under the floorboards was already full of dismembered corpses, so the following morning Nilsen stuffed Barlow’s body in the cupboard under the sink. Now that he had completely run out of storage space, Nilsen decided it was time to move. But he could hardly leave the bodies behind. He told the police:

  I made a huge, well-constructed bonfire using furnishings, cabinets and things from the house, and left a sizable hollow at the centre of the structure. This I did the day before. Early in the morning, I lifted the floorboards and started to pack the packages into the centre of the wooden structure, the base of which was two large doors on house bricks. I did not replace the floorboards this time. Going to the kitchen, I opened the doors of the cupboard under the kitchen sink. I noticed that the body had become bloated. I removed the body and dragged it through the house and laid it inside the structure. I covered the entire structure with more wooden posts and palings, and all the bundles of paper from under the floorboards were pushed aside. The opening was sealed with more wood and the bonfire set alight. It was positioned about 15ft from a point exactly halfway between the French window and the kitchen window. The fire started early morning. There were spurts, bangs, cracks and hisses, a continual hissing and sizzling coming from the fire. This was what I took to be fat and other parts of the bodies burning.

  He threw other rubbish from the flat on to the fire. When another resident came to see what was going on, Nilsen explained that he was moving out the next day and was burning the waste he could not take with him.

  Before he left, he checked under the floorboards to make sure that he had not left any body parts behind. It was dark and he could only see one or two bits of clothing. Then he nailed the floorboards back in position. After a quick check around the flat to see if he had left anything unaccounted for, he went out into the garden. First, he checked the shed; then he checked the ashes of the latest fire.

  ‘Some of it looked like bone splinters or even small pieces of skull, probably not identifiable as skull to the casual observer,’ he said.

  He took the garden roller and ran it over the ashes several times, crushing the remaining bone fragments. It was then that he remembered the arm and hand under the bush outside the French windows. He broke up the large bones with a shovel and flung them over the garden fence. A local dog was seen chomping on one some time later. The hole under the bush was then filled with ashes.

  Nilsen moved to a small attic flat at 23 Cranley Gardens. This was a deliberate attempt to stop his murderous career. He could not kill people, he thought, if he had no floorboards to hide them under and no garden to burn them in. He had several casual encounters at his new flat, picking men up at night and letting them go in the morning, unmolested. This made him elated. Again, he thought he had finally broken the cycle.

  But then John Howlett, or ‘Guardsman John’ as Nilsen called him, came back to Cranley Gardens with him and Nilsen could not help himself. He strangled Howlett with a strap and drowned him. A few days later, he strangled another man, Graham Allen, while he was eating an omelette.

  The death of his final victim, Stephen Sinclair, upset Nilsen. Sinclair was a drifter and a drug addict. When they met, Nilsen felt sorry for him and bought him a hamburger. Back at Cranley Gardens, he slumped in a chair in a stupor and Nilsen decided to relieve him of the pain of his miserable life. He got a piece of string from the kitchen, but it was not long enough. Then he got his one and only remaining tie and choked the life out of his unconscious victim.

  Killing in Cranley Gardens presented Nilsen with a problem. He was forced to dispose of the bodies by dissecting them, boiling the flesh from the bones, dicing up the remains and flushing them down the toilet. Unfortunately, the sewage system in Muswell Hill was not built to handle dissected corpses.

  The drains at 23 Cranley Gardens had been blocked for five days when, on 8 February 1983, Dyno-Rod sent Michael Cattran to investigate. He quickly determined that the problem was not inside, but outside the house. At the side of the house, he found the manhole that led to the sewers. He removed the cover and climbed in.

  At the bottom of the access shaft, he found a glutinous grey sludge. The smell was awful. As he examined it, more sludge came out of the pipe that led from the house. He called his manager and told him that he thought the substance he had found was human flesh.

  Next morning, Cattran and his boss returned to the manhole, but the sludge had disappeared. No amount of rainfall could have flushed it through. Someone had been down there and removed it.

  Cattran put his hand inside the pipe that connected to the house and pulled out some more meat and four small bones. One of the tenants in the house said that they had heard footsteps on the stairs in the night and suspected that the man who lived in the attic flat had been down to the manhole. They called the police.

  Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay took the flesh and bones to Charing Cross Hospital. A pathologist there confirmed that the flesh was, indeed, human.

  The tenant of the attic flat was out at work when DCI Jay got back to Cranley Gardens. At 5.40pm that day, Nilsen returned. Inspector Jay met him at the front door and introduced himself. He said he had come about the drains. Nilsen remarked that it was odd that the police should be interested in drains. When Nilsen let him into the flat, Jay said that the drains contained human remains.

  ‘Good grief! How awful!’ Nilsen exclaimed.

  Jay told him to stop messing about. ‘Where’s the rest of the body?’ he asked.

  After a short pause, Nilsen said, ‘In two plastic bags in the wardrobe next door. I’ll show you.’

  He showed DCI Jay the wardrobe. The smell coming from it confirmed his story.

  ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ Nilsen said. ‘I want to get it off my chest … not here, but at the police station.’

  The police could scarcely believe their ears when Nilsen admitted killing 15 or 16 men. In the wardrobe in Nilsen’s flat, the police found two large, black bin-liners. In one, they found a shopping bag containing the left side of a man’s chest, including the arm. A second bag contained the right side of a chest and arm; in a third, there was a torso with no arms, legs or head; a fourth was full of human offal. The unbearable stench indicated that the bags had evidently been closed for some time and the contents had rotted.

  In the second bin-liner, there were two heads – one with the flesh boiled away, the other largely intact – and another torso. The arms were still attached, but the hands were missing. One of the heads belonged to Stephen Sinclair. Nilsen had severed it only four days earlier and had started simmering it in a pot on the kitchen stove.

  Under a drawer in the bathroom, the police found Sinclair’s pelvis and legs. In a tea chest in Nilsen’s bedroom, there was another torso, a skull and more bones.

  The police also examined the back garden at 195 Melrose Avenue. A large forensics team had to be brought in. They found human ash and over 1,000 fragments of bone, enough to determine that at least eight people, probably more, had been cremated there.

  Nilsen was eventually charged with six counts of murder and three of attempted murder. His solicitor had one simple question for Nilsen: ‘W
hy?’

  ‘I’m hoping you will tell me that,’ Nilsen said.

  Nilsen pleaded not guilty on the basis of ‘diminished responsibility’.

  One of the most extraordinary witnesses at the trial was Carl Stottor. Nilsen had tried to strangle him three times, but somehow his frail body had clung to life. Nilsen had then dragged him to the bath and held him underwater. Somehow, Stottor had found the strength to push himself up three times and beg for mercy. But Nilsen pushed him down again. Thinking he was dead, Nilsen took Stottor’s body back into the bedroom and smoked a cigarette. Then Bleep, Nilsen’s dog, began to lick Stottor’s face and the young man began to revive. Nilsen could easily have snuffed out his life then and there. Instead, he rubbed Stottor’s legs to stimulate his circulation. He wrapped him with blankets and nursed him back to life. When he had recovered sufficiently, Nilsen walked him to the Tube station and wished him luck.

  Nilsen had left another survivor to testify against him. Paul Nobbs had slept at Cranley Gardens one night and woke at 2.00am with a splitting headache. When he woke again in the morning, he found red marks around his neck. Nilsen advised him to see a doctor. At the hospital, Nobbs was told that he had been half strangled. He assumed that his attacker had been Nilsen, but did not report the assault to the police, perhaps fearing they would dismiss the attack as a domestic squabble.

  In November 1983, Nilsen was convicted of the attempted murder of Stottor and Nobbs, plus the actual murder of six others. He was sentenced to life imprison-ment with the recommendation that he serve at least 25 years, although he will probably never be released.

  Nilsen said he did not lose sleep over what he has done, or have nightmares about it. Nor does he have any tears for his victims or their relatives.

  4

  BACKYARD CANNIBAL

  Like Dennis Nilsen, Milwaukee mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer kept the corpses of his victims around his home. But he wanted to possess them even more completely, so he ended up eating their flesh. That way they would be a part of him and stay with him forever. When he was finally arrested after a murderous career of 13 years, he was found to have a fridge full of human body parts. However, when he was a kid in rural Ohio, he disposed of his first victim in the backyard.

  Dahmer began his killing spree in 1978 when he was 18. At that time, he was living in Bath, Ohio, and his parents were going through an acrimonious divorce. Dahmer’s father had already left and his mother was away on a vacation. Dahmer was alone in the house and feeling very neglected. So he went out looking for company. He picked up a hitch-hiker, a 19-year-old white youth named Steven Hicks who had spent the day at a rock concert. They got on well and Dahmer took Hicks back to his parents’ house at 4480 West Bath Road. They had a few beers and talked about their lives. Then Hicks said that he had to go. Dahmer begged him to stay, but Hicks was insistent. So Dahmer made him stay. He picked up a heavy dumbbell, beat him around the head and strangled him.

  Then he stripped his victim’s body and caressed and fondled it, then masturbated over it. Afterwards, the full horror of what he had done swept over him. ‘I was out of my mind with fear that night,’ he later told psychiatrist Dr Kenneth Smail. ‘I did not know what to do. I had gone to such an extreme.’

  When darkness fell, Dahmer dragged Hicks’s body into the crawl space under the house and dismembered it with a hunting knife. He had had plenty of practice. His childhood hobby had been dissecting animals. While the blood soaked into the earth, he wrapped Hicks’s body parts in plastic bags and stashed them there. But the stench of rotting flesh soon permeated the house.

  Dahmer spent the whole of the next day wondering what to do. He decided that he should dump the remains in a ravine ten miles away. After a few beers, he loaded them into his car and set off. On the way, he was tailed by a police car that eventually signalled him to stop. It was 3.00am and Dahmer had been driving on the left-hand side of the road.

  When a backup arrived, Dahmer was ordered to get out of the car. This was before the introduction of the breathalyzer, so he was told to put his finger on the end of his nose and to walk in a straight line. He passed both tests.

  With a flashlight, one of the cops spotted the garbage bags on the back seat of his car. ‘What’s that smell?’ he was asked. Dahmer said that it was trash he was taking to the garbage dump. Why so late? Dahmer explained that his parents were getting a divorce and he could not sleep. He thought a drive might clear his mind. The cop gave him a ticket for erratic driving.

  Thirteen years later, the officer who had stopped him, Patrolman Richard Munsey, had become Lieutenant Munsey and he was sent by the Ohio Police Department to Milwaukee to interview Dahmer. It was only then that he discovered the mistake he had made that night when he was a rookie cop.

  Returning home, Dahmer put the remains back in the crawl space. Then he opened the bags to find the head. He carried it up to his bedroom, put it on the floor and masturbated over it.

  That following night, Dahmer took the remains and buried them in a nearby wood. But later he became afraid that local children would discover the grave. He had played there as a kid, digging up bones and flints; other kids might do the same. So he dug up the body parts, stripped the flesh and dissolved it in acid. The resultant brown sludge was flushed down a drainpipe.

  Then he pulverised the bones with a sledgehammer until there were no bone fragments larger than a small person’s hand. Then he scattered the pieces around his garden and the neighbouring property. In the backyard, he also burnt Hicks’s clothes and wallet and anything that might identify the victim. Then he took the necklace Hicks had been wearing when he picked him up and the knife he had used to cut him to pieces and tossed them off a bridge into the Cuyahoga River. It was ten years before Dahmer killed again … but he already knew he was doomed.

  ‘That night in Ohio,’ he said, ‘that one impulsive night … nothing’s been normal since then. It taints your whole life. After it happened, I thought that I would just try to live as normally as possible and bury it, but things like that don’t stay buried. I didn’t think it would, but it does, it taints your whole life.’

  In 1986, Dahmer, then aged 26, was sentenced to a year’s probation for exposing himself and masturbating publicly in front of two 12-year-old boys. He claimed he was urinating and promised the judge that it would not happen again.

  By then Dahmer had moved to Milwaukee to live with his grandmother. He was a loner. He would hang out in gay bars; if he did strike up a conversation with another customer, he would slip drugs into their drink. Often they would end up in a coma. Dahmer made no attempt to rape them or kill them, he was simply experimenting. But when the owner of the Club Bar ended up unconscious in hospital, Dahmer was barred.

  Six days after the end of his probation, he picked up 24-year-old Stephen Tuomi in a gay club. They went to the Ambassador Hotel to have sex. When Dahmer awoke, he found Tuomi lying dead next to him; there was blood around his mouth and bruising on his neck.

  Dahmer had been drunk the night before and realised that he must have strangled Tuomi. Now he was alone in a hotel room with a corpse and any minute the porter would be checking whether the room had been vacated. He rushed out and bought a large suitcase. He stuffed Tuomi’s body into it and took a taxi back to his grandmother’s house. The taxi-driver even helped him drag the heavy case inside. Dahmer then cut up the body and put the bits into plastic bags which he put out for the garbage truck. He performed this task so well that he left no traces at all. When the police called round to ask him about the disappearance of Tuomi, there was no sign of a body and Dahmer found that he had got away with his second murder.

  Sex, companionship and death were now inextricably linked in Dahmer’s mind. Four months later, he picked up a young male prostitute. They went back to Dahmer’s grandmother’s house to have sex in the basement. Dahmer gave the boy a drink laced with a powerful sedative. When the young man was unconscious, he strangled him. He dismembered the corpse, stripped off the flesh,
pulverised the bones and scattered the pieces. No remains were ever found.

  Two months later, Dahmer met 14-year-old Native American male prostitute James Doxator who was broke. Dahmer offered him money to perform in a video. He had oral sex with Dahmer, in his grandmother’s basement. When it was over, Dahmer offered him a drink, drugged him, strangled him and disposed of the corpse.

  In March 1988, Dahmer picked up 22-year-old bisexual Richard Guerrero and took him back to his grandmother’s. He drugged him, strangled him and performed oral sex on the corpse. Dahmer put the body out with the trash, but kept the skull for a couple of months.

  Dahmer’s grandmother began to complain of the smell that persisted even after the rubbish had been collected. She then found a patch of blood in the garage. Dahmer said that he had been skinning animals out there. She accepted this excuse, but made it clear that she wanted him to move out.

  Then Dahmer found himself a small apartment in a rundown, predominantly black area. On his first night there, he lured Keison Sinthasomphone, a 13-year-old Laotian boy back to the flat and drugged him. The boy, whose older brother later perished at Dahmer’s hands, somehow managed to escape. Dahmer was arrested and charged with sexual assault and enticing a minor for immoral purposes. He spent a week in jail, then was released on bail.

  His father had already given up on him, saying his son ‘would never be more than he seemed to be – a liar, an alcoholic, a thief, an exhibitionist, a molester of children. I could not imagine how he had become such a ruined soul … For the first time, I no longer believed that my efforts and resources alone would be enough to save my son. There was something missing in Jeff … we call it a “conscience” … that had either died or had never been alive in the first place.’