The demoralisation of Dennis Nilsen reached crisis point at the end of 1978. ‘I felt defeated on all fronts.’ Career prospects were stunted by his union activities. The apathy of those work-mates who had elected him to be their front man and then would not support him with enthusiasm added a deepening depression. And the loneliness threatened to overwhelm him. In the days before Christmas there were plenty of social occasions with heavy drinking, but in the morning there would be just himself, the dog, and a hangover. If he vanished, he thought, no one would notice.
Loneliness is a long unbearable pain. I felt that I had achieved nothing of importance or of help to anyone in my entire life. I would think that if I drank myself to death my body would not be discovered until at least a week after (or longer). There was no one I felt I could call upon for real help. I was in daily contact with so many people but quite alone in myself …20
… I was becoming depressed and conditioned to a belief that I was impossible to live with. This feeling of despair reached its peak when I spent Christmas of 1978 alone with the mutt. I would find comfort in music and the bottle. I was in a fit of drunken desolation by the time New Year approached.21
The thought that he might meet someone who would then, like all the others, walk away, caused him to view himself with extreme self-pity. On 30 December he decided he must at all costs get out of the flat and seek some company. Instead of going to one of his usual haunts, he went to the Cricklewood Arms, a rough Irish bar on Cricklewood Broadway, where he drank pint after pint of draught Guinness. He spied the local police constable across the room but did not speak to him. He did however engage in desultory conversation with a number of other people in groups until he found himself chatting to an Irish youth who was, like himself, alone. ‘That night things began to go terribly and horribly wrong.’22
fn1 A pseudonym.
6
VICTIMS
They walked from the Cricklewood Arms to 195 Melrose Avenue, where they stayed up late drinking themselves insensible. Eventually they both undressed and crawled into bed together, but no sexual activity took place. Dennis Nilsen woke up a couple of hours later, as first light was dawning, and looked at him lying there.
I was afraid to wake him in case he left me. Trembling with fear I strangled his struggling body and when he was dead I took his young body back to bed with me and it was the beginning of the end of my life as I had known it. I had started down the avenue of death and possession of a new kind of flat-mate.1
When the police asked him what had started him off on his murderous career in 1978, Nilsen said that he had never stopped asking himself the same question and had not yet found a reply. Later, after the trial, he wrote a more detailed account of the first killing which offers some insight into his state of mind at the time (assessed retrospectively), and into his disastrously contorted emotions:
The fire had been on all night so it was quite warm. I snuggled up to him and put my arm around him. He was still fast asleep. Still lying there I pulled the blanket off us and half-way down our bodies. He was on his side turned away from me. I ran my hand over him exploring him. I remember thinking that because it was morning he would wake and leave me. I became extremely aroused and I could feel my heart pounding and I began to sweat. He was still sound asleep. I looked down on the floor where our clothes lay and my eyes fixed on my tie. I remember thinking that I wanted him to stay with me over the New Year whether he wanted to or not. I reached out and got the neck tie. I raised myself and slipped it on under his neck. I quickly straddled him and pulled tight for all I was worth. His body came alive immediately. We struggled off the bed on to the floor. ‘What the …’ he said, but I retightened my grip on the tie. Pushing himself with his feet (with me on top of him) we moved along the carpeted floor … We had moved about three yards from the bed and so doing had knocked over the coffee-table, ashtray and glasses. His head was now up against the wall. After about half a minute I felt him slowly going limp. His arms flopped on to the carpet. I stood up trembling with tension and exhaustion. Then I noticed he had resumed breathing in rasping breaths. He was still unconscious. I wondered what to do. I ran into the kitchen and filled a plastic bucket with water. I returned to the main room and placed it on the floor. ‘I’d better drown him,’ I thought. I got hold of him under his armpits and pulled him up and draped him head down over the seat of a dining-chair. I placed the bucket near and grabbing him by the hair raised his head, which I pushed into the bucket of water. Excess water splashed all over the carpet. I held his head in there and he did not struggle. After a few minutes the bubbles stopped coming. I lifted him up and sat him in the armchair, the water was dripping from his short brown curly hair. I just sat there shaking, trying to think clearly about what I had just done. It was still early in the morning. The room was in a bit of a mess. I kept looking at him and a multitude of thoughts kept pounding through my head. I smoked a lot and made myself a cup of coffee to help the shaking.
Having cleaned the room up to some extent, the dog came in from the garden and sniffed the dead man’s leg. Nilsen took her by the scruff of the neck and harshly told her to leave, after which she kept out of the way. Then began a ritualistic second stage to the crime. For a long period he sat down, shocked. If anyone had walked in at that moment, he would not have stirred a muscle. He took the tie from the corpse’s neck as if that would make everything better.
I sat opposite the dead youth and just stared at him. I went into the bathroom and ran a bath. When it was nearly full I put a towel over the curtainless window and returned to my room. I knelt down in front of the armchair and pulled the body forward over my right shoulder. Supporting it around the thighs I hoisted it over my shoulder and carried it to the bathroom. I lowered him on to the rim of the bath and slid him into the water … With washing-up liquid I washed him and his hair. He was very limp and floppy. Getting him out of the bath wasn’t easy as his wet skin made it difficult to hold him. I pulled him out by the wrists and sat him on the lavatory seat. I towelled him dry. I hoisted him over my shoulder again, carried him into the room and laid him on the bed. I cleaned myself up and went over to take a closer look at him. His face was slightly discoloured (pinkish) and his eyes were half open. His face seemed to be slightly puffed up and his lips (bluish) slightly parted … I turned him over on the bed and ran my fingers down the length of him … he was still warm to the touch. His wet hair left a mark on the pillow. I straightened him up (on his back) on the bed and pulled the bedclothes up to his chin. I sat down thinking what I was going to do. I expected a knock on the front door in a few hours when he didn’t come home. I had lost all interest in him over the New Year, my mind was concentrated on how to get rid of him. I left the house and walked down Willesden High Road to clear my mind.
In a local ironmongers he bought a cooking pot and an electric knife, but when he returned home he thought the idea which had occurred to him was ridiculous, and put them away. (The electric knife was to be used a year later to carve turkey at the office Christmas party and was eventually given to one of the staff; it was never used in the pursuit of Nilsen’s crimes.)
I couldn’t think what to do at all – at that stage. I was now feeling the full tired effects of a hangover. I pulled the bedclothes off the youth’s body. I went to the wardrobe and took out some underwear and socks (still in their cellophane packets from Woolworth’s). I dressed the youth in the white Y-fronts, vest, and socks, and put back the bedclothes. I had a bath myself and got into bed with him. I held him close to me with my arms around him, and I began to remove his pants and explore his body under the blankets. (I had an erection all this time.) When I tried to enter him my erection automatically subsided, I could feel that his body temperature was cooling. I got up and lifted him into my arms, laid him on the floor and covered him with an old curtain. I went back into bed and fell instantly asleep.
Nilsen slept soundly all that day. In the evening, he let Bleep in, made himself something to eat and watched
the television. The shrouded body was still lying on the floor. He determined that he would prise up some floorboards and put the body beneath them, with bricks from the garden and some earth, but rigor mortis had set in and when he pushed the body under, feet first, it got stuck and he had to take it out again. He stood the body up against the wall. ‘I heard somewhere that rigor mortis soon passes, so I could wait.’
The next day he was still standing against the wall. I laid him on the floor and worked his limbs loose. I examined closely and systematically every part of him from his toes to his hair … I eased him into his new bed and covered him up. It was very cold under the floorboards. The cat got in there and I spent ten minutes coaxing her out. I replaced the boards and the carpet. I ripped up all his clothing and put it with his boots into the dustbin. A week later I wondered if his body had changed at all or had started to decompose. I disinterred him and pulled the dirt-stained youth up on to the floor. His skin was very dirty. I stripped myself naked and carried him into the bathroom and washed the body. There was practically no discolouration and he was pale white. His limbs were more limp and relaxed than when I had put him down. I got him out of the bath and washed myself clean in the water. I carried the still wet youth into the room and laid him on the carpet. Under the orange side-lights his body aroused me sexually. I knelt over him and masturbated on to his bare stomach. Before I went to bed I suspended him by the ankles from the high wooden platform. He hung there all night, his fingers just touching the carpet. The next day while he was still hanging there upside down I stood beside him and masturbated again. I wiped him and took him down. I laid him on the kitchen floor and decided to cut him up, but I just couldn’t do anything to spoil that marvellous body.2
Nilsen replaced the body under the floorboards, where it stayed unmolested for the next seven and a half months. On 11 August 1979, he brought the body up and burnt it on a bonfire in the garden which he had constructed the day before. It was not dismembered but wrapped in bags and tied with string. With a seven-foot-high fence and a derelict house next door, Nilsen knew he could not be seen, and he added rubber to the fire to cancel out any smell of burning flesh. ‘I pounded the ashes to powder and raked them into the ground.’ Thus the Irish youth disappeared without trace, his existence obliterated for no clear reason by a man who did not know him. He has never been identified and probably never can be; indeed, we have only Nilsen’s own confession to indicate that this murder ever took place.
Nilsen went about his work in a thoroughly normal way in the months before the burning, and for the rest of that year. He was able to forget about what lay beneath the floor, the more so as time passed and nobody came to investigate. It seemed astonishing to him that such a thing should happen and pass unnoticed. If anyone had missed the boy there was nothing whatever to link him with 195 Melrose Avenue. At times Nilsen thought he should present himself for arrest, but his instinct to survive was stronger than this impulse and was reinforced by the lack of any inquiry at his home or work. Gradually he realised that this appalling episode need never be discovered, and he might continue his life in an equable way. He could not bear to think of the moral implications. He had no reason, he thought, to believe it would ever happen again. He continued occasionally to spend an evening or a night with a stranger without anything going wrong, although, oddly, no sexual activity took place for nearly two years. It looked as if he was safe with his one dreadful secret and would not commit murder again. But he was wrong.
An incident occurred in October 1979 which served to remind him of what he was capable. He met a young Chinese student, Andrew Ho, who accompanied him home. There the man started talking of bondage and wanted either to tie Nilsen up or be tied up himself. He also said he was short of money. Nilsen offered him a sum for his company, but did not want to indulge in any intimacy. The man wondered what on earth he had come for, in that case, and Nilsen tied his feet together to keep him quiet. He thought Ho might have wanted to rob him, and told him he was leading a dangerous life. He put a tie round his neck and pulled it, saying that this was the sort of thing that could happen to him. Ho panicked and Nilsen released his grip. He threw a candlestick at him and rushed out. Half an hour later the police called, but no charges were brought because Mr Ho was reluctant to proceed and Nilsen denied that there had been any attempt at strangulation, which was strictly true. Nevertheless, he had placed the tie around the man’s neck, whether to frighten him or to teach him a lesson and then get rid of him, and that gesture alone must have sounded an echo in his mind. He said later (in 1983) that it was a pity that he was not arrested there and then.
Before he moved from Melrose Avenue in September 1981, Nilsen killed a total of twelve men, of whom four have been identified; they are Kenneth Ockendon, Martyn Duffey, Billy Sutherland, and Malcolm Barlow. The other eight remain nameless. At Cranley Gardens in 1982 he killed another two men, John Howlett and Graham Allan, and the last, Stephen Sinclair, at the end of January 1983. In addition to these fifteen deaths there are, by Nilsen’s own account, seven attempts at murder, in which either he was fought off, or he himself managed to ‘snap out’ of the killing trance before it was too late. One man he actually saved from death after he had almost succeeded in killing him. There is no unifying thread of behaviour either during the murders or after them; similarities occur between some of them, and are not repeated in others. With the exception of Kenneth Ockendon, who was a Canadian tourist on holiday in London, they all had the most slender connections with their origins. Some were in trouble with the police, some were drug-addicts or ‘punks’, some (but not all) were homosexual, many were homeless and jobless, and many drifted through the crowds of London without aim or purpose, their disappearance being such a regular event that their few acquaintances were neither surprised nor alarmed. Kenneth Ockendon was the only one whose disappearance was noted in the national newspapers.
The world of the young, single, unemployed homeless people of London is invisible. It is impossible to say how many there are, or where they all come from. If you have nowhere to live, no job to occupy you, and no close family ties, you will come to London simply because it is the capital and it must offer more opportunities. If you have an acquaintance there, you may sleep on his floor for a while before you move on. Then you may very easily vanish.
There are a number of hostels and organisations in central London devoted to giving help to young people who are drifting – advice, care, a bed for the night. Centrepoint Nightshelter in Shaftesbury Avenue offers emergency accommodation for short periods; every day residents are sent on their way with a list of addresses for employment, medical attention, and housing, and have to report back with their belongings in the evening. The system encourages initiative and responsibility, but it makes scant allowance for a man who is inadequate to these demands. City Roads deals with youngsters who have been trapped in the whirlpool of drugs. The Soho Project offers help on all levels, and it is frequently there that a young man who has given up or who does not know where else to turn makes his first appeal. None of these organisations is able to keep track of what happens to a man after he has passed through their hands. If he signs on with the Department of Health and Social Security there will be a card recording his existence, but if he ceases to claim then the D.H.S.S. does not initiate inquiries to find out what has happened to him. He may be on a doctor’s list, but if he moves about from one district to another he will not stay on the list for long, and anyway doctors discourage the sort of young ‘drop-out’ who most needs help; he does not look good in the surgery. The man may well end up as a piece of flotsam, anchored nowhere, belonging to no one, stranded on the streets of central London hoping for a chance meeting which may provide a meal or a bed. Even if his family wishes to trace him, the task has by now become hopeless.
Every year the Soho Project sees two thousand young people at their top-floor office in Charing Cross Road. With patience, tolerance, and a determined absence of moral preaching, they counsel runa
ways and often gradually effect a reconciliation with their families. But many are so damaged by their home life that the ‘instant’ community of the streets of London is preferable, despite its instability, to a return to parents or to being ‘in care’. Some have been discharged from care on reaching a certain age and thus, in effect, abandoned to the winds. The workers of the Soho Project spend almost every evening touring the streets and amusement arcades of Soho, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, talking to youngsters who may need help but who either do not know where to go or are too distrustful to follow advice. These young people congregate in coffee-bars, hoping to make a cup last all night, or offer themselves for prostitution. The Soho Project is able to provide some help, but not for long. They well know that their organisation is engaged essentially in ‘first aid’, though their work is no less vital for that. They are campaigners, tirelessly passionate in their efforts to provide a harbour for young people in crisis and, incidentally, to protect them from men like Dennis Nilsen.
It happened that the second victim, who died almost a year after the first, was not typical of the young men so far described.
On 3 December 1979, Kenneth Ockendon had breakfast at the Central Hotel in Argyle Street, London WC1, and left for the day with his camera. He had been staying there at a rate of £7 a night, on a tour of England looking up relations, and was due to fly back home to Canada in the near future. He never returned to the hotel for his belongings. At lunchtime, he met Dennis Nilsen in a West End pub, Nilsen having leave from work for the afternoon. They chatted amiably until three in the afternoon, each buying a round of drinks, then went off to see the sights of London and take photographs. They fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, then went to Horseguards Parade and on to Downing Street and Westminster Abbey. At the end of the afternoon, they agreed to go to Nilsen’s flat and have something to eat, then perhaps go out for a drink later in the evening. After a meal of ham, eggs and chips, their plans changed and they went together to the off-licence next to Willesden Green underground station and filled a carrier bag with rum, whisky and beer, Ockendon insisting on sharing the bill. Back at the flat, they put drinks on the table and sat down to watch television and listen to music. They seemed to enjoy each other’s company, having been together for nine hours. They were friends already. Ockendon reminded Nilsen of Derek Collins. It was for Nilsen the happiest evening of the year, and Ockendon, too, was relaxed. But Nilsen could not get out of his mind the fact that Ken would be flying back to Canada the next day. In the following weeks, newspapers carried stories of the disappearance of a Canadian tourist.
Killing For Company Page 13
