Nilsen’s recollection of Ockendon’s last night is as follows:
It must have been well after midnight – maybe one or two in the morning. I was dragging him across the floor with the flex around his neck. The flex was round his throat. I was saying, ‘Let me listen to the music as well.’ He didn’t struggle. I was dragging him across the floor. The dog was barking frantically in the kitchen trying to get in the door and I opened the kitchen door to put the dog out in the garden and said, ‘Get out, this is fuck all to do with you.’ He was lying on the floor. I untangled the earphones. I must have put half a glass of Bacardi in the glass. I put the earphones on, sat down, and listened to the whole sequence of records. He was dead. I kept on drinking. With the music and the drinking I could get away from what was around me. In the morning the record player was still going round.
Going back, I don’t actually remember putting the cord around his neck but I remember pulling him with the cord around his neck and dragging him.3
After I had killed him with the headphones cable I stripped him naked, finding that he had completely messed himself. I cleaned him up a bit with a long piece of paper kitchen towel and hoisted him over my shoulder… I bathed his body and laid him on the bed. I kept him in the bed with me for the rest of the night. No sex, only caressing, etc. When I awoke in the morning he was hanging half out of the bed and to touch he was much colder. I pulled him back in beside me and straightened him up. I got up and cleaned the mess. I ditched all his things. I put him in the cupboard as I was going to work. That night I checked him in the cupboard where he was doubled up and he was rigid in that approximate position. The next day I bought a cheap polaroid colour camera. That evening I took his body from the cupboard and straightened him. While he was crouched in the cupboard a brown liquid had been dripping from his nose on to his chest and arms, so I washed him over with a wet paper towel.
I sat him on a kitchen chair and dressed him in socks, briefs and vest. His face was a little bit puffy and slightly reddish. I put body colour on his face to remove the colour. I arranged the body in various positions and took several photos (which I destroyed with the last burning). I lay in bed fully clothed with him lying spreadeagled on top of me as I watched television. I would sometimes speak to him as though he were still listening. I would compliment him on his looks and anatomy. By crossing his legs I had sex between his bare thighs (although no penetration of the body occurred). I wrapped him well before putting him under the floorboards.
I took him up on about four occasions in the next two weeks. It was cold down there and he was still very fresh. I always stripped him before wrapping him. I would sit him in the other armchair next to me as I watched an evening’s T.V., drinking. I thought that his body and skin were very beautiful, a sight that almost brought me to tears after a couple of drinks. He had not a mark on him save for red lines on his neck. Before he returned to his ‘bed’ I would sit him on my knee and strip off the underwear and socks, wrap him in curtain material and put him down (actually saying, ‘Good night, Ken’). I destroyed the records which reminded me of him afterwards, smashed them with a spade and put them in the dustbin.4
Martyn Duffey came from the Merseyside area. He had had a troubled childhood with marked signs of instability: theft, running away from home, threatening behaviour. When he was fifteen, he had walked out of his parents’ house saying that he was going to the library, hitch-hiked to London, and after a week of sleeping rough had been directed to the Soho Project, which paid his return fare to Birkenhead. His father committed him into care, and he attended a school for maladjusted children. More than once he was seen by psychiatrists. He returned home on discharge from the school and was for a short time employed as a junior salesman.
In many ways, Martyn was no different from thousands of other youngsters who experience a difficult adolescence and emerge from it battered but mature. He frequented homosexual clubs in Liverpool and often stayed out all night (becoming addicted to Valium tablets), but he kept up a correspondence with a social worker in London which gave growing evidence of touching sensitivity and intelligence. Heeding his correspondent’s advice to keep away from London, he took a catering course and formed a deep attachment to a girlfriend. For the first time, his future held promise of stability. He was visibly and hearteningly overcoming his problems, but he relapsed after he was questioned by police for evading his train fare. In May 1980 he packed a suitcase, including the kitchen knives he had acquired on his catering course, and informed his family that he was going to live in New Brighton. They never saw him again after 13 May. Somehow he turned up in London. Had he contacted a social worker, all might have been well; but he didn’t. He slept in stations, then a few days later met Dennis Nilson on the day that Nilsen returned from the union conference in Southport. He was not quite seventeen.
Nilsen recalls that Martyn Duffey drank only two cans of beer on their evening together. After that, the boy crawled into bed.
I remember sitting astride him (his arms must have been trapped by the quilt). I strangled him with great force in the almost pitch darkness with just one side-light on underneath. As I sat on him I could feel my bottom becoming wet. His urine had come through the bedding and my jeans. When he was quite limp I pulled him by the ankles to the edge of the platform and stepped on the ladder. I pulled him over my shoulder and carried him down. He was unconscious but still alive. I put him down, filled the kitchen sink up with water, draped him into it, and held him there, his head under the water. I must have held him there for about three or four minutes. I then lifted him into my arms and took him into the room. I laid him on the floor and took off his socks, jeans, shirt and underpants. I carried him into the bathroom. I got into the bath myself this time and he lay in the water on top of me. I washed his body. Both of us dripping wet, I somehow managed to hoist this slipping burden on to my shoulders and took him into the room. I sat him on the kitchen chair and dried us both. I put him on the bed but left the bedclothes off. He was still very warm. I talked to him and mentioned that his body was the youngest looking I had ever seen. I kissed him all over and held him close to me. I sat on his stomach and masturbated. I kept him temporarily in the cupboard. Two days later I found him bloated in the cupboard. He went straight under the floorboards.5
Nilsen threw Duffey’s knives away, but allowed them to rust first.
Billy Sutherland was a heavy drinker from Edinburgh who had been to an approved school and to prison. He was covered in tattoos on his arms, hands and chest. The fingers of his hands were tattooed with the words LOVE and HATE. In Scotland he had had a girlfriend and fathered a child, but in London his style was that of a gypsy, never staying long in one place, and sleeping with men for money. He would steal when necessity demanded. He was known to the Soho Project. Wherever he was, he would keep in touch with his mother in Scotland, and it was she who reported him as a missing person to the police and the Salvation Army when he abruptly ceased contact with her. (The missing persons list included forty men named Billy Sutherland.) He met Dennis Nilsen in a pub near Piccadilly Circus and they started an evening of pub-crawling, finishing up in Charing Cross Road. Nilsen said he was fed up with walking and wanted to go home. He walked down the stairs into Leicester Square underground station and bought himself a ticket, then turned to find Billy Sutherland standing behind him. He said he had nowhere to go, and Nilsen, rather reluctantly, bought him a ticket and took him to Melrose Avenue. Sutherland was then twenty-seven years old.
Nilsen has no precise recollection of the killing of this man, only that he strangled him from the front, and that there was a dead body in the morning.
Malcolm Barlow was about twenty-four but looked much younger. He had spent most of his life in care or in hospitals for the mentally handicapped. His parents were dead and he was totally friendless. He suffered from epilepsy and could, when occasion demanded, induce a fit to extract sympathy. Another method he used to gain attention was to tell heavy lies. He was disruptive
, extremely difficult to handle, and no one who spent any time with him could stand him for long. He would do anything for money, including sleeping with men and attempting blackmail. He would live in hostels or with anyone who picked him up off the street. Originally from Sheffield, where he had a probation officer with whom he kept in touch sporadically, he would turn up in all parts of the country. Although of low intelligence, Malcolm Barlow understood the D.H.S.S. system like a professional, and never missed a date to sign on. In September 1981 he was claiming from a London office.
On 17 September, Dennis Nilsen left his flat at 195 Melrose Avenue at 7.30 a.m. to go to work. On the pavement, his back against a garden wall a few houses away, was Malcolm Barlow. Nilsen asked him if he was all right, had he fallen down or something? Barlow said it was the pills he was taking (for epilepsy), and that his legs had given way. Nilsen told him he should be in hospital and, half supporting him, took him back to the flat and made him a cup of coffee. Nilsen then went to a telephone kiosk in Kendal Avenue (leaving Barlow in the flat to keep an eye on the dog) and dialled 999, asking for an ambulance immediately. It arrived within ten minutes and took Barlow away to Park Royal Hospital.
The next day, 18 September, Malcolm Barlow was released, and signed on as usual with the D.H.S.S. He then went to 195 Melrose Avenue and sat down on the doorstep waiting for Nilsen to come home. He had had some difficulty in finding the house as he had mistakenly taken the address as Number 295. When Nilsen saw him there he said, ‘You’re supposed to be in hospital,’ to which Barlow replied that he was all right now and had been discharged. ‘Well, you’d better come in, then,’ said Nilsen.
Dennis Nilsen cooked him a meal and sat with him to watch television. Nilsen started drinking, and Barlow asked for a drink himself, which Nilsen initially refused on the grounds that alcohol should not be mixed with the pills he was taking. But Barlow was insistent that one or two drinks would not do him any harm, so Nilsen relented. ‘Be it on your own head,’ he said. Barlow had at least two Bacardi and cokes, then went to sleep on the sofa. After about an hour Nilsen went to wake him, slapping his face, but there was no shifting him from a deep slumber. Nilsen thought he might have to call the ambulance again, and sat for twenty minutes before deciding what to do. ‘I’m sorry that he managed to find me again,’ he later wrote.6
The decision to kill Barlow, after sober reflection, proved to be one of the most intractable problems which Nilsen’s defence psychiatrists faced, for it showed a cool deliberation for which no excuse could be found. Barlow was murdered because his presence was a nuisance:
Putting my hands around his throat I squeezed tightly. I held that position for about two or three minutes and released my hold. I didn’t check but I believed him to be now dead … I finished my drinks, switched T.V. off and climbed back into bed. The next morning, not feeling much like prising up the floorboards, I dragged him through into the kitchen and put him under the sink and closed the door. I went to work.7
Malcolm Barlow was the last person to die at Melrose Avenue. There were half a dozen bodies already awaiting final disposal. A total of seven men died between September 1980 and September 1981, most of whom are identified only by a stray physical characteristic recalled by the murderer, such as the skinhead with the words CUT HERE tattooed around his neck (not easy to trace – there are hundreds of men with similar tattoos in London), the long-haired hippy, and the emaciated young man whose legs rose in cycling motions as he died.
The skinhead’s body was hung up by the wrists, the clothes cut away with a knife, and a basin of warm soapy water placed beneath him. Nilsen washed the body down, dried it clean, and took it to bed with him, where intercrural sex took place.
One other anonymous victim was remembered in detail by Nilsen, and the incident needs to be related here for the light this memory sheds upon the murderer’s state of mind, his motives, and his calm after the event:
We climbed our drunken way naked up to the wooden platform bed. Later I remember being straddled over him, my knees each side of him with the back of my head pressed against the ceiling. I was squeezing his neck and remember wanting to see more clearly what he looked like. I felt no struggling. I got up shaking and nearly fell down the ladder. I put all the room lights on and comforted Bleep to go back to sleep. I put a chair beside the ladder and climbed up. I pulled aside the bedding and pulled his ankles until he half hung off the platform. I got on to the chair and pulled his warm, limp, naked body into my arms. I got down from the chair and saw my reflection in a full-length mirror. I just stood there and looked at myself with the lad’s naked body in my arms. His head, arms and legs hung limply and he looked asleep. I could feel his warmth against my skin. I began to have an erection and my heart began to beat fast, my armpits were sweating. I put his legs on the floor and changing my hold on him I hoisted the inert youth on to my shoulder. I washed him in the bath and sat him dripping wet on the loo, and bathed myself in the water. It was an act to purify him and apparently (with hindsight) me also. I carried him into the room and sat his wet body on a dining-chair. His head lay right back. I dried his body carefully with a bath towel and the steam rose from him in the cold air. (When I moved or carried him a deep sigh would come from his throat.) His hair was still damp. Putting him again over my shoulder I carried him up the ladder and laid him on the bed. I dressed him in his socks and my tee-shirt and underpants. I tucked the body into bed and lay beside him naked on top of the bedclothes. I smoked and fetched a stiff drink. A tape was playing of Copeland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’. I was crying. I got into bed and held him close to me. I was whispering to him, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s fine, sleep.’ The music subsided. I explored his body in simulated seduction. I held him so close in my arms that my erect penis was held between his thighs. I stripped off his pants and pulled the bedding back. I took his genitals in my hand and masturbated myself with the other hand … I wiped him clean with a paper towel and lay with him asleep in my arms. I remember first thing in the morning thinking ‘This is absolutely ridiculous,’ and pushed his cold body from me. (I kept him for a week before putting him under the floorboards.) Getting up in the morning I put him sitting naked in the cupboard and went to work. I never thought of him again at work until I came home that evening. I got dressed into my jeans, ate and turned on the T.V. I fed Bleep and the cat. I opened the cupboard and lifted out the body. I cleaned him up. I dressed him and sat him in front of the T.V. in the armchair next to mine. I took his hand and talked to him my comments for the day with cynical remarks about the T.V. programmes. Bleep would find a cosy corner and behave as if he were not even there. Perhaps life to a dog means something warm. I would also take him [the body] on to the armchair with me and hold him safe and secure. I placed him on the table and slowly stripped him. I would always remove his socks last. I would closely examine (slowly) every part of his anatomy. I would roll him on to his stomach and do likewise to his back. His naked body fascinated me. I remember being thrilled that I had full control and ownership of this beautiful body. I would fondle his buttocks and it amazed me that there was no reaction from him to this … I was fascinated by the mystery of death. I whispered to him because I believed he was still really in there. I ran my fingers all over his body and marvelled at its smooth beauty. If he were in there alive it was obvious that his penis was irrevocably dead. It looked so small and insignificant. I would hold him towards me standing up and view in the full length mirror (my arms around him). I would hold him close often, and think that he had never been so appreciated in his life before … After a week I stuck him under the floor. Three days later I removed him (only once). I wanted him to lie there underneath in a bed of white roses.8
Three murders took place at 23 Cranley Gardens. The first was John Howlett, a ne’er-do-well constantly in trouble with the police, who had been virtually evicted by his family at the age of thirteen and had done nothing much since. He had lived at times in houses for backward children, had been impris
oned for stealing, and was a chronic liar. As he boasted of being an ex-Grenadier guardsman (and Dennis Nilsen did not know his surname) John the Guardsman is the nickname which police investigators used. He and Nilsen met twice. On the first occasion, they had a long conversation in a West End pub in December 1981, about two months after Nilsen had moved to Cranley Gardens; they drank for a couple of hours, then parted company. In March 1982, Nilsen was drinking in the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane when John the Guardsman walked in. He recognised Nilsen immediately and went up to join him at the bar. He explained that he was down from High Wycombe for the day and would return there later. He grew impatient at the slow service and suggested they go together somewhere else. They walked to an off-licence and stocked up, then on to Charing Cross underground station where they took the Northern Line to Highgate. From there they walked to 23 Cranley Gardens. Nilsen cooked a meal for them both, and they settled down to watch television, drinking continuously. The late film started (towards midnight) and John the Guardsman said he wouldn’t mind getting his head down; Nilsen muttered assent and continued to watch the film, while John disappeared into the front room (at that stage the bed was kept in the front room). About 1 a.m. Nilsen put the lights out and went to the other room, where he found John asleep in bed. ‘I thought you were getting your head down, I didn’t know you were moving in,’ he said. He roused him and told him that he would call for a taxi to take him home, but John said he didn’t feel much like moving. Nilsen went back to the kitchen and poured himself another rum, then sat on the edge of the bed. He noticed that John the Guardsman had taken most of his clothes off, but he did not feel like getting into bed with him. In fact, he did not want him there at all:
Killing For Company Page 14
