Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  The above lines were written while Nilsen was on remand in Brixton Prison. He does not say whether the spectre of insanity ever splintered his consciousness before arrest, but there were times when he was brutally reminded of the dark mad new life which now ran parallel to his visibly perceived existence and which he strove mostly to forget: ‘A fly buzzing around would sometimes remind me of another dimension under the floor. I would dismiss these intrusive thoughts as though these events had happened to someone else other than me.’4 But at least twice a day he could not avoid being reminded, for he sprayed the flat, morning and evening, to kill the flies as they emerged from their pupas, or put deodorant sticks under the floor. A tenant in the house, Miss Adler, mentioned the pervasive smell, which Nilsen attributed to general decay of the building. He felt that both parts of his life were continually ‘spying on each other’, and developed the ability to step into and out of either world. He even found it exciting to reflect that he might be arrested any day.

  Various items scattered around the flat also pricked the memory – a watch, a St Christopher medallion, a carving fork, a tobacco tin, pieces of a camera – but they seem not to have disturbed Nilsen unduly: ‘The small objects belonging to the dead became part of the household. I did not feel that it was theft as their owners hadn’t really gone away.’ So indifferent was he to the suggestive power of objects that he wore a watch taken from one victim and gave another away to a rent boy on the game. Clothing he generally threw into the dustbin.

  Music, on the other hand, did have the power to frighten him as nothing else could; hence his destruction of records. At Christmas in 1979 he organised the office party, supervising the catering, cooking for eighty people, costing and planning. As usual he put all his energies into the task, and there is a card of gratitude signed by about fifty staff members in affectionate terms which testifies to its success. But he made the mistake of taking along some of his tapes from Melrose Avenue and leaving it to somebody else to play them:

  The music started, I was frozen in shock. It was the classical rock track – his and my music. My mind raced. A few days before he had been killed and I had him under the floorboards. I couldn’t touch another drop all evening. Here were two different and opposite worlds in collision.5

  Back home he found it difficult to sleep, the music still running through his head. Then he shouted out loud, ‘Right, if you want to listen to the music then damn well come out and listen to it.’ Taking the body from under the boards, he sat it on a dining-chair, but left the carrier bag over its head as he did not want to look at the face. He put on a tape, poured himself a drink, and stood naked and trembling for many hours. The next day he tried to busy himself cleaning up the office after the party, to prevent his thoughts from returning to Melrose Avenue. ‘He was back there waiting for me.’6

  It was established at the trial that the second victim, killed in December 1979, was the Canadian Kenneth Ockendon. A whole year had passed since the first murder, and Nilsen was confident, at that stage, that the nightmare would not be repeated. ‘The shock, grief and horror which followed the death of Ken Ockendon hit me like an “A” bomb,’ he says. ‘He was my friend. I liked him a lot. His music still haunted me. When I heard classical rock [L.S.O.] one night, I think I raised the floorboards and begged his forgiveness.’

  The office Christmas party, on 14 December, took place less than two weeks after the death of Kenneth Ockendon.

  There were other times when the reality of his deeds overwhelmed him and he could not maintain the fiction that they had been committed by ‘someone else’ who inhabited him:

  Long-haired hippy, why did I bring you back? I tremble at your death and permanent presence. I brush the hair from your eyes. I try to shake you alive. I want to say that I’m sorry and see you walk away. I try to inflate your lungs, hopelessly, but nothing of you is working at all.

  He then took a knife, sat in the armchair, and contemplated suicide, but Bleep came in, wagging her tail, and he sank to his knees, sobbing. He got up, made coffee and smoked, and spat at his image in the mirror to obliterate it.

  I undress the man’s body and wash it there on the floor. I look at the pale naked corpse and hold out my hands and stare at these instruments of death. I wipe the body clean and dry and put the clothing back on it (except his underpants soiled in death). When he is under the floor my shaking hands reach for the bottle and headphones.

  This account, written with hindsight, sounds melodramatic and totally out of tune with the bland, emotionless statements he gave to the police. Nilsen’s explanation for this is that the statements were purely factual, designed to give evidence which would secure his conviction, whereas his private sufferings would be of no use to them; his civil service training made him stick to the point under questioning. On the other hand this latter account, told in the present tense years after the event, may indicate his vision of how he would have liked to have felt, or ought to have felt, for his moral sense remained alive in spite of his immoral actions. (He told the police that he was amazed he had no tears for the victims, implying that he knew perfectly well that tears would be expected from a ‘normal’ man.) But we also know that he did once succeed in bringing back to life a man whom he had tried to kill, a fact which lends weight to his contention that he was often besieged with the emotions of fear, horror and remorse, and kept them to himself. ‘I feel a personal remorse not open to public expression.’

  Another similar memory is told with the conviction and force of authentic truth:

  The domestic debris of the night before litters the back room of my flat at 195 Melrose Avenue, NW2. My skull seems shrunk by the pressure of last night’s drinking. Sitting on the chair I survey the chaotic scene in fuddled concentration. There is a dead body on the floor and it is still quite early in the morning. Bleep comes up to me and I give her the assurance that all is well to keep her happy. I kneel beside the body and my hands are shaking. I undo the neck-tie from the neck of the body and the face is puffed out and red. I turn him over on to his back and a sigh escapes from his lungs. I stand and stare down at my unbelievable result. I sit and stare, with shaking hands, and draw deeply on my cigarette. ‘Hell, fucking hell, how long can this go on and on and on?’ I think. I take Bleep up into my arms and say out loud, ‘Bleep, what’s going to become of us, who will look after you when they come for me? They’re all gone, one after the other, it was me, me, nobody else but me. This is all my work. I must be mad, insane. They’re dead forever by these hands.’ I hold Bleep to me and cry and my tears turn to rage. I overturn the coffee table containing all the glasses, cans, ashtrays, mugs and things and bury my head in my hands. I take up a plastic folder containing my union correspondence and throw it across the room. It strikes the top of the music centre and the playing arm is dislodged on to an L.P. which had been turning all night on the turntable … I’m drifting away from all my present problems with my thoughts crowded out by the music. The applause at the end of the music track greets me as I stand dazed in the centre of the room in black recognition of the wreckage strewn around me. I sit down and work myself up to cleaning up the mess and seeing to the dead man on the floor. I don’t care what they think upstairs about the noise.7

  Nilsen could never tell when another murder might occur. He naively and rather desperately hoped that the latest would remain the last. He claimed that he never went out pub-crawling to look for a victim, a proposition that the police were happy to accept. What he did do was to go out and look for company, and it is important to remember that there were more people who accompanied him back to his flat and were left unharmed than there were those who died. ‘I could never beforehand make a deliberate choice to kill,’ he says. The crucial word here is ‘beforehand’; how far in advance of the event is ‘beforehand’? Sinclair was throttled with a tie with a piece of string attached to it; they were knotted together. Nilsen woke up on the morning of 27 January 1983 to find a dead man in the armchair and on the floor a piece of st
ring with tie attached. Recognising the significance of this, D.C.S. Chambers questioned him closely:

  Q. Where do you keep this piece of string?

  A. I must have made it up that night.

  Q. When?

  A. That night. It must have been that night.

  Q. I’m going to show you exhibit BL/8. Is that what you’re talking about?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Did he struggle?

  A. I don’t know. I thought it would be quick. In the morning you can tell if there was a struggle because things would be in disarray, but there was nothing. Nothing was knocked over.

  Q. Are you saying that you made up this string solely for the purpose of killing the man?

  A. I don’t remember making it up. There’s a bit of the tie missing.

  Q. Where’s the other bit?

  A. I don’t know.

  Q. Yesterday you told us that you had killed three people in the flat and that Sinclair was the last one. Did you use this piece of string to kill the first two?

  A. No, because that combination of string and tie could not have been in existence. The morning I met Sinclair that tie was hanging up in the wardrobe.

  Q. What did you kill the other two with?

  A. A belt or a sock, something like that. I’m not really sure.8

  Chambers was trying to establish that some degree of premeditation was necessary in order to put together the instrument of murder, to make a knot of the string and tie; at some point before the attack Nilsen must have known it was going to take place and so prepared for it. How long before? He would not say, and claimed it was not until the next day that he could tell whether or not there had been a struggle. Other murders were committed with an ordinary tie, with the hands, or with whatever was near, such as a cord or a piece of upholstery. None of these would have needed time to assemble, so that the moment of murder could have been a sudden impulse without preparation.

  Did he not worry that the drinking might provoke another attack? ‘While drinking, the previous killings had gone completely from my memory.’9 What, then, was the motive which made victims of some and left others unscathed, bearing in mind that none of them, while living, were the object of sexual attraction or activity, and that only six of them became so after death? ‘I can’t think of any slot to place myself in!’ he writes. ‘I can’t begin to grasp it.’10

  Why, if violence is so alien to Nilsen’s principles, instinct and nature, did he kill? He was, he says, the most unlikely killer he could think of. It happened as if by ‘casual whim of nature’.

  I wish there was a clear view on motive, conventionally speaking, then I could come to grips with the problem. Sex maniac? (I suppose I could lie and say they refused to have sex and I killed them.) No, that’s not true. Robbery? No, impossible. Sadism? No, the thought of receiving or inflicting pain is abhorrent to me. Necrophiliac? The thought of sex within the sacredness of a dead body turns me right off.fn1 Hate or vengeance? No, I can’t remember any hateful feeling to any one of them. Insanity? No, I don’t feel insane. Temporary insanity? Perhaps, but drink-induced temporary ‘anything’ cannot be an excuse for not keeping off the stuff. What I am is totally irresponsible.11

  Another of the disquieting aspects of this case is the emergence of a motive which seems so bizarre, so incongruous, so unequal to the enormity of murder itself that it is almost insulting. We have already seen that Nilsen would often place a body on a chair in front of the television days after the death and then conduct a weirdly commonplace conversation with it, and also that he would carefully wash and dry the body to make it clean and comfortable. The stark, unpalatable fact is that Nilsen killed for company, to have someone to talk to, someone to care for. Nilsen’s own explanation of his feelings runs as follows:

  In none of these cases am I conscious of feeling any hate towards any of the victims … I remember going out to seek company and companionship, which perhaps would lead to a personal sexual and social relationship being established. On these excursions I cannot remember thinking about death, killing, or past events. I was living for that moment only, and for the future. I would invite some people back with me, others would invite themselves. Sex was always a secondary consideration. I wanted a warm relationship and someone to talk to. Also I wanted to be a material provider and give hospitality. Because of the effects of drinking sex would (or would not) happen the next morning. Through the night it is a nice relaxing feeling to have someone warm beside you in bed. I would never plan to kill anyone. In a sudden inexplicable act, I would be a bit dazed, shocked and shaking all over afterwards. I had a feeling of hopelessness, grief, and a sense of emptiness, and even if I knew the body to be dead I felt that the personality was still within, aware and listening to me. I was the forlorn seeker after a relationship which was always beyond my reach. I felt somehow inadequate as a human being … Sex was not a factor of continuity with the victims (looking back and trying to work it out). The only similarity was a need not to be alone. It was to have someone to talk to and be with. They were not all homeless tramps, etc. Not all young homeless men who came to my flat were attacked or killed. Not all were even homosexual or bisexual. The reason that some were homosexual was mainly because they would come to the pubs which I frequented. I was approached marginally more times by those liaisons than I approached them … I sometimes imagine that I may have felt that I applied a relieving pressure on a life as a benevolent act, in that the subjects were ultimately free from life’s pain.12

  One is bound to ask, whose life was being relieved, the victim’s or the killer’s? The confusion is inherent in this killer’s mind. He told the police that at the time of murder he felt that his only reason for existing was to carry out that act at that moment. More revealing is the passage which follows, wherein confusion of identity is patent: ‘I never sensed the feeling of killing as such, only a feeling of stopping something terrible from happening, a compulsion to squeeze the person by the throat to relieve and absolve him and me from something terrible.’13 Nilsen himself underlined these words, but others might feel that the words ‘and me’ could be emphasised more tellingly. He found the interviews with a psychiatrist painful because they forced him to relive the details of each murder. It was bad enough, he wrote, when he had to keep control during the sessions at Hornsey Police Station:

  I cannot bring myself to keep remembering these incidents over and over again. These are ugly images totally alien to me. I seem to have not participated in them, merely stood by and watched them happen – enacted by two other players – like a central camera.14

  The significance of this is, once again, the detachment, the distance, the implication that the identity of the actors is uncertain. Is he killer, victim, or producer? The roles are malleable, not fixed and finite. Nilsen’s identity floats in and out of reality.

  There is not only confusion of role in the killer’s mind, but a potentially significant confusion of meaning. Back in the Shetlands Islands many years before, we noticed that Nilsen’s concept of death was strangely intertwined with his concept of love, an amalgamation further manifested in his mirror fantasies, wherein narcissistic love could only be expressed if the image of himself was still enough to appear dead and, later, was made pallid to simulate a corpse. How to interpret his attitude towards Sinclair at the moment of killing (‘I had a feeling of easing his burden with my strength’) unless it is seen as a grotesquely distorted version of the act of giving love? The desire to ease suffering, the care lavished upon victims after death, the wish to cherish and possess, the posthumous admiration bestowed in front of the mirror (‘He had never been so appreciated in his life before’), all point to the almost inconceivable and unpalatable possibility that the act of murder was, in this case, a diabolical corruption of the act of love.

  Of course, this reading of events cannot hold true for those murders in which there was little or no element of love, as with the emaciated stranger whom Nilsen did not even wish to look at after death, though the
re might still be a confusion of role at the moment of murder. But to pursue further the theme of love and death being hopelessly muddled, there is an interesting poem written by Nilsen on remand, in which the words ‘evil’ and ‘love’ change places in the course of the writing, and ‘killing’ in the first stanza becomes ‘loving’ in the last:

  Confusion in the fact of being evil,

  ‘Born into evil, all the time?’

  When evil is the produce

  Can there be a doubt?

  When killing men has always been a crime.

  What can I say in septic mitigation

  When innocents bear heavily on my soul.

  Living like a coward

  Safe behind the Crown,

  Guilty of a devastating toll.

  There is honour in killing the enemy,

  There is glory in a fighting, bloody end.

  But violent extirpation

  On a sacred trust,

  To squeeze the very life from a friend?

  Sentencing the fact of being evil,

  Dying of evil all the time.

  When love is the produce

  Can there be a doubt?

  When loving men has always been a crime.15

  I have omitted three stanzas, but they do not alter the drift of the poem. (Nilsen denies there is confusion. He is guilty of ‘killing men’, but has all his life been regarded as guilty of ‘loving men’. His poem muses on the contrast.) Another poem that he wrote after having read Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, whose metric rhythm he echoes, conveys similar ideas:

  It’s now the turning tide of time

  When all will ask me, why?

  I sleep, the only company

  Forever with me lie;

  And is there love in such a thing

  When everything must die?16

  Nilsen found that murder was the route which his disturbed emotions chose to express their purpose and their need. ‘Do they not know that I have lost the things I love?’ he asks. ‘That I have killed everything of love that I need? Do they really think that I enjoyed any of it?’ To summarise, then, Nilsen went to pubs to search for company which might relieve his loneliness; he found some temporary companions who came and went; he found others, less fortunate, whom he wanted to keep and to care for; and these died before they could refuse his attention by walking away. But, ‘in place of love I had only made death …17 I had cared for them to such a bizarre degree that I had sacrificed their lives and ultimately my own in an unbalanced obsession.’18