As before, the internal organs were placed in separate bags and not consigned to the space under the floor, where only bones and flesh were to be stored from now on. These bags were taken to the bottom right-hand side of the garden and the contents spilled in the gap between the two fences. There was quite a lot, but it all disappeared in time, feeding the earth and its varied population.
The problem had been shifted, but not solved, and it was to be disastrously magnified within a month by the murder of Nilsen’s twelfth victim. According to his own account, he still did not know when these killings were likely to occur, nor indeed if they were ever to occur again. It was only at the moment of strangulation that he ‘knew’ what was happening, and then nothing, not even a bomb-blast, would have stopped him. ‘What I was doing had to be done – my eyes must have been staring.’25 There was no room under the floorboards for the twelfth victim, so he had to be stuffed in the cupboard under the sink, where he obviously could not remain for long. Besides, the landlords had finally given up their efforts to prise Nilsen out of his flat, and had decided that he might go if they were to be conciliatory, even generous. The agent acting for the landlords commiserated with Nilsen for the trouble caused over the past year, and made a proposition on their behalf. There was a nice self-contained flat at 23 Cranley Gardens which he could have, and he would also receive £1,000 in compensation for the difficulties endured. In effect, of course, he was being bought out, and one might have expected his attachment to principle to raise some objection. But it was a fair offer, and he had more pressing reasons to get out of Melrose Avenue than the agent could ever divine. He was driven round to Cranley Gardens, accepted on the spot, and made arrangements to move at the beginning of October.
First, he had to get rid of the evidence which still littered the flat. Two days before he left, Nilsen built his third bonfire; on his last day of residence, it burned; the day he drove away in the removal van, it was reduced to cinders, the past once more incinerated, denied, renewed. This is how he told the police what he did:
I made a huge well-constructed bonfire using furnishings, cabinets and things from the house, and left a sizeable 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 at this time. Going to the kitchen I opened the doors of the cupboard under the 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 inside. The opening was sealed with more wood and the bonfire set alight. It was positioned about fifteen feet from a point exactly halfway between the french window and the kitchen windows. The fire burned fiercely, extraordinarily fiercely. 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.26
Any rubbish from the flat that he wanted to throw out was consigned to the flames, including the high platform bed he had constructed. One curious neighbour from the same house came to see what was going on. Nilsen told him that he was moving out the next day and was burning rubbish before he went. The neighbour was perfectly satisfied with this explanation, if he was ever really interested, and went on his way.
The next morning, as he waited for the removal van to transport his few belongings in a couple of tea-chests (the £1,000 would be useful perhaps to buy some more furniture), he sat and wondered whether he had left anything behind which a new tenant, or decorators, would notice.
I checked under the floorboards. I could see one or two bits and pieces of clothing maybe, but it was dark. I replaced the floorboards and nailed them up. I checked inside the house and there was nothing I could think of. I went out into the garden. I checked the bottom shed. There was nothing in there, except for damaged items from earlier. I went to the site of the recent fire and became aware of a large pile of ashes. Some of it looked like bone splinters or even small pieces of skull, probably not identifiable as skull to the casual observer. I took the garden roller and rolled it over the site several times hoping to crush yet further any bone fragments there might be. I stood back and had another think. It was then I remembered I had placed the hands and arms of Malcolm Barlow in a small hole next to the bush outside the window.
The larger bones he broke as best he could with a shovel, and flung them over into the waste ground behind the bottom fence. At least one of these turned up in the jaws of a neighbourhood dog some time later. Into the hole by the bush he shovelled several piles of ash. ‘Driving away from 195 Melrose was a great relief.’ It was 5 October 1981.
Sixteen months later, police officers searched the garden at various points indicated by Nilsen, and recovered over a thousand items of bone.
Perhaps it was bound to be a vain and forlorn hope, but as Nilsen settled into his attic flat he nursed the belief that his new conditions would conspire to prevent his criminal activities being repeated. At 23 Cranley Gardens there were no floorboards that could be prised up, nor was there a garden for his exclusive use; ease of disposal no longer existed. Two months after he moved in, there was an incident which greatly encouraged him. In the West End one evening he found a young man, paralysed through drink, lying in the street. He hailed a cab and took the man home to Cranley Gardens, cared for him, gave him his bed and made sure that he slept on his stomach in case he vomited during the night. The next morning he fed him a decent breakfast and went with him to the underground station to see him safely on his way. This was in December 1981. It was, Nilsen says, an act of kindness with no hideous consequences, an interpretation entirely corroborated by the young man, Kevin Sylvester, who declared that he was grateful for Nilsen’s assistance that evening; he had indeed been rescued by a stranger whom he had no reason to regard as anything but benevolent. ‘I felt elated and happy,’ says Nilsen. ‘He was alive and I had not been beyond control or anything. I felt really good and that the past was well behind me.’27
But it was not to be. Three men were strangled by Nilsen at Cranley Gardens, in March and September 1982 and in January 1983, and the methods used for disposing of the bodies were even more repugnant than before. After the first murder occurred, Nilsen placed the body in the wardrobe for a few days while he pondered what to do. The problem required urgent attention as he had a friend, Alan Knox, coming to stay for a short time. He decided that the safest course would be to dissect the body into small pieces and flush it down the lavatory. He carried the body into the bathroom and carried out the dissection in the bath itself. First he opened the stomach area and concentrated on the organs, chopping them on a cutting-board into small two-inch pieces and putting them down the lavatory in loads of about half a pound in weight each time. At this rate it threatened to be a long and laborious business, so he began cutting off large pieces which he boiled on the kitchen stove to make them disintegrate. The boiling could continue while he dealt with further dissection. The head was boiled in the large cooking pot, followed by the hands and feet, and the ribs, cut from the body one by one. Once boiled free of flesh, the bones were separated into smaller fragments and simply thrown in the dustbin, to be removed in the normal way by the council’s refuse collectors. Meanwhile, flesh, hair and organs were sent down into the sewage. Nilsen was then left with some large bones which still had some flesh attached. The shoulder blades he hurled over the back garden fence into waste ground, while the skull, arm-bones, leg-bones and pelvis he placed in several bags, sprinkled with a large amount of salt, in the tea-chest in the corner of the room. He packed the tea-chest with material, and covered it with the red curtain he had salvaged from Melrose Avenue. There it stayed while Alan Knox was visiting, and there it remained until police removed the tea-chest and i
ts contents eleven months later. (In the summer of 1982 he entertained an Irish youth for a weekend, without thinking once of the tea-chest in the corner.)
A similar procedure was followed with the next victim, except that he was put straight in the bath the day after the crime. He stayed in the bath for three days, Nilsen periodically changing the cold water in which he lay and, of course, still going to work every day (he had by now been posted to Kentish Town). On the fourth day he dissected the body in the bath, boiling the head, hands and feet and putting the rest into black plastic bags. One bag was hidden in a cubbyhole at the end of the bath (removed by Nilsen and placed in the wardrobe the day of his arrest), the other joined the remains in the tea-chest. Some flesh and organs were flushed down the lavatory,fn4 but it appears likely that Nilsen took some larger pieces out of the flat in a bag and dumped them. In December 1982 Fred Bearman saw a black plastic bag lying on its side next to his allotment in Roundwood Park, Willesden. It was open and had been, he thought, ravaged by dogs. The contents were spilling out. He saw what he thought was a rib-cage with a central spinal column, but he had no idea what kind of animal it could have come from. It looked quite horrific and revolting. Later that day he took his flat-mate, David Anfam, to have a look. Anfam thought it might have been the remains of a Christmas dinner, but he had never seen anything quite like it. Neither man touched the bag or reported it. Four days later it had gone, presumably collected by dustmen. What Bearman found was, however, too far away from Nilsen’s flat to be positively connected with him, even with hindsight. Much more significant was the bag of entrails found by Robert Wilson and reported to the police in the summer of 1981 (see Appendix). They were in Dollis Hill Lane by Gladstone Park, where Nilsen frequently walked his dog. When asked about this, Nilsen thought it ‘impossible’ that he could have had a hand in it, but he now concedes that in a drunken condition he may well have discarded parts of a victim in this way. All that remained of this man were ‘a bunch of keys, a digital watch, legs and pelvis, arms and a head.’
The last man to be murdered, Stephen Sinclair, was in the process of being butchered in much the same way as the previous two when Nilsen was arrested on 9 February 1983. The crepe bandages on Sinclair’s arms were used to tie the bags into which he was placed. Dismemberment had not proceeded very far, and police were able to assemble the parts in the mortuary of Hornsey Police Station.
Dennis Nilsen’s response to the outrage felt by most people who know how he disposed of the bodies is one of frank incomprehension. ‘I can never quite understand a traditional and largely superstitious fear of the dead and corpses,’ he writes.28 Even when he was overwhelmed with remorse for his crimes in the months following his arrest, he saw no need to apologise for having ‘desecrated’ the bodies, except once when he acknowledged that he had denied the families of his victims the right to a gravestone. Other remand prisoners at Brixton pointed out to him that while they, as possible criminals, could conceive the act of murder without too much trembling, they could not understand, let alone forgive, the violation of dismemberment. It is this aspect of his crimes which has caused the most public revulsion, but to Nilsen it appears to be the least important. He was faced with a problem, he says, which he had to resolve somehow. He regards the murders themselves as unpardonable and disgusting, but the disposal of remains as merely the inevitable consequence that flowed from them. In a much-quoted sentence, written in the cell at Hornsey Police Station, Nilsen said, ‘The victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing-up is a clinically ordinary task.’ This is an attitude not altogether unfamiliar to psychiatrists who have had dealings with murderers, and some maintain that it shows an innate grasp of logic which a feeling of outrage would distort. The wrongful act, in their view, is to kill; once a victim is dead, no amount of grotesque behaviour towards the body should be allowed to divert one’s horror from the murder itself. One cannot hurt a corpse, after all, and if one is more outraged by dissection of the dead than by extinction of the living then one’s moral priorities have gone awry. Murderers do not generally suffer from this confusion. Nilsen’s attitude towards the dead is catastrophically confused in many other respects.
Nilsen took refuge in work with ever-growing commitment. Miss Leaman was grateful that he seemed happy to take work home, including the drawing of graphs and charts which most people avoid, and that he took pains with them.
Before Christmas of 1982, he received a telephone call from his mother in Scotland. It was the first time they had spoken in years. Mrs Scott regularly wrote Dennis a letter on his birthday, and sent a Christmas card every year, but he replied to neither. Her last letter had been typical of her usual style. ‘Dear Dennis,’ she had written, ‘Well, you’ll be another year older on the 23rd and I still don’t know how you are getting on. It will be seven years come Christmas since you have been home.’ She had said that she was enjoying herself at last, after bringing up seven children, and wondered if Dennis was ever thinking of marriage. This plea for news, like the others, had been ignored. Now here she was suddenly on the telephone. Janet Leaman remembers that he flew into her office and talked about the call for twenty minutes. While declaring indifference to his mother, his very garrulity on the subject betrayed him. He was pleased. It was a slender sign of normal human contact.
In addition to the fifteen murders admitted by Nilsen, there were a further seven attempts at murder (by his own reckoning) which failed for one reason or another. Of these, four people have been identified; the rest presumably either walk the streets today unaware that they were nearly killed, or have decided for their own purposes to keep silent.
Paul Nobbs
On 23 November 1981, Paul Nobbs, a nineteen-year-old student of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London, decided to miss his lecture and go instead to buy some books at Foyles. First, he thought he would have a drink at the Golden Lion in Dean Street, where he arrived about 1.30 p.m. He fell into conversation with a man who introduced himself as Des Nilsen and they chatted for about an hour. ‘He wasn’t the kind of run-of-the-mill Golden Lion type and seemed very intelligent,’ said Nobbs. They left the pub together and spent about fifteen minutes in Foyles, when Nilsen suggested Nobbs should accompany him to his flat in Muswell Hill for something to eat. Nobbs agreed. The date was seven weeks after Nilsen’s move into 23 Cranley Gardens, and a few weeks before the happy encounter with Kevin Sylvester. It was also, incidentally, Nilsen’s thirty-sixth birthday.
They stopped at Sainsbury’s on the way home and bought some chops, some rum and some Coca-Colas, and arrived at the flat in time for the television news at 5.45 p.m. They spent the evening, after Nilsen had cooked a meal, drinking and watching ‘Panorama’, at which point Nobbs telephoned his mother in Watford and said he would be home soon. Later, he felt rather ill as a result of the Bacardi, and called again to say that he would not come home after all, but would stay with friends. The two men undressed and got into bed; some tentative sexual activity took place, but they were both too tired to bring it to a conclusion. They fell asleep.
At two in the morning, Paul Nobbs woke up with a throbbing headache and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He sat on the sofa for about ten minutes, trying to contain the raging pain in his head and feeling nauseous. He had no idea why. Nilsen stood by the door. Eventually, they both went back to bed, and Nobbs fell asleep within five minutes.
At 6 a.m. he woke again, turned on the light and saw himself in the mirror above the kitchen sink. There was a deep red mark around his neck and across his throat, his face was red, bruised and sore, and the whites of his eyes had turned completely red. His throat felt sore and he was shaking. Nilsen got up and told him, ‘God, you look awful,’ and advised him to see a doctor. Before he left, Nilsen gave him his address and telephone number, with the information that he could find him by taking the underground to Highgate or a Number 134 bus. He hoped they might meet again.
Nobbs staggered down the street, barely a
ble to keep his balance. He went to Malet Street and met his Polish language tutor who immediately arranged for him to be seen at the clinic of University College Hospital in Gower Street, just a walk from the building. Another student, Christopher George, accompanied Nobbs, who was shaking so badly that he knocked over a coffee cup in the waiting-room and could not light his own cigarette. Doctors gave him tranquillisers and eye ointment and confirmed that his symptoms were consistent with a classic case of strangulation. He took about five days to recuperate at home, and the mark around his neck remained for three months. He did not report the matter to the police, and told doctors he had been mugged by a stranger.
Paul Nobbs did not care to think about the incident, but he realised that if indeed someone had tried to strangle him, it must have been Des Nilsen. Yet this realisation did not conform with his impression of Nilsen: ‘He seemed a fairly reasonable man and in no way strange.’
Nilsen says, ‘The clearest recollection I’ve got is that I had a tie around his neck and he was on the bed. I was panicking. I remember trying to revive him because his heart was still beating. I must have thrown a glass of cold water in his face as well.’29
The two men never met again, although Paul Nobbs did spy Nilsen in the Golden Lion about a year later and avoided talking to him. ‘I am very happy that he did not die,’ says Nilsen now.30
Killing For Company Page 18
