So deeply did he think about this other prisoner that Nilsen hoped their trials would be concurrent and that they would pass into history together. (He was gratified to the extent that they would share the same solicitor and advocate.) The qualities and faults which he saw in the man were more often than not the qualities and faults which he wanted to possess himself. ‘He is the timeless expression of me, myself. His happiness is my happiness. His misery is my misery.’ It is not too much to say that he was once more engaged in an attempt to shed his identity and leave the shameful skin of Dennis Nilsen to rot upon the prison floor. Most significant of all, perhaps, was the fact that he had first seen this prisoner lying on a stretcher as he was brought to the hospital wing following a hunger strike.
Over and over again, as he lay in his cell, Nilsen ruminated on the past. ‘I have led a strange life so far,’ he wrote,
schoolboy, soldier, chef, projectionist, policeman, clerical officer, executive officer, drunk, sexualist (male and female), murderer, animal lover, independent trades union officer, debater, champion of social causes, dogooder, dissector of murder victims, grand vizier, and probably ‘lifer’. If there is a god he must have a weird and jumbled sense of priorities – job finder, peace campaigner, amateur film maker, mine of useless information, administrator, pen-pusher, detained prisoner, solitary reaper, killer of the innocent, unremorseful, reformed character, enigma – now rapidly becoming a national receptacle into which all the nation will urinate, warped monster, madman, ungodly, cold and alone.11
On 9 May 1983, D.A. Nilsen resigned from the civil service with a formal letter addressed to his superior at Kentish Town, Janet Leaman, the resignation to take effect from midnight on 22 May. ‘I have in my time tried to do the best for my colleagues,’ he wrote, ‘and for the greater public interest in the commissioning of my official and union duties in the M.S.C. I hope that I can be forgiven for the excesses of my professional temperament.’12
Meanwhile, the excesses of his emotional disorder were, beyond all else, the main preoccupation of his mind during the summer of 1983.
‘Emotions are the most toxic substances known to man,’ wrote Nilsen. He had, for the past four years, been reluctant to examine himself too deeply for fear of what he might discover. If his responses to stimuli were not subject to his will, but had an energy of their own which used him as a vessel, it was better to leave them alone than to engage in a struggle one was bound to lose, and whose outcome could not fail to be catastrophic to the psyche. The enforced contemplation of a remand in custody brought him to this conflict at last. ‘I have now taken possession of my own emotions,’ he wrote (again implying that they existed independently of him), and he emerged from the exercise battered, reduced, exhausted. The events he rehearsed in detail, and the analysis he brought to bear on them, were of a kind that in general happened to someone else, casually glimpsed in a newspaper or overheard in a bar. ‘Now the someone else is me.’13 Dennis Nilsen would have the rare and fearsome opportunity to peer into the mind of a murderer, knowing that murderer was himself. How would it be possible to absorb and digest such knowledge? What would it be like to face squarely the recognition of evil in oneself?
‘I go through a personal hell each day,’ wrote Nilsen from Brixton Prison. ‘I know that I have no hate in me … what made you kill all those people? … Part of me was aware of what it wanted but it never took the trouble to explain why to my sober conscious mind.’14 He went on to talk of ‘slaying the dragon within’, presumably by his efforts at self-understanding, and this idea was to be enlarged, as the weeks progressed, until it suggested the deeper notion that the murders themselves might have been a misdirected or transferred attempt to kill the devil which inhabited him.
When he came to read the depositions against him, he perceived, as anyone would, that the tone of his answers during police interrogation was cold and even. ‘I was unburdening a heavy weight on my conscience for four years,’ he said, ‘and I was anxious to get everything out as quickly as possible.’15
There had been no breaking down, no display of emotion. Whatever tears there were lay deep, and had to be summoned. ‘It must be the most wonderful gift to be able to throw your arms around someone and just weep,’ he wrote.16 There is evidence, however, that the tears did rise spontaneously one day in his cell, not from the recall of his own crimes, but as the result of an incident which brought vividly before him the vision of those crimes without the intercession of voluntary memory.
An inmate whose name we must protect (not Martin) had tried to hang himself and failed. He was left looking drugged, with staring eyes, scarcely human. When Nilsen first caught sight of him, the experience was as powerful as a catharsis, stirring pity and fear until they churned and overwhelmed him. ‘I hope he has not suffered irreparable brain damage,’ he wrote. ‘In his pain and condition I see all the effects of my past and of this case. I am the guilty man who has caused this pain in others.’ He questioned one of the hospital officers who, according to Nilsen, confirmed that brain damage was a possible outcome. Nilsen in his cell scrawled across the page, ‘NO NO NO NO NO NO NO’, the words progressively more illegible and unformed, finishing in a desperate scribble as his pen ran away to the right in a jagged line. It is the mark of a man about to burst, and is clearly genuine.17 In fact, the other prisoner recovered in the course of time.fn5
The only mitigation Nilsen could find as he searched his soul was the certainty that he had not maliciously planned any of the deaths for which he was responsible. He wrote as much in his letter to D.C.S. Chambers, to which reference has been made, but one might cynically expect a statement of the sort in a letter which would go to the prosecution, as it touched crucially upon the issue of premeditation. He returned to it again and again in less guarded moments. Pondering the charges of attempted murder, he wrote, ‘It is my belief that whatever prompted the initial attacks on these occasions … they were not committed with a great deal of resolution and force.’ The assaults were sudden, and equally suddenly discontinued. If he had wanted to kill a man who was already unconscious, surely he could have done so? Why did he stop? Why did he spend hours afterwards trying to revive Carl Stottor? These are the thoughts of a man who has seen the demon in himself, and recoiled; he must find the angel in himself too, to preserve sanity. The future of his self-regard depends on the existence of that angel.
Sometimes, too, Nilsen would turn the blame upon ‘society’. Perhaps nothing of the nightmare would have occurred, he implied, if we lived in a social ambience where people cared about their neighbours, where society as a whole did not permit homelessness and despair in the young. There is confusion here. At moments, Nilsen seems to suggest that his victims might not have become victims if there had been people to take notice of them. The newspapers, he told Mr Chambers, would have a field day after the trial, but the ‘Des Nilsens, Stephen Sinclairs, Billy Sutherlands and Martyn Duffeys will still stagger along their blind worried way, unnoticed and alone. Society is more interested in a death than in a life.’18 By placing himself among the victims, Nilsen wants to express solidarity with them against an unfeeling world. Perhaps, he thought, he made the mistake of trying to take on his shoulders alone all the care that the selfish world refused (just as he had tried to represent all the workers at his branch and been largely despised for it); the emotional pressure was too fierce. ‘Part of their destruction [the victims] may have been my frustration in not being able to solve their problems.’19 It sounds absurd, but Nilsen may partly have murdered in anguished assault against social injustice; he was not killing individuals, but society itself. And what had society done? Apart from neglecting its duty to care for the individual, it had neglected Nilsen himself. So the confusion is circular. General anger against social crimes is honed down to specific anger against neglect of Des Nilsen. If people had cared, they would have seen the plight of Stephen Sinclair, his arms cut to pieces in self-laceration; they might also have seen the obscure and distant Mr Nilsen. ‘
My signals were going out right from the start but nobody seems to have bothered to notice them.’20
Such a displaced view of responsibility could not be sustained for long. Ultimately, Nilsen could not bring himself to shirk the truth or shift the blame. Self-analysis must be pursued:
Killing is wrong, and I have reduced my own principles to ashes. The extent of this calamity is immeasurable and the responsibility for it lies with me alone. It would be a just result if I were taken from the courtroom and hanged so that I might be free from guilt. It would also appease public opinion whose mob enthusiasm is more appreciative of sixteen corpses than fifteen. I have strangled to death these men and youths. I have stolen from them their rights to life … my murders were for no useful end as murders never are.21
I believe my offences are motivated by emotional disorders under unique conditions of extreme mental pressure which release areas in the subconscious when I have lost control … I cannot conceive myself breaking the law and injuring people for material or financial gain, jealousy, sexual lust, hate or sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain. Mine is a disease peculiar to me which I should have sought to cure or control. There is no excuse for taking the lives of fifteen innocent people and trying to kill eight others. The buck stops here.22
It would not do for me to escape just punishment. I am an irresponsible selfish bastard who deserves everything that is coming to him … Society has a right to call me a cold mad killer. No other category fits my results.23
These passages reflect the mood of Nilsen’s most acute depression during the weekend of 29 April to 2 May, when he was sending out letters declaring that he was unfit to be with humans and should be considered as already in the tomb. That crisis, it will be remembered, followed directly upon his alleged rejection by church-going prisoners. As the mood subsided, it left in its wake a revelation: as soon as he saw himself in the tomb, Dennis Nilsen also saw the last memory of his grandfather, lying silent in a box in the front room at 47 Academy Road, Fraserburgh. In a flash, all paths met in that box – his near-drowning in the sea, his attachment to the earth in Shetland, his narcissistic fantasies with the mirror image, his presentation of himself as a corpse to be adored, the feeling of love (or anger?) as he killed, the ritual washing and caring for dead men at his feet. Coolly, Nilsen surveyed his situation in the light of this new insight. It had come as an intuition and was pursued with labour. Might it also contain the key to his emotional disorder?
I could only relate to a dead image of the person I could love. The image of my dead grandfather would be the model of him at his most striking in my mind. It seems to have been necessary for them to have been dead in order that I could express those feelings which were the feelings I held sacred for my grandfather. It was a pseudo-sexual infantile love which had not developed and matured. It has taken me until now to identify it and grow out of it practically overnight … great relief. Self-knowledge arrived too late to save the dead or myself … misplaced love out of its time and out of its mind.
In the post-death awakening these men were as I last remembered Andrew Whyte, the sight of them brought me a bitter sweetness and a temporary peace and fulfilment. I could not see this at the time, it is all clear to me now.24
Nilsen advanced this hypothesis tentatively. He knew it was imperfect, and held spurious logic. He looked forward to the more professional views of the psychiatrists, Dr Bowden and Dr MacKeith. Moreover, the explanation, if such it was, did not promise the end of the road. Far from it. Several dams were unblocked by this neat conclusion to his ruminations, the long-delayed responses to his crimes suddenly released. He now thought he could see with clarity, and what he saw was hideous. The first reaction was to open, at last, the way to remorse.
On 10 February 1983 Nilsen had been taken by the police to his former address at 195 Melrose Avenue, and had pointed out exactly where they should dig in order to find forensic evidence of human remains. At that stage, his purpose was practical, his method speedy and accurate. With the passage of time and the temporary relief at having adumbrated a possible solution to the mystery of these events, Nilsen now felt quite differently towards those who had died at Melrose Avenue. Released from the shackles of incomprehension, he had the freedom to test and explore his regret:
I look back with shame that the small space on that living-room floor could have witnessed twelve deaths, and that small back lot, twelve incinerations … I made the garden, I looked after its growing things. The high cost of fertiliser has ruined me… That ground will always have their dust in it.25
How can I ever make amends or respond to the suffering and loss caused to the next of kin of those whom I have killed? … Will they forever hate me, or will they forgive me in the fullness of time?26
At times he thought it might have been better to leave them in peace at Melrose Avenue and not tell the police they were there. At other times, he forced himself to bring them back, to people his cell with their images, by drawing the dead bodies as he remembered them. This portfolio, entitled ‘Sad Sketches’ (some of which are reproduced here), would be ghoulish in the extreme were it done for amusement. Nilsen says he was filled with self-loathing as he put pen to paper, and wrote in the margin around the pictures what he was feeling. ‘They are as I remember them – worse when you can recall the detail of real flesh, hair, and skin.’27
He reserved a special degree of remorse for Ken Ockendon and his parents, for many reasons. In the first place, Ockendon obviously had family ties, and came from a home with love in it; had he lived, he would have had somewhere to return to. Secondly, Nilsen and Ockendon had been happy together for a whole day, much longer than had been the case with any of the other victims, who generally died after an acquaintance of three or four hours. The death of Ockendon seemed even more inexplicable to Nilsen than the others. It was not only arbitrary, not only impulsive, but a cruel and horrid parody of what might have been. The two men could have continued as friends. His attitude towards Ockendon’s parents underwent several metamorphoses. He felt protective, and did not wish them to know that he had met their son at a pub frequented by homosexuals; this is why he withheld the name of the pub from the police. (To this day he has no idea whether Ockendon was homosexual or not – their conversation never touched upon the subject.) Then he longed for a romantic redemption which he expressed in high-flown language:
To Mr and Mrs Ockendon, what can I say? Apologise? I would be sorrier than they at his loss by my hands … I feel forgiven by him. All he asks is that I spend a lifetime in his chains and make him real to those he never knew. I must pay for their [Mr and Mrs Ockendon’s] pain.28
Forgetting for a moment the offensive presumption that he could ‘outdo’ the Ockendons in their grief, the passage throws additional light on Nilsen’s complex personality. Suffering in the abstract (the sort of suffering inflicted by a faceless state authority, for instance) he cannot endure. Personalised suffering, as a penance for someone, carrying his chains, he can understand, even welcome. He positively enjoys the responsibility of ‘standing in’ for Ken Ockendon, or of representing him in some way, of speaking for him. To do so would be a form of giving, a form of love. One move further, and Nilsen almost becomes Ockendon the better to represent him. However distasteful the idea that he could somehow replace the murdered man, the notion is important to an understanding of the murderer. He aspires to nothing less than absolution through love:
The Ockendons must be made fully aware of the guilt of my hands, but also of the guiltless heart … If I had remained silent, his fate might never have been known. I must behave as they would expect their son to behave, for the rest of my life. I am the only living material of their son Ken. It is almost unbearable to think that they should ever accept me as a son. It may be that they would prefer another corpse. I am at their disposal.29
Allied to this desire to be identified with the victim is Nilsen’s oft-repeated contention that he has absorbed the essence of the dead into himself. ‘I have alwa
ys believed they are, in a sense, living on within me.’ he writes.30 It is perhaps necessary at this point to make clear that the meaning of this and similar statements is not to be construed literally; there is no evidence that any of the murders were followed by cannibalism. Nilsen’s claim to have assimilated the dead is intended to be taken in a spiritual sense, as was the case when he watched the bonfire at Melrose Avenue (see here) and declared that the vanished life of the burning corpses had entered into himself. To his mind, this was a mark of the deepest benevolence, and it thoroughly confused his newly-discovered feelings of remorse. If he felt contrite for having killed, he could not always feel a suitable remorse for having taken upon himself the sufferings of his victims without denying what he saw as the ‘angel’ within him. The result was a sorry ethical jumble. Here he is reflecting upon the death of Stephen Sinclair:
Here in this cell he is still with me. In fact I believe he is me, or part of me. How can you feel remorse for taking his pains into yourself? I loved him much more than anyone else he had ever met in his twenty years. The image of the sleeping Stephen is and will be with me for all of my life. No court or prison can ever take that from me, or this almost holy feeling.31
Quite apart from the odd presumption that no one else had ever cared for Sinclair (how could he know? they were only acquainted for about four hours), there is a very clear impression that Nilsen’s deepest yearning is to assume another identity, any identity other than his own. Thinking about Sinclair, his self-image melts into the contemplation, so that one is not quite sure if he sees two people or two aspects of the same person:
Stephen had to die to get attention for his plight. I would give anything for him to walk into my cell now alive and warm, and shoot me dead. But then only to return to the junked-up slow twilight of his misery. He might just pause long enough to feel the sticky warmth of my blood before blowing himself away. The moment we met we were both long ruined. All the pious aftercare comes now it is too late. A fatal trio, two men and a dog sitting through the mad moments … Stephen got temporary release from the needles and I from the bottle, but it couldn’t last. The spartan reality of a cold new day would almost certainly have led to him stealing for dope and me killing for company … Stephen may depart up the chimney at Golders Green. They must bring me in chains, naked to Piccadilly Circus, and pour his ashes on my head in the healing sun.32
Killing For Company Page 21
