For the moment the case for the defence rested, and there remained only the ‘rebuttal’ psychiatrist for the prosecution to hear, Dr Paul Bowden, the man whom Nilsen called a ‘cold fish’ but who had seen the defendant on no less than sixteen occasions covering fourteen hours spread over eight months. There could be no disputing that he had been more thorough than the other doctors, nor, as he stood in the witness box, that he was indeed icy.
Questioned by Alan Green, Dr Bowden examined the precise wording of the Homicide Act 1957, Section II, Subsection 1, and declared that he could find no abnormality in Nilsen which fitted the definition of the Act.fn4 There was no arrested or retarded development of mind (whether in intellect or personality), no mental disease, no injury, no inherent cause. There was no genetically inherited or constitutional component which would predispose the defendant towards a depressive condition. (Dr Bowden plainly had not inquired after the history of fishing villages in Aberdeenshire, and knew nothing of the chronic incidence of clinical depression among Nilsen’s immediate antecedents – the Stephens and the Duthies.)
Bowden gave the impression that the defendant had been busy trying to manipulate him and that he had resisted. He painted a picture of a gregarious boy, intelligent, artistic, in a close family atmosphere, with a mild feeling of being an ‘outsider’. ‘Latterly the defendant has been more emphatic in presenting his boyhood as lonely and withdrawn,’ he added. He also challenged Nilsen’s account of the relationship with David Gallichan, which he had said was based only on sex. Gallichan denied this in interview with Dr Bowden.
The witness dismissed various motives for murder which Nilsen had postulated, offering his own version, to the effect that Nilsen had transferred his feeling of guilt about his homosexuality into guilt at being a murderer. (In other words, I feel guilty already, so why not do something really bad?)fn5 ‘I found the case extremely harrowing, at least initially,’ said Dr Bowden. ‘Latterly, putting aside the horrendous nature of the crimes, I felt strong sympathy for the defendant and believed I understood him, however imperfectly.’
There was no evidence, in his view, of dissociation, such as occurs during an epileptic fit, a diabetic coma or an incident of sleepwalking. Dissociation invariably involved amnesia, whereas Nilsen could remember some of the murders in great detail. Those that he found painful to recall he had suppressed from his memory.
There was no evidence, either, of especial loneliness or withdrawal apart from the usual sense of distance felt by homosexuals. As for the masturbation beside the corpse, which occurred only once (Sinclair),fn6 this was not sexual in nature (sic), and the powdering of corpses was merely by way of disinfectant to smother the smell. There were no paranoid tendencies and no difficulties in forming personal relationships. There was no impaired sense of identity, and the grandiosity referred to in court was too recently acquired to be considered a long-standing personality defect; it showed in his relaxed interviews with the police as ‘a transparent defence against the hopelessness of his position’.
Dr Bowden revealed to the court one incident which, he said, demonstrated Nilsen’s capacity to feel very deeply and to conceal his feelings in order to preserve appearances. Only once had he walked out of an interview with the psychiatrist, when he was asked to recall the death of John the Guardsman. He did not want to allow his feelings about that killing to come forward, having until then put the episode at the back of his mind. He would not talk about it, his eyes filled with tears, and he left the room rather than be vanquished by emotion. Remorse was evident, said the doctor.
(The interview to which Dr Bowden referred took place on 13 April 1983. Immediately afterwards, Nilsen confided his own reflections on his distress in his prison journal. ‘He presses me, yet again, for all the details of a “killing”,’ he wrote. ‘I have run these images over and over in my mind and they are unbearable. It was bad enough when I had to keep control during the police statement 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.’4 This sounds not unlike the phenomenon of ‘depersonalisation’. The prison journals were available to but not requested by any of the psychiatrists.)
Dr Bowden could find no evidence of maladaptive patterns of behaviour ameliorating (as they generally do) in middle age. On the contrary, Nilsen’s admittedly abnormal behaviour only emerged in adult life. Asked to give his view of Dr Gallwey’s ‘False Self’ syndrome, Bowden said it was no more than a theory and therefore impossible to refute. One either has to believe such theories or not believe them, and Dr Bowden did not believe this one. It conflicted with what evidence there existed, which was of a man displaying purposeful integrated behaviour as he wilfully encouraged his victims to relax or fall asleep. There was no disintegration of the personality either before or after the killings, no high degree of anxiety, but rather a rational and goal-directed mind. Dr Gallwey’s theory was an attractive medical explanation, but no more.
A page of doodles prepared by the prisoner for Dr Bowden in March 1983.
Mr Lawrence’s cross-examination attempted to show, in essence, that Dr Bowden was a rather poor psychiatrist. The last sentence of the doctor’s report dated 20 September stated, ‘I am unable to show that Dennis Nilsen had an abnormality of mind.’ Little more than one month later, Dr Bowden was stating the opposite, that he did have an abnormality of mind but not a mental disorder. Why had he changed his conclusion? And why should we place more reliance upon what he says now than on what he said on 20 September? Dr Bowden explained that he had previously thought the two expressions (abnormality of mind and mental disorder) were synonymous. For the first time in his career he had to admit they were not. Nilsen was a unique case. Though abnormal, he was not mentally defective.
Mr Lawrence asked why so many cardinal events in Nilsen’s life were ignored by Dr Bowden. The death of his grandfather, for instance? ‘I do not believe it was psychologically damaging to him at that time,’ said Bowden. His increased social isolation after 1978? That was due to the fact there were bodies all over the place.
There were some giggles in court when Mr Lawrence insisted on the abnormality of Nilsen’s conduct and drew from the witness the blandest of replies tinged with weary impatience.
‘Of course strangling people is not normal behaviour,’ conceded Dr Bowden.
‘How then do you interpret his attitude towards the victim?’
‘I suspect he wanted to kill him.’
As for the defendant’s stark lack of emotion, Bowden at first maintained that, on the contrary, his ability to share feelings with another person was extensive, then added another common-sense remark. ‘In my experience,’ he said, ‘the vast majority of people who kill have to regard their victims as objects otherwise they cannot kill them.’
When the cross-examination of Dr Bowden resumed on Tuesday, 1 November, there was a further altercation over the definition of terms. Counsel wanted to dwell upon ‘diminished responsibility’ but witness refused to comment, because ‘diminished responsibility is not an illness like the ‘flu but a subsection of the Homicide Act.’ All right. Mr Lawrence tried again. Was not Nilsen’s obsessive guilt about homosexuality indicative of a mental disorder? ‘No,’ said Bowden, ‘it is preposterous to suggest that if a person is homosexual he suffers from a mental disorder.’ So it would be, but that was not what Lawrence had suggested. Dr Bowden’s remorselessly colourless response to questions was frustrating counsel, who seemed unable to prise from him the smallest admission that there was anything at all wrong with Nilsen (except his by now obvious enjoyment in killing people), until they touched upon the period of Nilsen’s remand at Brixton Prison. Bowden agreed that Nilsen had shown an unusual degree of complaint, and further agreed that this might point towards paranoid tendencies. When he said that there were no such te
ndencies in Nilsen, he carried little conviction, especially since the court had heard examples of Nilsen’s conduct in prison. It transpired that Bowden had been responsible for consigning Nilsen to the hospital wing in prison because he thought he was a suicide risk. Is it not true that a man who is liable to commit suicide is suffering from some disorder of the mind, asked Mr Lawrence? Not in Nilsen’s case, answered Dr Bowden, though he was subsequently pressed into admitting that the majority of remand prisoners who commit suicide are indeed suffering from mental disorder, and Nilsen was initially thought to be one such person. But Dr Bowden had since changed his mind.
It was then the witness’s turn to win a point. You cannot infer mental abnormality from the killings and then explain the killings in terms of mental abnormality, he said. This was a circular argument, tantamount to saying the man was mad because he killed and killed because he was mad. The next point he made was considerably less persuasive. Surely the fact that the defendant gave Carl Stottor his name and address after he had almost killed him, and allowed Paul Nobbs to telephone his mother and say where he was before attempting to kill him, indicating extraordinary irrationality, asked Mr Lawrence. Not at all, said Bowden, ‘it points to the pleasure he derived in being so powerful.’ There were not many in court who could imagine such coolness in full clarity of mind.
Dr Bowden’s long ordeal in the witness-box finished with another clash over the definition of terms, in which he for the first time betrayed his irritation. ‘People with prodigious memories have an abnormality of mind,’ he said, ‘in that their behaviour is not normal, not usual, but that does not amount to a mental disorder.’
‘But on 20 September you said that Nilsen’s abnormality did amount to such a thing. You’ve got your terminology wrong, haven’t you, doctor? How many times before have you got your terminology wrong?’
‘Several.’
‘And on those occasions did the courts act upon your report?’
‘No.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Lawrence, pausing to fix the floor with a long look of disbelief before sitting down.
With that, the evidence in the case of Regina v. Nilsen was complete. Both Mr Green and Mr Lawrence went to some trouble in their closing speeches to remove from the jury’s mind the clutter of psychiatric classification with which they had been bombarded for four days and to reduce the case to its basic recognisable elements. For Mr Green, they were dealing with a defendant who liked killing people and derived satisfaction from the act itself. For Mr Lawrence, they had before them a man who was simply out of his mind. ‘The defence says he couldn’t really help it,’ opened Mr Green. ‘The Crown says, oh yes he could.’
Mr Green depicted Nilsen as a man who was able to exercise self-control over his actions, able to choose whom to leave alone, whom to kill and whom to reprieve. He was resourceful and cunning, coherent and articulate, ‘a plausible fellow, able to bluff his way out of many a tricky situation’. Taking the jury through the many points counted against Nilsen (his warning to Stottor about the zip on the sleeping-bag, the trouble he took to construct a ligature of tie and string with which to kill Sinclair, his rusting of Duffey’s knives before throwing them out), he ended each one with the air of a man stating the obvious – ‘So there it is!’
‘There were no nightmares for Mr Nilsen, whatever the psychiatrists may tell you,’ said Green. ‘The motives he has offered are not motives at all, but pretexts latched on to by Nilsen to explain his actions after the event.’ Quoting from the police interviews the sentence, ‘I could see what had happened before would happen again,’ Green maintained that this showed conclusively that Nilsen was not a man of moral blindness, that he knew right from wrong, and went on inviting young men to his premises in the full knowledge that they might end their lives there. Alcohol he dismissed as forming no part of diminution of responsibility. ‘A drunken intent is still an intent,’ he said.fn7
Green’s oration, which continued into Wednesday, 2 November, was a powerful piece of plotting, free from invective or drama, clear and disarmingly polite (it was noticeable that he often referred to the defendant as ‘Mr Nilsen’, whereas his own counsel invariably called him ‘Nilsen’). When he terminated with the quiet invitation to the jury to find the man guilty of murder, there was a moving sense of awe in the court.
Ivan Lawrence picked up this sense of awe as he began his closing speech for the defence. He was going to state, he said, what was blindingly obvious. ‘Does not common speech oblige one to say of the perpetrator of those killings, he must be out of his mind? Even if the law were an ass, members of the jury, you are here to apply your common sense.’ Echoing Mr Green’s ‘So there it is,’ Lawrence went through a catalogue of horror, pausing after each item to ask the rhetorical question, ‘Is there nothing substantially wrong with the mind of a man like that?’ It was a Ciceronian performance which concealed the fact that there was little legal substance in what Lawrence was saying. He was appealing to naked innocence, inviting the jury to regard the law as inadequate to deal with such a freak as Nilsen and suggesting that they might know better. The only evidence he considered at length was that offered by Dr Bowden, whom he called the ‘Dr No of Central Criminal Court Number 1’ because he had consistently refused to see any sign of mental disorder in the defendant, whereas men and women of the world could see it without looking very far. ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur,’ he intoned, ‘The thing speaks for itself.’ It did not need psychiatrists, it did not need lawyers, it just needed a sensible jury [or Lord Chief Justice Parker’s ‘reasonable man’] to see that the defendant was, in effect, crazy.
For nearly four hours, Mr Justice Croom-Johnson summed up the issues raised in the case and clarified the subtleties of the task which faced the jury. To the public at large, it might have appeared easy, even absurdly so; the man had not denied his crimes, why should so much time and effort be wasted in deciding what label to pin upon him – the sentence would be the same whatever happened. As Nilsen himself wrote in the cell, they had to decide ‘Am I outrageously bad or just very bad?’ There were indications in the press that such questions were being raised. Here in the courtroom, however, the jury had to cope with a problem set for them by incautious legislators. The concept of ‘diminished responsibility’ had been introduced into the 1957 Homicide Act to save the Home Secretary from having to send to the gallows a man who was patently so dim-witted as to be not answerable for his actions. Now the gallows had gone, but the ‘diminished’ clause remained. It was archaic, it had outlived its purpose, and it placed an intolerable burden upon juries, who had to decide whether the mental abnormality of the defendant was substantial enough to impair his judgment.fn8 ‘What is meant by “substantial”?’ asked Croom-Johnson. ‘It doesn’t mean total. Nor does it mean slight or trivial. Parliament has left it to you to decide, I’m afraid. You may legitimately differ from the doctors and use your common sense. If you found there was some impairment, but not enough, you would be allowed to find him guilty of murder.’
The jury would have first to determine if on the six counts of murder Nilsen killed the men, then to decide if he intended to kill them. Should the answer to both questions be ‘Yes’, then they had a case of murder. Only afterwards should they consider whether or not to reduce the offence to one of manslaughter. (This procedure was followed scrupulously by the members of the jury, with the result that they gave a note to the judge the following day to say they were all agreed on murder, having completed the first two stages of their deliberations, and would like to delay the question of responsibility. The judge had then to correct his earlier instruction and tell them they must decide upon responsibility before concluding that the case was one of murder. They were apparently divided six to six on the matter of responsibility.)
The judge’s summing up was delivered in a quiet, tired, frail voice, which belied the close attention he had clearly given to every aspect of the evidence. One was left with the impression that Croom-Johnson was the only per
son in court capable of absorbing and unravelling the complexities of all the evidence. As he proceeded, however, it became apparent which verdict he personally thought the jury ought to return. On one count of attempted murder, there were few who would dispute that the law left no alternative to a verdict of guilty. The fact that Nilsen had spared Paul Nobbs was irrelevant. ‘Up until the time that change of heart took place, what was it that Nilsen was trying to do?’ mused the judge. The evidence offered by Douglas Stewart was less conclusive. It was by no means clear that Nilsen had even started to kill him, only that he had intended to start. The disparity between the two cases was reflected in the eventual verdict, when all twelve jurors found the defendant guilty of attempting to murder Nobbs, and ten of them (with two dissenting) found him guilty in the case of Stewart.
On the six counts of murder, Croom-Johnson’s bias was pronounced. ‘There are evil people who do evil things,’ he said. ‘Committing murder is one of them.’ Again, ‘A mind can be evil without being abnormal.’ (The question as to whether evil represents a departure from the norm or is inherent in the human condition is a metaphysical one, which has been debated by philosophers for centuries and will continue to be debated without any hope of resolution. It cannot be resolved because it is incapable of proof one way or the other, but depends upon the ideas men develop as they contemplate intractable human nature, and the language they use to express them. Ultimately, it boils down to the religious concept of Original Sin. Psychiatrists do not tamper with such concepts. Nor, in the normal way, do lawyers.)
Killing For Company Page 26
