Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  If Dennis Nilsen suffered from a retarded development of personality, that, alas, was not something which could be measured like an intelligence quotient. It was very difficult even to describe it, as the psychiatrists had demonstrated. If it only meant ‘character’, then the jury should not, warned Croom-Johnson, give it undue weight. ‘There must be no excuses for Nilsen if he has moral defects … a nasty nature is not arrested or retarded development of mind.’ (Lord Denning is on record as saying that ‘any mental disorder which has manifested itself in violence and is prone to recur, is a disease of the mind.’ This ruling was not mentioned by anyone in court.)

  The jury retired late on the morning of Thursday, 3 November. A verdict was confidently expected during the afternoon, but the hours passed and it was not forthcoming. At 4.30 p.m. the judge asked the foreman of the jury whether they might reach a verdict if the court sat until the early evening. ‘No, my lord,’ he replied without hesitation. They were then sent to a hotel for the night and ordered to resume their deliberations the following morning at 10 a.m. Meanwhile, the London evening newspaper, the Standard, had misread the ease with which the jurors would make up their minds, taken a gamble, and published a great deal of background material on Nilsen and his bloody career in clear contempt of court. Frantic efforts were made to gather up copies from the streets of London, but it was too late. The next day, five national newspapers followed suit.ix

  Thursday evening, in his cell, Nilsen wrote:

  At the end of this day I am tired. I am tired. I face tomorrow and tomorrow is the future. I will be putting on that stuffy civil service garb for the last time in many many years. I do not know what will happen tomorrow … I tend to see myself as in jail for keeps. I must make the best of whatever future now remains for me (thirty years or so). I’ll survive.5

  On Friday, 4 November, at 11.25 a.m., Mr Justice Croom-Johnson told the jury he would accept a majority verdict. This came through at 4.25 p.m., with two dissenters on every count except the attack upon Paul Nobbs, when all twelve jury members agreed. Dennis Andrew Nilsen was found guilty of murder six times and of attempted murder twice. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of twenty-five years. He went down to the cells and was removed to Her Majesty’s Prison Wormwood Scrubs. To the last, Nilsen remained strangely impervious to the ghastliness of his crimes. The agony of remorse which had overcome him at least three times during his remand, and had lasted for some days, was not apparent immediately after conviction. Writing of himself in the third person, he says, ‘He has committed fifteen homicides and it is other people who think him important.’6

  fn1 The actus reus (state of affairs caused by the conduct of the defendant) was agreed. Dispute centred upon the mens rea (state of mind of the defendant at the time).

  fn2 Nilsen denies ever having said he was married.

  fn3 The idea of the False Self was put forward by R.D. Laing, adapting some theories of Jean-Paul Sartre. The false self was an artificially created self-image designed to concur with expectations, while the true self remained hidden and protected.

  fn4 Such abnormality of mind (whether arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind or any inherent causes or induced by disease or injury) as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts and omissions in doing or being a party to the killing.’ (Homicide Act 1957)

  fn5 The reader is invited to read again Nilson’s poem here, which deals with the transference of guilt in a graphic manner.

  fn6 It occurred more often, but Nilsen had not told Dr Bowden this. See Chapter 6.

  fn7 In this he is supported by Wolfgang and Strohm, ‘Relationship between Alcohol and Criminal Homocide’ in Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, vol. 17, no. 3 (1956), wherein it is stated that intoxication does not preclude deliberation and premeditation.

  fn8 In 1975 the Butler Committee (of which Croom-Johnson had been vice-chairman) recommended a new verdict – ‘Not Guilty on evidence of mental disorder’. The Criminal Law Revision Committee has completed its report on Butler’s recommendations, but they have yet to be debated in Parliament.

  fn9 The Attorney General’s office took no action.

  10

  ANSWERS

  ‘How many more words must I write without arriving at a smooth compact conclusion?’1 By the time his trial was over, Nilsen had filled nearly fifty prison exercise books with random reminiscences in what looked like a concentrated effort to find himself, to unravel the multiple knots of motive and mind which caused him to become a killer. Like Raskolnikov in Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment, he was a criminal pondering his own crimes and hoping by relentless examination to dispel bewilderment. The need was sometimes so urgent that he would scribble on the back of his depositions; with uncomfortable irony the murderer’s self-justifications are found on the reverse of a list of human remains consequent upon his acts. The court had accepted the prosecution’s case that Nilsen killed ‘in cold blood’ to satisfy his own perverted desires. This at least had the merit of simplicity and would obviate the need for any further inquiry:

  I probably did enjoy those acts of killing. It was intense and all-consuming. Poor Doctor Bowden won’t be satisfied until he has a reason. Well, enjoying it (killing) is as good a reason as any. I hope he will be contented with that. How the hell do I know what motivated me to kill someone I had nothing against at that particular time! I needed to do what I did at that time. I had no control over it then. It was a powder keg waiting for the match. I was the match. The more I write, the less I know. I have probably already written the reason somewhere back there amongst all these words … everything must be in small neat boxes for these people … the real answer might lie in the fact that I could be just a bad bastard.2

  Colin Wilson, who has made a long study of murder, insists that we must acknowledge the urge to destroy as an inherent characteristic of mankind. He writes:

  For whatever reason, man is capable of experiencing a morbid involvement in the act of destruction, as if some deep erotic nerve had been touched by a craving for violence. And, like the sexual impulse, this destructive impulse has the power to blind him to everything but its own satisfaction.3

  As if in corroboration, Nilsen’s final statement, written in Wormwood Scrubs Prison a few days after his life sentence began, shows that he had decided to ‘come clean’ and make a frank admission that the Crown case against him had been essentially correct all along. Here are some extracts from that statement:

  The loner has to achieve fulfilment alone within himself. All he has are his own extreme acts. People are merely supplementary to the achievement of these acts. He is abnormal and he knows it.

  I had always wished to kill but the opportunity never really presented itself in safe conditions … therefore substituted by fantasies which had me killed in the mirrored images. I had been killing this way for years, killing my own image.

  The kill was only part of the whole. The whole experience which thrilled me intensely was the drink, the chase, the social seduction, the getting the ‘friend’ back, the decision to kill, the body and its disposal.

  The pressure needed release. I took release through spirits and music. On that high I had a loss of morality and danger feeling … If the conditions were right, I would completely follow through to the death.

  He failed to kill Stewart and Ozawa, he says, because excessive alcohol clouded his judgment. As for Nobbs and Stottor, those attempts were interrupted ‘for reasons of survival and had nothing to do with sympathy for the victim’. With Nobbs, he suddenly realised as he was throttling the man that he (Nobbs) had twice telephoned his mother that evening, and would be missed by her. As for Stottor, it was a practical decision not to complete the murder; he simply had no room for the body! Besides, they may have been seen together in the Black Cap. Kevin Sylvester, whom Nilsen rescued one evening (afterwards, the reader will recall, Nilsen felt ‘elated’ because the man had co
me to no harm), was spared because he had been found unconscious in the street and therefore fell outside the necessary formula of the ‘chase’. The formula had to be right. (Why, then, did he kill Barlow, who also was not hunted, but presented himself twice to Nilsen?) Nilsen names two other men whom he ‘really wanted’ to kill, but did not because the conditions were not right or the risk of discovery was too great. An untold number of others owed their lives to the fact that there were already too many bodies under the floor at Melrose Avenue and Nilsen could not be seen to have bonfires with uncommon regularity without arousing suspicion. Two more sentences in this ‘final’ confession, slipped in almost in parentheses, alert one to see a different emphasis. ‘The decision to kill was never taken until a few moments before it was attempted or transacted,’ he writes; and ‘I wished I could stop but I could not. I had no other thrill or happiness.’4

  Quite obviously, there are some inconsistencies in the statement which make it difficult to accept in every detail. Nilsen had, for example, known that Paul Nobbs was a university student, with a firm identity and a home, since lunchtime on the day that they met. It is inconceivable that he should only remember this when he had all but killed him some nine hours later. The problem of what to do with Stottor’s body in the attic flat at Cranley Gardens had not prevented him from killing one man only a month earlier (in March 1982), and would not prevent him from killing two more before he was caught. And the risk of discovery in the case of Kenneth Ockendon was very high (it being likely that a good number of people had seen them together during the day, especially at the pub where they drank for two hours or at the shop where they bought food that evening). Yet Ockendon died in a sudden moment of unreflective impulse. The risk was also high with Barlow, with the possibility that Nilsen might be traced through hospital records. Nilsen says he relished the excitement of risk. With his trial out of the way, Nilsen may well have been prone to attach exaggerated importance to his power of decision, almost as a sop to his pride and a childish desire to demonstrate that he had been capable of superlative deception. Added to which, I believe, he was weary of looking for answers.

  This is not to say that the central truth of Nilsen’s confession, namely that he killed for pleasure, should be discarded. But it would be wholly wrong to regard that as the end of the matter. The degree of control Nilsen was able to exercise over his acts requires further attention, and it is all but certain that he is the last person to measure that degree in any adequate manner. Moreover, to say that a killer enjoys killing is tautological. It offers no answer, but merely restates the question, and to accept it as it stands would be a facile surrender.

  Even as one reads these documents, and half-welcomes the summation they represent, one is struck by involuntary revelations which suddenly and temporarily lift Nilsen from the unfathomable depths of monstrosity and bring him back into the air where we can recognise him more readily. ‘I have unburdened myself and held nothing back,’ he writes. ‘I have been candid to the point that the reader may be horrified at times.’5 And again, ‘I do not feel like a very acceptable human being when I write these notes directly pertinent to my offences. I feel unclean.’6

  How can it be that a murderer of so black a hue can first express fear that his revelations might offend, then look upon himself with contempt as if he were the one who is offended by them? These are not the remarks of a man without conscience. The moral sense, suffocated almost beyond recall, does still retain a timid voice. A true psychopath, insensible to any understanding of morality, does not make this kind of apology to the susceptibilities of his listeners. Nilsen’s last chapter makes him more, not less, enigmatic.

  We have already had cause to be reminded of Dostoievsky’s great study of motiveless murder in Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov in the most profound solitude is driven to endless contemplation of his crime in a desperate effort to repress the guilt which continually surges up by finding an explanation which will at least make him human. His worst punishment is a constant, relentless pondering on his brutal killing of an old woman, a perpetual self-analysis which he cannot escape. One critic has interpreted Raskolnikov’s need in these words: ‘To sustain himself in the terrible isolation of his guilt he must be in complete possession of a single incontrovertible motive representing his deepest self, his own rock-bottom truth.’7 It is not too extravagant to recognise in this summary the same preoccupation which has beset Nilsen; any motive is better than none, and the worst fate is insubstantiality. The same critic points out the several personalities which Raskolnikov displays in the course of the novel, and once more they reflect some of the confusing disparities in Nilsen’s character as they emerged at his trial and in this book. There was an altruistic Raskolnikov and an egotistic Raskolnikov, ‘a despot by nature’; a radical Raskolnikov with ideas of revolution, and a grandiose Raskolnikov who demanded the right to self-assertion, to exercise his own power in his own way; ‘and there is the neurotic who acts out his illness through a murder intellectually rationalised but inexplicable except in terms of an unconscious drive.’8

  There is no need, however, to resort to literary echoes. A number of experienced criminal psychiatrists have studied the phenomenon of the multiple murderer and have attempted to draw a picture of the kind of man whose character and life history mark him out as a potential murderer of this kind. The point of such studies is to enable psychiatrists to spot the clues before a personality finally disintegrates and fulfils itself in destruction. (This is not to say, of course, that everyone who fits such a description is a potential killer, only that potential killers will often fit it.) One particular study, by Dr Robert Brittain, builds a portrait of the mass murderer-to-be that is so like Dennis Nilsen in almost every respect that it takes one’s breath away. The study was published in a medical journal in 1970, and represented the fruit of twenty years’ close study of murderers who killed for no apparent motive other than enjoyment.

  The sadistic murderer, says Dr Brittain, is commonly an introspective and rather withdrawn man. He has few associates, and usually no close friends. His pursuits are solitary, such as listening to music. He is studious and pedantic, retiring, essentially shy, and he feels inadequate. Sometimes he presents himself as pseudo-intellectual. He is uncommunicative, and rarely if ever shows his temper. He does not retaliate to violence, and never did, even at school. He is very clean, and meticulous in appearance. He feels different from other people, and is thereby isolated and insecure. He tends not to drink very much. He feels inferior to everyone, except in relation to his offences, when he feels superior to other men. He is at his most dangerous when he has suffered a loss of self-esteem, such as might happen if he were demoted at work.

  Nilsen is already recognisable, apart from in the reference to abstention from drink. The reader does not need to be reminded of his loneliness and introspection. At school he did not join in playground fights, and we know also that he felt inadequate in every way when compared to those around him. His pretensions to intellectuality are evident in his writings, where he will occasionally use something picked up from a dictionary of quotations and reveal his source. His first crime was committed after the breakdown of personal relationships and the failure of his superiors at work to recommend him for promotion when he had completed the requisite number of years’ service and acquitted himself well.

  Dr Brittain goes on to describe his composite man as a

  vain, narcissistic, egocentric individual who, through his vanity, may be convinced that he can commit murder and escape detection by being more clever than the police. He would rather be notorious than ignored and … he may have ideas of himself going down in history as a major criminal and, before detection, read and comment on details of his crime reported in the newspapers. He sometimes expresses very strong and punitive views on what should be done with the murderer when he is caught. There can be a peculiar arrogance about him.

  Other characteristics are tendencies to hypochondria and homosexua
lity. He is sometimes regarded as a ‘loner’. Beneath his retiring façade there is a deep aggression which he cannot normally express.

  We should pause here only to remark that Nilsen, ever protective of his health, was anxious to ensure a regular daily intake of Vitamin C, and that during his trial he asked that he should be supplied with the principal newspapers so that he could read the reports on his case, and correct inaccuracies. On the other hand, no one would say that he had a ‘retiring façade’, and his aggression was frequently expressed in fluent harangues on political and moral issues.

  The murderer has a rich and active fantasy life.

  Even as a child he is likely to have been withdrawn, living in part in his own dream world. His fantasy life is in many ways more important to him than is his ordinary life, and in a sense more real, so diminishing the value he puts on external life and on other people. It is almost as if he were forced by practical realities to emerge unwillingly from fantasy at times, but returns to it as soon as he can.

  He is generally under thirty-five (Nilsen was thirty-three at the time of his first murder) and of high intelligence, which would be necessary to indulge and develop his complicated fantasy life. He is emotionally flattened, shows little or no remorse and is without pity for his victims. He is indifferent to the moral implications of his acts.

  Dr Brittain continues:

  He will frequently express regret if asked, but he does not feel it, or, if he does, his feeling is only transiently sincere, is shallow, and is quite insufficient to prevent him from killing again. Such expressions of regret are commonly to create what he hopes is the right impression and one designed to achieve some advantage for himself. He can detach himself from his killing, being aware of it but not emotionally involved. He knows he is responsible for his offence but regrets only its legal consequences.9