After his arrest, Nilsen displayed no hint of remorse under questioning by the police. Subsequently, waves of contrition have possessed him (the first being at the end of March 1983), but they are of short duration and separated by intervals of weeks or months; they are also on occasions disguises for self-pity. Sometimes Nilsen’s remorse shows evidence of deep feeling, but he is himself alive to the possibility that it is spurious, and wonders why. He has written, ‘Words like “sorry” hold little comfort for the bereaved. I mistrust my own inner sincerity to bear even to utter them.’10
There is more to say on the question of feeling. After his crime, the sadistic murderer behaves normally and calmly. ‘Intellectually, he knows that it is wrong to kill but emotionally he does not feel this to apply in his case. He is indifferent to the feelings of others but shows much concern in matters relating to himself and in particular to his welfare or his safety.’ This passage recalls Dr Gallwey’s evidence in court about acts which are devoid of emotional content. We are also reminded of Nilsen’s note, left on his desk on the day he was arrested, pointing out that his death would not be the result of suicide, and also of his many complaints on remand about the way he was treated in Brixton Prison.
Murderers of this kind have little experience of normal sexual intercourse. Nilsen claims to have had coitus with women twice in his life, once with a prostitute in Berlin and once with a Swiss au pair girl in London. But the word ‘normal’ in this context may be taken to include complete homosexual love-making, which Nilsen did not experience until his late twenties. Thereafter, he passed a few years in random promiscuous sexual contact, which probably did include complete love-making on occasions. A letter found among his papers at Cranley Gardens from a man in Birmingham says ‘our love-making was so beautiful’. However, a few people who are known to have had sexual relations with Nilsen report that very little activity took place, and there is one passage among his notes which reveals more than it intended. Talking of the death of his first victim, Nilsen says that he examined the body with his hands, and was particularly fascinated to see that part of it which is normally never seen, between the scrotum and the anus. Lovers who are relaxed and are used to exploring each other’s body would find this statement odd, and may deduce that Nilsen could only have had limited sexual experience if he was a stranger to the perineum.
The multiple murderer ‘may describe opposing forces warring within him, referring to them as good and evil, or God and the Devil.’ As we have seen, Nilsen calls himself the ‘monochrome man’ – black and white – and makes frequent reference to the contrasting poles of man’s nature which possess him equally. This is an aspect which we shall have to look at more closely later, untrammelled by the disciplines of psychiatric method. For the moment, one of Nilsen’s letters to the author finishes with the sentence, ‘I am probably both devil and angel – the darkness and the light. I have had too much darkness – I have dispelled it and I am reaching out to the light.’11
There may be evidence of some minor sexual offence before the murders began, or of some fire-raising. In Nilsen’s case there is the episode with David Painter in 1975, which arose from a sexual advance, and instances of nearly starting fires at his flat on at least three occasions – with Martin Hunter-Craig, with Trevor Simpson, and with three young men who stayed with him one night in 1978. Nilsen maintains that these embryonic fires had the purpose of asphyxiating the men, and failed, but he may well not be right in thus identifying the source of his own actions.
There is usually no history of mental illness (there is none with Nilsen). The murderer considers himself sane, behaves and talks normally even to psychiatrists, but is afraid that psychiatry may emasculate him.
If the kind of murderer Dr Brittain is describing attempts to resist his murderous drives, anxiety and deep depression result. He is very keen on using mirrors, often has photography as a hobby, and writes poetry (Nilsen concurs on all three points). Also, a surprising number of such people have been professional butchers.
They plan the murders well and cunningly. The victims are always strangers to them. They make plausible liars. At the time of the murder the killer’s reason is dulled, all but obliterated by sexual and power drives. Excitement and ecstasy are greatest during the process of killing, leaving the death itself as an anti-climax. (‘I am joyful just climbing the mountain,’ wrote Nilsen, then speaking of sex rather than murder. ‘I never really want to reach the summit because the joy is over.)’ The usual method is strangulation, because death is thereby slower and pleasure can be prolonged, and also because the murderer can retain the power to increase or decrease pressure, to take the victim’s life or to give it back. It is not unlike a cat playing with a mouse.
‘The desire of having power over others is an essential part of this abnormality.’ The subjection of the victim to the killer’s power is more important than the infliction of pain, which is why these murderers do not feel cruel. Cruelty is not their primary objective, but the unavoidable means by which they achieve their end. (Nilsen has frequently said that he cannot tolerate the idea of cruelty, and that he dispatched his victims in a manner which was short, swift and decisive. He seems unable to understand that cruelty is not thereby erased, nor to reconcile his contention with the slow agony of John the Guardsman and Carl Stottor.)
‘Although these are essentially sexually motivated crimes’, writes Dr Brittain, ‘sexual intercourse or even orgasm does not always occur. Sometimes the murderer masturbates beside his victim.’ This passage accords entirely with Nilsen’s own account of his behaviour towards the corpses.
Multiple murderers may often talk quite freely about their crimes in great detail. They are blandly unperturbed when so doing, and show no embarrassment. Sometimes they take pleasure in writing a detailed account of what they have done, and are commonly annoyed if any part of their story is doubted. They can be disproportionately irritated if a tiny point is misunderstood. They are ‘indignant if they think some injustice is being done to them, seeing no incongruity in this when, at about the same time, they are relating some particularly monstrous actions of their own. They can even then appear self-righteous.’
Dr Brittain concludes his composite picture with the alarming remark, ‘this condition is not rare.’ Fortunately, it is still rare for the condition to become full-blown and homicidal, though the incidence of multiple murders over the last ten years indicates that complacency would be foolish. Especially in America, there has been a rash of cases which post-date the so-called Boston Strangler of the early sixties (Albert De Salvo), then thought to be a killer without parallel, and surpass him in the horror and magnitude of their crimes. Norman Collins in 1969 killed seven girls in Michigan. In 1973 Edmund Kemper killed eight and dismembered them, in one case burying the head in his garden facing the house, so that he could imagine the victim looking at him. The same year saw the nauseating case of Dean Corll in Houston, Texas, killer of thirty-one teenage boys, and Juan Corona, who murdered twenty-five vagrants at various times in California. In 1980, John Wayne Gacy was arrested in Des Plaines, Illinois, having murdered thirty-two young men and boys. In England, Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, killed thirteen women between 1975 and 1980. There is every reason to conclude that murderers like Dennis Nilsen are becoming progressively less rare and may well come to represent a type of ‘motiveless’ criminal who belongs predominantly to the twentieth century. Unless, that is, professional men can recognise his symptoms before they explode. The difficulty is, of course, that the symptoms are either concealed or apparently innocuous; none of Nilsen’s acquaintances was aware of his intensely secret fantasy life, nor did his overt personality ever give cause for alarm. One can only deplore that he did not himself feel the need, before 1978, to seek the advice of a psychiatrist. He would almost certainly have been diagnosed as potentially dangerous.
Brittain is not alone in drawing attention to the insidious danger of personality disorder in a tense society. Blackman
, Weiss and Lamberti in The Sudden Murderer, and Satten, Menninger, Rosen and Mayman in Murder without Apparent Motive (both American studies), have identified similar characteristics to those pinpointed by Dr Brittain, including the severe isolation, the confusion of sexual identity and the highly-developed fantasy life, more often than not violent and primitive. Furthermore, they all agree that the subjects they studied showed blunted and shallow emotional responses, and first began to kill when the boundaries between their private fantasy life and reality broke down.12
Denied the help of psychiatry, is there any other way in which Nilsen’s disorder might have been spotted before he committed murder? I have shown a page of his writing to an experienced graphologist who, with no knowledge of the identity of her subject (or of me), drew a picture which bore a striking resemblance to the personality described by Brittain, and evidently worried her; she asked how well I knew the man before she would give her report, and was relieved to discover that I was in no danger. The writer, she said, had a good brain but had not disciplined himself to educate his mind or direct it. Consequently, instead of turning creative (as he could have done), he turned destructive. He was very cunning and egoistic, wanting to satisfy his needs at all costs and without moral scruple. He was by nature extremely aggressive. He was also very suspicious, and an adept dissembler. He was touchy, unbalanced, and resentful of all authority.
For some reason which she could not define, the subject suffered from a feeling of inadequacy or impotence (impuissance, not necessarily sexual). He needed to talk about himself a great deal by way of compensation for this feeling, in search of reassurance. He had a mind open to illusion, to myths, which he increasingly believed in at the expense of his connection with reality. He was stubborn and capable of self-pity, though not of pity for others; or at least, his pity for others would be formed from intellectual recognition of the facts, while his pity for himself was emotionally based. He was as defensive as a cat, but with tremendous physical power which could be released in an irrepressible surge of aggression if he felt himself slighted by some chance remark. He was homosexual, yet virile and masculine. The graphologist concluded by admitting that she found the handwriting very frightening.
Presumably, a handwriting expert who saw evidence of Nilsen’s script before 1978 might have recommended a course of psycho-analytic treatment. But none did. We are therefore, tragically, limited to a post facto examination of how and why the mind of this particular man grew so distorted as to require nourishment in death. The tragedy is final for his victims; he, at least, may recover. We are aided in the search not only by psychiatry, but by the history of sexual perversions, by philosophy, and by religion. They may all, separately or collectively, throw some light upon why Dennis Nilsen crossed the abyss between thought and deed, why his impulses triumphed over his restraints.
Nilsen’s own rationalisations may serve by way of illustration, but must not be allowed to dictate the route. It is well enough known that we are bound to rationalise when one part of our personality seeks to justify to another part acts for which it anticipates disapprobation; that is what repression is about. If the disapproval is likely to be intolerable, then we invent ‘causes’, ‘motives’, ‘reasons’, which may be more acceptable and which will disguise the truth from ourselves. The huge amount that Nilson has written indicates that the rationalisation process is constant, the expected disapproval harsh. The conflict rumbles on within the same paragraph or upon the same page. At one point he knows that the aims of repression should not succeed (‘I cannot justify any of these deaths, ever’), but is then sharply reminded by the self-protective side of his personality that ‘murder is a sign of alarm’; the two remarks cancel each other out.13
The Psychiatric View
1. Schizoid personality
‘Homicide can be “caused” by practically any type of major psychiatric illness.’14 So says Marvin Wolfgang, an acknowledged American expert on murder. At the trial of Dennis Nilsen, it was contested by two psychiatrists that the defendant suffered from several kinds of personality disorder which, when put together, made an impressive heap of problems which he could not possibly hope to solve. Paramount among these was a schizoid tendency.
Schizoid people have such a deep mistrust of others that they regard any really intimate relationship with another person as dangerous. They are inwardly weak and vulnerable (as is the child, whose vulnerability attracts the love of the parent), but because they are afraid of being at the mercy of anyone on whom they are emotionally dependent, they never allow their vulnerability to show. This might arise because the vulnerability was not rewarded in infancy, and they will not risk any such disappointment again. They therefore compensate with a disproportionate desire for power and superiority, and if they cannot attain this in reality, they invent it in fantasy. Their greatest fear is humiliation, which they equate with the position of being loved, as the love might at any moment be withdrawn. Hence, by a sad inversion of cart and horse, they are convinced that they are unlovable, and extreme hostility festers within them as a result. This hostility can be of such intensity that it frightens even themselves, but remains for the most part hidden. It might show in the most bitter resentment of any kind of criticism, however slight. The anger which rages within will reveal itself indirectly in a stream of sarcastic remarks, which defeat of any kind may let loose. As Anthony Storr has written:
The disposal of aggression is particularly difficult for schizoid people; for, in them, the normal positive aspects of aggression in defining identity and asserting independence are so intermingled with hatred for past disregard that it is almost impossible for them to be aggressive without being destructive. When rebuff or criticism, however mild, are interpreted as insult, withdrawal or murder may seem the only possible alternatives.15
Storr, in his book Human Aggression, goes on to point out that schizoid people may be safe if they can attain high power or accomplishment. They may be visionaries or messianic political leaders (Joan of Arc is a fine example), or they may sublimate their aggression in stern, demanding artistic endeavour. One such, according to Dr Storr, was Beethoven, who did not hesitate to call himself a genius:
He was generally morose and suspicious, and never succeeded in making any permanent relationship with a woman. His deafness increased his isolation and mistrust of human beings; but this disability merely accentuated characteristics which were already present. He displayed, in marked degree, the conviction of superiority so typical of schizoid characters … in personal relations he was so touchy that even his closest friends were liable to find themselves excluded on account of some supposed slight.16
It is when the aggression cannot be channelled into some creative activity, or is not kept dormant in secure social bonds, that it may be detonated by accumulated stress and the schizoid person becomes a danger to himself and to others. The Dutch murderer, Hans von Zon, who killed six people for no clear motive between 1964 and 1967, was a schizoid type. So was Raymond Morris, the Cannock Chase child-killer whose alleged victims died also between 1965 and 1967. He was an adept photographer, had written poetry, and constructed a rich fantasy life. People thought him cold and emotionless, but he was capable of violent rages. His intelligence was above average. Dean Corll, the Houston mass murderer of the seventies, was hypersensitive, morose, unsociable – all possible indicators of a schizoid personality. If we go back to one of the famous cases of the nineteenth century, we find that Pierre Lacenaire was a lone wolf, bereft of emotion, incapable of satisfactory human contact, who murdered out of rage against ‘society’. (He is also one of the rare murderers before Dennis Nilsen who wrote his own memoirs; Dostoievsky published them in a journal he edited.)
The reader already knows enough of Nilsen’s arid emotional life to judge how far the schizoid diagnosis may apply to him. Nilsen does not regard himself as a violent man, yet these explosions of violence afforded him, in the aftermath, a temporary peace. ‘Each one seemed to be its own last time,
’ he writes.
In any domestic situation where I had constant contact with people or a person, these things could never have occurred. They were the products of the lonely empty life and the mind therein. I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime.17
We recall Dr Gallwey’s testimony in court that the schizoid elements in Nilsen’s personality lay relatively undisturbed while he maintained human contact with David Gallichan as a flat-mate. After Gallichan there were Martin and Pett, both briefly, followed by collapse towards the end of 1978. Nilsen’s isolation was by then complete. Feeling defeated and humiliated on all sides, and unwilling to blame himself for his misfortunes, resentment grew like a cancer and others had to pay the price.
Another manifestation of the schizoid type is a dangerous ability to place false meanings on what people say. Dr MacKeith said Nilsen had ‘an unusual capacity to invest others with attitudes and feelings reflecting his own feelings’.18 There are manifold examples of this in Nilsen’s life. While on remand in Brixton Prison, he asked a cleaner to get him a cigarette, and was told it would come later. In the interim, he constructed a whole convincing (to himself) portrait of the man as a hypocrite, toady and liar, reflecting on to him the qualities of his own frustration and anger. He did not express his anger verbally, but scrawled it alone across the page: ‘A man can’t fucking look you in the eyes when he is lying.’ The cleaner had only uttered two words to Nilsen, ‘Yes, later.’ In fact, a roll-up cigarette was pushed under his cell door in time, and Nilsen recognised his own disability. ‘I have a knack of misjudging some people – if not all people,’ he wrote, adding that he felt ashamed.19 It is more than likely that he also misjudged the characters of some of his victims, and decided that they were using or humiliating him on no evidence at all.
Killing For Company Page 28
