Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  It was not my intention to get satisfaction by normal sexual intercourse, but by killing.

  … throttling in itself was a pleasure to me, even without any intention to kill.

  When I myself think about my deeds, then I abhor myself so much that I am impatient for my execution.

  I can’t feel remorse, but only regret for the innocent victims.37

  One must not press the similarities too far, however. Kürten had had a deprived childhood and had been in prison in adolescence. He had been a vicious sadist all his life, glorying in the sight, smell and taste of blood. At the age of nine, he had pushed little boys into the Rhine, and by the time he was thirteen he had been amusing himself by stabbing sheep as he sodomised them. He admitted that if he happened to be near a road accident he would ejaculate involuntarily, and when his lust rose he would cut the neck from a swan and drink the blood. None of this is relevant to Nilsen. On the other hand, they were both pedantic, remorseless, and alarmingly normal. Kürten’s colleagues at work were quite certain that a mistake had been made when he was arrested, and Dr Berg stated that his patient was not insane.

  There is a feeling with both Kürten and Nilsen that they welcomed the opportunity for self-analysis (albeit far too late) in order to identify their monster and gain the freedom that is born of knowledge. ‘Introspection is the key,’ wrote Nilsen. ‘We ignore our inner natures … We are attracted only to the darkness of others’ lives, never our own. Our own demons are relegated to the subconscious.’38 If the psychiatrists are right, then these ‘demons’ can be rooted out by prolonged and sustained psycho-therapy. The first step is to recognise them and accept responsibility for them, even if they seem to possess the strengths of renewal and tenacity. As George Meredith wrote:

  In tragic life, God wot,

  No villain need be! Passions spin the plot;

  We are betrayed by what is false within.39

  Nilsen may not yet know what has caused (if anything?) the falseness within, but he does know it has made him an irredeemable killer. ‘I could not kill now,’ he writes, ‘because I now know myself and my past. I now have some kind of identity (even though it be one that I would rather not have). There are no longer any mysteries about me to trouble me. Knowing yourself is everything.’

  ‘I regret everything that is past. But we do not control everything.’40

  Sexual Aberration

  If Nilsen’s crimes could be explained in terms of distortion of the sexual need, that might provide sufficient answer in itself. There is certainly no lack of precedents, and any experienced prostitute will confirm that the varieties of sexual stimulation are seemingly endless. The Hungarian murderer Sylvestre Matuschka could experience sexual excitement only when he saw trains crashing, and so made a habit of causing dramatic collisions with consequent (and to him irrelevant) loss of life. A Freudian might consider this as symbolic of penetration, one train forcing entry into another. The ‘Thames nude murderer’ of 1964 removed the teeth of his female victims after death so that he might use their mouths as a vagina. Kürten, we have already seen, was stimulated by the sound of gushing blood. William Heirens, whose interviews with the police are reprinted in Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes by J.M. Reinhardt, revealed that he was more disgusted by sex than by murder, and that his distortion became so acute that he would experience orgasm at the point of entering a strange house through the window, whether it be for the purposes of burglary or murder.41 (That, also, is capable of a fairly obvious Freudian interpretation.)

  Somewhat closer to our purpose is the case of John Christie, who murdered in order that he might have intercourse with a female corpse, it being impossible for him to have an erection when the body was animate. Similarly, Sergeant Bertrand, who was in the French army, would visit cemeteries at night to dig up freshly-buried corpses of young girls, whom he would then violate. ‘All my enjoyment with living women is as nothing compared to it,’ he said. The compulsion was so strong with Bertrand that he once swam an icy stream in order to get to a cemetery.

  Christie and Sergeant Bertrand both conform to the popular view of a necrophiliac, that is a man who engages in the sexual act with a dead body. Necrophilia is in fact not quite so simple, a fact which has not prevented even psychiatrists from reducing it to a statement of the obvious: ‘A motivating factor in necrophilia’, writes P. Friedman, ‘seems to be the need to eliminate the risk of rejection by choosing an object that can offer no resistance of any kind.’42 As long ago as 1919, Wulffen divided varieties of necrophilia into three main categories, namely:

  (a) Lust murder (in which the act of killing provides excitement);

  (b) Stealing of corpses (which are then hoarded);

  (c) Necrophagy (or the mutilation and eating of corpses).

  Neither the second nor third of these categories can apply to Nilsen. He kept bodies for several months in some cases, but not in the spirit of a collector; he wanted rather to have them out of sight, until such time as he could dispose of them. Also, the dissection of his victims proceeded from the practical need for disposal, not from the desire for any kind of gratification. Moreover, there was no cannibalism in his case. On the other hand, there are grounds for suggesting that he may belong to Wulffen’s first type, the lust murderer, for whom the act of causing death itself, rather than the anticipation of possessing dead bodies, is the passionate stimulus.

  Very little has been written on the subject of necrophilia, still less on homosexual necrophilia, and one must search hard in the annals of crime for examples which have received more than perfunctory attention. In Australia, the defendant in Regina v. Forbes was a twenty-two-year-old married man who had homosexual fantasies involving a dead male. One day he went out with a gun, found a complete stranger, and shot him. Afterwards, he played with the corpse and finally sodomised it. His defence, like Nilsen’s, tried to establish that he was suffering from a disease of the mind, but the court would not accept this view. His sanity was not in question, yet ‘if he was overwhelmed by deviant sexual drives then he could not reason with sense and composure whether mentally diseased or not.’ Forbes’s own remark was a familiar one: ‘I do not think anything would have stopped me. I was mad with power. I had him in my power and nothing could stop me.’43

  The victim in another Australian case, Regina v. Isaacs, was a nine-year-old boy whose anus was widely open and gaping, indicating that penetration had been forced after rigor mortis had begun. Again, the outcome of the trial was satisfactory only in the judicial sense, while the attempt to find a label which could apply to the defendant was fruitless. The disorder of necrophilia appears to be beyond the competence of legal opinion to understand, and court records show conclusively that most necrophiliacs have been adjudged ‘normal’ and dealt with accordingly.

  Two mistakes commonly warp our understanding of necrophilia. One is to regard it as predominantly a sexual deviation, whereas it springs more from a distortion of the desire for power; it is the freedom to do exactly what one wants with the body that excites, as Forbes’s own comment amply demonstrates, and any sexual pleasure per se is tangential. Most lust murderers talk in a similar way of their compulsion to kill, to satisfy an exigent and exultant itch for power; their resistance to the drive is so helpless as to be crushed at inception. The other mistake is to equate necrophilia with cruelty and sadism. Krafft-Ebing himself promulgated this mistake, writing that necrophilia was a horrible manifestation of sadism, but Moll corrected him on the grounds than no actual pain was caused by the necrophile.44 The connections here are subtle. The sadist, too, is interested in power rather than sex (the Marquis de Sade’s writings are full of the adoration of power, and sexual perversions are incidental means towards this end), but the sadist needs to have his power confirmed by the screams of pain from his victim. The necrophiliac, on the other hand, is interested in a corpse precisely because it is passive, because it cannot scream or protest in any way. Consequently, the sadist may torture and kill slowly, to prolong the
pleasure, while the necrophiliac kills swiftly and painlessly, the quicker to produce the beloved corpse. Kürten was a sadist, Nilsen a necrophiliac; both are lust murderers who gain pleasure from the selfish gratification of their need for power, but in different ways. It may even be said that a necrophiliac is a cowardly sadist, or a sadist-with-a-conscience, in that he cannot bear to be reminded of the violation he is enacting and must have a silent passive victim. Nilsen has himself written, ‘Mine is the weakness of a coward.’45,fn2

  The Nilsen case spotlights both these errors. He has consistently maintained that he was not interested in sexual penetration of a dead body. The idea occurred to him with the first victim, but his erection subsided before he could put it into effect, and he never tried again, he says. ‘I remember being repulsed strongly even thinking about sexual intercourse. That and the pure after-image could not go together. They were poles apart.’ The pathologist’s examination of the remains of Stephen Sinclair indicated that the condition of the anus was consistent with having been sodomised, but there was no evidence of the event having taken place after death. Nilsen was adamant that he had not even broached the subject of sex with Sinclair, and that if Sinclair had been buggered, it was not by him. ‘Poor Stephen,’ he wrote, ‘maybe he thought I would give him something (financial). Instead, I took everything.’46 With six of the victims, there was some sexual activity following the murder, which took the form of masturbation over or near the body; this Nilsen terms as ‘reverence for the body with sexual associations, but no direct sex’.47 On one occasion it involved photography of the corpse. He also insists that he has never been attracted by the idea of inflicting pain.

  Why, then, this ‘reverence’ for a dead body? Why this fascination with death? ‘It was as if the spirit of the man still dwelt within and the decay of death was a consummation of life itself. I compared my own “living” body with the dead body and thought how strange it was that they were now beyond pain, problems and sorrow and I was not.’48 The mystery of death grew for Nilsen into an unnatural and morbid obsession, the seeds of which cannot now be traced further than his conscious memory will take us, and it would need a long course of psycho-therapy to discover where they took root in the unconscious. That voluntary memory reverts time and time again to the death of his grandfather when he was a six-year-old boy.

  A short story by C.M. Eddy entitled The Loved Dead bears a strong resemblance to Nilsen’s emotional history. The narrator tells how he grew into a necrophiliac (though he does not use that word) whose solitary pleasure was the contemplation of a corpse. He described his infancy thus:

  My early childhood was one long, prosaic and monotonous apathy. Strictly ascetic, wan, pallid, undersized, and subjected to protracted spells of morbid moroseness, I was ostracised by the normal, healthy youngsters of my own age …

  Had I lived in some larger town, with greater opportunities for congenial companionship, perhaps I could have overcome this early tendency to be a recluse … My life lacked motivation. I seemed in the grip of something that dulled my senses, stunted my development, retarded my activities, and left me unaccountably dissatisfied.

  The narrator’s sullen attitude towards life changed dramatically when his grandfather died, and his mother took him into a room to see the body in its casket:

  For the first time I was face to face with Death. I looked down upon the calm placid face lined with its multitudinous wrinkles, and saw nothing to cause so much of sorrow. Instead, it seemed to me that grandfather was immeasurably content, blandly satisfied. I felt swayed by some strange discordant sense of elation. So slowly, so stealthily had it crept over me, that I could scarcely define its coming. As I mentally review that portentous hour it seems that it must have originated with my first glimpse of that funeral scene, silently strengthening its grip with subtle insidiousness. A baleful malignant influence that seemed to emanate from the corpse itself held me with magnetic fascination. My whole being seemed charged with some ecstatic electrifying force, and I felt my form straighten without conscious volition.

  Now in adulthood, the narrator has grown into a killer, steadily narrowing the interim between one murder and another, forever seeking a renewal of that thrill which comes with the proximity of a fresh corpse. The bind is inescapable. ‘I knew, too, that through some strange satanic curse my life depended upon the dead for its motive force; that there was a singularity in my make-up which responded only to the awesome presence of some lifeless clod.’49

  Fiction, and florid fiction at that, but the story simmers with pertinent echoes from Nilsen’s own account of his obsession. We have seen already in this narrative how the child was transfixed in confusion at the sight of his grandfather in a coffin, and how he felt that the image of death was ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’. In subsequent self-appraisal before his trial, Nilsen expatiated on the theme, and came to his own conclusion that he had been ‘fixed by the wrong internal image’, and that his emotional development had been sent on a wrong course:

  I carried and developed that image inside me … I took that hybrid image [i.e. of death being both good and bad, tragic and glorious] with me, intact into maturity. The living grown-ups had somehow lied to me about my grandfather. I always wanted to be like him in my earliest recollections. My sexual and emotional aspirations became entrenched in creating and enhancing the ‘dead’ image. I became dead in my fantasies. In the mirror I became dead. I did not regard the image as me at all but perhaps as a vision of me in a visually perfect state. I fear pain, but in a real sense I do not mind being dead because ‘dead’ is a desirable image. I think that in some cases I killed these men in order to create the best image of them. It was not really a bad but a perfect and peaceful state for them to be in.50

  Could this be another attempt to shift blame to some extraneous cause? We should consider how the above corresponds to other aspects and episodes of Nilsen’s life as he recalled them at different unconnected moments over a period of eight months. From the ritual washing of the body after death, back through the fascination at the police morgue in 1973, the filming of his army friend in the Shetlands in 1972, the semi-fantasy of finding himself naked and near-dead in the back of an Arab taxi in 1967, the vision of Mr Ironside’s drowned body at Strichen in 1957, back to childhood dwelling on death at sea (his own included), Nilsen’s understanding of death has always been askance or awry. We have noticed several chapters ago how the notion of death frequently suggests to him the notion of love (and vice versa), whereas the idea of sexual satisfaction does not arise spontaneously from either notion. The spontaneity of his conceits is best judged when he is himself unaware of it, when he is not seeking to make a point or influence the reader of his random notes, but where the point and the influence emerge unwillingly. A poem which Nilsen wrote about his childhood wandering by the sea at Fraserburgh may serve as an illustration. Entitled ‘Kinnaird Head’ after the lighthouse at the edge of the promontory, it is ostensibly inspired by the legend of the lady who threw herself from the former castle into the sea with the body of her lover in her arms, but it quickly transmutes into a celebration of the power of the sea, then to a vision of himself ‘dead in the womb of cradle rock, whose blood was the sea’. It concludes:

  Her voice in shingle tones,

  She threatened and terrorised and loved me

  To a coldness deep in my bones.51

  Nilsen’s verse rarely rises to the level of poetry, but it has an immediate guilelessness which escapes the restraints of studied form in spite of the versifier’s own efforts, and it reveals a twisted, narcissistic soul with a morbid ambition.

  Nilsen’s dreams, too, betray a constant preoccupation with death. Some have been related already. Others begin with scenes of emotional happiness and end in disaster, though it is forever ambivalent – death bearing the face of peace rather than of pain. Yet others have no image of death at all, and invite rampant speculation. He frequently refers (not only in dreams) to the loved object and/or the victim bein
g ‘in’ him. When challenged, he claims that he means this to be interpreted in a spiritual sense. Of his fellow-prisoner at Brixton, David Martin, for whom he felt a powerful attachment (the most powerful of his life, he says), he writes ‘he is in me for all time’. This could be significant if it is held to mean he wishes to be the receptive partner, the consoler, to be in fact a woman. If Nilsen’s instincts are feminine, this would help to explain why he never pursued a person for whom he felt love, and why in his sexual encounters he was active in performance but passive in spirit. The act of murder could then be a warped act of love, the only way in which he could give his beloved the warm embrace of his body, as a woman would and as his confused sexuality would not permit. I do not suggest that this innate desire was recognised by his conscious self, but there is evidence that he ‘mothered’ people in life, and by his own account he physically embraced them after death. It is at least possible that had he allowed himself to be a passive partner on every level, the tragedy that befell fifteen men who had to be killed to satisfy him might have been averted.

  There is also a dream which has occurred more than once depicting Nilsen at the mercy of a man who has strapped him to the wall and forcibly sodomised him. In the dream the experience is pleasant, and he grudgingly admits that it may have happened in reality on occasions when he was drunk in a stranger’s flat. He acknowledges the possibility that he may have enjoyed this, and fancies the encounter ending with his being strangled. Part-dream, part-fantasy, part-reality, this welcome nightmare can possibly be a disguised celebration of necrophilia.

  Among Nilsen’s papers at Cranley Gardens was found a peculiar short story entitled ‘The Monochrome Man’ (incidentally proving that his self-designation in these terms was not a dramatic contrivance conceived after his arrest, but a long-standing obsession). It harks back to the semi-fantasy of his being drowned and rescued as a child,fn3 and contains some significant sentences: