Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  Fowler quotes a useful analogy to help fix the relevance of the term: ‘In the psychotic we suppose that there has been some radical breakdown in the machinery; in the neurotic we suppose that it is working badly, though perhaps only temporarily; in the psychopath we suppose that the machinery was built to an unusual pattern or is faulty.’ One might add that the pattern is lost and the fault invisible.

  Similarly, to call Nilsen a monster is to avoid the issue. People identified as ‘witches’ were once burned without further ado, it being simpler to get rid of them than to examine the questions which their alleged conduct, and society’s hysterical reactions to it, raised. Nilsen has done monstrous things, and the responsible attitude would be to study his personality probingly in the hope of finding out why. Not for his sake, to give him the chance of redemption, but for ours, to deepen our knowledge and improve the chances of detecting such an aberrant personality before it does harm and causes grief. If the death penalty were still in force, it would now be idiotic to kill Nilsen, for that would be to destroy the only evidence worth exploring.

  Until this detailed exploration occurs (if it occurs) we can look only to theory and experience for an explanation. Psychiatry offers one answer, fragmented into a dozen smaller answers; philosophy offers another, the theory of sexuality a third, and diabolism a fourth. None has the translucent clarity of unassailable truth, and we have seen that they contradict one another often on essentials. The untutored intuition of a novelist might do as well as any of them. For my own part, I think there are certain threads which run through Nilsen’s life which are not adequately encompassed by any of the tentative explanations so far postulated. I have hinted at them in previous chapters.

  Nilsen’s concepts of love and death are inextricably entangled in his mind. This has little to do with psychology, or even with ethics, but is bound up with the perception of ideas. We still know nothing of how ideas, represented by words, are formulated in the mind. Why does the word ‘love’ persistently strike a chord which releases the word ‘death’ in Nilsen’s sentences? There have been manifold examples of this in the present narrative. ‘I searched for love and in my struggles made death,’ he writes. Even if this is conscious rationalisation, an artful stab at trying to make tangible the dichotomy which he wishes us to believe is the root of his illness in a neat antithetical sentence, why did those two words rather than any others serve his purpose? Antithesis is stylistically dramatic, enabling the mind to grasp quickly an arresting idea, but one must venture beyond form and semantics to see why Nilsen’s mind always thinks in opposites, and always tries to fuse them.

  Inevitably, I must return to the grandfather. Andrew Whyte was the one love of Nilsen’s infancy. The boy’s last view of the loved object was as a body, which he only gradually perceived to be dead. It is a commonplace that the infant wants first to possess the parent, then to be the parent, finally to be like the parent. Whyte was ‘parent’ to Dennis Nilsen as no other member of the family had been. I believe that he never ceased wanting to be ‘like’ him, as a demonstration of love, and that when Andrew Whyte was dead, the only way that Nilsen could still ‘feel’ that love was in simulating his own death, and finally the death of others. The idea of death resurrected the idea of love as nothing else could. When simulation ceased, and reality took over, his behaviour towards the corpses of his victims (in the immediate aftermath) was that of an affectionate parent.

  The confusion of ideas must have existed in the infant mind before the vision of grandfather’s corpse; he was, after all, already six years old. (There are plenty of grounds for believing that character continues to be shaped after this age, anyway.) Andrew Whyte had been a seafaring man, absent for long periods and frequently. Each departure must have seemed like a death to the child, and each return a renewal of love. Unable to accept that the final departure meant the disappearance, for ever, of love, the boy morbidly clung to its last manifestation in the coffin, the last return.

  (There is surely some connection between the powerful influence of the sea in Nilsen’s childhood and the fact that several of his victims were drowned after strangulation. The image of water never lost its grip on his imagination.)

  We remember, also, that the mentality in fishing villages is deeply fatalistic, and that some of the genes of Nilsen’s ancestry contributed to a depressive predisposition. Without these factors, Nilsen might not have fallen into morbidity.

  There is a further possibility. Semi-autistic children who cannot feel warm love for the mother none the less need to feel it for someone. If the mother is not the object of that love but is replaced by someone else, then the love may well haul guilt along with it. Young Dennis gave his love to Andrew Whyte, all the time feeling that he should not, that he should reserve it for his mother. His inability to show even a little affection for his mother made his guilt inevitable and permanent. In a sense, the murders arise from this guilt, and his real love for his mother lies far deeper than even he suspects. Interestingly, it is not unusual for children like this to dream of suicide in the sea, which is the ultimate mother-symbol.

  When Nilsen now talks of the excitement and thrill in tracking down a suitable victim and pursuing his plan as far as the kill, he thinks it is pleasure in the act of murder which motivates him, but he could be wrong. The excitement might derive from his anticipation of the return of that beloved object – the corpse. Generally speaking, lust murderers experience anti-climax when the deed is accomplished. Nilsen appears on the contrary to have devoted unnecessary care and attention to the corpse, washing it, drying it, making it ‘comfortable’ and helping it to look ‘good’. (This of course cannot apply to those anonymous victims, like the ‘emaciated young man’, whom he placed almost immediately under the floorboards.)

  At the same time, the ‘real’ Nilsen is painfully aware that he is alive and thereby hopelessly distant from that state in which his grandfather lies. Hence his repeated flight from his own identity, his tireless denial of the Nilsen who persists in being of this world. We have seen time and again how he will snatch at any pretence to be someone else, to assume another name, to discard the identity he perceives as insulting to his grandfather simply because it is alive, and if he truly loved Andrew Whyte he would be dead like him. The one identity which he has consistently embraced is that of the corpse; he would have liked to be one of his own victims. But he was too weak to kill himself, and I fancy he feels more ashamed of this than he does of having murdered fifteen innocent and defenceless souls.

  Twice in his life he has felt love for another man, and on both occasions he kept it to himself. To declare it would have been, once more, to betray Andrew Whyte. There can be few more disturbing instances of ‘retarded’ or ‘arrested’ development of personality than this. The third love, engendered in Brixton Prison for David Martin, he did declare, in a letter pushed under the cell door (which was later handed back without comment). This was permitted because he now knew that he would be punished for not having loved Andrew Whyte enough by the living death of prison existence; the debt had been paid. As for Nilsen’s sexual exploits, it is more than likely that towards the end they amounted to very little, and that they were always preceded by such abandoned drinking that they could be written off by his subconscious as involuntary. Sex was for him less acceptable than murder, for sex pulled him further away from a stern moralist grandfather while murder, in the shambles of his notions, brought him closer.

  The role of alcohol in Nilsen’s crimes has been misunderstood. Not only is it the trigger that releases inhibitions (as it is with most murderers – between 60 per cent and 90 per cent, according to which survey you read), but it is the excuse which exculpates the infant Nilsen. This is how I believe Nilsen’s subconscious morality might operate: Andrew Whyte was a strict teetotaller, so if the infant who persists inside Nilsen suffers (imagined) disapproval from grandfather for having murdered, the adult can blame the drink, which grandfather had warned against, thus proving grandfather
right and at the same time demonstrating that drink, rather than Dennis, is the source of evil. For a long time Nilsen did blame the alcohol following the first murder in 1978, and is still apt to attribute undue significance to its ingestion. He overestimates the power of alcohol in the commission of his crimes, but underestimates its symbolic significance.

  The way in which Nilsen disposed of dead bodies was revolting. Given that they had to be disposed of in some way if he wished to escape detection, then from a practical point of view he was merely efficient. There have been many murderers who got rid of the evidence in more unpleasant ways than he (Druse, Webster, Luetgert, Denke, Fish, Grossman, Haigh, to name only a few). He derived no pleasure from the task, and there was no sexual element in dismemberment. (Only once did he cut the genitals from a corpse, with the first victim at Cranley Gardens, and he says he felt it was an act of sacrilege.) But this is not the point. It is not why he dismembered bodies that bewilders, but how he could face himself having done so. The police photographs of human limbs and torn flesh found at Cranley Gardens would make any normally ‘sane’ person stagger and sweat. How is it possible to wake up in the morning to a man’s head in a pot on the gas-stove? How can one place pieces of people in suitcases in the garden shed and leave them there for months at a time, then pick them up, rotting, for incineration? How was he able to tell me, with quasi-scientific curiosity, that the weight of a severed head, when you pick it up by the hair, is far greater than you would imagine? I confess I cannot even guess at answers to such questions, and as I said at the beginning, it is Nilsen’s inhuman detachment, his invulnerability to the squalor of human remains, that makes him finally unrecognisable.

  In this there is an insoluble paradox. For Nilsen is a man who feels, who can bestow loving care on a sparrow or surprise a colleague with a thoughtful gift. His response to the natural world is that of a sensual romantic. In May 1983 he wrote to me about his lack of close friendship at school.

  My best friends [he said] were the sea, sky, rivers, trees, air, sun, snow, wind, mountains, rocks, hares, rabbits, birds, and the dear land. I was at one with the natural environment, with my face constantly turned to the light or the bosom of the soil and its living grass and broad sweep over the beautiful world. I now know myself too late. I would have been happier as a shepherd up in the desolate reaches with my dog and my flock in a contented harmony with the natural elements.72

  With people, on the other hand, he was never ‘at one’; he was cold, distant, untouchable – his own mother said she could not cuddle him.

  Nilsen always knew well enough that it was difficult for him to demonstrate feelings which other people display naturally, recklessly. He can only intellectualise them on paper. That gulf between the Nilsen who feels and the Nilsen who writes is as wide today as it ever was. In trying to bridge the gap, to turn feelings into deeds rather than words, he became a killer of men. Given that he can feel, can he feel enough? Is the remorse that he has occasionally expressed genuine or false? We are told that ‘psychopaths’ are adroit at giving voice to emotions which they cannot feel, talking of ‘love’ and ‘remorse’ only because they know they ought to. Stavrogin wanted to be tormented by remorse for his act, and felt instead only tepid regret.

  We conclude with two passages in Nilsen’s own words, contrasting as starkly as the black and white of his own invention, the ‘monochrome man’, and so deeply in tone, substance, and manner that they might be the voices of two people. The first is a detailed account written after the trial, of how he killed Stephen Sinclair, answering some of the nagging questions about the degree of premeditation and the state of his mind. The second was written in Brixton Prison three months after his arrest.

  I am sitting cross-legged on the carpet, drinking and listening to music. It finished with the theme from Harry’s Game. I drain my glass and take the ’phones off. Behind me sits Stephen Sinclair on the lazy chair. He was crashed out with drink and drugs. I sit and look at him. I stand up and approach him. My heart is pounding. I kneel down in front of him. I touch his leg and say, ‘Are you awake?’ There is no response. ‘Oh Stephen,’ I think, ‘here I go again.’ I get up and go slowly and casually through to the kitchen. I take some thick string from the drawer and put it on the stainless steel draining board. ‘Not long enough,’ I think, I go to the cupboard in the front room and search inside. On the floor therein I find an old tie. I cut a bit off and throw the rest away. I go back into the kitchen and make up the ligature. I look into the back room and Stephen has not stirred. Bleep comes in and I speak to her and scratch her head. ‘Leave me just now, Bleep. Get your head down, everything’s all right.’ She wags her tail and slinks off into the front room. Her favourite place is on one of the armchairs in there, where she curls up. Looking back I think she knew what was to happen. Even she became resigned to it. If there was a violent struggle, she would always become excited and start barking. I was relaxed. I never contemplated morality. This was something which I had to do. I knotted the string because I heard somewhere that this was what the thuggi did in India for a quicker kill.fn7 I walked back into the room. I draped the ligature over one of his knees and poured myself another drink. My heart was pounding very fast. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Stephen. I thought to myself, ‘All that potential, all that beauty, and all that pain that is his life. I have to stop him. It will soon be over.’ He was wearing his white running shoes, very tight drain-pipe black jeans, a thick jersey, leather jacket and blue and white football scarf. I did not feel bad. I did not feel evil. I walked over to him. I removed the scarf. I picked up one of his wrists and let go. His limp arm flopped back on to his lap. I opened one of his eyes and there was no reflex. He was deeply unconscious. I took the ligature and put it around his neck. I knelt by the side of the chair and faced the wall. I took each loose end of the ligature and pulled it tight. He stopped breathing. His hands slowly reached for his neck as I held my grip. His legs stretched out in front of him. There was a very feeble struggle then his arms fell limp down in front of him. I held him there for a couple of minutes. He was limp and stayed that way. I released my hold and removed the string and tie. He had stopped breathing. I spoke to him. ‘Stephen, that didn’t hurt at all. Nothing can touch you now.’ I ran my fingers through his bleached blond hair. His face looked peaceful. He was dead. The front of his jeans was wet with urine. I wondered if he had defecated as well. I got up and had a drink and a cigarette. He had made no noise; I had to wash his soiled body. I ran a bath. I kept the water in it hand-warm and poured in some lemon washing-up liquid. I returned and began to undress him. I took off his leather jacket, jersey and tee-shirt. Then his running shoes and socks. I had difficulty with his tight wet jeans. He still sat there, now naked, in the armchair. He had only urinated. He obviously had not had a square meal in a couple of days. I had not really known that his hair had been bleached until I had stripped him. I discovered that he had ginger pubic hair. Otherwise his body was pale and hairless. He had crepe bandages on both forearms. I removed these to reveal deep, still open, recent razor cuts. He had very recently tried to commit suicide. His heart was stopped. He was very dead. I picked up his limp body into my arms and carried it into the bathroom. I put it into the half-filled bath. I washed the body. Putting my hands under his arms I turned him over and washed the back of his body. I pulled him out. He was very slippery with all that soap. I sat him on the loo and towelled the body and his hair as best as I could. I threw him over my shoulder and took him into the back room. I sat him on the white and blue dining chair. I sat down, took a cigarette and a drink and looked at him. His head hung back with his mouth slightly open. His eyes were not quite closed. ‘Stephen,’ I thought, ‘you’re another problem for me. What am I going to do with you? I’ve run out of room.’ I dismissed the future problems from my mind. I would cross that hurdle when I came to it. I laid him on top of the double bed. It must have been well into the next morning of 27 January. I lay beside him and placed the large mir
ror at the end of the bed. I stripped my own tie, shirt and grey cords off and lay there staring at both our naked bodies in the mirror. He looked paler than I did. Being ginger haired he would anyway. I put talcum powder on myself and lay down again. We looked similar now. I spoke to him as if he were still alive. I was telling him how lucky he was to be out of it all. I thought how beautiful he looked and how beautiful I looked. He looked sexy but I had no erection. He just looked fabulous. I just stared at us both in the mirror. Soon I felt tired. I got in between the sheets as I was starting to become cold. He still lay there beside me on top of the bedclothes. I knew he would become cold very soon and I did not want to feel his coldness actually in bed with me. The coldness of a corpse has nothing endearing in it. Bleep came into the room and jumped up on the bed beside me. ‘Come on, old girl, get your head down. Stephen is all right now. He’s O.K.’ She settled down at the end of the bed stopping only to sniff once near Stephen’s leg. She knew that the warm friendly Stephen was no more and ignored his body completely. I turned his head towards me and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Goodnight, Stephen,’ I said, switched off the bedside light and went to sleep. I was up a few hours later. It was an ordinary day of work for me ahead. Stephen was cold. I carried him into the front room and laid him on the floor under a blanket. I straightened him, as I knew that rigor mortis would set in soon.

  In postscript, Nilsen added, ‘People understandably will find the description of me killing Stephen Sinclair very horrifying. Nevertheless, that is the way it was.’73