Of all the up close, chillingly

As a veteran crime reporter, NEIL DARBYSHIRE came face to face with many murderers in the dock. But one above all disturbs him still... and he’s been brought uncannily back to life on TV

THE most remarkable thing about Dennis Andrew Nilsen was that he appeared so thoroughly unremarkable.

In the Old Bailey’s Court No 1 on the first day of his trial, he looked exactly what he was, a smartly dressed junior civil servant with a flat in the London suburbs and a dog. He was the man you saw in the bus queue or at the Post Office and vaguely registered but didn’t really notice.

With large, wire-rimmed glasses, sports jacket, slacks and tie (an accessory that would assume more sinister overtones later, when it was revealed to be his murder weapon of choice), he was the faceless man in the crowd.

The less ordinary thing about him, of course, is that he was a serial murderer. As the trial days passed, he listened attentively but dispassionately as the full enormity of his crimes was laid out before the jury. It was almost as if they had been committed by someone else.

In police interviews he claimed not to remember killing some of his victims. Of one he said: ‘In the morning he was lying on the bed, fully clothed. He was dead. I came to the conclusion that I had killed him.’

In more than a decade as a crime correspondent, first on the London Evening Standard then The Daily Telegraph, I had the opportunity to observe a good many killers at close quarters across various courtrooms.

Terrorists with icy contempt for British justice; men who could blow up women and children or put a gun to a man’s head and blow out his brains, yet claim a spurious legitimacy because of their political cause.

Scary, malevolent gangsters who had eliminated rivals, or disobedient subordinates, or simply those unlucky enough to have got in their way. All bravado and muscular defiance.

Then there were the serial killers, those for whom murder was a way of life. The brooding, saturnine Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, who claimed to hear the voice of God telling him to kill and mutilate women.

GRINNING, twitching Stockwell Strangler Kenneth Erskine who had a mental age of 11. He murdered at least seven elderly men and women in their homes, before doing unspeakable things to their corpses.

Sometimes he would fall asleep in court. An unscientific judgment it may be, but Erskine gave every impression of being stark raving mad.

Rose West by contrast, looked almost bored in the dock as the Crown detailed the reign of terror she exerted with her husband Fred at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. The only time her mask slipped was after conviction, when she had a screaming fit as she was taken down to the cells.

These killers were all unnerving in their different ways. But in his ordinariness, Nilsen, who died at HMP Full Sutton near York in 2018, was perhaps the most unnerving of all. A monster in plain sight.

In court, he had a habit of fixing his gaze on you for what seemed like hours. It wasn’t an aggressive look, by any means. More a half-smile and slight cock of the head as if he wanted to initiate a conversation. But it was constant. Every time you looked up from a concentrated bout of shorthand note-taking, he would still be staring straight at you in that same almost quizzical way. Knowing what he was capable of, this was beyond disconcerting.

He also clearly fancied himself as something of a wag. After telling police he had strangled most of his victims with a tie, he said: ‘I think I started off with about 15 ties, now I’ve only got one left. And that’s a clip-on.’

Grim as the subject was, it broke the mood and half the courtroom burst into barely suppressed laughter. Nilsen laughed along, looking mighty pleased with himself for being so witty. He had a similar smirk when the court heard that when detectives asked him how many bodies he had stored under the floorboards at any one time, he answered: ‘I don’t know. I didn’t do a stock check.’

In the new ITV drama Des, the superb David Tennant is made up to look uncannily like Nilsen, and certainly manages to capture some of his understated menace. But ordinary is difficult to act, and Tennant’s Nilsen seems to me to have rather more charisma than the original. Because the series is based largely on Nilsen’s own writings and self-analysis, Tennant is perhaps Nilsen as Nilsen saw himself, rather than as others saw him. But it is gripping, authentic drama.

It begins by setting the scene. The winter of 1982/3 was a deeply unquiet time in the life of the UK. Margaret Thatcher’s brimstone cure for the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ — though it would eventually yield economic recovery — had seen unemployment rise to a record 3.2 million. The sense of fracture was almost palpable.

Jobless and rootless young men gravitated towards London in the hope of work. For many, it was a life in hostels or on the street. Some slipped into a demi-monde of drink, drugs and male prostitution, mainly around Soho and the West End.

It was in this netherworld that Dennis Andrew Nilsen stalked his prey.

Between December 1979 and February 1983 he lured, intoxicated and strangled 15 young, mostly gay men, before engaging in sexual activity