Fury at serial killer Nilsen’s ‘confessions from beyond grave’

FURIOUS relatives of serial killer Dennis Nilsen’s victims have blasted publication of his grisly memoirs, once banned by the Government.

In them Nilsen, who died aged 72 in 2018, confesses to killing at least two previously unknown men.

He also reveals he was a suspect in the murder of a cabbie in Germany by fellow soldier Leslie Grantham – who went on to play Dirty Den in TV’s EastEnders.

He wrote: “All our fingerprints were taken ‘for elimination purposes’, but Lance Corporal Grantham was found guilty of the murder.”

Nilsen, from Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, murdered at least a dozen men between 1978 and 1983, mostly strangers he met in pubs.

The gruesome psychopath’s initial bid to get his autobiography published in the 1990s was blocked by the then Government.

Now History Of A Drowning Boy has been put together from 6,000 pages of typed notes he left to a pen pal after his death. Graphic designer Mark Austin, 54, says royalties from the book will go to charity.

Julie Bentley, whose brother, Carl Stottor survived a murder attempt by Nilsen, called the book “morally wrong”. She said her brother, who died in 2013 after battling booze and depression, “fought all his life” to stop publication of the memoirs.

Of Nilsen, she said: “When that evil man died, I thought it was over. Why should he have his say?”

A friend of another bereaved relative told a Sunday newspaper: “It’s as if he’s still laughing at us from beyond the grave. When he died, this book should have died with him.”

But Daily Express columnist and ex-Tory Prisons Minister Ann Widdecombe, 73, said there was “no good reason” to block publication given the time since the crimes – as long as no one cashes in.

In the book, civil servant

Nilsen

Face of evil...Nilsen when he was in the Army. The serial killer died in 2018

considered eating a victim or feeding “a small chunk” to his dog.

Speaking of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his maternal grandfather when he was five, he wrote: “If I could go back now to my childhood and see again the small boy, I think I would like to hammer a stake through the heart of his misery.”

The book, published by RedDoor Press, includes confessions to three previously unknown victims – a sex attack on a drunken soldier and the murder of two other men.

Most of his victims were gay or homeless. Nilsen would ply them with food and alcohol before killing them and dismembering their bodies.

In Cricklewood, north-west London, he buried the remains in the garden. But in Muswell Hill he boiled the heads, cut up the bodies and flushed them down the drains – with the blockages being his undoing.

Nilsen was jailed in 1983 for six murders. Of the estimated 12 to 15 victims only seven were identified. The crimes recently featured in the ITV drama Des. He was played by David Tennant, 49.

LITTLE COMFORT: Whittle’s marriage to Dorothy was strained daring, skilful RAF pilot, gave him a unique insight into the science of aeronautics.

But he could also be prickly, insecure, demanding, naïve and paranoid, traits exacerbated by the fight for acceptance by officialdom. George Bulman, the Government’s head of engine development, described Whittle as “the most impossible man I ever had to work with”.

Shattered by exhaustion and tension, he became addicted to the anti-depressant Benzedrine and suffered two nervous breakdowns. He found little comfort in his strained marriage to his first wife Dorothy, by whom he had two sons, though he had a close relationship with his devoted wartime secretary.

Part of Whittle’s insecurity and sensitivity stemmed from his modest background. Born in 1907 in Coventry, he was the son of a machine tool engineer who bought his own business but went bankrupt after the First World War, causing real poverty to the fam