Letters from a narcissistic psychopath that still chill my blood
Dead after 35 years in jail, serial killer Dennis Nilsen revealed his innermost thoughts to RUSS COFFEY — laying bare the mind of a loner with grotesque delusions of grandeur
DENNIS Nilsen liked to portray himself as a serial killer worthy of Hollywood, a sick genius like Hannibal Lecter, with the emotional complexity of Norman Bates in Psycho.
In his own distorted mind he was a crusader, a poet, a composer and a wit, the Oscar Wilde of mass murderers.
But in truth this deluded, manipulative murderer, who killed at least 12 people between 1978 and 1983, was essentially just a grubby sex offender who was lucky to have got away with his inadequate and disgusting crimes for as long as he did.
As a journalist who began corresponding with him 20 years ago and have waded through thousands of pages in which he detailed the sickening ways he disposed of his victims, I feel a sense of relief at his passing.
He was an intensely controlling man: even though we never met face to face, there was always a sense in his letters that he could turn unpleasant if he were ever to be challenged.
I will never hear from him again. He died in prison on Saturday at the age of 72, after reportedly undergoing a stomach operation. He had been behind bars for 35 years.
His legacy is lives needlessly cut short or wrecked beyond repair — victims who escaped his clutches but were ignored by the police — and the suffering of his victims’ families.
To those who knew him as an employee at the job centre in Denmark Street, in London’s West End, he was an unremarkable, introverted man. Those who served with him in the Army during the Sixties, when he was a young squaddie, say they could not recognise the cultured, erudite character who was later described in the Press.
Nilsen’s upbringing in Aberdeenshire was cold and dour. His father Olav was a shadowy figure whose real name was Moksheim, a Norwegian who came to Scotland during World War II. His mother Betty was unemotional, from a Puritan background.
Growing up, Nilsen dared not confess his homosexuality to his family and tried to hide it from almost everyone except the men he picked up in gay pubs for casual sex. He also hid the violent fantasies he had started to develop in the Army.
When he committed his first murder, in December 1978, he barely planned it, and was surprised not to be caught at once. HE
MET 14-year-old Stephen Holmes in a North London pub and took him back to his flat in Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, West London, where they both drank themselves into a stupor. At some point during the night, while the boy was asleep, Nilsen throttled him, then drowned him in a bucket.
He kept the body under his floorboards for eight months before burning it on a bonfire in his back garden.
Nearly a year after killing Stephen, he lured a student from Hong Kong named Andrew Ho to the flat and tried to strangle him. Ho fought him off and ran to the police, who questioned Nilsen but did not arrest him.
Ho did not want to press charges: although gay sex between consenting adults had been legal for more than a decade, it was still regarded with distaste by the authorities and police did not treat gay men with sympathy.
Nilsen killed again in December 1979, strangling a 23-year- old Canadian student named Kenneth Ockenden with the cable of his headphones as he listened to music. He took Polaroids pictures of the body and claimed that in the next few days he would sometimes drag it from under the floorboards and watch TV with it sitting in a chair beside him.
At least seven more young men, many of them homeless and aged 16 to 26, were murdered at the flat before Nilsen’s landlord asked him to leave. Neighbours had protested about foul smells coming from the apartment: Nilsen, too, had made other complaints, apparently oblivious to the risk that any inspection could uncover barely concealed body parts in the cupboards or under the floor.
Before moving out, he dismembered the corpses, removed their organs, threw some bones away with the rubbish and built a pyre of car tyres on wasteland to dispose of the rest. Incredibly, none of this activity alerted the police.
Nilsen’s nonchalant methods were partly because he didn’t own a car. He had to store the bodies or get rid of them openly.
But they also stemmed from a deeply disturbed personality that enabled him to shut down his emotions. Whatever had happened in the flat was ignored as soon as he stepped outside.
At work he appeared friendly and articulate, a trade unionist with a sense of humour who never talked about his private life. Even when he invited men back to the flat, usually with promises of alcohol, he laughed off the squalid conditions, blaming the smell on his dog and spraying air fresheners around the rooms.
His fantasies, his crimes and his outwardly respectable life all existed in separate mental compartments. He did not allow them to cross over, and did not envisage that anyone else could possibly connect them.
These contradictions ran so deep that when he attempted to strangle and drown 21-year-old drag artiste Carl Stottor in 1982, only to realise the man was not dead, he resuscitated him — then nursed him in bed for two days. Pretending Carl had almost been asphyxiated by a faulty zip on
his sleeping bag, Nilsen posed as his saviour before letting him go.
Years later, Carl described the grisly ordeal to me. He was a psychological wreck for the rest of his life, never fully recovering from the attack.
By contrast, Nilsen was seemingly unaffected by his horrific acts. One writer who collaborated with him on his biography commented that this was a man capable of buttering toast while a severed head sat in a pan beside the cooker.
Nilsen was furious, not at the accusation of callousness but over what he perceived as inaccuracies in the image. He would not have buttered toast, he told me angrily. More likely, he’d have eaten a bowl of cereal.
After he moved out, he continued to kill at his new flat in Muswell Hill, North London, carving up the remains and wrapping them in plastic before storing them in a wardrobe and a chest of drawers.
The bones were boiled to remove the flesh, which he flushed down the toilet. Eventually this blocked the drains and when residents (including Nilsen) complained to the landlord, a plumber was called. He discovered human remains.
Arrested at last, Nilsen intended to plead guilty to the killings and even confessed to three that the police could not confirm — perhaps inventing them to ensure he was ranked among Britain’s most prolific serial killers.
At the last minute, he was convinced by his solicitor to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of diminished responsibility.
The argument was, in essence, that nobody sane could have lived for so long with body parts rotting above and below the floorboards. It took many weeks for Nilsen to be persuded to plead not guilty because his ego could not bear the thought that he was ‘diminished’ in any way.
I first wrote to him in the late Nineties, after reading that he was campaigning to be allowed to publish a self- glorifying autobiography. It soon became obvious that, in a perverse way, he enjoyed life in prison: despite taking every opportunity to rail against the system, he was no longer lonely and had crusades to occupy him, whether for gay rights or against ‘censorship’.
He gave me access to a copy of the manuscript he had smuggled out of jail. He told me it was the first serious attempt to explore his ‘psychological condition’. In truth it was a work of abject selfpity. Describing his loveless childhood, he likened himself to ‘a dog that had never been patted’.
I was cast in the role of the serious journalist, the only one perceptive and enlightened enough to recognise Nilsen for the superior being he was.
As long as his ego was placated, he would answer any question. His numerous letters, often stretching over 20 pages, combined black humour and comments about prison life with a subtle air of menace.
It was a masterclass in manipulative behaviour. The prison authorities, keen to ensure that Nilsen’s autobiography never saw the light of day, would not permit me to meet him — which probably helped me maintain a healthy distance and avoid the influence of his dark personal charm.
Others were taken in by the myth he was weaving. In 1988, Melvyn Bragg and the South Bank Show featured film of a modern ballet called Dead Dreams Of Monochrome Men, supposedly based on Nilsen’s life and exploring the ‘ tragic consequences’ resulting from ‘society’s homophobia’.
Hundreds of macabre fans, both men and women, found themselves attracted to the archetype of a tortured soul, sensitive and estranged from all around him.
I have seen letters from emotional women who wanted to share his loneliness, and men who enclosed photographs of themselves. Many of them seemed willing to overlook his crimes.
NILSENconcurred with this view of himself. In the phraseology of psychiatrists, he had an ‘ exquisite sensitivity’ to his own feelings but utter disregard for how others felt. Incapable of empathy, he was skilled at ‘pressing people’s buttons’, bullying them with their own emotions.
He was also a narcissist and a psychopath with a grandiose selfimage on the borderline of uncontrolled psychosis. This mass of mental disorders was barely under control, though he was able to appear quite conventional and well-adjusted to people in whom he had no sexual interest.
It was only when a young man was identified as sexual prey that he allowed his sick mind to control his behaviour.
Nilsen wanted to believe he was a unique case. In fact, he was the opposite — prisons are full of people like him. I have spoken to many murderers, particularly in the U.S., who exhibit the same traits. It’s just that Nilsen was good at spinning his own mythology and too many people wanted to believe it. He wanted to be a monster and the world indulged him.
Dennis Nilsen was not, as he wanted us to believe, an exceptional person destroyed by a murderous flaw. He was just a vile sex criminal whose brain lacked a crucial component. The kindest thing we can do for his victims is to forget his name.