REAL COPS ON

GRIM TASK Police search garden of Nilsen’s Melrose Avenue home

DC Brian Lodge

IN 1983 Brian Lodge was a detective constable who became the exhibits officer responsible for all the evidence on Nilsen, which included body parts and fragments of bone found at the killer’s two North London addresses.

The horrific material caused a nightmare which has kept recurring for 37 years. He explains: “I had it last night, two weeks ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, who knows. It’s there all the time.

“I’m in a room, green, smoky, foggy haze in the room. Dead bodies are hanging from the ceiling. I keep trying to leave and I can’t because I’m slipping on bits of guts all over the floor, I can’t get out, I can’t get out and I’m stuck in that room. I don’t know how long the dream lasts because I don’t know how often I have it. It’s all to do with that inquiry.”

Mr Lodge said these days the officers who went to his flat and retrieved body, parts including heads in cooking pots and a pair of legs in the bathroom, would get proper counselling. “In those days you didn’t,” ” he said “You’re just told that’s your job and get on with it. If it happened d nowadays, the police would look after you, there’s a duty of care. e.

“In those e days... you just went to the pub. Nobody said, ‘Are you all right?’” t?’”

Lodge is played in the drama by Ben Bailey Smith, and was invited vited to visit the set along ng with

DI McCusker. er. He says that getting all the evidence together, bagged up, was a massive task. “I had put in more than 1,000 bits,” he says. As well as bones and body parts, there were murder weapons and items like a cooking pot used to boil heads in.

Mr Lodge says it’s a mystery why Nilsen wasn’t caught sooner: “The first four or five bodies, he kept under the floorboards or under the kitchen sink in a cupboard – they must have been rotting. Why that smell was never noticed by neighbours, I’ll never know.”

He still feels frustrated that many victims were never identified. “There’s many, many families around the world wondering if their missing uncle, brother, son, cousin, husband was a victim. If we had carried on the investigation longer we might have identified more people.

“If this happened five or six years ago, there would be so much more DNA and a lot of people might have been identified.”

The team was relieved when Nilsen was found guilty on a majority verdict, after pleading not guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility:

“We were so happy when hewas he was found guilty of being bad

not mad.”

SET VISIT Brian left and actor Ben