Killer Nilsen reveals three more victims from beyond the grave
Autobiography reveals attacks
SERIAL killer Dennis Nilsen confesses to three further sex attacks in his autobiography, which is being published posthumously this week.
Nilsen, who died in 2018, tells how he attacked a young soldier who had passed out drunk in the toilet of an overnight train from London to Aberdeen in 1968.
That was 10 years before he began murdering young men and boys at his North London homes, first at 195 Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood, then at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill.
In History of a Drowning Boy, which Nilsen was banned from publishing when he was alive, he admits at least two further attacks at Cranley Garden.
He writes: “I half strangled at least another two men into unconsciousness there before they were used as sexual props to my drunken fantasies. To date, they have never come forward.”
After his death in prison, aged 72, Nilsen, who killed at least 12 times between 1978 and 1983, left 6,000 pages of typed notes to his pen pal Mark
Austin, 54. Austin has defended his decision to publish the autobiography, arguing that it provides a valuable insight into the mind of a killer.
Austin told The Sunday Times: “If that might help prevent one future victim, then it has to be worth it.”
He said all royalties would be given to homelessness and rehabilitation charities. But the book has drawn criticism from the families of Nilsen’s victims. One friend of a bereaved relative told The
Sunday Times: “He’s done enough damage already. It’s a slap in the face. It’s as if he’s still laughing at us from beyond the grave. When he died, this book should have died with him.” Nilsen tried to publish his autobiography in the late 1990s but was stopped by rules banning prisoners from profiting from their crimes. In it, he
denies cannibalism but admits reflecting on the “culinary possibilities” of human flesh. He blames his crimes on being abused by his grandfather in a war bunker as a five-year-old.
He also reveals that while serving in the army in West Germany, he and his regiment were fingerprinted on suspicion of shooting a local taxi driver.
Soldier Leslie Grantham, known for his later acting career as Dirty Den in EastEnders, was convicted of the killing.
Nilsen, who grew up in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, wrote: “I found him a good-looking kid, he was a bit too aggressively extrovert in personality for there to have been any social rapport.”
Designer Austin, who exchanged 800 letters with the killer, said Nilsen wanted his ashes scattered at Melrose Avenue.
He added: “I thought it was an insult. When the time comes I will probably scatter them in the sea in Fraserburgh.”
David Tennant played Nilsen in last year’s ITV drama Des.