SERIAL KILLER RECORDED HIS THOUGHTS IN CELL My name is Dennis Nilsen...
They are the first words you hear from the serial killer known as the Muswell Hill Murderer whose despicable crime spree had appalled the nation.
“My name is Dennis Nilsen. My companions, as you can hear, are a couple of mating budgies, Hamish and Tweetles. He’s a good boy Hamish.”
The words are spoken in a new documentary, which is based on 250 hours of tapes he recorded in prison.
Job centre worker Nilsen was 37 when he was arrested in 1983 after human remains were found blocking the drain of his flat. He immediately confessed to killing “15 or 16” men.
He explained in chilling detail how he dismembered the bodies, sometimes after keeping them like mannequins in his home for days, before disposing of them. One of his victims was 14.
Nilsen, who spent the rest of his life in prison, remained unrepentant.
He would use his time tending to his pet budgies in his beige cell, playing keyboards in his underpants and smoking marijuana, which apparently was freely available to him behind bars.
And he used a tape recorder to dictate his life story for his own twisted version of an autobiography.
Waxing lyrical about his life, Nilsen reviewed the prison food, moaned about his treatment and discussed his crimes, which included acts of necrophilia.
The chain-smoking killer joked about his own demise. Coughing, he said: “We are ruining our healths. Oh well, we’ve all got to die of something, haven’t we?”
Documenting a hedonistic Christmas, he recorded himself while high on marijuana, saying: “What a way to spend Christmas. Because it’s the festive season, I think I should have a magic cigarette. Let’s have a wee spot of magic.”
»»Introduced his budgies in bizarre start »»He joked: ‘We all have to die of something’
Spluttering, he adds: “Oh God, I’m stoned as a bat here. Ah, I’ve got the keyboard out in front of me. Before me is a small portable mini keyboard of 1980s vintage.
“Here, in this splendid and accustomed isolation, I can use this audio brush to paint all the coloured hues of my emotions. I reach out to the board and my hands are shaking slightly.”
Nilsen expressed disdain for the guards, venting his anger that he was being treated like a monster.
He moaned: “I was given this categorization review, Category A. ‘Your custodial behaviour is satisfactory. Reports, however, describe you as a cold and calculated individual, who has shown little inclination to confront your offending behaviour. There are no recommendations for downgrading due to the absence of any real remorse’.
“So I... [provided] a comment. ‘This report is just the sort of politically correct prejudiced hatchet job one can expect from petty officials anxious to embroider the monster myth’.”
Talking like he was dictating a novel, Nilsen described his craving for younger men, saying about one of his victims: “As is my desire, the most beautiful creature in my universe is sleek, slim, male youth.
“The sight of him in his adamant glory sends my mind into a concentration of cathartic spasms. The man obsessed... The heart a-pounding. He is oblivious to the future.”
Nilsen barely acknowledges the effect of taking a life, instead priding himself on having told the police everything on his arrest and ranting about the “unfairness” of newspapers branding him a psychotic monster.
“There were no questions I refused to answer, going into minute detail. If anything, no other British murderer has ever been so forthright in confronting his offending behaviour than I have been,” he brags.
“A clearly prejudiced picture had been allowed to form in the public’s mind, even before I was charged with any offence, giving the media full latitude to milk their property.
“This allowed the images of monstrosity to take full flight, to whet the profitable public imagination... I am a man, not a monster. Awkward, isn’t it?”
The murderer, who had often targeted
homeless and homosexual men, joked he was known as “Gay killer Dennis Nilsen: the Mincing Menace”.
Nilsen, born in 1945, was raised in Aberdeenshire. After 11 years in the Army, he joined the police and moved to London. He soon quit the force and became a civil servant in 1974.
His known killings occurred between 1978 and his arrest in 1983.
The victims were murdered at Nilsen’s homes in north London – firstly 195 Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood, then 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. At Melrose Avenue, he disposed of the bodies under the floorboards before, as he said, “the maggots and smell set in”.
He later burnt the bodies on bonfires and scattered the remains in the garden. After moving to Cranley Gardens, he would dismember the victims and dispose of them down the communal drain. It was only when neighbours complained about blocked pipes that his murder spree was uncovered.
After his confession, it was thought Nilsen had murdered 17 people.
Only eight of his victims have been identified. Many of them were not reported missing because they had already fallen off the radar.
This included drug addicts and runaways. And when his targets survived, they feared coming forward due to rampant homophobia at the time.
He said: “I’m homosexual but I keep myself to myself. The last thing anyone would ever admit to is being gay.” He was charged with six murders and two attempted murders.
Several men eventually came forward to secure Nilsen’s conviction – most notably Carl Stotter, who was in the process of being drowned by Nilsen before the killer decided to revive him.
Recalling his encounter with Carl, Nilsen said: “I am both strong and weak, angelic and demonic.
“The cool hand to soothe the fevered forehead and the desperate raging hand at the throat. The harbinger of life and death.”
Nilsen pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility.
His lawyers argued he should be convicted only of manslaughter but the jury disagreed.
The killer, whose musings are featured in new Netflix documentary Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes, died due to a pulmonary embolism and a haemorrhage at Full Sutton prison in East Yorkshire in 2018. He was 72.
Most tapes were sent to journalist Russ Coffey. He said: “Everybody in the Nilsen case comes to a point where they decided Nilsen was bad not mad.
“You just have to know him long enough. It’s like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You’re left with this little piece of dirt.
“Nilsen [painted] such a vivid picture of a romantic outsider that made it hard to believe he killed out of pure evil.
“Society didn’t create Nilsen. That’s what he’d like you to believe. But we’ve still got to take responsibility for creating the prejudiced society that allowed him to kill over and over again.” Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes is on Netflix now.