My colleague the secret serial killer – by Nilsen’s boss
SERIAL killer Dennis Nilsen told office colleagues it would be ‘easy’ to murder young men and get away with it, his former boss has revealed.
Iain Mackinnon, Nilsen’s manager at a London job centre in 1980, said the Scot had spoken in the office about how no one would notice or care if a ‘rootless young man’ was picked up in a bar and killed.
The comments were also heard by Mr Mackinnon’s wife – but were dismissed at the time as ‘just another rant’ from Nilsen about the state of the country under then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Nilsen, originally from Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, was jailed at the Old Bailey in 1983 after being convicted of six charges of murder and two of attempted murder.
He claimed to have killed 15 men and boys after befriending them in pubs and luring them to homes in north London, where he would kill them and dismember their corpses.
His crimes were the subject of an ITV drama called Des, as Nilsen was known, which starred David Tennant as the serial killer.
Writing in The Spectator, Mr Mackinnon described Nilsen as a ‘pain in the neck’ to deal with – regularly complaining about working conditions and being ‘overbearing’ and ‘outspoken’ – but admitted he was a good candidate for promotion and could be funny.
He said: ‘My wife recalled him saying in the office one day, ‘‘You know, it would be really easy to pick up some rootless young man in a bar and knock them off. Who’d notice? Who’d care?’’
‘For his colleagues it was just another rant, a weird take on his continuing critique of Thatcher’s Britain. ‘‘Oh shut up, Des!’’, they no doubt thought.’
Mr Mackinnon said: ‘Des worked with me at the hotel and catering Jobcentre in 1980 and he was unquestionably odd.
‘After his arrest and before he was named, the papers simply said that the man arrested was a civil servant, a Scot, and a former soldier. ‘I thought to myself, I know someone who fits that description. Could it be Des? I decided it could be. Were the warning signs there? I’m not convinced they were. Des never gave me the creeps, I never felt uncomfortable in his presence.’ In 2018, Nilsen died behind bars at the age of 72 while serving a
whole-life sentence.