THE BIG READ:

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A SERIAL KILLER

ONE of the most significant insights into the minds of serial killers comes from the pen of Dennis Nilsen.

Nilsen, a lonely, socially awkward outsider from Aberdeenshire, killed at least 12 young men between 1978 and 1983. He is, in many ways, the archetypal serial killer – his strange and terrifying psychology a guide to understanding what makes such men (and serial killers nearly always are men) tick.

His crimes still resonate so powerfully in British society that his life is to be dramatised from tomorrow night in a new ITV series, Des, starring David Tennant.

The gateway to understanding Nilsen, and other killers like him, comes in the form of a series of sketches, poems and prose passages which he composed called Monochrome Man: Sad Sketches. The drawings and writings detail his crimes and his feelings towards both himself and his murders. The sketches comprise a ghastly collection of drawings of his victims. One image shows an impassive Nilsen staring down at a dead body on a bed. Another shows a victim stuffed into a wardrobe while a third is titled “The body on the floor. Ritual stripping and washing”. Others depict mutilated and naked bodies.

If Nilsen’s drawings reveal the utter detachment and terrifying lack of empathy with which a psychopath views human suffering, then his writings show us the absolute emotional deadness which exists inside the serial killer. One of his poems reads:

The monochrome man is a dream

It is the black and it is the white of life. There he stands near himself and distant He is the cameo who activates now and then

Can’t cope with metropolitania Taking him sometimes to this, numbing chant.

On the waste he laid before him

Peaceful, pale flesh on a bed Real and beautiful – and dead.

There’s nothing inside Nilsen, the poem tells us. He’s emotionally dead, any sense of human feeling gone. Nilsen is confessing that he quite literally doesn’t function as other humans function – he’s like some alien creature pretending to be human. He’s a “cameo” – an unnoticed walk-on part in life. He cannot bear modern society – “metropolitania”, as he calls it. Nilsen clearly says that it’s his rejection of this world, which the rest of us live in, that led him to murder.

Nilsen is obviously trying to exempt himself from the sin of being simply evil – of killing for the mere pleasure of killing. However, while he self-pityingly blames his crimes on the modern world turning him into an emotionally blank “thing”, he also effectively confesses that he only feels alive during murder. The acclaimed writer Brian Masters called his study of Nilsen Killing For Company because the murderer kept the corpses of his victims in his home to assuage his intense loneliness and inability to connect to other, living, human beings.

There’s an horrific truth to Nilsen’s writings when it comes to the study of serial murder. Most repeat killers share the same emotional deadness, rejection of society, and inability to feel alive unless involved in an act of destruction. This loser Nilsen, this nobody from Fraserburgh, this forgettable dull friendless non-entity, is also the template of the modern serial killer. This makes studying Nilsen and his crimes both dreadful and necessary, because his murders say something very important and disturbing about the nature of modern crime and society.

Self-esteem killers

THE philosopher and writer Colin Wilson