Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (10 page)

In January 1967, Nilsen was informed of a new posting. It was in Aden in the Gulf of Arabia, now part of the state of Yemen. This British Protectorate had found itself in a state of emergency after a series of terrorist attacks from Islamic extremists. A decade or so since the Suez crisis, Britain was now considering whether the time had come to leave the port of Aden. If the time had almost come to leave, however, Harold Wilson’s Government didn’t want the action of
anti-colonial
terrorists to be the trigger.

Fuelled by increasingly radical Islamic fervour, the rebels became more and more obsessive. Just as in modern-day Afghanistan, troops operated in near-impossible heat and difficult terrain against a fanatical opposition. Nilsen describes being flown over in a VC10 airliner. When he arrived in Arabia, it was like ‘walking into the blast of a baker’s oven’. He thought the terrorists seemed in complete disarray with ‘everyone intent on killing everyone else’ and ‘the only point of agreement being killing the English’.

Nilsen’s kitchen served the Military Provost Staff Corps. They were in charge of detainees at the Al Mansoura Prison. The prison was a walled fort, with a disused gallows guarded by gun towers. The town of Al Mansoura is now a suburb of Aden City. At that time it was a warren of low-rise,
breeze-block
buildings with a single road running through them. It was situated five miles from the city and port of Aden. The military complex was basic and functional. Unlike the tented townships that made up other military bases, however, the
barracks here were buildings built out of red clay. Their colour merged in with the surrounding desert.

On active service, even the cooks were required to take full part in the patrolling. As Nilsen walked the dusty roads, he says he would see dead bodies casually discarded by the roadside. He says he didn’t find anything exciting in the ‘shot-up mechanics of death’ while also pointing out he didn’t like to think of attractive male bodies spoiled. The way he talks suggests those bodies didn’t excite him, but they certainly helped desensitise him to the reality of death. He started to become very blasé about his own safety, volunteering for dangerous patrols and, when off duty, drinking copiously before wandering off on his own. It was an impulse he didn’t understand.

One afternoon, while off duty at the Steamer Point army base, near the old city, Nilsen decided to hitch-hike his way the few miles to Al Mansoura. He was picked up by a lorry, which then drove straight through terrorist-ridden areas. Nilsen says that although he was wearing his ‘civvies’, there could be no mistaking what he was. He thinks the only reason he survived may have been because the rebels assumed that he was part of a set-up.

Yet he says he was excited by the experience. Again, he offers no explanation as to why the line between life and death was so thrilling. It is likely, however, that being in a conflict zone had reawakened his childhood fascination with death and sex. It is also likely that Nilsen can’t fully remember what did and didn’t happen. The whole experience of being in Aden was so different from anything a young British soldier might have experienced; it would surely have had a dreamlike
quality. Nilsen’s imagination would have amplified that. Even the geography would have appeared fantastical. The city of Aden nestled in a volcanic crater connected to the mainland by an isthmus. Zealots who looked like they had come straight out of a film lived in a harsh desert, further inland.

Nilsen liked to re-imagine one incident over and over again. It was even cited at his trial as an example of his difficulty in separating fact and fantasy. The event occurred one Friday evening when Nilsen had gone with others to cool down in the Oasis bar in Aden city. After a night’s drinking, and unsteady on his feet, he decided to hail a cab back. He says he did so casually, as if ‘in the West End of London’, not ‘somewhere where any Westerner was likely to be killed’. In the back, full of rum and beer, he passed out on the leatherette seat.

Suddenly, he felt a violent blow to the back of his neck. Nilsen passed out. When he came to, he was naked in the boot with his clothes in a pile beside him. The cool metal was pressing into his body. Outside, someone was turning the lock. Nilsen felt a sense of detachment. As soon as the boot was opened, he says he hit the ugly, old taxi driver with a jack. The man slumped to the ground, motionless. He took the man’s clothes and ran for it.

Whatever happened, it certainly wasn’t as described. The reasons for Nilsen’s confusion between reality and imagination in this particular story, however, become clear in his autobiography. This incident was part of the same developing fantasy theme as the ‘Fat Hans’ scenario. Some kind of altercation probably did happen in that taxi, but Nilsen wanted it to have been much more unpleasant than it
was. He wanted to imagine he had been stripped by an old man and interfered with. He wanted sex, and for it to be close to an experience of death.

Another far-fetched story does, however, contain a greater ring of authenticity. Again, it involved the line between life and death. Nilsen occasionally drank with one particular private who was full of stories and enjoyed impressing his colleagues. One afternoon, during a quiet period, the private told Nilsen he had something interesting to show him. He led him through a set of doors, which gave out into a large courtyard; in the middle stood a fully operational gallows. The private’s job was to perform routine maintenance. Although unused, it was kept in working order.

Fascinated, Nilsen climbed the scaffold. His friend shouted up that if you supported your body weight with your arms on the rope, you could probably put the noose around your neck and drop down the trap-door. He was half joking, but that, though, was exactly what Nilsen did. He pulled the noose over his neck and then took the weight and dangled over the open hole. ‘I was buzzing with fear and excitement … my eyes drawn to the gaping hole of eternity,’ he says. His friend rushed up the steps, frightened that Nilsen’s arms weren’t strong enough. But as he reached him, Nilsen had swung back onto the platform and was grinning.

By June 1967, Nilsen was posted further round the Gulf to what is now known as the United Arab Emirates. Then, they were called the Trucial States, an area where the British had signed a truce with the local sheikhs. Nilsen was to be the head of kitchen at the Trucial Oman Scouts officers’ mess at
Sharjah. Oil had just been struck in nearby Dubai and money was starting to flow into the area. The TOS was a British paramilitary outfit intended to keep order in various protectorates and Sheikdoms across the Gulf. Life in Sharjah couldn’t have been more different from the posting in Aden. It was like going from hell to a holiday. Around him, Nilsen saw people wearing distinctive patterned Arab head-dresses. They reminded him of scenes from
Lawrence of Arabia
, one of his favourite films.

Dennis Nilsen was finally able to relax. Agreeable evenings were spent drinking with servicemen and ex-pats. This was also where Nilsen experienced his first significant sexual experience. It was with one of the teenage Arab boys assigned to clean the officers’ rooms. These ‘bearers’ had the responsibility of tidying the rooms, washing and cleaning kit. Nilsen alleges that some had got into the habit of providing sexual favours in return for money to take back to their impoverished families. If it stretches the imagination to suppose such practice was rife, it’s not totally implausible they occasionally happened.

Now that Nilsen was an NCO Corporal, he had his own room. One evening, after bringing in some laundry, a boy of about 14 lingered. Nilsen says his nerves and inexperience almost resulted in him walking out. But just as the boy was turning around, the corporal realized what was going on and urged him to stay. With sentimental hyperbole, Nilsen describes their sexual liaison in
History of a Drowning Boy
. He said he felt ‘wedded to him’ and thinks the boy didn’t really want money because he felt the same way, too: ‘He enquired, “You like nice boy?” My brain was playing the “Hallelujah
Chorus”. I stretched out my hand. “Come over here,” I intoned, and patted the bed. He did as I had bidden and I took one of his hands in mine. I placed his hand on the hard, straining, 7in baton clearly shaped through my jeans … he lay on his back and looked up at me with those deep-brown,
doe-like
eyes.’

Nilsen claims to have had sex with the boy (although elsewhere he claims he didn’t actually have full sex until the age of 27) and that he was the active partner. Whether or not this was an exaggeration, Nilsen probably did have his first homosexual experience in Arabia with a teenage boy prostitute.

The way he talks about the months that followed indicate a change. He had suddenly become enlivened to the possibility he might yet be a sexual being. Now, when Nilsen went to the Carlton Hotel in Dubai, he did so feeling homosexually experienced and grown up. This bolstered his ego, which, in turn, helped him to believe that the oil executives sipping on their Martinis were eying him up as a rent boy. He thought this was a bloody cheek and switched to the Royal Flying Kunjah Club, where he fell in with a group of heavy drinkers. Nilsen describes them as ‘kindred rebel spirits’. He was particularly fond of a young man nicknamed ‘Smithy’. When the Combined Services Entertainment flew in Harry Secombe, Mike Yarwood and Dickie Henderson, Nilsen remembers sitting next to him. They enjoyed the impersonations of Mike Yarwood, and found Harry Secombe’s gooning around hilarious, but Nilsen became upset when Henderson came on and started singing the song ‘Love and Marriage’ with the words ‘John and Mary,
John and Mary … she’s a lesbian and he’s a fairy
…’

The following week, Smithy fell off his Land Rover and died. The incident added to an array of psychologically volatile factors. That this was all happening against a backdrop that only seemed half real may well have made things worse. In front of him, life was quickly and easily turning to death. Many of those lives were of young men with whom Nilsen wanted a forbidden intimacy. He was driven to ever deeper secrets and, the more private his fantasies, the more they skewed off at tangents.

If one single event could be said to have led to Nilsen’s later desire to possess dead bodies, it almost certainly happened one afternoon in Sharjah. This is the first indication we get in Nilsen’s manuscript that his internal life had moved from disturbing gay fantasies to abnormal, paraphilic, sexual fixations.

Nilsen’s room had a lock and he had got into the habit of using it to ensure total privacy while he spent afternoons masturbating in the nude. Sometimes, he would admire himself in the mirror while doing so. One day, he realized, using the free-standing mirror, he could create an effect whereby he could visually ‘split’ his personality such that it felt he was enjoying a sexual act with another man. This was narcissism in a very specific sense, Nilsen writes: ‘It was a very large mirror and I came to over-admiring myself in it … I would become aroused by my relaxed body … I imagined someone (the mirror’s view) looking at me and lusting after my body. In fact, I was lusting over my own body.’

The next step in the ritual was lying on the bed while positioning himself so that his head was no longer visible. He, the watcher, was one person, the passive reflection another. As
the watcher, he would play one role: ‘The man dominating the body had no face but he was always a dirty, grey-haired, old man.’ The boy in the mirror was a smooth, passive ‘victim’. This, too, would be Nilsen. As he developed this fantasy, he would take turns in playing both roles. The fantasies again derived from experiences like the Fat Hans/Arab taxi driver incidents. All future fantasies would also follow the same pattern of an older, powerful, brutal individual dominating a young, smooth, lifeless body.

Over the course of the summer, the fantasies escalated. Nilsen remembers one, in particular, frightening him. It was a scene imagined to be in the Second World War and again involved an old Arab. The other body now was not merely passive – it was an attractive, blond, young Nazi soldier who’d been recently killed. In his imagination, before the Arab finally has sex with the dead boy’s body, he washes and carries it, just as Nilsen would later do with the men he killed. The fantasy ended with the old man having full sex with the dead body. Nilsen says he ‘loosened his hold on the boy’s back and legs and his naked form flopped askew in limp rest, still impaled on the man, spread-eagled in pure lust’.

The worse Nilsen’s private sex fantasies became, the more psychologically isolated he also found himself. His internal world was so far removed from anything that he could possibly ever talk about, he had no problem walking out of his room with an innocent expression. As such, none of Nilsen’s colleagues had any reason to suspect that when Corporal Nilsen came out of his room he had been doing anything other than taking an afternoon nap.

In January 1968, Nilsen returned to the UK and was posted to the 1st Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders at Seaton Barracks, Plymouth. Being back in familiar surroundings quelled his wilder fantasies. Besides, with no locks on the doors, he couldn’t carry on masturbating in front of mirrors. Instead, he just spent more time watching TV. But despite home soil helping to normalise Nilsen’s sexual mindset, two incidents from that time are revealing. The second was, in fact, in all probability, another crucial step on the path towards becoming a killer.

The first happened in the barracks in Plymouth one Saturday night. Nilsen was watching late-night TV. In a dormitory down the corridor, some young privates had smuggled in a local barmaid. As Nilsen walked down to use the toilet, he heard a whimpering sound. With a mixture of curiosity and concern, he popped his head round the door. He was appalled to see his comrades were taking it in turns to have sex with the girl. Cowardice, however, stopped him intervening. Instead, he just went to bed, saying nothing. The next day, he considered he had failed the girl. But although he says he was ashamed, he also clearly took some pride in the fact that he could consider himself a good, compassionate man, unlike those others who had been involved in the attack.