Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (16 page)

With a regular job and a decent roof over his head, life
didn’t seem so bad. In Nilsen’s internal ‘film’ he saw himself as the leading man in a picaresque, sexual adventure. One night he woke up in the bed of an aristocrat’s butler; on another, it was a small-time Australian soap actor. But by the summer of 1975, however, another ‘incident’ occurred. One afternoon, Nilsen says in his autobiography that he met a 17-year-old called David Painter at the Job Centre where he had been looking for work. Later, Nilsen, bumped into him in the street. Nilsen was probably aware by this stage that Painter had mental problems of some sort, and knew that there’d be the risk of trouble if they went back to his flat. But Nilsen refuses to admit he did anything wrong that night, other than try to seduce someone who was particularly vulnerable:

Nilsen felt he had no option but call the police himself. Painter was taken to hospital where he claimed that Nilsen had tried to assault him sexually. And so the civil servant was
brought in … to his old police station, Willesden Green. He was questioned and then put in the cells for the night. In the morning, Painter and his parents decided not to press charges and Nilsen was released. The incident was logged. These were the days of manual typewriters and index cards and there was no easy way of recording incidents that could then be easily linked to those of a similar nature.

On the Monday morning, Nilsen didn’t mention the incident. No one in the office ever did or ever would have any reason to guess that their colleague’s home life was anything other than humdrum and lonely. His work was administerial, and, for the most part, he got on with it quietly. Sometimes, in conversation, however, he would vehemently put forward his opinion on every aspect of events in the news. He says he was now ‘ensconced in the noisy, empty, jungle/desert of the Metropolis’. Elsewhere, he described the empty world of the bedsitter as ‘devoid of any supportive community of neighbours’, a ‘lifestyle of underground trains and clerical work’.

Nilsen disliked his superiors. He felt they disapproved both of his sexuality and trade union activities. But, among his
co-workers
, there were still plenty who shared Nilsen’s socialist ideals. Occasionally, they would ask Nilsen for a drink after work. He may have been eccentric and opinionated, some thought, but maybe he just needed some encouragement? Nilsen would, as often as not, join them, but invariably he would soon become unsettled and leave early, in favour of the gay bars. Of those bars, he says they ‘left me with a kind of forlorn sadness which came from a long, frustrated run of “one-night stands” with the strangers bent on promiscuity
rather than the permanent relationship of my aspiration. I became trapped in a treadmill of work, drink and isolation.’

In the summer of 1975, at the age of 29, Nilsen finally found himself in an approximation of a domestic relationship. It began with a letter telling him his father had died. Olav Nilsen had ended his days as the manager of a fish canning factory in Ghana. He was on his fourth wife and had died of a heart-attack. The letter informed him that Olav’s surname wasn’t actually Nilsen, but Moksheim. Apparently, Dennis also had half-brothers and sisters he’d never heard of.

Olav Moksheim left Dennis £1,400. It was very welcome and accelerated his desire for a domestic life. Now that he had some money behind him, Nilsen decided he wouldn’t just let life happen. That weekend, Nilsen got chatting to David Gallichan in the Champion pub in Bayswater. Gallichan was 18, approximately 5ft 9in, skinny and blond with a friendly, round face. Dennis impressed the youngster by telling him he used to be a soldier. Gallichan had come up from
Weston-super
-Mare in search of the bright lights and was easily impressed. Small and exceptionally effeminate, with what Nilsen called ‘the mentality of a 15-year-old’, Gallichan easily succumbed to the older man’s suggestion that they set up home together.

After just one night in 80 Teignmouth Road, the pair went flat-hunting. The result was finding 195 Melrose Avenue, a substantial Victorian-conversion garden flat on the other side of Cricklewood and about a hundred yards from Gladstone Park. It was a good-sized, if poorly presented, semi-detached property, extended at the back.
Upstairs were two small flats and, downstairs, two larger ones. Nilsen and Gallichan’s flat was the rearmost of the ground-floor apartments. They had two rooms, a bathroom and a small kitchen. The living room (in which they also sometimes slept) had French windows to the rear and the kitchen was next to it. The bedroom had a bunk bed that Nilsen eventually converted to be just a top platform.

Nilsen decided to splash some of his inheritance money on home comforts, but first he wanted to make a project of the garden. The two of them spent an entire week doing it up. Gallichan would take the day shift while Nilsen was at work. In the evenings and weekends, Nilsen took over.

After all this work, he felt it only fair that they were granted sole access. He wrote a letter to the agent, Leon Roberts of Ellis and Co, explaining how only their French windows had direct access and only they seemed to care. He told him all about the stone paving he had put down, and the plum trees he had planted. It seemed reasonable, and Roberts signed the letter without coming down to inspect. Months later, Roberts dropped in to see the garden he had heard so much about. It struck him as the most bizarre outside space he had ever seen, with a series of mini fenced-off sections, and strange features.

Nilsen had also been careful to make sure animals were allowed. He brought his budgie, Hamish, over from Teignmouth Road, and bought a fish pond from a pet shop in Willesden. From another pet shop the two of them picked out a black-and-white mongrel puppy. Nilsen says he named her Bleep because she made a bleeping noise when they first brought her home. Later, the couple picked up a stray kitten named Deedee, standing for Des and David.

Next, they started to decorate. Gallichan painted the walls and Nilsen bought paintings and armchairs. This should have been a happy time – it was far from it. Some of Nilsen’s Super 8 film footage of them still exists and it makes for extremely disturbing viewing. Nilsen is relentlessly angry. Sometimes there’s a reason, such as when some roof plaster fell down, but more often than not it seems driven by an inner rage. Invariably, Gallichan bears the brunt of all this anger. We see ‘Twinkle’ – Nilsen’s nickname for him – being told he isn’t holding the camera right or that he’s looking like ‘a right poof’. Gallichan simply smiles back.

At least Nilsen was able to provide for him. But despite luxuries like a quality stereo and a decent television, the differences in their characters meant they rarely shared them. Gallichan didn’t like classical music or progressive rock; classic films bored him, too. Sexually, too, Gallichan became more interested in other men he would meet in town. He told a reporter that Nilsen wasn’t very good at or interested in sex.

Nilsen complained that Gallichan was too hairy, bony and too thin. He may well have added ‘too real’. After years of reflection, Nilsen also seems to have been aware of this: ‘I viewed my surroundings through an oblong, movie format. That’s probably why I was never able to get very close to people because my attraction was for ideal, theoretical people who presented a simplistic relationship free from the problems and complexities of real people. Despite living in close proximity to David Gallichan for 18 months, I didn’t really know him at all.’

Nilsen couldn’t stop ‘Twink’ sloping off to the bars of Soho. Still, if they were no longer lovers, they were still a household.
On one occasion when Nilsen’s half-brother Andrew was in town, Des was pleased to be able to invite him over to ‘their’ house. At the Job Centre Christmas party in 1975, Des showed Twinkle off as his ‘companion’, thereby eliminating any doubts over his sexuality. But, at home, they avoided each other as much as possible.

Even in January, when IRA bombs were going off in Soho, Nilsen preferred to frequent the gay bars there rather than go home. By March, he and Gallichan were hardly speaking. One night, Twinkle brought home a 15-year-old boy. Nilsen claims he seduced the youth for the night and dumped him back on Gallichan in the morning. When Gallichan woke up for his dishwashing job, he didn’t know what to do about the boy. He decided just to leave. That evening, Nilsen returned to find the electricity meter smashed and the money stolen. He was furious.

He was also beginning to feel ill from gallstones. Initially, he put his dull pains down to a diet of beer, rum and cheap takeaways. By April, the doctor had told him otherwise, but an operation couldn’t be scheduled for another couple of months. Depressed, he started hanging around the gay
drop-in
centre again.

By the time Nilsen had had his operation, England was enjoying a record heatwave. Once he was fit again, he was keen to spend the rest of the hot evenings in an alcoholic haze and looking for sex. He describes a number of people he met that summer. The functional encounters suggest a series of anonymous individuals, mainly oriental. And they left him with scabies and crabs.

By day, Nilsen was always the same old colourless
‘monochrome man’, to use the title of his own essay written in Cranley Gardens, but in the evenings his emotions were momentarily released by triggers that would cause them to overwhelm him with startling intensity. Music and alcohol were the main catalysts. Alcohol, he says, was also the ‘social lubricant’ that enabled him to turn sexual possibility into reality. It would give him ‘amazing strength’, both literally and figuratively. He stresses, however, that he was never an alcoholic in the sense that he
needed
to drink
all
the time. His drinking was ‘episodic’ with long gaps between ‘binges’, and this was true throughout his adult life. During drinking sprees, Nilsen would sometimes have black-outs; they worried him.

The more Nilsen got drunk, the more Twinkle probably wanted to leave. The beginning of the end came in the spring of 1977. Nilsen says it involved his first exposure to ‘death and disturbing bereavement’; an odd statement after his experiences with his grandfather, Aden and the police morgue. This story actually involved Bleep’s puppies, after she’d become pregnant by one of the neighbour’s dogs. One night, Nilsen went down to the off-licence to buy some rum and asked Twinkle to look after them. When he returned, two of the pups had drowned in the garden pond.

Nilsen was livid. He started to think about ways of getting rid of his, now unwanted, flatmate. Two weeks later however, Gallichan, unprompted, met an antiques dealer and moved with him to the West Country. Nilsen doesn’t make a great deal of the passing of Twinkle out of his life.

DCI Peter Jay, and defence psychiatrist Patrick Gallwey, however, considered the abrupt end to Nilsen’s dreams of
domesticity to be a catalytic event. For Jay, Nilsen couldn’t bear the rejection of Gallichan leaving, and decided he now wanted companionship that he could control. For Dr Gallwey, a breakdown of that relationship triggered another phase of his personality disorder.

The accounts in
History of a Drowning Boy
of the next
year-and
-a-half years are increasingly desperate. In 1983, Nilsen told the police that he responded to Gallichan’s departure by picking up a Swiss au pair girl in a bar in the West End, and reminding himself he could be bisexual. He no longer mentions this. Instead, Nilsen presents a catalogue of all the short flings and friendships he made over the summer of 1977 – Barry Pett, Stephen Barrier and Steve Martin all stayed for a while at Melrose Avenue. Steve Martin stayed the longest (about four months); Pett and Barrier stayed for a number of days. Nilsen wants the reader to believe he was perfectly able to partake normally in gay culture, but that it was lonely and fragmented. Instead, the reader is left feeling uneasy about what was clearly happening within him and fearful of what he might do next.

In 1978, Nilsen met Martyn Hunter-Craig, a young man who had recently moved to London and changed his name from Martin Tucker to mark this new chapter in his life. Now, in a big city, he wanted to start again.

Home had previously been Exeter in Devon, where he says his parents had a tumultuous relationship, often arguing, separating and reuniting. As he reached puberty, Hunter-Craig was diagnosed as having emotional problems and was sent to a special school. He always seemed lost in a dream world and
there were also suspicions over his sexuality. He told me: ‘I wasn’t camp or outrageous as a teenager. I was quite withdrawn. I didn’t like it; I didn’t want to be that way. I was made to feel quite dirty about it. I’ve had that hang-up ever since … I think I feel wretched and dirty about it. I don’t like it but that’s the way it is. I can do nothing about it, can I?’

Hunter-Craig had been in London for some months before meeting Nilsen, but he’s not quite sure how many. He found odd bits of casual work and, when it was hard to come by, he would supplement it, where necessary, by sleeping with men for money. Hunter-Craig thinks he met Nilsen around Easter time in 1978; he was nearly 18. Nilsen approached him in an amusement arcade in Leicester Square and struck up a friendly, light-hearted conversation. He looked smart in his beige suit and, without his glasses, his ‘sincere’ brown eyes were clearly visible.

Hunter-Craig told me: ‘We went back to Melrose Avenue and, between then and the time I saw him just before the arrest, I would go there every couple of months or so … definitely a few times a year. I would stay for a couple of days when I needed somewhere to stay. It was very awkward in those days if you were on Social Security. You couldn’t book in anywhere, unless it was a hostel, because of the delay getting the cheque from the DHSS. My work was casual. If I wasn’t working, I would see who I knew might be able to put me up. From the beginning, he said, “If you need somewhere to stay, please come back”.’