Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (19 page)

After leaving
TV-am
in 1989, Honeycombe retired to Australia, and would occasionally return to the UK to visit friends. In September 1995, a chance conversation in a London pub led to him discovering that one of Nilsen’s surviving victims, a Scotsman called Douglas Stewart, was living nearby. Now he saw another opportunity to deal with the subject. Apparently, Stewart wanted to talk. Honeycombe had also read about Carl Stottor’s letters to Nilsen from an article in the
Observer
newspaper. The author wondered if there might be enough material available to tell the Nilsen story from the victim’s perspective.

When Honeycombe met Stewart, however, he found him odd. The young Scotsman told a far-fetched story about Nilsen having an accomplice. Even though it seemed outlandish, Honeycombe decided to follow this up on his next trip. He also wondered if Nilsen himself might
co-operate
in his project. Back in Australia, Honeycombe wrote to Nilsen reminding him how, in 1983, he had written to him with a proposal to write about the case. Then he told of his meeting with Stewart and explained the rationale behind his ‘victims’ book. In the letter, Honeycombe also made a
suggestion that Nilsen might consider contributing his own thoughts and memories.

Nilsen replied with a long letter. He said he would be happy to contribute, but warned that Honeycombe might find Stewart untrustworthy. It seemed very odd to the author that someone might want to volunteer such judgements about someone they’d tried to kill. In the end, however, Stewart did indeed prove unreliable – or, at least, unavailable. When Honeycombe tried to reach him again, he had disappeared.

Now that Honeycombe was in touch with Nilsen himself, and he seemed prepared to talk, he started to wonder if he might actually use the killer’s confessions as the starting point for a project that would look at the case from all sides. If Nilsen would co-operate, Honeycombe thought, he could start by looking at how Nilsen remembered events and then fill in the other parts of the story with later research. He wrote to Nilsen with a series of questions.

The prisoner responded to each point in turn. Above all, he said he wanted to make it clear he didn’t think Masters’ book was satisfactory, and he wanted to put the record straight. There was no need, however, for him and Honeycombe to embark on a lengthy autobiographical correspondence about his life as he was, in fact, already writing a book.

This presented a potential problem. If Nilsen was writing a book, Honeycombe was sure he would be doing things in his own, inevitably unreliable, way. But he remained undeterred. He was sure if he could persuade Nilsen to let him use his memoirs to form the backbone of a book, then he would be able to balance his words with the testimony of others.

Another letter was dispatched to Nilsen saying he could be able to help with a publisher but
only
if Nilsen relinquished any idea of editorial control. Honeycombe pressed on him the need for this to be a serious, credible study, not a volume of a serial killer’s propaganda. Honeycombe emphasised how it was imperative to include statements from people who had opposing perspectives.

Nilsen seemed to agree with these suggestions. He even volunteered a suggestion for what he might like to do with his royalties – he wanted them offered to a victim’s charity. The manner in which Nilsen expressed it, however, betrayed signs of his pathological ego: ‘I would never exploit revelations in my own life for personal financial gain. Now that would be immoral,’ he said. He then speculated whether, with film rights, his royalties might amount to half a million pounds.

Within months, Nilsen completed two more volumes of memoirs. But by the spring of 1996, Honeycombe’s publisher had now decided the project was too controversial for them. He told Nilsen not to worry, as he still had others in mind, and to make sure the serial killer didn’t go cold on him, he kept writing from Australia. Soon, however, he started noticing a difference in Nilsen’s letters. Direct replies to questions were avoided and increasingly replaced by Nilsen deriding the prison system or emphasising his achievements.

Honeycombe decided he might get further by talking to Nilsen directly. On his next trip back, in July 1996, he asked for a visiting order to be submitted. In response, he was granted a two-hour session. Honeycombe later told me that the first thing that struck him on arriving at Whitemoor was
how incredibly tight the security was. Even tea and coffee could only be bought with plastic tokens.

Honeycombe said he bought a cup of tea and sat down. The visitors’ room was like a school hall. Despite the
post-IRA
escape atmosphere, the warders he spoke to recognised him from his TV work and were chatty and friendly. They also appeared to be slightly proud of their high-profile prisoner. When Nilsen finally arrived, he seemed taller than he had imagined. His manner was confident, and educated. But with the thick glasses, grey hair, bad teeth and pale skin his general appearance was ‘somewhat like a seedy academic’.

Nilsen spoke in a jovial, slightly bombastic manner. But at several points in the conversation, Honeycombe told me he couldn’t help looking down at Nilsen’s thin, white and peculiarly shaven hands that had robbed his victims of their lives. ‘How can I trust this man enough to work with him?’ he wondered. He was also curious about this friend, Jonny Marling, to whom Nilsen constantly referred.

Nilsen had now apparently developed a total and unquestioning faith in Marling. Just as Nilsen had wanted to offer up everything to Masters during the high point in their relationship, so Nilsen now sought to entrust everything to this new friend. All of his writing was sent straight to Marling’s lock-up in Bath. And so, after seeing Nilsen in prison, Honeycombe immediately scheduled a meeting at Marling’s home.

When Marling opened the door of his suburban home, Honeycombe was immediately struck by the normality of his married life. Marling was 29, with a pleasant, well-spoken manner. He had two daughters and ran a successful business.
And yet he also had a garage full of Nilsen’s writing and correspondence. After the pleasantries were over, Marling went through the boxes on the kitchen table.

Looking through all the letters sent to Nilsen, Honeycombe noticed many of these ‘admirers’ included photographs of themselves. Many of these, Honeycombe noticed, looked just like Nilsen himself. After about an hour going through the letters, Honeycombe asked if he could see the manuscript itself. But now there was a problem; Des, it seemed, had actually placed it in the hands of a solicitor for safe keeping. And it wouldn’t be easy to get access.

Marling explained why. After sending the manuscript to the solicitor’s – Blakemore’s of Stratford-upon-Avon – one of the firm’s partners had become nervous about the extent to which they could legally act as an intermediary. They had decided to go to a QC for clarification. This resulted in a bill of £3,000. Honeycombe didn’t want to pay it, and so, Parts II, III and IV of Nilsen’s memoirs stayed in the solicitor’s safe until 1998 when Marling came up with the money. Honeycombe returned to Australia.

One section of the book, however – ‘Orientation in Me’, Nilsen’s so-called ‘sexual history’ – was waiting for him when he got back. This volume had been written separately from the rest of the book and Nilsen had managed to have it sent out independently. Honeycombe decided to start on this and deal with the gaps in Nilsen’s life separately. But before he started investing any more of his own time in the project, he wanted to clarify in writing that Nilsen was unambiguously in agreement with what they were doing. Despite Nilsen’s reasonable manner, he didn’t trust him one bit. He told me he
felt that he was being manipulated, and that Nilsen sought to destabilise him by not answering his questions.

Honeycombe’s fears that Nilsen was playing some kind of ‘power game’ were soon confirmed. Nilsen now denied ever having been aware of any plans for the book to include other people’s opinions. This was – unequivocally – to be ‘
his autobiography
’ he said. Honeycombe says, ‘As with others before, like Brian Masters, and most of his correspondents, Nilsen lost interest and dumped me.’

Nilsen, however, was undeterred by the setback. He wrote to P-P Hartnett – now an established author – and asked if he might help edit the book. Hartnett agreed. But when Nilsen started to try to formalise this arrangement, he discovered that the prison authorities, who had previously seemed uninterested in what he was doing, were now well aware of the nature of the manuscript and wanted to prevent him progressing with it. Nilsen recalled in a letter to me, ‘[The Home Office imposed] a ban on all discussion of the project between me and P-P. Letters were stopped and sent back to him (contracts etc). I was also informed that no draft of the MS would be allowed into prison and that I would never be allowed to see or read the published book.’

There was still nothing, however, to stop the existing drafts being published. Furthermore, Nilsen felt he and Hartnett could make some progress through coded letters and by reading out extracts on audio cassettes. He told Hartnett he was happy for him to try to start generating interest. This led, in 1998, to a piece appearing in the
Daily Mirror
with the headline ‘
EX-TEACHER WHO WANTS
£30,000
FOR KILLER NILSEN’S SICK MEMOIRS
’. This sum was the amount they
claimed Hartnett wanted for the serialisation rights. There was also talk of a film. Hartnett was quoted as saying, ‘It is sensational. It is not the rantings of a madman. It is well written. Your readers will be astounded.’

Nilsen, however, felt that even if someone was prepared to publish the book as it was, the book was still far from satisfactory. And he had also now lost faith in Harnett’s ability to complete the project. He complained to me that, based on what he had been able to see, Hartnett’s ‘voice and style intrude too much’. On top of that, the attention the news stories had brought on him had again resulted in copy of the gay pornography magazine
Vulcan
to be confiscated along with a ‘sexy art book’ by Pierre and Gilles. This had made him furious.

It was the
Daily Mirror
article about Hartnett and the ‘£30,000’ autobiography that prompted my first letter to Nilsen. Having recently completed a journalism diploma, I was in the habit of scouring the news for stories to investigate. I had previously read
Killing for Company
. Between that and what I had read in the newspaper, I found the idea of him writing an autobiography intriguing. How could he or any publisher justify it? It wasn’t just the offence it would cause, it was equally the prospect of him being deceptive. But for the purposes of a newspaper story, Nilsen’s possible motives just made it all the more interesting. I decided to add him to my list of speculative letters that week.

Before writing, I thought hard about how to approach him. Gitta Sereny’s book on Mary Bell had just been released – Bell had killed children when still a child herself – and rather come straight out and interrogate him about
his
book, I
decided to ask him what he thought of that one. A week later, I received a 16-page dissertation handwritten in thick, black Biro. The subject of Mary Bell had clearly struck a chord: ‘The Mary Bell controversy,’ he told me, ‘is generated by a fear, on foundations of hypocrisy, by society which becomes deeply agitated when the spotlight of close examination falls upon itself and our own hallowed myths. History had dismissed the traumas of Mary Bell from its consciousness merely by placing her outside the realms of human experience, with the expedient use of the label “monster”, and shelving her inside a penal institution. This method spared society from having to acknowledge their association with her name and saved them the bother of having to think too much of her actions as a human in a community. Justice was done and she was gone – out of sight and out of mind. Her voice is always the voice of others.’

Nilsen sounded like he was writing more about himself than Mary Bell. He seemed insistent that
his
voice was that of others. The subtext was that he wanted people to know he still existed and to hear it from him. Most importantly for me, at the time, was that he seemed prepared to give me a privileged insight into what he had to say. I started to ask around for a publication interested in a piece on Nilsen. Several were keen, but I needed more material. I wrote back to Whitemoor Prison. Over the next seven months, Nilsen wrote me nearly 30,000 words of autobiography, politics, poetry and chat.

At the outset, dealing with Nilsen felt less unnerving than I had feared. In the main, he seemed quite charming and eccentric. Despite his constant complaining, he was also interesting. It wasn’t just his crimes and prison life he
spoke about – he had well-considered cynical opinions on current affairs. He was also funny. ‘Functioning under prison management isn’t only punishing,’ he once told me, ‘it’s embarrassing.’

Reading Nilsen’s letters could also, quite literally, be educational. He was so keen to show off his learning, sometimes it seemed like he was copying things out of an encyclopaedia. He would quote people like Edward Gibbons and Henri Amiel. Sometimes, I wondered if this might also be because he was slightly autistic. If he spoke about a typewriter or cassette player, there would always be the exact make and model number. And he would also become a little vexed if I forgot to acknowledge the exact date of his last letter, as if you had broken a rule of protocol that was very important to him.

Nilsen’s adherence to his etiquette meant he would always reply by return of post. And he never sent unsolicited letters; he thought that inappropriate. Sometimes, there seemed something almost quaint about exchanging letters in this way. I could often forget this was a man who had repeatedly killed. Despite his intensity, he seemed like many other fastidious, nerdy oddballs I’d known. He was fixated with details, and creating arguments that defended his world view. When I later saw his cartoons, drawings and tape recordings, it struck me that, if this had been the only side to his character, he might have made a reasonable schoolteacher.