Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (24 page)

Friday, 25 June 1982 would be Nilsen’s last day at the Denmark Street branch of the Job Centre. In the late afternoon, he was given a gold pen, a lighter and the traditional card full of friendly comments, such as ‘Keep up the talking’, and ‘Kentish Town may never be the same again’.

On the Monday, Nilsen took the Tube three stops to Kentish Town where his new position as Job Centre executive officer put him on a salary of £7,000. The new duties involved being a finance supervisor, a post supervisor and an accommodation and premises officer. It wasn’t just the salary and status that were an improvement – his immediate superior, Janet Leaman, was the only person, he says, he ever had a warm working relationship with. Everything about this new job gave him a new sense of optimism.

There was still, however, also the fairly regular outbursts of temper. Hunter-Craig described him, during this period, as being like the ‘little man’ in whom unexpressed anger builds up. But at work this was largely compensated for by hard work and attention to detail. It was also a sympathetic environment. The women in the office felt that Nilsen was lonely and some suspected he was gay, and probably vulnerable.

One night after staying late in the office to help mop up a flood, Leaman gave him a packet of cigarettes as a thank you.
She was struck by how he gushed about how grateful he was for the token of gratitude. Some months later, at Christmas, he told her about a phone call from his mother. It seemed he needed a mother more than most.

During his last six months at Cranley Gardens, Nilsen stopped trying to contact his mother altogether. He was now totally resigned to being a murderer. Martyn Hunter-Craig thinks that, in his own cryptic way, he admitted as such. He remembers him saying, ‘I know my life will be over in the Eighties,’ although at the time he’d assumed Nilsen had meant
his
eighties.

In September 1982, Nilsen found Graham Allen the worse for drugs and trying to hail a cab in Piccadilly. Allen was a 28-year-old Glaswegian known to his friends as ‘Puggy’. The man whom newspapers would characterise simply as a ‘registered heroin addict and petty criminal’ would become Nilsen’s fourteenth victim. He was tall, rugged and heterosexual, with a girlfriend called Lesley and a son called Shane. Although Allen drifted in and out of his boy’s life, Shane has clear memories of him, and grew up to look increasingly like his dad. But looks, and a fondness for drugs were, more or less,
all
Puggy gave Shane. Puggy was aggressive and uncultured, but Shane is relaxed and bookish. In his thirties, to help kick his own heroin habit, Shane moved from London to a village near Grenoble in the
south-east
of France. He still lives there, and supports himself with casual jobs in the civil service while trying to pursue a career in writing, which in the last couple of years has included his online presence: memoiresofaheroinhead.blogspot.co.uk

It was while researching pieces for his online journal that Shane found my
Sunday Times
article, which prompted him to contact me. After an email and phone exchange, he sent me a link to an essay he’d written about his father. He wanted me to be able to see that, for all Graham Allen’s faults, Puggy was still his father. The essay starts: ‘My father, Graham Archibald Allen, was born on 31 October 1954 in Motherwell, Scotland. The youngest of two, he grew up with attention problems and failed miserably at school. The only thing he excelled at was football. By the age of 15, he had discovered Glasgow, alcohol and cheap prescription drugs. By 17, he was out of school, out of pocket and out of home. Having been laid off by the steel works in Motherwell and with nothing else for it, he made his way down south to London.’

After failing to find unskilled work, Shane says his father’s options started running out. ‘After making a few contacts, he was soon taking advantage of the lenient squatting laws of the time. With a roof over his head, it wasn’t long before he was sucked into the sleazier side of city life. Cheap, strong booze and whatever pills were doing the rounds … [funding] his habit through a mixture of government unemployment money, begging, stealing and robbing tourists around London’s West End.’

But then something changed in Allen’s life. In 1972, he met Lesley Mead, a blonde, blue-eyed barmaid. Three years later, she gave birth to Shane. Over the next eight years, Mead spent her time oscillating between Allen and a small-time gangster called Ray. Shane’s memories of growing up are of his father moving in and out of his life, and are reproduced here with kind permission from the author:

Shane, later, adds, ‘I know the relationship between my mother and father was violent and unhealthy, but it was still love, and as we know, love is … never a logical emotion.’

Graham Allen was last seen in September 1982. Shane and his mother think that, after the scene at the window, he walked off to find drugs. They think it not unlikely that he may have had a vague plan to pay for them by mugging a gay man who’d tried to pick him up. When Nilsen found him trying to hail a cab in London’s West End, his dealer had probably already advanced a large hit of heroin. He had
probably also been drinking. Allen was standing at the foot of Shaftesbury Avenue with blood on his jacket.

Nilsen told the police, ‘The thing he wanted more than anything else was something to eat. I had very little supply in but I had a whole tray of eggs. So I whipped up a huge omelette and cooked it in the large frying-pan, put it on a plate and gave it to him. He started to eat the omelette. He must have eaten three-quarters of the omelette. I noticed he was sitting there and suddenly he appeared to be asleep or unconscious with a large piece of omelette hanging out of his mouth. I thought he must have been choking on it but I didn’t hear him choking – he was indeed deeply unconscious.

‘I sat down and had a drink. I approached him, I can’t remember what I had in my hands now – I don’t remember whether he was breathing or not but the omelette was still protruding from his mouth. The plate was still on his lap. I removed that. I bent forward and I think I strangled him. I can’t remember at this moment what I used … I remember going forward and I remember he was dead … If the omelette killed him, I don’t know, but anyway in going forward I intended to kill him. An omelette doesn’t leave red marks on a neck. I suppose it must have been me.’

Until Allen was identified through dental records from a metal plate in his jaw, he was simply referred to by Nilsen as ‘the omelette death’.

At least two men survived visits to Nilsen’s flat between the murders of Allen and the final murder, that of Stephen Sinclair; the first was Trevor Simpson. Simpson’s interviews
from 1983 paint a clear picture of Nilsen’s domestic situation during his last months as a free man.

They met on Wednesday, 22 December in a Soho pub. Simpson was 20 years old and had just served six months in jail for hijacking a car in Belgium. When Nilsen met him, he was stopping off in London en route to the Midlands. After a few drinks, Nilsen invited the young man back. As with Graham Allen, there was nothing homosexual about ‘Trevor from Derby’. On the first night, Nilsen slept in his room at the back, and told Simpson to settle himself in one of the armchairs in the lounge.

The next morning Nilsen told him he was welcome to stay a while. He took up Nilsen’s offer for seven days, during which he was the recipient of a constant barrage of left-wing rhetoric, and suggestions they visit Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery nearby. And, despite being struck by the smell, Simpson told police he wasn’t tempted to look for its source.

Christmas came and went just like any other day. There were no cards or decorations, no special meal and no friends. On the sixth night, Simpson irritated Nilsen by being rude about a stew he’d cooked. At around midnight, Simpson remembered Nilsen, drunk, muttering about having to consult the ‘professor’ about whether he could stay – an odd expression that Hunter-Craig also remembers Nilsen using.

Simpson was fed up and went to sleep. At about 1.00am, he found the room filling with smoke. He ran out into the kitchen. Nilsen was nonchalantly drinking a glass of water. Back in the living room was a smouldering pair of jeans on the fire. Nilsen told Simpson he must have dropped a cigarette on it.

Nilsen’s manuscript describes Simpson as the man he ‘lusted over’. He goes over the thought processes by which he decided to try and asphyxiate him with the burning jeans: ‘I thought of bashing him over the head with a blunt object but could not do it,’ he says. ‘I thought about stabbing him with a kitchen knife but couldn’t do that either.’ Nilsen then contemplated tying his legs together and then strangling him. But whether from cowardice or some other restraining impulse, he couldn’t bring himself to attack Simpson physically. That was when he came up with the idea of the fire. Simpson stayed for another day and, when he left, Nilsen said he must come again.

Once Simpson had departed, Nilsen continued to drink heavily. It was now almost four years since the first murder. On New Year’s Eve 1982, he started on the rum at
lunchtime
in a pub down the road. When the pub closed for the afternoon, he came home and by 8.00pm he was so drunk that he decided to invite Vivienne and Monique from downstairs to join him. Nilsen banged on their door, and slurred the invitation. The two girls politely but firmly declined.

Nilsen left, looking angry. He went upstairs and then out. Shortly after midnight, he returned. Ten minutes later, there was a commotion on the stairs. Downstairs, the front door slammed. It was a young Japanese chef called Toshimitsu Ozawa. Nilsen thinks he met him at the Green Man pub down the road just before last orders. Ozawa told police later that night that, once in the flat, Nilsen had calmly approached him with his arms outstretched and a tie in between them. Nilsen’s most vivid memory was of being
kicked hard in the groin. In the end, no more was made of the incident.

It was another example of how recklessly out of control Nilsen was now becoming. In his manuscript, Nilsen lists several occasions when he came within a whisker of being arrested. The closest he had come to being discovered had actually been a year-and-a-half before, at Melrose Avenue, just after the last ‘mass dissection’. Because of the ‘revolting nature’ of the task, Nilsen says he’d got ‘practically legless’ on Bacardi. He then went for a drunken walk to find somewhere to put the body parts:

The bag was found by a biology student called Robert Wilson, who called the police. The remains were seen to be in an advanced state of decay and, then, there was no easy way to determine what exactly they had been. Nilsen still, however, wants to have a dig at the police. ‘Had it been subjected to a closer examination by a qualified pathologist,’ he says, ‘then the alarm bells would have rang loud and clear to a death probably caused by foul play. My bloody fingerprints were all over the carrier bag and these could have been matched with mine on file in a relatively short time. This omission prolonged my arrest by eighteen months and four deaths later.’

When Nilsen met Stephen Sinclair on Wednesday, 26 January, he says his ‘addiction’ to murder was all-consuming. Although he doesn’t admit he targeted Sinclair, he cannot deny there was planning involved. A ligature made out of a tie and a piece of string was found in his flat. Nilsen says such preparation was just like an alcoholic planning his next drink. He felt powerless to resist.

After the arrest, Nilsen had said, ‘I sometimes feel my sole reason for existence was the killing.’ Now, he says, the ‘fantasy ritual’ was ‘everything’ to him. Even after killing Sinclair, he was finding new permutations on the same theme. He would place him on the bed and watch him slowly fall on to cushions.

A fortnight after Nilsen had been playing with the body of the young man whose life he had just taken, DCI Peter Jay, Inspector Steve McCusker and DC Jeff Butler were waiting out in the cold for him to return from work. The Duty
Officer had said something ‘odd’ had been discovered in a drain. When he got there, Jay says, two things particularly concerned him – the discovery of what looked like pieces of human hand, and that the blockage seemed to go up the soil pipe to Nilsen’s toilet.

Jay called in the Scenes of Crime Officer. He packaged up the findings and had them sent over to Professor David Bowen, a Home Office pathologist at Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith. At 2.00pm, Jay drove across town to Charing Cross. Bowen had not only established these were human body parts, but had also found a piece of neck bone with clear ligature marks on it. The victim had been strangled with great force. They drove back to the flat to await Nilsen. Jay told me: