Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (27 page)

Green thought that, between night and day, he didn’t so much ‘separate out mental functioning’ as put on an act. When strangers came back to Nilsen’s flat, it didn’t ‘just happen’ – he deliberately asked them back. Green read out
some of Nilsen’s statements about how he had invited victims back, and then turned to Mackeith and asked him whether or not he thought, by the evidence of Nilsen’s own stories, he showed resourcefulness and cunning. Mackeith didn’t think so.

Green then reminded the jury how Nilsen had allowed Duffey’s knives to rust, and picked up his belongings from the left-luggage at Euston Station. As for the so-called ‘depersonalisation’, how, he asked, was he able to stop midway through killing Stottor? When he killed Barlow and John the Guardsman, he clearly wasn’t in a trance; he did it consciously just because they had annoyed him.

Mackeith interjected, stating that just because Nilsen seemed to be saying he killed without motive, it certainly didn’t mean that was really the case. Nilsen, he pointed out, had personality problems and it needed expert judgement to interpret the truth behind his statements. He remained resolute on his opinion, but he wouldn’t say whether Nilsen’s mental problems were sufficient for a verdict of diminished responsibility. That had to be up to the jury.

‘Quite,’ said Green. He read out the statute, and then asked if there was anything in Nilsen’s statements that could constitute an ‘arrested development of mind’. He was, after all, an intelligent and lucid man. Mackeith suggested that the definition be widened to ‘arrested development of personality’. The judge agreed.

Dr Patrick Gallwey, the defence’s second psychiatric expert witness, had receding hair and a professorial demeanour. Like Mackeith, he felt Nilsen suffered from a retardation of
personality, but not intelligence. Unlike his colleague, however, he didn’t think Nilsen’s condition could be found in the
ICD
classification. He attempted his own definition, which was so complicated it ended up confusing both judge and jury. It was called ‘Borderline, False-Self as if
Pseudo-Normal
, Narcissistic Personality Disorder’.

It was a ‘borderline’ disorder in that Nilsen was unstable and suffered from emotional extremes and black-and-white thinking. Gallwey called the condition ‘pseudo-normal’, as throughout Nilsen’s adult life, he appeared to be normal, whereas he was really always on the verge of tipping into a ‘false-self’. The latter was a paranoid and schizoid personality that took over during times of high stress. Being ‘schizoid’ meant Nilsen’s emotionally blunt tendencies were intensified to the point that he couldn’t feel ‘normally’ at all.

Even during his ‘pseudo-normal’ periods, however, Nilsen’s emotional responses were poor. Gallwey said he constantly sought power because he felt so cut off, inferior and worthless. He also explained how Nilsen’s schizoid behaviour was of the type that involved a rich, elaborate fantasy life – a trait now more commonly associated with schizo-typal cases. This, however, was generally well hidden. His narcissism was more obvious. It showed in Nilsen’s constant grandiosity. He told the court: ‘He really does think he is the murderer of the century.’

In response to some blank looks from the jury, Gallwey then tried to clarify the relationship between Nilsen’s various mental states. Normally, he said, Nilsen was able to keep his paranoid and schizoid disturbances in check. But there was always conflict going on; psychological pressure would build
up, and need release. This happened in episodic breakdowns where he was now
predominately
schizoid. Gallwey clarified the meaning of the word – it didn’t mean Nilsen was delusional, but that his emotions had stopped functioning. The breakdowns were ‘psycho-sexual’, violent, sudden and seemingly without motive. When they happened, Nilsen wasn’t in control.

Gallwey tried to explain why these breakdowns happened. He said Nilsen particularly needed close relationships to stave off his ‘false self’. Life in London had been a recipe for disaster. The break-up with Gallichan may well have been the last straw. He said it left Nilsen ‘drowning in his own nightmares’. With no anchor, his schizoid tendencies started taking over. These were very distinctive – of the type, Gallwey said, that ‘indulges imagination for its own sake’. He explained that while such tendencies might also be found in some artists, in Nilsen they were just destructive, removing the last of his emotions. At the time of the murders, then, the victims had no meaning to him as real individuals. He was so lost in a depersonalised state that he became muddled as to their identity, and sometimes thought of them as part of himself. Nilsen echoes this when he talks about ‘fantasy props’ and ‘dualism’.

Gallwey said he saw the murders as being entirely consistent with a ‘false-self’ personality finding itself in the wrong set of circumstances. Even though the killing of Malcolm Barlow and John Howlett seemed to contradict the theory of episodic breakdowns, the psychiatrist believed, in truth, Nilsen had simply misremembered his thoughts and feelings.

Gallwey thought that during the period of the murders, Nilsen would have been unable to understand what was going on. He explained how he had tried cutting back on drink but said that that could not have helped at all. But he thought Nilsen had indeed suffered from diminished responsibility, not because he didn’t understand his mental problems, but because when he murdered he couldn’t emotionally distinguish between reality and fantasy. That meant there could be no ‘malice aforethought’. Gallwey explained that feeling was a crucial part of intent. He said that the episode with Carl Stottor, rather than showing a cold-hearted
cover-up
, demonstrated Nilsen had clearly gone in and out of a stage of dissociation and afterwards was ‘reassembling’ his personality.
This
showed the difference between the Nilsen who had emotions and the one who killed.

Allan Green put it to Gallwey that Nilsen knew exactly what might happen when he deliberately invited people back. Gallwey replied he might have factually known but he may not have
emotionally
understood what he was doing. And if he didn’t
feel
his actions were wrong he would not have been able fundamentally to ‘know what he was doing’. He would have known the ‘nature of his acts’ but not the ‘quality’ of them.

On Monday, 31 October, Lawrence asked Gallwey to recap. He focused on three main points. First, that the murders were part of a defence mechanism that prevented Nilsen from becoming completely psychotic by directing destruction outwards. Second, he said that if a person’s emotional
make-up
stops working, he can be unable to attribute meaning to the things he does. And finally, he emphasised his belief that
Nilsen’s schizoid tendencies had pushed his fantasy life into an abnormal and destructive place.

Lawrence then reminded the court what sort of abnormality they were looking for. He said it was one that would ‘substantially impair his judgement’ and was ‘a state of mind so different from that of ordinary human beings that the reasonable man would term it abnormal’.

There was only one witness left – Dr Paul Bowden – again from the Bethlem and Maudsley hospital. His role was to ‘rebut’ the testimony of Mackeith and Gallwey. He had one big advantage over them – only he had really got to know the defendant. In fact, he had seen him 16 times dating back to Nilsen’s first week on remand. He’d also spoken to others who knew Nilsen, including Cathy Hughes and Roger Farnham from the Job Centre, former boyfriend David Gallichan, and the last person to stay with Nilsen, Trevor Simpson.

Tall and moustachioed with combed-back hair, he approached the box in a cool, precise manner. On the Monday and Tuesday, he explained why he could find no abnormality in Nilsen which fitted the definition of the Homicide Act 1957. He admitted he did find Nilsen ‘abnormal’ in a loose, colloquial sense. But Bowden didn’t feel Nilsen suffered from a mental disorder; he said he was simply a man with deviant desires who used deception to make it look like he couldn’t help it. He immediately pointed to the way he would constantly revise his childhood accounts, to make himself seem more emotionally deprived than he had originally claimed.

Bowden considered Nilsen to be a man with normal mental functioning who also had extreme guilt about his own
sexuality. As he felt guilty, he figured he might as well do bad things. He said the murders were conscious, deliberate acts to satisfy his desires. Nilsen’s recollections, he said, were far too strong for there to be any question of the dissociation the other psychiatrists had talked about. He said he had other experience of such things and they invariably involved a long black-out.

But, as much as Bowden’s testimony chimed with a ‘good sense’ view, his opinions soon became more counter-intuitive. It seemed odd to say, as he did, that masturbating by corpses wasn’t sexual or powdering of the bodies was just a practical measure to stop them from smelling. Furthermore, it seemed very peculiar to say that Nilsen’s grandiosity was merely a reaction to being caught.

The defence asked why he had first said he found no ‘abnormality of mind’ in Nilsen, and then later changed that to an ‘insignificant abnormality’. Bowden replied he’d changed his mind. He had simply discovered more about him. It was like when he’d signed the papers to put Nilsen on suicide watch in Brixton. Nilsen had seemed agitated but, over the next few months, he felt he had got a deeper measure of him and his complaining nature.

Bowden simply considered Nilsen to be a liar and manipulator. As such, he chose to ignore many of the things he had been told by him. For example, he didn’t believe the death of Nilsen’s grandfather had had the damaging effect Nilsen claimed. As for Nilsen’s isolation, he said he believed this was a result of, rather than the cause of, being a murderer. Finally, he felt that Nilsen had been perfectly capable of forming personal relationships, but had forced himself to
objectify people. Bowden spelt out what he meant by that: ‘It made it easier to kill people.’ To illustrate how Nilsen deliberately suppressed his conscious, he described how when talking about the killing of John Howlett, he had to leave the room until he regained his composure.

Allen Green summed up his case over Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. His message was simple: Nilsen was cunning and had used his intelligence to avoid being detected while continuing to murder for pleasure. The jury were reminded of the level of planning involved in warning Stottor about the sleeping bag zip, the preparation of the tie to kill Sinclair, and allowing Martyn Duffey’s knives to rust. The fact he had been drunk was no excuse for any of his actions.

Ivan Lawrence’s final address appealed to plain reason. He went through Nilsen’s offences, crime by crime, and asked the court, again and again, ‘Is there not anything wrong with this man?’ Just because Bowden – or ‘Dr No’ as he called him – had failed to see anything wrong, it didn’t mean that the jury had to ‘ignore the blindingly obvious’. He might not have been insane ‘but he wasn’t normal either’.

On Thursday morning, Judge Croom-Johnson instructed the jury. He told them if they considered it
possible
that Nilsen did not understand what he was doing when he was killing, they should return a verdict of manslaughter. He closed by saying, ‘There are evil people who do evil things. Committing murder is one of them. There must be no excuses for Nilsen if he has moral defects. A nasty nature is not an arrested or retarded development of mind.’

The jury retired shortly before lunchtime on Thursday, 3
November. It had been expected that they would come back that afternoon. They were, however, deadlocked at 6-6.

The next day, at 7.00am, Nilsen wrote a diary entry in his cell, which Brian Masters has kindly permitted me to reproduce here: ‘I rise early, still an unconvicted man, to pen this letter. The jury is still out (and so are the Leyland workers). It will be 5 November tomorrow and society’s turn to throw me on the bonfire.’ At 11.25am, the judge said that he was prepared to accept a majority verdict. That verdict came through at 4.25pm – on the attempted murder of Paul Nobbs, everyone agreed that Nilsen was guilty. On every other count, the jury was split 10-2 in favour of a guilty verdict.

Dennis Nilsen was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 25 years. He was taken down to the cells, and then off to Wormwood Scrubs. While he sat in front of the television in the hospital area of the Scrubs, his first thoughts were self-pitying ones about being ‘expelled from society’. The next morning, when he woke up, he penned a letter to Brian Masters, angry about what he had read in the
News of the World
by John Lisners, whom he knew was writing a book about him. Nilsen’s previously unpublished words are provided courtesy of Brian Masters: ‘I arrived at Wormwood Scrubs last night. I read John Lisners’ “sour grapes” as he, in his ‘professional knowledge’ of me summed up my life and trial. It can’t be much of a book, which is largely based on fourth-hand knowledge … I exercise a great sense of relief that the trial is now finally over. I will see Ralph Haeems soon in order to discuss the merits and practicalities of appealing or not.’

O
n 9 March 2010, the European Court of Human Rights announced their refusal to hear a final appeal by Dennis Nilsen to have his manuscript returned so that he could work on it. Nilsen had now taken his case as far as it seemed he logically could, and had failed. The European judges had made final something that their British counterparts had ruled on seven years before. This was to uphold that the Prison Service’s verdict that, in his autobiography, Nilsen: (1) had nothing say in the public interest; (2) wanted to spread ‘highly personal’ details of some offences along with ‘lurid and pornographic passages’; and (3) sought both to justify his conduct and denigrate people he disliked.

The ECHR decision was the end of the line for Nick Wells, Nilsen’s lawyer for over 12 years. During that time, he had proved himself an innovative legal thinker. Changing the law
in favour of a serial killer’s rights, however, eventually proved too much for his abilities. Shortly after hearing the ECHR’s judgment, the lawyer and his client parted company.

Nilsen and Wells’ journey through the courts had started back in October 2001 with another ‘rights’ case. On this occasion it was Nilsen’s unsuccessful attempt to get access to the gay ‘pin-up’ magazine,
Vulcan
. Although the bid failed Nilsen thought he had found something useful whilst preparing it – the ability to use ‘legally privileged’ envelopes to communicate with his lawyer. This practice made him wonder if he might also be allowed to use similar envelopes to bring in a copy of his draft manuscript.

Nilsen asked Wells about this who, in turn, asked the governor. The governor replied that as
History of a Drowning Boy
was not a legal document, it would still need to be read and approved. Some months later, however, in 2002 Nilsen asked Wells to send the manuscript in anyway.

When he did so, the book was confiscated and a letter delivered to Nilsen’s cell:

Nilsen was furious. He would later write to me: ‘I understand that many of the prison revelations in the book (including the Central TV thing) will be embarrassing to the HO. I care not about this. I do not play politics, I merely write testimony of a personal life … Although my body is imprisoned, they will not succeed in controlling the positive expressions from my mind.’

The following year – 2003 – Nilsen’s lawyers decided on another tack. It was now reported in the media that Nilsen was going to take the Prison Service to Judicial Review on the grounds that certain prison rules violated his basic freedom of expression. The idea that a mass killer could take on an agent of the government on the grounds that
his
rights were being infringed sounded like the sort of thing you couldn’t make up. I had almost forgotten about Nilsen’s book. Now, again, I was intrigued.

I wondered if it was
just
attention he was looking for, or whether there was more to this mission to have his book published. But I couldn’t judge what he was up to until I had finally read
History of a Drowning Boy
. After some deliberation I decided my best chance might simply be to write a letter and ask Nilsen, straight out, how we could make this happen. That is what I did.

Two days later, I received a reply written on his new electric typewriter and sent from Full Sutton Prison. He appeared happy to hear from me, and said he would soon put me in touch with Jonny Marling, who had a copy. On the
strength of what I was going to be given access to – both
History of a Drowning Boy
and a series of essays, letters, pictures and tapes, the
Sunday Times
magazine commissioned a 5,000 word feature.

On a fresh and sunny day in May, I drove out west to see Jonny Marling in the offices of his travel business in Bath, situated at the edge of town. Marling, now in his thirties, seemed friendly and slightly intense. As he brought me a cup of tea, it was hard not to miss the large Nilsen painting by the desk.

‘You must think I am very, very odd,’ he said.

I changed the subject. ‘How did your friendship with Des begin?’ I asked.

He said he had chanced upon
Killing for Company
while browsing in a bookshop. The dust jacket revealed that Nilsen used to live in Cricklewood, where Marling, too, had lived. The coincidence intrigued him and he decided to buy it. After reading the book, Marling said he then started to become fixated with wanting to know what had made this ‘apparently ordinary bloke’ do what he did. He first wrote to Masters and then to Nilsen himself. The letters went well and soon they were writing weekly. Marling would visit whenever he could.

It was all very confusing. The man in front of me seemed intelligent and well balanced with a nice life. It was hard to see what place such a dark hobby might have in it. And it wasn’t just criminological curiosity that had taken root in him: Marling appeared to really want Des’s friendship. More than anything I was mystified why he was so ready to believe Nilsen’s versions of events. Sometimes, he seemed to want to
excuse Nilsen even more than Nilsen himself had done. When I asked him why he thought his friend had killed so many people, there was no hesitation – he was convinced it was the booze.

A couple of hours later, we travelled across town to collect a missing document from his home. Marling’s petite wife opened the door. She welcomed me into their clean, white kitchen. After chatting about their pets and children, the conversation moved on to how she had spent weeks over the past year typing up the manuscript I was being loaned. The killer’s place in this gentle domestic set-up now seemed even more perplexing than before.

In the following months, Nilsen replied to my letters in a prompt and business-like way. On request he supplied me with a list of reasons why he believed his book should be published and gave the various legal arguments that were going to be used. He told me his lawyers were looking to challenge clause ‘5b’ of the Prison Rules, which prohibited prisoners ‘sending out any material for publication if it is about their own crime or past offences.’ The only exception was when such correspondence consisted of ‘serious representations about conviction or sentence’.

Nilsen not only believed his was a serious work, but also that his ability to express himself was a human right. He wrote to me saying, ‘A prisoner recognises that he loses his liberty as a result of a just prison sentence, but the law never recognises that he loses his basic “freedom of expression”.’

But when it came to the Judicial Review it only took two days in October for Judge Maurice Kay to hear the case,
and rule that the Human Rights Act had not been infringed and that he could see no other reason for the manuscript to be returned.

Despite the adverse outcome, Nilsen was pleased what I had written about the episode and the fairness of my approach. Afterwards, we kept up an ad hoc correspondence. Over a period of time, the hard-edged tone of Nilsen’s letters started to soften and I begun to wonder if more than 20 years in prison was actually ‘normalising’ him. The continued complaints about the general state of the world were still there, but the letters were becoming more self-aware. I speculated if this might indicate psychological improvement.

While writing my magazine piece, I had asked many experts what emotional development they thought would ever be possible. Most felt his emotions and personality would probably remain fairly static. Brian Masters even told me that Nilsen only understood remorse like a ‘mathematical equation’. He said ‘attention-seeking’ was Nilsen’s ‘equivalent of love’ and worried that he sought to ‘intellectually seduce’ others’ minds. But Masters hadn’t seen Nilsen in more than 10 years; how could he really know?

One person who believes Nilsen has grown emotionally is Matthew Malekos. In his thesis ‘The Birth of Psychopathy: the Psychology of a Serial Killer’, he argues that Nilsen’s creativity in prison indicates the restoration of
fully-functioning
emotions. He believes the murders provided an impetus for Nilsen to look into himself, and that subsequent emotional development has taken place in prison. His thesis states: ‘The use of criminal actions, perversely, has made
Dennis Nilsen far stronger and more optimistic than he was at the point before carrying out his homicidal actions … he has undergone a positive personal transformation while he has been incarcerated … not because of prison, but in spite of it.’

Malekos’s reasons for believing this theory start conventionally enough, but they invariably end up in very esoteric arguments. His theories encompass spiritual and mystical thinking. In particular, Malekos uses the term ‘
self-actualisation
’ – a term originally invented by the
twentieth-century
American humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow – to explain Nilsen’s change. He describes it as a state ‘in which an individual strives to be the best that they can be having resolved their past traumas and “inner demons”’…and says that such people ‘[experience] an overwhelming sense of joy from books, music and the arts’.

Whatever one makes of Malekos’s theories, the question of whether Nilsen – and those like him – can change remains an important one. Prisons are meant to try to rehabilitate all prisoners. Social and religious reformers alike will tell you that whatever punishment may be required to serve justice, society must never stop caring about the state of prisoners’ souls and minds. Even when rehabilitation serves no practical end – for the whole-life prisoner – a moral society should aspire towards it. This had been uppermost in the mind of Lord Longford throughout his visiting periods with Nilsen.

What, though, if change might come, not through therapy or religion, but simply through growing older? Medical literature does indicate some people with personality disorders do, indeed, find their condition subsides with time. Could this be what was happening with Nilsen? His increased
self-awareness seemed to indicate so and yet a question remained of how we could trust such evidence.

Short of using lie detectors or PPGs, all we can ever go on is what people say. People like Nilsen are, however, extremely deceptive. And even though I thought I could detect signs of a changing character, every so often I would read something of Nilsen’s that would frighten me. On page 312 of Malekos’s thesis, for instance, Nilsen was quoted as having written in a letter: ‘Yes, I am obsessed with remembering and enjoying the frisson of my sexual rituals … what else is there [to do] but to caress [my] memories in my present social wasteland … I do not fantasise about other prisoners, but about the past.’

Since 2003, Nilsen has remained in Full Sutton Prison. He gets up at around 7.00am and starts working at 8.30am in the workshop where he translates books into Braille. At lunchtime he eats a sandwich and work finishes at 3.00pm. His wages are about £17 a week, and with this money, he rents a portable television. He no longer has a keyboard or a budgie in his room. Nearly all his spare time is still spent on his typewriter. His autobiographical reflections on prison life now amount to 4,500 pages.

Nilsen remains on cordial terms with the other inmates on the Vulnerable Prisoner Unit, but feels little in common with them socially or intellectually. He does, however, seem to have reached an equilibrium with his surroundings. This is despite a judge having ruled in 2006, when the Home Office system of whole-life tariffs had been abandoned, that he would never be eligible for parole.

Letters I have received during the period 2003 to 2012
have continued to be written in an increasingly ‘normal’ manner. His favourite topic eventually moved away from prison conditions to current affairs. The last letter he sent me was about the Jimmy Savile case, which was all over the newspapers after the former TV presenter was accused posthumously of perpetrating a huge number of sex attacks over several decades. Nilsen vividly described him as ‘garishly attired with long blond hair, appendages festooned with chunky gold bangles, chains, shades, and topped off by the omnipresent huge cigar, which, as well as being subliminally phallic, showed Jimmy shaking his huge cock at the world …’

Nilsen called this Savile’s ‘false persona’ which covered up for his stunted emotional development. In adulthood, he opined that all of Savile’s ‘emotional interactions’ were ‘transacted entirely on his terms and under his control’. Then, one sentence jumped out. Nilsen wrote: ‘As Savile’s MO was established, he grew in confidence. Of course, he never viewed himself as “studiously evil”.’ Not being ‘studiously evil’ was the exact expression Nilsen had used when referring to himself in one of his earliest letters to me.

I wondered if this meant he, Nilsen, was about to admit the extent to which he might have enjoyed his crimes? But the letter just fizzled out. Then I remembered the emotionally inert response he had given when confronted with the full extent of the evil of his first murder. In 2005, two policemen arrived at HMP Full Sutton to show him new photographs of someone he might have killed. By the time they left, Nilsen’s first victim was finally identified as 14-year-old Stephen Holmes. Nilsen casually spoke about the matter a year later in a letter to the
Evening Standard
: