Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (4 page)

In the early 1990s, Nilsen turned against both the author
and his book. ‘
Killing for Company
is so pretentious,’ he later wrote to me, ‘that it disappears into the contradictions of its own confused academic fog. With
History of a Drowning Boy
comes the rain.’

Nilsen began to compose his first draft in Albany Prison in 1992. He had been prompted to write by a letter from an American psychiatrist. He had also found that under the influence of a (claimed) easy supply of marijuana, he found he could look back on his life with greater clarity.

Initially, over a period of several weeks, Nilsen wrote late into the night while his budgie, Hamish, flapped around his cell. The first thing he wrote about was his earliest memories growing up in the far north-east of Scotland. What was particularly striking was the emphasis Nilsen placed on the poor relationship he had with perhaps the most influential person throughout his formative years – his mother.

I
n December 2010, Nilsen’s mother, Betty Scott, died. She was 89. Some months later, I asked Nilsen if he knew about her death. His reply was typical. He wrote, ‘I can tell you exactly when my mother died – it was 23 November 1945.’ Similarly, the feeling that she’d been dead to him from the moment he was born runs throughout the first 50 pages of his autobiography.

To the outside world, however, Nilsen’s mother seemed a warm, caring lady. Many journalists who travelled up to the village of Strichen, near Fraserburgh, on Scotland’s far northeast tip to interview Scott, considered her a rather dear old sort; religious and quite unable to understand how the gentle boy she had raised could be associated with such awful things. Although these reporters only saw her public face, those who knew her better, such as Nilsen’s biographer Brian Masters, agreed.

In her public statements, Betty Scott maintained it was for others to judge her son and that she would stick by him. Nilsen, however, never believed a word. It was all lies, he would say, designed to hide the truth of what a rotten mother she had been. In 1985, he ended their relationship with a letter.

Nilsen’s and his mother’s accounts of his childhood broadly agree on the facts. It was what was going on
behind
Dennis’s eyes that he feels his mother never understood. Nilsen says he felt different, unlovable, and needing to hide what he thought and felt.

Betty Scott did notice her son was a little introverted but did not have the time to worry about it. There were five other children to look after. Besides, she thought Dennis would eventually find a niche to suit his artistic, sensitive temperament or maybe his love of animals. In the last 27 years of her life, however, Scott would spend her days trying to work out what had gone wrong. She drew nothing but blanks.

Dennis Nilsen spent many hours pondering the same question. Now he feels he has answers. He is not inherently evil, he says, but rather ‘an ordinary man driven to
extraordinary
conclusions’. He is on a mission to make the world understand it was extreme psychological circumstances rather than the essential ‘him’ that had created a perfect storm in his head. Two out of the three psychiatrists at his trial also partly agreed. They argued he suffered from a variety of ‘personality disorders’; a term for abnormalities of mind that fall short of being full psychotic illnesses.

Nilsen dismisses such psychiatric concepts as ‘psychobabble’. He believes his crimes will only be fully
understood by reading an account of his life story, told
his
way. This is what he claims
History of a Drowning Boy
to be: a serious enquiry, and not a ‘whitewash’ of his life.

There is one man who seems to agree with many of Nilsen’s claims – Matthew Malekos, a 31-year-old psychologist living in Cyprus. They started corresponding in 2000, when Malekos was 18. Twelve years later, Malekos published a thesis on Nilsen called ‘The Birth of Psychopathy: the Psychology of a Serial Killer’ (2012). In the closing chapter, Malekos suggests that Nilsen’s ‘therapeutic’ writing may have helped him conquer the factors that once made him a psychopath.

Nilsen doesn’t explicitly go that far, but he still claims his book is a thorough ‘investigation’ into the ‘recesses’ of his mind, and he starts with his infancy.
History of a Drowning Boy
opens with: ‘As the unique amalgam, in a new genetic configuration of contributions from a man and a woman, one is born into the world. Therefore at birth I was as different from other people in much the same way as my fingerprints were different from other people’s.’

Although Nilsen accepts he was born ‘different’ from others, he will not concede his nature should have
necessarily
caused his later problems. ‘It was not these differences which spawned destructive behaviour later on in life,’ he wrote to me in 2003, ‘but an utter repudiation of them by my parents, peers and a conventional repressive society.’

The first chapter of Nilsen’s manuscript elaborates on this sense of rejection. Olav Nilsen, his father, had been virtually absent since his birth. Yet, although Nilsen clearly resents his lack of a father figure, it is his feelings towards his mother which dominate his thoughts. On the first page of his book,
he even complains bitterly about how she treated him when he was just a tiny baby.

In 1946, life was hard for everyone in the small Scottish fishing town of Fraserburgh, which had been hit hard by the war. For the residents of the top flat in 47 Academy Road, things were particularly austere. The living space was terribly cramped. Nilsen’s grandparents lived in one bedroom and Nilsen, his mother and brother in another. Nilsen says it was a cold, uncaring, dour and religious environment.

As a baby, Nilsen thinks he was especially sensitive to the unemotional atmosphere that surrounded him. He says he has reason to believe his mother and grandmother would pass him around like an ‘unpleasant object’. There were no loving hands, he laments, but rather, he says, he was ‘acted upon’ in ‘rituals’ of ‘carrying, stripping, bathing, powdering, dressing and laying out’, by ‘strong and towering powers’.

Nilsen says because his world consisted of harsh, domineering women, his first emotional connections were weak. More importantly, he says the way his body was bathed and changed in a ‘ritualistic’ way profoundly affected his basic emotional and sexual needs. Then he makes an explosive assertion which sets up his entire story. He speculates whether the rituals he later performed on the dead bodies of his victims – the compulsion to dress, undress and wash the victim’s corpses – were, in fact, all re-enactments of scenes from his infancy. Somehow, he feels, the emotional deprivation of early childhood had imprinted itself on to his sexual subconscious.

This concept needs further explanation. It’s not only absurd to think imperfect mothering, alone, could have had
such a catastrophic effect, but it also sounds as if he may be trying to fix the blame at such a distant past point in time that no one can argue. On the first point, Nilsen agrees that his earliest experiences weren’t, in themselves,
sufficient
to corrupt his subconscious needs. The rest of his first chapter attempts to explain those other formative childhood events that he feels set his emotions down such a dark and disturbed track.

In order to understand Nilsen’s developing psychology, it’s crucial to appreciate how he feels about his birth town. Fraserburgh – also known as ‘the Broch’ – is a mid-sized fishing town 35 miles north of Aberdeen, in the district of Buchan. The town centre is Victorian and grey. Most of these buildings are built of granite slabs which, in winter, can look like prison walls. Close by are dour housing estates. The harbour may be more colourful but it is decidedly functional.

Many residents feel trapped by the remoteness and sense of insularity (in recent years it has also been dubbed Scotland’s heroin capital). Mother Nature doesn’t help the sense of bleakness. The persistent winds whip up salt spray, the gulls are constantly screeching and, in winter, it seems dark all day long. But there is also a more uplifting side, especially when the sun shines. The surrounding land is of the kind that is perfect for golf links, and the beaches of Fraserburgh Bay are long and sandy. The natural surroundings can be quite spectacular. And that is the only positive thing Nilsen ever has to say about his birthplace.

Nilsen describes the Broch as a rain-lashed, cultural backwater full of bigots – some religious, others just rough. In one essay, he describes the freezing climate as ‘magnified by
the cold commanding calculation of other people’. He says he felt totally insignificant, and describes the emotions he felt as a child: ‘Big people wore clothes in black and grey and they were forever issuing orders. I was one of the little people to be controlled and ordered about.’ Then, in his essay called ‘Feelings’ (quoted by Matthew Malekos in his thesis), Nilsen gives a metaphor of reaching out to the world only to find his ‘hand dirled by the sharp crack of somebody’s thin hard stick’.

The stylised prose continues throughout. Nilsen says he was treated like a street dog, with an emotional life that was ‘a world of cold maximum power and minimal warmth of close tactile love. I took my place in the line for processing. I was a few points above the status of street urchin.’

Despite the obvious exaggeration, the fact that similar accounts convinced psychiatrists at his trial indicate that Nilsen’s words probably do reflect genuine feelings. The worst aspect of Aberdeenshire life, for him, was the sense of hardness and brutality. He observes it was a necessary character of the fishing trade which, when Nilsen grew up, generally thrived. The life of the fishermen was, he says, ‘a harsh, uncompromising life constantly tacking close to the cold lips of sudden death’. But that didn’t make it any easier for him to warm to them or they to him. As his own brother said of Dennis, ‘Fraserburgh isn’t a very good place for a poofter.’

After Nilsen’s arrest, most locals – both from Fraserburgh and his second home town of Strichen – concluded that Dennis had been born with something ‘wrong’ in his brain. That belief persists today. Even apart from what he had done, it was not hard to believe that there might have been
something wrong with him. And it was also the case that mental instability was not unknown within Nilsen’s own family – a great-aunt of his had spent most of her life in a mental asylum. It’s also true that generations of
intermarrying
meant that mental problems were, in fact, not uncommon in the area.

Dennis Nilsen, however, wasn’t a simple product of the local gene pool. His father Olav Nilsen, was a Norwegian resistance soldier who had come over during the Second World War. He had done so as a part of the British-organised ‘Shetland Bus’. The Nazis had occupied Norway since 1940, and in 1941 the British Secret Service set up an operation to bring key personnel over to the Shetland Islands or northern Scotland using Scottish fishing vessels. Olav Nilsen was one of those who made their way to northern Aberdeenshire. Fraserburgh, with its RAF bases, was a centre of military activity at the time. In fact, it was even nicknamed ‘Little London’ because of all the air-raids it had received. Other than how he arrived in Scotland, very little is known about Olav Nilsen.

Nilsen’s maternal line came from the Whyte family. His grandparents were Andrew and Lily. They were born in the 1890s into what he calls ‘poverty, hard work and danger’. They married young and they first set up home at Inverallochy, a small port near Fraserburgh. Later, they moved to Broadsea, a little way inland. Finally, they settled in Academy Road in Fraserburgh, where Dennis Nilsen was born and where he, his mother and siblings would live until 1954.

Academy Road, like much of Fraserburgh, was comprised
of geometrically square, granite council houses terraced into four reasonably-sized flats. In ‘Feelings’, Nilsen describes them as ‘blockhouse-prim, solid and grim with a black smoke of hell spouting from the red clay chimney pots standing in neat rows over the grey slate roofs.’ Number 47 was at the end of one small terrace. The Whytes occupied the top flat.

It was an uninspiring place to live but the couple never aspired to more. Besides, they never had any money. Despite working all his life as a fisherman, Andrew Whyte failed to own his own boat. This meant he was dependent on other fisherman for his livelihood and, when times were lean in the town, he would be unemployed. He found claiming welfare shameful. When his wife had to supplement their social security money with cleaning work, that humiliated him even more.

Andrew would try to compensate by telling elaborate stories. Down at the harbour, he had quite a reputation. Back at home, though, he was careful not to let his story-telling get in the way of the family’s spiritual life. God and the Bible were woven into their daily routine and it came as a great comfort to them when their daughter Betty, as a teenager, also became interested in the ‘Faith Mission’. In her later years, Betty Scott would talk a lot about her faith. Dennis, however, remembers his mother’s evangelicalism with scepticism. He thought, at heart, she was sensual rather than religious. In one letter to me, he moans, witheringly, that the only character trait they ever shared was a ‘fondness for cock’.

Whether or not Betty Nilsen had a particularly flirtatious nature when Dennis was growing up, there is no doubt in her early twenties she turned many of the heads of the
servicemen looking for relief from the war. As Fraserburgh became increasingly important as an RAF base, many local halls were commandeered as makeshift places of rest and recreation. On Fridays and Saturdays, romance happened quickly. Betty Whyte was petite with a delicate, pale face framed by brown hair, and would use all her youthful guile to sneak past her parents to get to social events. If it proved too hard to make it to the evening dos, she would try in the cafés during the afternoons.

This was how Betty Whyte met Sgt Olav Nilsen of the Norwegian Resistance. Olav was 6ft-2in tall, fair and rugged. He came over and rescued her from the unwanted attention of some RAF boys who had invited themselves to the table where she and her friend were sitting. Betty was won over by his gallant act and, afterwards, they walked off down the street together, hand in hand. It was March 1942 and she was 21.

They got married a couple of months later on 2 May. Things almost immediately started to go wrong. Olav soon left in search of more excitement and, no doubt, other women. And whatever military value he might have had – no one seems to know – quickly expired. He ended up in a tobacco factory. This was entered as his profession on Dennis’s birth certificate. He was also known for drinking heavily in the town’s pubs. Betty stayed in her grandparents’ flat. But despite the unconventional marriage, Olav still managed to father three children by Betty. The oldest was Olav junior; the youngest was Sylvia. In the middle was Dennis, born on 23 November 1945.