Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (9 page)

The more Nilsen opened up, the more friends and even the Crown’s trial psychiatrist, Paul Bowden, warned Masters that Nilsen might be manipulating him. Bookish and dapper, Brian Masters didn’t look much like a match for someone like
Dennis Nilsen. Masters, however, felt equal to all of Nilsen’s games. He was, though, very aware he would need to play detective to find out the truth.

It wasn’t just a case of judging what to believe but also finding the words to describe the drama of a man struggling to process a spree of 15 murders. His thoughts are given in a chapter called ‘Remand’. Here, Nilsen’s moods are described as a ‘kaleidoscope … shifting from elation to gloom, from resignation to despair, from regret about the past to hope for the future’.

During the remaining months before the trial, Masters visited twice a week. Throughout this period, Nilsen wrote his thoughts and biographical reminiscences daily in prison exercise books (he would also carry on writing after the trial). Under the agreement Masters had with the prison and Home Office, he was allowed to use anything Nilsen had written but nothing from the face-to-face meetings. He even had to sign a formal undertaking to that effect.

Soon, Brian Masters started to experience what appeared to be Nilsen’s fierce loyalty. At first, it seemed like one of his impulsive friendships. Eventually, however, he decided it was mainly an obsession with principles. During the summer, some prisoners suggested to Nilsen that Masters was a ‘plant’ for one of the tabloid newspapers. It made him extremely angry. He felt Masters was now his friend and an attack on the author was an attack on him. As the rumours grew, he responded by sulking and refusing to talk to his solicitor. This protest seemed childish.

Nilsen seemed confused by his own emotions. In one notebook, he described them as ‘the most toxic substances
known to man’. His words match, remarkably, a profile of ‘covert schizoid personality’ described by the psychiatrist Dr Salman Akhtar. Such people are characterised as being, amongst other things: cynical, grandiose, sensitive, creative, voyeuristic, amoral, autistic, hungry for love and envious of others’ spontaneity. Nilsen wrote it must be a ‘wonderful gift’ to ‘throw your arms around someone and just weep’. At that moment, he seemed to accept that, for much of his life, normal emotions had been beyond him.

More usually Nilsen presented the impression that he was convinced he had now returned to ‘normal’. Of course, it was odd that he felt so little sadness for his victims, but he didn’t feel there was essentially anything wrong with him. Yet whenever he put pen to paper, the results inevitably showed him to be disconnected from his crimes. Most strikingly, there were a series of drawings of his last victim, Sinclair. These ‘Sad Sketches’ were accurately drawn renditions of how his remains appeared after they had been dismembered. They were accompanied by notes recounting how he had cut up the corpse. Masters described them as being drawn with ‘energy and pride’, and ‘an odd kind of perverse affection’.

As 24 October 1983 – the date set for the trial – drew closer, Nilsen’s mood swings seemed more extreme than ever. One moment he could be cheery and, minutes later, he seemed tortured. ‘I go through a personal hell each day,’ he says in
Killing for Company.

The divisions within him in the run up to the trial were, however, still consistent with a personality that was under pressure but basically working. That impulsive infatuation
with Martin, the sudden friendships in the exercise yard, the erratic defence strategy and the compulsive writing may simply have been him coming to terms with being a murderer. His behaviour even reminded Masters occasionally of Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s motiveless killer whose reflections are the subject of the classic novel,
Crime and Punishment
.

Nilsen even said that he hoped if he accepted all blame, maybe he could look the parents of victim Ken Ockendon in the eye. Of all his victims, Ockendon was the most inexplicable. Nilsen had met the 23-year-old Canadian tourist in a pub one lunchtime. The young man had a loving family and probably wasn’t homosexual. The two of them had enjoyed an entire day together. Nilsen had seemed genuinely confused as to why he had killed him. In order to atone for what he had done, he told Masters he wanted to accept any punishment the law prescribed and some more besides.

Eventually, however, he seems to have changed his mind. Nilsen pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility. On 3 November, the 12 men and women of the jury were initially unable to agree whether there might be something sufficiently wrong with Nilsen’s brain to mitigate his actions. The next day, however, a majority verdict was accepted, and Dennis Nilsen was a guilty and an evil man.

During the trial, which is the main focus of Chapter 10, Nilsen had tried to convince the outside world of the context of the crimes. Once that failed, he felt had only his own writing to fall back on. In his letter to me, he stated, ‘I explain but
do not
excuse. We are not talking about studious “evil” but human inadequacy. Men will admit to potent criminality or controlling powerful “villainy” but never “inadequacy”. My
crimes flowed from personal inadequacy developed over a lengthy period. It was a desperate possessive “aggression”, almost spiritually passive in the motive and heat of expression.’

The evening following his life sentencing – with a minimum of 25 years to serve –Dennis Nilsen was in the hospital wing of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, and appeared utterly despondent. One of the orderlies let him watch TV. Nilsen says in
History of a Drowning Boy
that he sat blankly in front of it, considering his position: ‘The world that I looked at on the TV was not the world that I had known before… Everything had changed drastically and I now felt like a ghost looking at an alien world of flesh and blood people. With an endless sentence ahead of me, I felt that I had been expelled from society for ever more.’

N
ilsen’s memoirs focus hard on his childhood and life in London for answers to his behaviour. But neither begin to explain how he could have set out one night in 1978 for the pub, and then woke up the next morning a murderer. Thousands have worse childhoods than Nilsen, and almost as many young men deal with alienation through casual
pickups
and excessive drinking. But, if Nilsen’s raking over his first 30 years raises as many questions as answers, it does show
when
his mental abnormalities developed most uniquely. That was in the 11 years he spent in the Army. Nilsen’s accounts of his inner life during this period make for chilling reading. Ironically, it was a time when he was never short of company, structure or normality.

In the Army, Nilsen travelled the world, learnt a trade and had responsibility. But he also became used to death, felt
sexually ashamed and became accustomed to knocking his consciousness into submission through drink. Most disturbingly, he developed sexual fantasies that started with partners who were totally passive, then those who were unconscious, and finally involved the dead.

There was nothing particularly sinister in his make-up, however, when he alighted on Aldershot station platform in September 1961. He was not yet 16, quite tall, physically weak, enthusiastic and immature. As a boy soldier, Nilsen was posted to ‘V’ squad, along with 20 others of the same age. Aldershot was then a large garrison town on the Surrey–Hampshire border, surrounded by woodland and close to the stockbroker belt. Virtually the entire town was given over to the Army, and squaddies filled the local bars and canteens. This was still the pre-Beatles era and Elvis played on the jukebox for the whole of that year. In the nearby genteel market towns of Farnham and Guildford, wealthy commuters tutted when they saw young soldiers visiting their towns but, back in Aldershot, Nilsen and his companions saw a role model on every street corner. And being in such a densely military environment encouraged the youngsters. Together, they learnt discipline and drill, and all the other things the Army does to turn young lads into men.

Nilsen, in particular, says he became friendly with three of the boys: Brian Bacher, Chris Innerd and Eric ‘Tabs’ Talbot. Some of Nilsen’s happiest memories were of the three of them and their adventures. In 1962, they travelled to Cornwall and Devon together for the ‘Ten Tors’ competitive hike on Exmoor as part of their physical training. But Nilsen was unable to finish due to his weak legs, and he vowed he would
never let this happen again. Soon, he started to show an aptitude for cross-country running. But no amount of ‘manning up’ seemed to be able to rid him of his homosexual thoughts. The tightly scheduled days might have kept them at bay for a while, but there was nothing he could do about the nights.

Nor was there anything he wanted to do. Nilsen’s dreams became a comfort to him; he seems to have gone as far as trying to plan them in advance. There is one he still remembers vividly today. It was benign and involved him and a friend lying warm and naked under a fur blanket in a cabin while a blizzard blew outside. In contrast to most of Nilsen’s later sexual experiences which rarely got beyond the physical, in this fantasy he cherished a sense of togetherness. Still, it wasn’t an equal relationship; Nilsen enjoyed the thought of a submissive partner he could protect. It was the two of them against the world. He wrote in
History of a Drowning Boy:
‘We would stay there in warm comfort together forever. We never talked in the dreams. We would get up occasionally to eat food silently before a blazing fire. We would listen to the outside world on the radio. It was bliss, naked under these furs, in each other’s arms and the soft smoothness of his skin against mine. Strangely, we never fucked in these dreams. Very odd.’

The boys in this fantasy always had to conform to a certain androgynous physical type. Other than that, they could be of any race. Nilsen loathed racism in all forms and was determined never to discriminate. Here, in the parade squares of Aldershot, Nilsen says that around him in the 500-strong regiment he was disconcerted that he could only see ‘one
Indian and no blacks’. He comments that it upset him whenever he heard ‘nigger’ jokes. Nilsen found black men attractive but oriental men were his favourite: ‘I did, however, develop certain sexual, physical preferences in my males. I liked smooth men. Hairy men were a complete sexual turn off for me. I liked Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos; in fact, any type as long as they were smooth-skinned. Fat and
well-muscled
males, again, were a complete sexual turn off. I suspect that my attraction to Orientals has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of them display the characteristics of boys.’

Photographs from this period show an excited young man in round glasses and a smart green jumper getting on with the various activities of barrack life. He was healthy and
well-disciplined
and as happy ‘packing’ beds and scrubbing floors as any 16-year-old might be expected to be. After a year-
and-a
-half, Nilsen was made a junior corporal, and put in charge of a dorm of younger boys. There was one half-Dutch boy that he took a particular shine to. One day, Nilsen found him in his bed space crying. Nilsen claims that he wanted to put his arms around him and talk to him like ‘Mum’, but that wasn’t ‘what big, tough corporals did’.

Nilsen, however, was hardly considered a big, tough corporal – although his colleague, Eric Talbot, in a television interview remembered him occasionally trying to impress by trying to throw his weight around.

Nilsen was, in fact, extremely insecure. He remembers his biggest fear on arriving at Aldershot being the prospect of the communal showers. He thought that his genitals might be smaller than everyone else’s and, more importantly, he might start to get an erection at the sight of other naked bodies.
There was a rumour that when this had happened before, other boys had responded by ‘shoving a broomstick up his arse’. In the end, the showers proved nothing to worry about.

There was still, however, plenty in his behaviour that some found odd. Some would laugh about his stupid grin or the fact he seemed prudish about girlie magazines. Yet to others he was just normal and quiet. Dusty Payne, a platoon sergeant, couldn’t believe it when he saw the news in 1983. Could this really be the Dennis Nilsen he’d known in the 1960s? Later, after reading articles in the papers, there was no mistaking it. He wrote first to the governor at Albany and later to Nilsen. Payne told the governor he remembered Dennis as a reserved lad who performed his job conscientiously and whom he recommended for Junior Sergeant. He also, somewhat surprisingly, thought he remembered Nilsen’s mother visiting, and her being a ‘quiet, warm lady’.

Payne thought something drastic must have subsequently happened to Nilsen for his mind to have become so dark. In a letter he wrote to Nilsen’s prison governor, he speculates as to whether it could have been his time serving in Aden. Something, however, was already wrong in Aldershot. On the outside Nilsen may have seemed a ‘loner who did the job to the best of his ability’, but behind his exterior appearance, his ‘inner film’ had now developed into a serious condition. It was threatening to undermine his ability to differentiate between the world as it was and existence as he liked to imagine it. ‘I had two separate lives,’ Nilsen writes in his autobiography, ‘the real life and the fantasy life. When I was with people I was in the “real” world and in my own private
life I snapped easily into my fantasy life. I could oscillate from one to the other with instant ease.’

As had been so when he had reached puberty, Nilsen felt as if he were a film director controlling his own imagination. When, after three years, he passed the ‘senior education test’, he was disappointed that he ‘had no one to cheer [him] on except the heroes in [his] mind’. One imagines internally, though, he was imagining a triumphal scene climaxing in the year of 1964 with everyone throwing their berets in the air.

The military exams Nilsen had taken were generally considered to be an equivalent to school O-levels. He ended up with a solid but unremarkable five passes: Maths, English, Map-reading, Current Affairs and Catering Science. Most importantly for his future army career, he also passed the B2 catering exam. And even though Nilsen was to be a cook rather than a soldier, he had still developed well enough physically, completing full training on foot, arms and weapons drills. When, at 18, he took part in the passing-out parade in the summer of 1964, he says he felt ready for ‘the man’s army’.

That summer he went home to Strichen for a brief period of leave. On the second weekend he hired a scooter to go to Fraserburgh to see Granny. He skidded on some mud and hit his head quite badly, but no serious damage was apparent. Nilsen was upbeat, proud to show what he was doing with his life. He eagerly spoke of the excitement of his first posting. This was to be in Osnabruck in north-western Germany. Family members were pleased, if surprised, that the quiet boy writing poetry upstairs had not merely survived life as a cadet but wanted more.

Nilsen, of course, knew his time in Germany was going to be a more rugged adventure than anything he had experienced in the south of England. But he thought it would just be more exciting. So far, the experience of leaving the backwater of Fraserburgh for Aldershot had proved the right thing to do. He had no reason to think that the adult Army would do anything other than further expand his horizons.

Some months before his nineteenth birthday, Nilsen was driven over to Germany in a coach full of young men. The NATO barracks were a large, concrete complex surrounded by fields and woodland just outside Osnabruck’s medieval market town centre. The British Army presence was part of the wider NATO mobilisation in Europe during the Cold War.

Nilsen was attached to the Catering Corps within the Royal Fusiliers. He continued to train as a soldier and practice field manoeuvres, but his working life was focused around cooking in the mess. The team was headed up by the squadron quartermaster sergeant ‘Badger’ Maitland who was quick-witted and hearty. Nilsen admired him, and the fact he liked a drink made him approachable. Likewise, the cooks he worked with were an amiable, ‘hard-working, boozy lot’. Nilsen was soon very taken with the drinking culture. Within the barracks complex there were various bars, with some catering to individual squadrons, while others, like the NAAFI bar, were for everyone. It was much more exciting, however, to go out to the city centre at weekends.

As Nilsen casts his mind back, rather than recalling his work or the intricacies of life in the barracks, he mainly mulls
on his socialising. He remembers being someone who drank to ease his shyness but who was still one of the lads. It’s unlikely, however, that others saw him the same way. The testimony of various colleagues indicates he was seen as the squaddie who couldn’t hold his drink, and whose low tolerance, in turn, made him irritating to those around him – especially when Nilsen started to get drunk and spoiled others’ chances with girls.

Dennis Nilsen’s homosexuality was well hidden. Being gay was still far from being tolerated in the Army. Nilsen would therefore follow others to various rough and ready watering holes and pretend to be equally excited about the hunt for girls. One Saturday night, in one of the pubs far from the city centre, Nilsen’s entire squadron were questioned about a shooting in a bar. They had been in the area when a man shot a local taxi driver after an argument. The murderer was Leslie Grantham who would later find fame in the 1980s as ‘Dirty Den’ in the BBC soap opera
EastEnders
.

Nilsen spent just over two years in northern Germany. As a private, he slept in a ‘bed space’ in a medium-sized dorm. Towards the end of his two years in Germany, dorm inspections were sufficiently relaxed that Nilsen even managed to keep a dog called Rexie. He named it after his first cuddly toy, which he says his mother threw away in a bid to tidy up.

It is while describing his posting to Osnabruck that Nilsen’s memoirs start to change tone. The exuberance and lightness of youth is increasingly replaced by descriptions of his dark, fantasy life. Often the lines between reality and desires seem blurred. This was particularly so one Sunday morning, when
Nilsen says he woke up to find himself passed out on top of a mattress with a fat, young German called Hans. They were in a flat on the outskirts of town. Nilsen assumes that they had just passed out in the same room after a night’s drinking. He spent the next day, however, imagining that the man had interfered with him.

It pleased him to think that he might have been abused while totally passed out: ‘My mind thrilled at the thought of this fat German undressing and fondling me,’ he says. The fact the other man was fat and ugly accentuated Nilsen’s desire to feel androgynous. He desperately wanted some sexual activity to have happened. While he was working, he would daydream about scenarios where a sex-starved young squaddie might try to relieve some sexual tension with him. And how much more likely would that have been to occur than if he was out cold and passive? This, in turn, led to him pretending when he was out drinking to pass out in the hope that someone would carry him home and take pleasure in his body.

Nilsen’s strange behaviour when drunk eventually also got him into fist fights. He is careful to avoid discussion of these in his memoirs. They are, however, recorded in his army record, including one particular all-day drinking session which ended up with him getting into a fight which later required medical attention. Nilsen does, however, describe one incident he was ashamed of. It involved his dog Rexie, and was like a watered-down version of his earlier story about killing the cat. One afternoon, he says, he placed the dog on top of his locker and terrified her by growling, just to see her cower. He describes seeing her fear which ‘excited a frisson of
power’ within him. Eventually, she fell off the locker and cut herself on his bed. At that point, the cruel mood broke and he says he remembers starting to cry with guilt.