Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (7 page)

But although much of what he says is merely sexual, Nilsen also seems to want readers of his book to join in his youthful enthusiasm for the Army. Nilsen knew that, as much as he would have liked to have been able to develop his artistic side, in the general area of the Broch there were limited prospects to do so. Given his realistic options, the idea of adventure and male camaraderie certainly seemed more interesting than joining Uncle Robert in the Consolidated Pneumatic Tool Company. Above all, Nilsen had had enough of Aberdeenshire. He knew that in the Army there were all sorts of roles he could try. His favourite idea
was to try to be a cook. After a very brief spell in a fish canning factory, he went down to Aberdeen to the Army Recruiting Office and took the exams. He passed them with ease. He then signed up for a period of nine years.

One July morning in 1960, Adam Scott took Dennis Nilsen to the station to catch a steam train to London. The lad had high hopes of his new life. He would be able to see the world and have great adventures, far from the small-town attitudes of Strichen. He had, however, misjudged his ability to fit in with young, ‘normal’, heterosexual men. It would take a further 22 years and the lives of at least 12 young men before Nilsen could really start to accept his sexuality and background. Being frank with himself began with his nine months awaiting trial on remand.

T
he nine months Nilsen spent on remand were filled with conflict and confrontation. His crimes and odd personality caused him to be shunned by fellow inmates. Worse were the constant arguments he got into with warders. On occasion, these led to his being detained in solitary confinement. But by the end of his time on remand, Nilsen had begun to stabilise. He was helped both by the lack of destructive stimuli – sex and alcohol – and by the fact that, for the first time in years, he was no longer isolated.

Not only were there people surrounding him, but there were also others interested in him. Nilsen no longer felt invisible and it encouraged him to record his thoughts. Once he had started to write, a pen rarely left his hand. Every scrap of paper in his cell became covered in his dense, spidery handwriting. He was on a search for anything in his past –
such as the death of his grandfather – that might provide him with a reason why he had become a killer.

In
History of a Drowning Boy
, however, rather than recall his intense introspection, Nilsen chooses to concentrate on what he considered to be the awful regime of Brixton Prison and the injustices he felt were heaped upon him. The chapter he writes about the period before the trial is fascinating, frustrating and frequently unpleasant. Nothing in what he says is straightforward. Nilsen constantly seeks to cast himself in a better light by putting others down. Petty grumbles are given as much space as his reflections on how he had become ‘addicted to murder’.

Nilsen’s description of the day of his arrest is a case in point. Immediately after the arrest, the police had driven Nilsen over to Hornsey, a smallish police station two miles east of where he had himself been a probationary police officer. Nilsen says that Peter Jay, Geoff Chambers, Steve McCusker and Jeff Butler didn’t know what to expect from him. Jay, for his part, says Nilsen seemed ‘extremely odd’ and he knew he would need to be played carefully.

In particular, Jay suspected that, as a union man, Nilsen would be noticing whether the regulations were being followed. He was right. It shows in Nilsen’s description of Chambers as ‘having forgotten a lot of the basic principles of police evidence gathering despite his exalted rank,’ and his statement that he was pleased his treatment was ‘correct and amiable.’ Indeed Jay’s friendly, light-hearted and efficient manner created an environment in which Nilsen felt comfortable enough to talk freely.

When Nilsen set about unburdening himself, his manner
seemed relaxed and his words informative. Internally, however, Nilsen says he felt very differently. He says that ‘playing the part of a villain was new to me’ and being ‘absolutely isolated and friendless I entered into a spirit of bonhomie with my captors’. His conscience, he adds, was ‘in desperate need for relief’.

Jay remembers Nilsen as being quietly spoken but with a strange swagger. During the interviews, he drank endless cups of coffee, chain-smoked cigarettes and his words were peppered with his black humour. It resulted in many infamous remarks, such as: ‘I don’t know how many bodies I had under the floorboards at any one time. I didn’t do a stock check.’

Nilsen’s book makes no apology, however, for his black humour. He does claim, though, that that he talked more freely than he felt he should have. ‘Previous commentators,’ he says, ‘have grossly underplayed this … element of fear.’ Despite being photographed daily to minimise any threat of being beaten, Nilsen says he was worried ‘the police might hang [him] up in a cell and call it suicide’. But given his
first-hand
knowledge of police practice this is hardly convincing. Similarly, when he says that, on his second day in custody, he turned away a solicitor because he didn’t want to be told to remain silent, it as if he really wanted to appear in as good a light as possible to
himself
.

Soon, the detectives started to worry that, despite such behaviour, their prisoner might stop co-operating. Jay effectively led the investigation. He is 6ft 3in with a tough ‘old school’ manner. His boss, DCS Geoff Chambers, was nicknamed ‘Fag Ash and Confusion’. Jay told me how aware
they were of the time pressure they were working under. Without an extension they only had 48 hours to charge Nilsen and, even though he was talking constantly, there was still the task of corroborating what he said.

With the body of Stephen Sinclair reassembled on the mortuary slab, they decided to concentrate on his murder. Once Nilsen was detained on one charge, they would be able to question him about others at their leisure. But before this, Chambers and Jay had the press to deal with. The newspapers had first learnt about the goings on in Cranley Gardens after Mike Cattran had contacted a local reporter from Muswell Hill who then tipped off Fleet Street. Because of this, Jay and Chambers had to quickly call a press conference. The reporters were all looking for a quote for their front page. ‘How long,’ one journalist asked, ‘has Nilsen had this unusual habit?’

Chambers and Jay were conscious that if the papers reported too much it might hinder their investigation. They needed to act quickly. So at 5.00pm on Friday, 11 February 1983, Dennis Andrew Nilsen was charged with the murder of Stephen Sinclair. The case was now placed
sub judice,
with reporting forbidden until the trial.

Meanwhile, Nilsen was now starting to prove a difficult client for his solicitor, a cheerful man called Ronald Moss. At his first court hearing at Highbury Magistrates’ Court on the Saturday, 12 February, Nilsen forewent the customary blanket over the head and walked out in the full glare of the press. Images of him in his large spectacles and neat side-parted hair made the front pages of the tabloids, pictures which are still often shown today.

Nilsen’s behaviour may or may not have been a case of him trying to stage-manage his image. It was also down to the fact that once he got it into his head to do something a certain way, that was how it had to be. After unburdening himself of his crimes, he wanted to believe he had rejoined the world of decent, morally upstanding people. He says in his book that that morning he didn’t want to hide away like a common criminal. In a letter to me some years later, he wrote: ‘On my arrest, I regained the moral high ground. My commitment was clear. To assist in every possible way to bring lawful justice to the past, present and future … I am still firmly wedded to the moral code with the added degree of maturity which comes from the enlightenment of experience.’

On 18 February 1983, with most of the interrogation now concluded, Nilsen was taken to Brixton Prison. He was held on remand there from February until his trial in October. Going to Brixton was more than just a journey a few miles south. Hornsey had looked like the police station he had himself worked in, and Chambers and Jay gave him endless snacks and cigarettes. Brixton felt like what it was – prison.

It also epitomised everything bad about the Prison Service in the 1980s. The corridors stank of unpleasant food and male bodies; noise clattered around the bare walls and in winter it was constantly freezing. The physical discomfort was only part of it. The reality of what Nilsen had done was also starting to sink in. If killing was an addiction, here was the cold turkey.

Nilsen knew his eventual prospects were bleak. The best case scenario lay in a sentence mitigated by ‘diminished responsibility’. This could lead to a reduced sentence or, just
as likely, being sent to an asylum until considered ‘cured’. That possibility terrified Nilsen. One psychiatrist who visited, reported: ‘He is preoccupied with avoiding a mad label.’

Nilsen wasn’t just afraid, he was also angry. He was particularly furious about the idea that men who hadn’t yet gone to court were still treated like criminals. He says he no longer felt dangerous and wanted bail arrangement where he could be ‘held in prison custody away from the crude violence of the Brixton Prison Authorities’. Later, he also says he was surprised that DCS Chambers should imply ‘that if [he] were to be released from custody [he] would go around killing people and cutting them up’. Despite his open confessions, Nilsen deemed himself to now be ‘harmless’. Why couldn’t other people see it, he thought?

After returning from his bail hearing – it had been swiftly refused – Nilsen was taken off to a private room to talk to Paul Bowden, a senior Home Office psychiatrist. It was meant to be a pre-trial evaluation about his competence to stand trial. Bowden was sure Nilsen was not schizophrenic nor otherwise incompetent. But after an hour together, Bowden began to feel there was something about his excitability that was concerning. He recommended an eye be kept on him for his own safety. Nilsen was thus sent to the hospital wing and stayed there, as a potential suicide risk, month after month, throughout his period of remand.

Being kept in the hospital wing – what Nilsen considered to be ‘solitary confinement’ – angered him even more than before. Rather than being more relaxed, as one might expect, the authorities exercised additional powers over inmates in the medical unit. These included patient isolation for up to 23½
hours in a solitary cell. Nilsen alleges he was held like this for most of the time.

Although he didn’t have many friends, in his first couple of weeks in Brixton, Nilsen says he did still receive a couple of visitors. One was Cathy Hughes, who had taken over as Denmark Street Branch Secretary at the CSPA Union. His boss Janet Leaman also wrote but didn’t visit. In her letter she said she wouldn’t believe the accusations until they were proved. Her words were warm and reminded Nilsen how his cynical humour had ‘always hit the spot’. But between such, short-lived, signs of support, and Brian Masters getting in touch, Nilsen mainly relied on stilted conversations conducted between cells for companionship.

Some descriptions of those he met at this time are given in
History of a Drowning Boy
to highlight what a terrible place Brixton was. If they are to be believed then, for once, Nilsen might have had a point. Two cells down the corridor was an inmate called David – not his real name. His was a particularly sad case. He’d had been charged with the murder of his baby daughter. He claimed that the murder had been committed under the influence of drugs and he had no memory of it. Nilsen says he thought that David needed immediate treatment for his drug problems.

After telling the reader how awful this situation was, he gives a flavour of how he would interact with David. He remembers one afternoon in particular. It was just after the prison library trolley had done its rounds. Nilsen asked David if he could swap his book of poems for David’s copy of the
Complete Works of Shakespeare
. They started to discuss David’s case. Soon, the conversation turned to the unfairness
of wearing prison uniform. How can they make you dress as a prisoner, they agreed, when you haven’t yet been convicted of anything?

From the injustices of prison life, Nilsen moves on to the plight of some of the more wretched prisoners he saw. For the most part, he says inmates were just ‘ordinary human beings’ in adverse circumstances. Nilsen says that ‘in crimes of emotional/sexual psychology, it is a case of “there but by the grace of God goes anyone”’. But what to do with such prisoners? Nilsen says he thought prisons were there to help rehabilitate, not to further brutalise those to whom life had already been cruel. He concluded the prison authorities didn’t really want to manage their inmates back into society, but ‘warehouse’ them like ‘animals in a zoo’.

If he doubted for a moment that prison warders were thugs, then meeting another inmate – we’ll call him Carlton – settled the issue. Here was another very tragic situation. Carlton was standing accused of throwing a child out of a window during a burglary. The child had died as a result. Nilsen and Carlton spoke to each other during cell-to-cell conversations and exercise periods. It soon struck Nilsen that Carlton had mental problems. In fact, he thought he had no place being there at all. On top of that, he seemed to be the victim of racial abuse. Carlton was a heavily-built black man, who, Nilsen claims, was repeatedly beaten by the prison guards.

On one occasion, it was apparently just because he was listening to Bob Marley. Nilsen vividly describes the guards’ language: ‘Don’t you play that fucking jungle music in here, you black cunt.’ When the prison doctor came to do his
rounds on the medical wing, he allegedly ignored Carlton’s injuries. Carlton was eventually committed to Broadmoor. Before he left, he thanked Nilsen for not blanking him. It was written on a Mother’s Day card and Nilsen included it in the papers he gave Masters.

Nilsen enjoyed acting protectively – and, probably, domineeringly – towards weaker inmates like Carlton. Some were very grateful for his support and assistance. Peter Jay told me that, when he and Geoff Chambers travelled over to complete their final interviews, they were surprised to see other prisoners come up behind Nilsen and slap him on the back. It appears that, in particular, Nilsen helped others write letters to their girlfriends or lawyers.

Mostly, however, Nilsen was a nuisance to all around him. The governor, A J Pearson, told him one day that after all he had done, he had a cheek going on about prisoners’ rights. But Nilsen could only see the hypocrisy on the other side. To him, the authorities were punishing people by breaking the law themselves. His chapter on his spell on remand is replete with accusations of beatings, the forced administration of drugs such as chloropromazine (an anti-psychotic), and placing prisoners naked in what he referred to as ‘strip cells’ in the ‘punishment block’.

As a prisoner on remand, Nilsen was given an allowance of 88p a week. He was allowed to supplement this with his own money, but since he had resigned from the Civil Service (to spare them any embarrassment, apparently), he had no salary. Nilsen’s main outgoing was tobacco. As a lifelong
chain-smoker
, he’d been so concerned about running out in prison; the day he arrived he’d switched to roll-ups. Cigarettes and
writing materials were Nilsen’s necessities. When he could access money, it would be spent on newspapers and batteries for his small radio.