Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (8 page)

Dennis Nilsen may have had some friends among weaker prisoners, but a significant number objected to his very presence there; some because of what he had allegedly done, but others just disliked his aloof personality. One of Nilsen’s lowest moments in the pre-trial period came when the prison governor banned him from attending chapel. Despite his atheist beliefs, Nilsen had been a regular visitor to break up the interminable hours spent locked up in his prison hospital cell.

The governor was worried that Nilsen’s presence might cause a disturbance and present a threat to ‘good order and discipline’. That wasn’t how Dennis Nilsen saw it. In
History of a Drowning Boy
, he describes this incident as his ‘expulsion’ from ‘religious activity’. He felt the chaplains should have stood up to the governor and describes them as ‘Christian hypocrites’, and ‘worse than cockroaches’. They were forever ‘crossing to the other side of the road’, like in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The reader is left feeling that what really got to Nilsen was that the Church was meant to be there for all humanity. If it rejected him, what, then, was he?

If the world saw him as a monster, Nilsen’s ‘inner film’ was still working out ways to be the hero of his story. He found it, temporarily, when he fell in love. In between writing his
self-admonishing
essays, Nilsen had become infatuated with a young psychopath, who was also on remand, called David Martin. They met for short periods in the exercise yard. He was small, effeminate and bisexual. It is possible their
relationship may have developed if circumstances had been different. But, as it stood, it was largely one-sided. While Martin seemed initially to enjoy Nilsen’s attention, he was also smitten with an ex-model called Sue Stephens. Eventually, Martin sent a note to Nilsen to stop pestering him. Still, the ‘couple’ was gossiped about in the prison. One warder described them as the ‘copper who liked killing queers with the queer who liked killing coppers’, referring to Nilsen having been a policeman and Martin having shot one of them.

It was easy to see why Nilsen might have been attracted to David Martin. His story read like the plot of a gangster movie. He was a career criminal who had been in and out of prison all his life. Martin had resumed offending in 1981 after an eight-year sentence for fraud. His spree started with a series of burglaries on video stores to get equipment to start an adult movie business. A month later, he raided a gun store in Covent Garden. Finally, in August 1982, he broke into a film-processing laboratory, shooting a policeman in the leg before escaping.

Martin then fled to Spain. While he was away, detectives located his flat. Just as he returned, the flat was being put under surveillance. The only person they saw going in and out, however, was a slim, blonde girl. Then information reached them that Martin himself enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes – they had been watching him all along.

On 15 September, Special Branch waited outside the flat for the ‘blonde with the Adam’s apple’ to return. As armed officers approached him, Martin pulled a gun out of the top of his stockings and pointed it at them. They responded by shooting him in his neck.

Some months later, after he had recovered, Martin escaped from Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, using clips and pins hidden in his long hair to pick the lock. With his fur-coat collar up and a stack of papers in his arms, he then walked out of the building. News of the escape spread over the front pages, and a manhunt was launched.

When Nilsen chatted to Martin in the exercise yard, he discovered just how close he’d been to Martin’s subsequent, dramatic arrest. That their stories might be connected appealed to Nilsen’s sense of romance. In a ten-page sequence, his manuscript describes the last week of January in 1983.

Nilsen had killed Stephen Sinclair on Wednesday, 26 January 1983. The next morning, he says he woke with a hangover, but still felt ok to do a normal day’s work. When he got back, he spent some time admiring Sinclair’s naked body and then he decided to go for an evening’s drinking at the fashionable, gay-friendly, King William IV pub in Hampstead.

Half an hour before Nilsen had arrived at the ‘King Willy’, Martin had been arrested in Hampstead Tube station. One of the regulars at the bar was talking about how the police had shut the Tube station down. But Nilsen says at the time he was more interested in where he might find some action. He decided to move to the Sir Richard Steele pub near Belsize Park Tube just down the road. The police were there, too. Nilsen asked what was going on; the constable replied they had arrested a dangerous criminal.

Later, Nilsen got a cab back. He describes getting home and letting the dog out into the garden downstairs. Then he went up to his room, lifted Sinclair’s dead body up and placed him in the chair in the next room. Filling his glass, and
turning on the tape player, he turned to the dead man. Without any apparent shame or embarrassment, Nilsen recalls saying to him, ‘You’re a lot better off than the poor bastard they’ve got down the Tube station.’

Although Dennis Nilsen and David Martin served remand time together in the summer of 1983, they became separated that autumn when Martin was moved from Brixton to Parkhurst. Suddenly, Nilsen felt isolated. Impulsively, he wrote to Martin’s solicitor, Ralph Haeems, to see if he might represent them both. Any contact, he decided, was better than none.

Retaining Haeems as solicitor was not simply a romantic gesture by Nilsen – it was also a shrewd choice. Haeems had no qualms about representing notorious clients, frequently with favourable results. He was himself a colourful, unconventional character. Although brought up in Bombay, Haeems later relocated to London’s East End, and he was Jewish. During his career he acted for the Krays, defended clients in the Brink’s-Mat robbery and helped acquit a convicted paedophile, Russell Bishop, of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ killings. If ever there was a man to find a way to mitigate what Nilsen had already admitted to, it was surely Ralph Haeems.

By the time he appointed his new legal adviser, Nilsen had dismissed and re-appointed the previous solicitor, Ronald Moss, three times. In between these periods of appointment, he even tried to represent himself. Nilsen’s dismissals of Moss always sprang from the same complaint – he felt that his lawyer simply wouldn’t help him stand up to a prison regime,
which he felt repressed and bullied him. He wanted Moss to give him legal help to put an end to what he saw as the intolerable conditions of the hospital wing, and the ‘solitary confinement’ that inevitably resulted from his own efforts to square up to the strictures of life inside.

Above all, Nilsen objected to the ‘monster’ tag that everybody seemed to apply to him. Did no one appreciate the psychological complexities of a case like his, he would ask himself. One afternoon, he became so frustrated, he started tearing up his case papers. The act of tearing up the papers landed Nilsen another spell in an isolation unit for behaving ‘irrationally’ or, as the doctors on the unit might have considered, to safeguard his own safety.

After appointing Haeems, things initially went well. Nilsen eventually, however, became disenchanted. By the end of their relationship, he would describe Haeems as the sort of man who had a ‘tax-deductible heart’. Some months earlier, he became convinced Haeems briefed friends in Fleet Street about current cases. This was doubly intolerable. Nilsen felt that if his solicitor kept such company, the least he could do was lean on them to tell the world how badly Dennis Nilsen was being treated. He felt he was doing a better job of that himself.

There had been two incidents over the summer of 1983 when Nilsen got a story in the papers, and he considered both a success. In May, Nilsen wrote to the
Guardian
newspaper, complaining that he had been misrepresented when Alan Rusbridger’s column had claimed he’d been a member of the Social Democratic Party. Nilsen pointed out that he was a socialist rather than a liberal, and that he’d never joined any
party in his life. In fact, when asked to tick a box on his union forms, it had always been ‘independent radical’.

And then there was the ‘Chamberpot Incident’. At the end of the summer, Nilsen decided to show those around him that he would not stand for the inhuman conditions under which he was being kept. It had all started when Nilsen’s objections to the conditions of remand had resurfaced. He had threatened to protest against the way he, a man who had not yet stood trial, had to wear the clothes of a prisoner, by walking around naked. The response from the warders had been to tell Nilsen to remain in his cell. This, in turn, then had prevented him from being able to ‘slop out’. The faeces and urine built up in his pot to the point where the pot was overflowing with effluent. Determined to win the stand-off, on the evening of 1 August, Nilsen shouted ‘stand clear’ and threw the contents through the bars and out of the cell on to the landing. Several guards were hit and they retaliated robustly. In the ensuing scuffle, Nilsen lost a tooth, picked up a black eye, and earned himself 56 days in solitary confinement.

During Nilsen’s nine months on remand, his only regular visitor was author Brian Masters. The resulting study,
Killing for Company,
would go on to win the 1985 Gold Dagger crime writing award. Such a close relationship between author and criminal reminded some critics of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, his celebrated study on the perpetrators of the Clutter family murders in Kansas. Masters’ observational dynamic was, indeed, so unusual, it later became the subject of a BBC documentary,
Monochrome Man.

Brian Masters grew up in a prefabricated house on
London’s Old Kent Road, where his sickly, hunchbacked mother and ineffectual father had been housed after the war. Prospects for children like him, he says in his autobiography
Getting Personal
were limited. However, he was determined to better himself. One episode at school changed the course of his life. Looking to win a prize for best school project, Masters wrote to the acerbic TV personality Gilbert Harding, asking to interview him. Harding agreed to the request and afterwards invited his young interviewer to tea. Later, he made it his business to educate the ambitious lad. Masters is very clear that his motives were entirely genuine.

Harding’s mentoring helped Masters earn a place at Cardiff University, where he ended up with first-class honours in French Literature. He built on this by writing studies on Sartre and Camus. In his thirties, he moved on to biographies about British royalty. One on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was particularly well received.

In his early forties, Masters was interested in understanding the extreme possibilities of human behaviour. He read about the Nilsen case over breakfast one morning in his west London home. As he got to the end of the third page of revelations about the murders, he read a line about Nilsen enjoying reading Shakespeare. He wondered if this might be the opportunity he was looking for to study someone at the farthest end of the human spectrum. Towards the end of March, and ignorant of the protocol about writing to prisoners, Masters wrote a letter addressed to Nilsen c/o Brixton Prison. In it, he asked if he might want to co-operate with a book project. He also included a copy one of his previous biographies.

Although he knew he’d given the introduction his best shot, the author was only half expecting a reply. What he received on 30 March was truly chilling. The first line read, ‘Dear Mr Masters, I pass the burden of my past actions on to your shoulders.’

Authors in England are not, in fact, allowed to contact prisoners on remand unless express permission is given. Masters’ initial letter had slipped past the prison censor. When the correct procedure had been explained, Masters then contacted Nilsen’s solicitor at the time, Ronnie Moss, a cheerful man whom he describes as looking more like a publican than a solicitor. Moss helped him make the correct application to the authorities concerning the writing project.

Meanwhile, he was given a one-off visiting order to meet Nilsen as a friend. On 20 April, they met in Brixton’s noisy visitors’ room. From what he had read, Masters was expecting a nervy, introspective man only comfortable expressing himself on paper. He was surprised to find in Dennis Nilsen a tall, imposing figure, ‘bristling with confidence’.

Shortly after the meeting, the Home Office gave Masters the green light to carry on with his visits. This worried DCI Jay and DCS Chambers. Their investigation was still ongoing and they were concerned Masters’ influence might affect Nilsen’s attitude and co-operation. They also doubted Masters had the stomach for what he was about to undertake.

He was therefore summoned to the station where they showed photographs of what they had found in the flat. The portfolio included gruesome pictures of Sinclair. In his own memoirs, Masters describes ‘the lips boiled away, the eyes soft and gluey, and the hair drifting to one side’, as examples of the
sort of images he would never be able to forget. But these pictures also confirmed to him that here was a unique opportunity to explore the reality of evil.

Masters was not used to handling criminals. His recent subjects had been members of the aristocracy. But, whether by design or default, his approach turned out to be the key to open Nilsen. Masters just went ahead as normal and the prisoner responded with lengthy answers.

Nilsen would later tell me that the reason he had been so candid was because Masters was ‘all there was’, implying that if he had had any alternative outlet, he might have taken it instead. In truth, Masters was both a skilful interviewer and a sincere man. Nilsen also appears to have hoped that his sensitivity would also enable him to understand one crucial aspect to his character: his sexuality.

Increasingly, Nilsen let his guard down. It wasn’t just the crimes he spoke about. He issued a stream of thoughts on his entire existence. One letter to Masters listed all the roles he had played in his life: schoolboy, soldier, chef, projectionist, policeman, clerical officer, executive officer, drunk, sexualist (male and female), murderer, animal lover, independent trades union officer, debater, champion of social causes, do-gooder, dissector of murder victims, grand vizier, and probably ‘lifer’. He went on to speculate that if there were a God, what a strange set of ‘priorities’ he must have had for him.