Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (17 page)

Journalists have been unable to agree on Hunter-Craig’s testimony. He has appeared on several documentaries but, after the trial, some writers were cautious of him. Ex-
News of
the World
journalist John Lisners wrote: ‘Men [like
Hunter-Craig
] are social misfits … strange, emotionally-battered young people … Why was Nilsen attracted to people like this? Why did the apparently respectable, well-groomed civil servant with a flair for politics invite a self-confessed prostitute who lived in a fantasy world back to his flat?’

Other journalists just seemed to dislike him. Douglas Bence, from the
Daily Mirror
, wrote: ‘Nilsen had said to him, “Come to bed.” Cash changed hands next morning and the impoverished prostitute found he had a free season ticket to a gay bedsitter.’

When I asked Nilsen directly about his relationship with Hunter-Craig, he answered that he had known him but only casually. And yet Hunter-Craig’s DHSS card was one of the items that police found in Nilsen’s flat. He also shows detailed knowledge of both flats that Nilsen had lived in. Ultimately, Hunter-Craig’s credibility rests on personal judgement.

I traced Hunter-Craig in the summer of 2010. He was living in a council flat in North London. I put a note through his letter box and he replied by ringing the number I’d left. After that, we met twice in nearby pubs. From the old newspaper cuttings I had seen, I was expecting a rangy,
wild-looking
fellow. When I first I met him in a beer garden near the Heath, he was now stocky and nervous. His voice was soft and he complained of suffering from panic attacks. When I asked him what he’d like to drink, he explained he was trying not to drink at that moment. Although he hadn’t been a drinker during the time he’d known Nilsen, he’d made up for it later, apparently. As he rolled his cigarettes, I could see that his fingers were yellow with nicotine stains.

They also shook as he spoke. Although clearly a damaged person, Hunter-Craig also seemed to me to be essentially quite gentle. I sensed he was working hard to keep himself together. He told me he was being treated for his anxiety in a local medical centre and had also been taken on with some paid work there. Most of what Hunter-Craig told me rang true. Sometimes, and often quite obviously, he would exaggerate his knowledge of something or someone. But on the important facts, he was consistent and I found myself generally satisfied that the details he provided of Nilsen during the murder years were largely accurate.

He told me that they had had a brief physical relationship and described what it had been like. ‘He was very stiff. I remember saying at the time – although now it seems awful – I said it’s like having a relationship with a dead body. He laughed. Well, it wasn’t that funny. I said, “I wish you could be a bit more like that when you’re doing something.” He was passive. Many times you would just lay there. I would say, “Well, this isn’t much fun, is it? Are you going to move your legs a little bit?”’

On another couple of occasions, sexual contact was light. ‘It was just a bit of fumbling. He’d get naked and then fall asleep. Des wasn’t really gay in the sense of relationships. He couldn’t really be physically intimate, if for no other reason that he was usually so out of it.’

But Hunter-Craig feels that, as far as he was concerned, Nilsen mainly wanted companionship, and not a sexual relationship. He says Nilsen even suggested he move in. The memories Hunter-Craig relayed to me were a mixed collection of impressions and episodes. While talking, he would frequently look down with a pained expression.

Nilsen’s constant playing of classical and sophisticated pop music – material which ‘really turned Des on’ – particularly struck Hunter-Craig being, as it was, so different from the music most of his friends listened to. Nilsen’s favourites were Rick Wakeman, Mike Oldfield, Elgar, Mahler and Aaron Copeland. If there was a Western on TV, he says that Nilsen would insist they watch it, even though he knew they bored his friend. When commenting on people in the news, he remembered that Des admired strong people, even though he wanted to be with weaker types.

In general, however, Hunter-Craig found Nilsen to be a moderately kind and interesting person. Otherwise, he says, he wouldn’t have wanted them to be friends. He does, however, remember Nilsen often provoking arguments for fun; sometimes he was just rude. Hunter-Craig says he didn’t mind when Nilsen referred to him as ‘Skip’, short for Skipper, meaning someone who hung around the docks, but hated it when he refer to him as ‘she’. In these spats, Hunter-Craig says he would always give as good as he got. He thinks Nilsen liked that.

Despite Nilsen’s interest in film, they would rarely actually go to the cinema, which Hunter-Craig thinks was partly because you couldn’t drink in them, and Des always wanted to get drunk. So for entertainment they would either watch TV or go out to north London or Soho pubs. When in company, Hunter-Craig remembers Nilsen being shy and feeling self-consciously like a bore until the moment that, quite suddenly, the alcohol started to work. Then confidence flooded in. After this point, if Nilsen sensed that people were muttering about him, he would become furiously angry. In
the taxi or Tube back home, he would explode into a rage. ‘It was never to their faces,’ Hunter Craig recalls, ‘always behind their backs. He would usually say that he was too intellectual for them.’

Back at the flat, Nilsen was fascinated to hear about Hunter-Craig’s mother. How did
she
accept his
homosexuality
, he would ask? The question would be asked so he could make the point that he didn’t dare tell
his
mother. He knew how she would react. That was why he was so reluctant to go home for Christmas. That seemed odd to Hunter-Craig; from Nilsen’s description and her letters, he didn’t think she sounded too bad.

And surely, he thought, a trip home would be nice opportunity to get away from the shabby flat? But although Hunter-Craig remembers the flats as being rough, he says they were certainly not out of place for a bachelor in the late 1970s. ‘Everyone was poor then, and people less
house-proud
.’ Since leaving the Army, however, Nilsen had become very particular about his own personal hygiene, but he was unbothered about his living space. Hunter-Craig describes the smells of the flats as being ‘an extreme mustiness’. He remembers remarking to Nilsen in Cranley Gardens, ‘Des, what is it about that smell? It seems to follow you around.’

O
n Wednesday, 21 January 1993 at 8.00pm, six million viewers tuned in to Channel 4’s
Viewpoint 1993: Murder in Mind
to see Dennis Nilsen, the country’s most infamous serial killer, speak. Anyone looking for a ghoulish encounter would not have been disappointed. Dressed in a well-fitting prison-issue shirt, the 47-year-old Nilsen leant back in what looked like a supremely relaxed pose. Only the ashtray in front of him betrayed his nerves.

If members of the public thought it odd that Nilsen had been allowed such TV exposure, officials at the Home Office went into virtual meltdown. During the week leading up to transmission, government lawyers petitioned the High Court for an injunction to stop the documentary going out. Whatever permission had been given to the film-makers, they said, was based on misunderstandings. On the day before the broadcast was due, however, their lawyers stood on the steps
of the Royal Courts of Justice and admitted defeat. There was nothing now that could be done to stop the documentary going ahead.

The footage of Nilsen was actually just a small part of an hour-long film on criminal profiling. It was just a clip of about four minutes, used as an example of how understanding killers might help to catch them. Forensic psychologist Paul Britton asked a number of questions off-camera. A close-up of Nilsen behind a table filled the screen. The first thing Britton asked him was how he disposed of the bodies. In a leisurely, schoolmasterly Scottish accent, Nilsen replied:

The film then cut away from the prison to Brian Masters, who was filmed walking through university cloisters. The
narrator explained about Masters’ book and how, for years, he had continued to visited Nilsen. Then, facing the camera, Masters explained his theory of how the death of Nilsen’s grandfather had caused Nilsen to associate love with death. He said that when Nilsen wore talcum powder in his mirror fantasies, he did so because he wanted to look dead. The video image then cut back to Nilsen:

Whatever producer Mike Morley had had in mind when he approached Brian Masters to help introduce him to Mr Nilsen, he could hardly have hoped for a better performance. Not only was Nilsen confident, relaxed and intelligent, he also sounded superior. If Channel 4 had wanted to capture footage of a real-life Hannibal Lecter, then that is exactly what they got.

Their short, edited soundbites made Nilsen seem potent. The man who later described the incident to me in letters, however, simply appeared angry and petulant. He certainly wasn’t prepared to give Central TV, the production company responsible for making the film, any sneaking regard for their skill in achieving such a tricky interview. In a letter to me about the interview, Nilsen recalls:

In 2012, I asked Michael Morley in an email to tell me what he thought of a précis I had give him of Nilsen’s recollections. He said he thought they were ‘not completely accurate, not completely inaccurate either’. The film had initially been cleared, he told me, but authorisation had been removed at the last moment by the Home Office who failed to inform ACPO and the prison. As such, filming went ahead.

Nilsen still seethes over the incident. His indignation, however, is less directed at Morley – to whom he was grateful for the gift of a typewriter – than towards Britton, who had held on to the manuscript for so long. In his writings, he
points out that Britton – generally thought of as the inspiration behind ITV’s
Cracker
– was later widely criticised for his involvement in the arrest and then subsequent collapse of the case against Colin Stagg for the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992.

By the time
Murder in Mind
was aired, Nilsen had been moved from Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight to Whitemoor Prison near Peterborough. This brand-new facility had been constructed on the site of some old railway marshalling yards a couple of miles outside the town of March. It was a return to the old Victorian-style wing accommodation. Out, says Nilsen, were the ‘hard-to-police’ corridors, and in were open galleries.

Nilsen’s VPU was housed within a Special Secure Unit situated at the one end of the compound. Nilsen describes the SSU as a ‘prison within a prison’, with wings A and B for ‘vulnerable prisoners’, and C and D for ‘normal’ prisoners. He says that there was a thriving underground economy – illegal alcohol, knives and cannabis were, apparently, commonplace, and everything from drugs to exotic love birds were available for sale. Those who had money were ‘taxed’ by minor gangsters. Life was noisy, too, with people shouting from their windows late into the night.

Nilsen says in his autobiography that he just wanted to get on with doing his time quietly: ‘Most prisoners just wanted to do their bird and get the hell out of prison. But they were bullied by the gangsters whose philosophy was that of the loser who, in all his self-deluded insecurity, continues to believe he is a winner. The recidivist blames
everyone for his failure in life other than himself. If we are to make any positive progress, we must address our own offending behaviour.’

As before, Nilsen’s way of ‘addressing his offending behaviour’ was by throwing himself into the things he believed he was best at, including writing. In the spring of 1993, he turned his creative energies towards both his archive of personal autobiographical pieces, and to the number of regular correspondents he had. Some of these were ‘fans’, thrilled to be in dialogue with such a notorious criminal. But others, including criminologists, psychiatrists and sociologists, had sincere and legitimate, professional reasons to want to try to understand him.

In response to their questions, Nilsen would often try to contextualise his crimes. It was illogical, he would say, to demonise a criminal suffering from a psycho-sexual disorder any more than, for example, a terrorist. If anything, he felt, sex offenders were less culpable than other criminals, as their free will was compromised by a compulsive disorder. Nilsen thought the ‘evil’ actions of many of his neighbours were simply ‘men succumbing to the pressures of their psychological predicament’. His reaction to the murder of a child killer a couple of cells down from him was that it was just ‘another pointless killing to satisfy … the lust for revenge’.

In July 1993, Nilsen received a letter that particularly flattered his ego. It was from an aspiring author called
Peter-Paul
Hartnett. Hartnett had just begun writing
Call Me
, later to become a cult hit in certain gay circles. At the time, however, Hartnett was working as a special-needs
teacher-cum
-photographer.
One subject that particularly interested him was that of isolation in gay urban culture. The early drafts of what would later become
Call Me
went by the title
A Nasty Piece of Work
. The book told the story of one man’s trawl through the world of classified sex adverts. Hartnett’s anti-hero, Liam, claims to be a serial killer and, in the final book, frequently makes references to Nilsen.

Hartnett first wrote to Nilsen after reading one of his letters reproduced in the
Evening Standard
. Nilsen had been asked by journalist Tim Barlass to comment on a gay serial killer operating around Earls Court. He would later be identified as Colin Ireland, but at the time he was known as the ‘Gay Slayer’. It was believed his crimes might have been connected with Coleherne pub in Earls Court.

Nilsen had also been familiar with that pub. The words of his letter seemed to reveal him as being a bit of an expert on a certain twilight world. Hartnett wondered if this extreme personality might possibly become a
sounding-board
for his project. In the letter, he explained he was mainly interested in Nilsen’s thoughts on isolation and Hartnett’s writing, not on Nilsen’s crimes. After a few letters, the two men decided that their conversations might be better conducted face to face.

The governor’s office initially granted a one-off discretionary hour together. Nilsen describes the meeting in his book. He says he was thrilled to meet someone he considered so glamorous. Hartnett, aged 35, was tall, about Nilsen’s height, with similar dark hair and a boyishly handsome face. Nilsen says, ‘He looked really cool, and we hit it off as if we had been acquainted all our lives.’ Later, after
conducting a full background check, the prison authorities found unspecified reasons to decline further visiting rights. Still, Hartnett and Nilsen kept up a correspondence that would last for years.

The recognition Nilsen received from Hartnett and Barlass made Nilsen feel like an amateur psychologist. Now that he felt he was coming up with valuable answers, he was increasingly keen to tell anyone who cared to ask that he had received very little analysis of his own condition. In 1993, however, the prisoner was persuaded to take part in the country’s new Sex Offender Treatment Programme – one of the world’s first. Pilot projects had been judged a success and now the SOTP was being rolled out across the country. The scheme was underpinned by the principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

CBT is a process of intensive therapy designed to alter how people think and behave. Today, it is widely used to treat everything from depression to paedophilia. It is a ‘talking therapy’ but, unlike psychotherapy, CBT concentrates on practical techniques to modify attitudes and behaviour. Typically, sex offender patients on such courses will be required to work their way through folder upon folder of worksheets. They will question their sexual preoccupations, impulsiveness and emotional control. Afterwards, a series of exercises will be prescribed to change the way the subject thinks and acts. Where possible, these might then be tested with lie detectors or other measuring tools.

The therapy, however, is heavily reliant on motivation and co-operation. Patients really have to want to change
and work hard for it. Nilsen soon decided that the programme was not telling him anything he hadn’t already worked out for himself. He hardly mentions the course in his autobiography. Elsewhere, in essays and letters, what he has to say is disparaging. In his essay entitled ‘Anatomy of an Official Conclusion’, he says: ‘I learned nothing new from this SOTP which I had not learned from myself years before.’

Part of this attitude was down to Nilsen’s natural antipathy towards psychology and authority. But it was also because, after several years of self-analysis, the serial killer believed he now possessed the ability to unravel his own psychology. Underpinning his examination was a theoretical framework he had come up with and which he called the ‘Psychograph’. This was a term that had been used previously by phrenologists and handwriting experts to describe a graphical representation of mental attributes. For Nilsen, however, the psychograph is simply the mental map that early experiences leave as their legacy for the adult.