Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer (23 page)

He felt the letter constituted a smear on his name. But it was more a sign that the disturbance just beneath the surface was beginning to show. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1981 that his emotional problems really started to take over. The drinking became increasingly reckless and, during stupors, he would invite opportunist thieves back. He says he was also ‘gay-bashed’ which, undoubtedly, would have further soured him against the world. This culminated one night in Nilsen walking back from the Cricklewood Arms and then being mugged. His best jacket, shoes and wallet were taken. The wallet contained £300, a month’s wages to Nilsen. In other incidents, Nilsen lost his beloved movie camera and projector.

Finally, the stress came to a head and the civil servant collapsed at the end of Melrose Avenue. He thought he may be having a heart-attack and staggered to a phone box and called an ambulance which took him to Park Royal Hospital. He was kept under observation for a day. The doctors told him, however, that that there was nothing physically wrong with him. He was simply suffering from extreme stress and exhaustion.

In the end, however, it was simple disagreement with the landlord that caused Nilsen to leave Melrose Avenue. The landlord was fed up with the electricity meters being constantly forced – the acts of Nilsen’s ‘guests’ – with no explanations given. The rent was often late, and there were complaints about the awful smells coming from his flat. Nilsen had already had an inkling that there was a plan to evict him. On two occasions, he says he came back to find foreign-looking men outside, who said they had instructions
from the landlord to inspect the flat. Nilsen took this as intimidation, and said so in a letter to Leon Roberts of Ellis and Co.

One day in June, Nilsen returned from work to find that the entire flat had been vandalised. Almost everything he owned, including his music collection and his record player, was either smashed or covered in creosote. The same thing had happened in the flat upstairs. Bizarrely, Nilsen called in the police. The culprit was never found. Now left with only the suit he wore and with no one else to complain to, Nilsen told his colleagues about what had happened. They had had a whip round and, two weeks later, presented him with a cheque for £85. Nilsen was overwhelmed. He wrote a letter saying how a cynic such as he ‘seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing’. The letter ended with a quote: ‘Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we all unfold easily and well.’

In August, the heat had brought the smell and the flies back. Nilsen knew he needed to act soon – he decided on another bonfire. As before, he dismembered the bodies first. The process was even more revolting than before. There were more maggots and more effluent. The bags of viscera were put into the same gaps in the fence. He boiled the flesh off the skulls in the pot he’d used before. This time, he couldn’t use the shed as a storage facility as he’d burnt the door hoping he’d never have to use it again. Instead, he packed the other body parts with soil and deodorants and placed them back under the floorboards, waiting for the right moment.

It was approximately a month later that Nilsen killed Malcolm Barlow. That created another problem of storage –
there was no longer any room under the floorboards. He stuffed the body in a space under the sink. Shortly afterwards, a letter from the landlord’s agent arrived on the doormat saying that they needed to take possession of the flat. They could offer him a place in Cranley Gardens and £1,000 compensation.

Nilsen started to build his last fire two days before he was due to move. The next day, it burned brightly. In the morning, the removals van arrived. For the second time, he could try to start again as if none of this had ever happened.

O
n a misty autumn day, Dennis Nilsen climbed into the cab of a small removals van and, no doubt, with a few overbearing words of advice about the route, travelled the few short miles over to Muswell Hill. ‘Driving away,’ he told Jay and Chambers, ‘was a great relief.’ The destination, Cranley Gardens, mainly comprised respectable family houses. It was situated on a steep slope with grand views at the top. Number 23 was, however, for short-term renters with low horizons. According to the neighbours, from time to time there had even been virtual down-and-outs and squatters on the middle floor.

This would be Nilsen’s home for 16 months. During that time, Nilsen murdered three young men, and attempted to kill at least five others. When he arrived on 5 October 1981,
though, he appears to have hoped that a change of scenery could cure him of his ‘addiction’ to murder. It was not blind optimism. He was now living somewhere where the disposal of bodies would prove very difficult. Not only was there a shared garden, but even to get a body that far involved two flights of stairs. And, as Nilsen had never learnt to drive, there was no means of easily transporting the remains of victims away from the area.

The other tenants living in Number 23 found Nilsen eccentric but not out of keeping with the sort of people you might expect for that house. The occasional guests that Nilsen would receive, such as Hunter-Craig, noticed the new flat seemed a bit more Spartan than the last. But they also knew about the robbery at Melrose Avenue and that he was still replacing his possessions. And at least this new flat was bigger with a much better kitchen.

As with Melrose Avenue, the flat comprised two main rooms – a bedroom and a living room. Off these were a galley kitchen and a bathroom. Both were built into the eaves and had prominent, sloping ceilings. Initially, Nilsen decided to live in the bedroom and sleep in the front. Later, he would do most of his living and sleeping in the back room. He soon replaced the stereo that had been stolen with a cassette player and bought a black-and-white TV. Along with his record collection, some posters (oddly including a page-three
pin-up
) and a couple of house plants, it soon became somewhere not entirely out of keeping with how one might expect a bachelor on a limited income to live.

The new flat was also in a much more genteel part of town than Cricklewood. If the weather was nice, it was just a
10-minute 
walk down to the Tube in Highgate. On cold winter days, or if Nilsen had had too much to drink, there was also a bus that could take him up the steep hill home. Without the depressing memories and smells of Melrose, he started to become more comfortable again about encouraging guests. Hunter-Craig remembers him saying, ‘I like having you around Skip; it stops me doing naughty things.’

During the first few months at Cranley Gardens, Nilsen talks about experiencing varying levels of control over his urges. Without any actual killings, he still felt he was essentially winning the battle. But there were some near-misses.

In November, in Soho’s Golden Lion, Nilsen approached an earnest young man called Paul Nobbs. He was a London University undergraduate reading Slavic studies, with thick, curly hair. At about 6.00pm, Nilsen had noticed Nobbs being aggressively chatted up at the bar, and intervened. Nobbs thought it a gracious thing to do. After a couple of drinks, they went back to Cranley Gardens to drink Bacardi, eat snacks and watch
Panorama
.

After watching the
Nine O’Clock News
, Nobbs phoned his mum from the payphone in the hall and said he’d be back later. An hour later, the Bacardi had started to take effect. Nobbs phoned again and said he’d now be back the next day. The pair went to bed. Nobbs says he tried to initiate sex, but Nilsen said he didn’t ‘do’ penetration.

In the middle of the night, Nobbs awoke with a terrible pain in his neck and throat. In the bathroom, he saw his eyes were severely bloodshot. Nobbs was shocked and disorientated, but still had no idea he’d been attacked.

Nobbs went to the toilet, and then returned to the bed and quickly fell asleep. At 6.00am, he awoke again. In the bathroom mirror, he saw the bruising around his neck. He felt dazed.

Back in the bedroom, Nilsen was sitting upright. When Nobbs came in, he commented that the young man looked awful.

‘Thanks very much,’ replied Nobbs.

Nilsen asked what had happened. Nobbs shrugged his shoulders. Nilsen said he should go to see a doctor.

In hospital the worst was confirmed. Still, Nobbs didn’t want to go to the police out of embarrassment. And he was confused. After all, Nilsen had seemed such a nice, reasonable man; why would he want to kill him? The injuries left him in bed for a few days.

Some weeks later, another incident occurred that gave Nilsen more comfort that he might be regaining control; he had found himself with a perfect opportunity to attack and yet didn’t take it. At the end of a long night in a local pub, he had found a young man slumped against the bar. Nilsen took him home and let him sleep on his bed. He put the electric fire on and placed a blanket over him. He felt aroused and masturbated next to him but, still, didn’t feel compelled to kill.

In
History of a Drowning Boy
, Nilsen speculates on the possible reasons. He thinks it might have been less to do with self-control, or even the amount he had had to drink – the usual reason why attacks went wrong – rather than a function of the precise details of his ‘psychological addiction’. He explains that, that night, vital parts of his ‘fantasy’ were
absent. Here, as with Carl Stottor, he says, there was no thrill to be got from ‘rendering’ the young man passive; he was already passed out. Whatever the real reason, the fact that the potential victim walked out of his flat probably came as some relief. There would be no more murders for four months.

Christmas 1981 was, still as lonely and self-pitying as ever; Nilsen doesn’t talk much about this period. But a letter found in his flat at the time of the arrest – and now the copyright of Brian Masters – tells us something of his feelings during that period:

By ‘reasonably well’, Nilsen meant coping with his loneliness by seeking out others with equally chaotic lives. He found them in his usual haunts – the bars of Soho and the West End. This was how he met the man who, months later, would be the victim of his first murder in Cranley Gardens.

John Howlett, 28, was 5ft-10in tall with an impressive physique. He was the son of an electrical inspector from High
Wycombe who had left home as a teenager. To support himself, he would take on casual work, his favourite being helping out in travelling fairgrounds. But when they first met in a Soho pub, Howlett told him he had been a Grenadier Guardsman. He seemed an unlikely military man but, then again, so was Nilsen.

In March 1982, their paths crossed again. ‘John the Guardsman’ recognised Nilsen standing at the bar of the Salisbury pub on St Martin’s Lane. He approached him, explaining he was down from High Wycombe for the day. After a few drinks, Nilsen suggested they move back to his flat via the off-licence. Nilsen cooked a meal and they watched television and drank until late. When the late film started, Howlett said that he was tired and asked if Nilsen minded him getting some rest. Nilsen did mind, but Howlett went to lie down anyway. Around midnight, when the film had finished, Nilsen went into the next room and found Howlett in his bed.

‘I didn’t know you were moving in,’ he said with a scowl. He suggested calling a taxi, but Howlett just grunted. Nilsen went back next door, poured himself a drink and had a think. He didn’t like Howlett, nor did he find him attractive.

Nilsen’s police confessions state he killed Howlett simply because he was an inconvenience. It was a fiercely brutal attack; the only account he ever gave that contained a convincing description of the violence of murder. He told Chambers and Jay:

History of a Drowning Boy
doesn’t tell us any more about this attack, other than to imply that he exaggerated the above confession under pressure from Chambers and Jay.

There is no good reason to believe that, but there is cause to believe that killing in a location where, with no obvious way to dispose of the body, marked another level of psychological decline. Still, despite the situation he found himself in, once out of the flat, Nilsen reverted more than ever to his persona of a finicky and indignant complainer.

Nilsen has a number of anecdotes that, unintentionally, illustrate this. One was that, while walking Bleep one day, he found a body wrapped in a blanket on Highgate woods. Full of self-righteousness, he says he was shocked that there might be a murderer on the loose and called the police. It turned out to be a dead dog.

Further clues to Nilsen’s state of mind during this period are to be found in an unsent letter Nilsen wrote to his union friend, Alan Knox. It was full of breezy chat about his new television and their shared political views. The reason for writing the letter had been to prepare for a visit from Knox; and even while Nilsen’s wardrobe contained a dead body that he had no idea what to do with, he was able to cheerfully write, ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’

Eventually, Nilsen decided that disposal of Howlett’s body would best be done piece by piece. Three days after killing him, he moved the body out of the wardrobe, and brought it into the bathroom. Although he covered the floor with bin liners, the main dissection took place in the bath. Nilsen put a wooden board across it and then, with the body draped over this, the soft parts of the body were cut into pieces a couple of inches long and flushed down the toilet. But this process was too slow. To speed things up, Nilsen then started to boil the flesh and viscera down to a soup-like consistency. This seemed to allow the plumbing to cope better. When the head was soft enough, he scooped the brains out and flushed them, too. The larger bones were packed into bin liners in the wardrobe with salt and padding. While separating them, Nilsen broke several knives. The smaller bones were left out for the dustman.

After Alan Knox’s visit, Nilsen was able to appear relatively relaxed and chatty in company. That was how Carl Stottor found him when they met one wet May evening. Even today, Stottor’s most vivid memories of the night are still the pleasant hours they spent before the attack and how Nilsen
had approached him while he sat alone in Camden’s Black Cap pub, nursing half a pint. He remembers being able to confide how vulnerable he had felt with his previous, violent boyfriend. Stottor told Nilsen how he had felt unable to report how he had attacked him because, until the previous month, he had been under the gay age of consent –21 – and had been scared of attracting the attention of the authorities.

Not only did Nilsen have a comforting manner, he also reminded Stottor of his very first boyfriend. The stranger seemed sympathetic and kind. Even long after the attack, Stottor continued to believe that there had been a genuine connection between the two of them.

In the immediate aftermath, though, no one seemed to believe anything he had said. The police were dismissive and, when he told friends what he thought might have happened, they convinced him that he was getting confused with an earlier attack from his boyfriend.

When Stottor later wrote to Nilsen for answers, he was still finding it hard to remember all the details of the attack. He wrote in a spirit of open enquiry but shied away from divulging the full extent of his physical injuries: how after the attack he had needed to sleep constantly for almost a week, and the problems he still had with his lungs from the drowning.

Similarly, Stottor chose not to go into detail about the emotional breakdown and suicide attempt that followed the attack. The final thing he omitted to say was the bizarre discovery he’d made that ‘John the Guardsman’ – whose body had been in the wardrobe that night – was the same John Howlett he’d known from his own childhood. That coincidence made the trauma all the more personal.

The afternoon after letting Stottor walk free, Nilsen’s mind would have soon turned to certain welcome developments with his job. The previous October, against all expectations, Nilsen had finally been awarded a promotion. There were no immediate positions available, so he was put on a waiting list.