The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (54 page)

Following her conviction Hindley was told that she would spend 25 years in prison before being considered for parole. The Lord Chief Justice agreed with that recommendation in 1982, but in January 1985 Home Secretary Leon Brittan increased her tariff to 30 years. By that time, Hindley claimed to be a reformed Roman Catholic. Campaigners who opposed her release regularly gave television and newspaper interviews whenever the subject was raised.

In 1990, then Home Secretary David Waddington imposed a whole life tariff on Hindley, after she confessed to having a greater involvement in the murders than she had previously admitted. Hindley was not made aware of this until 1994, when a Law Lords ruling obliged the Prison Service to inform all life sentence prisoners of the minimum period they must serve in prison before being considered for parole. In 1997, the Parole Board ruled that Hindley was low risk and should be moved to an open prison. She rejected the idea and was moved to a medium security prison. The House of Lords ruling left open the possibility of later freedom. Between December 1997 and March 2000, Hindley made three separate appeals against her life tariff, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but each was rejected by the courts.

When in 2002 another life sentence prisoner challenged the Home Secretary’s power to set minimum terms, Hindley and hundreds of others whose tariffs had been increased by politicians, looked more likely to be released from prison, with plans made by supporters for Hindley to be given a new identity. Home Secretary David Blunkett instructed Greater Manchester Police to find new charges against her, to prevent her release from prison. The investigation initially looked at charging Hindley with the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, but the advice given by government lawyers was that because of the
DPP’s decision taken 15 years earlier, a new trial would probably be considered an abuse of process.

On 15 November 2002, at the age of 60, Hindley died in West Suffolk Hospital after a heart attack. She had spent 37 years in custody. During that time, she had gained an Open University degree and claimed to have returned to Roman Catholicism, to which she had ostensibly converted at the age of 15. She was Britain’s longest detained female prisoner and was given the last rites before she died. While incarcerated, she wrote her autobiography, which remains unpublished.

Her lawyers told the press that Hindley had been truly sorry for what she did. She had portrayed herself as a remorseful sinner, but knew that few people were willing to forgive her, though it was not impossible to find people with sympathy for Hindley as a reformed character. Those who felt that one purpose of the prison system is to extend the possibility of reform, rehabilitation and redemption to convicted criminals – even those who have committed such evil acts as Mira Hindley – suggested that in the last decade of her life she had shown sufficient remorse and was no longer a threat to the public, and therefore qualified for parole. Lord Longford, for example, risked derision from the public and popular press in his campaign to secure the release of certain criminals. He described Hindley as a ‘delightful’ person and said ‘you could loathe what people did but should not loathe what they were because human personality was sacred even though human behaviour was very often appalling’. Those who campaigned for her release said that she should not have ended her life behind bars.

None of Hindley’s relatives, not even her elderly mother, were among the dozen or so mourners at her funeral at Cambridge City Crematorium on 20 November 2002. Apart from one woman from nearby Soham (a community that had only recently endured the Soham murders) who left a sign reading ‘Burn in Hell’ at the crematorium entrance, the public stayed away from the funeral, which had tight police security. Hindley was
cremated and her ashes scattered at an undisclosed location. At an inquest into her death, it was revealed that she had asked doctors not to resuscitate her if she stopped breathing. Ironically, Myra Hindley could have been freed under a Law Lords ruling that came just two weeks later.

Three days after Hindley’s death, Greater Manchester Police revealed that they had been considering bringing charges against her for the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, to which Hindley had confessed, but for which she had not been charged. The police believed that a successful prosecution for these murders would have kept her in prison no matter how long she had lived.

Dennis Nilsen was born in Scotland in 1945. His mother was Scottish and his father Norwegian. His father was an alcoholic and his parents divorced when he was four years old. His mother remarried and sent Dennis to live with his grandparents, but after a couple of years he was sent back to his mother again.

Nilsen would later claim that the first traumatic event to shape his life came about when he was a small child, when his beloved grandfather died. His mother insisted that he view the body before burial. Whether this incident, or his mother’s and stepfather’s lectures on the ‘impurities of the flesh’, helped shape him into what he was to become, no one really knows.

In 1961, Nilsen joined the army and became a cook. He left the army in 1972 and served briefly as a police officer. From the mid-1970s, he worked as a civil servant in a job centre. During this time, he formed a number of casual relationships with men.

It was not until 1978 that Nilsen would turn to murder. On 30 December he met 14-year-old Stephen Holmes in a gay bar. They both went back to Nilsen’s house where they continued to drink, and eventually, after having sex together in bed, both fell asleep. Nilsen woke up at dawn and realised that his new friend was going to leave. He ran his hand over the young boy’s body,
becoming aroused. His heart pounded and he began to sweat. He watched the youth sleep and looked over at the pile of clothing they had both discarded. He spotted his tie, so he got out of bed to retrieve it. Nilsen raised himself up and slipped the tie around the boy’s neck, pulling it tight. Immediately, the boy woke up and started to struggle. They fell onto the floor and Nilsen retained the grip with the tie around his throat, finally rendering the boy unconscious. Nilsen then ran into the kitchen and filled a plastic bucket full of water in order to drown Holmes. Nilsen lifted him onto some chairs, draping his head back, pushed it into the bucket and soon the boy died.

Nilsen sat there shaking, barely cogniscant of what he had done and what he now faced as a result. He calmly made himself a cup of coffee and smoked several cigarettes, trying to think what to do. He removed the tie from the dead boy’s neck and just stared at him. Then he got up and carried the body into the bathroom. Gently, Nilsen put him into the bath, ran the water and washed the boy’s hair. He struggled to get him out of the tub and dry him off. Then he took him back into the other room and put him in the bed. His new friend was not going to leave him now. He ran his hand over the still-warm flesh, noticing the slight discoloration of the lips and face. He pulled the bedclothes over the body and sat on the bed, still trying to think what to do next.

Nilsen was not at all appalled by the sight of the body; in fact, he thought it quite beautiful. He had no idea why he had killed the young man. He just had not wanted him to leave. He had spent Christmas alone and did not want to do the same for New Year. Now he had someone to spend it with. Later that day, he went to the shop to buy an electric knife and a large pot, but he could not bring himself to cut the body up this way. Instead, he took some new underwear and re-dressed the body. That was when he decided to try to have sex with the dead boy. He got into bed, but could not sustain the erection he had had moments earlier, so he pulled the body off the bed and laid it on the floor. He used a curtain to cover it. He got up, made
dinner and watched television with the body still lying there on the floor.

He knew he couldn’t leave the body where it was so he took up some of the floorboards and tried to push the body under the floor, but rigor mortis had set in, preventing him from lowering it down. He decided to wait until the stiffness passed. Finally, he was able to get the body under the floor.

After a week, Nilsen grew curious, so he lifted the carpet and opened up the floor once again. The corpse was dirty, so Nilsen carried it back into the bathroom to wash it. Then Nilsen washed himself in the same water. When he carried the body back to the living room, he was so aroused that he knelt down and masturbated onto the corpse’s stomach. Rather than stuff him beneath the floor again, he trussed him up by the ankles. Eventually, he put the body back under the floorboards. It would remain there for seven and a half months, until Nilsen took it out and burnt it on a bonfire. He added rubber to the fire to mask the smell of burning flesh.

Following this murder Nilsen attempted a second. His intended victim was Andrew Ho, a student he had met in the Salisbury public house in St Martin’s Lane. Ho went home with Nilsen. The young man wanted to try some bondage play. Nilsen put a tie around his neck and told him he was playing a dangerous game. Ho managed to escape from the house and went to the police. Nilsen was questioned by police; however, the student decided he did not want to testify and Nilsen was released without charge.

Not put off by his failed murder attempt, on 3 December 1979 Nilsen met another young student, 23-year-old Kenneth Ockendon, a Canadian. They met at lunchtime at a pub. After drinking together for several hours, they ended up in Nilsen’s flat. Nilsen enjoyed Ockendon’s company, but he felt desperate at the thought that the Canadian was flying home the following day. When Ockendon fell asleep Nilsen strangled him with an electrical cord. He then removed Ockendon’s clothing and
dragged him into the bathroom to clean him up. Once finished, he placed the body in bed and slept with it for the rest of the night, caressing it frequently. In the morning, Nilsen placed the body in a cupboard and went to work.

Nilsen left the body until the following day, before taking it out. He cleaned the body, which he then dressed and placed in a chair, taking photos of it in various positions. When he was finished with that, he took the body into his bed and positioned it, spreadeagled, on top of him. He spoke to the body as if it could hear. Then he crossed the corpse’s legs together and had sex with it between the thighs. Following this, Nilsen hid the body beneath the floorboards. However, he did not just leave the body there; from time to time he would take it out, placing it in a chair so he could watch television with the body close to him. The body remained under the floorboards until Nilsen’s subsequent arrest.

On 13 May 1980, Martin Duffy, a 16-year-old homeless boy, accepted Nilsen’s invitation to go home with him. They sat drinking and then went to bed. Nilsen climbed on top, trapping Duffy’s arms under the covers, and strangled him. He went limp, but was still alive. Nilsen carried Duffy into the kitchen and drowned him by pushing his head into a sink full of water. Then he took the body to the bathroom and got into the bath with him. He sat talking to the body in the bath. Nilsen then took the body to the bedroom and kissed it all over, and then he sat on the stomach and masturbated. Finally, Nilsen put the body in the cupboard before later hiding it under the floorboards.

Nilsen’s fifth and sixth victims were both male prostitutes whom he met in bars, one from the Far East and the other from Ireland. Neither was ever formally identified. Nilsen’s seventh victim was a starving ‘hippie type’ he had found sleeping in a doorway in Charing Cross. Victim eight Nilsen could not recall anything at all about, except that after killing him he kept him under the floorboards of his flat until removing the corpse and cutting it into three pieces which he then put back again. He
burnt the corpse one year later. Victims nine and ten were both young men, picked up in gay bars in Soho. All suffered the same fate. His eleventh victim was a skinhead Nilsen picked up in Piccadilly Circus who had a tattoo around his neck saying, ‘Cut here’. He had boasted to Nilsen how tough he was and how he liked to fight; however, once he was drunk he proved no match for Nilsen, who strangled him when asleep and then hung his naked body in his bedroom for 24 hours before burying it under the floorboards.

Sometime during the period when Nilsen was committing the murders of victims five to 11, he had another brush with the law when David Painter, a young man whom Nilsen had met through his work, claimed that Nilsen had taken pictures of him while he was asleep. Painter was so incensed that he required hospitalisation as a result of their confrontation. Nilsen was brought in for questioning about the incident, but was subsequently released without charge. On 10 November 1980, he befriended another intended victim, a Scottish barman called Douglas Stewart, whom he met at the Golden Lion in Dean Street. He took Stewart back to his home address and, as with the previous victims, tried to strangle him while he was asleep. However, Stewart woke up while being strangled and was able to fend off Nilsen and escape. Although Stewart called the police almost immediately after the attack, the police, who considered the incident to be a domestic disagreement, took no action.

Nilsen’s next victim was Billy Sutherland, a 26-year-old male prostitute who went back to Nilsen’s house. During a sex session, Nilsen strangled Sutherland with his bare hands, disposing of the body in his usual way.

Nilsen’s twelth victim, on 18 September 1981, was Malcolm Barlow. Nilsen found Barlow sleeping rough in a doorway not far from his own home, took him in and called an ambulance for him. When Barlow was released the next day, he returned to Nilsen’s home to thank him and was pleased to be invited in for a meal and a few drinks. Nilsen then strangled him. The following
day, he placed Barlow’s body in a cabinet under the kitchen sink. Nilsen now had six other bodies awaiting disposal. Some of them he had kept in bed with him for sexual purposes for as long as a week. Having control over these men thrilled him and the mystery of a dead body that would not respond fascinated him. He felt that he appreciated them more deeply than they had ever been appreciated before.