The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (55 page)

Nilsen sprayed his rooms twice a day to be rid of flies that were hatching. Another tenant mentioned the pervasive odour, but Nilsen assured her it was the decay of the building. To get rid of the bodies, he would put his dog and cat out in the garden, strip down to his underwear and cut the bodies up on the stone kitchen floor with a kitchen knife. Sometimes he would boil the flesh off the head in the pot he had bought for the first victim. He had learnt how to butcher, so he knew how best to cut up a body, and he placed the organs in a plastic bag. Then he would place the whole package under the floor until the next step. At one point, there were two entire bodies beneath the boards and one dismembered one. He also put body parts in the garden shed or down a hole near a bush outside. Internal organs he pushed into a gap between the double fencing in his yard. A few severed torsos he stuffed into suitcases. When he could, he dragged the bags and suitcases out to the yard and burnt the bodies a few feet from the garden fence. On one occasion, he spotted a skull in the centre of the burnt embers and crushed it into ash. Then he raked the remains of six men into the earth. When he prepared to move to a new house, he checked around and nearly forgot that he had placed the hands and arms of Malcolm Barlow near a bush.

In November 1981, after moving to a new house in Muswell Hill in London, Nilsen met Paul Nobbs, a student, and invited him back to his new home. The student awoke the following morning with little recollection of the previous evening’s events, and later went to see his doctor because of some bruising that had appeared on his neck. The doctor revealed that it appeared
as if the student had been strangled and advised him to go to the police. However, afraid of disclosing his sexual orientation, Nobbs decided not to do so.

Following this attempted murder, Nilsen met Carl Stotter, a drag queen also known as Khara Le Fox, at the Black Cap in Camden Town. Again he took the intended victim back to his house and proceeded to strangle him. However, after passing out from the strangulation, Stotter regained consciousness while Nilsen was trying to drown him in a bath of cold water. He managed to fight off his attacker and hurriedly left.

John Howlett was the first victim to be murdered in Nilsen’s Muswell Hill home, in December 1981. Nilsen had taken a disliking to him and was determined that he should die. They had previously met once in a pub and had engaged in a long conversation. Then, on this day, Nilsen was drinking alone when Howlett walked in and recognised him. They chatted and then decided to go to Nilsen’s place where, after drinking awhile, Howlett got into Nilsen’s bed. Nilsen tried to get him to leave, but he refused to go. Nilsen then found a length of loose upholstery strap on an armchair and used it to strangle Howlett. At one point, he feared he would be overpowered so he tightened his grip as Howlett fought for his life. Then he struck his head, and soon Howlett went limp. Nilsen kept the strap on him until he was sure he was dead and then went shakily into the other room. However, he soon became aware that Howlett was still alive. Nilsen looped the strap around his neck again and held it for two or three minutes. Even then, Howlett’s heart was still beating, so Nilsen dragged him into the bathroom to drown him, leaving him there for the rest of the night. Then he put the body in a cupboard as he contemplated how to get rid of it.

He made a decision to cut the body up into small pieces and flush it down the toilet. This process took much longer than he anticipated so he was forced to improvise. He boiled the head, hands and feet in pots in his kitchen and then separated the small bones, which he put in the dustbin. The large bones he threw
over the garden fence into a waste area; other bones he put into a bag sprinkled inside with salt and stored it in a tea chest.

The next victim Nilsen murdered at this new address was Archibald Graham Allan, another homeless man whom Nilsen befriended. After taking Allan home and feeding him, Nilden proceeded to strangle him. He then placed the body in the bath and left it there for three days. He cut it up in the same way as his previous victim.

Nilsen’s final victim was a drug addict called Stephen Sinclair. On 1 February 1983, they met in Oxford Street and Nilsen suggested that they go back to his place. They sat and listened to music and Sinclair fell asleep. Nilsen went into the kitchen and found some thick string. The string was too short so he attached it to a tie. He draped the ligature over the sleeping man’s knees and poured himself a drink. Then he sat and contemplated all the pain in Stephen’s life and decided to stop it for him. He went over, made sure he was still asleep and then used the string and tie to strangle him. Nilsen then bathed him and put him into the bed. He placed two mirrors by the bed and removed his clothes so that he could look at the two of them naked together. Nilsen experienced a feeling of oneness and thought that this surely was the meaning of life and death. He talked with Stephen as if he were still alive. He turned the young man’s head towards him and kissed it. He had no idea that this body would later be his undoing and subsequent downfall. Nothing was further from the mind of Nilsen as he set about dismembering the body and disposing of the body parts in the same way as he had with the last two victims.

The house where Nilsen now lived was divided into flats. During the first week of February, one of the other tenants noticed that the downstairs toilet was not flushing properly. He tried to clear the blockage with acid, to no avail. Other toilets seemed not to be functioning properly either. A plumber arrived to investigate, but could not rectify the problem and called in a specialist.

Nilsen now believed that his own activities might be at the heart of the problems downstairs, so he stuffed the rest of Sinclair’s body into plastic bags, along with the partially boiled head. He locked the remains in the wardrobe and stopped flushing the toilet. Two days later, other plumbing engineers arrived to examine the blockage. Deciding it was underground, one of the engineers went into a manhole by the side of the house. He noticed a peculiar smell. He spotted sludge about 8in thick on the floor of the sewer and found that it was composed of 30–40 pieces of flesh, and had come from the pipe leading from the house. The engineer reported the find to his superiors. The tenants gathered around him as he phoned, including Nilsen, and he mentioned that they might have to call the police. First, however, he would do a better analysis by daylight. He then took Nilsen and one of the other tenants back outside with him to see the pile of rotting flesh.

Nilsen returned at midnight to remove the particles of flesh and dumped them over the fence. He thought about replacing them with pieces of chicken and then pondered suicide. Instead, he sat alone in his flat and drank, surrounded by the body parts of three men. However, one of the downstairs tenants had noticed his movements. When the engineer returned and found the sewer cleaned out, undeterred he went deeper into the sewer and pulled out one piece of what looked like foul-smelling meat but turned out to be human flesh and bone. The police were then called. They waited outside until Nilsen returned home from work. As Nilsen entered the building, the police officers identified themselves to Nilsen and explained that they had come about his drains. As they entered Nilsen’s flat, they immediately smelt rotting flesh. Nilsen queried why the police would be interested in his drains, so the officer told him they were filled with human remains. ‘Good grief, how awful!’ exclaimed Nilsen. One of the officers said to Nilsen, ‘Don’t mess about, where’s the rest of the body?’ Nilsen responded calmly by saying it was in two plastic bags in his wardrobe. He was then arrested and
cautioned on suspicion of murder and taken to the police station. On the way back to the station, Nilsen was asked how many bodies they were talking about and he told them 15 or 16.

The police then conducted a detailed search of Nilsen’s flat and his previous address. They found three heads in a cupboard in the flat and evidence of 13 more bodies at 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, Nilsen’s previous address. When interviewed, he made a full and frank confession to all the murders. However, as he talked the police realised that they had been given clues over the past four years about his conduct and that, had they acted differently, many lives could have been saved.

Nilsen was charged with six murders and two charges of attempted murder. The prosecution would be seeking to prove that Nilsen had killed in full awareness of what he was doing and should be found guilty of murder. The principal evidence was from Nilsen’s lengthy statement to the police, while the defence relied on psychiatric analysis to prove the opposite. The trial began on 24 October 1983. The charges were read and Nilsen pleaded not guilty to each one.

After hearing all the evidence and legal arguments, the jury retired on Thursday, 3 November. The following day, the judge said that he would accept a majority verdict, since there were two dissenters on every issue, except one of the attempted murder charges. At 4.25pm the jury delivered a verdict: guilty on all counts. The judge sentenced Dennis Andrew Nilsen to life in prison. He would not be eligible for parole for 25 years. In the interim period Nilsen had continued to challenge the legality of his sentence. His minimum term was set at 25 years by the trial judge, but the Home Secretary later imposed a whole life tariff, which meant he would never be released. In 2006, he was denied any further requests for parole.

Anthony John Hardy was born in 1951 in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the son of a coal miner. From an early age, Hardy
yearned to escape the lower middle-class lifestyle in which he was raised. He worked hard in school and excelled academically. Ultimately, he was accepted at London’s Imperial College to study engineering.

During the mid-1970s, Hardy met and married Judith Dwight, with whom he attended university. The couple moved to Tasmania, Australia, where they raised their two boys and two girls. However, it seemed that from as early as 1982, Hardy displayed symptoms of mental illness. It has been suggested that, around that time, Hardy tried to kill his wife by bludgeoning her over the head with a water bottle, before trying to drown her in the bath. Hardy was never charged; he simply checked himself into a psychiatric clinic in Queensland following the incident. He remained there for several weeks before discharging himself and returned to Britain.

The couple divorced in 1986. His wife secured custody of the children and, like Hardy, moved back to Britain to begin a new life. Shortly after returning to England, though, Hardy began stalking his ex-wife. This led to her obtaining a restraining order against him. He subsequently broke the order and as a result was imprisoned for a short time. Following his release, Hardy sought psychiatric help at outpatient clinics. He was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy, a disorder that is known to cause depression. He was also diagnosed with manic depression and prescribed medication to reduce the symptoms. In the early and mid-1990s, Hardy became homeless and spent much of his time living in various hostels throughout London. During that time, he took to taking drugs and drinking heavily, which further exacerbated his psychological problems. He was arrested on several occasions for theft and served several short custodial sentences. In 1998, Hardy was arrested for indecent assault after a prostitute claimed he had raped her, but the charges were later dropped and he was released. Police also investigated him as a suspect in three other rape cases, but there was insufficient evidence to connect them with him.

In 2000, Hardy moved into a one-bedroom public housing flat on Royal College Street in Camden, a short distance from King’s Cross, an area frequented by prostitutes. It was a location deliberately chosen for that very reason. The neighbourhood would become his hunting ground.

In January 2002, Hardy was again arrested after having been caught pouring battery acid through a neighbour’s letterbox. That incident led police to a gruesome find at Hardy’s flat. When police went to his flat, the bedroom door was locked. When they broke it open, they found the body of a young woman lying naked on his bed. She appeared to have cuts to her head and her body was covered in bite marks and bruises. The police suspected that she had been murdered. However, pathologists claimed that she had died of a heart attack rather than foul play.

The woman was later identified as Sally Rose White, 38, a prostitute from the King’s Cross area, who was known to have an addiction to crack and suffered from brain damage and behavioural problems caused by a birth-related spinal cord injury. It was believed that her condition, which had worsened with age and lack of treatment, coupled with her addiction to drugs, had resulted in her heart attack. However, her death from ‘natural causes’ would later be questioned.

On 30 December 2002, a gruesome discovery was made in rubbish bins behind a public house in Royal College Street. A vagrant was foraging in the rubbish bin looking for food when he came across several black bin liners. In one of the bags he found human remains, including severed sections of two legs. Instead of calling the police, the man took the remains with him to a nearby hospital where the police were contacted. They went and searched the rubbish bins and found more bags containing various body parts. On widening the search, police found the torso of a young woman in another rubbish bin about 100yd from the original discovery.

The body parts were taken to St Pancras mortuary, where pathologists examined them. The causes of death were difficult
to establish because the heads and hands of the victims were still missing. However, pathologists were able to determine that the remains were those of two different women, who had probably been murdered sometime over the Christmas holidays. DNA tests were conducted in the hope that it would help investigators uncover the identity of the women.

A crime scene examination revealed a trail of blood, which led police to Hardy’s ground-floor flat, located a short distance from where the bodies were discovered. They promptly obtained a warrant. Hardy was not at home and the police forcibly entered and searched his flat. They found a hacksaw with what appeared to be human skin still attached to the blade. They also found an electric jigsaw power tool and pornographic magazines scattered about the flat. A woman’s black stiletto shoe rested on the windowsill. Traces of blood were found in the bathroom and a devil’s mask lay alongside a note on a table, reading ‘Sally White RIP’. However, the most gruesome evidence found at Hardy’s apartment was a woman’s torso wrapped in bin liners.