Dennis Nilsen

 

In the police station, Dennis Nilsen calmly explained to the investigating officers, ‘The victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing up is an ordinary clinical task.’ He had performed that ‘ordinary clinical task’ no fewer than fifteen times, disposing of the bodies of the young men he had had brought home and from whom he could not bear to be parted.

It had all begun on 30 December 1978. He had befriended a young man at a local pub and taken him home with him to his flat at 195 Melrose Avenue in north London. Stephen Dean Holmes, it would later emerge, was only fourteen years old at the time and was on his way home from a concert when he met Nilsen. The two continued to drink at the flat and then climbed into bed together.

When Nilsen awoke towards dawn, he realised with an overwhelming sense of sadness that Holmes would be leaving when he woke up. Nilsen had spent Christmas entirely on his own and did not relish the thought of a solitary New Year. He picked up his tie from the piles of clothing they had thrown on the floor the night before and climbed on top of the boy, encircling his neck with the tie, pulling it tight. Holmes woke up immediately and they fell from the bed onto the floor as he struggled for his life. Nilsen pulled tighter and gradually, the life flowed out of Holmes and he went limp. He was only unconscious, however, and Nilsen went to the kitchen and filled a plastic bucket with water. He brought it back in and, placing Holmes on some chairs, dangled his head into the bucket, drowning him. Holmes did not struggle and within a few minutes, he was dead.

Nilsen was unnerved at having killed someone – especially someone whose name he could barely remember. He drank some coffee and thought about what to do. He carried the corpse into the bathroom where he washed its hair. He then returned it to the bedroom and put it to bed.

He later told how he thought that Holmes’s dead body was rather beautiful but, of course, he realised that he had to get rid of it somehow. He went out to buy an electric knife and a large cooking pot, but when he got back home, he could not bring himself to slice up his new friend. Instead, he dressed him in clean underwear and clothes, like a doll. He thought about having sex with the body, but was unable to. Then he laid it on the floor and went to bed for a while.

Later, when he got up again, he had some dinner and watched television, the body lying all the while on the floor. Suddenly, he had a brainwave. He prised loose some floorboards and tried to shove the body into the space beneath them. Unfortunately, rigor mortis had set in by this time and he could not manage it. He stood Holmes against the wall and decided to wait until the stiffness had worn off. Next day, he finally succeeded in squeezing him under the floorboards before nailing them back down.

A week passed and he wanted to have a look at the body again. He lifted the carpet and prised up the floorboards again. He was dismayed to see that the corpse was a bit dirty and so he took it out of the space and gave it a bath, before washing himself in the same water. All of this had aroused him and he masturbated over the body before inserting it in its grave under the floorboards again.

Remarkably, the body of Stephen Holmes would remain under those floorboards for more than seven months before Nilsen took it out into his garden and burned it, throwing pieces of rubber into the flames to disguise the stench of burning flesh.

A year later, a young Chinese student, Andrew Ho, escaped from Nilsen as they played bondage games in the flat. He actually went to the police and accused Nilsen of trying to strangle him, but the police decided not to charge him.

His second victim was Kenneth Ockendon, a Canadian whom Nilsen met at a pub, on 3 December 1979. Nilsen liked him a lot and was devastated to learn that his new friend was flying home to Canada the following day. As Ockendon listened to some music through headphones, Nilsen sneaked up on him and strangled him with their chord. He listened to some music with the body lying on the floor beside him and then dragged him into the bathroom to clean him up. He put him in his bed and climbed in beside him, remaining there for the night, stroking and caressing him. In the morning, he stuffed him into a cupboard and went to work.

The following day, he took the body out and photographed it in various positions before taking it to bed with him and having sex with it. Ockendon was then put under the floorboards but when Nilsen felt lonely, he would get the body out and sit beside it watching television. Nilsen would then clean the body again, dress it and put it back to bed under the floor, wishing him a gentle ‘goodnight’.

Five months later, in May 1980, he strangled Martyn Duffey, a sixteen-year-old homeless boy. Duffey had to be drowned before Nilsen took a bath with his body. He kissed him all over and then masturbated while seated on his stomach. It was then two weeks in the cupboard for him before he went under the floor.

Nilsen next killed a twenty-six-year-old Scottish male prostitute, Billy Sutherland, strangling him, it later emerged, with his bare hands. Nilsen did not remember killing Sutherland. He seemed to enter a trance of some kind when he was killing and his memories of many of his acts when he was in this state were wiped.

Many of his victims were itinerants or homeless and they were, consequently, never identified. The names of the next seven young men Nilsen killed have never been known. The first, his fifth murder, was again a male prostitute of oriental – possibly Thai – origin. His sixth was a young Irish labourer and the seventh was what he described as a ‘hippy type’ whom he encountered sleeping in a doorway in London’s Charing Cross area. Number eight remained under his floorboards for a year and numbers nine and ten were young Scottish men, picked up in the pubs of Soho. Number eleven was a young skinhead who had a tattoo around his neck – a dotted line saying ‘Cut Here’.

On 10 November, 1980, he picked up a Scottish barman who woke up back at the flat with Nilsen trying to strangle him. Douglas Stewart fought him off and ran out of the building. He went to the police but they refused to take action, putting it down to a homosexual domestic argument.

Martyn Barlow was next. Twenty-four-years-old with learning difficulties, he loitered outside Nilsen’s building and then complained of weakness from epilepsy. Nilsen called an ambulance and had him taken to hospital. On his release, on 18 September 1981, he returned to Nilsen to thank him and the two had a meal and drank together in the flat. When Barlow fell asleep, Nilsen strangled him. This time it was not because he did not want him to leave. He simply found him a bit of a nuisance. He squeezed his corpse into a cabinet under the sink in the kitchen.

Of course, the question of hygiene was becoming pressing and the neighbours began to complain about the smell in the building. Nilsen told them it was because the building was old. Meanwhile, he sprayed his flat twice a day to kill off the countless flies that were hatching in the putrefying flesh.

He got rid of the bodies by stripping to his underwear and cutting them up with a kitchen knife on the stone kitchen floor. He would often put the head in the large pot he had bought and boil the flesh off it. He knew how to butcher, having learned during a stint in the army as a chef. He would put pieces of bodies in the garden shed and disposed of internal organs in plastic bags between the double fencing in the garden. The rest he would burn in the garden.

He moved to a new flat at 23 Cranley Gardens in the Muswell Hill area of north London, having tidied up the old flat, remembering at the last moment that he had left Martyn Barlow’s hands and arms beside a bush in the garden. The new place had no garden and was an attic flat. He believed he would be able to bring an end to his murderous spree if he could not dispose of the bodies. He was wrong.

He met John Howlett in a pub and they went back to his flat to carry on drinking. For once Nilsen wanted him to leave, but ‘John the Guardsman’ climbed into Nilsen’s bed and refused to go. Nilsen took a length of upholstery strap and strangled Howlett with it. It was a tough one as Howlett was a fairly strong man. He hit him on the head, and the fight was over. Howlett would still not die, however, and he had to drown him before putting him out of sight in a closet.

He decided to dispose of the body by cutting it into small chunks and flushing it down the toilet. He then boiled some of the flesh and Howlett’s head, hands and feet, disposing of the bones in the rubbish.

Soon, he killed another man in the attic flat. He does not remember strangling Archibald Graham Allan. He just noticed him sitting there with a piece of the omelette he had been eating protruding from his mouth. He left him in the bath for three days before dissecting him.

Last of all, he killed twenty-year-old drug addict, Steven Sinclair, after meeting him in Leicester Square. He strangled him with some thick string and on removing some bandages from his victim’s arms afterwards, realised that he had recently tried to slit his wrists. He gave the dead man a bath and put him to bed. He then placed mirrors by the bed, undressed and lay down beside Sinclair’s body, becoming excited by looking at them in the mirror. He disposed of Sinclair in the same way that as the others at Cranley Gardens.

In February 1983 it all began to unravel when one of the five tenants of the house experienced difficulty in getting his toilet to flush. In fact, none of the toilets in the house were working properly and a plumber was called. He was unable to fix the problem, however, and a specialist was summoned. Nilsen began to worry that the toilets must be sticking because of what he had been flushing down his. He swiftly disposed of what he could from his flat. He stuffed what remained of Sinclair’s body into plastic bags and locked it in a cupboard.

Two days later, someone arrived to investigate the blockage. He clambered down a manhole at the side of the house and immediately noticed a strong smell. He was certain it was the smell of something dead. There was sludge in the sewer which he discovered was coming from numerous pieces of rotting flesh. Its source was a pipe from the house. He phoned in to his bosses and told the tenants, Nilsen amongst them, that he would have to notify the police. To their horror, he showed them the piles of flesh he had dragged out of the sewer.

Incredibly, that night Nilsen tried to get rid of the pile, dumping them over the fence, but he was spotted by a watchful neighbour. Next day, he is reported to have said to his colleagues at work, ‘If I’m not in tomorrow, I’ll either be dead or in jail.’

When he went home, three officers were waiting for him. A search of the flat very quickly uncovered Steven Sinclair’s body parts, amongst others. Nilsen accompanied them to the police station and began to talk, providing them with a full confession of what he had been up to for the previous four years.

Dennis Nilsen’s trial began on 24 October 1983 and on 3 November he was found guilty of six murders and two attempted murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-five years, but it is unlikely he will ever be released. Still, prison has its advantages – at least he will never be lonely again.