Dennis Nilsen was so lonely that he murdered his lovers to keep them nearby, sometimes cuddling up to a cadaver as he watched TV, or laying it next to him as he slept. It wasn’t until his neighbours complained of problems with the drains, that his murderous secret was uncovered.
It was already dark on 8 February 1983 by the time Michael Cattran from Dyno-Rod, the drain clearing company, got to 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, North London. It was a large house in a tree-lined street, which had been converted into six flats. Five of the residents had been complaining to the landlord about blocked drains for several days, although the man who lived in the attic flat said he was not having a problem. In Cattran’s line of business, dealing with foul smells went with the job, but even he must have recoiled when he lifted the manhole cover over the sewage outlet. The inspection pit was about a foot deep in rotting flesh. He told the residents he would come back in the morning when he could see what he was doing. When Cattran lifted the manhole cover again the next day, almost all the rotting flesh had gone. There were just a few bones and a piece of flesh stuck in the outflow pipe. One of the residents told him she had heard the man from the attic flat going up and down the stairs repeatedly during the night. Cattran phoned the police and it didn’t take them long to establish the flesh and bones were human remains.
Dennis Nilsen, who lived in the attic flat, had gone to work as usual that morning. By the time he returned to his flat in the evening, there were three policemen waiting for him. They told him they wanted to talk to him about the drains and he expressed surprise, wondering why they would be interested in such a thing. One of them asked him where the rest of the body was. He calmly told them it was in two plastic bags in his wardrobe. They arrested Nilsen and he said he would explain everything at the police station. Once there he confessed to 15 or 16 murders, he couldn’t remember exactly how many.
Dennis Nilsen was born in 1945 in Fraserburgh, a fishing town on the north-east coast of Scotland. His father was Norwegian and had come to Scotland during World War II to escape the Nazi invasion of Norway and had married Nilsen’s mother, a local Scottish girl. After years of fighting, Nilsen’s parents divorced when he was four years old. His mother remarried and he was sent to live with his grandparents, who were very strictly religious. He would say after his arrest that seeing the body of his grandfather, who died when Nilsen was seven, had a profound psychological effect on him and he became fascinated by death. Nilsen joined the army when he was sixteen, serving for 11 years as a cook and learning the butchery skills he would later use to dispose of the bodies of his victims. During his time in the army he also had his first homosexual experiences. After leaving the army, he joined the police force, but quickly realized it was not for him and resigned within a year. He got a job with the Civil Service, working in a job centre in central London, where he would meet unemployed boys and, occasionally, take them out for a meal and a drink after he finished work.
In 1978 Nilsen was living in a garden flat in Cricklewood, north-west London. That year he spent a lonely Christmas on his own. On 30 December, he picked up a boy in a pub and took him back to the flat. After they had had sex, Nilsen thought the boy would leave and he would be left on his own again. To stop this happening, Nilsen waited until the boy was asleep and strangled him with a tie. To make sure he was dead, Nilsen held the boy’s head in a bucket of water for several minutes. He then washed the body and hid it under the floorboards in his flat. A week later, he pulled the body out and washed it again. Finally, in August 1979, he dismembered the body, wrapped it in an old carpet and burnt it on a bonfire in the garden, throwing an old tyre on the fire to cover the smell of burning flesh. The boy was not positively identified until 2006. He was fourteen-year-old Stephen Holmes, who had been reported missing a few days before Nilsen killed him.
Shortly after disposing of Stephen Holmes’s body, Nilsen invited Andrew Ho, a student from Hong Kong, back to Cricklewood. Nilsen attempted to strangle him while they were having sex, but Ho fought him off and escaped. Despite initially reporting the attack to the police, Ho decided not to continue with the prosecution and charges against Nilsen were dropped. In December 1979, Kenneth Ockenden, was not so lucky. The nineteen-year-old Canadian student met Nilsen in a bar and, despite having a ticket to fly back to Canada the following day, agreed to go back to Nilsen’s flat for the night. The pattern Nilsen had established with Stephen Holmes repeated itself. He strangled the young Canadian and hid his body under the floorboards. On several occasions he retrieved the body and propped it up next to him as he watched TV in the evening and then slept with it in the bed next to him at night.
By May 1980, Nilsen had disposed of Ockenden’s body in the garden and replaced him under the floorboards with the body of Martin Duffey, a sixteen-year-old homeless boy. A few days later Billy Sutherland, 21, a male prostitute from Scotland, joined Duffey. Nilsen had strangled Sutherland with his bare hands. Over the next 14 months there would be seven more victims. Nilsen claims he either didn’t know their names or could not remember who they were. He has only given vague descriptions of them and all seven remain unidentified.
During this period Douglas Stewart, a barman in the Golden Lion pub in Soho, had a lucky escape. In November 1980 he accepted Nilsen’s invitation to go back to his flat. During the night, Nilsen attempted to strangle Stewart, but he woke up and pushed Nilsen away. Stewart reported the attempted murder to the police, but they treated it as a domestic squabble between two homosexual men and took no action against Nilsen.
The last known victim in Cricklewood was the 24-year-old homeless man Malcolm Barlow. On 18 September Nilsen came across the young man slumped in a doorway, took him back to his flat and called an ambulance. The following day Barlow returned to the flat to thank Nilsen for helping him. Nilsen invited Barlow in and strangled him during the night. Not long after this, Nilsen’s landlord informed him that he had to move out of the flat and offered him alternative accommodation in Muswell Hill. By this time Nilsen had accumulated a number of bodies in the flat. Before moving out he cut them up and burned them on another bonfire. He collected their internal organs in a bag and left them outside by the garden fence for rats, urban foxes and other scavengers to find.
Although there were no floorboards in the flat in Muswell Hill and Nilsen didn’t have access to the garden, by this time he was too out of control to stop killing. In November 1981 he picked up Paul Nobbs in the Golden Lion in Soho. In the morning Nobbs woke up in Nilsen’s bed to find red marks around his neck. He went to his doctor, who told him it looked like someone had tried to strangle him, but Nobb’s decided not to report it to the police. Not long after this, Nilsen attempted to strangle Carl Stotter while he was sleeping in Nilsen’s flat. Stotter, well known in the gay community as the drag queen Khara Le Fox, woke up while Nilsen was attempting to drown him in the bath and fought him off. Stotter didn’t approach the police either until after Nilsen was arrested. The obvious lack of trust between London’s gay community and the police undoubtedly contributed to the number of murders Nilsen committed before he was caught.
After two failures, Nilsen’s next victim was John Howlett, another well-known figure in Soho, where he was known as John the Guardsman. After drinking together in a bar, Howlett accepted Nilsen’s invitation to accompany him back to the flat in Muswell Hill. There was a disagreement between them and Nilsen asked Howlett to leave, but he refused. Nilsen attacked Howlett, attempting to strangle him, but he fought back. The struggle lasted several minutes before Nilsen overcame Howlett, finally drowning him in the bath after he was unconscious. With nowhere in the flat to hide the body, Nilsen decided to cut it up and flush it down the toilet. He boiled some of the body parts, including the head, in a pan on the cooker to make it easier to remove the flesh and stored the larger bones in a tea chest.
Nilsen claimed not to remember much about his next victim. He was a homeless heroin addict called Graham Allen. According to Nilsen, the only part he could remember was making Allen an omelette and then him being unconscious in the bath. Nilsen left the body there for three days before disposing of it in the same way as he had the previous one. His final victim was Stephen Sinclair, who was addicted to heroin. It was Nilsen’s attempts to flush this body away that would lead to his exposure and arrest. As well as the remains found in the drain, police recovered the parts of the body still in Nilsen’s flat, including the partially boiled head.
Nilsen was charged with the murder of the six people who could be identified together with two counts of attempted murder. At his trial in October 1983, Nilsen entered a plea of diminished responsibility. As the evidence against him was overwhelming, the defence rested on the jury accepting this plea. The chopping block he used to dismember his victims and the cooking pot he had boiled them in were shown to the court and the detailed confession he had written after his arrest was read out in full. Witnesses for the prosecution included Douglas Stewart, Paul Nobbs and Carl Stotter. Nilsen attempted to discredit their testimony by exposing some details they had got wrong, but, in doing so, succeeded in showing himself to be cold and calculating. After considerable deliberation, the jury came to a majority decision of 10 to 2 in favour of Nilsen being guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation he serve a minimum of 25 years. This minimum term expires in 2008, at which point Nilsen will be eligible for parole.