Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  In his prison life it has been in the matter of words in which he has caused a stir. His autobiography runs to 400 pages. This was written while he was in Whitemoor and he managed to send it to a publisher. But the manuscript has been seized and kept from him. The case is whether or not he has the right to publish the book, and in the High Court in 2001 Mr Justice Elias said that Nilsen could be allowed to challenge the decision to withhold the book from him and not to allow publishing. Although the proceeds from the book, as Nilsen has said, would go to charity, the issue is really about the content and the treatment of the crimes as in the narrative.

  In March 2002, he lost the legal battle. The High Court decided that the Prison Service had the right to seize and keep the typescript and indeed to work on it to censor material.

  Creative writing in prisons provides the opportunity for prisoners to express themselves in a variety of ways: they may choose to join drama groups or poetry workshops. But one tempting option is to write their autobiography. Many dream of writing a best seller, thinking that their life of crime would have the same kind of appeal as the ‘red back’ true crime books on the shelves, concerned with gangland and hit men, drug trafficking and bare-knuckle fighting. Recent successes in publishing crime memoirs have increased that interest. But the Prison Service is ruled by the order preventing the activity of writing for profit and also prohibiting any writing that deals with offences the person has committed. Nilsen was up against the latter, which is why he stated that any profits would go to charity.

  Nilsen’s lawyer, Flo Krause, insisted that the government, in suppressing the book, were breaching Nilsen’s human rights under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The breach was arguably against his ‘family life, home and correspondence’ as it was worded in the Act. She also argued that article 10 was breached: this concerns freedom of expression. Mr Justice Crane rejected the plea, saying that ‘The Home Secretary is fully entitled to require that the manuscript be stopped and read.’ The only argument the lawyer could try was that the book was ‘a serious work about his life and imprisonment’. But his case had not been helped by the fact that, back at the time when the manuscript was completed, Nilsen’s lawyer had taken it out of the prison.

  In 2004, the topic was in the news again. At the Court of Appeal, the case was turned down. The judges agreed that the script ‘Glorifies the pleasure that his crime caused him.’ They added, ‘We do not believe that any penal system could readily contemplate a regime in which a rapist or murderer would be permitted to publish an article glorifying the pleasure that his crime brought…’ The general opinion for some time had been that the script did not offer serious comment about imprisonment, but was an indulgence in the nefarious past of the man.

  Then, in 2006, there was more to come from Dennis Nilsen. He wrote a letter that reached the press, and in that he wrote about his crimes and about the autobiography. It was sent to Tim Barlass of the Evening Standard, because Barlass had been in touch with Nilsen for a while. Nilsen wrote about his book: ‘My own autobiographies have been obstructed and banned by the Home Office, every inch of the way. A whole list of writers, journalists, and independent academics (some from the US) have wished to visit me in prison, but all such applications have been rejected by the (mostly) Labour administration … Under Straw, Blunkett, Clark and now Reid, as the Stalinist Red Flag keeps flying, if not in the past then presently in their minds when it comes to censorship.’

  Nilsen explains the current situation and gives details of his book: ‘Even my lawyers have been denied access to four volumes of autobiography – which are not allowed to be sent outside of Home Office control and containment. These banned works amount to 4,000 typewritten pages of first-draft unedited script. Well, that’s another story which will unfold through legal events in the fullness of time.’

  When we recall the nature of his crimes, the reasons for the ban on his publication become clear. Between January 1978 and September 1981 he killed twelve men at his home in Melrose Avenue, London. One victim escaped: he had been taken back to the house, then had been to bed with Nilsen, and when the student woke the next day he felt very ill and had a severe headache. When he checked himself out he saw that he was bruised at the neck and his eyes were red. Nilsen had attempted to strangle him, but he was told that he had caught the flesh of his neck in a sleeping bag.

  He had stated earlier on arrest that he was determined to have some company, even if that was with corpses. His first victim was buried under the floorboards, left there for several months, and then taken to the garden to be burned. He was found out when Dyno-Rod came to clear drains and human remains were discovered.

  Even if his book analysed and responded to feelings about the killings, such topics are illegal for a prisoner to disseminate. After all, the works in print on him already offer plenty of bloody detail about the modus operandi of his murders. The murders in his home had filled up so much space in his efforts to hide the bodies that he had resorted to storing one victim under the kitchen sink. When DCI Jay arrived at the home, he reported that there was a noxious smell, and when asked to explain, Nilsen had said, with no sign of emotion that what the police searched for was in fact stored in various plastic bags. The items later found included two severed heads.

  There have been psychological writings about Nilsen, and there has been a large volume of biography. As time has gone on, he himself has written on a range of subjects, as he is now writing for company. Inside the prison, he works in a Braille workshop, and there he has transcribed the texts of complete works into Braille for use in libraries in Africa. In fact, from the start, after his arrest, he has written. When he was arrested and the trial was approaching, he wrote copious notes and sketches, compiling fifty notebooks of his memories.

  There was no diminished responsibility: his life inside since the trial has shown the perplexing aspect of duality which leads to a profile of a man who is generally referred to as ‘sick and twisted’ and a ‘dangerous psychopath’ but the person walking around the jail is quite the opposite: articulate, quiet and polite. It is almost as if there is a new identity occupying a shell. The dangerous occupant may still be down in the cellar, as it were, but the reasonable man answers the door.

  It is hard to resist the speculation that the man now would essentially say the same as he did in 1984 when asked why he murdered those people. He was at Knightsbridge Crown Court, when appearing at the trial of Albert Moffat, who was charged with malicious wounding after attacking Nilsen in Wormwood Scrubs. He had slashed Nilsen’s face with a razor, and the result was hospital attention amounting to eighty-nine stitches. Nilsen said, ‘By nature I am not a violent person. You can look at my school reports, army and police service and nine years in the Civil Service and you’ll find not one record of violence against me.’

  His retort about the motive was ‘Yes, it is a great enigma. These things were out of character. I killed people over a period of five years and it got worse.’ He also told the court that in jail he never gloried in his publicity, and he said that he had not attacked Moffat, adding, ‘Since I have been in prison I have felt no irresistible urge to kill someone.’

  That makes sense: he had plenty of company. Some men spend hours in the prison library, poring over the stout and heavy books on criminal law, looking for loopholes and desperately searching for a line to thought that will open up the past to scrutiny. Dennis Nilsen wants his book to see the bookshop shelves, and he wants for people to listen, not to fall asleep. ‘Then it will be okay.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Ian Brady: Keeping Shtum

  Before telling the story of Ian Brady in jail, I have my own experience on the Moors murders, something that happened to me quite by chance one day as I took some books out of my local library. It was the first time I had listened to a tale about Brady and Hindley from someone’s mouth, rather than from the pages of a book.

  At the issuing desk was Sandra, and we both started to chat about our i
nterest in crime writing. I went to interview her after she said that she had been present during the investigations into those murders, based in Hyde.

  Sandra has a good stock of scrapbooks about her involvement in one of the major murder enquiries in the history of crime. As we looked through them and she pointed out locations on the Saddleworth moors, or talked about a woman detective she knew, I felt as if I was revisiting a dark place in history. She showed me her photograph, as in the Daily Mirror at the time when Brady and Hindley were tried at Chester Assizes. Here was a woman with a story to tell, and it had been a long time since she showed these cuttings to anyone.

  We met by chance. I write about true crime and spend hours in libraries and archives. Most of this work is about old newsprint and fading photos you find on a blurry microfilm image. But here was that rare thing, a chance to talk about a period in modern history when police work was just emerging from its Blue Lamp image and was being given to us as something close to the ‘new documentary’. Not that it was being glamorised in the writing of the 1960s. Quiet heroism and career problems seemed to be the order of the day, and a PC was very non-PC by today’s standards.

  Sandra stepped into this world of mean streets and macho talk, and her photos show her wearing the stylish dark cape designed by no less a fashion guru than Norman Hartnall. But the impression she gives is that it wasn’t macho at all – more gentlemanly. After all, this is the time in which it was considered unacceptable to swear on the football terraces if a woman was present. At the time, she was just taking up duties in Birkenhead. Her days as a secretary to the team of detectives who combed the wilds of Saddleworth were behind her. The Sandra of these images is every inch the professional, standing by a Panda car, or looking firm and controlled outside a police station. She displays the virtues of the British police as I recall them, in my teenage life in Leeds in the sixties: strong, visible, reliable, demanding respect.

  The training course for this new life was at Padgate, Warrington. Sandra remembers this with real affection. ‘It was the best time of my life … I wept buckets when we had to leave’, she says. Sandra knows the date as soon as she is asked: 6 October 1968. It was a year of riot and unrest over the Channel, and here we were losing several layers of innocence about modernity as well. You might say that at this point, our conceptions of the police were changing radically, as was the case with the entire notion of authority.

  She notes that there was much pride in the training. There may have been a lively social side to the time, with entertainment being produced as part of the deal, but it was also tough. The drilling square was in use by eight in the morning and then it was down to some hard studying. All the details are still there as she fills in the picture. The famous cape was excellent quality, and the Cheshire force had a much better standard of dress than the Manchester outfit. Sandra tells me that some of the badges were enamelled. All the official photos show a woman completely comfortable in her position, status and very obvious responsibility. The car shines, well cared for. The hat and jacket are immaculate.

  From the seminar room and the role plays it was out into the stuff of life. Her photographs reflect that quasi-military life and the facial expressions are firm, in control. Yes, she had experienced a certain notoriety during the previous few years, as fate brought her a central role in a media show as the tabloids struggled to find ways of extracting daily stories from Hyde while the force was out combing the moors. But nothing in that phase prepared Sandra for the police work on the streets. She had been only nineteen when she began work as secretary for Bob Talbot and the Moors team.

  But in police work, she witnessed things that affected her deeply, such as being there when a mother callously rejected her own child, telling her to her face that she wanted nothing to do with her. ‘That was the worst thing I ever saw’ she says. But when I ask about the traumatic experiences in a police career, she smiles and says, ‘We didn’t do trauma … there was no time.’

  Whereas in the Moors investigation, she had sat in the incident room and answered the phone, now in uniform, she saw pain and suffering at first hand. She brings to mind one quiet Sunday morning and the harrowing experience of seeing the charred bodies of six children in the back of a car after a man had shot through some lights at high speed, just shattering the peace of that weekend lull in between the Saturday drunks and the afternoon in the park

  Of course, I have to mention the image of the macho, unreformed male in the police, slotted into our consciousness through a thousand television dramas since Z Cars. But Sandra is eager to put me right on this one. She uses the word camaraderie, and explains that there was professional respect, and that teamwork was at the core of everything. She talks about ‘gentlemanly’ officers and a very different basis of relationships in the force, reflecting a world with just as many social problems as now, but maybe more easily understood and remedied.

  As for her work in the Moors case, it is a fascinating chapter of history in the annals of modern police work. It was a steady, regular and ordered enquiry, with meticulous monitoring and recording. I picture her alone in the central office as the world’s press darted around frantically outside. In a pre-computer age, the office work functioned around phone calls, record cards and a coded range of knocks on the office wall: one for tea, two for a useful communication and three for ‘get out there now!’

  The days of the enquiry were long and hard, Sandra being collected at eight thirty in the morning, taken to the office in Hyde, and then work progressing steadily right through to eight at night.

  The journalists and writers flocked to Hyde and to Sandra’s office. She met Emlyn Williams, the author of the first book on the case, Beyond Belief. She and a friend were dogged by reporters and they sometimes had to hide. The whole business became so farcical that one day a newspaperman came into her office pretending to be ill. His performance was worthy of Olivier, but transparently sham. She had to fuss and seem concerned, while all the time watching him like a hawk.

  The team managed to snatch an hour at the Queen’s Head in Hyde for some bonding, but Sandra stresses that the talk on these occasions was strictly unwinding, easy small talk. There is nothing sensational in her memories of the time. It was ‘just careful, routine work, as with any case … we had no idea at the time that this was to be momentous, and in so many books’.

  She always wanted to be a police officer, from the time of her first job as a clerk in a magistrate’s court, but never dreamed that a few years on from that, she would be snapped by the Mirror cameraman. I sense that, even today, when her early career and the story of those awful child-murders is ‘classic crime’ history, there is a certain respectful reserve in her attitude, and every sentence she utters has a tone of a less hectic time and a more people-centred time. I can imagine her on the beat or taking a call, and I feel assured that she would have been totally professional. Her most frequent word when talking about colleagues from that time is ‘gentleman’.

  After the interview, I understand why she chooses to say more about policing Birkenhead than what Myra Hindley said to her in the office. It has something to do with actually doing something positive to help out on the streets and in the unhappy homes. The psychopaths can be left to specialists and therapists, but there are plain folk out there being robbed and attacked or just drinking too much and disturbing the peace, and you can do something about that.

  As she had sat in that office, at times there had been Ian Brady in the room behind her. Now he is an old man in jail and he has known no other life for decades.

  The facts of his killings which took him to the prison cell are very well known. As Brady and Myra Hindley worked together and realised that they both had a relish for sadism; Brady was interested in Nazi ideologies as well, and when the couple went to live with Hindley’s grandmother in Hattersley, Lancashire, Brady began to enjoy showing off his twisted imagination and love of weaponry to Hindley’s young brother-in-law, David Smith. Crimes were talked about; but
the talk became reality one day when Brady brought home a teenager called Edward Evans. Hindley went to fetch Smith and when he arrived at Brady and Hindley’s place he watched Evans being murdered with an axe.

  Smith called the police and the body was found and the search for the killers began. Suitcases were discovered in a left luggage store and there were weapons, tape recordings and other papers in a case. Tapes and other materials made it clear that two missing children, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride, had been killed. Photos of the two killers out on Saddleworth Moors led police to the burial places, and the couple were arrested and tried at Chester Crown Court, being convicted in May 1966 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  The number of their victims has increased. A third grave was found in 1987 and the body of another victim, Keith Bennett, is almost certainly out on Saddleworth, but has not been found. From 1985, Brady and Hindley were involved in the desperate search for bodies, the two being taken out their to assist in the search.

  Myra Hindley died in 2002, aged sixty, and had never been released, but Brady was declared criminally insane as early as 1985. The explanations for their heinous acts have been many and varied. But there’s one consensus: that a violent psychopath met a woman who also lived in a violent world, and the result was a horrific killing spree.