by Russ Coffey
Sinclair would have seemed like a safe bet. Not only was he a runaway but he had also just been in trouble. He had been being caught stealing at a St Mungo’s hostel and bailed to appear before magistrates on Monday, 12 February. It was hardly the first time Sinclair had got himself into bother. In fact, he’d rarely been out of trouble since he was born Stephen Guild in 1962.
He was illegitimate and was soon taken into the custody of the local authorities. After 14 months he was put up for foster care, and came into the home of Neil and Elizabeth Sinclair who adopted him to be a brother to their three daughters. Stephen Sinclair, however, wet his bed and constantly bunked off school. Things became so bad that a doctor’s advice was sought. It transpired that he had psycho-motor epilepsy.
He was then institutionalised until he was 12. By his mid-teens, he was also diagnosed as educationally sub-normal and spent time in Borstal. He soon graduated to prison. When he got out, things became worse. On one occasion, he slashed his wrists and, on another, he attacked his sisters. There was also an occasion when he tried to burn the house down.
Eventually, Sinclair was re-fostered into a new family. But the same old problems rose to the surface. As he turned 18, he was a drug addict, a glue sniffer and a recognised, opportunist criminal. At this time, though, there is no particular indication he was homosexual.
Wherever they met, we know that, very soon afterwards, Nilsen invited the young man on a tour of the West End pubs. He bought him anything he cared to drink and insisted on being called ‘Des’, explaining he hated the name Dennis. At closing time – 11.30pm – Nilsen suggested they go back to his flat for more alcohol.
In History of a Drowning Boy, he describes their journey home. They took the Northern Line up to Highgate. Sinclair had started feeling sleepy. As they got off, Nilsen noticed his companion was becoming woozier. During the mile or so walk back to his flat, Nilsen says he doubted he ‘understood a word he said in his half-drugged Scots brogue’.
Muswell Hill was a pleasant, leafy area where urban London dissolved into greenery and space. Most of the large, semi-detached houses remained intact as family homes for genteel and affluent city workers. 23 Cranley Gardens, a tall Edwardian house with Mock Tudor beams, was different. Later, when it appeared under the headline ‘HOUSE OF HORRORS’, it looked every bit the part. The house had been split into small bed-sits. There were tiles missing and the paint was flaking off. The landlady lived in India and the agents were in Golders Green. Tenants came and went without getting to know each other. In particular, the strange man living in the attic kept himself to himself.
In the dark, cold and full of drink, Stephen Sinclair was unlikely to have paid particular attention to the outside of the building. Once inside, they went up two flights of stairs and, when Nilsen opened the door, Bleep – his small, black-and-white cross-breed dog – jumped up and licked their hands. The flat was smelly, small and damp. As Sinclair walked in, he would have seen a grimy gas stove in small galley kitchen to his left. It adjoined the hall. The bathroom was opposite. The cooker, cooking pot and bath have now been preserved in Scotland Yard’s ‘Black Museum’ as a permanent reminder of the state of mind of the man who owned them.
Ahead of the kitchen was a door leading to the front room. This led to the other main room, the bedroom, in which was a double bed, a comfortable armchair, a stereo, the TV, posters, plants and a scented candle. The room at the front was not used. It contained a large wardrobe and some tea chests. It had been reported that, no matter what the weather, the windows were flung wide open.
There are a number of accounts of what happened next. Even before writing History of a Drowning Boy, Nilsen gave two versions. The first was his confession to the police. He told DCI Jay that when they came in and put on the television, he was pleased to see the working-class drama Boys from the Blackstuff being broadcast. The programme appealed to his socialist ideals. Sinclair sat on the floor and Nilsen in the armchair. They watched the programme while drinking the alcohol they had picked up on the way.
Towards the end, Nilsen noticed that Sinclair had disappeared to the corner of the room to inject himself with drugs. That disappointed Nilsen. He put The Who’s Tommy on his stereo. With his headphones tightly clasped to his ears, he says that he listened to all 75 minutes before dozing off. In a police statement later, he claimed, ‘I can’t remember anything else until I woke up the next morning. He was still in the armchair and he was dead. On the floor was a piece of string with a tie attached to it … I know I must have killed him … I must have made up the piece of string that night. I don’t know.’
Months later, after the trial, Nilsen wrote an account for author Brian Masters, which is reproduced in his book, Killing for Company (extracts of which are reproduced in this book by special permission). Here, he let his memories flow as if reliving the moment:
I am sitting cross-legged on the carpet, drinking and listening to music … I drain my glass and take the ’phones off. Behind me sits Stephen Sinclair on the lazy chair. He was crashed out with drink and drugs. I sit and look at him. I stand up and approach him. My heart is pounding. I kneel down in front of him. I touch his leg and say, ‘Are you awake?’ There is no response. ‘Oh, Stephen,’ I think, ‘here I go again.’ I get up and go slowly and casually through to the kitchen. I take some thick string from the drawer and put it on the stainless-steel draining board. ‘Not long enough,’ I think. I go to the cupboard in the front room and search inside.
On the floor therein I find an old tie. I cut a bit off and throw the rest away. I go back into the kitchen and make up the ligature. I look into the back room and Stephen has not stirred. Bleep comes in and I speak to her and scratch her head. ‘Leave me just now, Bleep. Get your head down, everything’s all right.’
I was relaxed. I never contemplated morality. This was something which I had to do. I knotted the string because I heard somewhere that this was what the thuggi did in India for a quicker kill. I walked back into the room. I draped the ligature over one of his knees and poured myself another drink. My heart was pounding very fast. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Stephen. I thought to myself, ‘All that potential, all that beauty, and all that pain that is his life. I have to stop him. It will soon be over.’
I did not feel bad. I did not feel evil. I walked over to him. I removed the scarf. I picked up one of his wrists and let go. His limp arm flopped back on to his lap. I opened one of his eyes and there was no reflex. He was deeply unconscious. I took the ligature and put it around his neck. I knelt by the side of the chair and faced the wall. I took each loose end of the ligature and pulled it tight …
I held him there for a couple of minutes. He was limp and stayed that way. I released my hold and removed the string and tie. He had stopped breathing. I spoke to him. ‘Stephen, that didn’t hurt at all. Nothing can touch you now.’ I ran my fingers through his bleached blond hair. His face looked peaceful. He was dead. The front of his jeans was wet with urine … I got up and had a drink and a cigarette. He had made no noise; I had to wash his soiled body. I ran a bath … I returned and began to undress him. I took off his leather jacket, jersey and T-shirt. Then his running shoes and socks. I had difficulty with his tight, wet jeans. He still sat there, now naked, in the armchair … his body was pale and hairless. He had crêpe bandages on both forearms. I removed these to reveal deep, still open, recent razor cuts. He had very recently tried to commit suicide …
I picked up his limp body into my arms and carried it into the bathroom. I put it into the half-filled bath. I washed the body … I sat him on the white-and-blue dining chair. I sat down, took a cigarette and a drink and looked at him … His eyes were not quite closed. ‘Stephen,’ I thought, ‘you’re another problem for me. What am I going to do with you? I’ve run out of room.’
The next morning … I lay beside him and placed the large mirror at the end of the bed. I stripped … and lay there staring at both our naked bodies in the mirror. He looked paler than I di
d … I put talcum powder on myself and lay down again. We looked similar now. I spoke to him as if he were still alive … I thought how beautiful he looked and how beautiful I looked … He just looked fabulous. I just stared at us both in the mirror. Soon I felt tired. I got in between the sheets …
‘Goodnight, Stephen,’ I said, switched off the bedside light and went to sleep. I was up a few hours later. It was an ordinary day of work for me ahead.
That ‘ordinary day’ at work was as an executive officer at the nearby Kentish Town Job Centre. Nilsen had been in the job for less than a year. For the previous seven years, he had worked in a junior role at the Denmark Street Job Centre. Prior to that he had been a security guard, a policeman (for eight months) and a cook in the Army. But although he had joined the Army aged 15, he still seemed highly educated. This is what had struck many of his colleagues when they first met him. He was quiet and bookish until the conversation turned to one of his pet subjects, like left-wing politics. Then he would quickly become verbose and, sometimes, domineering.
Nilsen’s extensive knowledge could also make him interesting. But his inability to know when to stop talking meant that, more often than not, he was a bit of a bore. Still, Nilsen often made his workmates laugh. He had a sharp, dry wit and never missed a copy of the satirical magazine, Private Eye. He still subscribes to it in prison.
For the fortnight between murdering Stephen Sinclair and his arrest, Nilsen continued normally at work. He interviewed applicants and complained about Margaret Thatcher. But although for the first week he was his usual businesslike self, after that he started to become fractious.
Nilsen’s most vivid recollections of the last week before his arrest are not to be found in History of a Drowning Boy but in essays he wrote for author Brian Masters, and which were later quoted in Killing for Company – the result of an extraordinary relationship of trust between subject and writer. The project began when Masters wrote to Nilsen while he was awaiting trial asking for co-operation in studying his case. He was one of two writers who did so. The other, ex-ITN newscaster Gordon Honeycombe, had recently written about some of the Met Police’s most famous cases in Murders of the Black Museum. That, clearly, made him well qualified on the subject. Masters, however, had a CV ranging from biographies on Sartre to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Nilsen apparently felt that a man of such sensibilities would be better suited to understand him.
Over the next year, Nilsen filled 55 prison-issue exercise books with thoughts and feelings for Masters. He wrote in incredible detail, and with apparent candour. He began by speaking about was what had happened at his first flat – how he had burnt bones on bonfires and put flesh out by the fence for the rats. He then proceeded to explain how the problems of getting rid of the bodies at the second flat led to his arrest.
From all available sources, this is what happened in the last seven days leading up to Dennis Nilsen’s arrest: Jim Allcock, a builder, lived on the ground floor of 23 Cranley Gardens with his girlfriend, a local barmaid. Two other girls lived on the same floor and the middle storey of the building was unoccupied. On Thursday, 3 February, Allcock noticed that his toilet didn’t work. He tried removing the blockage but it wouldn’t clear. The next day, he decided to call the management agents.
Early on the morning of 4 February, Allcock noticed his other toilet didn’t work either. When he spoke to the agents, he requested to be put directly in touch with a plumber. But now he also wondered if it was just his flat. So when his girlfriend, Fiona Bridges, bumped into Nilsen, she asked if he was also having a problem with his toilet. He replied he wasn’t. Bridges also noticed that he had been drinking. That wasn’t unusual.
Nilsen had actually gone to the pub to prepare himself for the process of getting rid of the ‘problem’ he had in his flat. He says this was a practice he found distressing and his solution was to get drunk and force himself to do what was necessary. First, Sinclair’s body was removed from one of the wardrobes. Then he made sheets from bin liners and put them down on the narrow kitchen floor. Finally, while still drinking Bacardi and Coke, Nilsen set about cutting up the body with a set of sharp chef’s knives.
On the hob sat a huge, steel cooking pot, similar to those he’d used in the Army Catering Corps. Its purpose was to soften the tissue sufficiently to enable it to be flushed down the loo. The water took a full half-hour to come to the boil, by which time Nilsen had got the head off and started to remove the innards. The organs smelt terrible, but the body, thankfully, wasn’t particularly messy. Nilsen says he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, and was always relieved how little there was after a body had settled for a few days. By midnight, he was too drunk to finish.
When he went to bed, he still hadn’t made any connection between him and the drainage problems his neighbours were complaining about.
The following Saturday morning – 5 February – suffering from a bad hangover, Nilsen decided to lie in. Meanwhile, the plumber had started inspecting the toilets and drains outside. He concluded that the blockage was a job for specialists. A call was put through to Dyno-Rod, but they informed him that they couldn’t send an engineer around until the following Monday. When Bridges and Allcock saw Nilsen leaving the house in the early afternoon, they told him it might be better if he didn’t use the toilet in his flat.
Now Nilsen started to worry that his activities were causing the blockage. He decided to do something about the mess and bought cleaning products and air fresheners before returning home.
That afternoon, by chance, Nilsen’s sometime friend, Martyn Hunter-Craig, popped round. He says Nilsen looked more agitated than ever before. When Nilsen opened his door a fraction, Hunter-Craig could see his friend’s face was a ghostly white.
‘You can’t come in, Skip,’ Nilsen said, ‘I’m tied up with someone.’
Hunter-Craig describes smelling what he calls an unusual ‘lavatorial’ smell which he thought might be vomit. He assumed Nilsen was drunk and probably in a complex sexual situation. As a former male prostitute, Hunter-Craig was used to seeing all kinds of things, and discreetly ignoring them.
Nilsen devoted the whole of Sunday to cleaning up. He finished cutting up the body, and put the parts in bin liners. Then these and the partially boiled head were covered with newspapers and stick deodorants.
On Monday, 7 February, Nilsen went to work feeling on edge. He was irritable and curt with his colleagues. He was resigned to the distinct possibility that when he came home the police would be waiting for him. But Dyno-Rod had failed to turn up and matters hadn’t escalated. Nilsen went to bed that night wondering if he might yet be able to escape detection.
The following morning, Nilsen again went to work in a tense mood. When he returned, it was sleeting. Mike Cattran, a 30- year-old engineer from Dyno-Rod had just arrived. Nilsen went straight up to his flat. Cattran went down to a manhole cover at the side of the building along with Jim Allcock. Cattran looked down, looked back up at Jim Allcock, and said, ‘I haven’t been in this job for long but I know this isn’t shit.’ He suspected the matter was from a rotting animal, but couldn’t be sure what, or how it had come to be there in such quantities. At 7.00pm he phoned his manager, Gary Wheeler.
His manager’s first reaction, as reported, sounded like it may have come from a 1970s TV show. He asked if there were Pakistanis in the building. Cattran replied that there weren’t but that he had concerns that someone was doing something untoward. They agreed to leave it until the next day.
By now Nilsen had come down to see what was going on. Along with the occupants of the ground floor – Allcock, Bridges and two more – they listened to the engineers discuss what they had seen. Allcock said he wanted to know exactly what was causing the blockage. Cattran replied that he needed to look in daylight, and not to worry – there was probably a perfectly innocent explanation. He turned to Nilsen and asked him, ‘Do you flush dog food down the pan?’ Nilsen replied that he didn’t.
Nilsen went back to his flat an
d wrote a letter to the agents complaining about the state of the building, including the drains. He asked that ‘routine upkeep and maintenance’ of the house be attended to, to keep ‘living standards at a tolerable level’. He moaned about the lights in the communal areas before arriving at the important issue: ‘When I flush my toilet, the lavatory pans in the lower flats overflow (since Friday, 4 February). Obviously the drains are blocked and unpleasant odours permeate the building.’
This wasn’t the first time that he had written such a letter. Complaining was part of his nature. His real intention here, however, isn’t clear. Maybe by complaining he could deflect attention. Or maybe, as he told me, he really was ‘inviting the end’ of his career as a murderer.
After writing his letter, Nilsen came down to find that Cattran was still there. Before he left, the three men at the house all took a look down the manhole together. Seeing how much the matter looked like flesh, Cattran remarked, ‘Looks like one for the Old Bill’.
‘It looks more to me like someone has been flushing down their Kentucky Fried Chicken,’ Nilsen replied. Again, he returned to his flat to consider his options.
When Nilsen later told the police about his thoughts that night, his words were carefully chosen. He said he had first wondered if he should run. But where could he go? As a former policeman he knew that he wouldn’t get very far. Besides, he claims to have thought it cowardly. Then, he says he contemplated suicide, but this scared him. He paused for a moment. Then he continued to say that he was concerned that if he wrote a suicide note, no one would believe what he would have to say. Besides, he wanted to face the music because he ‘owed it’ to ‘all the others’ to let their families know what had happened.