by Russ Coffey
On 18 February 1983, with most of the interrogation now concluded, Nilsen was taken to Brixton Prison. He was held on remand there from February until his trial in October. Going to Brixton was more than just a journey a few miles south. Hornsey had looked like the police station he had himself worked in, and Chambers and Jay gave him endless snacks and cigarettes. Brixton felt like what it was – prison.
It also epitomised everything bad about the Prison Service in the 1980s. The corridors stank of unpleasant food and male bodies; noise clattered around the bare walls and in winter it was constantly freezing. The physical discomfort was only part of it. The reality of what Nilsen had done was also starting to sink in. If killing was an addiction, here was the cold turkey.
Nilsen knew his eventual prospects were bleak. The best case scenario lay in a sentence mitigated by ‘diminished responsibility’. This could lead to a reduced sentence or, just as likely, being sent to an asylum until considered ‘cured’. That possibility terrified Nilsen. One psychiatrist who visited, reported: ‘He is preoccupied with avoiding a mad label.’
Nilsen wasn’t just afraid, he was also angry. He was particularly furious about the idea that men who hadn’t yet gone to court were still treated like criminals. He says he no longer felt dangerous and wanted bail arrangement where he could be ‘held in prison custody away from the crude violence of the Brixton Prison Authorities’. Later, he also says he was surprised that DCS Chambers should imply ‘that if [he] were to be released from custody [he] would go around killing people and cutting them up’. Despite his open confessions, Nilsen deemed himself to now be ‘harmless’. Why couldn’t other people see it, he thought?
After returning from his bail hearing – it had been swiftly refused – Nilsen was taken off to a private room to talk to Paul Bowden, a senior Home Office psychiatrist. It was meant to be a pre-trial evaluation about his competence to stand trial. Bowden was sure Nilsen was not schizophrenic nor otherwise incompetent. But after an hour together, Bowden began to feel there was something about his excitability that was concerning. He recommended an eye be kept on him for his own safety. Nilsen was thus sent to the hospital wing and stayed there, as a potential suicide risk, month after month, throughout his period of remand.
Being kept in the hospital wing – what Nilsen considered to be ‘solitary confinement’ – angered him even more than before. Rather than being more relaxed, as one might expect, the authorities exercised additional powers over inmates in the medical unit. These included patient isolation for up to 23½ hours in a solitary cell. Nilsen alleges he was held like this for most of the time.
Although he didn’t have many friends, in his first couple of weeks in Brixton, Nilsen says he did still receive a couple of visitors. One was Cathy Hughes, who had taken over as Denmark Street Branch Secretary at the CSPA Union. His boss Janet Leaman also wrote but didn’t visit. In her letter she said she wouldn’t believe the accusations until they were proved. Her words were warm and reminded Nilsen how his cynical humour had ‘always hit the spot’. But between such, short-lived, signs of support, and Brian Masters getting in touch, Nilsen mainly relied on stilted conversations conducted between cells for companionship.
Some descriptions of those he met at this time are given in History of a Drowning Boy to highlight what a terrible place Brixton was. If they are to be believed then, for once, Nilsen might have had a point. Two cells down the corridor was an inmate called David – not his real name. His was a particularly sad case. He’d had been charged with the murder of his baby daughter. He claimed that the murder had been committed under the influence of drugs and he had no memory of it. Nilsen says he thought that David needed immediate treatment for his drug problems.
After telling the reader how awful this situation was, he gives a flavour of how he would interact with David. He remembers one afternoon in particular. It was just after the prison library trolley had done its rounds. Nilsen asked David if he could swap his book of poems for David’s copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. They started to discuss David’s case. Soon, the conversation turned to the unfairness of wearing prison uniform. How can they make you dress as a prisoner, they agreed, when you haven’t yet been convicted of anything?
From the injustices of prison life, Nilsen moves on to the plight of some of the more wretched prisoners he saw. For the most part, he says inmates were just ‘ordinary human beings’ in adverse circumstances. Nilsen says that ‘in crimes of emotional/sexual psychology, it is a case of “there but by the grace of God goes anyone”’. But what to do with such prisoners? Nilsen says he thought prisons were there to help rehabilitate, not to further brutalise those to whom life had already been cruel. He concluded the prison authorities didn’t really want to manage their inmates back into society, but ‘warehouse’ them like ‘animals in a zoo’.
If he doubted for a moment that prison warders were thugs, then meeting another inmate – we’ll call him Carlton – settled the issue. Here was another very tragic situation. Carlton was standing accused of throwing a child out of a window during a burglary. The child had died as a result. Nilsen and Carlton spoke to each other during cell-to-cell conversations and exercise periods. It soon struck Nilsen that Carlton had mental problems. In fact, he thought he had no place being there at all. On top of that, he seemed to be the victim of racial abuse. Carlton was a heavily-built black man, who, Nilsen claims, was repeatedly beaten by the prison guards.
On one occasion, it was apparently just because he was listening to Bob Marley. Nilsen vividly describes the guards’ language: ‘Don’t you play that fucking jungle music in here, you black cunt.’ When the prison doctor came to do his rounds on the medical wing, he allegedly ignored Carlton’s injuries. Carlton was eventually committed to Broadmoor. Before he left, he thanked Nilsen for not blanking him. It was written on a Mother’s Day card and Nilsen included it in the papers he gave Masters.
Nilsen enjoyed acting protectively – and, probably, domineeringly – towards weaker inmates like Carlton. Some were very grateful for his support and assistance. Peter Jay told me that, when he and Geoff Chambers travelled over to complete their final interviews, they were surprised to see other prisoners come up behind Nilsen and slap him on the back. It appears that, in particular, Nilsen helped others write letters to their girlfriends or lawyers.
Mostly, however, Nilsen was a nuisance to all around him. The governor, A J Pearson, told him one day that after all he had done, he had a cheek going on about prisoners’ rights. But Nilsen could only see the hypocrisy on the other side. To him, the authorities were punishing people by breaking the law themselves. His chapter on his spell on remand is replete with accusations of beatings, the forced administration of drugs such as chloropromazine (an anti-psychotic), and placing prisoners naked in what he referred to as ‘strip cells’ in the ‘punishment block’.
As a prisoner on remand, Nilsen was given an allowance of 88p a week. He was allowed to supplement this with his own money, but since he had resigned from the Civil Service (to spare them any embarrassment, apparently), he had no salary. Nilsen’s main outgoing was tobacco. As a lifelong chain-smoker, he’d been so concerned about running out in prison; the day he arrived he’d switched to roll-ups. Cigarettes and writing materials were Nilsen’s necessities. When he could access money, it would be spent on newspapers and batteries for his small radio.
Dennis Nilsen may have had some friends among weaker prisoners, but a significant number objected to his very presence there; some because of what he had allegedly done, but others just disliked his aloof personality. One of Nilsen’s lowest moments in the pre-trial period came when the prison governor banned him from attending chapel. Despite his atheist beliefs, Nilsen had been a regular visitor to break up the interminable hours spent locked up in his prison hospital cell.
The governor was worried that Nilsen’s presence might cause a disturbance and present a threat to ‘good order and discipline’. That wasn’t how Dennis Nilsen saw i
t. In History of a Drowning Boy, he describes this incident as his ‘expulsion’ from ‘religious activity’. He felt the chaplains should have stood up to the governor and describes them as ‘Christian hypocrites’, and ‘worse than cockroaches’. They were forever ‘crossing to the other side of the road’, like in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The reader is left feeling that what really got to Nilsen was that the Church was meant to be there for all humanity. If it rejected him, what, then, was he?
If the world saw him as a monster, Nilsen’s ‘inner film’ was still working out ways to be the hero of his story. He found it, temporarily, when he fell in love. In between writing his self-admonishing essays, Nilsen had become infatuated with a young psychopath, who was also on remand, called David Martin. They met for short periods in the exercise yard. He was small, effeminate and bisexual. It is possible their relationship may have developed if circumstances had been different. But, as it stood, it was largely one-sided. While Martin seemed initially to enjoy Nilsen’s attention, he was also smitten with an ex-model called Sue Stephens. Eventually, Martin sent a note to Nilsen to stop pestering him. Still, the ‘couple’ was gossiped about in the prison. One warder described them as the ‘copper who liked killing queers with the queer who liked killing coppers’, referring to Nilsen having been a policeman and Martin having shot one of them.
It was easy to see why Nilsen might have been attracted to David Martin. His story read like the plot of a gangster movie. He was a career criminal who had been in and out of prison all his life. Martin had resumed offending in 1981 after an eight-year sentence for fraud. His spree started with a series of burglaries on video stores to get equipment to start an adult movie business. A month later, he raided a gun store in Covent Garden. Finally, in August 1982, he broke into a film-processing laboratory, shooting a policeman in the leg before escaping.
Martin then fled to Spain. While he was away, detectives located his flat. Just as he returned, the flat was being put under surveillance. The only person they saw going in and out, however, was a slim, blonde girl. Then information reached them that Martin himself enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes – they had been watching him all along.
On 15 September, Special Branch waited outside the flat for the ‘blonde with the Adam’s apple’ to return. As armed officers approached him, Martin pulled a gun out of the top of his stockings and pointed it at them. They responded by shooting him in his neck.
Some months later, after he had recovered, Martin escaped from Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, using clips and pins hidden in his long hair to pick the lock. With his fur-coat collar up and a stack of papers in his arms, he then walked out of the building. News of the escape spread over the front pages, and a manhunt was launched.
When Nilsen chatted to Martin in the exercise yard, he discovered just how close he’d been to Martin’s subsequent, dramatic arrest. That their stories might be connected appealed to Nilsen’s sense of romance. In a ten-page sequence, his manuscript describes the last week of January in 1983.
Nilsen had killed Stephen Sinclair on Wednesday, 26 January 1983. The next morning, he says he woke with a hangover, but still felt ok to do a normal day’s work. When he got back, he spent some time admiring Sinclair’s naked body and then he decided to go for an evening’s drinking at the fashionable, gay-friendly, King William IV pub in Hampstead.
Half an hour before Nilsen had arrived at the ‘King Willy’, Martin had been arrested in Hampstead Tube station. One of the regulars at the bar was talking about how the police had shut the Tube station down. But Nilsen says at the time he was more interested in where he might find some action. He decided to move to the Sir Richard Steele pub near Belsize Park Tube just down the road. The police were there, too. Nilsen asked what was going on; the constable replied they had arrested a dangerous criminal.
Later, Nilsen got a cab back. He describes getting home and letting the dog out into the garden downstairs. Then he went up to his room, lifted Sinclair’s dead body up and placed him in the chair in the next room. Filling his glass, and turning on the tape player, he turned to the dead man. Without any apparent shame or embarrassment, Nilsen recalls saying to him, ‘You’re a lot better off than the poor bastard they’ve got down the Tube station.’
Although Dennis Nilsen and David Martin served remand time together in the summer of 1983, they became separated that autumn when Martin was moved from Brixton to Parkhurst. Suddenly, Nilsen felt isolated. Impulsively, he wrote to Martin’s solicitor, Ralph Haeems, to see if he might represent them both. Any contact, he decided, was better than none.
Retaining Haeems as solicitor was not simply a romantic gesture by Nilsen – it was also a shrewd choice. Haeems had no qualms about representing notorious clients, frequently with favourable results. He was himself a colourful, unconventional character. Although brought up in Bombay, Haeems later relocated to London’s East End, and he was Jewish. During his career he acted for the Krays, defended clients in the Brink’s-Mat robbery and helped acquit a convicted paedophile, Russell Bishop, of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ killings. If ever there was a man to find a way to mitigate what Nilsen had already admitted to, it was surely Ralph Haeems.
By the time he appointed his new legal adviser, Nilsen had dismissed and re-appointed the previous solicitor, Ronald Moss, three times. In between these periods of appointment, he even tried to represent himself. Nilsen’s dismissals of Moss always sprang from the same complaint – he felt that his lawyer simply wouldn’t help him stand up to a prison regime, which he felt repressed and bullied him. He wanted Moss to give him legal help to put an end to what he saw as the intolerable conditions of the hospital wing, and the ‘solitary confinement’ that inevitably resulted from his own efforts to square up to the strictures of life inside.
Above all, Nilsen objected to the ‘monster’ tag that everybody seemed to apply to him. Did no one appreciate the psychological complexities of a case like his, he would ask himself. One afternoon, he became so frustrated, he started tearing up his case papers. The act of tearing up the papers landed Nilsen another spell in an isolation unit for behaving ‘irrationally’ or, as the doctors on the unit might have considered, to safeguard his own safety.
After appointing Haeems, things initially went well. Nilsen eventually, however, became disenchanted. By the end of their relationship, he would describe Haeems as the sort of man who had a ‘tax-deductible heart’. Some months earlier, he became convinced Haeems briefed friends in Fleet Street about current cases. This was doubly intolerable. Nilsen felt that if his solicitor kept such company, the least he could do was lean on them to tell the world how badly Dennis Nilsen was being treated. He felt he was doing a better job of that himself.
There had been two incidents over the summer of 1983 when Nilsen got a story in the papers, and he considered both a success. In May, Nilsen wrote to the Guardian newspaper, complaining that he had been misrepresented when Alan Rusbridger’s column had claimed he’d been a member of the Social Democratic Party. Nilsen pointed out that he was a socialist rather than a liberal, and that he’d never joined any party in his life. In fact, when asked to tick a box on his union forms, it had always been ‘independent radical’.
And then there was the ‘Chamberpot Incident’. At the end of the summer, Nilsen decided to show those around him that he would not stand for the inhuman conditions under which he was being kept. It had all started when Nilsen’s objections to the conditions of remand had resurfaced. He had threatened to protest against the way he, a man who had not yet stood trial, had to wear the clothes of a prisoner, by walking around naked. The response from the warders had been to tell Nilsen to remain in his cell. This, in turn, then had prevented him from being able to ‘slop out’. The faeces and urine built up in his pot to the point where the pot was overflowing with effluent. Determined to win the stand-off, on the evening of 1 August, Nilsen shouted ‘stand clear’ and threw the contents through the bars and out of the cell on to the landing. Se
veral guards were hit and they retaliated robustly. In the ensuing scuffle, Nilsen lost a tooth, picked up a black eye, and earned himself 56 days in solitary confinement.
During Nilsen’s nine months on remand, his only regular visitor was author Brian Masters. The resulting study, Killing for Company, would go on to win the 1985 Gold Dagger crime writing award. Such a close relationship between author and criminal reminded some critics of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, his celebrated study on the perpetrators of the Clutter family murders in Kansas. Masters’ observational dynamic was, indeed, so unusual, it later became the subject of a BBC documentary, Monochrome Man.
Brian Masters grew up in a prefabricated house on London’s Old Kent Road, where his sickly, hunchbacked mother and ineffectual father had been housed after the war. Prospects for children like him, he says in his autobiography Getting Personal were limited. However, he was determined to better himself. One episode at school changed the course of his life. Looking to win a prize for best school project, Masters wrote to the acerbic TV personality Gilbert Harding, asking to interview him. Harding agreed to the request and afterwards invited his young interviewer to tea. Later, he made it his business to educate the ambitious lad. Masters is very clear that his motives were entirely genuine.