by Russ Coffey
Harding’s mentoring helped Masters earn a place at Cardiff University, where he ended up with first-class honours in French Literature. He built on this by writing studies on Sartre and Camus. In his thirties, he moved on to biographies about British royalty. One on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was particularly well received.
In his early forties, Masters was interested in understanding the extreme possibilities of human behaviour. He read about the Nilsen case over breakfast one morning in his west London home. As he got to the end of the third page of revelations about the murders, he read a line about Nilsen enjoying reading Shakespeare. He wondered if this might be the opportunity he was looking for to study someone at the farthest end of the human spectrum. Towards the end of March, and ignorant of the protocol about writing to prisoners, Masters wrote a letter addressed to Nilsen c/o Brixton Prison. In it, he asked if he might want to co-operate with a book project. He also included a copy one of his previous biographies.
Although he knew he’d given the introduction his best shot, the author was only half expecting a reply. What he received on 30 March was truly chilling. The first line read, ‘Dear Mr Masters, I pass the burden of my past actions on to your shoulders.’
Authors in England are not, in fact, allowed to contact prisoners on remand unless express permission is given. Masters’ initial letter had slipped past the prison censor. When the correct procedure had been explained, Masters then contacted Nilsen’s solicitor at the time, Ronnie Moss, a cheerful man whom he describes as looking more like a publican than a solicitor. Moss helped him make the correct application to the authorities concerning the writing project.
Meanwhile, he was given a one-off visiting order to meet Nilsen as a friend. On 20 April, they met in Brixton’s noisy visitors’ room. From what he had read, Masters was expecting a nervy, introspective man only comfortable expressing himself on paper. He was surprised to find in Dennis Nilsen a tall, imposing figure, ‘bristling with confidence’.
Shortly after the meeting, the Home Office gave Masters the green light to carry on with his visits. This worried DCI Jay and DCS Chambers. Their investigation was still ongoing and they were concerned Masters’ influence might affect Nilsen’s attitude and co-operation. They also doubted Masters had the stomach for what he was about to undertake.
He was therefore summoned to the station where they showed photographs of what they had found in the flat. The portfolio included gruesome pictures of Sinclair. In his own memoirs, Masters describes ‘the lips boiled away, the eyes soft and gluey, and the hair drifting to one side’, as examples of the sort of images he would never be able to forget. But these pictures also confirmed to him that here was a unique opportunity to explore the reality of evil.
Masters was not used to handling criminals. His recent subjects had been members of the aristocracy. But, whether by design or default, his approach turned out to be the key to open Nilsen. Masters just went ahead as normal and the prisoner responded with lengthy answers.
Nilsen would later tell me that the reason he had been so candid was because Masters was ‘all there was’, implying that if he had had any alternative outlet, he might have taken it instead. In truth, Masters was both a skilful interviewer and a sincere man. Nilsen also appears to have hoped that his sensitivity would also enable him to understand one crucial aspect to his character: his sexuality.
Increasingly, Nilsen let his guard down. It wasn’t just the crimes he spoke about. He issued a stream of thoughts on his entire existence. One letter to Masters listed all the roles he had played in his life: schoolboy, soldier, chef, projectionist, policeman, clerical officer, executive officer, drunk, sexualist (male and female), murderer, animal lover, independent trades union officer, debater, champion of social causes, do-gooder, dissector of murder victims, grand vizier, and probably ‘lifer’. He went on to speculate that if there were a God, what a strange set of ‘priorities’ he must have had for him.
The more Nilsen opened up, the more friends and even the Crown’s trial psychiatrist, Paul Bowden, warned Masters that Nilsen might be manipulating him. Bookish and dapper, Brian Masters didn’t look much like a match for someone like Dennis Nilsen. Masters, however, felt equal to all of Nilsen’s games. He was, though, very aware he would need to play detective to find out the truth.
It wasn’t just a case of judging what to believe but also finding the words to describe the drama of a man struggling to process a spree of 15 murders. His thoughts are given in a chapter called ‘Remand’. Here, Nilsen’s moods are described as a ‘kaleidoscope … shifting from elation to gloom, from resignation to despair, from regret about the past to hope for the future’.
During the remaining months before the trial, Masters visited twice a week. Throughout this period, Nilsen wrote his thoughts and biographical reminiscences daily in prison exercise books (he would also carry on writing after the trial). Under the agreement Masters had with the prison and Home Office, he was allowed to use anything Nilsen had written but nothing from the face-to-face meetings. He even had to sign a formal undertaking to that effect.
Soon, Brian Masters started to experience what appeared to be Nilsen’s fierce loyalty. At first, it seemed like one of his impulsive friendships. Eventually, however, he decided it was mainly an obsession with principles. During the summer, some prisoners suggested to Nilsen that Masters was a ‘plant’ for one of the tabloid newspapers. It made him extremely angry. He felt Masters was now his friend and an attack on the author was an attack on him. As the rumours grew, he responded by sulking and refusing to talk to his solicitor. This protest seemed childish.
Nilsen seemed confused by his own emotions. In one notebook, he described them as ‘the most toxic substances known to man’. His words match, remarkably, a profile of ‘covert schizoid personality’ described by the psychiatrist Dr Salman Akhtar. Such people are characterised as being, amongst other things: cynical, grandiose, sensitive, creative, voyeuristic, amoral, autistic, hungry for love and envious of others’ spontaneity. Nilsen wrote it must be a ‘wonderful gift’ to ‘throw your arms around someone and just weep’. At that moment, he seemed to accept that, for much of his life, normal emotions had been beyond him.
More usually Nilsen presented the impression that he was convinced he had now returned to ‘normal’. Of course, it was odd that he felt so little sadness for his victims, but he didn’t feel there was essentially anything wrong with him. Yet whenever he put pen to paper, the results inevitably showed him to be disconnected from his crimes. Most strikingly, there were a series of drawings of his last victim, Sinclair. These ‘Sad Sketches’ were accurately drawn renditions of how his remains appeared after they had been dismembered. They were accompanied by notes recounting how he had cut up the corpse. Masters described them as being drawn with ‘energy and pride’, and ‘an odd kind of perverse affection’.
As 24 October 1983 – the date set for the trial – drew closer, Nilsen’s mood swings seemed more extreme than ever. One moment he could be cheery and, minutes later, he seemed tortured. ‘I go through a personal hell each day,’ he says in Killing for Company.
The divisions within him in the run up to the trial were, however, still consistent with a personality that was under pressure but basically working. That impulsive infatuation with Martin, the sudden friendships in the exercise yard, the erratic defence strategy and the compulsive writing may simply have been him coming to terms with being a murderer. His behaviour even reminded Masters occasionally of Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s motiveless killer whose reflections are the subject of the classic novel, Crime and Punishment.
Nilsen even said that he hoped if he accepted all blame, maybe he could look the parents of victim Ken Ockendon in the eye. Of all his victims, Ockendon was the most inexplicable. Nilsen had met the 23-year-old Canadian tourist in a pub one lunchtime. The young man had a loving family and probably wasn’t homosexual. The two of them had enjoyed an entire day together. Nilsen had seemed genuinely confused
as to why he had killed him. In order to atone for what he had done, he told Masters he wanted to accept any punishment the law prescribed and some more besides.
Eventually, however, he seems to have changed his mind. Nilsen pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility. On 3 November, the 12 men and women of the jury were initially unable to agree whether there might be something sufficiently wrong with Nilsen’s brain to mitigate his actions. The next day, however, a majority verdict was accepted, and Dennis Nilsen was a guilty and an evil man.
During the trial, which is the main focus of Chapter 10, Nilsen had tried to convince the outside world of the context of the crimes. Once that failed, he felt had only his own writing to fall back on. In his letter to me, he stated, ‘I explain but do not excuse. We are not talking about studious “evil” but human inadequacy. Men will admit to potent criminality or controlling powerful “villainy” but never “inadequacy”. My crimes flowed from personal inadequacy developed over a lengthy period. It was a desperate possessive “aggression”, almost spiritually passive in the motive and heat of expression.’
The evening following his life sentencing – with a minimum of 25 years to serve –Dennis Nilsen was in the hospital wing of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, and appeared utterly despondent. One of the orderlies let him watch TV. Nilsen says in History of a Drowning Boy that he sat blankly in front of it, considering his position: ‘The world that I looked at on the TV was not the world that I had known before… Everything had changed drastically and I now felt like a ghost looking at an alien world of flesh and blood people. With an endless sentence ahead of me, I felt that I had been expelled from society for ever more.’
4
OLD KIT BAG
‘The Army gave me an education, a trade, and the key to travel to other worlds. The north-east of Scotland was no place for a young, gay man.’
DENNIS NILSEN, IN A LETTER TO THE AUTHOR
Nilsen’s memoirs focus hard on his childhood and life in London for answers to his behaviour. But neither begin to explain how he could have set out one night in 1978 for the pub, and then woke up the next morning a murderer. Thousands have worse childhoods than Nilsen, and almost as many young men deal with alienation through casual pickups and excessive drinking. But, if Nilsen’s raking over his first 30 years raises as many questions as answers, it does show when his mental abnormalities developed most uniquely. That was in the 11 years he spent in the Army. Nilsen’s accounts of his inner life during this period make for chilling reading. Ironically, it was a time when he was never short of company, structure or normality.
In the Army, Nilsen travelled the world, learnt a trade and had responsibility. But he also became used to death, felt sexually ashamed and became accustomed to knocking his consciousness into submission through drink. Most disturbingly, he developed sexual fantasies that started with partners who were totally passive, then those who were unconscious, and finally involved the dead.
There was nothing particularly sinister in his make-up, however, when he alighted on Aldershot station platform in September 1961. He was not yet 16, quite tall, physically weak, enthusiastic and immature. As a boy soldier, Nilsen was posted to ‘V’ squad, along with 20 others of the same age. Aldershot was then a large garrison town on the Surrey–Hampshire border, surrounded by woodland and close to the stockbroker belt. Virtually the entire town was given over to the Army, and squaddies filled the local bars and canteens. This was still the pre-Beatles era and Elvis played on the jukebox for the whole of that year. In the nearby genteel market towns of Farnham and Guildford, wealthy commuters tutted when they saw young soldiers visiting their towns but, back in Aldershot, Nilsen and his companions saw a role model on every street corner. And being in such a densely military environment encouraged the youngsters. Together, they learnt discipline and drill, and all the other things the Army does to turn young lads into men.
Nilsen, in particular, says he became friendly with three of the boys: Brian Bacher, Chris Innerd and Eric ‘Tabs’ Talbot. Some of Nilsen’s happiest memories were of the three of them and their adventures. In 1962, they travelled to Cornwall and Devon together for the ‘Ten Tors’ competitive hike on Exmoor as part of their physical training. But Nilsen was unable to finish due to his weak legs, and he vowed he would never let this happen again. Soon, he started to show an aptitude for cross-country running. But no amount of ‘manning up’ seemed to be able to rid him of his homosexual thoughts. The tightly scheduled days might have kept them at bay for a while, but there was nothing he could do about the nights.
Nor was there anything he wanted to do. Nilsen’s dreams became a comfort to him; he seems to have gone as far as trying to plan them in advance. There is one he still remembers vividly today. It was benign and involved him and a friend lying warm and naked under a fur blanket in a cabin while a blizzard blew outside. In contrast to most of Nilsen’s later sexual experiences which rarely got beyond the physical, in this fantasy he cherished a sense of togetherness. Still, it wasn’t an equal relationship; Nilsen enjoyed the thought of a submissive partner he could protect. It was the two of them against the world. He wrote in History of a Drowning Boy: ‘We would stay there in warm comfort together forever. We never talked in the dreams. We would get up occasionally to eat food silently before a blazing fire. We would listen to the outside world on the radio. It was bliss, naked under these furs, in each other’s arms and the soft smoothness of his skin against mine. Strangely, we never fucked in these dreams. Very odd.’
The boys in this fantasy always had to conform to a certain androgynous physical type. Other than that, they could be of any race. Nilsen loathed racism in all forms and was determined never to discriminate. Here, in the parade squares of Aldershot, Nilsen says that around him in the 500-strong regiment he was disconcerted that he could only see ‘one Indian and no blacks’. He comments that it upset him whenever he heard ‘nigger’ jokes. Nilsen found black men attractive but oriental men were his favourite: ‘I did, however, develop certain sexual, physical preferences in my males. I liked smooth men. Hairy men were a complete sexual turn off for me. I liked Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos; in fact, any type as long as they were smooth-skinned. Fat and well-muscled males, again, were a complete sexual turn off. I suspect that my attraction to Orientals has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of them display the characteristics of boys.’
Photographs from this period show an excited young man in round glasses and a smart green jumper getting on with the various activities of barrack life. He was healthy and well-disciplined and as happy ‘packing’ beds and scrubbing floors as any 16-year-old might be expected to be. After a year-and-a-half, Nilsen was made a junior corporal, and put in charge of a dorm of younger boys. There was one half-Dutch boy that he took a particular shine to. One day, Nilsen found him in his bed space crying. Nilsen claims that he wanted to put his arms around him and talk to him like ‘Mum’, but that wasn’t ‘what big, tough corporals did’.
Nilsen, however, was hardly considered a big, tough corporal – although his colleague, Eric Talbot, in a television interview remembered him occasionally trying to impress by trying to throw his weight around.
Nilsen was, in fact, extremely insecure. He remembers his biggest fear on arriving at Aldershot being the prospect of the communal showers. He thought that his genitals might be smaller than everyone else’s and, more importantly, he might start to get an erection at the sight of other naked bodies. There was a rumour that when this had happened before, other boys had responded by ‘shoving a broomstick up his arse’. In the end, the showers proved nothing to worry about.
There was still, however, plenty in his behaviour that some found odd. Some would laugh about his stupid grin or the fact he seemed prudish about girlie magazines. Yet to others he was just normal and quiet. Dusty Payne, a platoon sergeant, couldn’t believe it when he saw the news in 1983. Could this really be the Dennis Nilsen he’d known in the 1960s? Later, after reading articles in the p
apers, there was no mistaking it. He wrote first to the governor at Albany and later to Nilsen. Payne told the governor he remembered Dennis as a reserved lad who performed his job conscientiously and whom he recommended for Junior Sergeant. He also, somewhat surprisingly, thought he remembered Nilsen’s mother visiting, and her being a ‘quiet, warm lady’.
Payne thought something drastic must have subsequently happened to Nilsen for his mind to have become so dark. In a letter he wrote to Nilsen’s prison governor, he speculates as to whether it could have been his time serving in Aden. Something, however, was already wrong in Aldershot. On the outside Nilsen may have seemed a ‘loner who did the job to the best of his ability’, but behind his exterior appearance, his ‘inner film’ had now developed into a serious condition. It was threatening to undermine his ability to differentiate between the world as it was and existence as he liked to imagine it. ‘I had two separate lives,’ Nilsen writes in his autobiography, ‘the real life and the fantasy life. When I was with people I was in the “real” world and in my own private life I snapped easily into my fantasy life. I could oscillate from one to the other with instant ease.’
As had been so when he had reached puberty, Nilsen felt as if he were a film director controlling his own imagination. When, after three years, he passed the ‘senior education test’, he was disappointed that he ‘had no one to cheer [him] on except the heroes in [his] mind’. One imagines internally, though, he was imagining a triumphal scene climaxing in the year of 1964 with everyone throwing their berets in the air.
The military exams Nilsen had taken were generally considered to be an equivalent to school O-levels. He ended up with a solid but unremarkable five passes: Maths, English, Map-reading, Current Affairs and Catering Science. Most importantly for his future army career, he also passed the B2 catering exam. And even though Nilsen was to be a cook rather than a soldier, he had still developed well enough physically, completing full training on foot, arms and weapons drills. When, at 18, he took part in the passing-out parade in the summer of 1964, he says he felt ready for ‘the man’s army’.