by Russ Coffey
That summer he went home to Strichen for a brief period of leave. On the second weekend he hired a scooter to go to Fraserburgh to see Granny. He skidded on some mud and hit his head quite badly, but no serious damage was apparent. Nilsen was upbeat, proud to show what he was doing with his life. He eagerly spoke of the excitement of his first posting. This was to be in Osnabruck in north-western Germany. Family members were pleased, if surprised, that the quiet boy writing poetry upstairs had not merely survived life as a cadet but wanted more.
Nilsen, of course, knew his time in Germany was going to be a more rugged adventure than anything he had experienced in the south of England. But he thought it would just be more exciting. So far, the experience of leaving the backwater of Fraserburgh for Aldershot had proved the right thing to do. He had no reason to think that the adult Army would do anything other than further expand his horizons.
Some months before his nineteenth birthday, Nilsen was driven over to Germany in a coach full of young men. The NATO barracks were a large, concrete complex surrounded by fields and woodland just outside Osnabruck’s medieval market town centre. The British Army presence was part of the wider NATO mobilisation in Europe during the Cold War.
Nilsen was attached to the Catering Corps within the Royal Fusiliers. He continued to train as a soldier and practice field manoeuvres, but his working life was focused around cooking in the mess. The team was headed up by the squadron quartermaster sergeant ‘Badger’ Maitland who was quick-witted and hearty. Nilsen admired him, and the fact he liked a drink made him approachable. Likewise, the cooks he worked with were an amiable, ‘hard-working, boozy lot’. Nilsen was soon very taken with the drinking culture. Within the barracks complex there were various bars, with some catering to individual squadrons, while others, like the NAAFI bar, were for everyone. It was much more exciting, however, to go out to the city centre at weekends.
As Nilsen casts his mind back, rather than recalling his work or the intricacies of life in the barracks, he mainly mulls on his socialising. He remembers being someone who drank to ease his shyness but who was still one of the lads. It’s unlikely, however, that others saw him the same way. The testimony of various colleagues indicates he was seen as the squaddie who couldn’t hold his drink, and whose low tolerance, in turn, made him irritating to those around him – especially when Nilsen started to get drunk and spoiled others’ chances with girls.
Dennis Nilsen’s homosexuality was well hidden. Being gay was still far from being tolerated in the Army. Nilsen would therefore follow others to various rough and ready watering holes and pretend to be equally excited about the hunt for girls. One Saturday night, in one of the pubs far from the city centre, Nilsen’s entire squadron were questioned about a shooting in a bar. They had been in the area when a man shot a local taxi driver after an argument. The murderer was Leslie Grantham who would later find fame in the 1980s as ‘Dirty Den’ in the BBC soap opera EastEnders.
Nilsen spent just over two years in northern Germany. As a private, he slept in a ‘bed space’ in a medium-sized dorm. Towards the end of his two years in Germany, dorm inspections were sufficiently relaxed that Nilsen even managed to keep a dog called Rexie. He named it after his first cuddly toy, which he says his mother threw away in a bid to tidy up.
It is while describing his posting to Osnabruck that Nilsen’s memoirs start to change tone. The exuberance and lightness of youth is increasingly replaced by descriptions of his dark, fantasy life. Often the lines between reality and desires seem blurred. This was particularly so one Sunday morning, when Nilsen says he woke up to find himself passed out on top of a mattress with a fat, young German called Hans. They were in a flat on the outskirts of town. Nilsen assumes that they had just passed out in the same room after a night’s drinking. He spent the next day, however, imagining that the man had interfered with him.
It pleased him to think that he might have been abused while totally passed out: ‘My mind thrilled at the thought of this fat German undressing and fondling me,’ he says. The fact the other man was fat and ugly accentuated Nilsen’s desire to feel androgynous. He desperately wanted some sexual activity to have happened. While he was working, he would daydream about scenarios where a sex-starved young squaddie might try to relieve some sexual tension with him. And how much more likely would that have been to occur than if he was out cold and passive? This, in turn, led to him pretending when he was out drinking to pass out in the hope that someone would carry him home and take pleasure in his body.
Nilsen’s strange behaviour when drunk eventually also got him into fist fights. He is careful to avoid discussion of these in his memoirs. They are, however, recorded in his army record, including one particular all-day drinking session which ended up with him getting into a fight which later required medical attention. Nilsen does, however, describe one incident he was ashamed of. It involved his dog Rexie, and was like a watered-down version of his earlier story about killing the cat. One afternoon, he says, he placed the dog on top of his locker and terrified her by growling, just to see her cower. He describes seeing her fear which ‘excited a frisson of power’ within him. Eventually, she fell off the locker and cut herself on his bed. At that point, the cruel mood broke and he says he remembers starting to cry with guilt.
In January 1967, Nilsen was informed of a new posting. It was in Aden in the Gulf of Arabia, now part of the state of Yemen. This British Protectorate had found itself in a state of emergency after a series of terrorist attacks from Islamic extremists. A decade or so since the Suez crisis, Britain was now considering whether the time had come to leave the port of Aden. If the time had almost come to leave, however, Harold Wilson’s Government didn’t want the action of anti-colonial terrorists to be the trigger.
Fuelled by increasingly radical Islamic fervour, the rebels became more and more obsessive. Just as in modern-day Afghanistan, troops operated in near-impossible heat and difficult terrain against a fanatical opposition. Nilsen describes being flown over in a VC10 airliner. When he arrived in Arabia, it was like ‘walking into the blast of a baker’s oven’. He thought the terrorists seemed in complete disarray with ‘everyone intent on killing everyone else’ and ‘the only point of agreement being killing the English’.
Nilsen’s kitchen served the Military Provost Staff Corps. They were in charge of detainees at the Al Mansoura Prison. The prison was a walled fort, with a disused gallows guarded by gun towers. The town of Al Mansoura is now a suburb of Aden City. At that time it was a warren of low-rise, breeze-block buildings with a single road running through them. It was situated five miles from the city and port of Aden. The military complex was basic and functional. Unlike the tented townships that made up other military bases, however, the barracks here were buildings built out of red clay. Their colour merged in with the surrounding desert.
On active service, even the cooks were required to take full part in the patrolling. As Nilsen walked the dusty roads, he says he would see dead bodies casually discarded by the roadside. He says he didn’t find anything exciting in the ‘shot-up mechanics of death’ while also pointing out he didn’t like to think of attractive male bodies spoiled. The way he talks suggests those bodies didn’t excite him, but they certainly helped desensitise him to the reality of death. He started to become very blasé about his own safety, volunteering for dangerous patrols and, when off duty, drinking copiously before wandering off on his own. It was an impulse he didn’t understand.
One afternoon, while off duty at the Steamer Point army base, near the old city, Nilsen decided to hitch-hike his way the few miles to Al Mansoura. He was picked up by a lorry, which then drove straight through terrorist-ridden areas. Nilsen says that although he was wearing his ‘civvies’, there could be no mistaking what he was. He thinks the only reason he survived may have been because the rebels assumed that he was part of a set-up.
Yet he says he was excited by the experience. Again, he offers no explanation as to why the line between life and d
eath was so thrilling. It is likely, however, that being in a conflict zone had reawakened his childhood fascination with death and sex. It is also likely that Nilsen can’t fully remember what did and didn’t happen. The whole experience of being in Aden was so different from anything a young British soldier might have experienced; it would surely have had a dreamlike quality. Nilsen’s imagination would have amplified that. Even the geography would have appeared fantastical. The city of Aden nestled in a volcanic crater connected to the mainland by an isthmus. Zealots who looked like they had come straight out of a film lived in a harsh desert, further inland.
Nilsen liked to re-imagine one incident over and over again. It was even cited at his trial as an example of his difficulty in separating fact and fantasy. The event occurred one Friday evening when Nilsen had gone with others to cool down in the Oasis bar in Aden city. After a night’s drinking, and unsteady on his feet, he decided to hail a cab back. He says he did so casually, as if ‘in the West End of London’, not ‘somewhere where any Westerner was likely to be killed’. In the back, full of rum and beer, he passed out on the leatherette seat.
Suddenly, he felt a violent blow to the back of his neck. Nilsen passed out. When he came to, he was naked in the boot with his clothes in a pile beside him. The cool metal was pressing into his body. Outside, someone was turning the lock. Nilsen felt a sense of detachment. As soon as the boot was opened, he says he hit the ugly, old taxi driver with a jack. The man slumped to the ground, motionless. He took the man’s clothes and ran for it.
Whatever happened, it certainly wasn’t as described. The reasons for Nilsen’s confusion between reality and imagination in this particular story, however, become clear in his autobiography. This incident was part of the same developing fantasy theme as the ‘Fat Hans’ scenario. Some kind of altercation probably did happen in that taxi, but Nilsen wanted it to have been much more unpleasant than it was. He wanted to imagine he had been stripped by an old man and interfered with. He wanted sex, and for it to be close to an experience of death.
Another far-fetched story does, however, contain a greater ring of authenticity. Again, it involved the line between life and death. Nilsen occasionally drank with one particular private who was full of stories and enjoyed impressing his colleagues. One afternoon, during a quiet period, the private told Nilsen he had something interesting to show him. He led him through a set of doors, which gave out into a large courtyard; in the middle stood a fully operational gallows. The private’s job was to perform routine maintenance. Although unused, it was kept in working order.
Fascinated, Nilsen climbed the scaffold. His friend shouted up that if you supported your body weight with your arms on the rope, you could probably put the noose around your neck and drop down the trap-door. He was half joking, but that, though, was exactly what Nilsen did. He pulled the noose over his neck and then took the weight and dangled over the open hole. ‘I was buzzing with fear and excitement … my eyes drawn to the gaping hole of eternity,’ he says. His friend rushed up the steps, frightened that Nilsen’s arms weren’t strong enough. But as he reached him, Nilsen had swung back onto the platform and was grinning.
By June 1967, Nilsen was posted further round the Gulf to what is now known as the United Arab Emirates. Then, they were called the Trucial States, an area where the British had signed a truce with the local sheikhs. Nilsen was to be the head of kitchen at the Trucial Oman Scouts officers’ mess at Sharjah. Oil had just been struck in nearby Dubai and money was starting to flow into the area. The TOS was a British paramilitary outfit intended to keep order in various protectorates and Sheikdoms across the Gulf. Life in Sharjah couldn’t have been more different from the posting in Aden. It was like going from hell to a holiday. Around him, Nilsen saw people wearing distinctive patterned Arab head-dresses. They reminded him of scenes from Lawrence of Arabia, one of his favourite films.
Dennis Nilsen was finally able to relax. Agreeable evenings were spent drinking with servicemen and ex-pats. This was also where Nilsen experienced his first significant sexual experience. It was with one of the teenage Arab boys assigned to clean the officers’ rooms. These ‘bearers’ had the responsibility of tidying the rooms, washing and cleaning kit. Nilsen alleges that some had got into the habit of providing sexual favours in return for money to take back to their impoverished families. If it stretches the imagination to suppose such practice was rife, it’s not totally implausible they occasionally happened.
Now that Nilsen was an NCO Corporal, he had his own room. One evening, after bringing in some laundry, a boy of about 14 lingered. Nilsen says his nerves and inexperience almost resulted in him walking out. But just as the boy was turning around, the corporal realized what was going on and urged him to stay. With sentimental hyperbole, Nilsen describes their sexual liaison in History of a Drowning Boy. He said he felt ‘wedded to him’ and thinks the boy didn’t really want money because he felt the same way, too: ‘He enquired, “You like nice boy?” My brain was playing the “Hallelujah Chorus”. I stretched out my hand. “Come over here,” I intoned, and patted the bed. He did as I had bidden and I took one of his hands in mine. I placed his hand on the hard, straining, 7in baton clearly shaped through my jeans … he lay on his back and looked up at me with those deep-brown, doe-like eyes.’
Nilsen claims to have had sex with the boy (although elsewhere he claims he didn’t actually have full sex until the age of 27) and that he was the active partner. Whether or not this was an exaggeration, Nilsen probably did have his first homosexual experience in Arabia with a teenage boy prostitute.
The way he talks about the months that followed indicate a change. He had suddenly become enlivened to the possibility he might yet be a sexual being. Now, when Nilsen went to the Carlton Hotel in Dubai, he did so feeling homosexually experienced and grown up. This bolstered his ego, which, in turn, helped him to believe that the oil executives sipping on their Martinis were eying him up as a rent boy. He thought this was a bloody cheek and switched to the Royal Flying Kunjah Club, where he fell in with a group of heavy drinkers. Nilsen describes them as ‘kindred rebel spirits’. He was particularly fond of a young man nicknamed ‘Smithy’. When the Combined Services Entertainment flew in Harry Secombe, Mike Yarwood and Dickie Henderson, Nilsen remembers sitting next to him. They enjoyed the impersonations of Mike Yarwood, and found Harry Secombe’s gooning around hilarious, but Nilsen became upset when Henderson came on and started singing the song ‘Love and Marriage’ with the words ‘John and Mary, John and Mary … she’s a lesbian and he’s a fairy …’
The following week, Smithy fell off his Land Rover and died. The incident added to an array of psychologically volatile factors. That this was all happening against a backdrop that only seemed half real may well have made things worse. In front of him, life was quickly and easily turning to death. Many of those lives were of young men with whom Nilsen wanted a forbidden intimacy. He was driven to ever deeper secrets and, the more private his fantasies, the more they skewed off at tangents.
If one single event could be said to have led to Nilsen’s later desire to possess dead bodies, it almost certainly happened one afternoon in Sharjah. This is the first indication we get in Nilsen’s manuscript that his internal life had moved from disturbing gay fantasies to abnormal, paraphilic, sexual fixations.
Nilsen’s room had a lock and he had got into the habit of using it to ensure total privacy while he spent afternoons masturbating in the nude. Sometimes, he would admire himself in the mirror while doing so. One day, he realized, using the free-standing mirror, he could create an effect whereby he could visually ‘split’ his personality such that it felt he was enjoying a sexual act with another man. This was narcissism in a very specific sense, Nilsen writes: ‘It was a very large mirror and I came to over-admiring myself in it … I would become aroused by my relaxed body … I imagined someone (the mirror’s view) looking at me and lusting after my body. In fact, I was lusting over my own body.’
The
next step in the ritual was lying on the bed while positioning himself so that his head was no longer visible. He, the watcher, was one person, the passive reflection another. As the watcher, he would play one role: ‘The man dominating the body had no face but he was always a dirty, grey-haired, old man.’ The boy in the mirror was a smooth, passive ‘victim’. This, too, would be Nilsen. As he developed this fantasy, he would take turns in playing both roles. The fantasies again derived from experiences like the Fat Hans/Arab taxi driver incidents. All future fantasies would also follow the same pattern of an older, powerful, brutal individual dominating a young, smooth, lifeless body.
Over the course of the summer, the fantasies escalated. Nilsen remembers one, in particular, frightening him. It was a scene imagined to be in the Second World War and again involved an old Arab. The other body now was not merely passive – it was an attractive, blond, young Nazi soldier who’d been recently killed. In his imagination, before the Arab finally has sex with the dead boy’s body, he washes and carries it, just as Nilsen would later do with the men he killed. The fantasy ended with the old man having full sex with the dead body. Nilsen says he ‘loosened his hold on the boy’s back and legs and his naked form flopped askew in limp rest, still impaled on the man, spread-eagled in pure lust’.
The worse Nilsen’s private sex fantasies became, the more psychologically isolated he also found himself. His internal world was so far removed from anything that he could possibly ever talk about, he had no problem walking out of his room with an innocent expression. As such, none of Nilsen’s colleagues had any reason to suspect that when Corporal Nilsen came out of his room he had been doing anything other than taking an afternoon nap.