by Russ Coffey
In January 1985, Nilsen received an advance copy of Killing for Company. He devotes 10 pages of History of a Drowning Boy to his analysis. The first thing he disliked about it was the title. He’d wanted The Case of Dennis Nilsen, which, of course, would have given him star billing. His opinions on the contents were more ambiguous, but still generally just as negative. On the one hand, he says the book was ‘the only serious study on my aberrant actions’; on the other, he calls it ‘another Monster book, cloaked in learned technique’.
By using a straightforward biographical style, Masters had made his starting point not a criminal phenomenon, but rather a human being who had done evil things. That his biographer didn’t simply assume he was subhuman had initially pleased Nilsen. But by the time he had got to the end of the book, he became extremely indignant that Masters seemed to conclude that Nilsen was not really fit to sit alongside other human beings.
In particular, Nilsen picked up on the little details; one was Masters’ speculation that he would happily butter his morning toast while there was a head boiling on the stove. In his typically literal way, Nilsen is quick to point out that the actual truth was that he lived on takeaways.
Another line that Nilsen particularly objected to was one that appeared in Masters’ conclusion: ‘It is Nilsen’s invulnerability to the squalor of human remains that makes him finally unrecognizable.’ Nilsen argues that because he would sometimes be sick when cutting up bodies he could not have been immune to the presence of rotting flesh. But he also partially contradicts this by questioning why people are so concerned by what he did to the dead bodies. The wicked thing, he says, was to kill. A corpse, on the other hand, can’t feel.
There are also passages in History of a Drowning Boy that indicate prisoner B62006 may also, partly, have been positively emotionally affected by someone having taken an interest in him. One sentence stands out as a fleeting sign of warmth: ‘I like Brian very much, with all his faults and weaknesses and I hope he feels the same towards me.’
By late 1985, neither Nilsen nor Masters could quite seem to work out their attitudes to the other. Masters was still visiting Nilsen and had also become a friend to his mother. He told me he could have just ‘dropped’ Nilsen after the book, but what would that have said about him? The situation he now found himself in, he reasoned, surely carried responsibilities. But after publication of the book, Masters’ public pronouncements on Nilsen appeared to become stronger, as if he felt he needed to emphasise the full horror of what he had done. That, at least, was how it seemed to Nilsen. When Prisoner B62006 heard Masters on the radio or saw newspaper articles he had written, he became more and more resentful. He later expressed it to me with one of his soundbites: ‘I’m afraid to pick up the phone,’ he wrote, ‘in case I get the answerphone saying, “Please speak after the high moral tone.”’
Most of the reviews of Killing for Company applauded the skill with which Masters had handled the difficult balance to be struck. There was one dissenting voice – author Gordon Burn, writing for Time Out, felt that the many lengthy extracts from Nilsen’s writings were tantamount to giving Nilsen a mouthpiece. He described Nilsen and Masters as being ‘in business’; Nilsen had provided the story, he felt, and Masters had retired to the library to write it up without much further research. Such comments may have under-appreciated the skill and experience with which Masters rendered the material. But there was still, however, a danger that readers would simply read the extracts of Nilsen’s writing and ignore the commentary. This was especially true because in the written word, and then through subsequent editing, Nilsen was more persuasive and articulate than he ever had been face to face.
Burn went on to write a highly acclaimed book on the Yorkshire Ripper case called Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. Brian Masters later found a point of comparison to his study of Nilsen with that of the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (arrested in 1991). They were both gay men of a similar age, who lured back other gay men. A letter Nilsen wrote to Masters on the case, and the psychology behind such gay sex crimes, ended up in a piece the latter wrote for Vanity Fair.
By 1986, Nilsen was becoming militant about his sexuality. Now that AIDS had hit the public agenda, he wanted to campaign for gay rights in prison. He had even taken to walking around with a pink triangle sewn on to his uniform. It was a form of protest to allow condoms to be made freely available. When this went largely unnoticed, Nilsen wrote to the authorities. They replied that gay acts were contrary to ‘good order and discipline’. Nilsen passed his observations over to the magazine Gay Times, including a comment from the authorities that the idea that prisoners could buy condoms with their own money was both ridiculous and offensive. Despite the source, the magazine felt that the issue of AIDS in prison deserved a mention.
And although Nilsen’s crimes were against the gay community, letters written to him show that some gay men were interested in the idea that his murders might have been born of psychological isolation. During his first decade in prison Nilsen’s mail bag became well-filled. Many letters were from loners who appeared to get some feeling of potency from proximity to a killer. Some were fixated; one teenage girl wrote almost daily. Her letters became increasingly disturbed, with suicide being discussed. Nilsen never replied.
Extraordinarily, one of Nilsen’s previous victims also wrote. His name was Carl Stottor. He was 5ft 11in with long blond hair. When he composed his first letter he was 25, and four years had passed since Nilsen had tried to kill him. During this time, Stottor had suffered from depression and other post-traumatic conditions. Initially, he had thought the trial would bring closure, but it just threw up more questions. The lack of clarity over what exactly had happened, and why, continued to build up, causing ever-increasing emotional pressure.
On 16 February 1986, Stottor decided to ask prisoner B62006, directly, why he had tried to killed him. They exchanged letters over a period of months. I had heard about the correspondence from newspaper cuttings, and decided to track Stottor down. I met him one July afternoon in his flat on the south coast. The man who opened the door was frail, but welcoming. He was glad I had made it down to see him, as so many journalists had written about him without bothering to make the effort to visit. For several hours, and over several pots of tea, Stottor described what he now believes happened.
One Wednesday night, in the summer of 1983, Stottor found himself in the Black Cap in Camden, a gay pub that specialised in drag acts. Stottor was feeling depressed; he had recently run away from a violent boyfriend and still had carpet burns on his face from the last attack. While he drank his lager and lime, and contemplated his life, Stottor’s gaze was drawn to Nilsen, who was chatting to a local at the bar.
After Nilsen’s companion left, he came over and asked Stottor about his face. Stottor immediately noticed his eyes were big and brown. He seemed kind. Nilsen smiled and assured Stottor he was still pretty. Conversation flowed naturally. They soon discovered that both felt alienated from their families. It made Stottor feel Nilsen was someone he could confide in. At closing time, Nilsen suggested that they return to his flat. In the cab back, they held hands.
Although the evening went well, there were still two things that happened before the attack that made Stottor feel uneasy. First, on the way back, Nilsen became furious with the taxi driver about the route, and paid him in the smallest change he had. The second occurred later in the flat. Stottor had been sitting cross-legged on the floor listening to Laurie Anderson’s haunting ‘O Superman’. He said it was his favourite song and Nilsen replied, ‘You haven’t even heard it til you’ve listened to it through these headphones.’ As he listened, he became aware that Nilsen was standing behind him staring at his head.
These, however, were just uncomfortable moments in an otherwise pleasant evening. Stottor hardly cared about the state of the flat, and it didn’t really seem that bad – ‘shabby’, but certainly not the worst he’d been in. The smell was a mixture of wet dog, stale dog food,
cigarette smoke, damp and air fresheners. Stottor was much more interested in his new friend. They drank Bacardi and got drunk and, despite having told Nilsen that he was not up for any kind of sexual activity, they started to kiss and cuddle.
Stottor remembers the petting as normal, and tactile. Then the Bacardi started to take effect, and he was sick. They decided to go to bed, where they cuddled and fondled a little more. Instead of a blanket, Nilsen had an open sleeping bag. Nilsen drew Stottor’s attention to the zip, which had come away from the padding, hanging loose like jagged rope. Nilsen warned him about getting caught in it.
An hour later, Stottor suddenly felt a sharp pain around his neck. Nilsen was strangling him with the zip he had been careful to tell him about. It later became apparent that Nilsen was using sufficient force to cause blood vessels in Stottor’s eyes to pop. For several minutes, the young man instinctively fought against death, flailing around ineffectively. Nilsen then took him to the bathroom to finish him off. He ran the bath and then forced Stottor’s head underwater. With his head held hard under the surface, Stottor could no longer resist the urge to breathe and started to inhale the water.
At this point, Stottor says he felt he was giving in to death. For Nilsen, this was the moment he began to feel his sex ritual going wrong. In his manuscript, he says he stopped the attack because Stottor had now been ‘rendered passive’. The goal of the fantasy had been achieved and there was no need to go further. This seems highly implausible, if for no other reason than Stottor had already been extremely passive through alcohol and sleep before the strangulation had started.
Whatever the reason, once the ‘moment’ passed, everything changed. Nilsen says he then comforted Stottor, telling him about the zip and that he’d had to splash water on to him to bring him to. They cuddled some more, and in the morning he saw Stottor off.
Stottor told me that, after the initial ‘drowning’, he passed out and then regained consciousness underwater. He then passed out again. A while later, he says he experienced what might have been an out-of-body experience. He felt like he was floating in the room, looking down on a young, blond man laid out on the floor by an armchair. The man looked dead. Then a dog started licking his face. Another man was in the room. He was tall and dark. Realising the man by the chair was still alive, he approached him.
Stottor now believes he was finally revived the following morning, after he had been in the flat for 35 hours. Nilsen then walked him to the Tube. From here Stottor made his way to the Royal Free Hospital, where he told the doctor he had got caught up in a zip. The doctor shook his head and told him, ‘You’ve been strangled. Somebody may have tried to kill you.’ His state of shock deepened.
When I asked Stottor about the letters that he and Nilsen had exchanged, he seemed partly embarrassed and partly disgusted. He said he was still confused about what had happened. There had been times, he confessed, using one of his favourite lines, when he didn’t know if Nilsen was his ‘murderer or his saviour’. As there had only been two people in that room, he’d decided to ask the other one for an explanation.
Nilsen’s manuscript also talks about the correspondence. He says he was happy to write to Stottor, but mindful that too much contact might not necessarily be helpful. It seemed to him that Stottor might be attributing everything that made him unhappy about his life to that single attack. Nilsen says in History of a Drowning Boy: ‘I bore the man Carl Stottor no feelings of personal malice … my fateful and traumatic encounter with Stottor has to be viewed in proportion with this true light which places me as just being one of a succession of competing forces in his greatly troubled life.’
In 1987, the letters between Nilsen and Stottor stopped. Stottor says the closest he ever got to an explanation as to why Nilsen had spared him was an unconvincing feeling that a ‘thin strand of humanity passed between us’. He now believes the real reason he was spared was down to something infinitely more practical – Nilsen had decided he didn’t have any more room for another dead body.
1989 was Nilsen’s last full year in Wakefield. In History of a Drowning Boy, Nilsen tells his would-be readers he still had enough prison enemies to keep him in the newspapers, and sufficient friends to supply him with ‘pot’. When contemplating his life in a marijuana haze, Nilsen felt he could see the whole of eternity stretched out in front of him. He describes the phenomenon in philosophical language. Life, he says, seemed short and insignificant. The experience was given a grandiose name: ‘Nilsen’s Second’.
Soft drugs were now an important and integral part of his life. He found they helped both his emotions and his ability to think. Instead of making him paranoid, as they frequently can, he says they would enable him to be tranquil and meditative. When he got high, he could think back and ‘see’ his victims in an almost peaceful state.
But, when off them, an opposite state of mind would, apparently, often bother him. He says his crimes might ‘intrude’ on to him with ‘periodic reminders’. If someone’s face put in mind a victim, for instance, he might become physically sick. Nilsen talks as though he liked to put his offending past into a mental box marked ‘emotional breakdown’ and doing so was easier when he was ‘out of it’.
It wasn’t just the drugs that helped Nilsen cope with his past. The whole atmosphere of prison helped. There were people everywhere to whom Nilsen could compare himself and not come off so badly. On his wing was Archibald Hall, a serial killer butler who, in old age, had become an avuncular figure. And, for a while, Nilsen found himself locked up with the ‘country’s most violent prisoner’, the man who had changed his name to that of the actor Charles Bronson, whose violent assaults on staff had turned an 11-year sentence into seemingly indeterminate incarceration. Nilsen marvelled at his physique and spirit.
Much more terrible than Hall or Bronson was Ted Paisnel. For 11 years, Paisnel had roamed the island of Jersey at night, dressed in rubber and chains, raping women and children. Now he seemed just an ordinary bloke. In fact, the most incredible thing about him – that his wife had stood by him all this time – seemed almost reasonable.
Towards the end of the year, Nilsen experienced the last ‘romantic’ relationship he would have, or at least talk about, in prison. It was a sex-offender whom we’ll call Peter Chapple. He was 34 and good looking, although emotionally stunted. Chapple was serving a sentence for having sex with teenage boys. Before talking about their relationship, Nilsen makes some remarks about Chapple’s character that are revealing both about his ability to judge others and also how he saw himself at the time. Nilsen says that Chapple would prefer to divert himself in activities like maths and computers than take part in the ‘risky world of adult emotions’. Nilsen, with his own preference for books, saw himself as emotionally superior.
Even though Chapple was emotionally immature, he was still one of the most powerful personalities on his landing. Initially, Nilsen’s attraction to someone with such a strong character might seem odd. The way he had chosen his victims had indicated, after all, that, typically, he would seek out those with weaker wills for company. In this instance, one reason for the attraction, other than looks, soon becomes apparent. Nilsen was drawn to the fact that Chapple was an instinctive musician. This was a skill Nilsen greatly coveted. For his 43rd birthday, Brian Masters had bought Nilsen the cheap Casio electronic keyboard he’d asked for. Now he wanted to learn to play it.
After hearing Chapple demonstrate how it worked, Nilsen immediately decided they should write a musical together. He would be the wordsmith and Chapple the composer. Nilsen had taken charge of the relationship, and also shown his potential partner what a creative force he was. The plans stalled a week later. After two sessions trying to come up with musical ideas, it became apparent that Chapple couldn’t compose. Nilsen emphasises that he was still desperate to do something creative. He proposed putting on a comedy revue. No one, however, wanted to be in it.
Undeterred, Nilsen started submitting poetry for prison magazines, and composing
on his keyboard. He tells us that he had his eyes on the prestigious Koestler Awards for artistic achievement in prison. But whereas Nilsen’s plays and art were of a good amateur standard, the quality of his music couldn’t match his desire to produce it.
In 1990, Nilsen was transferred to Full Sutton Prison, a relatively new maximum-security facility in Yorkshire. Many prisoners objected to his presence. Nilsen says in History of a Drowning Boy that, when he arrived, he was made to feel about as welcome as a ‘dead pig in a synagogue’. He describes violence, too. One night, two hooded men burst into his cell with a bowl of boiling water into which sugar had been dissolved to make it boil hotter. He picked up the only object to hand, a battery for his keyboard, and threw it in their direction. Being unco-ordinated, it hit the wall above them. Still, it made them drop the water.
The next day, he was transferred to the segregation unit. He spent virtually the whole summer there. Afterwards, he was told he was going to be part of the trial for the Vulnerable Prisoner Unit scheme. VPUs were being set up in various prisons across the country to protect prisoners who might become a target from others, such as terrorists and policemen. In practice, the VPUs were mainly used for sex-offenders; in Nilsen’s words, ‘ghettos for nonces’. He didn’t enjoy the company he was now keeping. The prisoners on the VPU were a concentration of the facility’s least popular inmates. As such, it isn’t hard to believe some of his allegations. Despite being segregated, Nilsen says at mealtimes he saw human faeces in the custard, and razors in the pies.
The following year (1991), he was moved to the VPU in Albany on the Isle of Wight. It was a 1960s-built prison that later specialised almost entirely in ‘vulnerable prisoners’. The regime was austere – there was no cell association, and evening association in the common room was by rota. Nilsen was sent to work in a wood mill, a far cry from the education, drama and art he enjoyed. This was labour and damn hard. If Nilsen had once expressed a desire to suffer to atone for his crimes, he didn’t like the reality of the wood mill one bit. Constant arguments with the guards and instructors earned him spells in the segregation unit. As in Brixton, he would refer to it as ‘the punishment block’.