Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer

by Russ Coffey

  When it finally happened, it was not from one of his trips to the gay bars – it was an opportunistic rape. The victim was a teenage boy whom Nilsen had met during a social visit to a gay drop-in centre run by a Church of England curate. On certain evenings, a small hall would become a place for advice and warm drinks for youngsters, many of whom were runaways. Nilsen invited one Scottish boy out to the pub. As they got more and more drunk, Nilsen realised he had nowhere to go, so he asked him if he’d like to spend the night in a cheap hotel. En route, he bought some rum.

  Back in the hotel, the youth passed out on one of the two single beds. For the second time, Nilsen saw the opportunity for having a sexual encounter with an unconscious male body. ‘I lifted him up into my arms and just stood there for a moment savouring the power of the situation. I looked down at his helpless, vulnerable nudity dangling in my arms,’ he says. He then pulled the boy’s trousers down and started to bugger him in his sleep. In the morning, everything was normal. The boy went on his way, and Nilsen remembered it as a thrilling encounter.

  Nilsen presents this story as part of his explanation of how he developed a deep ‘psycho-sexual’ need. To understand his logic, one must first accept his understanding of the effect of a series of traumas in his life: his dysfunctional childhood had left him feeling inadequate; this turned his sexuality in on itself, forcing him to become reliant on fantasies. And experiences in the London gay scene, being anonymous and depersonalised, easily became extensions of this destructive, internal world.

  Although Nilsen talks about psycho-sexual fantasy ‘needs’, in fact, they read like something more psychologically straightforward: a catalogue of perversions whose pull was irresistible. And despite anything he might say about having problems controlling his thoughts, Nilsen cannot give any persuasive reasons for acting on them. Nilsen’s development of normal empathy clearly seems to have stalled in early childhood. He bridles at any such suggestions. His letters are full of indignant mentions of the word. Nilsen seems fascinated by the idea of empathy but never able to grasp the real meaning.

  Commenting on a report compiled for a probation hearing, for instance, he says, ‘I have always had deep empathy with my victims. I know both the pain of their lives and the degree of loss caused by those who loved them.’ Empathy didn’t feature as a natural part of the actual attacks, he says, because in those instances he was acting out of a compulsion, not out of free will. He does admit he had to desensitise himself when he came to destroy the bodies. Nilsen denies, however, that he ever desensitised himself any more than, for instance, people who work for the ambulance service or in morgues.

  We have seen, by now, abundant evidence of Nilsen’s tendency to desensitise, compartmentalise and separate aspects of his world on an almost permanent basis. From the story of the rape, for example, he moves easily on to other subjects. He recalls a series of films he had enjoyed watching, and says that he particularly admired Stanley Kubrick. From films he moves on to art and his favourite painting – Gericault’s The Raft of Medusa. And then he goes straight back to sex and death. He tells us the painting features an image of an old man with a dead, naked boy on his lap. He would use that scene in his fantasies.

  By mid-1973, death had now become a fixed theme in Nilsen’s sex fantasies. Although he didn’t have a mirror, he would play new variations on old themes in his head before going to sleep. In one, the ugly old man was replaced by a handsome, powerful, well-muscled black man. The passive character was now an emaciated, teenage junkie, dead from an overdose.

  Nilsen attempts several explanations of what he calls the ‘psychological conundrums’ of his fantasy life. ‘In sexual intercourse,’ he tells us in ‘The Psychograph’, ‘the magic number is two.’ Being a loner, he felt this was beyond him. So his subconscious responded by splitting itself into two sexual elements. These two ‘types’ in his sexual imagination would always correspond to the old man and the youth, with the man active and the boy totally passive. ‘This passivity,’ Nilsen says, ‘ranged from being drunk, drugged, asleep, comatose or dead.’

  Nilsen’s mind was the ‘curator’ of both parts. The sexual thrill – or in his terms ‘frissive excitement’ – came from the combination of extreme passivity and absolute power. He would typically imagine himself in one role or the other, but feels at a deeper level he was always both. ‘The goal,’ Nilsen says, ‘was never to dwell in unreality but to coax the need out of its closet into the real functioning world.’ But this never happened. Instead, he says, his fantasies or ‘Fortress Fantasy Psychograph’, only brought him short term ‘medicinal’ value because his long-term ‘entrenchment’ resulted in ‘augmenting his isolation’. The more he did it, the more he ‘came to depend on it for nourishment’. In simpler words, the fantasies only ever made things worse.

  The more Nilsen withdrew into his world, the less impression he made on his colleagues. There were suspicions about his sexuality, but otherwise he was seen as a competent loner. Still, there was something about him that seems to have given at least one other colleague an uneasy feeling.

  Journalist John Lisners in his book House of Horrors tells a story that when news got out about a multiple murderer being found in North London, before Nilsen’s name had been released, a former colleague was heard saying, ‘If it’s true he’s an ex-copper, my money’s on it being Dennis Nilsen.’

  Nilsen was evidently becoming increasingly estranged from his colleagues. It seems he was now beginning to see himself as an outsider figure, siding with anti-establishment heroes he would read about. ‘The more I got to know my colleagues,’ he writes, ‘The more I thought I might be in the wrong line of work. Police and villains looked much the same.’ He shirked patrolling for men engaged in ‘indecent acts’. If he saw two young men parked up in a quiet road, he crossed over. What were they doing, other than trying to connect with other human beings, he thought. As for himself, he was becoming increasingly convinced of the emotional limitations of promiscuity.

  Nilsen’s manuscript is, however, less bleak on this period of his life than he was later in his confessions to Brian Masters. Ten years on, in 1983, Nilsen observed in Killing for Company, ‘I was left with an endless search through the soul-destroying pub scene and its resulting one-night stands … passing faces and bodies, the unfulfilled tokens of an empty life. A house is not a home and sex is not a relationship. We would only lend each other our bodies in a vain search for inner peace.’

  But now, he describes the summer of 1973 in brighter terms. That June, Nilsen met a young man in the William IV in Hampstead, one of London’s greenest and most sophisticated areas. Unlike the Coleherne, the ‘Willy’ was not an exclusively gay pub. But with its proximity to the cruising ground of Hampstead Heath, it took on that quality at many times during the week. The man in question – whom we’ll call Derek – had a mane of androgynous, long blond hair and looked like a glam-rocker.

  They went back together to Nilsen’s room at the Police Section House which, in all the drunken excitement, Derek had assumed was a hostel. Again, with a chair pressed up against the door for privacy, the pair engaged in sexual activity that Nilsen rated as one of the most enjoyable sex experiences of his life. When Derek awoke, Nilsen was putting on his uniform. ‘Is this the police station?’ asked Derek.

  Nilsen replied with a flirtatious joke about ‘taking down his particulars’.

  As he walked out of the Section House, the sergeant stared across at him. Derek’s appearance suggested to Nilsen’s senior officer that he was not the sort of man who should have been ‘passing through’ at that time of the morning. Nilsen explained his presence by saying that he had just sold the young man a fish tank. He then walked Derek down to the Tube and, just to show what rebellious spirits they were, they kissed full on the mouth just before the doors closed. Nilsen still had his policeman’s hat on. He describes the incident triumphantly.

  Derek proved to be just another young man looking for sexual adventure. Nilsen, however,
was now looking for someone to be close to. The two met on a number of further occasions, but it soon became clear to Nilsen that Derek was really interested in sleeping around to make him feel better about himself. The last time Nilsen saw him was in 1975. On that occasion, Derek asked if he could ‘borrow’ money. The encounter left Nilsen with more than a bad taste in his mouth – he discovered he’d contracted gonorrhea.

  At the end of 1973, at the age of 27, Nilsen decided to go no further with the police. A rumour exists that he was informally asked not to continue after a colleague reported him for masturbating in the morgue, but there isn’t much evidence to support the claim. Nilsen says he just felt he was in the wrong business. He wanted to have fun, but had found the police force to have been full of bigots. He now just wanted to be a normal citizen.

  During the winter of 1973-74, the UK was in the midst of a depression. The pop group Slade might have been celebrating their huge hit, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, but elsewhere an oil crisis had just ended and the three-day week was about to start.

  Nilsen, however, was feeling optimistic. Just before Christmas, he moved into 9 Manstone Road, a sub-let bedsit in a Victorian house just off Cricklewood Broadway (another mixed suburb with a large Irish immigrant community). Despite Nilsen’s initial sense of hopefulness, the festive period soon became lonely. His only company came from occasional trysts in bars. He wrote to his mother as he did periodically throughout the year, but had no other contact with his family. There were no friends to give him support, or to give him an injection of normality or common sense.

  In the first week of January, the Labour Exchange found Nilsen a job as a security guard for the Department of the Environment. Compared to the police, it was straightforward. Mainly, it just involved patrolling various government buildings in different parts of town. In one office in the Shell building, next to Waterloo, he found a book on toxicology. Two photographs brought home to Nilsen his increasing sexual interest in dead bodies. One was an image of a boy who had died of drowning; the other was a colour photo of a boy with rigor mortis. By a trick of the light, his flesh tones suggested that he was still alive. That photograph made Nilsen realise that he could be ‘frantically aroused’ by the idea of someone being at the ‘dividing line between life and death’. He contemplated stealing the book. As he writes about this, his prose becomes even more direct and confessional.

  Another story from this period also rings true, even though it is utterly bizarre. It finds Nilsen trying to act out his ‘old man fantasy’ with a dead gorilla. It was in the warehouse of the Natural History Museum, and the gorilla was stuffed. Nilsen was again working as a security guard. He was patrolling one night when he came across the animal, which, with its false eyes, looked alive to him. More importantly to Nilsen, the dead primate looked ‘powerful’.

  Nilsen had recently dyed his hair blonde, and thought he looked young, Aryan and pretty. The contrast between himself and the gorilla provided just the frisson he enjoyed. Looking at the gorilla, Nilsen says his heart beat harder and harder until he could no longer resist the urge to strip off. He placed the gorilla’s hand on his naked flesh. Having no mirror, he imagined he was looking down on the scene, and the gorilla was about to carry him off. But when he looked down, he found that the gorilla only had a ‘pathetic little stump’ for a penis. His arousal subsided, and he put his clothes back on.

  With his new blond haircut, Nilsen says he now particularly enjoyed admiring himself when masturbating. When old men in bars eyed him up, however, it made him furiously angry. Nilsen’s new look also drew the attention of his neighbours. Eventually, other tenants complained about him bringing men back. Entertaining was forbidden and Nilsen was given a warning. He took this as a sign he was at another crossroads in his life. Night was a time for being gay, he felt, and not for masturbating with gorillas. He would find a new flat and a new job and live his life in London to the full.

  The next few months were no happier though. Nilsen resigned from his security guard job, and then with £8 he got by selling his General Service medal he set himself up in another bedsit, this time in a detached Edwardian house in nearby 80 Teignmouth Road. ‘Like Dickens’ Mr Micawber’, he said, he felt that some job or other was bound to turn up. He went down to the Labour Exchange (later the Job Centre) in Denmark Street in the heart of the West End. ‘They didn’t couldn’t find me a job, or give me money … but they did give me a job. Working for them,’ Nilsen writes.

  Despite nestling among guitar shops, the employment centre dealt with the low-paid jobs for the restaurants in nearby Soho. Nilsen’s experience in catering made him a good fit. Initially, he was frustrated not to be put on front-line duty interviewing clients – instead, he was relegated to answering phones – but he still found the work environment better than anything he had previously experienced. It was a much more accepting atmosphere than the police or Army. One colleague called him Des, and from that day the name stuck. ‘Des’ became convinced some other colleagues were closet homosexuals. He also liked the way that some of the women in the office guessed he might be gay. If asked, he would confirm it quietly with a smile.

  With a regular job and a decent roof over his head, life didn’t seem so bad. In Nilsen’s internal ‘film’ he saw himself as the leading man in a picaresque, sexual adventure. One night he woke up in the bed of an aristocrat’s butler; on another, it was a small-time Australian soap actor. But by the summer of 1975, however, another ‘incident’ occurred. One afternoon, Nilsen says in his autobiography that he met a 17-year-old called David Painter at the Job Centre where he had been looking for work. Later, Nilsen, bumped into him in the street. Nilsen was probably aware by this stage that Painter had mental problems of some sort, and knew that there’d be the risk of trouble if they went back to his flat. But Nilsen refuses to admit he did anything wrong that night, other than try to seduce someone who was particularly vulnerable:

  Risk became hard fact when I picked up a 17-year-old ‘disturbed’ teenager named David Painter … I don’t think he had an experienced alcohol intake. We watched TV at my room at 80 Teignmouth Road, watched a reel of test film I had shot of London and had a few Martinis. He knew he was sleeping with me in the single bed and he entered it as naked as did I … (I) just put my arm around his body. To my utter amazement he threw a screaming fit … running around the house … ‘Oh God,’ I said to myself, ‘a nutter!’ … later, I did my best to calm him down but he barged into a glass partition, in front of other tenant witnesses in the house.

  Nilsen felt he had no option but call the police himself. Painter was taken to hospital where he claimed that Nilsen had tried to assault him sexually. And so the civil servant was brought in … to his old police station, Willesden Green. He was questioned and then put in the cells for the night. In the morning, Painter and his parents decided not to press charges and Nilsen was released. The incident was logged. These were the days of manual typewriters and index cards and there was no easy way of recording incidents that could then be easily linked to those of a similar nature.

  On the Monday morning, Nilsen didn’t mention the incident. No one in the office ever did or ever would have any reason to guess that their colleague’s home life was anything other than humdrum and lonely. His work was administerial, and, for the most part, he got on with it quietly. Sometimes, in conversation, however, he would vehemently put forward his opinion on every aspect of events in the news. He says he was now ‘ensconced in the noisy, empty, jungle/desert of the Metropolis’. Elsewhere, he described the empty world of the bedsitter as ‘devoid of any supportive community of neighbours’, a ‘lifestyle of underground trains and clerical work’.

  Nilsen disliked his superiors. He felt they disapproved both of his sexuality and trade union activities. But, among his co-workers, there were still plenty who shared Nilsen’s socialist ideals. Occasionally, they would ask Nilsen for a drink after work. He may have been eccentric and opinionated, some thought, but maybe he just needed some
encouragement? Nilsen would, as often as not, join them, but invariably he would soon become unsettled and leave early, in favour of the gay bars. Of those bars, he says they ‘left me with a kind of forlorn sadness which came from a long, frustrated run of “one-night stands” with the strangers bent on promiscuity rather than the permanent relationship of my aspiration. I became trapped in a treadmill of work, drink and isolation.’

  In the summer of 1975, at the age of 29, Nilsen finally found himself in an approximation of a domestic relationship. It began with a letter telling him his father had died. Olav Nilsen had ended his days as the manager of a fish canning factory in Ghana. He was on his fourth wife and had died of a heart-attack. The letter informed him that Olav’s surname wasn’t actually Nilsen, but Moksheim. Apparently, Dennis also had half-brothers and sisters he’d never heard of.

  Olav Moksheim left Dennis £1,400. It was very welcome and accelerated his desire for a domestic life. Now that he had some money behind him, Nilsen decided he wouldn’t just let life happen. That weekend, Nilsen got chatting to David Gallichan in the Champion pub in Bayswater. Gallichan was 18, approximately 5ft 9in, skinny and blond with a friendly, round face. Dennis impressed the youngster by telling him he used to be a soldier. Gallichan had come up from Weston-super-Mare in search of the bright lights and was easily impressed. Small and exceptionally effeminate, with what Nilsen called ‘the mentality of a 15-year-old’, Gallichan easily succumbed to the older man’s suggestion that they set up home together.