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

by Russ Coffey

  After just one night in 80 Teignmouth Road, the pair went flat-hunting. The result was finding 195 Melrose Avenue, a substantial Victorian-conversion garden flat on the other side of Cricklewood and about a hundred yards from Gladstone Park. It was a good-sized, if poorly presented, semi-detached property, extended at the back. Upstairs were two small flats and, downstairs, two larger ones. Nilsen and Gallichan’s flat was the rearmost of the ground-floor apartments. They had two rooms, a bathroom and a small kitchen. The living room (in which they also sometimes slept) had French windows to the rear and the kitchen was next to it. The bedroom had a bunk bed that Nilsen eventually converted to be just a top platform.

  Nilsen decided to splash some of his inheritance money on home comforts, but first he wanted to make a project of the garden. The two of them spent an entire week doing it up. Gallichan would take the day shift while Nilsen was at work. In the evenings and weekends, Nilsen took over.

  After all this work, he felt it only fair that they were granted sole access. He wrote a letter to the agent, Leon Roberts of Ellis and Co, explaining how only their French windows had direct access and only they seemed to care. He told him all about the stone paving he had put down, and the plum trees he had planted. It seemed reasonable, and Roberts signed the letter without coming down to inspect. Months later, Roberts dropped in to see the garden he had heard so much about. It struck him as the most bizarre outside space he had ever seen, with a series of mini fenced-off sections, and strange features.

  Nilsen had also been careful to make sure animals were allowed. He brought his budgie, Hamish, over from Teignmouth Road, and bought a fish pond from a pet shop in Willesden. From another pet shop the two of them picked out a black-and-white mongrel puppy. Nilsen says he named her Bleep because she made a bleeping noise when they first brought her home. Later, the couple picked up a stray kitten named Deedee, standing for Des and David.

  Next, they started to decorate. Gallichan painted the walls and Nilsen bought paintings and armchairs. This should have been a happy time – it was far from it. Some of Nilsen’s Super 8 film footage of them still exists and it makes for extremely disturbing viewing. Nilsen is relentlessly angry. Sometimes there’s a reason, such as when some roof plaster fell down, but more often than not it seems driven by an inner rage. Invariably, Gallichan bears the brunt of all this anger. We see ‘Twinkle’ – Nilsen’s nickname for him – being told he isn’t holding the camera right or that he’s looking like ‘a right poof’. Gallichan simply smiles back.

  At least Nilsen was able to provide for him. But despite luxuries like a quality stereo and a decent television, the differences in their characters meant they rarely shared them. Gallichan didn’t like classical music or progressive rock; classic films bored him, too. Sexually, too, Gallichan became more interested in other men he would meet in town. He told a reporter that Nilsen wasn’t very good at or interested in sex.

  Nilsen complained that Gallichan was too hairy, bony and too thin. He may well have added ‘too real’. After years of reflection, Nilsen also seems to have been aware of this: ‘I viewed my surroundings through an oblong, movie format. That’s probably why I was never able to get very close to people because my attraction was for ideal, theoretical people who presented a simplistic relationship free from the problems and complexities of real people. Despite living in close proximity to David Gallichan for 18 months, I didn’t really know him at all.’

  Nilsen couldn’t stop ‘Twink’ sloping off to the bars of Soho. Still, if they were no longer lovers, they were still a household. On one occasion when Nilsen’s half-brother Andrew was in town, Des was pleased to be able to invite him over to ‘their’ house. At the Job Centre Christmas party in 1975, Des showed Twinkle off as his ‘companion’, thereby eliminating any doubts over his sexuality. But, at home, they avoided each other as much as possible.

  Even in January, when IRA bombs were going off in Soho, Nilsen preferred to frequent the gay bars there rather than go home. By March, he and Gallichan were hardly speaking. One night, Twinkle brought home a 15-year-old boy. Nilsen claims he seduced the youth for the night and dumped him back on Gallichan in the morning. When Gallichan woke up for his dishwashing job, he didn’t know what to do about the boy. He decided just to leave. That evening, Nilsen returned to find the electricity meter smashed and the money stolen. He was furious.

  He was also beginning to feel ill from gallstones. Initially, he put his dull pains down to a diet of beer, rum and cheap takeaways. By April, the doctor had told him otherwise, but an operation couldn’t be scheduled for another couple of months. Depressed, he started hanging around the gay drop-in centre again.

  By the time Nilsen had had his operation, England was enjoying a record heatwave. Once he was fit again, he was keen to spend the rest of the hot evenings in an alcoholic haze and looking for sex. He describes a number of people he met that summer. The functional encounters suggest a series of anonymous individuals, mainly oriental. And they left him with scabies and crabs.

  By day, Nilsen was always the same old colourless ‘monochrome man’, to use the title of his own essay written in Cranley Gardens, but in the evenings his emotions were momentarily released by triggers that would cause them to overwhelm him with startling intensity. Music and alcohol were the main catalysts. Alcohol, he says, was also the ‘social lubricant’ that enabled him to turn sexual possibility into reality. It would give him ‘amazing strength’, both literally and figuratively. He stresses, however, that he was never an alcoholic in the sense that he needed to drink all the time. His drinking was ‘episodic’ with long gaps between ‘binges’, and this was true throughout his adult life. During drinking sprees, Nilsen would sometimes have black-outs; they worried him.

  The more Nilsen got drunk, the more Twinkle probably wanted to leave. The beginning of the end came in the spring of 1977. Nilsen says it involved his first exposure to ‘death and disturbing bereavement’; an odd statement after his experiences with his grandfather, Aden and the police morgue. This story actually involved Bleep’s puppies, after she’d become pregnant by one of the neighbour’s dogs. One night, Nilsen went down to the off-licence to buy some rum and asked Twinkle to look after them. When he returned, two of the pups had drowned in the garden pond.

  Nilsen was livid. He started to think about ways of getting rid of his, now unwanted, flatmate. Two weeks later however, Gallichan, unprompted, met an antiques dealer and moved with him to the West Country. Nilsen doesn’t make a great deal of the passing of Twinkle out of his life.

  DCI Peter Jay, and defence psychiatrist Patrick Gallwey, however, considered the abrupt end to Nilsen’s dreams of domesticity to be a catalytic event. For Jay, Nilsen couldn’t bear the rejection of Gallichan leaving, and decided he now wanted companionship that he could control. For Dr Gallwey, a breakdown of that relationship triggered another phase of his personality disorder.

  The accounts in History of a Drowning Boy of the next year-and-a-half years are increasingly desperate. In 1983, Nilsen told the police that he responded to Gallichan’s departure by picking up a Swiss au pair girl in a bar in the West End, and reminding himself he could be bisexual. He no longer mentions this. Instead, Nilsen presents a catalogue of all the short flings and friendships he made over the summer of 1977 – Barry Pett, Stephen Barrier and Steve Martin all stayed for a while at Melrose Avenue. Steve Martin stayed the longest (about four months); Pett and Barrier stayed for a number of days. Nilsen wants the reader to believe he was perfectly able to partake normally in gay culture, but that it was lonely and fragmented. Instead, the reader is left feeling uneasy about what was clearly happening within him and fearful of what he might do next.

  In 1978, Nilsen met Martyn Hunter-Craig, a young man who had recently moved to London and changed his name from Martin Tucker to mark this new chapter in his life. Now, in a big city, he wanted to start again.

  Home had previously been Exeter in Devon, where he says his parents had a tumultuous relat
ionship, often arguing, separating and reuniting. As he reached puberty, Hunter-Craig was diagnosed as having emotional problems and was sent to a special school. He always seemed lost in a dream world and there were also suspicions over his sexuality. He told me: ‘I wasn’t camp or outrageous as a teenager. I was quite withdrawn. I didn’t like it; I didn’t want to be that way. I was made to feel quite dirty about it. I’ve had that hang-up ever since … I think I feel wretched and dirty about it. I don’t like it but that’s the way it is. I can do nothing about it, can I?’

  Hunter-Craig had been in London for some months before meeting Nilsen, but he’s not quite sure how many. He found odd bits of casual work and, when it was hard to come by, he would supplement it, where necessary, by sleeping with men for money. Hunter-Craig thinks he met Nilsen around Easter time in 1978; he was nearly 18. Nilsen approached him in an amusement arcade in Leicester Square and struck up a friendly, light-hearted conversation. He looked smart in his beige suit and, without his glasses, his ‘sincere’ brown eyes were clearly visible.

  Hunter-Craig told me: ‘We went back to Melrose Avenue and, between then and the time I saw him just before the arrest, I would go there every couple of months or so … definitely a few times a year. I would stay for a couple of days when I needed somewhere to stay. It was very awkward in those days if you were on Social Security. You couldn’t book in anywhere, unless it was a hostel, because of the delay getting the cheque from the DHSS. My work was casual. If I wasn’t working, I would see who I knew might be able to put me up. From the beginning, he said, “If you need somewhere to stay, please come back”.’

  Journalists have been unable to agree on Hunter-Craig’s testimony. He has appeared on several documentaries but, after the trial, some writers were cautious of him. Ex-News of the World journalist John Lisners wrote: ‘Men [like Hunter-Craig] are social misfits … strange, emotionally-battered young people … Why was Nilsen attracted to people like this? Why did the apparently respectable, well-groomed civil servant with a flair for politics invite a self-confessed prostitute who lived in a fantasy world back to his flat?’

  Other journalists just seemed to dislike him. Douglas Bence, from the Daily Mirror, wrote: ‘Nilsen had said to him, “Come to bed.” Cash changed hands next morning and the impoverished prostitute found he had a free season ticket to a gay bedsitter.’

  When I asked Nilsen directly about his relationship with Hunter-Craig, he answered that he had known him but only casually. And yet Hunter-Craig’s DHSS card was one of the items that police found in Nilsen’s flat. He also shows detailed knowledge of both flats that Nilsen had lived in. Ultimately, Hunter-Craig’s credibility rests on personal judgement.

  I traced Hunter-Craig in the summer of 2010. He was living in a council flat in North London. I put a note through his letter box and he replied by ringing the number I’d left. After that, we met twice in nearby pubs. From the old newspaper cuttings I had seen, I was expecting a rangy, wild-looking fellow. When I first I met him in a beer garden near the Heath, he was now stocky and nervous. His voice was soft and he complained of suffering from panic attacks. When I asked him what he’d like to drink, he explained he was trying not to drink at that moment. Although he hadn’t been a drinker during the time he’d known Nilsen, he’d made up for it later, apparently. As he rolled his cigarettes, I could see that his fingers were yellow with nicotine stains.

  They also shook as he spoke. Although clearly a damaged person, Hunter-Craig also seemed to me to be essentially quite gentle. I sensed he was working hard to keep himself together. He told me he was being treated for his anxiety in a local medical centre and had also been taken on with some paid work there. Most of what Hunter-Craig told me rang true. Sometimes, and often quite obviously, he would exaggerate his knowledge of something or someone. But on the important facts, he was consistent and I found myself generally satisfied that the details he provided of Nilsen during the murder years were largely accurate.

  He told me that they had had a brief physical relationship and described what it had been like. ‘He was very stiff. I remember saying at the time – although now it seems awful – I said it’s like having a relationship with a dead body. He laughed. Well, it wasn’t that funny. I said, “I wish you could be a bit more like that when you’re doing something.” He was passive. Many times you would just lay there. I would say, “Well, this isn’t much fun, is it? Are you going to move your legs a little bit?”’

  On another couple of occasions, sexual contact was light. ‘It was just a bit of fumbling. He’d get naked and then fall asleep. Des wasn’t really gay in the sense of relationships. He couldn’t really be physically intimate, if for no other reason that he was usually so out of it.’

  But Hunter-Craig feels that, as far as he was concerned, Nilsen mainly wanted companionship, and not a sexual relationship. He says Nilsen even suggested he move in. The memories Hunter-Craig relayed to me were a mixed collection of impressions and episodes. While talking, he would frequently look down with a pained expression.

  Nilsen’s constant playing of classical and sophisticated pop music – material which ‘really turned Des on’ – particularly struck Hunter-Craig being, as it was, so different from the music most of his friends listened to. Nilsen’s favourites were Rick Wakeman, Mike Oldfield, Elgar, Mahler and Aaron Copeland. If there was a Western on TV, he says that Nilsen would insist they watch it, even though he knew they bored his friend. When commenting on people in the news, he remembered that Des admired strong people, even though he wanted to be with weaker types.

  In general, however, Hunter-Craig found Nilsen to be a moderately kind and interesting person. Otherwise, he says, he wouldn’t have wanted them to be friends. He does, however, remember Nilsen often provoking arguments for fun; sometimes he was just rude. Hunter-Craig says he didn’t mind when Nilsen referred to him as ‘Skip’, short for Skipper, meaning someone who hung around the docks, but hated it when he refer to him as ‘she’. In these spats, Hunter-Craig says he would always give as good as he got. He thinks Nilsen liked that.

  Despite Nilsen’s interest in film, they would rarely actually go to the cinema, which Hunter-Craig thinks was partly because you couldn’t drink in them, and Des always wanted to get drunk. So for entertainment they would either watch TV or go out to north London or Soho pubs. When in company, Hunter-Craig remembers Nilsen being shy and feeling self-consciously like a bore until the moment that, quite suddenly, the alcohol started to work. Then confidence flooded in. After this point, if Nilsen sensed that people were muttering about him, he would become furiously angry. In the taxi or Tube back home, he would explode into a rage. ‘It was never to their faces,’ Hunter Craig recalls, ‘always behind their backs. He would usually say that he was too intellectual for them.’

  Back at the flat, Nilsen was fascinated to hear about Hunter-Craig’s mother. How did she accept his homosexuality, he would ask? The question would be asked so he could make the point that he didn’t dare tell his mother. He knew how she would react. That was why he was so reluctant to go home for Christmas. That seemed odd to Hunter-Craig; from Nilsen’s description and her letters, he didn’t think she sounded too bad.

  And surely, he thought, a trip home would be nice opportunity to get away from the shabby flat? But although Hunter-Craig remembers the flats as being rough, he says they were certainly not out of place for a bachelor in the late 1970s. ‘Everyone was poor then, and people less house-proud.’ Since leaving the Army, however, Nilsen had become very particular about his own personal hygiene, but he was unbothered about his living space. Hunter-Craig describes the smells of the flats as being ‘an extreme mustiness’. He remembers remarking to Nilsen in Cranley Gardens, ‘Des, what is it about that smell? It seems to follow you around.’

  7

  WHITEMOOR

  ‘The bodies have gone, everything is gone, there’s nothing left, but I still feel in a spiritual communion with these people.’

  DENNIS NILSEN, IN A
CHANNEL 4 INTERVIEW

  On Wednesday, 21 January 1993 at 8.00pm, six million viewers tuned in to Channel 4’s Viewpoint 1993: Murder in Mind to see Dennis Nilsen, the country’s most infamous serial killer, speak. Anyone looking for a ghoulish encounter would not have been disappointed. Dressed in a well-fitting prison-issue shirt, the 47-year-old Nilsen leant back in what looked like a supremely relaxed pose. Only the ashtray in front of him betrayed his nerves.

  If members of the public thought it odd that Nilsen had been allowed such TV exposure, officials at the Home Office went into virtual meltdown. During the week leading up to transmission, government lawyers petitioned the High Court for an injunction to stop the documentary going out. Whatever permission had been given to the film-makers, they said, was based on misunderstandings. On the day before the broadcast was due, however, their lawyers stood on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice and admitted defeat. There was nothing now that could be done to stop the documentary going ahead.

  The footage of Nilsen was actually just a small part of an hour-long film on criminal profiling. It was just a clip of about four minutes, used as an example of how understanding killers might help to catch them. Forensic psychologist Paul Britton asked a number of questions off-camera. A close-up of Nilsen behind a table filled the screen. The first thing Britton asked him was how he disposed of the bodies. In a leisurely, schoolmasterly Scottish accent, Nilsen replied:

  ‘The summer brought a smell problem. I asked myself what would cause this, and came to the conclusion it was the innards. I would pull up floorboards. I’d find it totally unpleasant. I’d get blinding drunk, and start dissection on the kitchen floor.’

  ‘But if you are going to dismember a body on the kitchen floor, what about the mess?’