by Russ Coffey
By the autumn of 1979, he had been saving for months for a three-month adventure revisiting childhood haunts and catching up with friends and relatives. In September 1979, when he landed at Heathrow he was a young-looking, slight 23-year-old with shoulder-length dark hair that betrayed his love of heavy rock music. This was the wildest thing about him. He drank and smoked in moderation, and his other main hobby was photography. Socially, he was polite and well mannered.
Ockendon’s trip started with a visit to the Lake District with an old friend. He had plenty of money and made regular phone calls home. When he got down to London, he methodically ticked off all the relatives on his list. He was also in almost constant contact with his mother’s brother, Gordon Gillies. Then on Monday, 3 December, Kenneth Ockendon disappeared, having spent the previous night in a small hotel in London’s shabby King’s Cross area.
Ockendon called Uncle Gordon at about 3.00pm that day. He said that he wanted to go back to Canada for Christmas, and could he come over on Wednesday, 5 December to pick up some cash being kept safely for him. During their conversation, Uncle Gordon could hear voices and music in the background, and asked where he was. He replied it was the Princess Louise, an ornate Victorian pub that apparently had live jazz. There wasn’t, however, a band playing until the evening. Ockendon was standing at the bar when Nilsen came over and started asking about his camera.
Ockendon’s failure to pick up the money from his uncle was so out of character, Gordon made a mental note to bring it up with Kenneth’s mother the next time they spoke. As Christmas approached, still no one had heard from Ken. The police were then called in. Foul play was soon suspected. Having paid for another night at the hotel in advance, it was clear he had intended to stay longer. Moreover, his property was still there, including a pub guide and a diary from which they were able to trace his various movements up to the day he disappeared.
The following February, Ockendon’s parents flew into London. At a press conference, they declared they were, ‘staying here as long as it takes to find Ken’. The police warned them to be prepared for the worst, but they refused to give up hope. Posters were circulated around the capital and the disappearance was featured in an episode of Police 5, which Nilsen later told detectives he saw. He doesn’t, however, describe any sense of anguish at seeing the parents’ TV appeal.
Nine months on, Ken and Audrey were still placing more advertisements in newspapers carrying financial rewards for information. As late as December 1982, on the third anniversary of his disappearance, fresh posters had been put up on notice boards in police stations across the capital.
In February 1983, a cigarette in hand, Dennis Nilsen told police what had happened to Kenneth Ockendon. He described how he had met him in the pub which he said was also popular with gay men. It was a day off for him. A remark Nilsen made about Ockendon’s camera started the conversation but, soon, they also chatted about music and where Nilsen’s sister lived in Toronto. At about 3.00pm, Nilsen suggested that he take the young man on a tour of London landmarks where he could get some nice photographs. They went down to Trafalgar Square, The Mall and over to the Houses of Parliament.
As it began to get dark, Nilsen again mentioned his large record collection. He persuaded him to come back to his flat, where they listened to Rick Wakeman, The Who’s Tommy, and the Royal Philharmonic’s Hooked on Classics. While Ockendon had the headphones on, Nilsen knocked up a quick ham, egg and chips. After they ate, they went to the off licence to get some rum and beer.
Then they settled in for the evening. Nilsen was thrilled by the young man’s company and how he seemed to find him interesting. Ockendon had an open nature and was no doubt enjoying meeting someone new. He had become used to making quick friendships from the hostels and small hotels he had been staying in, and ‘Des’ seemed like someone whose company he would fondly remember at the end of the trip.
If there was a moment when Nilsen decided Ockendon represented a second opportunity to make a sex fantasy real, he doesn’t say. He just told police it was about 1.00am that he found himself tightening the headphone cord around Ockendon’s narrow neck. He was shouting, ‘Let me listen to the music as well.’
Ockendon didn’t struggle. Nilsen then quietened down the dog – ‘Shut up, Bleep … this is fuck all to do with you!’ – and he put her out. The headphone flex was untied and a Bacardi was poured. Then he stripped and washed the body and placed it in his bed. He poured himself more to drink and listened to all the records again. Finally, he went to bed and kissed and caressed the body. When he woke in the morning, he says he ‘noticed’ the person next to him was cold.
Ockendon was now what Nilsen calls a ‘prop’ in his fantasy. To satisfy the requirements of the fantasy, Nilsen needed to remove any reminder of who the person had once been. He wrapped all his victims’ possessions in bin bags and put them out for the dustman. The body was placed in a cupboard, and off he went to work. At lunchtime, he bought a cheap Polaroid camera.
When he returned, he removed the body from the cupboard, lay it out on the bed, and used up his 15 instant prints, creating a permanent record of his acts. Then he got in bed and placed the naked, dead body on top of him. He says he watched TV in this position. He talked to the body, and cried in appreciation of its beauty. His behaviour was, in plain language, insane.
After the ‘ritual’ was over, his behaviour became more rational. The next day, he collected all the albums they had listened to together, took them out to the garden and smashed them with a spade.
Some days later, Nilsen showed a similarly extreme reaction towards the same music tracks that he’d listened to that night with Ken Ockendon. Nilsen was on the organisation committee for his office Christmas party, and had been largely responsible for organising and cooking for about 80 people. He had found such responsibility a huge honour and prepared very carefully, including making tapes of any music he felt might be appropriate. But he forgot that the tapes he had prepared included many tracks he had enjoyed with Ockendon, including Hooked on Classics. When the music came out of the speaker, he was shocked. His face turned white, he poured his drink away and went outside for air.
Once back in his flat, reality and fantasy again became blurred. Nilsen removed the body, sat it on a chair and played the music that he’d brought back from the party, while drinking himself into a stupor.
Nilsen’s third victim was Martyn Duffey, born on 6 July 1963 in Birkenhead near Liverpool. He was murdered sometime between 13 and 19 May 1980, and was not yet 17. Duffey’s parents, Roy and Patricia, had divorced a few years earlier. At 15, he left school only to find there were few unskilled jobs left in the Merseyside ship industry. He began to get into trouble, being caught stealing and threatening other boys. One day he walked out of the house, hitch-hiked to London and slept rough for a week. When he eventually turned up at the Soho Project, a homeless charity, they paid for him to return home.
Prior to his final disappearance, Duffey had been seen by a number of psychiatrists and social workers. He kept up a correspondence with one in particular. Despite his drug taking and casual gay sex, she helped him to complete a catering course and get a girlfriend. ‘Above all else,’ she warned, ‘stay away from London.’
Duffy ignored this advice. When he met Nilsen, he was sleeping rough around Euston station. When he spoke to police, Nilsen remembered it was the day he had returned from a union conference in Southport but couldn’t remember the precise date. He would have seen a trip to the station as an opportunity to look for the young runaways that hung around that area. Having just been up in Merseyside, he would also have had plenty to talk to Duffey about. Nilsen can’t remember much about their conversation back at his flat, other than the fact that Duffey was extremely exhausted. After only had a couple of cans of beer, Duffey said he had to go to bed.
In Killing for Company, Nilsen says Duffey was lying on the top-bunk platform: ‘I remember sitting astride him (his arms must have been trapped by the quilt). I s
trangled him with great force in the almost pitch darkness with just one side-light on underneath. As I sat on him, I could feel my bottom becoming wet. His urine had come through the bedding and my jeans.’
Nilsen then carried the body down from where he had strangled him. Duffey was still just alive. He took him to the kitchen, filled the sink and drowned him. The body was then moved to the bathroom. He stripped both himself and the dead youth and then sat in the bath with him. Then the body was hoisted on his shoulders and carried back up to the bed. In History of a Drowning Boy, Nilsen comments that it was the youngest-looking body he had seen. That was a turn-on.
Afterwards, Nilsen put the body in a cupboard and, another two days later, the floorboards came up again. In a perfectly rational act of covering up his tracks, Nilsen threw Duffey’s chef’s knives away, having first let them rust so they wouldn’t attract attention (sloppily, he also forgot to throw all of them out). He also found a left-luggage tag in Duffey’s pocket and went down to Euston to retrieve and dispose of the property – an old suitcase.
By the middle of 1980, Nilsen was becoming less emotional about being a murderer. He would later tell psychiatrists that seeing a fresh body now panicked him no more than going on patrol in Aden. But he has never spoken about what made him give in to his urges once he had picked someone up.
At Hornsey Police Station, he spoke of the killings as if they had simply happened without input from his conscious mind. ‘I’ve killed people,’ he said, ‘but I can’t understand why those people. There’s no common factor … when I voluntarily go out to drink, I don’t have the intention at that time to do these things … they’re not fore-planned … I seek company first, and hope everything will be all right.’
After 30 years of reflection, he hasn’t got much further with understanding the mechanics of what happened on any of those fateful nights. Either that, or he doesn’t want to say. The closest we get are a number of statements that imply that, when he was feeling low, seizing an opportunity to satisfy his sex ritual temporarily relieved him of his feeling of inadequacy.
Nilsen’s vague analyses contrast with an internal prison report written in 2000. This attempted a slightly more clinical analysis of the psychological factors that enabled Nilsen to kill. The authors listed them as: (1) development of deviant sexual fantasies leading to enactment; (2) poor behavioural controls further disinhibited by alcohol; (3) breakdown in an intimate relationship; (4) emotional detachment employed as a maladaptive coping strategy; (5) callousness and lack of empathy.
The report, written for a probation review, annoyed Nilsen so much that he produced a very lengthy ‘rebuttal’ report of his own called ‘Anatomy of an Official Conclusion’, in which he downplays the idea of deviant sexual fantasising, and rejects the idea that he’s ‘compartmentalising’ in a way that is different from every other member of society:
It is not the deviant sexual fantasy which leads to enactment, but the addiction to the ritual. A fantasy is a set of ideas in the mind. The ritual is no fantasy – it is real … The fantasy images themselves were not images of enacted violence … What was outrageously abnormal was how the images were translated into reality on the ground. What was callousness and lack of empathy was then only true within the trance of the ritual …
… Most people compartmentalise different areas of their lives. One separates one set of interests and relationships from other sets. A man may belong to a football supporters’ peer group that is distinct and separate from his workplace peer group and from his family unit. It’s … how we all function in the community … the notion of compartmentalisation (as) somehow special and unusually directly related to my past offending is spurious. Emotional detachment … is an acquired trait or coping strategy development.
This statement is not very clear. Nilsen’s evasive language threatens to obscure the meaning. What he seems to be saying in the first passage is that he sees a distinction between his sex fantasies which, in themselves, were relatively benign, and his compulsion to act these fantasies out by acquiring ‘passive bodies’. He accepts that the ritual was callous but thinks that it happened in a kind of ‘trance’ over which he had little control.
As for the aftermath of the killings, Nilsen thinks the way he dealt with the bodies was within the range of what a normal person might do when faced with an extraordinary set of circumstances. It did not, he thinks, represent a pathological detachment nor indicate there was anything inherently wrong with him.
Throughout 1980, Nilsen continue to function normally at work and in union activities, but he was now increasingly likely to murder at night. In August, Billy Sutherland, whom Nilsen met in a gay pub in Soho, became his next victim. He was a 25-year-old father of one and, allegedly, an occasional male prostitute.
Sutherland had grown up in a slum estate in the north of Edinburgh, surrounded by drug dens. Six years before he met Nilsen, he moved into a flat with a girlfriend, Donna, who soon gave birth to their daughter. When the girl was three, he decided to move to London. Donna joined Billy for a while but soon missed home. When she returned, Billy stopped calling. It struck her as very out of character.
When reports of Nilsen’s activities hit the news in 1983, Donna immediately felt this was the reason why he hadn’t been in touch. She called Billy’s father, who contacted the police. In Hornsey, the detectives showed a photograph to Nilsen. He nodded his head to indicate he had killed Sutherland. He couldn’t remember much more, however, than the fact he had strangled him from the front with his bare hands.
Between August 1980 and September 1981, Dennis Nilsen murdered between five and eight young men. He attempted to murder at least one more – Douglas Stewart, the man whom Gordon Honeycombe had met in Soho. Nilsen’s memory of this period is poor, but there’s no reason to disbelieve the general pattern of behaviour described to the police. This would involve drinking and listening to music with the victim, followed by sudden, impulsive murder. Over the following few days, Nilsen would admire, masturbate over and talk to the body.
Nilsen’s manuscript makes some additional confessions. He says that he would shave any body hair from the bodies to make them conform to his physical ideal. He elaborates on the thrill of dressing them up. Sometimes, he wished he’d had lipstick. He did have talcum powder and this he used to make them smell nicer and, ironically, to make them look more alive. When he picked up the limp bodies, he would become extremely aroused and have to masturbate.
When he talks about what he did with the dead bodies, he wonders again if this excitement at holding the dead, limp bodies derived from being carried and washed by his mother and grandmother. Nilsen, however, has no definitive explanation as to how these ‘infantile connections’ worked their way into his sexual composition.
He is much clearer about what he isn’t than what he is. He is not a ‘lust murderer’, like Paul Kürten, the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’ to whom he was compared in Killing for Company. He says he never derived a direct, sexual thrill from the actual act of murder. Time and time again, Nilsen repeats the purpose of the attacks – to acquire a lifeless body. To illustrate this, he says that to find the bodies attractive he would pretend he had stumbled upon the scenario, and ignore the fact that he had killed them. He even claims that if he had had access to a ‘knock-out drug’, he mightn’t have killed them at all. But, of course, we know that most of his victims were already significantly incapacitated through alcohol.
Besides, common definitions of ‘lust murder’ do match Nilsen’s activities. They include deriving satisfaction from playing with dead bodies, and a fascination with dead genitalia. Nilsen clearly enjoyed interacting physically with dead bodies. History of a Drowning Boy also reveals for the first time that Nilsen would have liked to have kept some of the body parts as trophies. He says he would have particularly liked to keep the genitals, if he’d had a suitable liquid in which to preserve them.
‘Lust murder’ is closely related to necrophilia. Nilsen again, specifically
denies being a necrophiliac. Other than on one occasion where he confesses to have had sex between a corpse’s buttocks, he denies ever having had penetrative intercourse with any of the bodies. He does, however, say he would occasionally sexually abuse men who had passed out drunk in his flat. Interfering with a limp, unconscious body, however, was not sufficient to fulfil the main fantasy. That still required a dead body.
Finally, Nilsen is adamant he never ate any of the bodies of those he did kill. He thought about feeding some chunks to the dog as they looked strikingly like beef, but he didn’t trust that the bodies didn’t carry disease. Indeed, one of the corpses in the flat was later found to be carrying the Hepatitis virus.
In Hornsey Police Station, Nilsen confessed he’d killed 12 men in Melrose Avenue; he now claims the real figure was nine. His says he felt pressured by Jay and Chambers, and exaggerated as a result. When I told Peter Jay that Nilsen was now denying three of his victims, Jay shrugged his shoulders and replied that he ‘seemed pretty sure about them at the time’. He then retrieved the list of victims the police had compiled from Nilsen’s interviews. The list of those murdered at Melrose Avenue was as follows:
Irish youth (between 17 and 19 years old). 5ft 6in. Met Nilsen 29 Dec 1978. (Now known to be Stephen Holmes.)
Kenneth Ockendon (23). 5ft 8in. Met Nilsen 3 Dec 1979.
Martyn Duffey (16). 6ft 1in. Met Nilsen 17 May 1980.
Billy Sutherland (26). 5ft 9in. Met Nilsen Aug 1980.
‘Irish labourer’ (between 27 and 30 years old). 5ft 9in. Met Nilsen October 1980 in the Cricklewood Arms. He was tall with rough hands, and wore an old suit. Now denied.
‘Mexican or Filipino’ (20s). 5ft 10in. Met Nilsen November 1980 in the Salisbury Arms in St Martin’s Lane. Slim and looked like a gypsy. Possibly a rent boy.