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

by Russ Coffey

  Nobbs went to the toilet, and then returned to the bed and quickly fell asleep. At 6.00am, he awoke again. In the bathroom mirror, he saw the bruising around his neck. He felt dazed.

  Back in the bedroom, Nilsen was sitting upright. When Nobbs came in, he commented that the young man looked awful.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ replied Nobbs.

  Nilsen asked what had happened. Nobbs shrugged his shoulders. Nilsen said he should go to see a doctor.

  In hospital the worst was confirmed. Still, Nobbs didn’t want to go to the police out of embarrassment. And he was confused. After all, Nilsen had seemed such a nice, reasonable man; why would he want to kill him? The injuries left him in bed for a few days.

  Some weeks later, another incident occurred that gave Nilsen more comfort that he might be regaining control; he had found himself with a perfect opportunity to attack and yet didn’t take it. At the end of a long night in a local pub, he had found a young man slumped against the bar. Nilsen took him home and let him sleep on his bed. He put the electric fire on and placed a blanket over him. He felt aroused and masturbated next to him but, still, didn’t feel compelled to kill.

  In History of a Drowning Boy, Nilsen speculates on the possible reasons. He thinks it might have been less to do with self-control, or even the amount he had had to drink – the usual reason why attacks went wrong – rather than a function of the precise details of his ‘psychological addiction’. He explains that, that night, vital parts of his ‘fantasy’ were absent. Here, as with Carl Stottor, he says, there was no thrill to be got from ‘rendering’ the young man passive; he was already passed out. Whatever the real reason, the fact that the potential victim walked out of his flat probably came as some relief. There would be no more murders for four months.

  Christmas 1981 was, still as lonely and self-pitying as ever; Nilsen doesn’t talk much about this period. But a letter found in his flat at the time of the arrest – and now the copyright of Brian Masters – tells us something of his feelings during that period:

  Dear Mum,

  Just my (annual) note to keep you, at last, informed that I am still alive and reasonably well. I’ve moved into a new flat (self-contained) on Friday. It’s more expensive than my last one (with much better facilities). I still have the dog (now six years old) and still function as an employment officer and trade-union branch secretary.

  I hope everyone is keeping well. I am sure you will agree with me that it is easy to lose touch when we are living in two different worlds, 500 miles apart. Love, Des

  By ‘reasonably well’, Nilsen meant coping with his loneliness by seeking out others with equally chaotic lives. He found them in his usual haunts – the bars of Soho and the West End. This was how he met the man who, months later, would be the victim of his first murder in Cranley Gardens.

  John Howlett, 28, was 5ft-10in tall with an impressive physique. He was the son of an electrical inspector from High Wycombe who had left home as a teenager. To support himself, he would take on casual work, his favourite being helping out in travelling fairgrounds. But when they first met in a Soho pub, Howlett told him he had been a Grenadier Guardsman. He seemed an unlikely military man but, then again, so was Nilsen.

  In March 1982, their paths crossed again. ‘John the Guardsman’ recognised Nilsen standing at the bar of the Salisbury pub on St Martin’s Lane. He approached him, explaining he was down from High Wycombe for the day. After a few drinks, Nilsen suggested they move back to his flat via the off-licence. Nilsen cooked a meal and they watched television and drank until late. When the late film started, Howlett said that he was tired and asked if Nilsen minded him getting some rest. Nilsen did mind, but Howlett went to lie down anyway. Around midnight, when the film had finished, Nilsen went into the next room and found Howlett in his bed.

  ‘I didn’t know you were moving in,’ he said with a scowl. He suggested calling a taxi, but Howlett just grunted. Nilsen went back next door, poured himself a drink and had a think. He didn’t like Howlett, nor did he find him attractive.

  Nilsen’s police confessions state he killed Howlett simply because he was an inconvenience. It was a fiercely brutal attack; the only account he ever gave that contained a convincing description of the violence of murder. He told Chambers and Jay:

  Summoning up all my strength, I forced him back down and his head struck the rim of the head-rest on the bed. He still struggled fiercely so that now he was half off the bed. In about a minute, he had gone limp. There was blood on the bedding. I assumed it was from his head. I checked and he was still breathing deep, rasping breaths. I tightened my grip on him again around his neck for another minute or so. I let go my grip again, and he appeared to be dead.

  I stood up. The dog was barking in the next room. I went through to pacify it. I was shaking all over with the stress of the struggle. I really thought he was going to get the better of me. I returned and was shocked to see that he had started breathing again. I looped the material round his neck again, pulled it as tight as I could and held on for what must have been two or three minutes. When I released my grip, he had stopped breathing.

  History of a Drowning Boy doesn’t tell us any more about this attack, other than to imply that he exaggerated the above confession under pressure from Chambers and Jay.

  There is no good reason to believe that, but there is cause to believe that killing in a location where, with no obvious way to dispose of the body, marked another level of psychological decline. Still, despite the situation he found himself in, once out of the flat, Nilsen reverted more than ever to his persona of a finicky and indignant complainer.

  Nilsen has a number of anecdotes that, unintentionally, illustrate this. One was that, while walking Bleep one day, he found a body wrapped in a blanket on Highgate woods. Full of self-righteousness, he says he was shocked that there might be a murderer on the loose and called the police. It turned out to be a dead dog.

  Further clues to Nilsen’s state of mind during this period are to be found in an unsent letter Nilsen wrote to his union friend, Alan Knox. It was full of breezy chat about his new television and their shared political views. The reason for writing the letter had been to prepare for a visit from Knox; and even while Nilsen’s wardrobe contained a dead body that he had no idea what to do with, he was able to cheerfully write, ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’

  Eventually, Nilsen decided that disposal of Howlett’s body would best be done piece by piece. Three days after killing him, he moved the body out of the wardrobe, and brought it into the bathroom. Although he covered the floor with bin liners, the main dissection took place in the bath. Nilsen put a wooden board across it and then, with the body draped over this, the soft parts of the body were cut into pieces a couple of inches long and flushed down the toilet. But this process was too slow. To speed things up, Nilsen then started to boil the flesh and viscera down to a soup-like consistency. This seemed to allow the plumbing to cope better. When the head was soft enough, he scooped the brains out and flushed them, too. The larger bones were packed into bin liners in the wardrobe with salt and padding. While separating them, Nilsen broke several knives. The smaller bones were left out for the dustman.

  After Alan Knox’s visit, Nilsen was able to appear relatively relaxed and chatty in company. That was how Carl Stottor found him when they met one wet May evening. Even today, Stottor’s most vivid memories of the night are still the pleasant hours they spent before the attack and how Nilsen had approached him while he sat alone in Camden’s Black Cap pub, nursing half a pint. He remembers being able to confide how vulnerable he had felt with his previous, violent boyfriend. Stottor told Nilsen how he had felt unable to report how he had attacked him because, until the previous month, he had been under the gay age of consent –21 – and had been scared of attracting the attention of the authorities.

  Not only did Nilsen have a comforting manner, he also reminded Stottor of his very first boyfriend. The stranger seemed sympathetic and kind. Eve
n long after the attack, Stottor continued to believe that there had been a genuine connection between the two of them.

  In the immediate aftermath, though, no one seemed to believe anything he had said. The police were dismissive and, when he told friends what he thought might have happened, they convinced him that he was getting confused with an earlier attack from his boyfriend.

  When Stottor later wrote to Nilsen for answers, he was still finding it hard to remember all the details of the attack. He wrote in a spirit of open enquiry but shied away from divulging the full extent of his physical injuries: how after the attack he had needed to sleep constantly for almost a week, and the problems he still had with his lungs from the drowning.

  Similarly, Stottor chose not to go into detail about the emotional breakdown and suicide attempt that followed the attack. The final thing he omitted to say was the bizarre discovery he’d made that ‘John the Guardsman’ – whose body had been in the wardrobe that night – was the same John Howlett he’d known from his own childhood. That coincidence made the trauma all the more personal.

  The afternoon after letting Stottor walk free, Nilsen’s mind would have soon turned to certain welcome developments with his job. The previous October, against all expectations, Nilsen had finally been awarded a promotion. There were no immediate positions available, so he was put on a waiting list.

  Friday, 25 June 1982 would be Nilsen’s last day at the Denmark Street branch of the Job Centre. In the late afternoon, he was given a gold pen, a lighter and the traditional card full of friendly comments, such as ‘Keep up the talking’, and ‘Kentish Town may never be the same again’.

  On the Monday, Nilsen took the Tube three stops to Kentish Town where his new position as Job Centre executive officer put him on a salary of £7,000. The new duties involved being a finance supervisor, a post supervisor and an accommodation and premises officer. It wasn’t just the salary and status that were an improvement – his immediate superior, Janet Leaman, was the only person, he says, he ever had a warm working relationship with. Everything about this new job gave him a new sense of optimism.

  There was still, however, also the fairly regular outbursts of temper. Hunter-Craig described him, during this period, as being like the ‘little man’ in whom unexpressed anger builds up. But at work this was largely compensated for by hard work and attention to detail. It was also a sympathetic environment. The women in the office felt that Nilsen was lonely and some suspected he was gay, and probably vulnerable.

  One night after staying late in the office to help mop up a flood, Leaman gave him a packet of cigarettes as a thank you. She was struck by how he gushed about how grateful he was for the token of gratitude. Some months later, at Christmas, he told her about a phone call from his mother. It seemed he needed a mother more than most.

  During his last six months at Cranley Gardens, Nilsen stopped trying to contact his mother altogether. He was now totally resigned to being a murderer. Martyn Hunter-Craig thinks that, in his own cryptic way, he admitted as such. He remembers him saying, ‘I know my life will be over in the Eighties,’ although at the time he’d assumed Nilsen had meant his eighties.

  In September 1982, Nilsen found Graham Allen the worse for drugs and trying to hail a cab in Piccadilly. Allen was a 28-year-old Glaswegian known to his friends as ‘Puggy’. The man whom newspapers would characterise simply as a ‘registered heroin addict and petty criminal’ would become Nilsen’s fourteenth victim. He was tall, rugged and heterosexual, with a girlfriend called Lesley and a son called Shane. Although Allen drifted in and out of his boy’s life, Shane has clear memories of him, and grew up to look increasingly like his dad. But looks, and a fondness for drugs were, more or less, all Puggy gave Shane. Puggy was aggressive and uncultured, but Shane is relaxed and bookish. In his thirties, to help kick his own heroin habit, Shane moved from London to a village near Grenoble in the south-east of France. He still lives there, and supports himself with casual jobs in the civil service while trying to pursue a career in writing, which in the last couple of years has included his online presence: memoiresofaheroinhead.blogspot.co.uk

  It was while researching pieces for his online journal that Shane found my Sunday Times article, which prompted him to contact me. After an email and phone exchange, he sent me a link to an essay he’d written about his father. He wanted me to be able to see that, for all Graham Allen’s faults, Puggy was still his father. The essay starts: ‘My father, Graham Archibald Allen, was born on 31 October 1954 in Motherwell, Scotland. The youngest of two, he grew up with attention problems and failed miserably at school. The only thing he excelled at was football. By the age of 15, he had discovered Glasgow, alcohol and cheap prescription drugs. By 17, he was out of school, out of pocket and out of home. Having been laid off by the steel works in Motherwell and with nothing else for it, he made his way down south to London.’

  After failing to find unskilled work, Shane says his father’s options started running out. ‘After making a few contacts, he was soon taking advantage of the lenient squatting laws of the time. With a roof over his head, it wasn’t long before he was sucked into the sleazier side of city life. Cheap, strong booze and whatever pills were doing the rounds … [funding] his habit through a mixture of government unemployment money, begging, stealing and robbing tourists around London’s West End.’

  But then something changed in Allen’s life. In 1972, he met Lesley Mead, a blonde, blue-eyed barmaid. Three years later, she gave birth to Shane. Over the next eight years, Mead spent her time oscillating between Allen and a small-time gangster called Ray. Shane’s memories of growing up are of his father moving in and out of his life, and are reproduced here with kind permission from the author:

  During the last five years of his life, my father was in and out of prison, in and out of rehab, and in and out of life. His living was hard and his addiction was harder – it was completely out of control … If that wasn’t enough, he was also halfway to becoming a chronic alcoholic…

  [On the night of Allen’s disappearance in 1982] I remember him arguing with my mother and demanding money for heroin. He was drunk and cut and she had taken refuge inside the family house. [His] demands took place from outside, standing on the window ledge and shouting through the glass. He was hung up their like some perverse embodiment of Christ, black blood coming out his mouth where he’d punched his own face … That was the last sight either my mother or I saw of him. Well, that and then finally climbing down before casually skipping the low garden wall and disappearing into the night. That image haunts my mother, and what haunts her even more were her very last words: ‘Fuck off … and NEVER come back!’

  Shane, later, adds, ‘I know the relationship between my mother and father was violent and unhealthy, but it was still love, and as we know, love is … never a logical emotion.’

  Graham Allen was last seen in September 1982. Shane and his mother think that, after the scene at the window, he walked off to find drugs. They think it not unlikely that he may have had a vague plan to pay for them by mugging a gay man who’d tried to pick him up. When Nilsen found him trying to hail a cab in London’s West End, his dealer had probably already advanced a large hit of heroin. He had probably also been drinking. Allen was standing at the foot of Shaftesbury Avenue with blood on his jacket.

  Nilsen told the police, ‘The thing he wanted more than anything else was something to eat. I had very little supply in but I had a whole tray of eggs. So I whipped up a huge omelette and cooked it in the large frying-pan, put it on a plate and gave it to him. He started to eat the omelette. He must have eaten three-quarters of the omelette. I noticed he was sitting there and suddenly he appeared to be asleep or unconscious with a large piece of omelette hanging out of his mouth. I thought he must have been choking on it but I didn’t hear him choking – he was indeed deeply unconscious.

  ‘I sat down and had a drink. I approached him, I can’t remember what I had in my hands now – I don’t remember whether he was
breathing or not but the omelette was still protruding from his mouth. The plate was still on his lap. I removed that. I bent forward and I think I strangled him. I can’t remember at this moment what I used … I remember going forward and I remember he was dead … If the omelette killed him, I don’t know, but anyway in going forward I intended to kill him. An omelette doesn’t leave red marks on a neck. I suppose it must have been me.’

  Until Allen was identified through dental records from a metal plate in his jaw, he was simply referred to by Nilsen as ‘the omelette death’.

  At least two men survived visits to Nilsen’s flat between the murders of Allen and the final murder, that of Stephen Sinclair; the first was Trevor Simpson. Simpson’s interviews from 1983 paint a clear picture of Nilsen’s domestic situation during his last months as a free man.

  They met on Wednesday, 22 December in a Soho pub. Simpson was 20 years old and had just served six months in jail for hijacking a car in Belgium. When Nilsen met him, he was stopping off in London en route to the Midlands. After a few drinks, Nilsen invited the young man back. As with Graham Allen, there was nothing homosexual about ‘Trevor from Derby’. On the first night, Nilsen slept in his room at the back, and told Simpson to settle himself in one of the armchairs in the lounge.

  The next morning Nilsen told him he was welcome to stay a while. He took up Nilsen’s offer for seven days, during which he was the recipient of a constant barrage of left-wing rhetoric, and suggestions they visit Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery nearby. And, despite being struck by the smell, Simpson told police he wasn’t tempted to look for its source.

  Christmas came and went just like any other day. There were no cards or decorations, no special meal and no friends. On the sixth night, Simpson irritated Nilsen by being rude about a stew he’d cooked. At around midnight, Simpson remembered Nilsen, drunk, muttering about having to consult the ‘professor’ about whether he could stay – an odd expression that Hunter-Craig also remembers Nilsen using.