Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay was waiting just inside the front door. He had been to Cranley Gardens at 11 a.m. following the call from Fiona Bridges, had seen the flesh and bones hauled up from the drain, taken them in a plastic bag to Hornsey Mortuary, and finally taken them to Charing Cross Hospital where David Bowen, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of London and consultant pathologist, had examined them at 3.30 in the afternoon. Professor Bowen declared that the tissue was human, probably from the region of the neck, and the bones were from a man’s hand. By 4.30 p.m. D.C.I. Jay was back at 23 Cranley Gardens, accompanied by Detective Inspector Stephen McCusker and Detective Constable Jeffrey Butler. They waited for Dennis Nilsen to appear. He arrived home at 5.40 p.m.

  D.C.I. Jay introduced himself, saying that he had come about the drains. Nilsen expressed surprise that such a matter should be of concern to the police, and asked if the other two gentlemen were health inspectors. He was told they were police officers and given their names. All four men walked up to Nilsen’s flat and entered the bedroom at the back. Mr Jay told Nilsen he was interested in the drains because they contained some remains which had been identified as human. Nilsen expressed surprise (‘Good grief! How awful!’), but not for long. ‘Don’t mess about,’ said Jay, ‘Where’s the rest of the body?’ ‘In two plastic bags in the wardrobe next door,’ said Nilsen. ‘I’ll show you.’ They went into the front room where Nilsen pointed out the wardrobe and offered his keys. Jay said he would not open the wardrobe for the moment, as the smell was confirmation enough. ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked. ‘It’s a long story,’ said Nilsen. ‘It goes back a long time. I’ll tell you everything. I want to get it all off my chest, not here but at the police station.’ D.C.I. Jay then cautioned him and arrested him on suspicion of murder. For Nilsen it was the end of a road fraught with bewilderment, anxiety, horror, and the keeping of a desperate solitary secret. For Inspector Jay it was the beginning of a case unlike any he had encountered in twenty-six years as a policeman. Indeed, it was to prove unlike any in the history of criminal investigation in Britain. He had a suspected murderer, and as yet had no idea who had been murdered. The investigation would have to go backwards towards detection, rather than forwards towards arrest.

  Butler was left at the flat, while Jay and McCusker took Dennis Nilsen by car to Hornsey Police Station. Sitting in the back of the car next to Nilsen, McCusker said, ‘Are we talking about one body or two?’ Nilson replied, ‘Fifteen or sixteen, since 1978. I’ll tell you everything. It’s a relief to be able to get it all off my mind.’ In the charge room at Hornsey Jay was still incredulous. ‘Let’s get this straight,’ he said. ‘Are you telling us that since 1978 you have killed sixteen people?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Nilsen, ‘three at Cranley Gardens and about thirteen at my previous address, 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood.’ ‘That was the end of the beginning and the end of the killing,’ wrote Nilsen later. ‘The wheels of the law were beginning to spin and speed up down the long slope accelerating under the weight of their new unexpected load. It was all out.’9

  The signs of shock sustained by experienced policemen who might have been impervious to such revelations was palpable. The causes were many. There was the apparent readiness of Dennis Nilsen to talk freely, openly, even volubly, about events which it was not to his advantage to reveal; his seeming emotional indifference; the fact that it was possible to kill undetected for four years in a London suburb. There would be later press allegations that the police had been offered clues over the past years which they had failed to recognise, clues often strewn by Nilsen himself.fn1 But this is to anticipate. The implications of these thoughts revealed themselves gradually over the next few days. For the moment, on 9 February, shock derived from the grisly evidence found at 23 Cranley Gardens in the wardrobe.

  That evening, while Nilsen remained in a cell at Hornsey Police Station, Professor Bowen accompanied the detectives Chambers and Jay to Nilsen’s flat at 9 p.m. They removed from the wardrobe two plastic bags which they took to Hornsey Mortuary; Professor Bowen opened the bags and conducted the examination. In one bag he found four smaller bags, three of them the kind of light shopping bag in everyday use and supplied by cashiers at supermarkets; one was a Sainsbury’s bag. In the first shopping bag he found the left side of a man’s chest, including the arm; in a second there was the right side of the chest, also with the arm attached; the third contained a headless, legless and armless torso, with no evidence of fractures or wounds but clear signs of skilful dissection. The Sainsbury’s bag carried perhaps the most frightening load of all: a heart, two lungs, spleen, liver, gall bladder, kidneys and intestines, all mixed together in a disgusting, impersonal pottage. The stench, released from long-sealed bags, was overpowering.

  Professor Bowen identified a knife wound in the heart, but drew no conclusions from it. When he read Bowen’s statement weeks later, Nilsen reflected upon this himself, with unbelievable detachment: ‘The stab wound to the heart was probably caused accidentally when I had my hands and knife inside the rib cage working blind and trying to cut it out [the heart].’10

  In the second large bag, which also had many smaller ones within it, Professor Bowen discovered another torso, this time with the arms attached but the hands missing; a skull whose flesh had been boiled away, and a head which still retained much of the flesh and some hair at the back, though the hair from the top and front of the head had gone. It looked as if it had been subjected to ‘moist heat’, quite recently. This was the head that Nilsen had started to boil at the weekend, in a final rush to get rid of it.

  At a quarter to eleven the next day, 11 February, the questioning of Dennis Nilsen began, in Mr Jay’s first-floor office at Hornsey. It was to last over thirty hours, spread throughout the coming week, and was distinguished by a most unusual degree of full and thorough co-operation by Nilsen, who offered details, descriptions of technique, and aids towards identification calculated to help the police. Not only did he make no hindrance, but positively swamped the detectives with information faster than they could seek it. He barely required questioning; he spoke in an almost unbroken autobiographical monologue, as if to purge his conscience of a burden which he could no longer bear alone. Yet there were no irrelevant details, no digressions into personal life, no pleas for comfort or understanding. It turned out that one of Nilsen’s previous jobs had been as a probationary police officer, which gave him some knowledge of how interviews of this nature should be conducted, and he had himself interviewed hundreds of people in the course of his work as a civil servant. Another striking aspect of this week was Nilsen’s apparent lack of any hint of remorse; he admitted that he was astonished he had no tears for the people who had died at his hands. In the interviews he displayed no more emotion than the chair on which he was sitting. The police officers found this self-control chilling, but Nilsen would later reveal that he had to remain dispassionate in order for the evidence to be taken down in a proper manner, that his professional training enabled him to feign calmness and rationality while, privately, the rehearsal of his past actions disturbed a long-suppressed whirlpool of fear, pity and self-lacerating remorse within him. ‘Nobody must see me weep for victims,’ he wrote, ‘that is our private grief.’11 The question as to whether or not this ‘grief’ was genuine would prove crucial to an understanding of the man and to an assessment of the causes which diverted his personality down a path strewn with ghastly encounters. But for the moment, facts were all.

  Within the first few minutes of the first interview, Nilsen had told the police that there were the remains of three different people at his flat, one whom he called John the Guardsman, one whose name he did not know, and the third, Stephen Sinclair, a young drug-addict and social outcast whom he had met on 26 January and killed that same evening. This meant that the police had a name and could, if they worked quickly on identification, keep Nilsen on one charge pending deeper investigation; otherwise they would have had to release him within forty-eight hours
, and they knew enough already to view that prospect with alarm. He also told them, after they had challenged him with the contents of his wardrobe, examined the previous night, that they should look in the tea-chest in the corner of the front room, and under the drawer in the bathroom. Disconcertingly, he expressed relief that he had been caught. ‘If I had been arrested at sixty-five years of age there might have been thousands of bodies behind me.’ 12

  Accordingly, on 11 February Dr Bowen had the task of opening the tea-chest and a bag stuffed in the bathroom. The bag contained the lower half of Stephen Sinclair, from the waist down and including the legs. In the tea-chest, beneath a thick velvet curtain, sheets, and pages from the Guardian, there were several bags, including one from Woolworth. In these were found another torso, another skull, various bones, mothballs and air-fresheners.

  It was now possible to assemble various pieces of Stephen Sinclair on the floor of the mortuary, a ghoulish reconstruction which caused D.C.I. Jay, for the first time in his professional life, to feel faint. D.C.S. Chambers, too, was affected as never before, although his years of experience outnumbered even Jay’s. The remains were identified as belonging to Stephen Sinclair by fingerprints, which were on police files, Sinclair having been wanted for minor offences at the time of his death. Fingerprints from hands of dismembered arms matched.

  On the same day, Nilsen went with the police to a house at 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, where he had lived from 1976 to 1981 and where, according to him, another twelve men had met their deaths. He pointed out an area of the garden where they might find some evidence of human remains. Furthermore, he told them that there were another seven people he had tried to kill and failed, some because he had stopped himself, others because they had escaped.

  By the evening of 11 February, police evidence was sufficient for them to bring a charge against Dennis Nilsen, and he was advised that he should have a solicitor with him. (He had been offered this facility earlier, but had declined.) Accordingly, Ronald T. Moss of Moss, Beachley was approached and asked if he would represent Nilsen. Moss, an ebullient, cheerful man around forty years of age, had been involved in murder cases before, but never anything of this magnitude. Initially hesitant, fearful that the implications of the case might prove an unusually harsh emotional burden, Moss needed only a few seconds’ reflection before he accepted. ‘I knew it was going to be the most worrying responsibility I would ever have,’ he said, ‘but it’s my job.’ As it turned out, his comparative youth and his straightforward approach, lacking any of the traditional deviousness one sometimes finds in lawyers, won Nilsen’s confidence from the start, although the relationship was to collapse when the pressures of Nilsen’s long remand began to tell. At 5.40 p.m. precisely, Nilsen was charged with the murder of Stephen Sinclair.

  At 10 a.m. the next morning, Nilsen appeared at Highgate Magistrates’ Court and was remanded in police custody for three days. Ronald Moss wanted to satisfy himself that Nilsen understood what was happening. Of this there could be little doubt. ‘Defendant calm and rational,’ he noted. Nilsen had been brought to the court at 8 a.m. in order to avoid the hordes of pressmen and photographers who were expected to gather. Gather they did, for the case, already reported in the newspapers as a result of police activity in Melrose Avenue, and also owing to the awkward coincidence that one of the witnesses who had just made a statement was related to a journalist, was arousing frantic interest. Some of the tabloid newspapers merrily referred to the ‘House of Horrors’ before there was any evidence that anything horrific had taken place within its walls. (‘The only House of Horrors I know’, wrote Nilsen in his cell, ‘is Number 10 Downing Street.’)13 Within an hour of his having been charged, reporters had tracked down his mother in Aberdeenshire, a white-haired, attractive and extremely friendly woman, and invaded her house, demanding photographs. Bemused by such an overwhelming piece of news, she went upstairs to fetch what she could find, and had the precious snaps snatched out of her hand by people eager to get a ‘scoop’. She insisted that she was only lending the pictures, not giving them away, but she later received word that some had been sold for large sums of money. (She herself would not accept a penny.) She later discovered that one man had a tape-recorder in his pocket which was switched on to capture her response at the moment she was told her son had been arrested for murder. When they dispersed, she was left trembling with shock. Other careful reporters, proud of themselves for having noticed that all the victims were said to have been men, hunted down people who had been at school with Dennis Nilsen twenty-five years earlier and asked if they had ever masturbated together. All this frenzied activity erupted long before the police had finished questioning their suspect, and on one occasion a Japanese crew was located in a house opposite the police station training highly sophisticated sound equipment on the walls and eavesdropping on Nilsen’s amazing revelations.

  Gradually, the newspapers ferreted out some basic clues to his past: he was homosexual, he came into contact with young men in the evenings, he was a radical left-wing trade unionist with a reputation for militant attitudes, and he appeared cold. Angry at the simplistic press attention he was receiving, Nilsen penned his own pastiche of a tabloid news report, a week after his arrest:

  RED MONSTER LURES YOUNG MEN TO THEIR DEATHS IN HOMOSEXUAL HOUSE OF HORROR

  Dennis Andrew Nilsen, 37, once believed to have close links with the Militant Tendency and the Socialist Workers Party (and personal supporter of Red Ken) appeared at the Old Bailey today to face 15 charges of murder and 9 charges of attempted murder.

  Nilsen, who has been to East Berlin, sat in court in sombre suit and tie. He appeared unmoved and emotionless as the prosecution evidence was read out. It was revealed that Nilsen, a misfit and extremist trade union agitator, had butchered his helpless victims on his kitchen floor and burnt the pieces in front of neighbourhood children.

  It is believed that during the Garners Steak House dispute he had ‘bullied’ staff at the Jobcentre into blacking of legal job vacancies. ‘He always intimidated us,’ said a spokesman for the staff at the Jobcentre. While maintaining a respectable front in the civil service he prowled the streets of London.14

  The humour, which might appear misplaced, was to prove a welcome antidote to the catalogue of killing which Nilsen revealed in the course of that week. Policemen are as vulnerable as the rest of us to the shock of such a story, especially when delivered fluently, in a factual manner indifferent to its effect. Chambers, Jay and Nilsen all smoked ceaselessly throughout the interviews, leaving the non-smoker Ronald Moss to breathe his way through the fumes as best he could. Moss was perceptibly upset by what he heard. Nilsen told how he had cut up a body in the bath into small pieces of flesh, a few inches long, and flushed them down the toilet. When he asked what he should do with his cigarette butts in his cell, where there was no ashtray, and was advised by a junior constable to put them in the lavatory, he said that the last time he did that he was arrested. The police officers must be forgiven for bursting into relieved laughter. They needed it. They did not understand what manner of man they had before them and welcomed any respite, however short and however tasteless, from the labour of concentrating upon the dilemma with which they were faced. Who was he? How could he? What possible motive could there be? How was it possible that he escaped detection for so long? Why was he now telling them so much? Why did his long and vivid statement to the police make them feel sick, even physically ill at some points, and seem to leave him unmoved? Why, finally, in spite of his obvious self-confidence, the hint of arrogance, his unattractive stubbornness, did Messrs Chambers and Jay find that they did not dislike him, that they naturally fell into the habit of calling him ‘Des’?

  There is no doubt that one of the reasons Nilsen co-operated so totally was that he felt at ease with Chambers and Jay. Before beginning the interviews, the two detectives discussed privately what sort of approach they should take with him. Should they be firm, authoritarian, heavy with him, or should they ai
m at a relaxed atmosphere? Mr Chambers instinctively felt that they would elicit more information from this man by the second approach, and Mr Jay confirmed that that was his impression too. They further recognised that his long experience in the army (see Chapter 4) would make him respect rank, but resist coercion. It was a professional decision born of long experience, and it paid off. Had they assumed a posture of attack, Nilsen would almost certainly have clammed up.

  Still, the enigma deepened with each hour, the mysteries multiplied. Chambers and Jay tried to cling to the central threads of motive and manner, but could see no consistency. Superintendent Chambers, who asked all the questions throughout the week of interviews, at one point challenged Nilsen with the view that he was a cold, calculating killer: ‘I think you went out looking for these people with the express intention of luring them back to your flat, plying them with drink and then killing them.’ This, at least, would make sense, and would clearly establish, if true, that there was premeditation. Without hesitation, Nilsen replied:

  I can agree with a part of what you say. I do go out in search of company. When I voluntarily go out to drink I do not have the intention at that time to do these things. Things may happen afterwards drinkwise but they are not foreplanned. I’m certainly not consciously aware of what you are saying. I seek company first, and hope everything will be all right.15

  Under further questioning, it emerged that there were far more people who had been to Nilsen’s flat for a drink without any harm coming to them than there had been people who finished the evening dead. ‘I’ve killed people, but I can’t understand why those people. There’s no common factor.’ That was the problem, precisely: no consistency of purpose, no repetition, no easily recognisable pattern. Here was a man who had, by his own admission, performed monstrous acts, yet resented being called a ‘monster’ and was never treated as such by those who arrested him, a man whose company some had sought and paid a terrible price for, while others crossed his path unscathed many times, and yet others had been saved from death by him. Here was a man who until 1978 had been an estimable citizen and was still, in every other respect, a normal London resident going about his work. His activities had not terrorised the community; on the contrary, no one noticed the disappearance of most of his victims, a circumstance which astonished him as much as anyone; had it been otherwise, he would in all likelihood have been caught earlier, and would, again as far as one can make out, have welcomed arrest. (Superintendent Chambers was however convinced that he would never have walked into a police station and given himself up, which is also probably true.) Had they been privy to the poem which Nilsen wrote about his attitude towards the dismembered body of Stephen Sinclair on his last day before arrest, they would have been even more confused. The poem, entitled ‘Sweet’, indicates a softness and a gentleness which nobody who had come into contact with Nilsen in the past few days would have credited as being natural to him. It also shows a strange identity of murderer and victim forming an alliance against the authorities, and it undeniably shows a heart-stopping distortion of personality: