Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  Disposal of the bodies was a problem which Nilsen solved after much deliberation. Having corpses in the flat caused him no distress, and he only bothered to get rid of them when lack of space dictated the necessity. After seven and a half months under the floor, the first victim was burnt whole in a bonfire at the bottom of the garden at 195 Melrose Avenue on 11 August 1979. By the following summer there were two more bodies under the floor, and one of them was decomposing so badly that it caused a constant smell. At this point Nilsen decided they would have to be removed. In the cupboard under the stairs there were some old suitcases. Nilsen brought the bodies up and laid them on the kitchen floor, dissected them into several parts, placed the parts in various bags and stuffed the suitcases with these bags. He then put the suitcases in the garden shed (originally constructed for Bleep), built a low brick wall round them, put in a few deodorant sticks, and covered the lot with piles of newspaper and more bricks. The door to the shed was always unlocked, and the suitcases remained there, with their grisly contents, for the next six months.

  In September, October and November of 1980, three more men died and were placed under the floorboards. At one point there were two whole bodies beneath the floor, and one dismembered. If Nilsen forgot to put a body to rest out of sight (yes, he could forget), he might be suddenly reminded when he opened the cupboard; ‘two bare legs fell out on me and I snapped back into the reality of my situation.’19

  By the end of 1980, Nilsen had six corpses on his hands, some in pieces in the garden shed and some under the floor, plus the arms and hands of one victim which he put down a hole by the bush outside the French windows, having found that the torsos and severed heads filled the suitcases and left no more room. These arms and hands remained under the bush for over a year. The rest of the bodies were burnt in a bonfire on waste ground a few feet beyond the garden fence. But first he had to complete the dissection.

  ‘I dreaded pulling up those floorboards and getting the kitchen floor prepared,’ wrote Nilsen. He would put the dog and cat out in to the garden, and strip naked or to his underpants. He wore no protective clothing and used an ordinary kitchen knife. The pot he used on three occasionsfn2 for the head ‘was used for boiling the flesh from the skulls and the term “cooking” is totally misplaced’. This was the same pot as he had taken to the Denmark Street staff party, but at that stage it had not yet served its additional purpose. (It had also served as a provisional home for goldfish.) He would never allow the dog anywhere near him when dissecting, and never fed it any human flesh. ‘The flesh looked like just any meat one would see in a butcher’s shop and having been trained in butchery I was not subject to any traumatic shocks.’20 Traumatic or not, the business of dissection was acutely distressing. Cutting up bodies held no fascination for him, he says. The body was ‘a relic of mood’ which had to be destroyed. The years he had spent in the Army Catering Corps gave him all the experience he needed to decide where to cut most effectively; his knowledge of anatomy was now put to the most diabolical use.

  Some bodies were in better condition than others, but Nilsen dealt with them all in the same way, kneeling beside them on the stone kitchen floor. The manner in which he set about the task is best described in the murderer’s own words; it makes unpleasant reading:

  I prised up the floorboards. I uncovered the body and took it by the ankles. I pulled it up through the gap in the floor and along the floor into the kitchen on to a piece of plastic sheeting. There were other bodies and parts of bodies under the floor. I got ready a small bowl of water, a kitchen knife, some paper tissues and plastic bags. I had had to have a couple of drinks before I could start. I removed the vest and undershorts from the body. With the knife I cut the head from the body. There was very little blood. I put the head in the kitchen sink, washed it, and put it in a carrier bag. I then cut off the hands, and then the feet. I washed them in the sink and dried them. I wrapped each one in paper towelling and put them in plastic carrier bags. I made a cut from the body’s navel to the breast bone. I removed all the intestines, stomach, kidneys and liver. I would break through the diaphragm and remove the heart and lungs. I put all these organs into a plastic carrier bag. I then separated the top half of the body from the bottom half. I removed the arms and then the legs below the knee. I put the parts in large black carrier bags. I put the chest and rib-cage in a large bag and the thigh/buttock/private parts (in one piece) in another. I stored the packages back under the floorboards. I would leave the bag with the entrails/organs out. I uncovered the next body which had been there longer. I pulled it out by the ankles on to the kitchen floor. There were maggots on the surface of the body. I poured salt on these and brushed them off. The body was a bit discoloured. I was violently sick. I drank a few more glasses of spirits and finished the job as with the other. I got a bit drunk that afternoon. The French windows were open and I had to go out every so often. I was naked to save soiling my clothes. After I replaced the packages under the floor I had a bath. To carry out these dissections I only used a kitchen knife – no saws or power-cutting tools. Afterwards I would listen to music on the headphones and get really drunk, and perhaps take the ‘weed’ [his dog] out to Gladstone Park. (Bleep was always a bit apprehensive and stayed in the garden while I carried out these tasks.)21

  The messiest part of dissection came with the removal of the internal organs, which inevitably involved liquids and an overpowering smell. Yet they were the quickest to dispose of. Nilsen would put the liver, intestines and so on in the gap between the double fencing at the side of the garden, and within a day or two they would have disappeared, devoured by minute creatures of the earth during the night.

  Nilsen realised that he would have to build a second bonfire to consume the remains in suitcases in the garden shed and under the floor; he could delay no longer, and the last four murders had occurred in such rapid succession that he could foresee himself being overwhelmed by corpses if they continued. Still, nobody appeared to notice, nobody knocked at the door with a warrant, nobody was aware of what he was doing. Seven men had walked through the front door at 195 Melrose Avenue and not walked out again. Nilsen himself thought it incredible that he was able to carry on, and dispose of what he called ‘my tragic products’ in his own way, unmolested.

  One very cold day at the beginning of December 1980, Nilsen prepared a huge bonfire on the waste land beyond the garden. The base was built of large sections of tree trunk from an old poplar which had been felled months before and left there. On and around these he stacked pieces of wood from unwanted furniture dumped by neighbours, leaving a sizeable hole in the centre. When he had finished, the bonfire stood about five feet high. Then he went to bed.

  At 6.45 a.m. the next day. Nilsen went out into the garden to make sure no one was about. He then pulled up the floorboards, and wrapped the two bundles which were kept there in large amounts of carpeting, tied and secured. He dragged these one after the other down the garden path to the back fence, paused to remove four palings from the fence to squeeze through, and dragged the bundles across the ground to the bonfire. He removed some of the wood to expose the hollow in the centre and managed to push the bundles through into the very heart of the construction. With each movement he looked around nervously, but it was still early and no one appeared to be abroad, besides which the bonfire was strategically placed to obscure the view between it and the fence.

  The shed was in a convenient place at the bottom corner of the garden just inside the fence, a couple of feet from the missing palings. He lifted the door off and began pushing the suitcases one by one through the fence. The ones on top were heavy but intact, whereas those at the bottom of the pile had been crushed almost to papier-mâché and fell to pieces when he lifted them. Pieces of brown-coloured bone and flesh fell out, leaving a trail of human debris. The shed was awash with dead flies and fly chrysalises as well as maggots. He threw the carrier bags containing headsfn3 into the centre of the bonfire, and went back several times to pick up bits stre
wn along the way. When he had concealed everything in the bonfire, he tidied up the shed and put all the magazines and newspapers around the pile, closing the gap with more wood. On the top he placed an old car tyre to disguise whatever smells there might be. Periodically he checked the garden next door to see if anyone was about, but there was no sign of movement. Then he sprinkled lighter fuel on to the newspaper around the base, and set it alight.

  The fire burned all day long. Nilsen watched it constantly, throwing on some extra wood whenever necessary. Children from the neighbourhood came to watch, and Nilsen warned them to keep their distance:

  The large bonfire is blazing fiercely while I stand near, stone cold and in a nervous sweat. Three neighbourhood kids are gathered and it would seem in order if they danced around it. The devilish purity and innocence of children dancing around a mass funeral pyre would have a simple and solemn grandeur beyond the most empty and formally garish State funeral. The sparks, heat, hot air, smoke and energy of life arrowing skywards in a great visual display of living natural forces. Like some Viking ship glowing westwards to Valhalla. I thought on those who now magnified my empty life seeing their sweetness pervading the London air. I stood like an obedient usher, silenced by them and their powerful consuming presence. Through the open French windows of 195 the two large speakers rang out their ‘Tubular Bells’. I remembered them and knew that they were not in the flames but in me, an integral part of me. Not for them the insulting monotony of a uniform and anonymous corporation cemetery. A mixing of flesh in a common flame and a single unity of ashes. The children turn away to resume their lives. The sun is setting on the glowing embers and I, weeping, drink the bottle dry.22

  ‘I stood there amazed,’ he later wrote, ‘trying to comprehend what I had just done. I found it all hard to believe, that I, Des Nilsen, had actually done all that. It all seemed like some bad dream from which I would soon awaken or at best forget forever.’

  As the fire died down, Nilsen returned occasionally to see if anything was visible. Spotting a skull in the centre, he crushed it into powder with a garden rake and smoothed the surface over. When there was nothing left but ashes, he placed some of the bricks which had been in the shed on to the ashes, to discourage any casual observer from scratching around. Then he washed the floor of the shed with disinfectant, allowed it to dry out and replaced the door. Finally he put the fence palings back into place and retreated indoors, comforting Bleep. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured, ‘everything’s all right now.’ It had taken one complete day to vanish from the earth all traces, or as it turned out almost all traces, of six people.

  Afterwards, Nilsen took a bath, dressed, and went by underground to Tottenham Court Road station. He wandered down to the Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane, where he met a young man and took him back to Melrose Avenue in a taxi. They had satisfying sexual contact and slept soundly together. The next morning they walked to Willesden underground station and said their farewells. Nilsen never saw the young man again. He felt, perhaps, that the past was finally behind him and would never again intrude on the present.

  This, he says, was the first overtly sexual encounter he had permitted himself since the murders had started two years before. Why? The long series of casual bedmates who had filled the years before Christmas 1978 had suddenly ceased with the first murder and were not resumed until the next six victims had disappeared once and for all. Why did Nilsen feel the need for normal sex, and the freedom to enjoy it, immediately after this ritual burning? Did the bonfire represent a release from imprisonment, the shedding of an irksome personality? Could he not hope to retrieve what was left of his former self as long as bodies remained on the premises as physical evidence of his new, murderous identity? And why deny himself sex during the period when those murderous impulses threatened to well up at any time? It cannot have been to protect people from himself, for he did not have sex with any of the men who subsequently died, and could hardly, therefore, regard sex as the trigger. Was it that sex was guilty and murder pure? Sex dirty, murder clean? Or was it the other way round, that he could not give himself sexually until he had exorcised in fire the demon he harboured within him?

  But the demon was not exorcised. The nightmare continued, with five more people dying in 1981, often indiscriminately in so far as few of them held any interest for Nilsen. In fact, 1981 was a year of growing crisis in many respects, building towards a crescendo which was not subdued until his departure from 195 Melrose Avenue.

  In the first place, Nilsen’s continued neglect by the promotion panel at Denmark Street depressed and angered him. At the same time, he had been subjected to a series of petty robberies (often through his own carelessness) culminating in an attack in the street as he staggered back drunk from the Cricklewood Arms. He was overpowered, his jacket and shoes taken, and was left to lie in someone’s front garden. Worse, there was one month’s wages in the jacket, rather in excess of £300; he had to apply for money from the Department of Employment Benevolent Fund to tide him over. After that, he learnt not to take with him any more than he could afford to lose in one evening. His camera and projector had already been stolen in a previous incident. ‘I became more and more depressed with the callousness of life,’ he writes, adding that he was so debilitated and demoralised that he once collapsed in the street, and himself summoned an ambulance to take him to Park Royal Hospital. This combination of defeats was compounded by his self-imposed workload of dealing with union matters in the evening, for which he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he received scant regard. He threw himself into work, he says, ‘believing each hour to be my last’, and to avoid concentrating on the explosive cargo accumulating out of sight. He sometimes wondered how his colleagues would react if they knew all the things he had done. No matter how seriously he took his duties at the Jobcentre, they were insufficient to deflect his murderous impulses. ‘God knows what I was going to do with all those bodies which were happening … It became like a disease.’

  The final straw was an acute exacerbation of his always strained relations with the landlords.

  Nilsen had never been an easy tenant. Irritatingly aware of what was and was not permitted by law, he resisted any scheme the landlords might propose which disregarded their legal obligations. From their point of view, he was not only uncooperative but obstructive. They wanted to know why the electric meters were empty, and why his rent was delayed. There had been occasions when Nilsen had returned home to find Asian men about to enter his flat, and they would then issue grave hints that they intended to ‘modernise’ the house and would need to have vacant possession. He had once written to the landlords’ agents that ‘I will not be intimidated into giving up my rights as a tenant no matter what kind of tactics this company adopts.’

  One day in June he discovered that his entire flat had been vandalised. The television and record-player were smashed, as was the mirror. His clothes, bedding, chairs and carpets were covered in creosote to the point where they were completely unusable. Even the records were smothered in it. Everything he owned apart from the suit he was wearing was utterly destroyed, and he learnt that another flat upstairs had been accorded the same treatment. He contacted the police, who sent detectives to investigate and make a report (unaware that bodies were lying beneath the floor on which they were standing), but those responsible were never caught. It took Nilsen two weeks to restore any kind of order to the flat, but he was left with virtually nothing, and all wooden furniture was chucked into the garden, to await its later destiny as the basis of another bonfire. There was, however, one pleasant consequence of this incident. Nilsen had told the story at work, and was astonished when, a few weeks later, he was presented with a cheque for £85 which his colleagues had collected for him to rebuild his home. He wrote to them a letter which was displayed; it was one of the few expressions in gentle prose which he had ever committed to paper:

  Dear Friends and Colleagues,

  I am humbled by the quiet dignity and unsung qualities
of support and encouragement I have received from all my colleagues at Denmark Street. A cynic like myself seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  It is with a little half-guilt and humility that I gratefully accept this kind gift from fellow workers whose own personal financial situations are never ‘overcomfortable’.

  It is at times like this that I fail to fully articulate my feelings for your generous and caring response. Emerson (from his Journal of 1836) can express it better than I: ‘Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we all unfold easily and well.’23

  Yours faithfully,

  Des Nilsen

  He could hardly have chosen a more ironic quotation, for Nilsen’s personality at that very time was unfolding with the most profound unease. He had murdered four more people since the bonfire, and placed all of them under the floor. In August, the smell persisted in spite of his spraying disinfectant daily, and so one Friday evening he set about dealing with the problem.

  I sat and deliberated this task reluctantly. I fortified myself with about half a bottle of drink before lifting up the floorboards. I removed the intact bundles one at a time, placed them on the kitchen stone floor and unwrapped the bundles one at a time. I put the wrapping to one side. I removed the clothing from the bodies and set about dissecting them. The smell was grossly unpleasant and in some cases there existed large colonies of maggots. I dissected the bodies and wrapped the parts in white paper kitchen towel rolls of which I had an adequate supply. I tightly re-wrapped the parts in smaller compact bundles and put them to one side. I treated the three bodies in this fashion until all was complete and a number of bundles lay on the kitchen floor. I re-packed the bundles in the space under the floorboards, packed them with earth and deodorant tablets.24