Some inmates were so frequently on hunger-strike as their only form of protest that the event barely warranted notice. Nilsen did it twice for a few days in order to break the monotony. Besides, he wrote, ‘It is perfectly feasible to eat normal rations here and still remain effectively on hunger-strike.’5 It was a remark illustrative of his liability to misrepresent through humour.
The worst depression of his early confinement arose, strangely, from the denial of his privilege to attend a church service. He was still not a religious man and was hardly amenable to the blandishments of priests, though he enjoyed regular chats with the Methodist minister who made no attempt to impose religious content on the conversation. But the weekly service was a welcome interval, until it was suggested to Nilsen that his presence there disturbed other inmates who did not wish to be contaminated by such a monster. He wrote, ‘The prison shepherd puts a strong guard on the 99 in the fold who want to get out. He goes out to seek the lost sheep and when he finds it he cuts its throat because it will not fit into the fold.’6 Nilsen had been trying hard to foster the impression that he was one among many, that he was human and belonged with humans. The blow shattered his illusion in a moment, reminding him that the offences with which he was charged set him far beyond the pale where he was destined to remain, in a solitary confinement more severe than that represented by the prison cell. He wrote to his mother the shortest letter of his entire life, telling her to forget him as he was already in the tomb.
I first met Dennis Nilsen on 20 April 1983, and we had corresponded for three weeks before that. I sent a letter to Brixton Prison in March, together with a copy of one of my earlier books. On 30 March I received the first letter on lined prison notepaper, every inch of the four sides used up to avoid waste, which began, ‘Dear Mr Masters, I pass the burden of my past actions on to your shoulders.’7
I could have had no notion, at that stage, that the flood of letters, often more than one a day, would build into an impressive archive measuring a man’s mood as he contemplated his fate, and full of iconoclasm, humour, anger and despair; nor that I would be virtually Nilsen’s only visitor and confidant in the coming months. I have to admit that I did not find it a burden. It would be easy and fruitless to condemn, but arduous and worthwhile to discern, if I could, the source of a tragic disturbance. It was in his second letter that Nilsen warned me I might be distressed by what I read, in notes that he was preparing for his solicitor, Ronald Moss, with specific instructions that they be passed to me after his trial. That alone, at the very outset, was revealing, for a man who knows the emotion of distress and is alive to its causes cannot be amoral. He used this very adjective himself. As he sat and thought and wrote about the past, he described himself as ‘an amoral John Bunyan who is making progress backwards in all directions’,8 but the concept of morality, albeit severely crippled, was apparent in his musings on the images which filled his mind, images of the dead, images of which he knew he would never be relieved. Picturing himself on the last weekend at Cranley Gardens with the body of Stephen Sinclair before him, he wrote a poem which suggests turmoil beneath calm:
I try to smile
Despite the vengeance looking at me,
Covered in your tomato paste,
A man of many parts
I try to forget.
Even the perfume of your passing
Lingers on.
More problems now
With all your bits and pieces.
I try to run,
And pinioned to this spot
In acres full of you,
Of dust and bones.
I try to weep,
With you looming large in my cell,
Of problems to the grave.
I try, I try
To unravel enigmas,
And each way I turn
I’m still holding you.
I try to smile
But you’re not smiling now.
In April death is dead
And all the new life lives
Upon our garbled inquest.9
From the letters already exchanged, I expected a sensitive and introspective man. At our first meeting we sat opposite one another across a small table, and I saw an assertive man, bristling with confidence and swagger, amazingly relaxed as he slouched with an arm over the back of the chair, totally in command and behaving as if he was interviewing me for a job. He gave forth an impression of intellectual intensity, coupled with a contemptuous disregard for appearances. He was polite (he stood to shake hands, for example, and never failed to do so subsequently), but strangely casual. When the fifteen minutes allowed for visits had elapsed, he asked me to call in any time, as if it were to a local pub. Of course, the circumstances were odd, we were each sizing up the other, and there were two warders present in the room. Later, our talks were much less strained. Yet one clear inference from this first meeting remained constant throughout: the divorce between the Nilsen who wrote and the Nilsen who spoke was marked to an unusual degree. All of us conceal in conversation clues to personality which we happily reveal on paper, because the added distance of writing lends protection and encourages the risks of intimacy. Nilsen also maintained that a lifetime of public service laid on top of the inherent ‘shame’ of his sexuality had taught him to wear an ‘official’ face. Yet neither explanation quite accounts for the gulf between his reflective writing and his assertive conversation.
On 21 April, the day after this initial meeting, Nilsen surprised everyone at his routine appearance at Highgate Magistrates Court by declaring that he wished to discharge legal aid. Ronald Moss was completely taken aback and discussed with him at length what he meant. Did he intend to instruct another solicitor because he was dissatisfied with Moss? No, Nilsen was adamant that he had no complaint with his legal representation, but wanted to dispense with legal aid altogether. Henceforth he would defend himself. The magistrate was even more perplexed and seemed not quite sure what to do. Nilsen was asked three times if he realised the implications of his request, and three times he replied that he did. At root he was frustrated by his treatment at Brixton, where every application made to the governor or through his solicitor to the Home Office was ignored, and he found the notion of innocence before trial ruefully funny. The final straw had been the decision by church-going inmates that they did not wish to be soiled by his company.fn3 He wrote to me that he would battle on alone, and that if he were going to fail he would do so in his own way, with his ‘integrity’ intact. I noticed the interpretation he implied in the word ‘failure’, not failure to win his case, but failure to stand up to the ‘system’. He was still the union branch secretary hostile to abuses of organised authority. He knew it would be difficult, but not impossible, to conduct his own defence, and he did not intend to withhold any of the truth. He was angry about what he thought were leaks to the press from within the prison and/or from the police. I noted in my diary, ‘It is alarming how easily he assumes conspiracy and corruption.’ I further wrote, ‘Though his suspicion of the venality and awfulness of all authority is perhaps exaggerated, it is rooted in a healthy distrust of any humbug. And it is perhaps right that he should be aggrieved at the denial of all his freedoms when he is only on remand.’ I thought that he wanted me to know everything to test whether I should still be able to look him in the face afterwards. Could a relationship based upon trust survive the revelation of such iniquity?
Ronald Moss accepted Nilsen’s decision, as he must, but wondered whether this was the right way to make his protest. He respected the man, intuited his loneliness, and wanted the best possible outcome for his former client. He let it be known that if Nilsen were to change his mind, he would be available. As it turned out, Nilsen would discharge legal aid twice more, and twice more apply for it to be renewed. Five weeks before his trial, when Moss had already written his brief for counsel and while a psychiatrist appointed by the court, Dr MacKeith, was preparing his report, he elected to instruct a new solicitor with quite a different approach to
his case, Ralph Haeems. These changes of strategy were not as abrupt as they seemed. They derived both from the erratic emotional state of Nilsen himself, and from the pressures of cellular confinement at Brixton. The Nilsen who kept control, who organised, finally succumbed to the Nilsen who felt trapped and despondent. The two sides of his character, locked in perpetual disequilibrium, would not be reconciled.
On 28 April he appeared without legal representation at Highgate and complained that he was afforded no facilities to prepare his defence and that confidential papers were removed from his cell. He was told these were matters he should take up with the prison governor. By 6 May he had been granted a renewal of the legal aid order, and on 26 May he was committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court on five charges of murder and two of attempted murder. On 15 July he discharged the legal aid order again, though Mr Justice Farquharson told him frankly he thought the move unwise. Legal aid was renewed at Nilsen’s request on 5 August, as the direct result of an incident at Brixton Prisor,
At the end of July, Nilsen refused to wear prison uniform in accordance with his understanding of the 1964 Statutory Prison Rules. He was therefore not allowed to leave his cell to ‘slop out’. On August 1 his chamber-pot was overflowing and he shouted through the window of his cell door that everyone should stand clear; he then threw the contents of the pot out, and splashes hit some prison officers. In the fracas which followed Nilsen’s glasses were removed and smashed, he received a black eye and lost a tooth. He was due to appear at the Old Bailey on August 5 to announce his decision on legal aid after a week’s time for reflection allowed by the court. I saw him on August 4 and he asked me to contact Ronald Moss to have him present in court in order that he might re-instruct him. Moss resumed the case on August 5. An adjudication panel heard the charges against prison discipline which were levelled at Nilsen on 9 August. He was found guilty of assaulting prison officers and given fifty-six days’ punishment withdrawing all privileges, including the right to smoke cigarettes. He maintained that he had assaulted no one, but was not believed; the panel decided that he was lying.
Later in August, he tore up some of his depositions (he says in order to have something to do – he only destroyed the least important papers) and was placed in a ‘strip cell’ for having committed an ‘irrational act’. Nilsen’s response to this was that the papers were his to do with as he chose, and that anyway it was an irrational act to vote Conservative, but one was not punished for it by enforced nakedness. Finally, some autobiographical papers entitled ‘Orientation in Me’, which covered his sexual history, were not among the papers returned to him after his period in strip cell. The prison authorities made an internal inquiry, but the papers were not found, and were assumed to have been ‘removed’ by persons unknown.
Nilsen’s behaviour began to show signs of paranoia. He went so far as to accuse the prison governor (in a letter to me) of stealing postage stamps from his letters, and he did not appear to be joking. His reasonable justification was that when his letters were stopped by the censor, envelopes bearing his stamps were not returned. He said the governor had called him an ‘impertinent wretch’ and told him he was behaving like a schoolgirl. On one of my visits, he walked out of the room when the warder said he could not smoke, and had to be coaxed back in. One of the warders had apparently told him with reference to another prisoner who might try to hang himself that he (the warder) would willingly hang on the suicide’s legs. Nilsen’s emotional state swung from one extreme to the other, including compassion for a cleaner who had smuggled him a roll-up cigarette, and warm feelings towards a former female colleague who visited him while she was heavily pregnant; he cherished, he said, ‘the nearness of new innocent life to such a mess of guilt as I am myself’. The remark betrayed a degree of egomania of which he was himself quite unaware.
By September Nilsen’s resistance had broken, and he was uncharacteristically submissive, openly indifferent to what happened to him. He was due to discharge legal aid yet again on September 19 (and request permission for me to sit with him in the dock), until another prisoner mentioned the name of Ralph Haeems, and it was this solicitor who took over his case forthwith. The judge warned that the court would tolerate no further applications from Nilsen.
Throughout this tempestuous time, his relationship with me gradually developed into real loyalty. Whatever happened to his legal representation, the one connection ‘outside’ which he could not envisage breaking was mine, and he frequently claimed that my visits and support gave him the will to continue when he was at his lowest. Naturally I knew well enough that part of this loyalty sprang from the knowledge that I and I alone was going to tell his story from his point of view. It was not fame that he sought; on the contrary, he felt bitter that his good work for the union went unnoticed, while (understandably) his crimes brought the spotlight of public attention burning in on him. He would have liked, he said, to make a mark in his career, not be notorious for these dark acts. So he did not rely upon me to spread his name about – that would be done anyway – but to display the clean linen as well as the dirty. I imagined also that he might be a clever manipulator using me for his own ends; he could not have escaped detection for four years without some native cunning. I was now fast becoming his mouthpiece, his only contact with the outside world, and I should not underestimate his ability to engineer situations which might make me his moral representative.
I was especially alarmed one day when he intimated that he would need to see all the exhibits to be presented by the prosecution (this was at a time when he had no solicitor), including the photographs taken by the police photographer. I knew and he knew that these pictures included nauseating shots of skulls, a half-boiled severed head, a bag full of human entrails, and the separate limbs of Stephen Sinclair. He had not seen them, but he wanted to, and showed no sign of fear. Frankly I found this chilling, as I could only imagine that the contemplation of such photographs in a lonely prison cell would corrode the soul. But I forgot that Nilsen had gone beyond that; he had not seen photographs, but he had seen the real man, and had dismembered his body, and had looked at him afterwards.
The reasons for Nilsen’s loyalty to me were born of a simple (some might say naive) reverence for principle which was elevated in his mind to the status of a god, the only god he worshipped. It was the one constant factor in his turbulent life, and it remained strong in spite of the fact that he knew his offences had violated his own most deeply-held principles as well as those of society. He clung to it with passion. Two incidents among many might serve to illustrate the point. A rumour had spread in prison that I was a fraud, a secret journalist in the employ of a tabloid newspaper. Nilsen was so angry that he refused to see his solicitor and counsel as a protest to demonstrate that he would not suffer my honour to be impugned in this way. He expected an apology from the assistant governor who had made the allegation. Once he had given his trust, he would not dilute it or allow it to be challenged. He nursed and protected it with the stubbornness of a child; to those who did not know him, these impulsive reactions might appear petulant. A similar conclusion could be drawn from the other incident I want to introduce. During a conversation between cells, an inmate launched into an attack upon Nilsen, telling him that the only reason he spoke to the rest of them was to collect material which he would then sell to newspapers. He had until then rejoiced in the small acts of comradeship in prison, and that he could be suspected of betraying his last friends for money hurt him. He withdrew into morose silence for three days.
Nilsen’s moods in prison were kaleidoscope, shifting from elation to gloom, from resignation to despair, from regret about the past to hope for the future. They were rarely equable. His most robust and jubilant period followed his discovery that he was in love with another prisoner on the block. The man was David Martin, himself the object of much press attention at the time as he had been on the run prior to his arrest and was now awaiting trial on a number of serious charges.fn4 When those news
papers more interested in scandal than news got wind of the fact that Martin and Nilsen were in the same wing at Brixton, they invented a story to the effect that the two men were enjoying a passionate love affair. This was both more than and less than the truth. Their relationship was never sexual, but it did evolve into a tie of affection and confidence which was important to them both. David Martin, habitually reticent and reluctant to talk to anyone, found himself able to chat at length to Nilsen when they walked together in the exercise yard, revealing much about his life that he withheld from others. For Nilsen, ever the ‘monochrome man’ incapable of compromise, the friendship reached deeper levels and engaged his emotions to the point of abandon:
If I was sentenced to a choice of either freedom or fifty years in prison with him I would without question make the latter option. I can’t fully understand why him? Why doesn’t really matter. I’m really alive and vibrant and there is no one in Britain who I would change places with now that he is here … If I kill myself, I will no longer be able to think about him … Few really beautiful and wonderful things have ever happened to me … This is perhaps the most glorious event of them all. Providence has not forgotten me.
Inspired by this unexpected affection (the third such in his life after Terry Finch and Derek Collins, and eclipsing them both in intensity), Nilsen wrote a poem entitled ‘Danger’, expressing his fear of rejection if ever he were to declare himself, as well as fear lest the relationship compromise Martin’s reputation with the tabloids:
I am at the peak of feeling
When I shield him from me,
And all the secret places
Wherein sleeps my emotion.
I have a lead-lined skin,
Not so much to keep him out
As keep my power in.10
The piece is interesting in its implication that someone needs to be ‘shielded’ from the ‘power’ of his emotions; others in the past had been less fortunate. He also intimated that it was ‘perverse to be happy after lives are silent’.
Killing For Company Page 20