The confusion is even more pronounced in the commentaries he wrote to the drawings – ‘Sad Sketches’. One sketch shows a body slumped in the wardrobe, another depicts two bodies under the floor, a third the body of a blond youth ritually stripped after the killing:
After twelve hours his body had become cold and rigid with rigor mortis and his arms became fixed as they had been left. I would have to force his limbs loose after another twelve hours had passed. I put a clean undergarment on him and left him on the spare bed. I wept for us both. [Author’s italics]
A fourth drawing shows a body lying on a table and another man, evidently Nilsen himself, standing by it and looking down upon it:
I stood in great grief and a wave of utter sadness as if someone very dear to me had just died … amazed at such a tragedy … ritual washing … waited for arrest. I sometimes wondered if anyone cared for me or them. That could easily be me lying there. In fact a lot of the time it was.33 [Author’s italics]
The conclusion is obvious, and Nilsen had to face it. ‘It may be that when I was killing these men I was killing myself.’34 The progression from a static admiration of his own body in the mirror, to feigning death, and finally, to the actual contemplation of a real corpse which represented himself, was complete. The victims had died to satisfy Nilsen’s search for an identity, and the only identity he yearned for was a dead one. It followed that a punishment ending in death would be a consummation.
It seemed to Nilsen that the capital sentence, fallen into desuetude since 1967, would have been the fitting solution to his life. He admitted that it would be a relief to walk into the prison yard one day and be hanged, and he meant not only relief from oppressive guilt but from uncertainty and doubt. It would at last make sense. ‘I was destroying myself and the destruction of others could have been instruments in a binge of guilty self-punishment.’35 If this was really so, then the self-punishment must finally be self-directed; there would, he knew, be no more victims to take his place. While he would welcome hanging, he could not countenance suicide which would assuage guilt rather than embrace it:
I would step up there [on the scaffold] safe in the knowledge that the books were now to be balanced for the good of all. I’ve thought of hanging myself but I can’t bear the prospect of it being interpreted as an act of cowardice on my part and running away from my responsibilities and punishment. It would also have a ruinous effect on my mother, relatives and friends … I’d like posterity to know that I can take anything that they choose to throw at me. Suicide is an escape from justice, and I have handed myself over so that justice may be seen to be done.36
Rejection of suicide did not amount to a stubborn attachment to life. On the contrary, Nilsen’s death-wish grew steadily more persistent throughout his remand, invading his dreams and distorting his judgment. He would imagine himself in a room, possibly at Melrose Avenue, with all fifteen victims lying dead around him, except that he was dead too. He was one of them, with a noose around his neck. The only sound of life was Bleep whining and howling in the garden. The interesting aspect of such a vision is not so much that Nilsen should receive attention in death (the dog’s lamentations offering proof that he mattered), as that he should be where he belonged, where he felt at home. The corollary of this attitude is that he is a foreigner, an alien in the living world, a permanent and helpless outsider. Perhaps, after all, the church was right to ban his attendance at services; perhaps he really was not fit to be with humans, as he was not essentially part of the human race himself. Perhaps he was the incarnation of evil, the instrument of diabolical designs.
‘I wish I was “consciously” evil, so that I could at least have a god to worship,’ wrote Nilsen. ‘I do not feel like an evil person. I doubt if I could kill someone now, even under orders and with lawful authority. I am about the least likely killer that I know.’37
This is potentially one of the most revealing passages in all Nilsen’s writings, for it is obviously a genuine cry of bewilderment, and if we turn later to consider the religious view of his crimes, and the possibility of possession, we shall see that according to this view the devilish influence works insidiously and subtly to convince the person selected to act on its behalf of his essential innocence. Nilsen once wrote to me that he must not lose sight of this innocence. He did not, of course, mean to deny that he had killed, but to give voice to the feeling that he had in some way been used by a power to which he had surrendered control. It was not a thought which occurred to him often. Most of the time he accepted total responsibility for his acts. But it was there, latent and subdued, the last glimmer of self-esteem.
‘We are born with a skull wherein a great harvest can be sown … they cut away the goodness and leave the field barren, to spray their deadly chemicals within and bring forth a poisoned yield.’38 Who, exactly, are ‘they’? Supporters of a Manichaean vision of the world and of man’s predicament would identify them as messengers of Lucifer. Psychiatrists might call them pressures of a personality disorder brought on by morbid imagination. Medical men could say that they are chemical imbalances in the body, or an inherited tendency towards madness. Environmentalists would blame amorphous ‘society’. Do they all amount to the same thing dressed in different words? And where, in all this, does human will fit? ‘The fashion of treating human behaviour as conditioned by events in infancy or by impersonal forces in history has been conveniently used to exempt individuals from moral responsibility,’ Noel Annan has written.39 It might equally be said that intimations of possession by evil forces postulate a similar exemption. The whole question of free will ultimately comes into play.
One of the letters which Nilsen sent me was written as he emerged from this long period of introspection. It touched upon the themes of alienation and evil, of guilt and punishment, and reverted once more to his grandfather. It might serve to illustrate how the prisoner saw himself five and a half months before his trial:
My case has produced a series of delayed emotional and moral shocks as the mind slowly accumulates the enormity of events. My range of emotions recently have all arrived at the same destination – self-punishment. I am now in a void of uncertainty. I remember the past and I remember some of it with vivid clarity. I recollect these images from the past and I sometimes wonder if anything that transpired was somehow meant to be. I think I am two stark contrasting poles of man’s character. I have played the angel’s role, unimpeachably, balanced disastrously by momentary and uncontrollable outbursts of primitive evil. In my life at its most important junctions there was no middle of the road. At these critical moments there were no grey areas. I had seen through my union principles to a conclusion of absolute defeat or absolute victory. Moderation became alien to me. When my feelings directed its love on another living being I would overpower that person with overwhelming emotion. In a moderate conventional world this is considered bizarre and alien. I had always held within me a fear of emotional rejection and failure. I seemed always to travel at 100 m.p.h. in a stream of traffic with an upward limit of 30 m.p.h. Nobody ever really got close to me. I was a child of deep romanticism in a harsh plastic functioning materialism … I am an odd personality for today. There never was a place for me in the scheme of things … My inner emotions could not be expressed, and this led me to the alternative of a retrograde and deepening imagination. I turned to self-love and found myself competing against the advances of others to win my affection. I think (now) that I was jealous of giving myself to anyone completely. I led a dual life – one life was constantly pulling against the other. I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark endless dirges. I think that I must have subconsciously wished to be in the tomb with my grandfather. My emotional development had become arrested at that traumatic moment long ago.40
Explanation, however, was no exoneration. As he searched deeper, he became more contrite and more intent upon atonement. Of the victims, he wrote, ‘I must keep their memory alive. I must be reminded constantly and never be allowed to forget.’
Expiation for such vicious deeds was impossible, the offence was too great, too far beyond the reach of punishment. Nilsen sought wildly for some dramatic sign he might give. Should he change his name to Stephen Sinclair, thus forcing himself to face reality every day? It was an absurd notion, scribbled down one afternoon, but it conveyed the same impulse as his vain hope that he might be a son to Mr and Mrs Ockendon – namely that he must strive to escape the devil of Dennis Nilsen, to become someone else. In similar vein, he asked me to find out how he might change his name by deep poll and assume his real name of Moksheim. If a way could only be found, ‘Nilsen’ must somehow be left behind.
Set against these advances in self-knowledge, the forthcoming trial began to look less significant to him. Justice would be done, but he was at a loss to see how that would assist him in finding a way to live with himself. Naturally, that was not the purpose of justice; it was for him to come to terms with his soul during whatever sentence might follow. ‘What advice can all the legal men in the world now give me that will resurrect the dead?’ he wrote. ‘I shower much longer than other prisoners because there is so much blood on me.’41
Meanwhile, he would make a start with whatever tiny opportunities might be afforded him. He would ‘try to improve by the small daily acts of communion with my fellow beings. My effort must be greater as my sins are many and of enormous proportions.’42 A month later he wrote:
I believe that there is much in my past which I need to morally redress and I will spend the years remaining to me in acquiring knowledge in order to give all my talents to my fellows. I am a grain of sand who just has to face the oncoming tide and I will expect no miracle.43
This mood was severely tested in August, when Nilsen was given fifty-six days’ punishment at Brixton Prison for ‘assaulting’ prison officers, a sentence which he thought vindictive. He grew more combative and difficult. He dismissed Ronald Moss as his solicitor not for any personal reason (he always maintained that he held Moss in the highest regard), but because Moss had been unable to alleviate the conditions of his punishment despite letters and representations. He would discharge legal aid altogether as a protest. Then he met Ralph Haeems. After many years’ experience representing notorious criminals, Haeems cheerfully welcomed any challenge to authority, a characteristic which appealed to Nilsen immediately. Besides, the same solicitor had recently taken on David Martin’s case. On Mr Haeems’s advice, having studied all the evidence, it was decided that there was a case for ‘diminished responsibility’ due to a mental abnormality in Nilsen. This would mean that the victims of attack, like Paul Nobbs and Carl Stottor, would have to be called to the witness-box; this he had previously intended to avoid, to spare them the anguish of reliving experiences in open court. He had hoped that the prosecution could accept their written statements without question, but this would no longer be possible if his state of mind was to receive full consideration.
Now, at last, Nilsen saw the photograph of human remains found at 23 Cranley Gardens. The experience acted like an exorcism. ‘My mind is depressingly active’, he wrote, ‘as I am now deep into the horrific details of the case. The weight of the mountainous burden of my past presses heavily upon me … the details of this case are horrible, dark and alien … I must relive the past.’ He says he felt nauseous and disturbed. When he saw what was left of John Howlett, he wrote, ‘I must be a really terrible, horrific man … I am damned and damned and damned. How in heaven’s name could I have done any of it?’44 That night he had a dream in his cell, in which he was dragging a part of a body, putrefying, across the floor of the office at Kentish Town trying desperately to conceal it. The office floods, and someonefn6 calls the fire brigade.
In the final week before his trial, Nilsen’s attitude swung evenly between recognition of guilt for his acts, and protestation that they were committed involuntarily. The conflict between ‘angel’ and ‘devil’ continued, and who could tell when, if ever, it would be resolved? The court would reach a decision in the light of the law and the evidence. Nilsen’s own decision might be many years ahead. He clung to the efforts of Dr MacKeith, for whom he secretly wrote a quotation from Spinoza: ‘I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.’
Two sentences serve to illustrate his frame of mind before his trial: ‘I have judged myself more harshly than any court ever could’ ;45 ‘We are not dealing with murder here, although I have killed.’46
fn1 The author has given a written undertaking to the governor of Brixton Prison that he will not publish details of conversations held on prison visits. Information in this chapter derives partly from letters which passed through the prison censor, partly from notes prepared by Dennis Nilsen for the author.
fn2 An electroencephalogram (EEG) test might have been useful. EEG abnormalities occur four times more frequently in cases of homicide than other cases. (British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. III, p. 1115, 1969.) It is fair to add that the precise value of EEG findings is now more open to dispute.
fn3 In fact, though Nilsen did not know it at the time, none of the inmates had complained. The governor had made the decision as a precaution in case they might.
fn4 Convicted in October 1983 of malicious wounding and other offences. Committed suicide in his cell at Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight, in March 1984. Another prisoner subsequently wrote to Nilsen saying, ‘I am sure if you were in the same prison with him, it would not have happened because he would have told you how he was feeling and you could have talked him out of it, like you did before in Brixton.’
fn5 It should be pointed out, however, that a graphologist who has examined this page draws a quite different conclusion, according to which the scrawled sequence of NOs demonstrates deep-seated frustration arising from the vision of the half-throttled man and Nilsen’s inability to finish the job. It was the killer, in this view, who rose to the surface and directed his pen.
fn6 The author.
9
TRIAL
The remark at the close of the previous chapter was written by Dennis Nilsen not on the eve of the trial, but months before. Rephrased in unfamiliar legal or psychiatric jargon, it was in effect to be the one central issue which dominated proceedings over the next two weeks. No one disputed that Nilsen had killed.fn1 The prosecution counsel, Mr Alan Green, maintained that he did so with full awareness and deliberation, and should therefore be found guilty of murder. Defence counsel, Mr Ivan Lawrence, would suggest that at the time of each killing the defendant was suffering from such abnormality of mind as to substantially reduce his responsibility for the act, and should therefore be guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. Prosecution would rely entirely upon Nilsen’s own account given at Hornsey Police Station, while defence would bring expert psychiatric evidence to establish the degree of abnormality involved.
One difficulty arose even before the trial began. On the six charges of murder the burden fell upon the defence to prove ‘diminished responsibility’. On the two charges of attempted murder, however, the law did not permit a defence of diminished responsibility, and the burden of proof reverted to the prosecution. Mr Lawrence submitted to the judge, Mr Justice Croom-Johnson, that this conflict might confuse the jury, whose task could be simplified if the charges of attempted murder were removed from the indictment, or tried separately. The point was valid, for if the jury were to find Nilsen guilty of attempted murder, but guilty only of manslaughter on the murder charges, they would in essence be saying that his responsibility was diminished when he succeeded in killing but not at all reduced when he failed. In order to avoid this logical nonsense, their decision on the murder charges might be influenced by their virtually inevitable verdict on the charges of attempted murder; denied the opportunity of considering his mental state at the time of the attempts, even if they wanted to, they were bound to find him guilty on the evidence of surviving witnesses. Mr Lawrence’s submission was unsuccessful, the judge ruling that the matter was not so
intolerably complicated as to confuse the jury. For at least two members of the jury the final verdict was to prove him wrong, and there are indications that a further four jurors struggled to resolve the non sequiturs which the law had forced upon them.
On the morning of Monday, 24 October 1983, the chief administrator of the Central Criminal Court, Mr Michael MacKenzie, read out the charges, that Dennis Andrew Nilsen murdered Kenneth Ockendon, Malcolm Barlow, Martyn Duffey, John Howlett, Billy Sutherland and Stephen Sinclair, and attempted to murder Douglas Stewart and Paul Nobbs, at the end of each charge asking, ‘How say you, Nilsen, are you guilty or not guilty?’ To each the defendant replied, ‘Not guilty,’ and those were to be the only two words the court would hear from him. The jury was then sworn in with the oath: ‘I swear by Almighty God that I will faithfully try the several issues joined between Our Sovereign Lady the Queen and the Prisoner at the Bar and give a true verdict according to the evidence.’ There were eight men and four women, dressed unspectacularly in jeans and shirt-sleeves, crumpled suits, or skirts and jumpers, collectively an eloquent demonstration that the ultimate decision rests in law with twelve ordinary men and women of the world. They might have walked off the street, their very incongruity in the awesome surroundings of Court Number 1 acting as a kind of reassurance.
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