Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  Alan Green, for the prosecution, opened his case by relating in detail the events of early February 1983 which led to the arrest, including a description of the human remains found in the drain at 23 Cranley Gardens and subsequently hurled over the back garden fence. He promised the jury that the photographs they would be shown were only of the house and garden; and they would not be asked to look upon photographs of an unpleasant nature, by which he meant those pictures of the contents of plastic bags found at the flat. Mercifully, these were never produced in court.

  Counsel went on to say that seven victims had been identified, although only six were listed on the indictment. The seventh, Archibald Graham Allen, aged twenty-eight, from Glasgow, was the fourteenth person to die (the ‘omelette’ death), but he was only identified by dental records after the indictment had been drawn up. Similarly, the jury would hear evidence from three victims of attempted murder, whereas there were only two on the indictment; Carl Stottor had been traced, with information given by the defendant, too late for inclusion in the indictment. Mr Green claimed that all the murders fitted into a pattern:

  (a) Every victim was a man;

  (b) Each one met the defendant in a public house;

  (c) They were all unknown to him until that meeting;

  (d) They were all (with one exception) without permanent address;

  (e) They were all strangled;

  (f) Some were homosexual, and a few were male prostitutes.

  On the last point, counsel implicitly conceded in advance the defence contention that none of them had died because they had rejected sexual advances from the defendant; homosexuality was a coincidence arising from the nature of the pubs where they had been picked up, and was not put forward as an indication of motive.

  Selecting relevant passages from the lengthy confession at Hornsey, Mr Green took the jury through all fifteen killings, with particular emphasis on how Nilsen had described them. The death of the emaciated young man whose legs rose in a cycling motion as he died, that of Malcolm Barlow, killed as he lay unconscious because it would have been a nuisance to call an ambulance for the second time, and that of John the Guardsman, three times strangled and finally drowned, brought the court to an incredulous hush. Counsel’s strong, theatrical voice needed no exaggeration or embellishment of manner to have effect. He called the account of John the Guardsman’s death ‘chilling’ (the judge would nine days later call it ‘appalling’), and the evident shock on the faces of several jurors showed that the adjective was well chosen. The public gallery, high near the ceiling of the courtroom, looked down upon the silent defendant with a concerted, fascinated gaze.

  Counsel also made the telling point that Nilsen had acquired certain butchering skills in the Army Catering Corps, and confirmed that a search of the garden at Melrose Avenue yielded evidence that ‘at least eight bodies’ had been disposed of in bonfires there. Rather less relevant, but even more effective, were the quotations Mr Green chose to bring before the jury, taken from Nilsen’s confession. Of killing the emaciated young man he had said ‘it was as easy as taking candy from a baby’. Of another he remarked, ‘end of a day, end of the drinking, end of a person’. Asked about his ties, Nilsen had said he started out with fifteen and only had a clip-on tie left, and questioned as to how many bodies lay beneath the floor at any one time, he had replied, ‘I am not sure. I did not do a stock-check.’ It has to be remembered that the interviews at Hornsey were conducted in an extremely relaxed manner. Messrs Jay and Chambers needed to keep the accused ‘sweet’ in order to coax as much information from him as they could (he was, after all, their only source at that stage), and Nilsen did not want to make matters any worse for himself by being difficult. The result was much laughter and casual rapport as they addressed each other in a friendly manner to alleviate the intolerable tension created by the revelations themselves. Jokes in the circumstances may well have been tasteless, but they are not important. They assumed importance as presented to the jury. So also did Nilsen’s remark that he had taken on a ‘quasi-God role’. Given undue emphasis this suggests the delusions of a missionary, which would be misleading. ‘At the time of the killings I don’t remember saying any such things,’ wrote Nilsen that evening in his cell. ‘The interviews with police were given with hindsight.’ To me he wrote:

  Now that the court has accepted the ‘evidence’ that I am God I’ve begun to get looney letters from religious freaks … all this because I casually threw the police a psychiatrist’s cliché. I wonder if the press would print it if I said ‘At that moment I really believed I was the Emperor of China’?1

  The ‘quasi-God role’ was to be mentioned in court half a dozen times and would make headlines in one newspaper.

  Jurors’ attention was specifically drawn to two points in Mr Green’s address, both concerned with quotations from the confession. Describing the problem of disposal after the death of John the Guardsman, Nilsen had said to Messrs Chambers and Jay, ‘I decided to dissect the body in the bath and flush the pieces of flesh and organs down the lavatory. This proved a slow process so I decided to boil some of it, including the head. I put all the large bones out with the rubbish.’ One could almost feel the shivers of fear and repulsion emanating from the jury benches, as the vision of dustmen carrying away bits of people loomed before them. A lady juror stared at Nilsen as if she did not believe he was real.

  The second point Mr Green made concerned Nilsen’s state of mind. Very cleverly, he planted the seed of the defence’s case for them, as if in a spirit of generosity and understanding, but leaving them with precious little to add. Police officers had asked Nilsen whether he needed to kill, said Green, and Nilsen had replied, ‘In some cases I am aware that at the precise moment of the act I believe I am right in doing the act. If there was a bomb blast at the time, nothing would stop me.’ One could hardly imagine a more vivid portrait of a man apparently ‘out of his mind’, and some jurors nodded slightly in recognition of this possibility. Mr Green seemed to acknowledge the shakiness of his own case, but then he added, ‘The Crown says that even if there was mental abnormality, that was not sufficient to diminish substantially his mental responsibility for these killings.’ In other words, Nilsen could be sick, but still guilty of murder; the jury’s entire task would pivot on the weight they must give to the one adverb – ‘substantially’.

  The first witness for the prosecution was Douglas Stewart, aged twenty-nine, from Thurso, Caithness, whom Nilsen had attacked on 10 November 1980. Dressed in an ill-fitting three-piece green suit, he gave an impression of extreme self-possession, even cockiness. He spoke with a pronounced Scottish accent which the jury found difficult to follow (and they were not alone), and at such speed that the judge had frequently to ask him to slow down. One of the charms of the English legal system is that evidence should be given at such a pace as to allow a judge to copy it down in longhand with a quill pen. It was established immediately that Mr Stewart had married in July 1981 and was not homosexual.

  Mr Stewart told how he had met Nilsen in the Golden Lion pub in Dean Street, with a number of other people whom he had assumed were Nilsen’s friends. The defendant had introduced himself as ‘Dennis’ and had suggested, after closing time, that they go back to his flat to continue drinking. It was very late, and they were the last to leave the pub. Mr Stewart thought the invitation was extended to all present, and was somewhat surprised to discover he was the only guest. They drank two more pints of lager, after Stewart had refused the vodka which was offered, and Nilsen eventually went to bed on the raised platform at Melrose Avenue. He invited Stewart to join him and Stewart declined, on the grounds that he ‘did not do that sort of thing’. Stewart fell asleep in the chair.

  When he woke up, his ankles were secured with a tie, and his own tie had been removed and replaced around his neck under the collar. Nilsen had his knee pressed against Stewart’s chest. Stewart fought him off, scratching him wildly beneath the eye and drawing blood, and finally pinned him to t
he ground, whereupon Nilsen shouted several times, ‘Take my money, take my money!’ This would later be represented by the Crown as evidence of cool presence of mind, in that Nilsen hoped his voice would be heard throughout the house and blame might then be shifted on to Stewart. Nilsen also said, in a calm voice, ‘I could kill you,’ when he was in no position, beneath Stewart, to harm anyone. This, said the defence, showed that his state of mind was abnormal.

  They got up, and Nilsen then went to the kitchen whence he emerged carrying a large knife. He did not seem to be brandishing it, but was calm and ‘normal’ throughout. Stewart decided to humour him, apologised for hurting him, and went with him to the kitchen to wipe the blood from his face. He stayed another ten minutes, had a drink, and left. Going to the nearest telephone box in the street he called the police, who sent an officer to 195 Melrose Avenue, where he heard conflicting reports from Nilsen and Stewart and concluded that there had been a lovers’ quarrel. It is not uncommon for the police to be called to intervene in a domestic squabble, and most of them are settled without further action. In this case, Stewart was informed that the C.I.D. would take a further statement from him, but they could not trace him the next day, and he did not renew contact with them. The matter was forgotten until after Nilsen’s arrest more than two years later.

  Throughout Stewart’s evidence, Nilsen had been leaning over the dock and passing hasty notes to his solicitor, Ralph Haeems, who handed them to counsel behind him. Ivan Lawrence requested a short adjournment to take fresh defence instructions arising from these notes, and the court reassembled half an hour later.

  Ivan Lawrence’s cross-examination of Douglas Stewart sought to undermine his credibility as a witness, at least on matters of detail. He suggested that Stewart had drunk more than two pints of lager during the two and a half hours he spent in the pub, was therefore more drunk than he admitted and his memory less clear than he claimed. Stewart had made three trivial mistakes which lent weight to Lawrence’s contention. He said that Nilsen had introduced himself as ‘Dennis’, a name he never used; that he had offered vodka, a drink he never kept in the flat (it was always rum); that the house bore a number-plate ‘195’, which it did not. Why had Stewart not pointed out to the police the scratch he had inflicted upon Nilsen, which would have supported his story of the attack and scuffle? There was not time, said the witness, ‘and I am not used to people half-killing me’. Why did he not run for his life, instead of staying for another drink? There was no adequate response to this question. Lawrence finished by asking the witness if he had sold his story to a newspaper. Yes, he had. Mr Justice Croom-Johnson asked which newspaper, and made a note of the reply, ‘The Sunday Mirror.’ ‘And of course, newspapers want details, don’t they, not hazy recollections,’ commented Mr Lawrence as he sat down.

  The next witness was the police constable summoned by Stewart on the night of the attack. From notes he made at the time, it was clear that no injury to Nilsen’s face had been pointed out, or been noticed by the constable. On the other hand, his notes did indicate that Stewart’s tie was missing when he called to investigate, the strong inference being that Nilsen had secreted it.

  On the next day, Tuesday, 25 October, the court heard frightening evidence from two young men who almost died at Dennis Nilsen’s hands. Baffling evidence, too, for they were both reprieved by their assailant, who could easily have dispatched them but chose not to – in the one case, before he finished the act and had a ‘change of heart’, in the other case after he thought his victim was already dead. This ‘change of heart’ was for the prosecution damning evidence that the defendant was constantly in control of himself, had free will and exercised it by playing with life and death as if they were in his gift. For the defence, the same curious behaviour indicated extreme instability of mind and a temporary state of what psychiatrists call ‘dissociation’. But for the court, the evidence heard that day was a painfully intense personal drama which few of us have ever had to experience.

  Paul Nobbs, aged twenty-one, was the first in the witness box. With dark, straight hair, clean-cut and good-looking, Nobbs was clearly nervous at the prospect of being questioned. He stood way back in the box and could scarcely be heard. Although he was a prosecution witness, the junior prosecution counsel who questioned him appeared to intimidate him, telling him to speak up a dozen times. The judge also intervened with the stern admonishment, ‘Keep your voice up.’ Nobbs looked as if he could not wait to be released.

  Mr Nobbs told the court how he had met Nilsen in the Golden Lion at lunchtime in November 1981, while he was a student at London University. He used Nilsen as an excuse to escape the attentions of a man who had been trying to pick him up, and went off with him, first to Foyles to buy some books, then home to Cranley Gardens. He telephoned his mother twice during the evening. After some drinking, Mr Nobbs told the court that he got into bed and Nilsen followed him. They kissed, cuddled, and fondled each other, but were both too drunk for anal sex, although Nobbs did make a move to penetrate Nilsen, who asked him not to because he was still ‘a virgin’. Nobbs then went to sleep.

  He woke up about two in the morning with a stinking headache, went to get a glass of water, sat down for a while and went back to bed. A few hours later he woke again, still feeling ill. ‘I went to splash some water on my face and in the mirror over the sink I saw my face. It was very red and there were no whites in my eyes; they were all bloodshot. I had a sore throat and I felt very sick.’

  Nilsen had told him, ‘God, you look bloody awful,’ to which he had replied something like, ‘Oh, thanks very much.’ There was nothing odd in Nilsen’s behaviour, rather the contrary. He was concerned and sympathetic, suggesting that Nobbs was perhaps the worse for wear after too much rum. It was only later, after his tutor had sent him to hospital, that Nobbs was forced to acknowledge he had been strangled, and assumed that his attacker had been Nilsen. He had not wanted to report the attack to the police because they would be unlikely to pay much attention to him when they realised he was homosexual.

  When Ivan Lawrence rose to cross-examine the witness, he was smiling, avuncular, and polite. ‘I do not wish to challenge anything you have said,’ he began, ‘but want to ask some questions which may help us.’ The point of his first questions was to remind the jury of certain aspects of Douglas Stewart’s testimony while it was still fresh in their minds, without actually mentioning Stewart’s name. Nobbs confirmed:

  (a) That the defendant was called ‘Des’ rather than ‘Dennis’;

  (b) That the Golden Lion pub was a recognised place for homosexuals to pick up partners. Nobbs did not think that anyone who used that particular pub could be ignorant of its reputation.

  The remainder of Mr Lawrence’s cross-examination was designed to alert the jury to the lack of any motive for the attack, and by implication to prepare them for the possibility that the defendant was mentally unstable.

  ‘There was no question of his forcing himself upon you, of his stalking you?’

  ‘No. He was doing me a favour by pretending to be with me, by rescuing me.’

  ‘Did he seem to be offering genuine friendship and companionship?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wasn’t saying to you, “Come on, drink up, drink faster, drink more”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He didn’t stop you calling your mother, or stop you saying anything you liked to her, or stop you from giving the address where you were?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There were never any sadistic, masochistic, violent or bondage acts which you were asked to perform?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He didn’t try to force you to continue with sex?’

  ‘No.’

  Having established that Nobbs first felt the headache at 2 a.m., and then again when he awoke at 6 a.m., Mr Lawrence suggested that the attack must have occurred before 2 a.m. ‘He must have let you sleep unmolested from about two to six, with no attempt to murder you while you were utterly at his
mercy.’ Nobbs could not be sure when the attack had occurred. Lawrence went on:

  ‘Assuming as we must that he attacked you and tried to strangle you, did you give him the slightest justification for doing so, any provocation, any words of anger?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing you said, nothing you did caused him to behave in that extraordinary way? You didn’t reject him, tease him, frustrate him in any way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the next morning he behaved as if nothing unusual had happened in the night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he seemed concerned about your condition?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was there any sign from him that he thought he must have done something awful in the night?’

  ‘No.’

  Paul Nobbs’s monosyllabic answers were potentially of crucial significance. In view of later suggestions that Nilsen had stalked his victims, here was one who said that he did not. It would be proposed that Nilsen had been enraged at people not listening to his conversation, and killed them in anger, but here was a living witness who testified to the contrary, maintaining that Nilsen’s behaviour both before and after the attempt at murder was unremarkable. The next witness, Carl Stottor, would leave the same impression. Even more importantly, Nobbs’s evidence was at odds with the idea that Nilsen purposefully chose victims who were rootless drifters, unlikely to be missed. He had twice stood by while Nobbs had called his mother, but the knowledge that there was a mother had not prevented him from trying to kill Nobbs. There was no doubt that Nobbs’s disappearance would have been noticed, nor even that there were people who had seen him talking to Nilsen at the pub that day. Was this why Nilsen stopped half-way through, suddenly realising his prey had an identity? If so, why did he not realise it before the attempt, and leave Nobbs alone? Or was it that Nilsen was literally ‘in two minds’, one of which was the mind of a murderer, and that his rational self could not always influence the actions of his murderous self?