If Paul Nobbs was nervous, Carl Stottor was positively terrified by the ordeal of giving evidence. There was the slightest pause in his step as he entered the court and saw for the first time the awesome theatre of his performance. His hands were thrust into the pockets of a loose jacket and held close to his stomach. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath which a neck-chain was occasionally visible, and there was a hint of make-up on his otherwise pale face. Twenty-one years old, effeminate and shy, he would be referred to rather unnecessarily by prosecuting counsel as ‘a rather pathetic young man’. Certainly there could be no one in court who did not feel sorry for him as he related the most horrifying story in a quiet, soft, barely audible voice. He, too, had to be told to speak up, but the drama of his narrative was intensified by its mouse-like delivery, and the court was so silent one might almost have heard a feather sway to the ground.
Mr Stottor told how he met Dennis Nilsen in the Black Cap in Camden High Street in May 1982. Stottor was deeply depressed over a love affair in Blackpool which had gone wrong, and Nilsen comforted him, encouraged him to talk, tried to instil an optimistic spirit. ‘He said how pretty I was. He seemed a very nice person, very kind, talking to me when I was depressed.’ Nilsen paid for all the drinks, and eventually suggested they go back to his flat, promising that he would not touch him. They took a taxi to Cranley Gardens, holding hands for the length of the journey. At the flat, Stottor had said that he wished he were dead, and Nilsen had told him not to be so silly, that he should not throw his life away for one man, that he had a whole future to look forward to. When Stottor felt ill from the alcohol, they both went to bed. Stottor was invited to tell the court what he could remember of the events of that night. In a voice made even quieter by the pain of recollection, he relived a nightmare.
I woke up feeling something round my neck. My head was hurting and I couldn’t breathe properly and I wondered what it was. I felt his hand pulling at the zip at the back of my neck. He was saying in a sort of whispered shouting voice, ‘Stay still, stay still.’ I thought perhaps he was trying to help me out of the sleeping bag because I thought I had got caught up in the zip which he had warned me about. Then I passed out.
Stottor’s voice broke with emotion before he could continue; it seemed he might sob, but did not. He had been, he said, semi-conscious:
The pressure was increasing. My head was hurting and I couldn’t breathe. I remember vaguely hearing water running. I remember vaguely being carried and then I felt very cold. I knew I was in the water and he was trying to drown me. He kept pushing me into the water. The third time I came up I said, ‘No more, please, no more,’ and he pushed me under again. I just thought I was dying. I thought this man was killing me and I was dying. I thought, ‘You are drowning. This is what it feels like to die.’ I felt very relaxed and I passed out. I couldn’t fight any more.
To his own amazement, Mr Stottor woke up to find himself on the couch with the dog, Bleep, licking his face. Later he saw a red line round his neck and broken blood vessels all over his face. Nilsen told him he had had a nightmare and that he, Nilsen, had had to splash his face with water to get him out of the state of shock, Later still, he was in bed, gradually getting warm as Nilsen cuddled him.
Counsel for the prosecution established two important facts which pointed to premeditation. First, Nilsen had asked Carl Stottor in the Black Cap whether he had any family, a question which supported the thesis that Nilsen was consciously looking for victims with no decor to their lives. Second, he had warned Stottor about the loose zip on the sleeping bag before he went to bed, which could only mean that he intended to use it as an excuse if need be, since no one can sensibly become entangled in the zip of a sleeping-bag which is lying on top of the bed. (Stottor was not inside the sleeping-bag.) The implication was that if Nilsen warned him about the zip, the intention to use it for strangulation was already in his mind before Stottor went to bed.
Cross-examining, Mr Lawrence was concerned to establish the apparent normality of Nilsen’s behaviour before and after the attack. Stottor agreed that the defendant was a good listener, patient and genuinely interested. ‘I got the impression he didn’t want to leave me on my own in the state I was in,’ said the witness. He also agreed that he had not been forced to stay, that there had been no word about sex, no sexual proposal, no violent argument, no frustration. Three points emerged from Lawrence’s questioning:
(a) The police had traced Mr Stottor only from information given them by the defendant;
(b) As Stottor had been too weak to save himself, the defendant ‘must have’ let him up out of the water at a time when he could have killed him with ease;
(c) After the event, Nilsen had accompanied Stottor to the underground station.
Was the defendant both calm and concerned before and after the incident, ‘as though he was unaware that he had done anything to harm you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How odd that was,’ mused Mr Lawrence as he resumed his seat.
The court would later hear from a page which Nilsen wrote for the police exactly how odd it was, for Nilsen had frantically heated the room and the body of a man he had thought was dead, to save him from the effects of an attack he had himself perpetrated: ‘I was desperate that he should live.’
All eyes in Court Number 1 followed Carl Stottor as he walked softly past the jury, the press benches, and back into ordinary life. He looked as if he might remain scared for many years.
Reflecting that evening in his cell, Nilsen wrote that he could not recall Stottor’s being in the bath. He remembered wanting him to appreciate the good feelings that music and drink produce: ‘I wanted him to share in it so that he would feel happy.’ Of course he knew he had tried to kill him, that is why he had told the police about it in the first place, but he did not feel personally responsible for the attack (Nilsen’s italics). With, apparently, no hint of irony, he further wrote, ‘I hoped that these uncontrollable events would not affect our relationship.’ Certainly his behaviour after the attack, as confirmed by Stottor, shows that was precisely what he hoped. ‘These incidents were not ends but bloody disasters which blighted my sexual and social desires. They in no way enhanced them.’ Of Stottor he wrote, ‘I hope he can forgive me (although he will never forget). He must have a prospect of future happiness.’2
Mr Green next invited Mr Lawrence to admit certain facts which were not in dispute. Lawrence having made the formal admission, the next witness was called, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay. He recounted the circumstances of Nilsen’s arrest on 9 February, then read out to the court three statements volunteered by Nilsen after his arrest (including the document entitled ‘Unscrambling Behaviour’) and the letter he sent to the police from Brixton Prison on 25 May. Mr Jay read slowly and clearly, and once again the courtroom was plunged into attentive silence as everyone strained to absorb the import of these extraordinary passages of self-appraisal.
I guess I may be a creative psychopath who, when in a loss of rationality situation, lapses temporarily into a destructive psychopath, a condition induced by rapid and heavy ingestion of alcohol. At the subconscious root lies a sense of total social isolation and a desperate search for a sexual identity. I have experienced transitory sexual relationships with both males and females before my first killing. After this event I was incapable of any intercourse. I felt repelled by myself and as stated have had no experience of sexual penetration for some years … God only knows what thoughts go through my mind when it’s captive within a destructive binge. Maybe the cunning, stalking killer instinct is the only single concentration released from a mind which in that state knows no morality. It may be the perverted overkill of my need to help people – victims who I decide to release quickly from the slings and arrows of their outrageous fortune, pain and suffering. There is no disputing the fact that I am a violent killer under certain circumstances. The victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing-up is a clinically ordinary task. It would be better if my reason for killing could
be clinically defined, i.e. robbery, jealousy, hate, revenge, sex, blood-lust, or sadism. But it’s none of these. Or it could be the subconscious outpouring of all the primitive instinct of primeval man. Could it be the case of individual exaltation at beating the system and the need to beat and confound it time and time again? It amazes me I have no tears for the victims. I have no tears for myself or for those bereaved by my actions. Am I a wicked person, constantly under pressure, who just cannot cope with it, who escapes to reap revenge against society through the haze of a bottle of spirits? Maybe it’s because I was just born an evil man. Living with so much violence and death, I’ve not been haunted by the souls and ghosts of the dead, leading me to believe that no such fictional phenomena has, does, or ever will exist.
That (‘Unscrambling Behaviour’) was written on 15 February. Two days later, he described the ecstatic emotional experience of listening to music and drinking, which released him from the prison of his life. ‘I bring back to my prison (flat) people who are not always allowed to leave. Maybe I want them to share my high experience of spirits and music. I still do not know the engine of my performance.’
On 19 February, Nilsen offered the police information on attempted murders, including the passage describing his feverish efforts to revive Carl Stottor, and the bungled attempt to strangle Toshimitsu Ozawa on New Year’s Eve 1982.
The final document was the letter of 25 May thanking the police for their professional skill in trying to unravel the case. It asked Mr Jay to believe that he did not maliciously plan any of the attacks, and for the first time touched upon the possibility of remorse.
My remorse is of a deep and personal kind which will eat away inside me for the rest of my life. I am a tragically private person, not given to public tears. The enormity of these acts has left me in permanent shock … The evil was short-lived and it cannot live or breathe for long inside the conscience. I have slain my own dragon as surely as the press and the letter of the law will slay me.
Nilsen finished this letter with a stanza from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol which I had sent him a few weeks before.
Some aspects of these documents deserve consideration. In February, Nilsen said he had no tears for the victims, while in May he was talking of a deep and personal grief. What had happened in the meantime was the discovery of a remorse he had initially striven to suppress, released by his interviews with the psychiatrist Dr Bowden, by his visits from myself, and especially by his ‘Sad Sketches’, the drawings he made in April of bodies as he remembered them. These images brought at last into his cell the ghosts of the dead which in February had not yet troubled him. It is also clear that he had helped police trace living witnesses to his iniquity, whose existence might otherwise not have been suspected. No one was sure why he should want to ‘slay his own dragon’ so totally. Nilsen not only provided most of the evidence against himself, but encouraged the discovery of evidence which might easily run counter to his own version of events. Finally, Nilsen it was who first mentioned the possibility of innate evil. Neither prosecution nor defence used the word ‘evil’, which belongs to the vocabulary of moral philosophy and has no place in legal definitions, but Mr Justice Croom-Johnson in his summing up would give the word a questionable emphasis.
As for the multiplicity of motives suggested by the defendant for his actions, and all rejected by him, there were some who thought he was so clever as to try to confuse judge and jury alike by widening the scope of their deliberations, and others who were convinced that Nilsen was genuinely bewildered. We hoped (vainly, as it turned out) that the psychiatrists would sift the relevant from the muddled.
‘Have you ever been involved in a case where the accused seemed to be so willing to co-operate?’ asked Ivan Lawrence on opening his cross-examination of Mr Jay. The Chief Inspector agreed that he had never known a defendant be so immediately co-operative, and revealed that even up to the week before the trial, Nilsen had been helping to identify further victims from photographs. On the matter of Carl Stottor’s reprieve, Mr Jay admitted that Nilsen had made no mention of having tried to drown him before the dog drew his attention to the body, and Lawrence drew the inference that he had suffered a complete block of that part of the incident, an inference which would assume its importance when Nilsen’s state of mind came to be considered. Jay said that the defendant had given his long confession in a calm, unmoved, matter-of-fact manner while he, Jay, had found the substance of that confession ‘horrific’. ‘Did you find it almost impossible to associate the man you were interviewing with this catalogue of horror?’ asked Lawrence. ‘Very difficult indeed,’ came the reply, and Mr Jay completed his evidence with the formal acknowledgment that Dennis Nilsen was of previous good character, with no criminal record.
Detective Chief Superintendent Geoffrey Chambers spent the whole of the Tuesday afternoon, 25 October, and Wednesday morning, 26 October, reading verbatim the long interviews at Hornsey. Chambers, a ‘wise old owl’, in Alan Green’s phrase, betrayed no emotion as he read this astonishing confession, nor did the defendant, leafing through the pages and following Chambers’s recital word by word, as if ready to correct any errors of syntax which might occur. The public gallery, however, was mesmerised by the detailed revelations of death, scarcely taking their eyes from Nilsen throughout the four hours that it took to read the interviews. Some appeared shocked, incredulous, others were near to tears. A young blonde woman with heavily painted red lips looked distraught, another stared down at Nilsen with hatred pouring from her face. The jury showed signs of nervousness, one man repeatedly running his hands through his hair as he winced at some details. Many of them smiled nervously when Chambers came to Nilsen’s remark that he did not do a stock-check of bodies under the floor. One juror looked pale and kept blowing out his breath. The dark-haired lady occasionally glanced at the prisoner in the dock, quizzically, searchingly, looking for an answer. At the point when Nilsen had described unpacking bundles of human remains, the stench and the colonies of maggots, even the judge looked repelled by what he heard. Towards the end of Mr Chambers’s evidence, several exhibits were produced in court, including the large cooking-pot in which three heads had been boiled, the cutting board used to dissect pieces of John the Guardsman, and Martyn Duffey’s knives. The judge’s face then screwed up in unmovable disgust, and two jurors were so shaken they seemed close to being sick. For the first time in the trial, there was much nervous coughing in court. There could hardly have been a more eloquent demonstration of the gulf which divided ordinary men and women from the impassive prisoner in the dock. At this point, it was difficult to believe he was human at all. He himself wondered, he wrote, if the jury could see him decomposing slowly in the dock.
A photograph of Martyn Duffey was produced as an exhibit. It had been shown to the accused and positively identified by him. In his private journal, Nilsen had written of this moment at Hornsey: ‘D.C.S. Chambers passed me a colour photo of a young man. I recognised it as Martyn Duffey taken when he was younger. The memory flooded back. I stopped myself reacting. I wanted to weep but there were now too many witnesses.’3 There were now even more witnesses in court. Nilsen kept still, and none of them knew what, if anything, he felt.
Under cross-examination, Mr Chambers agreed that the police had managed to trace fourteen men who had visited Dennis Nilsen in one or other of his flats and had come to no harm. There were probably many more. He further agreed that Nilsen appeared to be unburdening himself, giving precise details on some murders and being unable to recall specifics on others. (Nilsen later told me that he knew from his months as a policeman that too many replies of ‘I don’t remember’ tended to make them impatient, and he was anxious not to be obstructive. He was thinking as a policeman, investigating himself. Sometimes the details of one killing would merge with those of another, until he was unsure which was relevant, but he edited these recollections to make the task easier for the police who were questioning him. The killing of John the Guardsman, for insta
nce, was a montage of flashes from several incidents. He thought of the Hitchcock film Torn Curtain as he was telling it.) Chambers said that the defendant showed no remorse, no feeling of horror or disgust, as he told of dissecting rotting bodies and boiling heads on the cooker to make the flesh come away. On this note, Ivan Lawrence sat down. Alan Green had no further questions to put, and the case for the prosecution was completed.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ivan Lawrence rose again to open the case for the defence. He said that he would not attempt to prove that Dennis Nilsen was insane in either the medical or the legal sense, but that he was suffering from an abnormality of mind at the time of each killing, and was therefore incapable of forming the specific intention of murder. The defence has only to prove that he may have been suffering from such abnormality, said Mr Lawrence, not that he must have been so suffering, at which point the judge intervened to chastise counsel; he would direct the jury on points of law, not Mr Lawrence! He concluded his opening remarks by exhorting the jury not to give way to the temptation of thinking that the killings were so horrible, the killer so vile, that they need not waste their time on subtleties which would affect the sentence. ‘Society, whom you represent, requires that you give the matter proper consideration.’ With that, Lawrence called his first witness, Dr James MacKeith of the Bethlem Royal Hospital.
Dr MacKeith began with the stark contention that on each of the six occasions of homicide, Dennis Nilsen had been suffering from a severe personality disorder which substantially reduced his responsibility. There were, he said, maladaptive patterns of behaviour which continued from youth into adulthood. He then summarised Nilsen’s early life, with which the reader is familiar, and made three interesting points very early in his evidence:
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