(a) Nilsen had always experienced difficulty about expressing any feelings apart from anger.
(b) He had a tendency to attribute to others certain attitudes and feelings without checking if they were true.
(c) He always fled from situations where personal relationships had gone wrong.
Dr MacKeith said that Nilsen’s trouble was an unspecified type of personality disorder, which did not fit any particular category. He showed signs of disorder in all categories, but insufficient to diagnose when taken alone; it was the combination of these signs which convinced Dr MacKeith that Nilsen was a severe, but hidden, case.
Two stories were presented before the jury as being related to the concepts of nakedness and unconsciousness in a sexual context. The first was Nilsen’s recollection of walking into the sea at Fraserburgh when he was ten, and being rescued by an older boy who masturbated over him. The second was the story of the Arab he killed in self-defence in Aden. They were both bizarre stories, said the psychiatrist, like fantasies. ‘I do not say these two stories are important if accurate, but important because he has consistently told both stories to at least one other person, and they demonstrate an extraordinary interest in the concept of unconsciousness.’ The one other person to whom Nilsen had told these stories was myself, and he had admitted to me that there were elements of fantasy in them, though they were based upon true events. Dr MacKeith told the court that it did not matter whether the stories were true or false; what mattered was that they were in his mind.
Having told the court of Nilsen’s interest in mirrors and his habit of masturbating by a corpse before dissecting it (without, it must be said, revealing the significance of these unusual symptoms), Dr MacKeith went on to consider his occasional amnesia brought on by excessive drinking (‘You mean he passed out because he was drunk,’ said the judge), and his aggressive manner. He had the ability to separate his mental functions and his behaviour to an extraordinary degree, as was indicated by his behaviour towards the victims of attempted murder, when two parts of him appeared to operate a few minutes apart in total discrepancy.
Nilsen was unduly suspicious, with a paranoid reaction to immediate circumstances, and a craving for attention which amounted to ‘grandiosity’. He had an unlimited need for interest in himself and his viewpoint. Dr MacKeith suggested that this might provide a clue to one reason why people died, namely that they did not pay attention to what he was saying and undervalued his opinion. ‘It was the ultimate to pay for apathy.’
Finally, Dr MacKeith touched upon the defendant’s impaired sense of identity and his habit of ‘depersonalisation’. He was capable of apparently purposeful activity without its being under his full conscious control, perceiving himself at a distance in a manner not unlike that of a sleepwalker. Psychiatrists had a name for this neurosis; it was called ‘dissociation’.
The cross-examination of Dr MacKeith began on Wednesday, and continued for most of Thursday, 27 October. It was not difficult for Alan Green to throw doubt upon the reliability of psychiatric jargon, which to a lay person seems nebulous and elusive. What, in the end, was the basis of Dr MacKeith’s diagnosis? Nothing more than what the defendant had told him, and the way in which he had told him. Was there any evidence of ‘deeply ingrained maladaptive behaviour’ before the first killing occurred in 1978? The witness could not say. Was there any evidence of ‘retarded or arrested development of mind’? Quite the contrary; the defendant’s intelligence was above average, but Dr MacKeith insisted that this legal form of words was, for a psychiatrist, too narrow. It ought to cover retarded or arrested development of personality, which would certainly apply to Nilsen. After consultation with counsel and the judge, it was agreed that ‘personality’ should be included in the definition, but this did not advance precision much further, as the judge intervened to ask what was meant by ‘personality’. When the witness said ‘character’, Mr Justice Croom-Johnson replied tartly, ‘That’s what I thought you would say.’
Referring to the two stories which Dr MacKeith had related to the court, Mr Green asked, ‘Did you believe a single word of those stories was fact?’ The witness would not be forced into a short answer, in spite of being asked the same question three times, until the judge intervened again. ‘Was it true?’ he said. ‘What’s your answer?’ Dr MacKeith replied, ‘Highly unlikely.’
Mr Green continued to build a catalogue of lies which Nilsen had told, to try to establish the point that he was a consistently untruthful person. Nilsen had, for example, told Paul Nobbs that his scar had been inflicted in Northern Ireland, when it was the result of a gall-bladder operation, and he had told the Japanese man that he was married.fn2
Quoting from Nilsen’s own words, counsel said that he had managed to suppress all thoughts of morality from his mind, and invited Dr MacKeith to agree that whereas ‘repression’ was subjectively not deliberate, ‘suppression’ certainly was. The witness conceded this was correct. Green also said that Nilsen displayed resourcefulness, cunning and presence of mind, to which the witness replied that he would not use such words, but would prefer to be more illuminating. Mr Green then proposed that the separation of mental functioning to which Dr MacKeith had referred meant nothing more than that Nilsen was ‘a jolly good actor’. It was becoming clear to the court that antagonism between lawyers and psychiatrists was endemic; at one point Mr Green leant forward and said to the witness, ‘You know you really must make up your mind about your diagnosis.’
Mr Green presented several examples of Nilsen’s plausibility and cunning. He had never, for example, faced the fact that he invited people back to his flat, using neutral terms instead, yet the initiative must have come from him. This was because he did not want to show the police that the purpose of their visits was to die at Nilsen’s hands. He had hoodwinked Nobbs and Stottor into believing that nothing untoward had happened to them. He had allowed Martyn Duffey’s knives to rust before throwing them out, and had collected Duffey’s belongings from the left luggage at Euston Station. He had been able to stop midway in the course of strangulation, demonstrating that the root of this case was the extent to which the defendant was able to wield power over life and death. He was able to exercise self-control and desist when he wanted to, the implication being that he could also kill when he wanted to. Dr MacKeith disagreed, pointing out that it was striking how Nilsen recalled some physical aspects of his victims, but scarcely anything about them as people. They were objects who filled his assumptions, indicating a strange depersonalised state.
Mr Green took the witness through Nilsen’s own account of four killings, in order to show awareness and deliberation. The most significant of these were the long and painfully vivid murder of John the Guardsman, and the almost casual killing of Malcolm Barlow. Nilsen, faced with an unconscious epileptic in his flat, had said that he had a problem and dealt with it. He had thought for twenty minutes wondering what to do. Dr MacKeith agreed that in this case there was no evidence of dissociation or depersonalisation. ‘And yet you say his responsibility was diminished at the time?’ asked Green. ‘Oh come, doctor,’ he shouted. ‘Face up to my question!’
The cross-examination terminated in confusion. Mr Green asked if the witness still maintained that the defendant’s responsibility was diminished in all six counts of murder. MacKeith was reluctant to use such words, so the judge requested counsel to put the question again. MacKeith said that the defendant was suffering from a mental disorder which profoundly affected his judgment. Mr Green put the question a third time. ‘I hope it’s simple,’ he said. ‘Do you yourself think he was of diminished responsibility?’ ‘I cannot answer that as an expert witness,’ replied Dr MacKeith. ‘That is for the court to answer.’ ‘I am pressing you, doctor,’ pursued Mr Green, supported by the judge, who said to the witness, ‘You are an expert. Why don’t you say?’ Dr MacKeith said that he could not say whether the defendant’s responsibility was diminished, as that was a legal form of words which was for the court to determine o
n the basis of psychiatric evidence as to his abnormality of mind. ‘Would your answer be the same on all six counts of murder?’ asked Mr Justice Croom-Johnson. ‘Yes.’ ‘In other words, you will not say?’ ‘No.’
Having begun his evidence by claiming diminished responsibility for the defendant, Dr MacKeith was forced to retract and in effect say that he was unable to judge as it was not a matter for him to determine. The lawyers and the psychiatrists did not speak the same language.
Dr Patrick Gallwey was the second psychiatric witness for the defence. He, too, began with the statement that the defendant suffered from an arrested development of personality (though not of intelligence) which substantially impaired his responsibility for his actions.
At the root of Nilsen’s trouble was a condition of which Dr Gallwey had made a special study. It carried the impossible name ‘Borderline False Self As If Pseudo-Normal Narcissistic Personality Disorder’, but Dr Gallwey, no doubt mindful of the impatience such a mouthful might kindle in judge and jury alike, settled for the ‘False Self’ syndrome. Its essential feature was a combination of paranoid and schizoid elements and an apparent normal functioning of the personality. Because Nilsen can behave normally, without pretence (maintained Gallwey), he is able most of the time to keep at bay those schizoid disturbances which cause him to behave differently, but the strain involved in this conflict causes periodic breakdowns when the schizoid features predominate. These outbreaks would display the same characteristics – sudden, episodic, motiveless, violent, psycho-sexual – not understood as normal extensions of personality. The emotional experience of oneself and of others is at these times drastically altered.fn3
On Friday, 28 October, Dr Gallwey returned to the witness-box to elaborate on his False Self analysis. There was evidence, he said, in the accounts of survivors to indicate the kind of breakdown he would expect to see. The murders followed the same pattern of breakdown, with one exception. Dr Gallwey was not happy with the reasons Nilsen gave for killing Malcolm Barlow, which made the attack differ in a significant way from the others. He did not say why.
False Self personalities, Gallwey continued, are kept in proper order when surrounded by affectionate relationships, but are more likely to disintegrate when socially isolated. They positively need good relationships to hold them together. In Nilsen’s case, his liability to breakdown became severe when the relationship with David Gallichan collapsed. Anyway, ‘Gallichan did not provide sufficient contact with human goodness.’ He then clung to his office work obsessively, like a ‘man drowning in his own nightmares’, desperate to keep them under check. The killings (again with the one exception of Barlow) were ‘motiveless from any point of view that a normal person could understand’.
After the first killing, Gallwey said, Nilsen tried to pull himself together. He thought it must have been the drink which caused it (he was wrong in this), so he laid off drinking for six months, and when he started again he was relieved to discover that he was all right. He was trying to explain his behaviour to himself.
The defendant’s lack of feeling when he was killing was a crucial part of Dr Gallwey’s analysis. ‘The victims had no meaning to him as real individuals,’ he said.
He was muddled as to their identity, and frequently felt they threatened his private world. Divorced from normal awareness that his victims were real people enlivened with human properties, they became objects to him. Sometimes they seemed to be himself. This is very relevant to depersonalisation. The motiveless murder of John the Guardsman shows horrifically the effect of treating another person as if he were just an object. A normal person enriches experience and life with imagination. A schizoid personality indulges imagination for its own sake. This can produce artists, but in schizoids it can be dangerous, causing a split in personality. Nilsen’s imagination eventually took him over, causing recurrent breakdowns.
Mr Justice Croom-Johnson interrupted to ask on what Dr Gallwey’s conclusions were based, with reference to the defendant. The witness said Nilsen’s fantasies provided evidence. What fantasies, asked the judge, tell us what they are! The witness said that Nilsen did not have the ability to separate his perception from his imagination, but this answer did not satisfy the judge, who was obviously angry when Dr Gallwey had to admit that he could not specify any one ‘fantasy’ which supported his thesis. He simply had not investigated them at all.
Returning to the absence of an emotional content to Nilsen’s actions, Dr Gallwey said, ‘I cannot see how he can be guilty of malice aforethought if he is entirely without feeling, since feeling is an integral part of a person’s intent and motivation,’ whereupon the judge told him that he was trespassing on the law, and should confine himself to medical opinion. The evidence of Carl Stottor’s ‘reprieve’ indicated that Nilsen had emerged from an episode of dissociation and was ‘reassembling’ his personality; he was guided by some feeling, which had been absent during the attack.
When the court adjourned for lunch, Douglas Bence, a journalist, rushed up to the witness in front of the jury to ask a question about the disposal of human remains. Dr Gallwey refused to answer and reported the matter to the court administrator, as a result of which Mr Bence was reprimanded by the judge at the beginning of the afternoon session. He had been guilty of a gross contempt of court (which everyone present realised) and could be imprisoned forthwith (which many would have welcomed). But Croom-Johnson accepted the man’s apology and Gallwey took the stand once more for cross-examination by Alan Green.
Mr Green suggested that the witness accepted some things the defendant had told him, and flatly rejected others. This was normal practice in psychiatry, said Dr Gallwey.
‘Do you believe the account he gave to the police of the killing of Malcolm Barlow, John the Guardsman, and the emaciated young man?’ asked Green.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘He is giving an account of actions when he must have been in a very abnormal state of mind.’
‘If the defendant’s account to the police is indeed substantially true,’ continued Green, ‘then there’s an end of your diagnosis as far as those three killings are concerned?’
‘I could be wrong.’
‘Aren’t you putting the cart before the horse, doctor? You’ve come along here with a theory …’
‘No,’ interrupted Dr Gallwey.
‘ … a diagnosis … ’
‘That’s not a theory.’
‘Let’s not split hairs.’
‘It’s not splitting hairs.’
Dr Gallwey explained his position with an analogy. If a man complained of an ingrowing toenail and claimed it had given him gonorrhoea, he would discount the evidence of the toenail and look elsewhere. Counsel pounced upon this as a trivial example, causing Dr Gallwey to explode in a rare show of anger. ‘I treat this case extremely seriously,’ he said. ‘It has caused a great deal of distress and tragedy to a number of people, and I strongly object to the way counsel has taken my answers.’ Wisely, Mr Green let the matter drop.
Green then concentrated on the degree of awareness shown by the defendant and his ability to make choices and decisions. He chose to invite men to his flat when he was perfectly aware what might happen to them. He decided to kill Malcolm Barlow rather than do anything else. With John the Guardsman, he had offered to ring for a taxi, then decided to kill him instead. Giving emphasis to each word, Green said, ‘He knew exactly what he was doing. It is impossible to imagine a clearer picture of that event.’
‘Leaving aside emotion, yes,’ said Gallwey, ‘but his emotional condition is vital.’
‘You in no way dispute that he was intellectually aware of what was going on?’
‘No.’
‘He knew what he was doing?’
‘I don’t agree with that. The distinction between intellectual and emotional awareness is not a trivial matter. If his emotions were removed, then he would behave like a machine.’
‘Did he know the nature and quality o
f his acts?’
‘No. He knew the nature of the acts only, he did not know the quality of them.’
Mr Justice Croom-Johnson then made an intervention which was important in giving the jury everyday words with which to wrestle rather than abstruse medical concepts. ‘By reason of his emotions not being involved, he is acting in cold blood. Is a cold-blooded killer not responsible for his acts?’ Dr Gallwey replied that such words were not within his discipline.
The re-examination of Dr Gallwey by Ivan Lawrence on Monday, 31 October, was designed to clarify certain concepts which had arisen in evidence the previous week, namely:
(a) The acts of murder prevented Nilsen from going insane, by pointing destruction outwards instead of inwards. Without them, his mind would have collapsed into psychosis.
(b) A person cannot know what he is doing unless he has emotional awareness of what he is doing. With the emotional factor drained from him, he would be like an automaton.
(c) ‘Cold-blooded’ does not mean the same as ‘without emotion’. A crocodile is cold-blooded. Applied to human behaviour, it is merely a metaphor and can be misleading. It departs from scientific precision.
(d) There is nothing abnormal in fantasising as such; the abnormality lies in what the fantasy serves. The schizoid trait can push it over the edge.
Mr Lawrence experienced some difficulty in framing questions which could extract these answers without ‘leading’ the witness, a cardinal sin for a barrister to commit. After putting one question three times without either the witness or anyone else in court understanding what he meant, the judge with a hearty chuckle said, ‘Put it in a leading form, Mr Lawrence, come on.’ Mr Lawrence did not look abashed, but rather grateful.
He also introduced a significant ruling in the case of Regina v. Rose, to the effect that ‘a man may know what he is doing and intend to do it and yet be suffering from such abnormality of mind as to substantially impair his judgment.’ If the jury could be reminded of this precedent frequently enough, Mr Lawrence might yet be able to show that Dennis Nilsen was such a man. In addition, he invited the court to consider the Appeal Court judgment of Lord Chief Justice Parker in the Byrne case. Parker had said that abnormality of mind was, ‘wide enough to cover the mind’s activities in all its aspects and meant a state of mind so different from that of ordinary human beings that the reasonable man would term it abnormal.’
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