2. Egocentricity
Allied to the schizoid capacity to misinterpret the feelings and thoughts of others is a desperate, obsessive need that everyone should bend his energies to noticing and understanding the miscreant himself. ‘Report me and my cause aright,’ said Hamlet; this might be Nilsen’s leitmotiv, expressing his desire that at last some attention might be afforded him. Of course, it is a truism to say that the need for attention is part of the universal need for love, but it is important to see that this represents the converse of the schizoid’s abject failure to recognise love for what it is and to accept it when offered. While he is frightened of loving attention and sees it as a danger, a door to dependency and humiliation, he none the less still craves it, and is reduced to expressing this craving in a comparatively ‘safe’ way, by noticing every event or gesture in so far as it affects himself. The Old Bailey heard of Nilsen’s need for attention and his ‘grandiosity’, and there have been many examples in these pages of his tendency to regard himself as a victim along with those whom he killed. He talks of Duffey, Sinclair, Barlow and Nilsen as all lonely outcasts, thus turning the face of compassion upon himself. Two more quotations from his prison notes may serve to emphasise the point. ‘I want crowds around me to listen to my solitude,’ he writes. ‘I want others to know that I am feeling pain. I want others to see that I suffer. I do not like suffering, but it seems now to be expected of me.’20 Nothing could better illuminate his condition than that last sentence, with its implication that any stratagem might be countenanced if it would gain the necessary attention; the infant who resorts to tears is doing much the same thing – he will play a role to achieve the desired end. What Nilsen does not fully realise is that the attention, when given, will be misunderstood by him if it contains any element of affection.
A poem that he wrote in September 1983, as his trial approached, underlines both this egocentric characteristic and the schizoid fear of closeness. It was penned with David Martin in mind, but equally can apply to himself:
Never a man so sore afraid
To let his feelings shine;
Never a man so helpless
To stop and notice mine.21
3. Fantasy
All are agreed that a central element in the psychology of the schizoid type is the development of a fantasy life. Time and again it is found in the psychic history of multiple murderers, from Kürten to Christie to Kemper. It does not arise spontaneously, from a void, but is a link in a chain of circumstances which may ultimately lead to murder or suicide unless the chain is broken. Fantasy begins as a solace to the lonely child (and is then very common and quite harmless); it takes hold if the loneliness is not relieved in adolescence; and it grows more complex and sophisticated with the adult. It answers the search for immediate satisfaction. Danger looms when fantasy becomes more cherished than reality, and when people from the real world impinge upon it, innocent of the terrible intensity they are jostling.
I have tried to show in these pages how Nilsen’s fantasies gradually developed alongside his overtly normal life. At about the age of ten he was aware of sexual attraction towards other boys, and at the same time knew that he must therefore be wicked. The thoughts had to be suppressed.
I assumed that there was something abnormally wrong with me when contrasted with other boys. I felt apart, alien and inferior (and more than a bit soiled). I had no person to confide in, and it is there that my road to isolation began to lengthen and be really ingrained in my personality.22
So a fantasy, originally quite safe, took the place of bleak reality. The boy imagined himself happy with a friend, such as the boy in the playground, but did not dare to try translating the happiness into real life, for fear of rejection and scorn. Next, the fantasy attached to a drawing, in a French grammar, of a boy who could not possibly respond. The fantasy was fed, also, by the cinema, where everyone was beautiful, popular and famous. When the memory of the one love of his life, his grandfather, entered the fantasy and became co-mingled with it, then it took a new and morbid turn. The loved object became himself as a corpse, viewed in the mirror (this development dating from Nilsen’s early manhood, immediately post-adolescence). At the same time, the cinematic fantasy was gratified by his own movie camera and projector, which he used in particular to film the young soldier with whom he fell in love in the Shetlands (and to whom, significantly, he never declared himself). Together they would enact dramas in which the young soldier had to ‘play dead’ while Nilsen filmed his prostrate and apparently lifeless body. Afterwards, he would sometimes masturbate when watching these films alone. Until his mid-twenties, his sexual experience in the real world was nil, as the fantasy life was already a far more enticing alternative. When he entered his promiscuous period, after the age of twenty-seven, we have the word of at least one man who spent the night with him that Nilsen would pretend to be asleep or lifeless and wait for the lover to entertain his motionless body. ‘He went dead on me.’ Meanwhile, the solitary experiments with the mirror continued, with ever more complicated stratagems to make himself appear dead, that is, by covering his body with powder, making his eyes bloodshot, his lips blue, and so on.
The fantasy, it should be noted, is not the source of the problem, but the instrument by which the problem is tamed – until, that is, its greed makes it impossible to contain any longer and it spills over into the real world. We recall that when Nilsen began to kill, he would frequently hold the body up in front of the mirror and ‘love’ the mirror image. The two worlds had collided.
Here now are some extracts from Nilsen’s own understanding of his fantasy life:
I wandered aimlessly through a life and found only the shadows of my own imagination weeping in front of those spent lives.23
The need to return to my beautifully warm unreal world was such that I was addicted to it even to the extent of knowing of the risks to human life. That was my irresponsibility, that is my crime. It is just as bad as any premeditated act in my view. I had the power to say no to my trips but I only thought of the sublime pleasure these feelings gave me. It was a great and necessary diversion and escape from the troubled reality of life outside … The pure primitive man of the dream world killed these men … 24
I have been my own secret scriptwriter, actor, director and cameraman … I took this world of make-believe, where no one really gets hurt, into the real world, and people can get hurt in the real world … These people strayed into my innermost secret world and they died there. I’m sure of this.25 [Kenneth Ockendon went too close to the fantasy world by listening to Nilsen’s ‘magical’ music through headphones.]
Nilsen also touches upon the dreadful irony that his crimes have made him ‘someone’ for whom there is no longer any need to take refuge in fantasy. ‘I have become the real character in the movie. The notoriety of arrest and imprisonment in Brixton became more real than anything I could have created in the movie world.’26 Cynics will suspect that this is what he intended all along, and his bearing since conviction would give them support. But that would be to misconstrue the purpose of the fantasy, which is not merely to imagine fame, but to caress death. He will never kill again. Either the fantasy has been melted away by exposure, or exorcised by examination. Or, if it remains, it can only be consummated by his own death, the most pleasurable ‘trip’ of all. Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf sadist, said that he looked forward to hearing the sound of his own blood rush out as his head was severed on the block. Nilsen has said he would welcome the hangman’s noose.
4. Control
If Nilsen’s fantasies were kept in check for years, what finally broke down the barrier and made them trespass into the real world? ‘Often a criminal is a man who does what other people merely think,’ writes Frederic Wertham in his study of murder, Dark Legend.27 People normally restrict their fantasies to ‘thinking’ because they have an inherited ability to control their impulses which is sometimes given the word ‘morality’. But this ability to control is fragile in all of us, a
nd when it is under strain it can lead to neurosis – anything from a headache to a mental breakdown. Nilsen lost control over his secret amoral world.
Aggression is a natural and beneficial aspect of the human condition. It enables the child to grow independent and the adult to master his environment. It is a necessary part of any endeavour which strives to improve upon given premises or to open up new avenues of knowledge. It is not confined to violence between individuals or warfare between nations, as the word normally implies in daily conversation. If the aggressive drive is totally blocked then illness must result. The Ute Indians are neurotic almost to a man, because their rigid ethical laws prevent any discharge of aggression.28 On the other hand, aggression has to be controlled if it is not to run amok, and nature has evolved a subtle method of control which is termed an ‘appeasement gesture’. You can observe how these gestures work in animals. Geese swoop and undulate their necks as a way of showing aggression or working it out of their system without actually coming to a fight. Similarly, herring gulls tear up grass. Even the neighbourhood dogs will demonstrate the mechanism by offering their hindquarters to a potential aggressor in order to ‘appease’ and avert catastrophe. We do virtually the same thing by shaking hands, thus offering proof that we carry no weapons. One cannot fail to have a sense of admiration, writes Konrad Lorenz, ‘for those physiological mechanisms which enforce, in animals, selfless behaviour aimed towards the good of the community, and which work in the same way as the moral law in human beings’.29 The moral law, then, is a fact of evolution passed down through the species, and not an invention of man.fn1
The point here is that Nilsen’s natural control of aggression faltered and gave way to selfish rather than selfless behaviour. Instead of displaying appeasement gestures, he treated people who crossed the threshold into his fantasy world in much the same way as we might treat an ant. According to accepted psychiatric theory, aggression in such a case has to be released in order to prevent something worse. (Is this what Nilsen subconsciously meant when he said that he had to squeeze somebody’s throat to ‘stop something terrible from happening’? That ‘something terrible’ would have been the complete collapse of the personality which Dr Gallwey described in court.)
Let us hear some psychiatric definitions of murder. Murder is ‘a defence against impending psychotic ego rupture’.30 It is ‘episodic dyscontrol which functions as a regulatory device to forestall more extensive personality disintegration’.31 In his study of ‘Gino’, Wertham writes, ‘the act of murder appears to have prevented consequences far more serious for Gino’s mental health.’32 Murders result from ‘severe lapses of ego control which make possible the open expression of primitive violence born out of previous, and now unconscious, traumatic experiences’.33 The eighteen-year-old American killer William Heirens left a note which said, ‘For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself,’ and the psychiatrist Dr Brussell claimed that the Boston Strangler, Albert De Salvo, was ‘progressing’ through murder towards greater maturity.34
All this makes uncomfortable reading, for it seems to suggest that murder is somehow excusable on grounds which have nothing to do with morality as we understand it. But the point is not that it is excusable, but explicable in terms of the breakdown of control, the smothering of that inhibiting factor which works so well in the animal kingdom. Dr Wertham gives a name to this breakdown of control. It is a ‘catathymic crisis’. ‘A violent act’, he writes, ‘is the only solution to a profound emotional conflict whose real nature remains below the threshold of the consciousness of the patient.’ The catathymic crisis has five stages, namely:
(a) Initial thinking disorder;
(b) Crystallisation of a plan;
(c) Extreme tension culminating in violent crisis;
(d) Superficial normality;
(e) Insight and recovery.35
It is interesting to note that Nilsen’s history can be made to fit this pattern, if one accepts that the crisis can be episodic and occur over a period of five years (Wertham was dealing with only one murder).
If this is true, then we have identified the process by which the schizoid’s control over fantasy breaks down and allows subdued aggression to explode, but we still do not know the origin of the conflict which artificially kept the aggression in check.
Nilsen has been asked about his lack of control. He says he was enraged by apathy, especially that of his colleagues in the trade union. He would talk incessantly, and wanted people to understand, but they would get bored and fall asleep.
All these frustrations came down to someone sitting in my armchair or on my bed and everything dear to me became nothing but boring trifles to them. My views, me, my emotions, my love and aspirations meant nothing to them. Life itself seemed to mean nothing to them … I think I was giving them a last chance to fight for something. It seemed that their own lives were of no importance to them. The only way for them to listen to me and take me seriously was to apply that pressure.
He goes on to imply that he was trying in a way to waken them up, to ‘vivify’ them. When the killing was over, Nilsen felt ‘intense fulfilment and mutual release for us both’.
They didn’t have to listen any more and I didn’t have to talk any more … I had tried to communicate with them but they had chosen to cease to listen … I cared enough about them to kill them … I was set off by their silence, by their rejection of everything that I was … I was engaged primarily in self-destruction … I was killing myself only but it was always the bystander who died.36
It would be easy to dismiss this as more rationalisation, self-justification or righteous bombast. It does not mention the hunt or the chase for a victim, nor the sexual attraction of a corpse. Nilsen’s case is by any standards a complex one, requiring not one answer but the congruence of several. However, it is interesting to discern clues in his statement which may trigger recognition. The need for release of tension is obvious. Somewhat less clear, at the moment, is Nilsen’s insistence upon the illusion of self-destruction.
5. Precedents
The temptation to compare Nilsen with other mass murderers need not be resisted, for analogies can be instructive. His case clearly echoes to some extent that of John Christie, hanged in 1953 for the murder of six women at 10 Rillington Place in London. Christie also brought his victims home and made them drunk, he also strangled them, masturbated over the bodies, and placed them under the floorboards. He said he would have continued to kill had he not been caught. Lacenaire compares with Nilsen in other ways, being a fierce radical who despised the complacent rich and wanted to teach ‘society’ a lesson. Landru, the Frenchman executed in 1922, shared Nilsen’s black sense of humour, offering to surrender his seat in the dock to a lady who could not find room in the public gallery, and he also refused all religious comfort. But until now, the only time an opportunity was afforded to investigate the mind of a multiple killer was in the case of Peter Kürten, at once the most interesting and the most horrifying of all murderers, not excepting Jack the Ripper. Between his arrest and his execution, Kürten formed a relationship of trust with a psychiatrist, Dr Karl Berg, to whom he revealed his most private thoughts and feelings. Berg published the text of their conversations, with his conclusions, in a unique book which appeared in English translation in 1938 (it is now extremely rare). Many of the characteristics which emerge about Kürten are strangely familiar and when Kürten speaks, it is almost as if one were listening to Dennis Nilsen; on occasion the very words are identical.
Kürten dictated to the police stenographer meticulous details of all his crimes in chronological order, including many with which he was not charged and which came as a total surprise to the officers. He had precise recall, even to exact addresses and the day and time of murders which were committed up to thirty years before. There were some imaginary embellishments, but Kürten was always accurate on points of fact. His memory was unreliable only when relating the climactic point of his murderous gratificatio
n.
Kürten experienced orgasm as he seized the victim’s throat, or as he plunged in the knife. When the urge to kill came upon him, he went out in search of a likely victim. He accepted his guilt, because he thought he ought to have been able to control his urge, but did not. He was ready to shoulder his punishment, and admitted that people were right to call him a beast, although he suspected his execution might be seen as an act of vengeance rather than justice, to placate the public mood. He agreed that he enjoyed talking about his crimes and watching the astonished look on the faces of his listeners. He had amazingly cool presence of mind, and had been able to bluff his way out of awkward situations. Dr Berg found in him an odd mixture of mendacity and frankness, but was convinced that essentially he told the truth and showed genuine interest in Berg’s interpretations. In the period leading up to his trial, Kürten grew introspective and tried to come to some self-understanding. He was also preoccupied with the question of his legal responsibility.
He showed no emotion at all in the dock, apart from irritation at inaccuracies and discrepancies in the evidence. In a speech before sentence, Kürten declared that he would make no excuses for his detestable deeds, but hoped that the relatives of his victims might one day forgive him. His last wish was to write thirteen letters to those relatives, seeking pardon. His exuberant fantasy life entirely disappeared after his arrest.
Here are some of the statements made by Kürten in conversation with Dr Berg:
Believe me, if I tell you the whole truth, you will hear a lot of horrible things from me.
… my blood and the blood of my victims … I had no pity for my victims.
Yes, if I had had the means I would have killed masses.
Killing For Company Page 29