The boy stood steady and cold against the wind in awe of his doomed universe and the devil and all that he could imagine a creator and destructor to be. He was cut off and engulfed by the sea, carried away into the numbing pressures of a silent peace without fear, without panic … He floated down into the womb of death, the painless seat of freedom. His glazed eyes stared, his body suspended, hair streaming, and limp hanging arms conducting a dreamless world. Natural living forces animated the pale white boy dancing, drunk in a timeless sea … The man spoke as he washed the boy’s lifeless body in soothing quizzical tones. ‘There is something so temporarily attractive in the bodies of dead young men. The limpness of the movable parts, the ineffectiveness of a non-personality. The texture of dead cold skin to the touch. The uses which fantasy can make on an unresisting model of life … The hands and fingers are not rigid, not limp, but lie as though undecided between the two. It is an unlovable thing but traumatic in its presence.’
The piece is undated, but it bears the signs of experience more than imagination, and must therefore have been written after December 1978. The role of the imagination is in placing Nilsen himself as the dead youth, being conscious of what is said to him by the man who handles him. Nilsen spoke to the bodies of his victims in similar fashion, and one can hardly doubt any longer that his ultimate unrealisable fantasy was to have the roles reversed.
It should not pass unnoticed that the only mass murderer of recent times whom we know to be a necrophiliac, John Halliday Christie, was at the age of six profoundly affected by the sight of his grandfather dead in a coffin. The difference is that Christie hated his grandfather, and Nilsen loved his (that at least is how they recalled their emotions, though it is always possible that there was some suppressed love in Christie’s feeling and some suppressed hate in Nilsen’s). The point is that the experience scarred Christie to the extent that he remembered it vividly, and it was never fully explored at his trial. It ought now to be perceived as more than coincidence in the light of the Nilsen case.
We must finally return to our earlier categorisation of Nilsen as a ‘lust murderer’, a necrophiliac not in the manner of Christie (killing in order to commit the sexual act with a corpse), but in the manner of Kürten (killing as an end in itself, making death). He had, he says, a need for more prolonged excitement and for the thrill of nearness to death, even his own. Yes, he was, before the murders began in 1978, sometimes tied up in a man’s flat. ‘I half-expected to be strangled. I wanted to live and be strangled at the same time. From stalking until my eventual capture it was all part of this need for thrill and fear!’
I did it all for me. Purely selfishly … I worshipped the art and the act of death, over and over. It’s as simple as that. Afterwards it was all sexual confusion, symbolism, honouring the ‘fallen’. I was honouring myself … I hated the decay and the dissection. There was no sadistic pleasure in killing. I killed them as I would like to be killed myself … enjoying the extremity of the death act itself. If I did it to myself I could only experience it once. If I did it to others, I could experience the death act over and over again.52
Do any other definitions of this mysterious aberration help towards an understanding? In On the Nightmare, Ernest Jones divided necrophilia into two types.
(a) Arising from a frantic aversion against accepting the fact of final departure, as with Periander, who had sexual coitus with his wife Melissa after her death, and King Herod, who was said to have slept with his wife for seven years after hers. This kind of activity is celebrated in some of the work of de Sade and Baudelaire. It is clearly not the problem with Nilsen.
(b) Arising from ‘the most extreme imaginable perversion of the love instinct’. This, we have already seen, is applicable to Nilsen, who may furthermore have obscurely hoped for union with the dead and, for a time at least, felt that he had achieved this. But he never went so far as to bite or devour dead flesh, which Jones says is the ultimate manifestation of such necrophilia, and which has been detailed in gruesome case studies by J. Paul de River.
Von Hentig cited five examples of necrophiliac behaviour:
(a) Acts of sexual contact with a corpse;
(b) Sexual excitement produced by sight of a corpse;
(c) Attraction to graves;
(d) Acts of dismemberment;
(e) Craving to touch or smell odour of corpses.
Of these, only the second applies to Nilsen, the fourth being in his case irrelevant (despite appearances) because, far from craving to dissect his corpses, he frequently left them for months unmolested, and finally dismembered them only to get rid of them. But when Von Hentig describes the ‘necrophilous character’, his remarks may bear more relevance to Nilsen’s case. Widely interpreted, necrophilia is ‘the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction’.
Erich Fromm, who quotes Von Hentig, goes much further in his identification of the character-rooted passion of necrophilia. The semi-autistic child, who is cold and emotionless, is likely to develop a necrophilous character, he says. The trouble is, this ‘character’ (according to Fromm) can betray itself in so many scores of insignificant actions, without ever burgeoning into aberrant behaviour, that it might apply to half the people we know. It can be seen in the habit of breaking matchsticks in half, in pedantic and ‘lifeless’ conversation, in a pallid visage, and in the fascination with things mechanical. Relevant to Nilsen, perhaps, is the predilection for black and white rather than colour, but this is only one trait among many which are too common to be precise. Fromm does usefully point out that necrophilia is an extreme extension of narcissism. While the sadist is still actually with other people, wanting to control not annihilate them, the necrophiliac lacks even this degree of relatedness. Necrophiliacs are more narcissistic, more hostile, than sadists. ‘Their aim is to transform all that is alive into dead matter; they want to destroy everything and everybody, often even themselves, their enemy is life itself.’
To sum up, the necrophiliac is not only a man who violates a corpse sexually (as popular belief holds) but, a man for whom death is the ultimate beauty. Why Nilsen should glory in the act of death, and develop into a dangerous man, sane but with what must now be inadequately described as a ‘personality disorder’, while there are millions among us who have seen dead grandfathers and remain in control, is a question which persistently eludes an answer. ‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark,’ wrote Bacon. Nilsen, it seems, feared life.
The Philosophy of Murder
It would be reassuring to believe that murder was a gross abnormality, a dramatic departure from respected ethical standards which restrain civilised man from surrendering to his baser instincts. This used to be the accepted view, and the murderer was regarded as beyond the pale, irreconcilable with the rest of mankind. Advances made in our knowledge of ethology, evolution and human psychology present challenges to such banal assumptions which cannot be ignored. Not least important among them is the crucial recognition that, far from being an aberration which despoils civilised man, murder belongs to civilised man more than it does to primitive peoples or to other species which inhabit the planet. As man has become more civilised, intelligent, creative and dominant, so he has become more murderous, thus posing a problem for philosophers to grapple with.
Statistically, murder is still rare in proportion to the population. In the United Kingdom, the victims of murder in any one year may be accommodated in three or four double-decker buses. Of these, well over three-quarters are killed as the result of a sudden surge of emotion – a violent quarrel or a jealous rage in domestic conditions. So the kind of murder which Nilsen committed, purposeful and repeated yet motiveless, is rarer still. Yet the increase in this type of murder demands attention, however baffling it may appear, because if one can identify the ‘causes’ of such crimes, one may cast a chink of light on the condition of modern man. Dennis Nilsen is not a stranger among us, he is an extreme instance of human p
ossibility. The psychiatrist who appeared for the prosecution at his trial, Dr Bowden, implicitly said as much when he commented that Nilsen was ‘a very rare animal indeed’ but not mad. If he were merely a monster we could learn nothing by studying his deplorable behaviour; it is because he is also human that we must make the attempt.
It is pretty obvious that the search for self-esteem is the motive force behind much human activity; when successful, it can engender happiness, stability, and achievement; when thwarted, it can lead to bitterness and failure. It is generally assumed that self-esteem flourishes alongside sexual confidence, even that the one is rooted in the other. A man who is certain of his own masculinity, or a woman of her femininity, may be certain of much else besides, and growth in all directions must begin with this certainty. Conversely, the man who does not think highly of himself, cannot be tolerant towards his fellows, because (such is human nature) he is apt to blame others for his lack of self-regard. It is they who think little of him, throwing back at him an image to which he is forced to assent, and unless he can crack the image and replace it with one of which he can feel proud, he is likely to nurse resentment all his life. Even those who have self-esteem need to have it constantly reaffirmed in sexual conquest. Otherwise, the sexually inadequate man may revert to his grim dark prison of frustration and anger, lowering at the world outside which denies him his ‘right’ to self-assertion. Murderers are always locked in this windowless stultifying prison.
This, broadly, is the view of Freudian analysts who regard self-esteem as arising from sexual confidence. Latterly there have been alternative ideas which, alas, were misinterpreted and vulgarised by the soppy generation of the sixties. Paramount among these is the work of the late Abraham Maslow, whose positive theory of human motivations postulated a ‘hierarchy of needs’ in which the need for sexual love and the need for self-esteem exist separately and sequentially, the latter only arising after the former has been satisfied.
According to Maslow,53 the earliest and most fundamental needs are physiological, i.e. the need for food, drink and exercise. When these are satisfied, man moves on to the second level and requires security, order, protection. This achieved, he then reaches the third stage and needs social bonds: love, friendship, sexual fulfilment. The fourth and critical stage for our purpose is the need for self-esteem, that is praise, achievement, acknowledgment, status amongst one’s fellows. The final rung in this hierarchy (and the one which the hippy philosophy exalted) is ‘self-actualisation’ – the need to realise one’s full potential, to be everything one is capable of being. Few of us ever reach this far, but most of us manage to satisfy the first four salient needs, at least up to a point. Though they must be dealt with by each individual in their proper sequence, none ever entirely disappears. The man who has attained the level of ‘esteem need’ may have his needs for security or love suddenly reawakened by the loss of his job or the desertion of his spouse, and these needs must be hastily re-satisfied before he can build once more towards rewarding his need for self-esteem.fn4
It may well be that murderers falter at the ‘esteem’ level, and that this has less to do with sex than with the exercise of the will. When the will is able to press forward in a purposive manner, encountering obstacles and dealing with them successfully, then self-esteem is safe and healthy, and one may even enjoy what Maslow described as the ‘peak experience’, that feeling of elation when a task has been accomplished to a degree of satisfaction beyond even what one expected. But if the will is frustrated, a violent act may ensue as a desperate measure to thrust it forward. ‘The hungry will, like an empty stomach, craves fulfilment.’54 This vocabulary is startlingly apt when one remembers how often Nilsen has referred to his own ‘peak of feeling’ which he says arose when listening to music and drinking alcohol, but which was in fact the prelude to a murderous attack.
The violent act becomes necessary as a means of asserting the will and compensating for real or imagined humiliation. Understood in this way, murder is a purposive deed which, by horrid paradox, enables the murderer to reach the previously blocked ‘esteem level’; in other words, the very act which makes him despicable to the rest of us renders him healthy and admirable in his own eyes. The psychiatrists, remember, talk of murder as a safety valve to prevent disintegration of the personality, or an antidote to impending insanity. Our sanity depends upon our being able to satisfy this need for self-esteem, and that in turn depends upon our image of ourselves. Without self-esteem, the will comes up against a terminal moraine impossible to dislodge. So self-esteem must be encouraged by a good self-image, and this derives, whether we like it or not, from others. Other people are the mirror which reflects back a picture, and as the reflection constantly changes with the different people that we face, and even within our familiarity with the same person who may subtly alter the picture from day to day, so the image is sharpened, clarified, made real, defined. Stability can be undermined in two ways: either the image reflected is stagnant, always the same, or it is diffuse, blurred, virtually non-existent. The first danger was graphically dramatised by Sartre in his play Huis-Clos, in which four people are doomed to spend eternity together in a small room, so that each one is stuck with the image of himself reflected back in perpetuity by the other three, and the way forward is blocked. Thus the famous line from the play ‘L’Enfer, c’est les autres’ (Hell is other people), can be understood as representing the stagnation of the self-image with consequent impotence and absolute denial of any action which can change matters. The other danger, of having a self-image which is out of focus, comes to those who know few people, and nobody well, so that they live as though constantly in the dark. With no self-image they can have no self-esteem, because there is nothing there to value; they look, and they see a void. This produces habitual tension which must be resolved in some way or another, lest it dissolve into self-denigration and despair.
This is where fantasy comes in, as a route to the resolution of the impasse. If the image is blurred, then why not invent a sharper one, one that may offer satisfaction and produce the illusion of self-esteem? Since fantasy carries with it such pleasurable results, it can become addictive, and it must progressively be exaggerated and enlarged in order to simulate that ‘way forward’ which would evolve for the healthy man in real life. A fantasy of power eventually becomes a fantasy of extreme power, one of beauty grows into an image of flawless beauty. A fantasy of death, however, cannot progress towards its ultimate goal without bursting into the real world. Once again, it is easy to see how Nilsen’s story fits into this hypothetical scheme. His actual (not metaphorical) use of a mirror to convey a satisfying view of himself, his constant talk of ‘images’, the low threshold of his self-regard and the evident frustration of his will to action, all demonstrate that he was floundering at the edge of Maslow’s level of self-esteem, unable to break through and compensating wildly for his failure.
The outcome of these theories (which I have intersected at several points) is the disconcerting conclusion that murder is a creative act, a means of self-fulfilment. Colin Wilson has written a great deal about the ‘outsiders’ in society, an uneasy group which includes modern murderers as well as poets and musicians. Outsiders who become killers, he writes,
share certain characteristics of the artist; they know they are unlike other men, they experience drives and tensions that alienate them from the rest of society, they possess the courage to satisfy these drives in defiance of society. But while the artist releases his tensions in an act of imaginative creation, the Outsider-criminal releases his in an act of violence.55
It is worth noting in this regard just how many multiple murderers have sought to express themselves in verse. Lacenaire, Landru, Peter Manuel, all wrote sonnets while waiting for execution. Paul de River, in The Sexual Criminal, devotes a whole chapter to ‘The Poetic Nature of the Sado-masochist’ which includes many pieces written by one of his criminal patients.56 And the reader does not need to be reminded how often Nilsen
has assuaged his energies in verse since he was arrested in February 1983. He has even (see here) spoken unambiguously about the ‘art’ of murder. There does seem to be some evidence that the creative urge of the artist and the destructive urge of the murderer may spring from the same source.
This being so, it is hardly surprising that the murderer is reluctant to show remorse for his acts. Why should he disparage the one action which afforded him at last a feeling of self-fulfilment, which lifted him on to the plane of self-esteem? That would be to deny the self-image which he has so lovingly constructed. It would be a retrograde step, a kind of psychological suicide. Kürten, Lacenaire, Nilsen – none was willing to show remorse (and the verb is important), except when moral reality impinged, and then they did, for a brief period, show terror and remorse at the same time. The process is vividly apparent in Nilsen; remorse for his actions, coupled with terror at the renewed disfigurement or dissolution of his self-image which remorse must bring, followed by rapid patching up of the image and recantation of the remorse. Only one illogical course is then left open to these men – to turn the blame upon the nebulous concept of ‘society’, thus keeping their self-image intact and reconciling it with some expression of regret at the same time. Lacenaire vented his wrath against society. So did Ian Brady (the Moors murderer), Peter Kürten, and Charles Manson. Nilsen has done it too.
The Religious View
Stuttering advances in psychological understanding appear to some not to negate the old-fashioned concepts of good and evil, but to reinforce them. When forensic psychiatrists talk of a ‘personality disorder’ they imply that the personality can be, and generally is, ‘ordered’, and that something has disordered it; when it is in order, then goodness (or peace, or equanimity) prevails, and when disordered, it becomes a vehicle for evil (or distress, or ‘maladaptive patterns of behaviour’). The agent of the disorder is a harsh emotional experience in childhood which has the effect of disrupting the passions ever after and forcing the schizoid type to take refuge in fantasy. Some religious men, especially those with a Scottish inheritance, are not alarmed by such talk, but they see reflected in it ancient truths cloaked in new language. A personality disorder indicates for them that the devil is at work, and that the man imprisoned in fantasy has forsaken the world of God to pursue his miserable life in the vivid, seductive, intoxicating world of Satan. From this point of view, psychology has not slain religion, it has on the contrary reaffirmed man’s spirituality, previously represented to him in the symbolic language of myth, now muddied by the obtuse jargon of doctors. Psychiatry and religion, apparently at loggerheads, are in fact intimately allied in poring over the springs of human conduct, the difference being that psychiatry is rather more difficult to follow than myth. Simplicity is, after all, the purpose of myth, and when Martin Israel writes that ‘the forces of evil rule the distraught passions of unredeemed men’,57 he is not essentially arguing with psychiatrists so much as reducing their insights to symbols. Can a man like Nilsen be understood by parrying symbols?
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