How They Caught Dennis Nilsen E-Book

Dylan Frost

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 186

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Dennis Nilsen was one of the most evil and prolific serial killers in British criminal history. But how was he unmasked and captured? Sadly, some of the victims of Nilsen will likely never be identified and his true kill count is impossible to know for certain. Nilsen's dreadful and shocking killing spree took place from 1978 to 1983 Here is the true story of how this terrible killer finally got caught...

Leseprobe

How They Caught Dennis Nilsen

Dylan Frost© Copyright 2025 Dylan Frost

-

ContentsWho Was Dennis Nilsen?How They Caught Dennis Nilsen Part 1How They Caught Dennis Nilsen Part 2How They Caught Dennis Nilsen Part 3How They Caught Dennis Nilsen Part 4What happened to Dennis Nilsen Afterwards?Photo CreditWHO WAS DENNIS NILSEN?Dennis Andrew Nilsen was born in 1945 in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Nilsen is one of the most disturbing serial killers in British criminal history and although his precise kill count is hard to verify only the likes of Harold Shipman were more conclusively prolific than Nilsen when it comes to murder. Nilsen eventually confessed to murdering fifteen men and said he tried to kill others. A number of men also reported incidents where they (fortunately) managed to fight back escape from Nilsen after they went back to his flat and he turned violent. So when you add attempted murder you can see that Nilsen was a very active and dangerous killer who would have murdered many more people given the chance. There are believed to be other victims too who Nilsen simply couldn't remember many details about because he was drunk at the time. Sadly, some of the victims of Nilsen will likely never be identified and his true kill count is impossible to know for certain. Nilsen's dreadful and shocking killing spree took place from 1978 to 1983. Dennis Nilsen's confirmed verified victims are Kenneth Ockenden, Martyn Duffey, William Sutherland, Stephen Holmes, Malcolm Barlow, John Howlett and Stephen Sinclair. Nilsen would often strangle the victims and sometimes then drowned them in the bath just to make sure they were dead. He sometimes used a necktie to strangle them and would strike at opportune moments - like when they were asleep or listening to music through headphones. Nilsen would strike when victims were vulnerable and not alert. By this stage he had gained their trust so the last thing they expected was that Nilsen would suddenly attack them. He chose his victims carefully and tried to isolate men who would not pose a physical challenge to him. Many of Nilsen's victims were small and none of them were over the age of 27. There were though men who bravely fought Nilsen off and escaped - though sadly the police (rather shamefully) failed to take any action when these allegations were reported to them. Nilsen was famously into necrophilia and this deviant and horrendous pastime was the grim primary motivation for his murders. The necrophilia was what set the Nilsen case apart from your usual serial murdering lunatic. Nilsen was one of the few British serial killers who strayed into that icky and highly disturbing Ed Gein/Jeffrey Dahmer sort of territory. Nilsen said he murdered those men because he didn't want his victims to ever be able to leave him. Nilsen said it the fear of being alone which drove him to commit his depraved and shocking crimes. Nilsen would kill someone and then keep the body in his flat as long as he could for company. For this reason he sometimes became known as The Company Killer. Nilsen admitted that he used to talk to the corpses of his victims as if they were still alive. He would bathe them, watch television with them and enjoy having some 'company' for a change. But this company could only ever be temporary. At some point Nilsen would have no choice but to dissect the body and dispose of the remains. And this complication, ultimately, is what led to his downfall and capture. As a young man, Nilsen was enraptured by a painting called The Raft of the Medusa by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault. The painting depicts the French naval ship Méduse as it arrives in Mauritania on July 5, 1816 after experiencing problems on the journey. There was great damage to the Meduse and large numbers of casualties among the crew. This gruesome painting, with its homoerotic undertones, greatly appealed to Nilsen. Nilsen was always drawn to the bleak and macabre. He had dark thoughts and fantasies which, in the end, he became tragically determined to act upon and make a reality. The deluded Nilsen was odd in that he thought everyone was secretly like him but simply not brave or honest enough to act on it. He believed that most people fantasised about being a serial killer. What made Nilsen chilling is that he came across as dull, unthreatening and fairly ordinary in real life. He wore glasses and enjoyed listening to music and watching old black and white films. Most people who met him seemed to find Nilsen quite a boring and pedantic sort of person. While there was a grumpiness to Bilsen and he was one of those people who rarely smiled, the victims who went back to his flat were patently lulled into a false sense of security. They clearly had no idea this man was dark and dangerous and full of bad intentions. Nilsen, as far as serial killers go, was a very good actor. When he trawled the train stations and underbelly of London looking for victims he would often pose as the Good Samaritan. He would latch onto some young man who was perhaps strapped for their train fare home or needed a bed for the night. Nilsen would offer to buy them a meal or a drink and then at some point inevitably try to persuade them to come back to his flat. Nilsen would come across as quite a protective and kind figure to his victims. Almost like a mentor. He was able to gain trust and put people at ease. Because he was a decade or more older than his victims Nilsen even came across as something of a father figure. A kind stranger in an hour of need. While many incarcerated serial killers are reluctant to speak about their crimes or preposterously maintain they are innocent all the way to the electric chair, Dennis Nilsen was very different. Nilsen relished any chance to talk about his life and crimes and would talk for hours to journalists or detectives when given the chance. He seemed to crave attention and derived a weird satisfaction from his infamy. Nilsen was delighted to be famous and the fact he had only become famous because he was a serial killer and necrophile didn't bother him too much. Nilsen wrote endless essays in prison and they were all about himself. Serial killers are unavoidably narcissistic and Nilsen was up there with the worst of them when it came to the size of his ego. He only cared about himself and had no empathy for anyone - not even relatives. Nilsen grew up in a small fishing port - which he said was a lonely existence. A lot of the people where Nilsen lived ending up working in a local fish canning factory. Nilsen had no desire to end up like them and wanted to get out of Fraserburgh as soon as he was old enough. This is why joined the army and then later gravitated towards London. Nilsen had known he was gay since he was a little boy and he was well aware that Fraserburgh was not going to be an easy place to be a gay person in the 1960s and 1970s.When he was growing-up Nilsen had to keep his sexuality a secret because it wasn't easy to be openly gay in those days. He said that this created a feeling of tension and alienation that he never quite managed to shake off. From a young age, Nilsen had an obsession (a fetish one would say) with death. He saw a beautiful serenity and peace in death. This largely derived from a childhood experience when he saw his dead maternal grandfather Andrew Whyte before the funeral. Nilsen said that looking at dead people made him feel invulnerable. As a young man, Dennis Nilsen would smear himself with white makeup and talcum powder and pretend he was dead. He said he found this erotic. Nilsen actually believed he was doing people a favour by killing them and then caring for the body as long as he could. To him this was an affectionate act of love. Nilsen never seemed to grasp how wicked and strange his deeds had been. To him it wasn't a big deal to kill someone and then keep the body stashed in your flat. He thought that everyone secretly desired to do these grotesque things and he was the only one honest enough to admit it or act on those urges. Dennis Nilsen loved watching old war films and always liked the idea of serving in the armed forces. He joined the Army Cadet Force when he was fourteen. He then served in the British Army Catering Corps and was a chef in 1st Battalion the Royal Fusiliers. In his army career Nilsen was stationed in Aldershot, Norway, Germany, Plymouth, the Shetland Islands, and the Middle East. Nilsen served eleven years in the army and reached the rank of corporal. It was in the army that Dennis Nilsen learned how to butcher meat and use knives. He would deploy these 'skills' in gruesome fashion on his dead victims when he later became a serial killer. Nilsen eventually left the army for reasons which are vague. He would claim it was because of his objections to the situation in Northern Ireland. It seems more likely though Nilsen realised that as an unmarried secretly gay man it was going to be increasingly difficult for him in the armed forces. One of Nilsen's old army colleagues later told the newspapers that Nilsen left the army because he got into a couple of fights and couldn't hack it anymore. Nilsen was proud of his army career and, in his usual deluded fashion, seemed to think this mitigated his later crimes. In 1972, Dennis Nilsen moved to London and joined the police. His previous career in the army made him exactly the sort of person the police liked to recruit. Nilsen was six foot tall, quite intelligent (though not nearly as intelligent as he liked to think) and still fairly fit. He completed his police training course and passed his exams. When he was in the police, Dennis Nilsen had to view autopsied bodies in the morgue. He found this experience completely fascinating and sexually exciting. Nilsen was posted to Wilsden Green Police Station and served as a beat bobby before he swiftly decided that this wasn't the career for him. Nilsen said that one of the things which put him off the police was having to treat homosexuals like criminals. When he was a police officer, Nilsen once discovered two men having sex in a car late at night. He was supposed to arrest them but he just ignored them and walked past. Nilsen realised that, as a gay man, it was going to be very difficult for him to be a police officer. Nilsen also faced the problem of being gay and living in police accommodation. He had to keep his sexuality a secret because there was a lot of homophobia in the police as an institution at the time. Nilsen once sneaked a casual boyfriend back to his police digs and when the man was discovered Nilsen had to pretend he had come around to sell him something. Nilsen hated having to lie about his sexuality. He thought there was point living in a cosmopolitan city like London if he had to hide who he really was. That was the whole point of living in London in the first place. It was a big city with diverse communities where being gay didn't make you stand out like a sore thumb like it did in a village or small town. So in the end he decided that being a police officer was too much trouble and not the career for him. He was tired of having to hide who he really was. He wanted to go to gay pubs and have boyfriends and not have to pretend he wasn't gay. In a darkly ironic and tragic twist, the institutional homophobia in the police was later one of the reasons why Dennis Nilsen was able to get away with being a serial killer for so long. Any complaints about Nilsen by men who had escaped from him were practically ignored by the police because they generally didn't like to involve themselves in disputes and allegations which derived from the gay community. The homophobia in the police was a disadvantage to Nilsen when he was a police officer but an advantage when he became a serial killer. Had he been murdering women by the dozen in North London it seems unlikely that Nilsen's crimes would have remained so invisible to the local police. Nilsen was able to murder over a dozen men in five years in a constrictive four mile area of North London and yet the police didn't even deduce that a serial killer was active let alone catch him. This was a rare instance in Nilsen's life where he found that being gay was an advantage. Gay men disappearing just didn't seem to activate the police in the same fashion that women disappearing would have done. After he left the police Nilsen had a brief stint as a security guard. He also believed to have briefly worked in a gay pub. Nilsen did not like being unemployed. After eleven years in the army he liked routines and having a reason to get out of bed. Dennis Nilsen eventually became a civil servant after he dropped out of the police. His official job title was recruitment interviewer. Nilsen was the Acting Executive Officer at the employment office (Job Centre) on Denmark Street, Soho. Nilsen still had this job eight years later when he was arrested in 1983. He was good at his job and even earned a promotion. Having a mundane white collar job like this was actually good 'cover' for Nilsen as a serial killer. Those who worked with Nilsen would never in a million years have guessed that the man they saw each day at the Job Centre helping people find work was a prolific and sick necrophile and serial killer in private. Nilsen was also a socialist and a union rep. This was also good 'cover' for a serial killer. Iain Mackinnon, who was Nilsen's manager at the Job Centre, later said that Nilsen was odd but there were never any warning signs about him. He said he never felt uncomfortable in Nilsen's presence and that Nilsen wasn't 'creepy' or anything like that. There was some tension between Mackinnon and Nilsen because Nilsen always wanted to deal directly with the public in the Job Centre and interview them but Mackinnon felt Nilsen wasn't suited to this task and better deployed in more of a backstage role (so to speak). Nilsen always seemed to like to test authority and assert his individuality so it is something of a paradox that he joined the army and the police and actually lasted over ten years in the military. In 1975, Dennis Nilsen began a relationship with a man named David Gallichan - who Nilsen called 'Twinkle'. They met when Nilsen intervened outside a pub when Gallichan was being accosted by a couple of men. Nilsen and Gallichan moved into a ground floor flat together at Melrose Avenue in North London. Nilsen had been left £1,000 after the death of his father so his finances were in very good shape at the time. Nilsen and Gallichan were fairly happy at first but this didn't last. Gallichan eventually decided to leave and this left Nilsen feeling lonely and abandoned. Nilsen claimed that he ordered Gallichan to leave. Whatever the truth, the fact that Nilsen was left all alone was devastating for his already precarious mental health. Home movies of Dennis Nilsen and David Gallichan together indicate that Nilsen was the dominant person in the relationship. You can see that Nilsen is an irritable man who likes to be in control of a situation and be the boss. Nilsen seems to always be in a bad mood in these amateur films. Something seemed to change in Nilsen after the breakdown of his relationship with Gallichan. He became darker and more detached from society. Nilsen killed someone for the first time eighteen months after David Gallichan moved out of the flat they shared. Dennis Nilsen's first victim was Stephen Holmes. Stephen went missing in December 1978 and was only fourteen years-old. Stephen Holmes had spent the night with Dennis Nilsen. Nilsen didn't want Stephen Holmes to leave and so strangled and drowned him to prevent this from happening. He washed the body (including the hair) and abused the corpse sexually. Dennis Nilsen's passion for necrophilia was the motivation for his murders. He became addicted to the ritual of caring for a dead body. The actual killing part was not what satisfied Nilsen. It was what came afterwards. The killing was just an unavoidable necessity for Nilsen. Nilsen was unusual for a serial killer in that - for obvious reasons - he only killed people in his own home.Nilsen said he had not expected to get away with his first murder but to his surprise he did. Nilsen had assumed that if you murder someone then police detectives will be knocking on your door the next day but sadly the world doesn't always work like this. Sometimes people get murdered or vanish and the police don't have a clue what happened or who was to blame. Nilsen was amazed then to find that being a serial killer was surprisingly easy - at least compared to what he had expected. Dennis Nilsen would put plastic sheets or bin-liners on the floor before he dissected his victims (this was something he obviously no choice but to do when decomposition set in). He said he would vomit in the sink a few times while he did this grisly task. When he lived at 195 Melrose Avenue, Dennis Nilsen had access to a garden out the back which was blocked off from other residents. He was able to dispose of some of the victims by burning remains on a bonfire. Nilsen sometimes had to throw some tyres onto the bonfire to mask the odour of burning flesh and organs. However, this never alerted any suspicion because if you see someone having a bonfire the last thing you assume is that they are burning a dead body or human remains Dennis Nilsen had to leave 195 Melrose Avenue in the end because the landlord wanted to renovate the flat. Nilsen had one last bonfire before he left to clear the backlog of remains. He did though leave bones and evidence buried in the garden. When his crimes finally came to light years later that garden would become the site for a grisly police excavation. There were a few incidents of neighbours complaining of a smell coming from Nilsen's 195 Melrose Avenue flat. Nilsen told them that the odour stemmed from structural problem. Nilsen sometimes put the torsos of victims in suitcases until he had a chance to burn them. The fact that Nilsen never revealed all the names and details of his victims is open to interpretation. It is entirely possible that he genuinely couldn't remember all the details because he was somewhat drunk during some of these murders. However, it is equally true that serial killers often hold onto secrets because this is the only way they can retain some sense of power and control and mystery once they have been caught. Dennis Nilsen said that he would suffer blackouts when he drank too much. This was the explanation he gave to police for why he couldn't remember all the names and details of several of his victims. Nilsen was rare for a serial killer in that once in custody he seemed to genuinely enjoy talking about his crimes. He would happily ramble on for hours talking about himself if given the chance. Dennis Nilsen's favourite subject was Dennis Nilsen. He had a huge ego - which manifested itself in prison with his endless essays writing about himself. These writings eventually formed the basis of a tasteless autobiography. In his civilian life, Nilsen had no old army colleagues that he maintained any contact with. Nilsen was always puzzled by his inability to form lasting friendships. It was intensely painful for him to think that no one cared about him enough or enjoyed his company sufficiently to want to stay in contact over the long term. This was one of his motivations for moving to London. He wanted to find friends and maybe even lovers. He wanted to feel less alone in the world. More than anything Dennis Nilsen yearned for permanent companionship. He would eventually resort to desperate and extreme measures to achieve this. Nilsen would painfully discover though that alienation and loneliness can be even worse in a big city than the rural community where he came from. Dennis Nilsen embraced his 'career' as a serial killer quite late in life in comparison to many killers. He didn't murder anyone until he was in his thirties. A large number of serial killers kill for the first time in their teens or twenties. According to the Crime Classification Manual, a serial murder is defined as 'three or more separate events in three or more separate locations with an emotional cooling off period in between homicides'. This classification is very flawed though because, according to its strict criteria, Dennis Nilsen is not a serial killer! Typically, a serial killer's 'cooling off' period between murders will involve them going back to their 'normal' life for a time. The FBI generally states that one must kill three people to qualify as a serial killer. There must also be a gap between each killing (a bomber, for example, is a mass murderer or terrorist as opposed to a serial killer). When he moved to a top floor flat at Cranley Gardens, Nilsen no longer had access to a garden and so disposing of the bodies became much more difficult. Dennis Nilsen's last flat was in a very grotty and squalid condition when he was arrested. It was absolutely filthy with plates and empty food containers piled up. The oven was covered in dirt and everything was old, tattered, rusted, and falling apart. One of Dennis Nilsen's victims was a young man named Malcolm Barlow. Barlow suffered from epilepsy and had been found by Nilsen in the street looking unwell. Nilsen got him an ambulance and they parted. Tragically though, Barlow returned to Nilsen's building the next day and waited for him to get home from work. Nilsen found Barlow's presence an irritation so he killed him. Graham Allen was Nilsen's second to last victim. Nilsen kept Allen's body in his bath for several days after he killed him. Nilsen would boil the heads of his victims and then pick off the flesh so he could try and flush it down the toilet. At the start of 1983, Dennis Nilsen was now one of the most prolific serial killers in British criminal history. And yet the police had no idea there even was a serial killer operating in North London! There were no serious investigations at all about the men who had been vanishing in the area for the past several years. Dennis Nilsen had so far got away with his awful crimes. This was all about to change though due to an unusual set of circumstances one can only describe as bizarre... HOW THEY CAUGHT DENNIS NILSEN PART 1