true-crime:

Dennis Nilsen was a prolific serial killer, preying on men throughout London in the 1970s and 80s. Insisting he had no control of his actions, he claimed to be in a trance throughout and would ‘wake up’ to find a dead man in his home. While he argued that his murders were the fault of a personality disorder, the sheer ruthlessness of his killings and disposal of the bodies demonstrated a deadly instinct. Nilsen’s own efforts to end his rampage would prove to be his downfall.

Nilsen killed for the first time in 1978. He picked up a stranger in a pub and they slept together. As dawn broke he realized that he could not bear this newfound bedfellow to leave. He used a tie to strangle the sleeping man, then finished him off by plunging his head into a bucket of water.

Nilsen was at first shocked by his own barbarity but he soon overcame any qualms. His compulsion to kill led to bodies being stored beneath the floorboards of his apartment at Melrose Avenue, Willesden. One nameless victim was so physically appealing to Nilsen that it was a week before the body was put under the floor. The killer kept him in the room, returning from work to ‘chat’ with him and have sex with the corpse.

Another of his many victims had the misfortune to suffer an epileptic fit outside Nilsen’s home. Nilsen tended him and when the man returned the next day to thank him, he was murdered. Nilsen eventually disposed of his stash of corpses by chopping them up and burning them in backyard bonfires.

When Nilsen moved to an apartment at Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, he no longer had access to a garden, so he was forced to dissect corpses more fully, flushing the skin and bone down the toilet. Eventually the plumbing failed and kindly neighbors posted warning signs on his door. Nilsen knew he had to work fast for if plumbers entered his apartment, they might find the malodorous body of a 20-year-old man killed the previous week and hidden in his wardrobe.

Nilsen laid plastic sheets across the floor of his front room and. with a kitchen knife, dismembered the body and severed the head, placing it in a large cooking pot simmering on the stove. The body parts, including the boiled head, were put into black plastic bags. Nilsen had no time to dispose of them however, because neighbors had decided to resolve the plumbing problems by calling in industrial drain clearers.

When an engineer removed a manhole cover, he found decomposing matter was still evident. Police were called and a forensic scientist confirmed that it was human flesh.

When Nilsen returned home from work on February 9, 1983, detectives were waiting for him. He confessed, showing them the bags containing body parts stored in his wardrobe, He went on to relate a macabre series of murderous crimes committed by one of the most unlikely looking villains ever. For Nilsen just did not look the part of a serial killer. He seemed just too ‘ordinary”. Yet it transpired that his fascination with human corpses had been spawned in him when he was very oung…

Dennis Andrew Nilsen was born in November 1945 in Fraserbrugh, Scotland, the second son of Olav Nilsen, a Norwegian serviceman. Dennis grew up without his father but received enough love from his grandfather, Andrew Whyte, with whom he and his mother lived with. When the old man died of a heart attack at the age of 62, he was laid out at home, and it was noted that little Dennis, just five years old, was fascinated by the corpse. He later admitted that the powerful image of death loomed large in his mind for years.

Aged 16, Nilsen enlisted in the army, serving as a butcher in the Catering Corps, learning the skills that served him so well during his five-year killing spree. On leaving the Army in 1972, he took up police training but resigned and went on to become a recruitment interviewer. In 1975, he moved into the Melrose Road apartment with another man, although the latter denied it was a homosexual relationship, their friendship lasted two years but when the man left, Nilsen’s life began a downward spiral into alcohol and loneliness that culminated in the first murder 18 months later. Nilsen resolved that nobody would ever walk out on him ever again and, for many visitors, that really did mean ‘never’.

One visitor who did live to tell the tale was a made model, who, during the wave of publicity following Nilsen’s arrest in February 1982, told police that he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the mass killer after meeting Nilsen in a bar and returning with him to his apartment in Cranley Gardens. The model had later awoken gasping for breath, with a swollen tongue and burn marks around his neck. Nilsen had not only tried to strangle him but had also thrust his head into a bucket of water. The would-be victim sought hospital treatment but did not go to the police.

In court, Nilsen’s defense counsel tried to persuade the jury that the killer was mad. Thanks in part to the male model’s evidence, the panel at the Old Bailey did not believe it. He was found guilty of six murders and two attempted murders. The full tally was reckoned to be at least 15. On November 4, 1983, still showing not a shred of remorse, Dennis Nilsen was jailed for life.