February 8, 1983, a plumbing company has been
called out to 23 Cranley Gardens, a large house in a respectable leafy suburb of North London.
The occupants of the flats in the property have been complaining to the landlord about
blockages. Some of them at times have noticed a strange malodor wafting into their nostrils,
something akin to the smell of a dead animal. Michael Cattran, the guy tasked with the
job of finding the cause of the blockages, opens a drain cover. He’s immediately repulsed
by the stench, but determined, he digs his hands into the drain and pulls out the sludge.
To his disgust, he extracts what looks like flesh and small pieces of bone. Two of the house’s
occupants come outside and talk to Cattran. One of them remarks, “It looks to me like someone has
been flushing down their Kentucky Fried Chicken.” The person that says this is Dennis Nilsen,
the occupant of flat 23D. He’s amiable and seemingly intelligent, a bespectacled man with the
appearance of the cliched accountant. In truth, he’s a seriously deranged serial killer, a former
soldier and ex-cop whose crimes are so appalling, so hideous, they would make any person ponder the
deformities of this thing we call human nature. Dennis Nilsen was born on November 25, 1945, in
a small, rugged fishing town in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. His father, a Norwegian, arrived in
Scotland after the German occupation of Norway, and that’s where he met Dennis’s mother.
As is often the case with future killers, the vast map of childhood for young Dennis
was marked with many periods of sadness. The three children of the marriage were all
conceived only when the itinerant soldier decided to visit now and again. There was no love, just
carnal instinct driven by a soldier’s loneliness. Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t last long.
Still, the one person that young Nilsen adored was his grandfather, a man that took him on walks
through the sand dunes as the waves of the foreboding North Sea smacked the shore. He loved
this grandfather dearly and then aged 62 while out fishing, the grandfather died of a heart attack.
Even as a young kid, Nilsen was plagued by melancholy, often saying that until his
grandfather returned from those fishing trips his life was just empty. And then he was gone for
good. This constant needing for someone there, someone to love who’d never leave, could
have been the making of the monster to come. That’s something you budding
psychologists can tell us at the end. In his early teens, Nilsen realized he was
homosexual, but this was something he kept quiet. He felt confused, ashamed. More so
because he was attracted to boys that looked similar to his own sister and brother. At
one point he touched his brother while he slept as if exploring his feelings. The brother
woke up, and from then on, he belittled Dennis, at every opportunity calling him a sissy. In
public, the brother called him “hen” a Scottish term for a girl. It was excruciatingly
embarrassing, as well as saddening. Dennis felt he had no choice but to
leave that small minded, windswept town. At age 16 he did just that, moving to England to
train with the Army Catering Corps. He loved it, every minute of it, except for the fact he had
to keep his attraction to his fellow soldiers a secret. Deployed in West Germany, these
mixed feelings of his coalesced and churned. His antidote to his agony was hitting
the bottle. A habit, it would turn out, that was very useful for a serial killer.
He wanted a man, but he knew what would happen if he came out in the army. Let’s
not forget, this was early 1960s England, a time of pervasive homophobia. Nilsen was
stuck with his fantasies, ones that consisted of a passive lover, a man completely subdued
to his will. Better still, an unconscious man. He was then stationed in the Middle East, where
for the first time soldiers in his regiment died. He was even kidnapped by an Arab taxi driver at
one point and almost died himself. He got away, but the darkness that had always enveloped him
grew more intense. He’d seen death; he’d almost died, and now his fantasies were driven by death.
They often included intimacy with dead soldiers. It was only a matter of time until
fantasy would manifest as fact. In the early 70s, he moved to London and joined
the police force, and it was then that for the first time he started going to gay pubs and
had short-term relationships with other men. You’d have thought this fruition of his sexuality
would have been a good thing, finally being able to be intimate with another man. But now we’re
reminded of the loss of his grandfather again. He detested casual dating. He wanted the
men to stay with him, perhaps for eternity. He later became a civil servant and eventually
rose to the position of executive officer. He was affable, hardworking, a nice guy
who folks liked having around the office. But somewhere during all his success, he’d started
murdering the men he never wanted to leave him. November 1975. There’s a scene outside a pub, such
an ordinary sight in the rough streets of England. Nilsen helps a guy out, a 20-year old who he later
discovers after a drink or two is gay like him. Soon, a relationship blossomed. Things
were looking up. They both moved into a house on Melrose Avenue. Number 195, the first
place that would become a house of horrors. Like a scene from a Hollywood rom-com, the two
loved-up men spent months cleaning the place, planting flowers in the garden, painting
the walls, giggling as they threw soap suds at each other while doing the
dishes. It seemed like domestic bliss, although as time went on, that pall of
darkness soon hung over Nilsen’s head again. Just a year into their relationships the
soap suds turned into plates and glasses. They hurled abuse at each other. They slept
in separate beds and brought other men home. By 1977, the two had gone their
separate ways. This would be the last living love of Nilsen’s life. He
met men, but like others before them, they had no intention of staying with Nilsen. This
was problematic for our killer, to say the least. 1978 arrived. Lonely and distraught, Nilsen put
all his efforts into working hard through the day and drinking heavily at night. That was when he
met his first victim, a teenager who’d been trying to buy booze without much success. Nilsen was out
that night, on the prowl, and as luck would have it, the boy found someone to buy him the booze.
After a heavy session on their acquisition, Nilsen woke up to find the sleeping boy next to
him. He didn’t want him to leave, he couldn’t leave. In his mind he said, you will stay with
me over the New Year whether you like it or not. Nilsen took out a tie from the drawer and
walked calmly over to the sleeping boy. He strangled him and then drowned him in a bathtub
full of water. After that, he bathed and caressed the body. Now the boy was his, and he could
do what he wanted. The body stayed under the floorboards for months, until Nilsen burned
it in that garden he’d once made so pretty. Just a few months later and the hardworking civil
servant felt he was in need of another long-term partner. This time he met a young man in London
from Hong Kong. Again, after the victim was plied with strong alcohol, Nilsen brought out his tie.
This time it didn’t work, and the man escaped. The victim told the cops of course, but then
decided he didn’t want to take things any further. Did the cops investigate the matter? What
they saw was a well-spoken man who’d had a tryst with a stranger and things had
gotten out of hand. Maybe that’s just what they do in that community, they thought.
If only they’d have watched Nilsen for a while, because soon after he met a young Canadian
who was visiting England. Nilsen offered to show him the sights, but first, what about
some hard drinks? Why not, said the Canadian. After ample shots of rum and whisky, Nilsen
was in one corner of the room listening to music on his headphones. The Canadian, feeling
rather wasted, had his back turned to him. Nilsen crept across the room and strangled the
man with the headphones cord, whereafter he sat back down and carried on listening to music.
For the next week, during his boozy nights, he sat next to the dead body. He’d placed it
upright in an armchair to make it seem like the body was still alive. Together they watched TV.
Nilsen laughed out loud at the comedies he liked, occasionally turning to his partner, the
corpse, and remaking how funny the show was. The relationship ended when bloating
and putrefaction started. The body went under the floorboards, but now Nilsen was
single again, the great problem of his life. There were more victims, more housemates, more
lovers, call them what you want. Each of them watched TV with Nilsen, listened to music, shared
his bed. He bathed them and talked sweetly with them. He chatted to them while he was cooking
and he asked their opinion about the bad weather, but all of them would decompose and so
essentially leave him. Even though Nilsen committed these obscene acts, some part of him
knew it was wrong. Sometimes he’d spit at his own reflection after a murder, sometimes he’d
break down in tears, but it didn’t stop him. The bodies he hadn’t burned piled up under the
floorboards, but never mind how much deodorant or whatever other odorant he sprayed down there,
he couldn’t mask the smell of decaying flesh. One by one he pulled them up, each of them riddled
with maggots, oozing the liquids of decomposition, no longer boyfriends he wanted to have.
He chopped them all into pieces and then took them out to the garden where he burned the evidence.
To hide the smell of burning flesh he added to his great fire, tires from cars. Kids from the
neighborhood came around, excited that some man had made a bonfire. In Nilsen’s mind, they were
dancing around a great pyre of his former lovers. When the fire turned to ashes he raked out the
bone fragments and smashed the bits of skull. He stopped killing for a while, but he
couldn’t fight back those fantasies of his. A year later he was at it again. Why? Why
would he do this? Maybe the answer to this is something he later said: “I could only relate
to a dead image of the person I could love. The image of my dead grandfather would be the
model of him at his most striking in my mind.” The next victim was a young Scottish man who’d
made the mistake of not just talking to Nilsen but agreeing to have a drinking competition with him.
In another life, Nilsen could have drank booze for Scotland in the non-existent boozing Olympics.
He killed again, and again, and again, even a young man who he’d helped and taken to
hospital after seeing the guy slumped over after taking too much epilepsy medication. When the guy
returned from the hospital to thank Nilsen that was the end of him, after a few drinks of course.
This was his life. He even admitted it later, saying at times his days consisted
of “End of the day, end of the drink, end of a person ... floorboards back, carpet
replaced, and back to work.” He had to take a lot of sick days by way. Dissecting bodies and
burning them was time-consuming, and anyway, when the bodies were still fresh, he wanted
to spend as much time with them as he could. Then the shock came. Nilsen’s landlord asked
him to move out. He wanted to renovate the house. There were five more bodies under the
floorboards, most of them already dissected, one whole. It was looking like he’d have to
call in sick again, this time for a few days. He burned the bodies and collected a thousand
pounds from the landlord in compensation. And so now we come to 23 Cranley Gardens, a
1930s Semi-detached with Tudor-style exposed wood on the facade. A dream house for some,
a nightmare for others. It was also quite inconvenient for a serial killer, given it was
divided into flats and…and didn’t have a garden! Nilsen still invited young men up to his attic
flat, but knowing the disposal of bodies would be hard or impossible he stopped himself from
killing them, even when they were blind drunk. Then in March 1982, one young man got so drunk
Nilsen couldn’t awaken him. He tried numerous times, but the man was out cold. Nilsen
just stared at the body, like a famished dog that’s been ordered to wait before eating.
He then snapped, wound a strap around the man’s neck, and pulled it tight. The sleeping man was
thrust out of his slumber and he attacked back, wrapping his hands around Nilsen’s
throat, almost killing the killer. He passed out and Nilsen emitted a sigh of
relief, only for the guy to breathe and moan. It took Nilsen three attempts to finish him off.
When he went back to work the next day he had to make up a story about the bruises around his neck.
His colleagues weren’t suspicious, of course, Mr. Nilsen was the salt of the Earth, a lovely bloke.
The next victim changed everything. It was only two months after the last one. Nilsen
met the 21-year old in a drag cabaret bar in the famous Camden Town. They drank together while
the guy told him about how lost he felt after being dumped by another man. Nilsen’s answer
to that grief was a few drinks at his house. Sometime later, the man awoke partly stuffed
into a sleeping bag. He looked up at Nilsen, whose hands were around his neck. Only
partly conscious with the image blurring, the last thing he heard in a faint whisper
was, “Stay still.” The next thing he knew he was inside a bathtub and Nilsen was holding his
head underwater. Everything then turned to black. Nilsen, thinking he was done with the man,
placed him in the armchair next to him so they could watch some television together.
Nilsen’s dog, Bleep, joined in the fun. It got up on the armchair and started licking the
man’s face. To Nilsen’s surprise, he thought he noticed some vestige of life in the body.
Rather than finish him off, Nilsen rubbed him all over and tried to shake
him awake. The man did wake up, after which Nilsen told him he’d almost strangled
himself while trying to zip up that sleeping bag. He said he’d placed him in the bathtub of cold
water to bring him around. Nilsen, the hero, had resuscitated him and saved his life. Over the next
48 hours, the man didn’t know what was going on, only ever being partly conscious. When he
finally came to, Nilsen just let him leave and he went off to the nearest hospital. Before
they parted, Nilsen told him that he hoped they’d cross paths another day in the future.
They would, but not quite as Nilsen imagined. On October 9, 1982, Nilsen called in sick. He’d
killed again and dissection needed to be done. Only this time, there weren’t many places to hide
the body parts. A few months later he met 20-year old Stephen. Together they larked around, drank
copious amounts of booze and listened to The Who. Moments later, Nilsen leaned beside the man
and said, “Oh Stephen, here I go again.” It seems he almost felt sorry for this
victim since while he was killing him, he noticed the boy had bandages over his wrists.
Now he had three dissected bodies in his small flat. He decided to dump the organs
and smaller bits of flesh and bone in the toilet and flush them, but he was still
stuck with some heads, arms, legs, and torsos. Some of that he boiled to separate the flesh.
Believe it or not, sometime later he had the audacity to call the landlord and complain
the drains were blocked. Maybe he just wanted to be caught. The neighbors were also
complaining, so time was running out for him. And so, we come to those two words we so often
read in media: “gruesome discovery.” That plumber had an inkling that what he’d discovered was
not the remnants of Kentucky Fried Chicken. When he returned to the house the next
day with his boss they were both pretty darn sure they were looking at the remains
of a human being. They were sure that one thing they found in the drain was a human eye.
Suffice to say, they didn’t just unblock the drains and collect their cash. It was discovered
by a pathologist that the flesh was human or various humans. The next day the cops waited at
the house for Nilsen to return home from work. They didn’t tell him he was under investigation
for murder, but they were just interested in what looked like a health hazard. They
asked if they could look inside his flat. He didn’t say no.
It took about three seconds after entering the flat to notice the
awful stench of human decomposition. That’s a smell you never forget. When the cops told him
that they’d found human flesh in the drains, Nilsen pretended to be shocked, acting like
someone else had put the flesh there. This lasted about two minutes because he knew he was finished.
When the cops asked where the rest of the bodies were, he pointed them to a wardrobe. Before
they even opened it – they didn’t really need to due to the stench – they asked him
if there was more. Nilsen replied, “It's a long story; it goes back a long time. I'll tell
you everything. I want to get it off my chest.” In handcuffs, he was put into the back seat
of a police car. One of the officers asked him if the remains belonged to one or two people.
Seemingly unperturbed, even glad he’d been caught, Nilsen answered, “Fifteen or sixteen, since
1978.” Sometime later, investigators found in his flat hands, a skull, a severed head,
a torso, arms, organs, and other body parts. During the many hours of interrogations
he told them a lot, but not everything. They asked him why he did it, at which point he
said, “I'm hoping you will tell me that.” He said at another point, “I wished I could stop, but I
couldn't. I had no other thrill or happiness.” He eventually told them most of what you
have heard today, from the TV watching to the loss of his grandfather to how
much he worshipped those bodies and how much he enjoyed the ritual of killing people.
During the trial he tried to claim diminished responsibility, his argument being that when
killing people he thought he was doing the right thing. But then the ones who’d got away
came forward as witnesses, proving that Nilsen was in control all the time and knew exactly
what he was doing. The young man he’d let go could barely speak he was so traumatized.
The jurors seemed in a state of utter shock as they heard about how he made the
bodies his lovers as if they were alive. They almost threw up as they listened to how
he dissected the bodies. Nilsen stood in the dock looking like he didn’t have a care in the
world, and when he spoke about his crimes he did so as if he’d done nothing wrong in the slightest.
On November 3, 1983, he was sentenced to life with a minimum of 25 years. In 1994, the British Home
Secretary ruled that he would never get out of prison as long as he lived. He had to be kept away
from other prisoners as he was attacked on a few occasions. He spent the rest of his life reading
and writing, including his memoirs, which were put together from over 6,000 confessional notes.
In those memoirs he explains why he’d committed those crimes, one time writing, “I caused
dreams which caused death... this is my crime.” In 2018, aged 72, he died of a pulmonary
embolism and internal bleeding. No family members were present during the cremation.
Several years later, his renovated flat was up for sale at what seemed like a bargain
price for an affluent London suburb. Anyone who read the ad for the flat also read this
warning, “Buyers are kindly asked to research the history of this property or enquire with
the marketing agent prior to viewings.” Now you need to watch, “America's Most Evil
Serial Killer - John Wayne Gacy.” Or, try something lighter, “I Ate The Hottest Pepper In
The World And This Is What Happened - Challenge.”
