World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 8 - Dennis Nilsen - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-On the 8th of February, 1983, a maintenance worker was called out to a house in London
to investigate some unusual smells coming from the property's blocked drains. He was about to make a grisly discovery.
-Three or four pieces of flesh and three little bones, with a knuckle at each end.
And I thought these bones had probably come from a human hand. -Right under the noses of his neighbors,
37-year-old Dennis Nilsen had secretly been killing young men and butchering their bodies.
-He would get rid of the bones and other bits of the organs by flushing them down the loo.
It sounds, in many ways, like a very dark horror film. -Nilsen had complete disregard for all the lives he'd taken.
-He knew, of course, that it was wrong to kill people, but he didn't know why it mattered so much.
Why do people make a fuss about it? -Dennis Nilsen had carved a sinister place for himself in history
as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Dennis Nilsen is one of Britain's most prolific serial killers.
Over the course of five years, during the late 1970s and early '80s, he killed at least 12 men, confessing to as many as 15,
the majority of whom have never been identified. Nilsen thought his crimes were simply being flushed from existence,
by dissecting the bodies piece by piece, boiling them, and then disposing of them down the toilet.
But a routine drain inspection of his London home in 1983 would lead to his downfall.
-We found a number of interesting items, which can only be established once pathology says they can be.
-Are you satisfied that there are, in fact, human bodies? -It's a possibility, yes.
-As the public's fascination with the case began to unfurl at a rapid speed, author Brian Masters was determined to understand
the man at the heart of the story. -Like everybody else, I read in the newspaper
that the man had been arrested. It was obviously going to be a very interesting case.
There was a likelihood that somebody might write about it in a sensational way, where as what it really demanded and required
was a sober assessment of the state of mind of such a person. -Brian contacted Nilsen in Brixton Prison,
where he was on remand. -I didn't know that you weren't allowed to write to a prisoner awaiting trial on a murder charge,
so I wrote to him in innocence -- complete ignorance, really -- and said that, "I am interested in the case
in which you find yourself involved, and I would like to do a study of it, but I would not do so
without your cooperation and permission." He first letter to me -- the first out of about 2,000 --
said, "Dear Mr. Masters, I pass the burden of my life onto your shoulders." -A life that began almost 40 years previously.
-Dennis Andrew Nilsen was born on the 23rd of November, 1945, in Fraserburgh, Scotland.
He spent the early years of his life in this house. According to his mother, he was a quiet boy.
Little, if anything, marked him out from the ordinary. -After his parents' marriage broke down,
he spent the majority of his childhood living in the nearby village of Strichen.
-His father was largely absent. He grew up with his mother and his siblings and his grandparents,
and his family reformed and his mother remarried. So he had a lot of disruption. He had a lot of chaos.
But lots of children have that. -He was isolated from an early age, and the isolation found solace
in representations of people who weren't alive, like pictures in the storybook. He'd cut the picture off and take it home.
That's what he liked because that picture couldn't argue with him. It couldn't say no to him.
-His mother has actually talked about the way that she would cuddle and have, you know,
physical warmth with her other children, but she felt repelled by Dennis. She was quite cold towards him,
and this was even when he was just a little child. So right from the beginning, he's learning from his mum that he's different
and that he's kind of repulsive, in a way. -Due to the absence of his father and the distant relationship with his mother,
Nilsen grew particularly close to his grandfather, who worked as a North Sea fisherman.
-When he came back from sea, the grandfather would take him down to the beach, and they'd walk up and down the beach,
and he'd tell him stories of what happened at sea. His grandfather was the one person he could relate to.
This was the one tactile relationship he had, the only person who touched him. -But in 1951, Nilsen lost the one family member
that he'd looked up to the most. -I firmly hold to this view that the death of his grandfather
profoundly affected him. -His mother kind of skirted around the topic and said, "Your grandfather's just not very well, and he'll be back."
And then, when the funeral came around, and the body was laid out in the front room of the house,
as it often is in these communities at this time, he kind of thought his grandfather was just asleep.
So you've got this really traumatic event going on in his life, and he's really struggling to make sense of what's going on.
And he's feeling pretty rejected, really, 'cause he's got this really close relationship
with his grandfather. One minute he's there, and one minute he's not. -I'm utterly convinced that his idea of death
and his idea of love were fused at that point, and after that, he could only love people who were dead.
-The traditional community he was born into would go on to shape Nilsen and, in particular,
the way he felt about his own emerging homosexuality. -He came from an incredibly masculine community,
where men were alpha males and they were tough, and they got married and they had children,
and that was just what you did. So I think to come from those beginnings really did kind of shape
that sense of shame he felt about his sexuality. -Keen to remove himself from family life,
in September 1961, 15-year-old Nilsen enrolled in the Army. -He'd had a difficult childhood
and had wanted always to be in uniform, it would seem. He joined the Army. He was in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
-In the time that Nilsen served in the Army, he worked as a cook. And during this time, he learned how to butcher
and dismember the carcasses of animals and, unfortunately, this is something that he came to draw upon again.
-While serving in the Army, Nilsen began to show signs of unusual and disturbing behavioral traits.
-He got interested in photography. He would get soldiers that he was in the Army with
to pretend they were dead, and he'd photograph them then. So it's a slow progression towards disaster
that anybody with a trained mind in psychological behavior could have spotted very, very early on
the development that was going forward. -By December 1972, age 27, Nilsen had left the Army and moved to London.
He enrolled with the Metropolitan Police as a constable, but only lasted a year before joining the Civil Service
and settling in the north of the city. Unlike the traditional communities in Aberdeenshire,
where he'd grown up, London had an emerging gay community, and Nilsen found himself confronted by the urges
that had caused him turmoil in his adolescence. -I think Dennis Nilsen's homosexuality
is quite a significant factor when we look at his case because although homosexuality became legal
during his lifetime, there was still quite a considerable stigma attached to it.
Nilsen moves to London -- a very vibrant, very busy part of the U.K. -- and this is, perhaps, a place where he feels loneliest.
He's a gay man. He's frequenting gay bars and pubs and is part of that scene, but he can't form anything more than a one-night stand,
and I think that really does affect him quite badly. -In November 1975, 30-year-old Nilsen did manage to settle down
and moved in with a man called David Gallichan. But after 18 months, the relationship began to fizzle out.
-I think this is really significant because I think he's come to the conclusion that he quite likes having somebody else around the flat.
He likes having a companion to spend time with. And Nilsen's a bit of a narcissist,
so he likes having someone around who will kind of pander to him and reinforce him and support him in that way.
So what he's got now is a void. There's a gap in his life. He's had a relationship, and he wants another one.
But, unfortunately, he's not the kind of person who can develop a relationship at a normal pace.
So this is where we see things start to go spectacularly wrong. -Lonely and desperate for affection,
Nilsen's lust for company would soon turn deadly. On December the 29th, 1978, he met a 14-year-old boy called Stephen Holmes,
and Nilsen knew there was only one way to guarantee his latest lover would never be able to leave him.
-Stephen Holmes was a very young boy, and he was trying to get himself something to drink
at a pub in Cricklewood. Nilsen offered to help out with the drink and then brought him back to his flat.
-Stephen Holmes was never seen again. In a desperate attempt to stop him from leaving,
Nilsen murdered the 14-year-old boy by strangling him with a tie before drowning him in a bucket of water.
It was the beginning of a familiar pattern for Nilsen. -Essentially, he would frequent the gay pubs and gay bars
and would meet men that he found attractive. He would meet men that he wanted to form relationships with,
and they would go back to Nilsen's place. -His chosen victims -- not necessarily all homosexual,
but all vulnerable, I think you could say, or susceptible to somebody offering them
a bit of comfort or a meal or drink or whatever, but he obviously had the tendency
to go for handsome young men or people who made themselves available to at least just hang out with him for a while.
-But he didn't have the social skills to maintain a normal relationship at a normal pace,
in a way that wouldn't send people running for the hills. So the only way to keep people there was to kill them.
-With Stephen, Nilsen initiated what would go on to become a familiar ritual for him.
-The modus operandi of Dennis Nilsen was very similar for most of his victims. They would be plied with drink.
-He would have a tie. By the time the victim is now drunk -- almost comatose, going to sleep --
he would put the tie 'round his neck and strangle him that way. -And if they were unconscious but not dead,
then he would drown them in a bath or a bucket. -After that, he would get himself a drink,
light a cigarette, and then spend the next few hours looking after the body. -He would get them out,
and he would sit and watch television with them. He would clean up the bodies. -He would clean it, dry it, dress it,
put it comfortably in a chair. He would speak to the corpse in the chair. These were his pretend friends.
-So what we've got going on here -- there isn't, like, massive sexual depravity.
What he was creating was a picture of domesticity. He would sit there and watch television with them.
So he's killing for company, but in the most grotesque way. -It sounds, in many ways, like a very dark horror film,
the way that he behaved, and I think that was part of the fascination with him, which exists to this day.
-Dennis Nilsen's murderous career would continue undetected for five years. -I think one of the reasons Dennis Nilsen got away with it
for so long was that even at that time, which is post the legalization of homosexuality,
the disappearance of young men who were gay was not treated with the same amount of respect and energy
as the police, I think, would treat it nowadays. -When we look at the time that Nilsen's in London,
I think homosexuality still is very much in the shadows at that time. So there are particular parts of London
where the gay scene is happening, but it's still quite underground. It's still something that's seen as seedy.
-Nilsen's private social life was in stark contrast to his public one working as a civil servant.
-All the time that he's carrying out these killings, he's holding down a perfectly normal job,
and, occasionally, he has to take a day off work to dismember the body. His colleagues at work would have no idea
that Dennis Nilsen taking a day's sick leave was actually carrying out the hiding of a crime.
-All of us, to some extent, are two people. There's the one we display -- we show to even family and friends,
and there's a secret one, which we only ever admit to ourselves. And we try to keep it well, well-hidden.
When the other self came to the fore, it took possession of him. He was possessed by this other self,
and he could not prevent that other self behaving the way it wanted to. -There are quite a lot of different factors
that influence Nilsen's journey towards serial murder, but I think it was all rooted, essentially,
in a sense of shame. He didn't like who he was. The person that he was wasn't someone
who was socially acceptable. So he spent his entire life trying to become somebody else,
and I think that's what's at the root of all his problems. -By February 1983, 37-year-old Nilsen had moved home
and was living in a top-floor flat on Cranley Gardens, in Muswell Hill, north London.
After residents complained about the drains being blocked, a plumber was called in to investigate.
-And they found what looked like bits of flesh. Nilsen suggested that it could be
somebody had flushed their Kentucky Fried Chicken out or something like that, and that would be the explanation
for little bones and flesh. -But the plumber wasn't so sure, and the following morning,
February the 9th, 1983, he called the police. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay
remembers that day well. -My phone rang, and it was Peter Sleigh, the uniform inspector in charge that particular day.
And he said to me, "Could you possibly come up here?" He said, "I've got a bit of a problem.
I'm not sure what I've got, but I'd like you to see it." And he showed me a drain
with an inspection plate cover open. And he pointed out that some bits of flesh had been hauled out of the drain at the bottom.
So I said, "Well, let's have another haul around inside the drain, get anything else that's in there."
And the scenes of crime officer that I had with me managed to pull out three or four pieces of flesh,
each about four inches long, an inch wide, and three little bones with a knuckle at each end.
When I looked at them, I thought these bones had probably come from a human hand.
-Peter took the remains to Charing Cross Hospital, where resident pathologist Professor David Bowen
confirmed their suspicions. -He said, "It is. It's human." And he said, "By pure luck, you've brought me a piece of neck --
off the neck -- and your victim's been strangled." He said, "There's a clear ligature mark
on this piece of flesh." -Most of us think of hair as being hair, but different parts of the body, the hair is quite different,
when you look at it down the microscope. And so the pathologist in the Nilsen case
was identifying that this piece of skin had hair that fitted with being from someone's neck.
So despite the difficulties of fragments of tissue being found in a situation like a drain,
identifying the characteristic ligature mark on it -- it's pointing you very strongly towards strangulation.
-And I looked at him, and I said, "You sure you've not been watching too much TV, prof?"
And he said, "No, it's as clear as a bell." He said, "This is human." So that only meant one thing to me --
that somebody must have been murdered and flushed down the toilet. -Astounded, Peter drove back to Cranley Gardens
and waited outside the flat all day, until Nilsen returned home from work. -My first introductory words to him were,
"I am Detective Chief Inspector Jay from Hornsey Police Station. I've come about your drains."
And he looked at me, and he said, "Since when have police been interested in blocked drains?"
I said, "Well, you take me up in your flat, and I'll tell you." And you could smell, immediately,
the decomposing flesh. And I said to him, "Look, your drains were blocked with human remains,"
and he looked at me, and he said, "Oh, my God. How awful." And I just pushed my face a little bit nearer to his
and said, "Don't mess about. Where's the rest of the body?" And he said, "Okay. It's in plastic bags
in the front bedroom." Even at that point, his demeanor didn't change at all. He was just as he was when he came in the front door.
It was, "Okay. Maybe the game's up." And he was relaxed about it. So we walked him down to the car.
I told him I was arresting him. So I drove the car back, and then Steve McCusker was obviously thinking to himself
about all the body parts that were in so many different bags, and he popped the question to Nilsen,
"Are we talking here about one body or two?" And Nilsen said, "Neither." He said, "I think it's 15 or 16."
And I can remember the steering wheel sort of shaking in my hands, and it was just the shock of hearing that instant response.
-Well, Dennis Nilsen, when he was found out -- he was very calm and very, very cool and very collected
because he was an intelligent man, and he knew that one day he would be found out,
that this would all come to light, and I think he kind of made his peace with that
long before he was actually caught. -He described the day of his arrest as the day help arrived,
and I don't think most criminals would describe being finally stopped from their murders, or whatever,
as the day help arrived. -On February the 9th, 1983, Dennis Nilsen had been taken into custody.
Human remains had been found flushed down the toilet of his north London flat. Author Brian Masters made contact with Nilsen
whilst he was on remand. The police had given him permission to visit Nilsen's home in Cranley Gardens.
-Shortly after his arrest, after I'd made connection with him, I saw the grotty kitchen, which was really ghastly,
and the wardrobes. And in the wardrobes were plastic bags, or had been plastic bags.
I think what I remember most was the squalid nature of the kitchen because the pots had grease around their edges
and, of course, one now knows what that grease was. It was human flesh. That showed me the depths of depravity
of which human beings are capable. -News of the arrest and rumors of what had been discovered in Nilsen's flat
began to make headlines across the country. -We had the press descending on us from all different angles,
even though we had a blackout in the police station, which caused chaos. The press was at the front door, the back door, on the phones.
They were up on my first-floor window of my office. They had a metal bar up against the window
with a microphone on it. It just brought everything to a standstill. Anyway, we had a press conference --
a very, very brief one. We just told them something to get rid of them if we possibly could,
and then we were able to sort of placate them and promise that we would release what we could, when we could.
And then we were able to get on with our first proper interview with Nilsen. -With limited evidence relating to the victims' identities,
the only way to discover the truth would be to unlock the secrets that lay inside Nilsen's mind.
-We had a murderer in custody -- serial killer. We didn't know who he'd killed. We hadn't got a clue.
And we weren't gonna find out unless we got the truth out of him. We knew that the clock was ticking
and that we had to charge him within 48 hours. -Forensic teams searching Nilsen's home
had taken fingerprints from one of the victim's hands. It belonged to 20-year-old Steven Sinclair,
who hadn't been seen since disappearing after a night out with friends on January the 26th, 1983.
37-year-old Nilsen was formally charged with murder on February the 11th, 1983. -It was precisely 10:00
when Dennis Andrew Nilsen was led into the dock to face the bench of three magistrates.
The charge, a single charge of murdering Steven Neil Sinclair, was read over to him.
There were objections to bail and no application was made, and he was remanded in police custody
until Wednesday, the 16th of February. At just one minute past 10:00, he was taken down
to be driven away at some speed in a police van. -Nilsen immediately began to confess
to his crimes one by one. -He gave us a very, very brief description, in an hour or so, of what had happened.
We had told him that we were going to go through one victim at a time, one victim per interview,
because we knew it was gonna take at least two hours per victim because we had to get everything possible from him
so that we could identify the bodies, or identify the victims. A lot of them we didn't have bodies for.
So he was able to tell us nicknames. Occasionally he would give us a name. -Nilsen talked about his first victim,
14-year-old Stephen Holmes, whom he'd murdered in December 1979. He told officers he kept Stephen's body
under the floorboards of his home in Melrose Avenue for eight months before it began to decay.
-So the problem that somebody like Dennis Nilsen would have is not so much the murder.
It's what do you do with the body afterwards? You have to try and dispose of it somehow,
and that's not easy. It's not easy to burn them. It's not easy to dismember them.
It's not easy just to leave them somewhere and hope they're not found. He had to find a way to make sure these bodies weren't found
so he could carry on with what he was doing. -Nilsen cut Stephen's body into pieces,
and then constructed a makeshift bonfire in the garden, where he burned the remains of the young boy.
-He got away with it at Melrose Avenue because he was disposing of the bodies in-house
and having these bonfires in the middle of the night, like funeral pyres. And on the top of those bonfires, he put rubber tires
to destroy the possibility of the smell of flesh. -After disposing of Stephen Holmes' body,
Nilsen went out looking for company once more. He confessed to murdering 23-year-old Canadian tourist
Kenneth Ockendon on December the 3rd, 1979. And six months later, in May 1980, he struck for a third time,
killing 16-year-old homeless runaway Martyn Duffey. Nilsen kept both Kenneth's and Martyn's bodies
in his flat together for as long as he could, storing them under the floorboards.
-He would keep them in different parts of his house, or in the bath, and that's in complete contrast to the normal killer,
who wants to get rid of the body as quickly as possible, who doesn't want to be associated with it,
who doesn't want any traces of it around. -One of the 16 interviews that we did on him,
he was talking about putting yet another body under the floorboards in Melrose Avenue,
and I interrupted, and I said, "Hold on a minute. How many bodies did you have under the floor
at any given time?" And he looked me up and down, and he said, "I don't know." He said, "I never did a stock check."
-Nilsen confessed to killing at least five other men in 1980. However, only one of them, 27-year-old Billy Sutherland,
has ever been identified. As Nilsen's confession continued, he admitted to another four killings in 1981,
the last of which was 23-year-old Malcolm Barlow in September. Relying on the killer's memory of events
made the investigation very difficult. -Nilsen would tell us that he had murdered a young man
of about 20 years old who had a tattoo around his neck, and he'd strangled him, and he'd give us a full, detailed account
of how it all happened. But we had absolutely no idea at all as to who he was talking about.
You can't really charge a prisoner with killing a person unknown. We had to be absolutely sure that when we named a victim,
it couldn't possibly be anybody else. That was a mammoth undertaking. -When he was telling the police, confessing,
some of them he identified by strange memories. -One he described as a skinhead that he met in the West End.
Another was a young man from northern Ireland. -"The omelet boy" -- this is a man who he cooked an omelet for
before he killed him. -One of these victims was identified. 27-year-old Graham Allen went missing in September 1982.
His son Shane Levene remembers the day his dad didn't come home. -I was only 7 years old.
My father was a drug addict. He wanted money for drugs. And there was a bit of a fight, a bit of an altercation,
and my father was screaming for money through the window. My mother said, "No," and my mother's last words were to tell him
to never come back again, and he left that night and he never came back. My mother -- she was sure that something had happened.
It was quite a violent relationship, and they would often split up or have arguments.
He would disappear, but he would always make contact, and this had gone on for weeks, months.
There was no contact, and my mother thought the worst at that moment. -Graham had met Dennis Nilsen on Shaftesbury Avenue
in London's West End. Nilsen invited him back to his flat and cooked Graham an omelet
before strangling him from behind as he ate. Parts of Graham's body were recovered from Nilsen's drains.
-I heard my mother screaming as I came down the road back from school, and when I got home,
the police were inside our house, and they had told my mother some bad news. My mom was very upset, and they had told my mother
that they had found a skull in north London, in this house of horrors, and that the dental records had identified it as my father.
-The murder of Graham Allen took place at Nilsen's new flat on Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill.
Nilsen had moved there in late 1981, but because his new home was on the top floor,
he had no way of setting a bonfire, so he needed a new way of disposing of his victims.
He took to cutting up the body pieces, boiling them in water, and then flushing the remains down the toilet.
-To dismember a body on your own is a very difficult task, and it's far easier if you happen to have some skill
and knowledge of the anatomy and how to do it. I think it's very interesting that he was trained in the Army in butchery.
And that sort of skill -- being able to joint meat -- would probably be very helpful in identifying
the best places to cut into a body to dismember it, with the minimum effort possible.
-He was going to great lengths to dispose of the bodies. For instance, he had a massive-size saucepan.
He could get a whole head in a saucepan, and boiling it, and then breaking up the bones.
And, of course, all the flesh was going down the drain, getting flushed away, never to be found again.
-With the way that Dennis Nilsen disposed of the remains, it obviously created challenges for identification,
but often if you find a part of a skull or a part of a bone that's clearly human,
then it points you towards the body being that of a person, and identifying characteristics, such as teeth,
maybe old healed fractures, can give you an idea of who it is if you compare that to a missing person.
-We needed his assistance. If we came up with an idea as to the possibility of the identity of one particular chap,
and we got a photograph, we needed Nilsen to look at it and say yes or no. -Nilsen eventually confessed to 15 murders,
12 at his first home in Melrose Avenue, where he burned and buried the remains of his victims,
and 3 at his flat in Cranley Gardens, where he boiled and flushed them down the drain.
-But he certainly said to us, "I think if you hadn't caught me now, it wouldn't have been 15. It would have been 150."
And I think he was probably right, actually. -Peter and his team had the arduous task
of preparing for a trial, and they had a new problem. Nilsen's defense team were going to plead insanity.
If investigators couldn't prove that Nilsen knew exactly what he was doing, there was a good chance that he may get away with murder.
As the grisly facts surrounding the story hit the press, the British public were left stunned.
-We found a small piece of jaw and some teeth attached to it in the rear garden of the premises at Melrose Avenue,
and this morning, they found a significant amount of property, in particular quite a large consignment of human bones,
in particular, a large piece of thigh bone in the region of about six inches. -Once it became clear exactly what Dennis Nilsen had done,
there was inevitably a lot of horror. First of all, these vulnerable young men being taken to his house and killed --
that was horror enough. Then there was keeping the bodies for so long -- another horrific thing.
Then there was boiling up body parts and disposing of bits of them down the toilet and so on --
another horror thing. Then there was the sheer scale of the number of murders that he carried out.
-Anything that is found is given to one of my exhibit officers, and then the item concerned will then go to the laboratory
for scientific examination. -Is it very small remains that have been discovered so far?
-Minute ones, yes. -I remember the crime. I remember everyone was following that,
and, you know, it was a huge story that was breaking throughout Britain of these murders that were happening in north London.
Everyone was glued to those gory headlines. They wanted to know more and more details.
-Dennis Nilsen was something out of a completely different world, it seemed, so the press reaction, the public reaction,
was one of revulsion, but also a kind of horrible fascination, as well. -People often asked me how the country reacted to Nilsen.
And do you know what? I don't really know. I was so busy. I was so absorbed in this case that for nine months
I was having to eat, sleep, and drink it. I had to focus on it because there was so much to it,
and we had a big trial coming up at the Old Bailey, and we've got the world's press looking at us.
We had to get it right. And do you know what? I think we did get it right. -In a committal hearing on May the 26th, 1983,
Dennis Nilsen's trial date was set for October. The defense were building a case to prove that Nilsen was insane,
but the enhanced media coverage had produced a trio of key witnesses for the prosecution.
Three young men -- Douglas Stewart, Paul Nobbs, and Carl Stottor, came forward to say they'd been attacked by Nilsen.
Stottor had met Nilsen in May 1982 and went back to his flat in Cranley Gardens for some drinks.
-I fell asleep, and I woke up, and he was strangling me. And I passed out after I sort of think --
actually, I thought I'd got caught up in the sleeping bag, which he had warned me about,
and I thought he was helping me out, but he wasn't. And, anyway, I passed out from that,
and I remember vaguely hearing water running and being carried, and I felt very cold,
and I realized I was in the bath, and he was trying to drown me. -After trying unsuccessfully to murder him,
Nilsen eventually spared Carl's life and let him leave the flat two days later. It's likely there were many more unreported attacks by Nilsen.
-Sometimes the people concerned don't report it to the police, or say, for very good personal reasons,
that they don't want it pursued, and as a result of that, the killer then gets to believe
that they can get away with stuff, and they carry on, and it gets worse and worse.
And I think Dennis Nilsen is somebody who might have been caught earlier, had people been able to say,
"Yes, we want to pursue charges," but, for understandable reasons, did not decide to do so.
-Gathering evidence from both Melrose Avenue and Cranley Gardens, police were able to bring charges against Nilsen
for six of the murders. The trial began at the Old Bailey, on the 24th of October, 1983.
Even after the lengthy confessions, Nilsen's defense team had decided to plead not guilty
to all the charges against him. -The defense wanted to plead guilty to manslaughter,
on the grounds of diminished responsibility, when we got to the Old Bailey, but we weren't happy about that at all
because we had tried to find some sort of personality disorder. We had a psychiatrist from King's College in London
look at him in depth, and he said he couldn't find any evidence of a personality disorder at all.
-Well, when we look at insanity pleas, essentially we're looking at how much control
that person had over their behavior. Now, when you look at some of Nilsen's behavior,
you would think, you know, automatically, "Well, this is the behavior of somebody who isn't normal,
somebody who is a little bit mad." But, actually, he knew what he was doing. He was somebody who was not laboring
under some kind of psychosis. He was intelligent. He was articulate. He wrote reams and reams of pages about his crimes,
so he was very much conscious of what was going on. -Brian Masters was not only in the courtroom every day,
but also had a chance to see how Nilsen was coping firsthand. -I went to see him every day during the trial,
in the cells underneath the Old Bailey, and the one thing which struck me most about him
was this disorder, this imbalance, that he had no idea that what he'd done was important.
He knew, of course, that it was wrong to kill people, but he didn't know why it mattered so much.
Why do people make a fuss about it? -Psychiatrists on both sides gave their opinions
on Nilsen's state of mind. The court also heard extracts from the extensive interviews
conducted by police with Nilsen and testimony from the survivors. -It was left to the jury to decide whether or not
he had the capability to form an intention to kill, and he was found guilty of murder on all counts.
-When the jury came back into the box, and the foreman of the jury stood up to give his verdict,
there was a feeling in the courtroom that, "Thank goodness that's over. We can go home and be cleansed now.
We've listened to so much squalid evidence that we feel contaminated slightly." So everybody wanted to go home and wash.
-On the 4th of November, 1983, Sir David Croom-Johnson sentenced Dennis Nilsen to life imprisonment.
He would have to serve at least 25 years before he would be considered for parole.
He was immediately sent to Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London. In 1989, the home secretary made the decision
to change Nilsen's sentence to a whole-life tariff, meaning he will never be released.
-He knew perfectly well he would be found guilty, and he knew he deserved it. He knew he should be.
I think he was secretly relieved that he didn't have to make decisions anymore. All the decisions he'd made in the last few years were wrong.
Now, in prison, decisions would be made for him. -I just don't understand how this could go on
and nobody knowing anything. I mean, I don't know any about these 10 years of his life,
and I can't see what was happening to him. Something must have happened to him because it's not my Dennis that's doing it,
not the boy that I knew that's doing these things. He's always my son, and that's why I want him to know
that we're all concerned about him, and I just hope he'll get some help to cope with the situation he's in.
-Justice had finally been served for the family members of Nilsen's victims. -He lost his life in those crimes, as well.
He's not dead, but he's in prison, and our freedom is all we ever have. You know, we live once in this universe.
In the eternity of time, we live just once, and Dennis Nilsen spent more than half his life in prison.
-Over 30 years on, it still seems incomprehensible that Nilsen was able to operate seemingly unnoticed,
hidden behind a veneer of normality. -I think what's probably terrifying about this case
is the fact that Nilsen was so ordinary. You begin to think to yourself, "How many more of them are there around?
How many more Dennis Nilsens are there around who are disposing of the bodies of their victims,
never to be found again?" -The vulnerable young men Nilsen specifically targeted
slipped from this world almost unnoticed, and, most tragically, we may never fully understand
why Nilsen stole their lives and, in many cases, their identities. -A lot of the names of Dennis Nilsen's victims
remain completely unknown to most people today, and it was that anonymity that allowed him to continue.
-I did ask him why he did it, but he had no answer. He said, "I'm sorry. All I can tell you is what happened.
I cant tell you why it happened." I've tried. I've got closer than anybody else, I suspect,
but in the end, human behavior is a mystery. -He was just very, very different. I've never met anybody like him before in my life.
I couldn't really get to understand him. I mean, you deal with people, as police officers,
and mentally, you stick them in the evil box, or the sort of cry-for-help box. There's always a box you can stick them in, in your own mind.
You make up your own mind about people, when you deal with them in the police. But Nilsen I never got to the bottom of.
I couldn't understand at all. -Nilsen was a lonely man who appeared to kill for company.
His murders were purely selfish acts to satisfy his lust for affection. The crimes took place almost entirely unnoticed
and, in a final twist of cruelty, many of his victims' identities may never come to light.
The manner in which he desecrated the bodies of his victims, denying the families a chance to bury their loved ones,
is what makes Dennis Nilsen one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Dennis Nilsen killed at least twelve men in the late 70s and early 80s in Muswell Hill, London.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Dennis Nilsen, a British serial killer, murdered young men and disposed of their bodies, leading to a shocking investigation and trial.

Key points

The Grisly Discovery. A maintenance worker uncovers human remains in blocked drains, leading to a chilling investigation.
Nilsen's Dark Secret. Dennis Nilsen, a seemingly ordinary man, had been secretly killing and butchering young men.
The Arrest. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay confronts Nilsen about the remains found in his flat.
The Number of Victims. Nilsen reveals the shocking number of his victims during his arrest.
The Press Frenzy. News of Nilsen's arrest creates a media storm, overwhelming the police station.
The Disappearance of Steven Sinclair. 20-year-old Steven Sinclair vanished after a night out with friends in 1983.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I pass the burden of my life onto your shoulders.

Nilsen's first letter to Brian Masters.

3:29WatchJul 28, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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