In February 1983 a drainage engineer was called to a house in Cranley Gardens, North London, to deal with some smelly, blocked drains, little did he or anyone else know they were about to uncover the crimes of serial killer, Dennis Nilsen.
Dennis Nilsen was a reclusive man who killed up to 15 young, vulnerable men over the course of 5 years in a quest for company, and is the focus of ITV’s latest true crime drama, Des, starring David Tennant as the killer.
In the late afternoon of February 8 1983 an emergency plumber was called out to 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, North London, following complaints from one of the tenants about drainage problems in the building and bad smells coming from the drains. 23 Cranley Gardens was a townhouse that had been converted into three separate flats so all of the properties shared the same drainage system. The plumber Michael Cattran discovered what he initially believed to be butchers prepared meat – basically what looked like meat on the bones. But because it was late and getting dark he and his supervisor Gary Wheeler agreed that they would return at first light the next morning to properly examine the drains and figure out why it was full of bones and meat.
The next morning Cattran and Wheeler returned but they discovered that the bones and meat had been removed from the drains. The two men were immediately suspicious and they eventually found four bones which they believed to have come from a human hand, so they contacted the police. The pipe in which the bones were found was connected to the waste system for the middle and upper floor flats, but at that time only two of the flats were occupied, the top and bottom flats, the one in the middle was empty at that time. The bones and flesh were immediately sent to a Pathologist who confirmed that they were human remains and that the victim had been strangled.
One of the pieces of flesh had come from the victim’s neck and had ligature marks indicating strangulation.
DCI Peter Jay and two colleagues waited outside Cranley Gardens for Nilsen to come home from work, when he did they introduced themselves and asked to speak with him inside his home. There was still the possibility that Nilsen wasn’t a murderer who was flushing his dismembered victims down the toilet, it could have been someone else who had managed to gain access to the building who was disposing of victims in a location that couldn’t be linked to them. But upon entering the flat police were met with the smell of decomposing flesh and when they told Nilsen the blockages in the drains were caused by human body parts, Nilsen feigned ignorance and said “good grief, how awful.”
But the police were having none of it and asked him straight up where the rest of the body was, Nilsen told them that the body was in the wardrobe. Police didn’t try to retrieve the body but they did ask Nilsen if there were any other body parts to be found, to which 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. Not here — at the police station.”
Nilsen was arrested on suspicion of murder and put in the back of the police car and whilst en route to the station, one of the officers asked Nilsen how many victims there were. Nilsen calmly replied “15 or 16, since 1978.” DCI Peter Jay was driving and the other officer in the car recalls Jay almost crashing the car following Nilsen’s revelation.
So, who was Dennis Nilsen and what had led to his five-year killing spree with possibly 15 or 16 victims?
Dennis Andrew Nilsen, known as Des, was born on November 23rd, 1945 in Fraserburgh, North Eastern Scotland, the second of three children born to Scottish mother Elizabeth Whyte and Norwegian father Olav Magnus Moksheim who adopted the surname Nilsen. His father had travelled to Scotland in the Free Norwegian Forces in 1940 following the German occupation of Norway. Olav and Elizabeth married in May 1942 following a brief courtship, and the couple moved in with Elizabeth’s parents.
However, Olav did not take his marriage vows particularly seriously and spent very little time with his new wife and his in-laws, pre-occupying himself with the Free Norwegian Forces – it was later claimed that their three children (Olav Jnr, Dennis, and Sylvia) were conceived during Olav’s brief visits to his wife’s home. The couple divorced in 1948 and Olav left the family, returning to Norway, and Elizabeth and the children remained with her parents in Fraserburgh.
With his father absent Dennis spent much of his time with his grandfather and had quite a cold and distant relationship with his mother. But in October 1951, whilst fishing in the North Sea, Nilsen’s grandfather suffered a massive heart attack and died, Nilsen was only 5 years old. Young Nilsen was not told where his grandfather was until the coffin was displayed in the family’s home prior to burial. Now, there are a few different versions of what happened next. The first is that his mother asked him whether he wanted to see his grandfather. When he replied that he did, he was taken into the room where his grandfather lay in an open coffin. As he looked upon the body, Nilsen’s mother told him his grandfather was sleeping and that he had “gone to a better place”. The second is a colder version of events in that young Nilsen asked his mother where his grandfather was, and she pointed to the coffin and said ‘he’s there.’ Nilsen went over to the coffin and found his grandfather to be dead.
Nilsen would later describe this as his most vivid childhood memory.
Following the death of his grandfather, Nilsen went from being an outgoing and adventurous child to being very quiet and withdrawn. He would go to the harbour to watch the fishing boats alone whenever he could, and when he was at home, he refused to participate in family activities and would recoil when any family member showed him any attention or affection. His mother remarried and had four more children in the mid-late 1950s. Nilsen was closest to his younger sister Sylvia, but he grew to resent all of his siblings due to what he believed to be the unfair amount of attention shown to them by his mother and grandmother.
In his early teens Nilsen realised that he was gay and that he was attracted to his male classmates, but this is rural Scotland in the 1950s, and just anywhere in the UK in the 1950s was at best lonely and at worst a downright dangerous place to be openly gay. In fact it was still illegal to be gay in the UK in the 1950s, it wasn’t legalised until 1967.
So, because of this Nilsen never acted on his feelings, his attraction to any of his peers, but he did molest his younger sister. He said that his sister looked similar to some of the boys he was attracted to, and after molesting her he decided that his attraction to his classmates was really just a weird manifestation of his feelings for his sister.
But Nilsen didn’t stop with his sister. He also molested his brother while he was sleeping, but his brother woke up, and we’re not sure what his immediate reaction was but Olav Jr began to think that his little brother was gay. Olav started to torment his brother, publicly outing him and calling him ‘Hen’ which is usually a Scottish term of endearment to a woman like darling, love, chick etc, but in this case it was to insult young Dennis.
Not surprisingly Nilsen felt stifled living in rural, coastal Scotland with its limited career and entertainment opportunities. At the age of 14 he joined the Army Cadets, and when he finished school in 1961, Nilsen enlisted in the army with the intention to train as a chef and began his training with the Army Catering Corps at St. Omer Barracks in Aldershot which is in Southern England.
In 1964 Nilsen passed his catering assessments and was deployed to West Germany and during his deployment he began to drink heavily. One night in a drunken stupor he found himself in a flat with a young German man, he claimed that nothing happened between them other than them getting shitfaced together, but it fuelled his fantasies, specifically his desire for a sexual partner who ideally was a young slender twink basically.
Following two years in West Germany, Nilsen returned to Aldershot where he passed his final catering exams and then in he was deployed to Norway, a year later in 1967 he was redeployed again this time to the State of Aden – which up until 1963 had been a British colony just called the Colony of Aden and was part of Saudi Arabia.
Nilsen’s time in Aden or Yemen, whichever you prefer, was very eventful, on one occasion he was kidnapped by a taxi driver and locked in the boot/trunk of the car, but Nilsen when the boot was opened he managed to overpower his kidnapper and then locked the taxi driver in the boot of his own car.
In the less facing-almost-certain-death eventful kind of things, this posting was different from Nilsen’s previous deployments in that he had his own room in the barracks. In this room he was able to explore his sexuality. But over time his masturbatory fantasies began to incorporate the dead bodies he had seen throughout his various deployments and a very specific 19th century oil painting by French artist Théodore Géricault called The Raft of the Medusa. The painting depicts an old man holding and surrounded by the naked and dismembered bodies of young men.
Following his deployment to Yemen, Nilsen served in various places around Europe including Cyprus, Berlin, Scotland, and Plymouth, until October 1972 when he ended his 11-year military career, by that time he had achieved the rank of corporal. It was during his stint in Berlin that Nilsen had his first sexual experience with a woman, a sex worker whose services her solicited, and he described the experience as “over-rated” and “depressing.”
Nilsen briefly returned to the family home in North Eastern Scotland whilst he worked out his next career move.
But this stay did not go well, his mother badgered him about not being married with children and one night after watching a documentary about gay men he got into a heated debate with his elder brother about gay rights and Olav outted Nilsen to their mother.
Nilsen decided he was going to join the Metropolitan Police, which is quite common for people to leave the forces and go into the police, and he moved to London in December 1972, he never spoke to his brother again and maintained only very sporadic contact with his mother and sister.
In April 1973 Nilsen completed his police training and was posted to Willesden Green as junior constable. Although Nilsen enjoyed his new job, he missed the comradery of the army and began drinking heavily again. He also began to frequent they gay pubs and clubs from the summer of 1973 onwards, and engaged in numerous one-night stands, but he viewed these encounters as “soul destroying” and he longed for a serious long-term relationship. He eventually came to a conclusion that his professional life as a police officer was at odds with his “personal lifestyle” – which could be him being a gay man, the police force is notoriously homophobic, or just that being an officer can make a social life or relationship difficult for a number of reasons. Whatever “personal lifestyle” means, in December 1973 Nilsen resigned from the police force.
He took work as a security guard, but the work was intermittent and so in his desire for a more stable income he became a civil servant and was initially posted to the Job Centre on Denmark Street, which is in London’s West End. He was a quiet employee, his attendance record was mediocre, but he was good at his job and would often volunteer for overtime. In June 1982 he was promoted to Executive Officer and moved to the Job Centre in Kentish Town in North London.
In November 1975 Nilsen met 20-year-old David Gallichan who had recently moved to London from Weston-Super-Mare in South West England. Nilsen took David back to his flat and the two had dinner together and drank and talked all night and Nilsen learned that David was unemployed and living in a hostel. The next morning, not wanting David to leave, Nilsen asked him to move in with him, and David agreed.
In 1972 Nilsen’s father had died and left each of his children £1,000 (about £11,450 today). Nilsen had saved the money and in 1976 decided to use the money to help secure a larger property, although he still rented, and the two moved into a ground floor flat on Melrose Avenue in North West London. The flat was in a sorry state and Nilsen negotiated a deal with the landlord that he and David would restore it and have exclusive use of the garden.
And so, Nilsen went out to work and David stayed at home and worked on the flat and was basically a kept man. Nilsen didn’t want David to work, he wanted to be the breadwinner, and the one in control.
The relationship between the two has been described as more of companionship than a loving and sexual relationship, they mostly slept in separate beds and rarely had sex. This set up worked for the two for about a year but eventually the two of them started to bring home other men. The two began to fight more often and David claimed he became increasingly abusive to him towards the end of their relationship. In May of 1977 the relationship ended, each man claimed to be the one to end it, and David moved out of the flat on Melrose Avenue. For the next 18 months Nilsen frequently engaged in one-night stands and very short-term relationships, and he once again began to drink heavily.
By late 1978 Nilsen was living a very solitary life and had come to the conclusion that he was impossible to live with. One of the contributors to the Real Crime documentary, which we will link below, says that Dennis Nilsen was just a very boring person and eventually he bores people until they leave. Another said that his drinking was also a huge factor in isolating him from others and that if he had stopped drinking or at least cut down on the amount he was drinking he would have been a much more pleasant person to be around.
But in December 1978, Nilsen would find a way to make sure nobody could leave him again.
On December 30, 1978 Nilsen met 14-year-old Stephen Holmes at a pub called the Cricklewood Arms in North London, and Nilsen invited Stephen back to his flat. In police interviews Nilsen made it clear that he believed the boy to be around 18 or 19 years old, he was not targeting underage boys.
The two spent the night drinking in Nilsen’s flat and the next morning when Nilsen awoke to find the boy asleep in his bed, and in that moment, he decided that Stephen was going to spend New Year’s with him whether he wanted to or not. Whilst Stephen slept Nilsen took a necktie and strangled Stephen until he fell unconscious and Nilsen then drowned him in a bucket of water. Nilsen then washed Stephen’s dead body in the bathtub and laid him out on the bed. Nilsen was known to be a necrophile and he admitted to performing sex acts upon the dead bodies of his victims, but also claims these acts weren’t penetrative.
A few days later Nilsen hid Stephen’s body beneath the floorboards of his flat, which was where he would remain for about seven months.
In August 1979 Nilsen burned Stephen’s body in a bonfire in the garden at Melrose Avenue. But Nilsen couldn’t remember Stephen’s name and so when he was arrested and told police about his first murder victim, police had no idea who the boy was and no way of finding out. In fact, Stephen wouldn’t be identified until 2006 when microscopic remains from the garden at Melrose Avenue were DNA tested.
On October 11, 1979, Nilsen attempted to murder a student from Hong Kong named Andrew Ho. The pair had met in a St Martin’s Lane pub and Nilsen lured Andrew to his flat on the promise of sex. Nilsen attempted to strangle Andrew, but Andrew managed to flee from the flat on Melrose Avenue and reported the incident to police. Nilsen was questioned in relation to the incident, but no further action was taken. This is very similar to one of Jeffery Dahmer’s victims, one of whom managed to escape and was picked up by the police but Dahmer convinced that the battered and bloodied boy was actually his boyfriend and they’d just had a fight and didn’t bother to investigate further. Luckily, unlike Dahmer’s victim, Andrew Ho survived.
But it didn’t take too long for Nilsen to find another victim, about seven weeks actually.
His second victim was Kenneth Ockenden, a 23-year-old Canadian student who was travelling around the UK. The pair met on December 3, 1979 in a pub in London’s West End, and when he learned that Kenneth was a tourist, Nilsen offered to show him around, kind of be a tour guide and take him to all the sights and landmarks around London. He then invited Kenneth back to his flat on the promise of food and drinks, which Kenneth accepted. The pair spent the evening drinking rum and whisky, and at some point, Nilsen strangled Kenneth with the lead from a pair of headphones. When confessing to Kenneth’s murder Nilsen claimed that he couldn’t remember the murder properly, just that at some point he strangled him.
The next day Nilsen went out and bought a polaroid camera and posed Kenneth’s body in various sexual positions and then sat the body on the sofa and talked to him as he watched tv. Eventually he hid Kenneth’s body under the floorboards, as he had done with Stephen.
Nilsen’s third victim was 16-year-old Martyn Duffey, from Birkenhead, which is on the Wirral, near Liverpool in North West England. Duffey was a runaway and was also homeless. They met on May 17, 1980.
Nilsen met Martyn Duffey at a train station in London, and he was actually returning from a conference in Southport, which is actually fairly close to Liverpool where Martyn was from. Martyn had travelled to London just four days earlier, he had been questioned by British Transport Police for evading train fares and ended up hitchhiking most of the journey. He was sleeping rough near Euston Station, which is one of the main train stations in London.
Nilsen offered Martyn a place to stay and being exhausted, cold, and hungry Martyn jumped at Nilsen’s offer of food and a place to sleep.
But after Martyn fell asleep, Nilsen strangled Martyn with a ligature, and if that wasn’t enough, he also sat on his chest until he fell into unconsciousness, and then drowned him in the kitchen sink.
Nilsen bathed the body and kept it in the house for a few days, he performed sex acts upon it, but when he noticed signs of bloating, he put Martyn’s body under the floorboards.
Just three months later Nilsen would claim his fourth victim, in August 1980, even Nilsen himself wasn’t sure of the date, Nilsen met 26-year-old William Sutherland, originally from Edinburgh William was living in London and had turned to sex work to support himself. The pair met in a pub in Piccadilly Circus. Nilsen also couldn’t recall exactly how he killed William Sutherland, he knew that he had strangled him but other than that he couldn’t recall any details, just that in the morning there was another body in his flat.
Between Autumn 1980 and April 1981, Nilsen murdered a further seven victims, but tragically none of them have ever been identified. Nilsen confessed to all of these murders but did recant some of them.
The first one was in September 1980, Nilsen met this man in the Cricklewood Arms, and described the man as an Irish labourer with rough hands and aged between 27 and 30, but that is all he could remember about this man.
In October he met a male sex worker in the Salisbury Arms, who he described as slender, aged between 20 and 30, either Filipino or Mexican, with “gypsy-like features”, though what he meant by that was never really clear.
In November he met an English man who he described as a vagrant in his 20s. He met this man in the Charing Cross area of central London, where the young man had been sleeping in a doorway. Nilsen took the young man back to his home on Melrose Avenue and strangled him while he slept. Nilsen said he believed this victim’s life had been “one of long suffering”, and that the act of killing him had been “as easy as taking candy from a baby.”
In either November or December Nilsen met a man he described as a long-haired English hippie aged 25-30, after the pubs had closed in London’s West End. But Nilsen wasn’t happy with just murdering this man, he then dissected the body into three pieces and placed him beneath the floorboards.
At some point this flat began to smell horrendous, which will happen when you put eight bodies under the floorboards. So, Nilsen decided to remove all the bodies from the flat, dissected them all and burned them in a huge bonfire in the garden. But, as you would expect, the fire smelled really really bad, so he threw tyres on top of the bodies to disguise the smell.
1981 didn’t slow Nilsen down, and between New Years and April he killed a further three men, all of whom still remain unidentified.
On January 4 he met a man he described as an 18-year-old, blue eyed Scot, at the Golden Lion pub in Soho, and he invited the man back to Melrose Avenue. The two had a drinking contest and then Nilsen murdered him and kept the body in the flat for about a week and then dissected the body and hid it below the floorboards.
The tenth victim was murdered in February. He was slim, about 5’9” and had a Belfast accent. They had met after the pubs had closed in the West End, and Nilsen invited this man back to the flat and strangled him with a necktie, he then hid the body under the floorboards.
The next victim, who is the final unidentified victim, was described by Nilsen as a skin-head neo-Nazi, very muscular, about 20 years old, and the two met in Leicester Square in April 1981 and Nilsen lured him to the flat with the promise of food and drink. Nilsen said the man had a tattoo across his neck which was a dotted line and a pair of scissors and the words “cut here.” Like the others, Nilsen kept the body in the flat for a day or two and then hid the body under the floorboards.
Of these seven still unidentified men, Nilsen later claimed to have fabricated three of them, the Irish labourer, the long-haired hippie, and the skinhead, neo-Nazi. But unless more of the remains that were found following Nilsen’s arrest are able to be tested, we will likely never know whether he was lying about lying.
On September 18, 1981 Nilsen murdered his final victim at Melrose Avenue. 23-year-old Malcolm Barlow visited the flat on Melrose Avenue to thank Nilsen for helping him receive medical treatment the previous day. Malcolm was epileptic, and Nilsen had seen him outside his flat falling into the wall, so he called for an ambulance and waited with Barlow until they got there. He was also described as an orphan who had spent much of his life in and out of care homes. Nilsen strangled Malcolm and hid the body under the kitchen sink because he was running out of space under the floorboards.
In the winter of 1981-1982, Nilsen’s landlord decided to renovate the flat and tried to evict Nilsen, but Nilsen was refusing to go. Eventually the landlord and Nilsen came to an agreement and Nilsen was paid £1,000 to move out. But before he vacated the flat, he had to dispose of all of the bodies he was keeping under the floorboards, so he had another huge bonfire in the garden. Like the previous bonfire he topped it with car tyres to disguise the smell of burning bodies.
Then in early 1982 Dennis Nilsen moved into the attic flat at 23 Cranley Gardens.
In March 1982, 23-year-old John Howlett would become the first victim to be killed at Cranley Gardens. The pair met in a pub near Leicester Square and Nilsen lured John back to the house with the promise of more drinking, After John fell asleep Nilsen attempted to strangle him, but John woke up and fought back and it took quite a while for Nilsen to actually kill him. In the fight John Howlett tried to strangle Nilsen, but eventually Nilsen overpowered him and strangled John until he became unconscious and then drowned him in the bathtub. He then dissected the body, but this time he had a problem.
Unlike the flat at Melrose Avenue, at Cranley Gardens Nilsen had no access to a garden because he was in the attic flat, and he also couldn’t keep the bodies under the floor for some reason. So, Nilsen tried to dispose of the dissected body parts by flushing them down the toilet.
In September 1982 Nilsen met Graham Allen on Shaftesbury Avenue in Central London, Graham had accepted Nilsen’s offer of food and drink and accompanied him to the flat in Cranley Gardens. Nilsen claimed not to remember the exact moment when he murdered the 27-year-old father from Motherwell, just outside of Glasgow. However, he did know that Graham was eating an omelette and then he was dead having been strangled. As with his previous victim, Nilsen dissected Graham’s body and attempted to flush the body parts down the toilet. Graham was eventually identified by dental records as he had numerous healed jaw fractures.
Nilsen’s final victim was Stephen Sinclair, a 20-year-old with addiction issues from Perth (Scotland not Australia.) They met on Oxford Street on January 26, 1983, and Nilsen bought Stephen a burger before suggesting that the younger man accompany him to Cranley Gardens, and it was in the flat that evening that Nilsen strangled Stephen with a ligature. He then dissected the body and it was parts of Stephen’s body that were found by police two weeks later on February 9, along with parts of Graham and John’s bodies which he had not been able to dispose of.
There were a number of other acquaintances of Nilsen’s who only just escaped with their lives, including one man named Carl who Nilsen tried to strangle and drown but miraculously he survived and after lying unconscious for a couple of days in Nilsen’s living room he recovered enough to leave. Nilsen told Carl that he had almost strangled himself with the zip of the sleeping bag he was sleeping in, it was only a few years later that Carl learned the truth. Another man named Douglas testified at Nilsen’s trial that he had awoken in Nilsen’s flat with his ankles bound together and Nilsen straddling him, luckily, he managed to overpower Nilsen and escape with his life.
Nilsen confessed to all of the murders, although he says some of them, he fabricated. He was remanded into custody on February 11, but he didn’t really take well to prison life and whilst on remand he refused to wear the prison uniform and threatened to protest by wearing nothing, as a result he was not allowed to leave his cell. On August 1 he took his full chamber pot and threw it at a guard. As a result of this incident he was charged with assaulting a prison guard and put in solitary confinement for 56 days.
Nilsen was charged with six murders — remember several of the victims have never been identified so he couldn’t be charged with their deaths, especially since he recanted a number of confessions and claimed those men never existed — and two counts of attempted murder.
He pled guilty to all counts.
Much of the argument at his trial was based around whether or not Nilsen was in his right state of mind when he committed the murders. The prosecution argued that he was sane and showed premeditation, but the defence argued he suffered from diminished responsibility and should therefore be charged with manslaughter rather than murder.
In the opening statement the prosecution used part of Nilsen’s confession he had given to police saying “At the precise moment of the act [of murder], I believe I am right in doing the act,” adding “The Crown says that even if there was mental abnormality, that was not sufficient to diminish substantially his responsibility for these killings.”
On November 4 following a 10-day trial Nilsen was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
He was transferred to Wormwood Scrubs in London.
After the Scrubs Nilsen spent time in Pankhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, Wakefield prison AKA Monster Mansion, Full Sutton prison and Whitemoor prison. He was often moved for his own safety.
In 1994, 11 years after his trial, Nilsen’s original sentence of 25 to life was changed to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Nilsen accepted this sentence and is rumoured to have said that had he not been apprehended he would have kept killing. In 2003 he was transferred back to Full Sutton in the East Riding of Yorkshire where he would remain until his death.
Nilsen was not a particularly popular prisoner with inmates nor with the guards and made frequent petitions to the Home Office and eventually the European Court of Human Rights – which until Brexit was the highest court in the UK, still is for the rest of the EU. One complaint which I loved and just had to share is from 2001. Nilsen was a subscriber to a number of pornographic magazines, which is apparently allowed in prison. He brought a judicial review against the prison service, citing that the homosexual softcore pornography magazines to which he regularly subscribed, had some images and articles of a more explicit nature removed before the magazine reached him. The legal case he brought against the prison service was dismissed because he could not establish that any breach of his human rights had occurred.
On May 10, 2018 he was taken from Full Sutton to the York Hospital with severe stomach pains, he had surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm but suffered a blood clot as a result and died on May 12. Full autopsies must be carried out on all who die in prison custody and Nilsen’s autopsy showed he had died from a pulmonary embolism and retroperitoneal haemorrhage.
In the 37 year since his arrest Nilsen has been the subject of much debate, offender profiling, countless books and documentaries. He himself said that he was never able to fully explain why he killed or what compelled him murder. Although it has been widely accepted that he killed for company. Since the death of his grandfather he had always associated love with death and had problems when it came to socialise and communicating with others. It is generally understood that he killed for company because the dead could never leave him. And that is the story of serial killer Dennis Nilsen.
FURTHER READING:
My Life with Murderers by David Wilson
Surviving Dennis Nilsen (YouTube)
Does homophobia explain why Dennis Nilsen wasn’t caught earlier?
Introducing Dennis Nilsen, The Disturbing “British Jeffrey Dahmer”
RELATED CASES:
11: Britain’s Most Dangerous Prisoner
15: Senior Citizen Serial Killers
