00:00:05
-On the 8th of February, 1983, a maintenance worker was
called out to a house in London
00:00:12
to investigate
some unusual smells coming from the property's
blocked drains. He was about to make
a grisly discovery.
00:00:21
-Three or four pieces of flesh
and three little bones, with a knuckle at each end.
00:00:27
And I thought these bones had
probably come from a human hand. -Right under the noses
of his neighbors,
00:00:33
37-year-old Dennis Nilsen had
secretly been killing young men and butchering their bodies.
00:00:40
-He would get rid of the bones
and other bits of the organs by flushing them down the loo.
00:00:49
It sounds, in many ways,
like a very dark horror film. -Nilsen had complete disregard
for all the lives he'd taken.
00:00:58
-He knew, of course, that it was
wrong to kill people, but he didn't know
why it mattered so much.
00:01:03
Why do people make a fuss
about it? -Dennis Nilsen had carved a sinister place
for himself in history
00:01:10
as one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Dennis Nilsen is one of Britain's most prolific
serial killers.
00:01:38
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,
00:01:48
the majority of whom
have never been identified. Nilsen thought his crimes were simply being flushed
from existence,
00:01:56
by dissecting the bodies
piece by piece, boiling them, and then disposing of them
down the toilet.
00:02:04
But a routine drain inspection
of his London home in 1983 would lead to his downfall.
00:02:11
-We found a number
of interesting items, which can only be established
once pathology says they can be.
00:02:21
-Are you satisfied that there
are, in fact, human bodies? -It's a possibility, yes.
00:02:26
-As the public's
fascination with the case began to unfurl
at a rapid speed, author Brian Masters
was determined to understand
00:02:35
the man at the heart
of the story. -Like everybody else,
I read in the newspaper
00:02:41
that the man had been arrested. It was obviously going to be
a very interesting case.
00:02:45
There was a likelihood that
somebody might write about it in a sensational way, where as what it really demanded
and required
00:02:53
was a sober assessment of the state of mind
of such a person. -Brian contacted Nilsen
in Brixton Prison,
00:03:02
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,
00:03:09
so I wrote to him
in innocence -- complete ignorance, really -- and said that,
"I am interested in the case
00:03:16
in which
you find yourself involved, and I would like to do
a study of it, but I would not do so
00:03:22
without your cooperation
and permission." He first letter to me --
the first out of about 2,000 --
00:03:28
said, "Dear Mr. Masters, I pass the burden of my life
onto your shoulders." -A life that began
almost 40 years previously.
00:03:38
-Dennis Andrew Nilsen was born
on the 23rd of November, 1945, in Fraserburgh, Scotland.
00:03:45
He spent the early years
of his life in this house. According to his mother,
he was a quiet boy.
00:03:51
Little, if anything, marked him
out from the ordinary. -After his parents' marriage
broke down,
00:03:57
he spent the majority
of his childhood living in the nearby village
of Strichen.
00:04:02
-His father was largely absent. He grew up with his mother
and his siblings and his grandparents,
00:04:09
and his family reformed
and his mother remarried. So he had a lot of disruption.
He had a lot of chaos.
00:04:15
But lots of children have that. -He was isolated
from an early age, and the isolation found solace
00:04:24
in representations of people
who weren't alive, like pictures in the storybook. He'd cut the picture off
and take it home.
00:04:31
That's what he liked because that picture
couldn't argue with him. It couldn't say no to him.
00:04:38
-His mother has actually
talked about the way that she would cuddle
and have, you know,
00:04:43
physical warmth
with her other children, but she felt repelled by Dennis. She was quite cold towards him,
00:04:49
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
00:04:57
and that he's kind of repulsive,
in a way. -Due to the absence
of his father and the distant relationship
with his mother,
00:05:05
Nilsen grew particularly close
to his grandfather, who worked as
a North Sea fisherman.
00:05:10
-When he came back from sea, the grandfather would take him
down to the beach, and they'd walk
up and down the beach,
00:05:15
and he'd tell him stories
of what happened at sea. His grandfather was the one
person he could relate to.
00:05:20
This was the one
tactile relationship he had, the only person who touched him. -But in 1951, Nilsen lost
the one family member
00:05:32
that he'd looked up to the most. -I firmly hold to this view that
the death of his grandfather
00:05:37
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."
00:05:47
And then,
when the funeral came around, and the body was laid out
in the front room of the house,
00:05:51
as it often is in
these communities at this time, he kind of thought
his grandfather was just asleep.
00:05:59
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.
00:06:07
And he's feeling
pretty rejected, really, 'cause he's got this
really close relationship
00:06:11
with his grandfather. One minute he's there,
and one minute he's not. -I'm utterly convinced
that his idea of death
00:06:18
and his idea of love
were fused at that point, and after that, he could only
love people who were dead.
00:06:28
-The traditional community
he was born into would go on to shape Nilsen
and, in particular,
00:06:34
the way he felt about
his own emerging homosexuality. -He came from an incredibly
masculine community,
00:06:42
where men were alpha males
and they were tough, and they got married
and they had children,
00:06:47
and that was just what you did. So I think to come from
those beginnings really did kind of shape
00:06:53
that sense of shame
he felt about his sexuality. -Keen to remove himself
from family life,
00:06:59
in September 1961, 15-year-old Nilsen
enrolled in the Army. -He'd had a difficult childhood
00:07:09
and had wanted always
to be in uniform, it would seem. He joined the Army. He was in the Argyll
and Sutherland Highlanders.
00:07:16
-In the time that Nilsen
served in the Army, he worked as a cook. And during this time,
he learned how to butcher
00:07:23
and dismember
the carcasses of animals and, unfortunately,
this is something that he came to draw upon again.
00:07:30
-While serving in the Army,
Nilsen began to show signs of unusual and disturbing
behavioral traits.
00:07:37
-He got interested
in photography. He would get soldiers
that he was in the Army with
00:07:42
to pretend they were dead,
and he'd photograph them then. So it's a slow progression
towards disaster
00:07:49
that anybody with a trained mind
in psychological behavior could have spotted
very, very early on
00:07:57
the development
that was going forward. -By December 1972, age 27, Nilsen had left the Army
and moved to London.
00:08:08
He enrolled with
the Metropolitan Police as a constable, but only lasted a year
before joining the Civil Service
00:08:14
and settling
in the north of the city. Unlike the traditional
communities in Aberdeenshire,
00:08:21
where he'd grown up, London had an emerging
gay community, and Nilsen found himself
confronted by the urges
00:08:29
that had caused him turmoil
in his adolescence. -I think Dennis Nilsen's
homosexuality
00:08:36
is quite a significant factor
when we look at his case because although homosexuality
became legal
00:08:42
during his lifetime, there was still quite
a considerable stigma attached to it.
00:08:47
Nilsen moves to London -- a very vibrant,
very busy part of the U.K. -- and this is, perhaps, a place
where he feels loneliest.
00:08:56
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,
00:09:06
and I think that really
does affect him quite badly. -In November 1975, 30-year-old Nilsen
did manage to settle down
00:09:15
and moved in with a man called
David Gallichan. But after 18 months, the relationship
began to fizzle out.
00:09:22
-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.
00:09:28
He likes having a companion
to spend time with. And Nilsen's a bit
of a narcissist,
00:09:34
so he likes having
someone around who will kind of pander to him and reinforce him
and support him in that way.
00:09:41
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.
00:09:47
But, unfortunately,
he's not the kind of person who can develop a relationship
at a normal pace.
00:09:52
So this is where we see things
start to go spectacularly wrong. -Lonely and desperate
for affection,
00:09:59
Nilsen's lust for company
would soon turn deadly. On December the 29th, 1978, he met a 14-year-old boy
called Stephen Holmes,
00:10:09
and Nilsen knew there
was only one way to guarantee his latest lover would never be able
to leave him.
00:10:16
-Stephen Holmes
was a very young boy, and he was trying to get
himself something to drink
00:10:21
at a pub in Cricklewood. Nilsen offered to help out
with the drink and then brought him back
to his flat.
00:10:29
-Stephen Holmes
was never seen again. In a desperate attempt
to stop him from leaving,
00:10:35
Nilsen murdered
the 14-year-old boy by strangling him with a tie before drowning him
in a bucket of water.
00:10:43
It was the beginning of
a familiar pattern for Nilsen. -Essentially, he would frequent
the gay pubs and gay bars
00:10:50
and would meet men
that he found attractive. He would meet men that he wanted
to form relationships with,
00:10:55
and they would go back
to Nilsen's place. -His chosen victims --
not necessarily all homosexual,
00:11:02
but all vulnerable,
I think you could say, or susceptible to somebody
offering them
00:11:07
a bit of comfort
or a meal or drink or whatever, but he obviously had
the tendency
00:11:13
to go for handsome young men or people who made themselves
available to at least just hang out
with him for a while.
00:11:21
-But he didn't have
the social skills to maintain a normal
relationship at a normal pace,
00:11:27
in a way that wouldn't send
people running for the hills. So the only way to keep
people there was to kill them.
00:11:34
-With Stephen, Nilsen initiated what would go on to become
a familiar ritual for him.
00:11:40
-The modus operandi
of Dennis Nilsen was very similar
for most of his victims. They would be plied with drink.
00:11:49
-He would have a tie. By the time the victim
is now drunk -- almost comatose,
going to sleep --
00:11:55
he would put the tie
'round his neck and strangle him that way. -And if they were unconscious
but not dead,
00:12:02
then he would drown them
in a bath or a bucket. -After that, he would
get himself a drink,
00:12:07
light a cigarette, and then spend the next few
hours looking after the body. -He would get them out,
00:12:15
and he would sit
and watch television with them. He would clean up the bodies. -He would clean it, dry it,
dress it,
00:12:23
put it comfortably in a chair. He would speak to the corpse
in the chair. These were his pretend friends.
00:12:31
-So what we've got
going on here -- there isn't, like,
massive sexual depravity.
00:12:35
What he was creating
was a picture of domesticity. He would sit there
and watch television with them.
00:12:41
So he's killing for company, but in the most grotesque way. -It sounds, in many ways,
like a very dark horror film,
00:12:51
the way that he behaved, and I think that was part
of the fascination with him, which exists to this day.
00:12:58
-Dennis Nilsen's
murderous career would continue undetected
for five years. -I think one of the reasons
Dennis Nilsen got away with it
00:13:08
for so long
was that even at that time, which is post the legalization
of homosexuality,
00:13:15
the disappearance
of young men who were gay was not treated with the same
amount of respect and energy
00:13:23
as the police, I think,
would treat it nowadays. -When we look at the time
that Nilsen's in London,
00:13:28
I think homosexuality
still is very much in the shadows at that time. So there are
particular parts of London
00:13:34
where the gay scene
is happening, but it's still
quite underground. It's still something
that's seen as seedy.
00:13:41
-Nilsen's private social life
was in stark contrast to his public one
working as a civil servant.
00:13:48
-All the time that he's
carrying out these killings, he's holding down
a perfectly normal job,
00:13:54
and, occasionally,
he has to take a day off work to dismember the body. His colleagues at work
would have no idea
00:14:01
that Dennis Nilsen
taking a day's sick leave was actually carrying out
the hiding of a crime.
00:14:09
-All of us, to some extent,
are two people. There's the one we display -- we show to even family
and friends,
00:14:16
and there's a secret one, which we only ever admit
to ourselves. And we try to keep it
well, well-hidden.
00:14:23
When the other self
came to the fore, it took possession of him. He was possessed
by this other self,
00:14:30
and he could not prevent
that other self behaving the way it wanted to. -There are quite a lot
of different factors
00:14:36
that influence Nilsen's journey
towards serial murder, but I think it was all rooted,
essentially,
00:14:43
in a sense of shame. He didn't like who he was. The person that he was
wasn't someone
00:14:49
who was socially acceptable. So he spent his entire life
trying to become somebody else,
00:14:55
and I think that's what's
at the root of all his problems. -By February 1983, 37-year-old Nilsen
had moved home
00:15:04
and was living
in a top-floor flat on Cranley Gardens,
in Muswell Hill, north London.
00:15:11
After residents complained
about the drains being blocked, a plumber was called in
to investigate.
00:15:19
-And they found what looked like
bits of flesh. Nilsen suggested that
it could be
00:15:26
somebody had flushed
their Kentucky Fried Chicken out or something like that, and that would be
the explanation
00:15:33
for little bones and flesh. -But the plumber wasn't so sure,
and the following morning,
00:15:39
February the 9th, 1983,
he called the police. Detective Chief Inspector
Peter Jay
00:15:45
remembers that day well. -My phone rang,
and it was Peter Sleigh, the uniform inspector in charge
that particular day.
00:15:55
And he said to me, "Could you
possibly come up here?" He said,
"I've got a bit of a problem.
00:16:00
I'm not sure what I've got,
but I'd like you to see it." And he showed me a drain
00:16:05
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.
00:16:17
So I said, "Well, let's have another haul around
inside the drain, get anything else
that's in there."
00:16:23
And the scenes of crime officer
that I had with me managed to pull out
three or four pieces of flesh,
00:16:30
each about four inches long,
an inch wide, and three little bones
with a knuckle at each end.
00:16:39
When I looked at them,
I thought these bones had probably come from
a human hand.
00:16:44
-Peter took the remains
to Charing Cross Hospital, where resident pathologist
Professor David Bowen
00:16:50
confirmed their suspicions. -He said,
"It is. It's human." And he said, "By pure luck, you've brought me
a piece of neck --
00:17:01
off the neck -- and your victim's
been strangled." He said,
"There's a clear ligature mark
00:17:06
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,
00:17:14
when you look at it
down the microscope. And so the pathologist
in the Nilsen case
00:17:18
was identifying
that this piece of skin had hair that fitted with being
from someone's neck.
00:17:23
So despite the difficulties
of fragments of tissue being found in a situation
like a drain,
00:17:29
identifying the characteristic
ligature mark on it -- it's pointing you very strongly
towards strangulation.
00:17:36
-And I looked at him,
and I said, "You sure you've not been
watching too much TV, prof?"
00:17:41
And he said,
"No, it's as clear as a bell." He said, "This is human." So that only meant
one thing to me --
00:17:47
that somebody
must have been murdered and flushed down the toilet. -Astounded, Peter drove back
to Cranley Gardens
00:17:57
and waited outside the flat
all day, until Nilsen returned home
from work. -My first introductory words
to him were,
00:18:05
"I am
Detective Chief Inspector Jay from Hornsey Police Station. I've come about your drains."
00:18:12
And he looked at me,
and he said, "Since when have police been
interested in blocked drains?"
00:18:16
I said, "Well, you take me
up in your flat, and I'll tell you." And you could smell,
immediately,
00:18:20
the decomposing flesh. And I said to him,
"Look, your drains were blocked with human remains,"
00:18:26
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
00:18:33
and said, "Don't mess about.
Where's the rest of the body?" And he said,
"Okay. It's in plastic bags
00:18:40
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.
00:18:48
It was, "Okay.
Maybe the game's up." And he was relaxed about it. So we walked him
down to the car.
00:18:58
I told him I was arresting him. So I drove the car back, and then Steve McCusker was
obviously thinking to himself
00:19:06
about all the body parts that
were in so many different bags, and he popped the question
to Nilsen,
00:19:12
"Are we talking here
about one body or two?" And Nilsen said, "Neither." He said,
"I think it's 15 or 16."
00:19:19
And I can remember
the steering wheel sort of shaking in my hands, and it was just the shock of
hearing that instant response.
00:19:28
-Well, Dennis Nilsen,
when he was found out -- he was very calm and very,
very cool and very collected
00:19:33
because he was
an intelligent man, and he knew that one day
he would be found out,
00:19:38
that this would
all come to light, and I think he kind of
made his peace with that
00:19:42
long before
he was actually caught. -He described
the day of his arrest as the day help arrived,
00:19:50
and I don't think
most criminals would describe being finally stopped
from their murders, or whatever,
00:19:58
as the day help arrived. -On February the 9th, 1983, Dennis Nilsen had been
taken into custody.
00:20:09
Human remains had been found
flushed down the toilet of his north London flat. Author Brian Masters
made contact with Nilsen
00:20:19
whilst he was on remand. The police had given him
permission to visit Nilsen's home
in Cranley Gardens.
00:20:28
-Shortly after his arrest, after I'd made connection
with him, I saw the grotty kitchen,
which was really ghastly,
00:20:36
and the wardrobes. And in the wardrobes
were plastic bags, or had been plastic bags.
00:20:44
I think what I remember most was the squalid nature
of the kitchen because the pots had grease
around their edges
00:20:55
and, of course, one now knows
what that grease was. It was human flesh. That showed me
the depths of depravity
00:21:04
of which human beings
are capable. -News of the arrest and rumors of what had been
discovered in Nilsen's flat
00:21:11
began to make headlines
across the country. -We had the press descending
on us from all different angles,
00:21:17
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.
00:21:26
They were up on my first-floor
window of my office. They had a metal bar
up against the window
00:21:33
with a microphone on it. It just brought everything
to a standstill. Anyway,
we had a press conference --
00:21:40
a very, very brief one. We just told them something
to get rid of them if we possibly could,
00:21:47
and then we were able to sort of
placate them and promise that we would release
what we could, when we could.
00:21:52
And then we were able to get on with our first proper interview
with Nilsen. -With limited evidence relating
to the victims' identities,
00:21:59
the only way
to discover the truth would be to unlock the secrets
that lay inside Nilsen's mind.
00:22:06
-We had a murderer in custody --
serial killer. We didn't know who he'd killed.
We hadn't got a clue.
00:22:12
And we weren't gonna find out unless we got the truth
out of him. We knew that
the clock was ticking
00:22:18
and that we had to charge him
within 48 hours. -Forensic teams searching
Nilsen's home
00:22:25
had taken fingerprints
from one of the victim's hands. It belonged to 20-year-old
Steven Sinclair,
00:22:32
who hadn't been seen
since disappearing after a night out with friends
on January the 26th, 1983.
00:22:39
37-year-old Nilsen
was formally charged with murder on February the 11th, 1983. -It was precisely 10:00
00:22:49
when Dennis Andrew Nilsen
was led into the dock to face the bench
of three magistrates.
00:22:54
The charge, a single charge of
murdering Steven Neil Sinclair, was read over to him.
00:22:59
There were objections to bail
and no application was made, and he was remanded
in police custody
00:23:03
until Wednesday,
the 16th of February. At just one minute past 10:00,
he was taken down
00:23:08
to be driven away at some speed
in a police van. -Nilsen immediately
began to confess
00:23:14
to his crimes one by one. -He gave us a very, very brief
description, in an hour or so,
of what had happened.
00:23:23
We had told him that we were
going to go through one victim at a time,
one victim per interview,
00:23:28
because we knew
it was gonna take at least two hours per victim because we had to get
everything possible from him
00:23:36
so that we could
identify the bodies, or identify the victims. A lot of them
we didn't have bodies for.
00:23:44
So he was able to tell us
nicknames. Occasionally he would
give us a name. -Nilsen talked about
his first victim,
00:23:54
14-year-old Stephen Holmes, whom he'd murdered
in December 1979. He told officers
he kept Stephen's body
00:24:04
under the floorboards
of his home in Melrose Avenue for eight months
before it began to decay.
00:24:11
-So the problem that somebody
like Dennis Nilsen would have is not so much the murder.
00:24:17
It's what do you do
with the body afterwards? You have to try
and dispose of it somehow,
00:24:22
and that's not easy. It's not easy to burn them. It's not easy to dismember them.
00:24:28
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
00:24:35
so he could carry on
with what he was doing. -Nilsen cut Stephen's body
into pieces,
00:24:40
and then constructed a makeshift
bonfire in the garden, where he burned the remains
of the young boy.
00:24:47
-He got away with it
at Melrose Avenue because he was disposing
of the bodies in-house
00:24:56
and having these bonfires
in the middle of the night, like funeral pyres. And on the top of those
bonfires, he put rubber tires
00:25:06
to destroy the possibility
of the smell of flesh. -After disposing
of Stephen Holmes' body,
00:25:14
Nilsen went out
looking for company once more. He confessed to murdering
23-year-old Canadian tourist
00:25:21
Kenneth Ockendon
on December the 3rd, 1979. And six months later,
in May 1980, he struck for a third time,
00:25:32
killing 16-year-old
homeless runaway Martyn Duffey. Nilsen kept both Kenneth's
and Martyn's bodies
00:25:39
in his flat together
for as long as he could, storing them
under the floorboards.
00:25:45
-He would keep them in
different parts of his house, or in the bath, and that's in complete contrast
to the normal killer,
00:25:53
who wants to get rid of the body
as quickly as possible, who doesn't want to be
associated with it,
00:25:59
who doesn't want
any traces of it around. -One of the 16 interviews
that we did on him,
00:26:04
he was talking about
putting yet another body under the floorboards
in Melrose Avenue,
00:26:10
and I interrupted, and I said, "Hold on a minute. How many bodies
did you have under the floor
00:26:17
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."
00:26:25
-Nilsen confessed to killing
at least five other men in 1980. However, only one of them,
27-year-old Billy Sutherland,
00:26:34
has ever been identified. As Nilsen's confession
continued, he admitted to another
four killings in 1981,
00:26:45
the last of which was
23-year-old Malcolm Barlow in September. Relying on the killer's memory
of events
00:26:53
made the investigation
very difficult. -Nilsen would tell us
that he had murdered a young man
00:27:01
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
00:27:10
of how it all happened. But we had absolutely
no idea at all as to who he was talking about.
00:27:20
You can't really
charge a prisoner with killing a person unknown. We had to be absolutely sure
that when we named a victim,
00:27:33
it couldn't possibly
be anybody else. That was a mammoth undertaking. -When he was telling the police,
confessing,
00:27:41
some of them he identified
by strange memories. -One he described as a skinhead
that he met in the West End.
00:27:49
Another was a young man
from northern Ireland. -"The omelet boy" -- this is a man
who he cooked an omelet for
00:27:54
before he killed him. -One of these victims
was identified. 27-year-old Graham Allen
went missing in September 1982.
00:28:04
His son Shane Levene remembers the day
his dad didn't come home. -I was only 7 years old.
00:28:11
My father was a drug addict.
He wanted money for drugs. And there was a bit of a fight,
a bit of an altercation,
00:28:19
and my father was screaming
for money through the window. My mother said, "No," and my mother's last words
were to tell him
00:28:27
to never come back again, and he left that night
and he never came back. My mother -- she was sure
that something had happened.
00:28:36
It was quite
a violent relationship, and they would often split up
or have arguments.
00:28:42
He would disappear, but he would
always make contact, and this had gone on
for weeks, months.
00:28:46
There was no contact, and my mother thought
the worst at that moment. -Graham had met Dennis Nilsen
on Shaftesbury Avenue
00:28:55
in London's West End. Nilsen invited him
back to his flat and cooked Graham an omelet
00:29:01
before strangling him
from behind as he ate. Parts of Graham's body were
recovered from Nilsen's drains.
00:29:10
-I heard my mother screaming
as I came down the road back from school, and when I got home,
00:29:18
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
00:29:26
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.
00:29:37
-The murder of Graham Allen
took place at Nilsen's new flat on Cranley Gardens
in Muswell Hill.
00:29:45
Nilsen had moved there
in late 1981, but because his new home
was on the top floor,
00:29:51
he had no way
of setting a bonfire, so he needed a new way
of disposing of his victims.
00:29:57
He took to cutting up
the body pieces, boiling them in water, and then flushing the remains
down the toilet.
00:30:05
-To dismember a body on your own
is a very difficult task, and it's far easier
if you happen to have some skill
00:30:13
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.
00:30:20
And that sort of skill --
being able to joint meat -- would probably be very helpful
in identifying
00:30:27
the best places to cut into
a body to dismember it, with the minimum effort
possible.
00:30:33
-He was going to great lengths
to dispose of the bodies. For instance,
he had a massive-size saucepan.
00:30:40
He could get a whole head
in a saucepan, and boiling it,
and then breaking up the bones.
00:30:46
And, of course, all the flesh
was going down the drain, getting flushed away,
never to be found again.
00:30:52
-With the way that Dennis Nilsen
disposed of the remains, it obviously created challenges
for identification,
00:30:59
but often if you find
a part of a skull or a part of a bone
that's clearly human,
00:31:04
then it points you towards
the body being that of a person, and identifying characteristics,
such as teeth,
00:31:10
maybe old healed fractures, can give you an idea
of who it is if you compare that
to a missing person.
00:31:16
-We needed his assistance. If we came up with an idea as to the possibility of the
identity of one particular chap,
00:31:25
and we got a photograph, we needed Nilsen to look at it
and say yes or no. -Nilsen eventually confessed
to 15 murders,
00:31:34
12 at his first home
in Melrose Avenue, where he burned and buried
the remains of his victims,
00:31:40
and 3 at his flat
in Cranley Gardens, where he boiled and flushed them
down the drain.
00:31:47
-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."
00:31:56
And I think he was
probably right, actually. -Peter and his team
had the arduous task
00:32:01
of preparing for a trial,
and they had a new problem. Nilsen's defense team
were going to plead insanity.
00:32:09
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.
00:32:18
As the grisly facts surrounding
the story hit the press, the British public
were left stunned.
00:32:25
-We found a small piece of jaw
and some teeth attached to it in the rear garden of
the premises at Melrose Avenue,
00:32:33
and this morning, they found a
significant amount of property, in particular quite a large
consignment of human bones,
00:32:40
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,
00:32:49
there was inevitably
a lot of horror. First of all,
these vulnerable young men being taken to his house
and killed --
00:32:57
that was horror enough. Then there was keeping
the bodies for so long -- another horrific thing.
00:33:05
Then there was
boiling up body parts and disposing of bits of them
down the toilet and so on --
00:33:12
another horror thing. Then there was the sheer scale
of the number of murders that he carried out.
00:33:19
-Anything that is found is given to
one of my exhibit officers, and then the item concerned
will then go to the laboratory
00:33:28
for scientific examination. -Is it very small remains that
have been discovered so far?
00:33:33
-Minute ones, yes. -I remember the crime. I remember
everyone was following that,
00:33:42
and, you know,
it was a huge story that was breaking
throughout Britain of these murders that were
happening in north London.
00:33:47
Everyone was glued
to those gory headlines. They wanted to know
more and more details.
00:33:53
-Dennis Nilsen was something out of a completely
different world, it seemed, so the press reaction,
the public reaction,
00:34:02
was one of revulsion, but also a kind of
horrible fascination, as well. -People often asked me how
the country reacted to Nilsen.
00:34:17
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
00:34:27
I was having to
eat, sleep, and drink it. I had to focus on it
because there was so much to it,
00:34:37
and we had a big trial
coming up at the Old Bailey, and we've got the world's press
looking at us.
00:34:44
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,
00:34:55
Dennis Nilsen's trial date
was set for October. The defense were building a case
to prove that Nilsen was insane,
00:35:03
but the enhanced
media coverage had produced a trio of key
witnesses for the prosecution.
00:35:10
Three young men -- Douglas Stewart, Paul Nobbs,
and Carl Stottor, came forward to say
they'd been attacked by Nilsen.
00:35:18
Stottor had met Nilsen
in May 1982 and went back to his flat in
Cranley Gardens for some drinks.
00:35:26
-I fell asleep, and I woke up,
and he was strangling me. And I passed out
after I sort of think --
00:35:37
actually, I thought I'd got
caught up in the sleeping bag, which he had warned me about,
00:35:42
and I thought he was
helping me out, but he wasn't. And, anyway,
I passed out from that,
00:35:50
and I remember vaguely hearing
water running and being carried, and I felt very cold,
00:35:56
and I realized
I was in the bath, and he was trying to drown me. -After trying unsuccessfully
to murder him,
00:36:04
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.
00:36:14
-Sometimes the people concerned
don't report it to the police, or say,
for very good personal reasons,
00:36:20
that they don't want it pursued, and as a result of that,
the killer then gets to believe
00:36:29
that they can get away
with stuff, and they carry on,
and it gets worse and worse.
00:36:33
And I think Dennis Nilsen
is somebody who might have
been caught earlier, had people been able to say,
00:36:42
"Yes, we want to pursue
charges," but, for understandable reasons,
did not decide to do so.
00:36:48
-Gathering evidence
from both Melrose Avenue and Cranley Gardens, police were able to
bring charges against Nilsen
00:36:55
for six of the murders. The trial began
at the Old Bailey, on the 24th of October, 1983.
00:37:03
Even after
the lengthy confessions, Nilsen's defense team
had decided to plead not guilty
00:37:10
to all the charges against him. -The defense wanted to plead
guilty to manslaughter,
00:37:16
on the grounds
of diminished responsibility, when we got to the Old Bailey, but we weren't happy
about that at all
00:37:24
because we had tried to find some sort of
personality disorder. We had a psychiatrist
from King's College in London
00:37:34
look at him in depth, and he said he couldn't find
any evidence of a personality disorder
at all.
00:37:41
-Well, when we look at
insanity pleas, essentially we're looking at
how much control
00:37:45
that person had
over their behavior. Now, when you look at
some of Nilsen's behavior,
00:37:50
you would think,
you know, automatically, "Well, this is the behavior
of somebody who isn't normal,
00:37:55
somebody who is
a little bit mad." But, actually,
he knew what he was doing. He was somebody
who was not laboring
00:38:01
under some kind of psychosis. He was intelligent.
He was articulate. He wrote reams and reams
of pages about his crimes,
00:38:09
so he was very much conscious
of what was going on. -Brian Masters was not only
in the courtroom every day,
00:38:16
but also had a chance to see
how Nilsen was coping firsthand. -I went to see him every day
during the trial,
00:38:23
in the cells underneath
the Old Bailey, and the one thing
which struck me most about him
00:38:28
was this disorder,
this imbalance, that he had no idea that
what he'd done was important.
00:38:36
He knew, of course, that it was
wrong to kill people, but he didn't know
why it mattered so much.
00:38:40
Why do people make a fuss
about it? -Psychiatrists on both sides
gave their opinions
00:38:45
on Nilsen's state of mind. The court also heard extracts
from the extensive interviews
00:38:51
conducted by police with Nilsen and testimony
from the survivors. -It was left to the jury
to decide whether or not
00:38:58
he had the capability
to form an intention to kill, and he was found guilty
of murder on all counts.
00:39:07
-When the jury
came back into the box, and the foreman of the jury
stood up to give his verdict,
00:39:13
there was a feeling
in the courtroom that, "Thank goodness that's over. We can go home
and be cleansed now.
00:39:22
We've listened to
so much squalid evidence that we feel
contaminated slightly." So everybody wanted to go home
and wash.
00:39:33
-On the 4th of November, 1983,
Sir David Croom-Johnson sentenced Dennis Nilsen
to life imprisonment.
00:39:41
He would have to serve
at least 25 years before he would be
considered for parole.
00:39:47
He was immediately sent to Wormwood Scrubs Prison
in London. In 1989, the home secretary
made the decision
00:39:55
to change Nilsen's sentence
to a whole-life tariff, meaning he will never
be released.
00:40:02
-He knew perfectly well
he would be found guilty, and he knew he deserved it. He knew he should be.
00:40:07
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.
00:40:16
Now, in prison,
decisions would be made for him. -I just don't understand
how this could go on
00:40:23
and nobody knowing anything. I mean, I don't know any about
these 10 years of his life,
00:40:32
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,
00:40:40
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
00:40:47
that we're all concerned
about him, and I just hope
he'll get some help to cope
with the situation he's in.
00:40:55
-Justice had finally been served for the family members
of Nilsen's victims. -He lost his life
in those crimes, as well.
00:41:03
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.
00:41:10
In the eternity of time,
we live just once, and Dennis Nilsen spent more
than half his life in prison.
00:41:17
-Over 30 years on, it still
seems incomprehensible that Nilsen was able to operate
seemingly unnoticed,
00:41:24
hidden behind
a veneer of normality. -I think what's probably
terrifying about this case
00:41:30
is the fact that
Nilsen was so ordinary. You begin to think to yourself, "How many more of them
are there around?
00:41:40
How many more Dennis Nilsens
are there around who are disposing of
the bodies of their victims,
00:41:47
never to be found again?" -The vulnerable young men
Nilsen specifically targeted
00:41:52
slipped from this world
almost unnoticed, and, most tragically,
we may never fully understand
00:41:58
why Nilsen stole their lives and, in many cases,
their identities. -A lot of the names
of Dennis Nilsen's victims
00:42:08
remain completely unknown
to most people today, and it was that anonymity
that allowed him to continue.
00:42:17
-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.
00:42:24
I cant tell you
why it happened." I've tried. I've got closer
than anybody else, I suspect,
00:42:29
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.
00:42:39
I couldn't really
get to understand him. I mean, you deal with people,
as police officers,
00:42:44
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.
00:42:55
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.
00:43:02
I couldn't understand at all. -Nilsen was a lonely man who
appeared to kill for company.
00:43:10
His murders
were purely selfish acts to satisfy his lust
for affection. The crimes took place
almost entirely unnoticed
00:43:19
and, in a final twist
of cruelty, many of his victims' identities
may never come to light.
00:43:25
The manner in which
he desecrated the bodies of his victims, denying the families a chance
to bury their loved ones,
00:43:32
is what makes Dennis Nilsen one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪