I just can't get over it.
- How has it affected the family?
It's affected every one of them.
- Would you have any kind of warning
- to the parents of youngsters, particularly here in Scotland,
- who were thinking in terms of going down to London?
Never to go.
It’s such a cruel, horrible place.
The London train pulls out from Edinburgh's Waverley Station.
Apart from businessmen and holidaymakers, it often carries teenagers, some of them
stowaways fleeing from the deprivation and hopelessness
endemic in many of Scotland's sprawling housing estates.
These were the victims of Dennis Nilsen.
Drifters, who'd strayed to London in the expectation of streets
paved with gold and beacon lights that would guide them to prosperity.
People like Billy Sutherland,
who was killed by Nilsen after a massive drinking session.
Billy Sutherland lived on an estate in Edinburgh,
where he was unable to get a job.
Even the graffiti here seems to spring
from a deep well of bitterness and frustration.
When they first brought up on News at Ten,
when we saw the ground, I didn’t really think about it
much because I didn't think Billy could be one of the victims.
He knew how to handle himself and
take care of himself.
And it wasn't until I learnt that Billy was one of the victims,
and it hit me that all these policemen were walking all over his body
and all over the other victims’ bodies that were buried in the garden.
I mean, I loved the guy.
I married him.
Another victim was Steve Sinclair, the product of a shattered childhood.
He was slow at learning to speak and walk.
His life was to become a constant carousel of institutions.
Mental hospital. Special school.
Eventually, borstal and then prison.
He was very odd.
Yeah, because when he went to dances
he used to fight with his mates coming home, you know.
Always the fist, always on the defensive, all the time.
Bob Blyth is a social worker who knew Steve Sinclair.
I suppose that Steve fell into
the group of youngsters that had certain problems
that he couldn't cope with and felt that perhaps by coming to London,
he could have a new opportunity to resolve those difficulties.
- Why, then, was it a bad idea for him to come to London?
- I mean, what sort of problems did he face when he came?
Well, I think like most of the youngsters who come to London,
the first thing that they find is is that London isn't what
it appears to be on television, which is the bright lights of Piccadilly.
But really, London is a very sad place.
Nilsen's victims were largely drawn from that group of rootless youngsters
who now inhabit the shadowy world of London's West End.
A world of night shelters and lodging units, a world of drug abuse
and emotional problems triggered by a deep feeling of frustration
born out of the knowledge that they are the forgotten generation,
a generation upon which Dennis Nilsen preyed.
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.
Nilsen went to school in Fraserburgh, but during his school days he never knew
his father, who walked out on the family, while Dennis was still very young.
At the time of his arrest, Dennis Nilsen hadn't seen his mother for 10 years.
- How do you think Dennis was able to become involved
in this kind of problem and then be able to live from day to day?
Well, that's the bit I don't understand.
I just don't understand how
this could go on and nobody knowing anything.
I mean,
I don't know [inaudible] ten years of his life,
and I can't say what was happening to him.
Something must have happened to him because it's not my Dennis
that's doing it.
Not the boy I knew that's doing these things.
At the age of 15, Nilsen decided to join the army.
He signed up in Aberdeen, transferred to Aldershot,
and after a three-year training period with the Army Catering Corps,
including a course in butchery, Dennis
Nilsen spent the best part of a decade travelling the world.
He went to West Germany with the City of London Regiment.
He transferred to the King's own Scottish Borderers, cooking for the men
who guarded the Al-Mansour, a prison in Aden.
After that, Nilsen was off to the Gulf.
He volunteered for the Trucial Oman Scouts,
an Arab regiment led by British officers.
Then he was on the move again,
this time with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to Cyprus.
He stayed with the Argylls when they moved on to Ballater near Balmoral in Scotland.
Where Nilsen cooked for the Queen's Guard here at the Victoria Barracks.
He was rated a good soldier and even won the General Service Medal.
But after serving in Northern Ireland, he decided to leave the army.
Dennis Nilsen then joined the Metropolitan Police Force,
but his new career lasted for just 11 months.
After a short spell as a security guard, he became a civil servant working
for the Manpower Services Commission in several job centres around London.
He lived at 195 Melrose Avenue
in a ground floor flat with access to the land behind.
He later moved to this house in Cranley Gardens.
A lonely man who spent many solitary hours gazing at Karl
Marx's grave and who bored his workmates with interminable chatter.
Dennis Nilsen craved company.
He found it in the pubs of North London.
The Black Cap by Camden Town Tube Station,
The Golden Lion in the heart of Soho,
the Salisbury in the West End.
It was in these pubs that Nilsen met his victims.
Carl Stottor met Nilsen at The Black Cap,
where he agreed to go back to Nilsen's flat.
I fell asleep, and I woke
up, and he was strangling me,
and I passed out
after I actually I thought
I'd got caught up in the sleeping bag, which he'd 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 realised I was in the bath, and he was trying to drown me.
Dennis Nilsen spared Carl Stottor,
but at least 15 people weren't so lucky.
They paid the ultimate price for Dennis Nilsen's hospitality.
He killed them.
He chopped up their bodies, and he then burned, boiled or buried the pieces.
But Nilsen's reign of carnage was coming to an end.
In February of this year, a Dino Rod man discovered some human remains
in a manhole near Nilsen's last home in North London.
Nilsen was arrested and a search of Melrose Avenue
and Cranley Gardens revealed more than a 1,000 pieces of flesh and bone.
A special unit was set up at Hornsey Police Station
to try and identify the dead people.
Scotland Yard's Missing Persons Bureau, B14, was called in to help.
In the end, fewer than half of Dennis Nilsen's victims were identified.
Even Nilsen himself doesn't know who the others
were.
The question the jurors had to ask themselves at Dennis Nilsen's
trial was this.
Could Nielsen possibly be responsible for his own actions?
John Lisners has been studying the man for the past nine months.
He's written a book on the Nilsen affair, which is being serialised
in the News of the World.
The Crown said that he was in command of the situation,
that he knew what he was doing all the time.
The defense said that he did not know
what he was doing when he committed the acts of murder.
But what sort of a man do you think Dennis Nilsen is?
I think Nilsen was a man who stalked victims by night in a patch
he knew very well.
Areas that he'd been to as a policeman, as a night guard.
He loved the sordid, seamy life.
He used to observe it.
He's a voyeur of the underworld, if you like.
And I think over the years, he grew
so much a part of it that he wanted something more.
His office life, I think, was very boring.
He was a very strong union man.
But he wanted an excitement which he never found in the Civil Service.
Dennis Nilsen was incarcerated in his own personality.
His mother says that
when he was finally arrested, he walked out of one prison into another.
But does she still think of Dennis as her son?
Yes, 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.
Life took Dennis Nilsen from a childhood in the spacious countryside
of North East Scotland to the dark, dingy streets of London's West End,
where he found so many unfortunate youngsters.
As Nilsen wrote later, I decided to release them
from the slings and arrows of their outrageous fortune.