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