The Real Des (2020) - full transcript
Making myself look dead,
it's nothing to do
with death itself.
It's making myself
look as different from me
as it was possible to imagine, so,
I could really be convincing
as being somebody else.
Dennis Andrew Nilsen
seemed to be an ordinary man
with an ordinary life.
Bloody finger! You great pillock.
But behind the facade,
he was the stuff of nightmares.
It could kill somebody!
Because Nilsen was a killer
with the blood of at least
12 young men on his hands.
Dennis Nilsen
wanted to be in control
and dominant and domineering.
A seemingly boring civil servant
who hid in the shadows.
Nilsen was known as dodgy.
He had a terrible temper.
He was violent.
A control freak.
Now, the story of the making
of a mass murderer can be revealed
in never-before-aired material.
NILSEN ON TAPE
Exclusive testament
from the detectives
who brought him to justice.
There was a pair of legs
sticking out the end
of a big black bin liner.
I said to him, "How many bodies
are we talking about here?"
And his reply,
"I've killed 15 or 16."
It was one hell of a shock.
How many people
were buried in that garden?
The prison interview
the Home Office tried to ban.
It was my power and his passivity.
The more passive he could be,
the more powerful I was.
And the families of Nilsen's victims
speaking for the first time.
My dad was relentless in the way
he searched for our Martyn.
He said, "Where are you, son?"
Dennis Nilsen destroyed my family.
VOICE BREAKS
Sorry.
You pull the body out
from under the floorboards,
put it on a sheet
and then cut it up.
This shocking interview
was filmed in 1992.
A cold-blooded killer
calmly describing
how he got rid of his victims.
Come the summer, it got hot,
and I knew there would be
a smell problem.
I thought, well, I'm going to have
to deal with the smell problem.
And I thought what would cause
the smell more than anything else?
And I came to the conclusion
it was the innards.
This footage hasn't been seen
on British television
for over 20 years.
On a weekend, I would sort of
pull up the floorboards,
and I found it totally unpleasant
and I get blinding drunk,
so, I could face it and start
dissection on the kitchen floor.
I'd go out and be sick
outside in the garden.
But how did we get here?
12 years earlier, Dennis Nilsen
was in the middle of murder spree.
Opportunities for a serial killer
seemed horrifyingly easy.
Britain was undergoing huge
social change.
But not everywhere.
I joined the Metropolitan Police
in April 1979.
I came into the station
and there were two guys there
who were on my team.
I went up to them and said,
"Hello, I'm WPC 8141,
I'm starting today."
And they looked at me and said,
"Oh, for fuck's sake,
"we've already got one on the team,
we don't need another one."
That was my first introduction
to being a female police officer.
In the early '80s,
London was a magnet
for thousands of young people
heading to the city
to follow their dreams.
REPORTER:
'It's a familiar story,
'every night, trains
from Scotland and the North
'carry those hoping to escape
a dull and dreary existence
'and looking for
the extra excitement
'they believe life in the capital
will bring.'
But for many,
the reality was very different.
And huge numbers were going missing.
'At any one time, 8,000 people are
listed as missing in London alone,
'a clear illustration of how easy
it is for someone
'to simply disappear
without trace.'
We would give it 24 hours.
If they didn't come back,
then we would obviously do
the surrounding police stations.
Have they been arrested
for anything?
Hospital checks,
but that's really all we did.
In 1983,
I was the detective inspector
at Hornsey Police Station,
in north London.
In those days,
a missing person bureau
was a small office at Scotland Yard.
They didn't have
a national database,
it just wasn't
very professional at all.
ARCHIVE REPORT:
'They've often, deliberately
'cut all links with the past
'and this makes them
an easy target for exploitation
'by criminals or conmen.'
Because they were young,
they were inexperienced
and when they got there,
you could say they were led astray.
It meant they could be easy prey
for someone like Dennis Nilsen.
Martyn Duffy was one of them.
Our Martyn had a lovely smile. Yeah.
He'd do anything for anyone.
He had a heart of gold.
Hazel and Graham are talking for
the first time about their brother
and the last Christmas
they spent together in 1979.
You look at those photographs
and you can see he was happy.
Yeah, yeah.
It was one of the best times,
I suppose. Yeah.
As a family, we were all happy,
we were all together. Yeah.
In May 1980,
the 16-year-old ran away to London
in the hope of finding work.
Something he'd done before.
But this time, no-one heard
from Martyn after he'd arrived.
He didn't go to any of the contacts
we knew he had there,
he just disappeared
off the face of the earth.
Martyn's disappearance
was reported to the police.
His name was simply added
to the list of thousands
who were missing in London.
My dad was relentless in the way
he searched for our Martyn.
There was a photograph of Martyn
by his bed
and he just looked at it
and he said, "Where are you, son?"
It was obvious that something bad
had happened. Mm.
And something terrible
had taken place.
Three years later,
the truth was about to be revealed.
Hornsey Police Station,
North London.
Detective Inspector Steve McCusker
was about to get a report
that would haunt him
for the rest of his career.
A uniformed colleague of mine
came to my office.
He told me he'd been called
to an incident
at a house in Cranley Gardens.
Plumbers had found something
suspicious down the drain
they were unblocking.
McCusker headed to the house
with his boss,
Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay.
When we got up there,
we saw a number of people standing
around an open manhole cover.
REPORTER: 'What did you find?'
A mass of flesh.
Very heavily suspected
that it wasn't animal.
'One of the people in the house
was quite interested?'
That's correct.
Yes, the guy, I believe was living
in the top floor flat. Yeah.
'The man living in the flat
was a job centre supervisor
'called Dennis Andrew Nilsen.'
It was snowing, sleet,
real miserable, wet, dark evening.
His boss told him, "Look,
put the manhole cover back on
"and we will come to investigate it
in the morning in the light of day."
With the manhole left unguarded,
the neighbours heard Nilsen
going up and down the drain
at around midnight.
When Cattron returned the next day,
the remains had gone.
If a manhole can be sparkling,
it was sparkling!
But he did put his hand up
and he was able to extract from
the smaller drains in a manhole,
erm, what looked like
the fingers and knuckles
and skin and bone of human hand.
We got a phone call
from the mortuary,
telling us that, indeed, the bones
were actually from human being.
Our main suspect was a guy
called Dennis Nilsen.
Sometimes,
he goes by the name of Des.
Des was due home from work
at around half past five.
Detectives Peter Jay
Steve McCusker and Jeff Butler
were waiting for him.
He arrived, he was dressed
in a trench coat, wearing glasses,
carrying a briefcase.
We did say we were police officers
from Hornsey police station.
Nilsen expressed
some surprise at this.
He said, since when did police
officers get interested
in looking at people's drains?
We said, let's go up to your flat
and we'll tell you all about it.
He opened his door with a key.
It was a grubby flat.
There was a grubbiness to it
and, of course, the smell,
the smell was absolutely awful.
It was the smell of death.
Peter said to him, "Stop messing
us about, where is the body?"
He looked shocked.
It suddenly dawned on him
that the game was up.
And he simply said, "It's in there."
He pointed to a wardrobe to my left.
So, I opened the wardrobe and
I saw two black bin liner sacks,
full to the brim
with the remains of human bodies.
Peter Jay then told Nilsen
that he was arresting him
on suspicion of murder
and cautioned him.
The detectives put Nilsen
in the back of the car to take him
to the police station.
What he told Steve McCusker next
would be a defining moment
in the case.
And so I said to him, "How many
bodies are we talking about here?
"One or two?"
And his reply, shocked us.
"I've killed 15 or 16.
"There are three back here,
"and the rest I killed at a flat
I used to live in."
ARCHIVE REPORT: 'Scotland Yard
'launched its biggest
murder investigation today
'after a pathologist confirmed
that human remains,
'found in a sewer outfit,
were parts of three bodies.'
We knew we had not just a killer
but he said he was willing to talk,
tell us all about it.
We thought, well, we're going
to have a murder investigation.
We'll just get on with it.
Dennis Andrew Nilsen was under
arrest on suspicion of murder.
Detective Chief Superintendent
Geoff Chambers
and DCI Peter Jay
would question Nilsen.
While DI Steve McCusker ran
the day-to-day investigation.
'It was in this quiet
residential street
'in the north London suburb
of Muswell Hill,
'that the extraordinary
series of events
'began to unfold.'
The eyes of the world
were now on Nilsen's flat
as the murder investigation
intensified.
When we arrived at the property,
we went upstairs
to the second floor flat.
Walked into the flat
and straight away on the left-hand
side there was an open kitchen.
I noticed there was a head
in a cooking pot.
It had been boiled,
I think there was still
a bit of hair on the scalp.
Half the flesh was taken off it
and peeled back.
He'd severed right across
the back of the neck.
This is the first time
these officers have talked publicly
about the horrors
that confronted them.
It was one hell of a shock,
probably the biggest shock
that I'd ever received...
at a crime scene.
At Hornsey Police Station,
Nilsen was talking to detectives,
calmly and lucidly.
Telling them what he'd done.
He was answering all the questions,
he wasn't nervous.
The only thing
that seemed to concern him
a lot was that he told me
he had a dog.
Oh! Ah! Bloody finger,
you great pillock.
I thought to myself at the time,
well, he is concerned about the dog
and there's the remains
of three bodies lying in his flat
of men he'd killed.
During his interviews,
Nilsen gave detectives details
of some of the men he'd murdered
over a four-year period.
But he could only remember
two of the three men
he had killed in Cranley Gardens.
His final victim,
who was called Sinclair,
and a man called John
from High Wycombe.
He was also
telling investigators
where they should look
for more remains.
In the bathroom,
there was an upturned drawer
which had been used as shelf.
We turned that over.
We almost held each other's hands
as we did it.
Underneath, there was a pair of legs
sticking out of the end
of a big black liner.
Bin bags containing body parts
were removed from the wardrobe.
So was a wooden box
holding limbs and torso.
Investigators also found
four carrier bags
filled with internal organs.
It was unbelievable
what we were seeing.
This was the work of a man, clearly
deranged and not in his right mind.
The detectives' main challenge
was to find out who he'd killed.
Using fingerprints
found on the flat,
the first person to have
their identity confirmed
was Stephen Sinclair.
The 20-year-old from Perth
had been strangled in his sleep.
Stephen Sinclair's identification
within 48 hours was crucial.
It meant that Nilsen could now
be formally charged with murder.
'Nilsen had been brought here
to Highgate Magistrate's Court
'from Hornsey police station
early this morning.
'Dennis Andrew Nilsen looked
straight at the magistrate
'as the charge was read to him.
'That he did on or about
the 1st of February, 1983,
'murder Stephen Neil Sinclair.'
SHOUTING
CAMERA SHUTTERS
A picture of who Dennis Nilsen
really was began to emerge.
In the early 1980s,
London's gay scene was thriving.
But there were also predators
looking to exploit the vulnerable.
And Nilsen was one of them.
What are you doing switching
the bloody thing on and off for?
You'll never make a cameraman,
you know.
He was recognisable as, you know,
a guy on the gay scene.
He was recognisable as gay.
And kind of old school.
I can't understand you.
I ask you to fucking start filming
from the feet,
slowly up to the head.
And you go zip, zip, pan.
Bloody hell,
don't you ever watch movies?
You've seen thousands of movies,
you must know what it's like.
Nilsen was known to be violent
towards young male sex workers,
and he was always on the hunt
for new victims,
people who didn't know
his reputation.
Nilsen was known as TTM.
The Taxi Man.
He was known to... chat up people.
The suggestion of money,
suggestion of a taxi,
"Do you want to come home,
stay the night with me?"
It was that kind of thing.
Word was out that he was a...
He was dodgy.
That he had a terrible temper,
that he was violent.
He once said to me,
"Lead and they follow so easily."
Tragically, many did.
After Stephen Sinclair
was identified,
the investigation's attention
moved to Nilsen's previous home
in Melrose Avenue,
five miles from Cranley Gardens.
It was a ground-floor flat
with a back garden.
'Search teams, equipped
with spades, sieves and rakes
'arrived to turn over the garden
of Nilsen's first home
'in Melrose Avenue.'
Nilsen told the police he kept
up to three bodies at a time
under the floorboards
at Melrose Avenue.
He'd dissect them
on the kitchen floor,
then burn the dismembered body parts
in his back garden.
He drew a map to show
where he lit the fires.
When we got there,
we went straight down to the garden
and it was freezing.
And I thought,
"This is not gonna be easy,
"digging here anyway, in February."
We were looking for bones.
I found two or three
the first half an hour,
and then it went on to dozens.
We probably had 1,000 bones
in the ground there.
So, how many people are there?
The work is going slowly.
For it appears that the bones
are scattered
over the whole area of the garden.
I found a latchkey.
I found a torn, charred piece
of a postcard
with an Australian stamp on it.
Has he picked up a backpacker?
'How many people do you know of?'
Maybe five or six.
'Can you say anything about them?'
Nothing at all.
'Were they male or female?'
Male.
'And what age?'
We believe between 20 and 40.
Nilsen had moved into the ground
floor flat with his then boyfriend,
20-year-old David Gallichan,
in November, 1975.
Come on, mate,
let's have a little smile, then.
Come on.
Smile?
A little smile, come on.
Like that?
Come on, ducky, little smile.
Nilsen filmed this remarkable home
footage of David in the garden.
When we came here, this back garden
was like a bloody rubbish heap,
with tons of old cookers and tyres
and debris
and plaster and wood
and God knows what else.
This was the garden where Nilsen
would later burn the remains
of some of the men
he admitted killing.
In May, 1977, Nilsen's relationship
with David came to a bitter end.
You've been biting my cardigan
again.
It was the moment
everything seemed to change.
A year later,
he killed for the first time.
Professor David Wilson
is an expert on serial killers,
and has met many of them,
including Nilsen.
I first met Dennis Nilsen because
I was the new assistant governor
under training
at HMP Wormwood Scrubs.
And, of course, I'd read all
about this man in the newspapers.
There was a sense
in which I wondered,
"Have we got our own Hannibal Lecter
in Dennis Nilsen?"
And so I had this
incredible expectation
about meeting him
for the very first time
and I can tell you now...
I was completely underwhelmed.
Most serial killers that I've met
are really silent
and uncommunicative.
Nilsen was the opposite.
Nilsen spoke endlessly about
the murders that he had committed.
Dennis Nilsen
wanted to be in control
and dominant and domineering.
He wanted to control his legacy,
he wanted to tell everybody
who Dennis Nilsen was.
He was a true narcissist.
There was my power
and his passivity.
The more passive he could be,
the more powerful I was.
I still feel in a spiritual
communion with these people.
Nilsen was still co-operating
with the police,
but he was playing mind games.
Of the 12 victims
he initially confessed to killing
at Melrose Avenue,
he would offer only vague details
as to who some of them were.
He only ever gave the detectives
three full names.
Kenneth Ockenden, who went missing
in December, 1979,
Billy Sutherland,
who Nilsen strangled in 1980...
..and finally, Martyn Duffey.
The door went and you came
and you said, "It's the police."
And that's when they said
about Nilsen
and there was a possibility
that Martyn was one of the victims.
Nilsen had befriended
the 16-year-old
the day he arrived in London.
Detectives hoped the Duffeys could
identify items found at his flat.
It wasn't easy telling them
the truth about their son,
who'd been a victim of a man who,
at that time,
was headline news around the world.
Nilsen had taken
a left luggage ticket
from our Martin... Yeah.
..after he'd killed him.
And went back to Euston
to pick up the property.
Nilsen was using Martyn's briefcase
to take his sandwich
and his newspaper into the office.
That's right, yeah.
Nilsen also used Martyn's
treasured chef's knives.
They had been a gift
from his father.
Horrifically, he used the knives
as well to cut the victims up.
Of course, yeah.
Martyn's knives, that was a shock.
Nilsen's crimes shocked the world.
He'd confessed to killing
15 young men,
but what turned a Mr Ordinary
into a serial killer?
SEAGULLS CRY
Dennis Nilsen was born
just after the Second World War,
in the port town of Fraserburgh
in Scotland.
His parents, Betty and Olaf,
divorced in 1949,
and he became close
to his grandfather.
He told author Brian Masters
that the death of his grandfather
when he was just five years old
had a profound effect on him.
His mother said to him,
"Do you want to see your grandad?"
"Oh, yes."
And he went into the dining room
and on the table was a box.
And inside the box
was his grandfather.
Nobody told him anything,
nobody explained it to him.
But I was convinced,
and I put this to him,
that his idea of love and his
idea of death fused at that moment.
And thereafter, he always wanted
either to be dead himself,
and he would pretend to be dead,
or, eventually, he got round
to killing people instead.
The making myself look dead
was nothing to do with death itself,
it was making myself look
as different from me
as it was possible to imagine
so I could really be convincing
as being somebody else.
In 1985, Brian Masters published
his best-selling book,
Killing For Company,
the result of hours of conversations
with Nilsen himself.
He wanted company and he wanted...
erm, especially to have company
which didn't interrupt.
erm, especially to have company
So, eventually,
he fell back on this fantasy
of his grandfather and the dead.
And he would make somebody dead
in order to be able to talk to them.
This was the nearest
he ever got to friendship.
And I think it's tragic
from point of view of the people
he encountered, obviously,
but it's also pretty grim for him.
It's something I just
can't understand, this.
I've tried and I thought about it
and thought about it.
He just must be sick or something.
Because it's not the Dennis I knew
that's doing this, somehow or other.
By the age of 15, he was determined
to get away from his family.
In June 1961, he enlisted
in the British Army Catering Corps
and was posted to Aldershot.
Dennis Nilsen was in the same squad
as me, V Squad.
He was weird.
I say weird for the fact
he had a strange sense of humour,
he was very argumentative.
It was there,
as an apprentice army chef,
that Nilsen learned
how to butcher meat.
Kitchen work was to get you ready
for working in the main kitchens,
you learned how to cut up, erm...
sides of beef, carcasses of lamb,
sides of pork and so forth.
He was very meticulous, actually,
he was a good chef.
I just find it amazing
that somebody could actually
commit the crimes he did.
After 11 years in the army,
and only reaching the rank
of corporal,
Nilsen decided he'd had enough.
He moved to London
and eventually joined the Met
as a trainee police officer.
A revelation that initially
shocked detectives -
they were investigating
one of their own.
During the interviews it came out
that he had been a police officer.
When I found out that he hadn't made
his two-year probation,
I wasn't too concerned
and I thought that if Nilsen said
he'd resigned,
I would have thought it's more
likely
that he was gently ushered
out the door.
He'd lasted just 12 months,
leaving, he claimed,
because of homophobia.
He joined the Civil Service
as a junior officer at a job centre.
Then the murders began.
Nilsen was preying
on the vulnerable.
Young men he thought
would not be missed.
Sometimes runaways, sex workers.
But one of his victims
was different.
A mistake that could have ended his
killing spree three years earlier.
ARCHIVE: 'On 3rd December 1979,
'Kenneth Ockenden left his hotel
between nine and ten in the morning.
'It was the last time
he was positively seen alive.'
Kenneth Ockenden was a 23-year-old
tourist from Canada,
who'd been due to fly home
when he met Nilsen in a pub.
They went sightseeing
around the capital,
then Kenneth disappeared.
It became an international incident,
with the Canadian Prime Minister
calling Margaret Thatcher,
piling on political pressure
for the inquiry to be ramped up.
'Police said there was
a strong possibility
'that Kenneth Ockenden
had been murdered.
'But he did make
one last phone call.
'It was to his uncle in Surrey.
'The call came from
a public call box.
'There was music in the background.'
The police couldn't find him.
And the truth only came to light
when Nilsen was finally caught
three years later.
He'd taken Kenneth back to his flat
in Melrose Avenue,
then strangled him.
He'd kept his body
under the floorboards.
Bringing it out to wash
and dress it,
watching television with the corpse
as company.
Now the investigation team
needed proof.
And they had a lead,
discovered in Nilsen's home.
When they found an A-Z of London,
fingerprint people
took it back to Scotland Yard
and they blasted every page
of this book
and they found a fingerprint,
and that fingerprint identified
Kenneth Ockenden.
Nilsen was charged
with Kenneth Ockenden's murder.
And of another man
police had now identified.
Malcolm Barlow was suffering
from a fit
when Nilsen found him
and helped him get to hospital.
When the 24-year-old returned
to say thank you,
Nilsen invited him into his flat
and strangled him.
He kept Malcolm's body
under his kitchen sink
before burning it
in the back garden.
Five men had complained to police
in the past
that they'd been the victims
of violent attacks by Nilsen.
But their cases had never been
properly followed up.
Now the murder investigation team
needed to track them down.
This was when he was in one
of the hostels in London.
One of those survivors
was 21-year-old Carl Stottor.
JULIE: Carl was a lovely man.
I idolised him.
He had this infectious laugh.
He always used to open his mouth,
very much like Marilyn Monroe.
Chucked his head back and he would
mouth open and laugh.
Julie has never spoken publicly
about what happened to her brother.
He left home
after coming out as gay
and being disowned by his father.
It had a profound effect on him,
and I think the rest of his life,
all he looked out for
was love from another man.
In April, 1982, he met Nilsen
in the Black Cap pub in Camden Town.
Nilsen bought him a drink.
When the pub shot, erm,
Dennis Nilsen said,
"Do you want to come back to mine
for a drink?" And he said yes.
Nilsen paid for
the 15-minute taxi ride
back to his top floor flat
in Cranley Gardens.
Nilsen made him a drink,
put some music on.
I think he whispered,
"I'm falling in love with you."
He didn't feel very well at all,
and I think that's when
they went to bed early.
And I think Nilsen
had drugged his drink.
I sort of felt his hands,
and at first,
I thought he was sort of, like...
helping me out of it,
but he sort of shouted,
sort of whispered, sort of,
"Keep still."
And I sort of passed out.
Nilsen was trying to kill him.
The next thing Carl new,
he was in the bath.
The thought that went
through my mind was,
"You are drowning,
you are being murdered by this man
"and this is what it feels like,
and you're going to die."
And I thought I was dying.
For some reason, Nilsen stopped.
Instead, he began reviving him.
And I saw my face in the mirror,
and all my tongue was all swollen
and my face was bloated
and I had, like, red blotches
where the blood vessels had burst
in my face
and my neck was all sort of cut
round here.
Nilsen helped a confused
and disorientated Carl
to a nearby tube station.
After getting treatment
at a hospital,
he reported what had happened
to the police.
The police put it down
to a lover's tiff.
Carl, erm, could only remember Des'
first name
and that he lived in Muswell Hill.
So we didn't have enough information
to put a formal complaint in,
but at the same time,
the police didn't take it seriously
because it was in the 1980s
and there was a lot of homophobia
in the police force
and in the country.
Nilsen was question three times,
following different complaints,
but police took no further action.
Nilsen was able
to kill two more young men
after his attack on Carl.
London, 1983.
Murder detectives are trying
to identify the victims
of serial killer
Dennis Andrew Nilsen.
After months of investigations,
the police had only identified
five of 15 men
he confessed to killing.
Nilsen had given them another name -
John from High Wycombe.
After painstakingly
searching records,
detectives confirmed
victim number six as John Howlett.
Nilsen had strangled and drowned him
in March 1982.
The team at Melrose Avenue
had also uncovered more objects,
including three dental plates.
Exhibits officer Brian Lodge
thought that they could give them
more names.
I took them to some North London
dental laboratories
and asked if they could say
who they were made by,
or who they were for,
et cetera, et cetera, but...
from what I learned,
they were all made in Germany,
and I suggested to the inquiry
that perhaps enquiries
should be made in Germany.
But by then,
the investigation's overtime bill
was rumoured to be over £1 million.
Brian's request was denied.
That testing was never allowed
and never followed up,
which I thought was rather a shame
because perhaps there were many
families around the country now
who are wondering still
was their son,
was their brother, their uncle,
their dad a victim of this man?
Something we'll never know,
something they'll never know.
Nilsen's 14th victim, and the last
to be identified at Cranley Gardens,
was Graham Allen from Glasgow.
He was 28 and had a child.
Police had found a jawbone
and matched it
to Graham's dental records.
But because it happened
only days before Nilsen's trial,
the murder was never added
to the indictment.
'The Nilsen murder trial
at the Old Bailey
'has entered its closing stages.
Dennis Nilsen is charged
'with six murders
and two attempted murders.'
Nilsen entered a not guilty plea
on the grounds
of diminished responsibility.
The court heard evidence
from three psychologists
about his mental state,
and the prosecution argued
he was in his right mind
when he killed.
The jury agreed.
At the Old Bailey,
Dennis Nilsen has been found guilty
of six murders
and two attempted murders.
He's been jailed for life
with a recommendation
that he should serve
a minimum of 25 years.
Author Brian Masters
was at the court every day.
He believes the jury
came to the right verdict.
He was an intelligent man.
He knew perfectly well
that it was wrong to kill people,
but he didn't know
why it mattered so much.
The last victim,
er, he'd cut the head off
before he went to bed and put it
in a cooking pot
and put it on to simmer,
and then went to bed.
When he woke up in the morning
to take the dog out for a walk,
the pot was still simmering.
When he came back,
adjusted the flame
to see whether it needed to be
turned up or put down again.
Then he butted a slice of toast
and ate it.
I couldn't do that.
It is not possible
unless you are severely damaged
in your moral sense.
In the early 1990s,
Peter Paul Hartnett
began researching a book
and exchanging letters with him.
He also recorded
some of their conversations.
It's the first time
these have been heard.
Over the years,
I was getting many letters a week.
It might be three one week,
five the next,
and believe me, they were
a bore of a chore to wake up to,
cos it was page after page.
Nilsen asked him
to edit his autobiography.
What he had written was shocking.
He was saying in the manuscript
he had a regret about the murders,
and the regret was
that he hadn't kept body parts
in glasses of formaldehyde -
genitals, a pretty hand.
If Nilsen had had the money,
one of his fantasies
was to have a van
in which he could
pick up hitchhikers,
get them in the back of the van,
gas them, and bring them home.
Hartnett declined
to work on the book,
and by 2002,
they stopped corresponding.
There were too many triggers.
There were things that I had to say,
"I think we need to edit that out."
And the one person
you couldn't edit was Nilsen.
Control freak.
In those situations
where a knife is involved,
there's a lot of blood
flying around.
If I was to stab you right now,
or you were to stab me,
the heart is pumping away
and there would be blood
splattering all over the place.
In a dead body,
there's no blood spurts
or anything like that.
It congeals inside
and forms part of the flesh
and it becomes like anything
in a butcher's shop.
There's little or no blood.
During his time
as a prison governor,
David Wilson interviewed Nilsen
a number of times
and studied his motivations.
The reason why Dennis Nilsen killed
was because this was an extension
of his sexual fantasy.
He killed, therefore,
because it was through those murders
and then what he could do with
the victims after they had died.
Does fantasy shape the reality?
Or does fantasy shape the reality
until the first murder?
And then does fantasy propel the...
the sequence of murders
in an evermore dramatic way?
Because once you've engaged
in the reality the first time,
it's no longer fantastic.
The most exciting part
of the little conundrum
was when I lifted the body,
carried it.
It was an expression of my power
to lift and carry and have control.
And the dangling element of limbs
was an expression of his passivity.
Over the course of time,
not only is he killing his victims,
he is, erm,
then washing his victims,
he's, erm, propping his victims up
in chairs or on beds.
And although he would deny it,
and did deny it to me,
there is evidence to suggest
that he would engage in necrophilia.
He would have sex
with their dead bodies.
I think there is some indication
about cannibalism,
despite, again,
the fact that he would deny it.
He would trophy take.
He would cut up and keep
some of the victims' body parts
whilst disposing of other parts.
This is somebody who was a complete
and utter failure in his life,
and the only way that he could gain
some sense of who he wanted to be
was through killing
and after he had murdered.
And that's the ultimate form
of being a loser.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING
Carl died the day that he found out
Dennis Nilsen tried to kill him.
He had survivor's guilt.
He couldn't understand
why he was saved
and the others weren't.
And he just needed the pain
to go away,
which made him an alcoholic.
Carl Stottor passed away in 2013.
He died alone at the age of 52.
What happened in 1982 haunted him
until the end.
His life was horrendous for him.
He lived in his own hell
and his own prison.
But Nilsen's attempt
to kill her brother
also devastated her own family.
Three years ago, Julie's oldest son,
Jack, took his own life.
He suffered from depression
and said that he didn't want
to end up like his Uncle Carl.
His personality, the nice side
of him, was like my brother.
Jack would hit a depressed spot
and he'd remembered what Nanny
had gone through with Carl
and didn't want to put me
through the same thing.
Dennis Nilsen destroyed my family,
both my son and my brother.
Sorry.
Only eight of Nilsen's victims
were ever identified.
The rest remain unknown to this day.
Events like this
can blow families apart,
erm, but for us,
it definitely pulled us
closer together. Yeah.
There's yards and yards
of column inches
given over to Nilsen
and his motivations,
but very little
about the people that he killed.
And those people were far more
important than Nilsen will ever be.
The victims are all like
just an afterthought, I suppose.
And because of the way
Martyn certainly,
and most of the others,
were portrayed in the press,
it's very unjust.
Describing all of his victims
as gay, homeless drifters
was purely...
just a catch-all term to sort of
pigeonhole people into being...
..of less value.
Nothing could be
further from the truth. Mm-hm.
Martyn was part of our family.
He was loved.
Mm.
And we miss him.
Mm. Yeah.
Subtitles by ITV SignPost
it's nothing to do
with death itself.
It's making myself
look as different from me
as it was possible to imagine, so,
I could really be convincing
as being somebody else.
Dennis Andrew Nilsen
seemed to be an ordinary man
with an ordinary life.
Bloody finger! You great pillock.
But behind the facade,
he was the stuff of nightmares.
It could kill somebody!
Because Nilsen was a killer
with the blood of at least
12 young men on his hands.
Dennis Nilsen
wanted to be in control
and dominant and domineering.
A seemingly boring civil servant
who hid in the shadows.
Nilsen was known as dodgy.
He had a terrible temper.
He was violent.
A control freak.
Now, the story of the making
of a mass murderer can be revealed
in never-before-aired material.
NILSEN ON TAPE
Exclusive testament
from the detectives
who brought him to justice.
There was a pair of legs
sticking out the end
of a big black bin liner.
I said to him, "How many bodies
are we talking about here?"
And his reply,
"I've killed 15 or 16."
It was one hell of a shock.
How many people
were buried in that garden?
The prison interview
the Home Office tried to ban.
It was my power and his passivity.
The more passive he could be,
the more powerful I was.
And the families of Nilsen's victims
speaking for the first time.
My dad was relentless in the way
he searched for our Martyn.
He said, "Where are you, son?"
Dennis Nilsen destroyed my family.
VOICE BREAKS
Sorry.
You pull the body out
from under the floorboards,
put it on a sheet
and then cut it up.
This shocking interview
was filmed in 1992.
A cold-blooded killer
calmly describing
how he got rid of his victims.
Come the summer, it got hot,
and I knew there would be
a smell problem.
I thought, well, I'm going to have
to deal with the smell problem.
And I thought what would cause
the smell more than anything else?
And I came to the conclusion
it was the innards.
This footage hasn't been seen
on British television
for over 20 years.
On a weekend, I would sort of
pull up the floorboards,
and I found it totally unpleasant
and I get blinding drunk,
so, I could face it and start
dissection on the kitchen floor.
I'd go out and be sick
outside in the garden.
But how did we get here?
12 years earlier, Dennis Nilsen
was in the middle of murder spree.
Opportunities for a serial killer
seemed horrifyingly easy.
Britain was undergoing huge
social change.
But not everywhere.
I joined the Metropolitan Police
in April 1979.
I came into the station
and there were two guys there
who were on my team.
I went up to them and said,
"Hello, I'm WPC 8141,
I'm starting today."
And they looked at me and said,
"Oh, for fuck's sake,
"we've already got one on the team,
we don't need another one."
That was my first introduction
to being a female police officer.
In the early '80s,
London was a magnet
for thousands of young people
heading to the city
to follow their dreams.
REPORTER:
'It's a familiar story,
'every night, trains
from Scotland and the North
'carry those hoping to escape
a dull and dreary existence
'and looking for
the extra excitement
'they believe life in the capital
will bring.'
But for many,
the reality was very different.
And huge numbers were going missing.
'At any one time, 8,000 people are
listed as missing in London alone,
'a clear illustration of how easy
it is for someone
'to simply disappear
without trace.'
We would give it 24 hours.
If they didn't come back,
then we would obviously do
the surrounding police stations.
Have they been arrested
for anything?
Hospital checks,
but that's really all we did.
In 1983,
I was the detective inspector
at Hornsey Police Station,
in north London.
In those days,
a missing person bureau
was a small office at Scotland Yard.
They didn't have
a national database,
it just wasn't
very professional at all.
ARCHIVE REPORT:
'They've often, deliberately
'cut all links with the past
'and this makes them
an easy target for exploitation
'by criminals or conmen.'
Because they were young,
they were inexperienced
and when they got there,
you could say they were led astray.
It meant they could be easy prey
for someone like Dennis Nilsen.
Martyn Duffy was one of them.
Our Martyn had a lovely smile. Yeah.
He'd do anything for anyone.
He had a heart of gold.
Hazel and Graham are talking for
the first time about their brother
and the last Christmas
they spent together in 1979.
You look at those photographs
and you can see he was happy.
Yeah, yeah.
It was one of the best times,
I suppose. Yeah.
As a family, we were all happy,
we were all together. Yeah.
In May 1980,
the 16-year-old ran away to London
in the hope of finding work.
Something he'd done before.
But this time, no-one heard
from Martyn after he'd arrived.
He didn't go to any of the contacts
we knew he had there,
he just disappeared
off the face of the earth.
Martyn's disappearance
was reported to the police.
His name was simply added
to the list of thousands
who were missing in London.
My dad was relentless in the way
he searched for our Martyn.
There was a photograph of Martyn
by his bed
and he just looked at it
and he said, "Where are you, son?"
It was obvious that something bad
had happened. Mm.
And something terrible
had taken place.
Three years later,
the truth was about to be revealed.
Hornsey Police Station,
North London.
Detective Inspector Steve McCusker
was about to get a report
that would haunt him
for the rest of his career.
A uniformed colleague of mine
came to my office.
He told me he'd been called
to an incident
at a house in Cranley Gardens.
Plumbers had found something
suspicious down the drain
they were unblocking.
McCusker headed to the house
with his boss,
Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay.
When we got up there,
we saw a number of people standing
around an open manhole cover.
REPORTER: 'What did you find?'
A mass of flesh.
Very heavily suspected
that it wasn't animal.
'One of the people in the house
was quite interested?'
That's correct.
Yes, the guy, I believe was living
in the top floor flat. Yeah.
'The man living in the flat
was a job centre supervisor
'called Dennis Andrew Nilsen.'
It was snowing, sleet,
real miserable, wet, dark evening.
His boss told him, "Look,
put the manhole cover back on
"and we will come to investigate it
in the morning in the light of day."
With the manhole left unguarded,
the neighbours heard Nilsen
going up and down the drain
at around midnight.
When Cattron returned the next day,
the remains had gone.
If a manhole can be sparkling,
it was sparkling!
But he did put his hand up
and he was able to extract from
the smaller drains in a manhole,
erm, what looked like
the fingers and knuckles
and skin and bone of human hand.
We got a phone call
from the mortuary,
telling us that, indeed, the bones
were actually from human being.
Our main suspect was a guy
called Dennis Nilsen.
Sometimes,
he goes by the name of Des.
Des was due home from work
at around half past five.
Detectives Peter Jay
Steve McCusker and Jeff Butler
were waiting for him.
He arrived, he was dressed
in a trench coat, wearing glasses,
carrying a briefcase.
We did say we were police officers
from Hornsey police station.
Nilsen expressed
some surprise at this.
He said, since when did police
officers get interested
in looking at people's drains?
We said, let's go up to your flat
and we'll tell you all about it.
He opened his door with a key.
It was a grubby flat.
There was a grubbiness to it
and, of course, the smell,
the smell was absolutely awful.
It was the smell of death.
Peter said to him, "Stop messing
us about, where is the body?"
He looked shocked.
It suddenly dawned on him
that the game was up.
And he simply said, "It's in there."
He pointed to a wardrobe to my left.
So, I opened the wardrobe and
I saw two black bin liner sacks,
full to the brim
with the remains of human bodies.
Peter Jay then told Nilsen
that he was arresting him
on suspicion of murder
and cautioned him.
The detectives put Nilsen
in the back of the car to take him
to the police station.
What he told Steve McCusker next
would be a defining moment
in the case.
And so I said to him, "How many
bodies are we talking about here?
"One or two?"
And his reply, shocked us.
"I've killed 15 or 16.
"There are three back here,
"and the rest I killed at a flat
I used to live in."
ARCHIVE REPORT: 'Scotland Yard
'launched its biggest
murder investigation today
'after a pathologist confirmed
that human remains,
'found in a sewer outfit,
were parts of three bodies.'
We knew we had not just a killer
but he said he was willing to talk,
tell us all about it.
We thought, well, we're going
to have a murder investigation.
We'll just get on with it.
Dennis Andrew Nilsen was under
arrest on suspicion of murder.
Detective Chief Superintendent
Geoff Chambers
and DCI Peter Jay
would question Nilsen.
While DI Steve McCusker ran
the day-to-day investigation.
'It was in this quiet
residential street
'in the north London suburb
of Muswell Hill,
'that the extraordinary
series of events
'began to unfold.'
The eyes of the world
were now on Nilsen's flat
as the murder investigation
intensified.
When we arrived at the property,
we went upstairs
to the second floor flat.
Walked into the flat
and straight away on the left-hand
side there was an open kitchen.
I noticed there was a head
in a cooking pot.
It had been boiled,
I think there was still
a bit of hair on the scalp.
Half the flesh was taken off it
and peeled back.
He'd severed right across
the back of the neck.
This is the first time
these officers have talked publicly
about the horrors
that confronted them.
It was one hell of a shock,
probably the biggest shock
that I'd ever received...
at a crime scene.
At Hornsey Police Station,
Nilsen was talking to detectives,
calmly and lucidly.
Telling them what he'd done.
He was answering all the questions,
he wasn't nervous.
The only thing
that seemed to concern him
a lot was that he told me
he had a dog.
Oh! Ah! Bloody finger,
you great pillock.
I thought to myself at the time,
well, he is concerned about the dog
and there's the remains
of three bodies lying in his flat
of men he'd killed.
During his interviews,
Nilsen gave detectives details
of some of the men he'd murdered
over a four-year period.
But he could only remember
two of the three men
he had killed in Cranley Gardens.
His final victim,
who was called Sinclair,
and a man called John
from High Wycombe.
He was also
telling investigators
where they should look
for more remains.
In the bathroom,
there was an upturned drawer
which had been used as shelf.
We turned that over.
We almost held each other's hands
as we did it.
Underneath, there was a pair of legs
sticking out of the end
of a big black liner.
Bin bags containing body parts
were removed from the wardrobe.
So was a wooden box
holding limbs and torso.
Investigators also found
four carrier bags
filled with internal organs.
It was unbelievable
what we were seeing.
This was the work of a man, clearly
deranged and not in his right mind.
The detectives' main challenge
was to find out who he'd killed.
Using fingerprints
found on the flat,
the first person to have
their identity confirmed
was Stephen Sinclair.
The 20-year-old from Perth
had been strangled in his sleep.
Stephen Sinclair's identification
within 48 hours was crucial.
It meant that Nilsen could now
be formally charged with murder.
'Nilsen had been brought here
to Highgate Magistrate's Court
'from Hornsey police station
early this morning.
'Dennis Andrew Nilsen looked
straight at the magistrate
'as the charge was read to him.
'That he did on or about
the 1st of February, 1983,
'murder Stephen Neil Sinclair.'
SHOUTING
CAMERA SHUTTERS
A picture of who Dennis Nilsen
really was began to emerge.
In the early 1980s,
London's gay scene was thriving.
But there were also predators
looking to exploit the vulnerable.
And Nilsen was one of them.
What are you doing switching
the bloody thing on and off for?
You'll never make a cameraman,
you know.
He was recognisable as, you know,
a guy on the gay scene.
He was recognisable as gay.
And kind of old school.
I can't understand you.
I ask you to fucking start filming
from the feet,
slowly up to the head.
And you go zip, zip, pan.
Bloody hell,
don't you ever watch movies?
You've seen thousands of movies,
you must know what it's like.
Nilsen was known to be violent
towards young male sex workers,
and he was always on the hunt
for new victims,
people who didn't know
his reputation.
Nilsen was known as TTM.
The Taxi Man.
He was known to... chat up people.
The suggestion of money,
suggestion of a taxi,
"Do you want to come home,
stay the night with me?"
It was that kind of thing.
Word was out that he was a...
He was dodgy.
That he had a terrible temper,
that he was violent.
He once said to me,
"Lead and they follow so easily."
Tragically, many did.
After Stephen Sinclair
was identified,
the investigation's attention
moved to Nilsen's previous home
in Melrose Avenue,
five miles from Cranley Gardens.
It was a ground-floor flat
with a back garden.
'Search teams, equipped
with spades, sieves and rakes
'arrived to turn over the garden
of Nilsen's first home
'in Melrose Avenue.'
Nilsen told the police he kept
up to three bodies at a time
under the floorboards
at Melrose Avenue.
He'd dissect them
on the kitchen floor,
then burn the dismembered body parts
in his back garden.
He drew a map to show
where he lit the fires.
When we got there,
we went straight down to the garden
and it was freezing.
And I thought,
"This is not gonna be easy,
"digging here anyway, in February."
We were looking for bones.
I found two or three
the first half an hour,
and then it went on to dozens.
We probably had 1,000 bones
in the ground there.
So, how many people are there?
The work is going slowly.
For it appears that the bones
are scattered
over the whole area of the garden.
I found a latchkey.
I found a torn, charred piece
of a postcard
with an Australian stamp on it.
Has he picked up a backpacker?
'How many people do you know of?'
Maybe five or six.
'Can you say anything about them?'
Nothing at all.
'Were they male or female?'
Male.
'And what age?'
We believe between 20 and 40.
Nilsen had moved into the ground
floor flat with his then boyfriend,
20-year-old David Gallichan,
in November, 1975.
Come on, mate,
let's have a little smile, then.
Come on.
Smile?
A little smile, come on.
Like that?
Come on, ducky, little smile.
Nilsen filmed this remarkable home
footage of David in the garden.
When we came here, this back garden
was like a bloody rubbish heap,
with tons of old cookers and tyres
and debris
and plaster and wood
and God knows what else.
This was the garden where Nilsen
would later burn the remains
of some of the men
he admitted killing.
In May, 1977, Nilsen's relationship
with David came to a bitter end.
You've been biting my cardigan
again.
It was the moment
everything seemed to change.
A year later,
he killed for the first time.
Professor David Wilson
is an expert on serial killers,
and has met many of them,
including Nilsen.
I first met Dennis Nilsen because
I was the new assistant governor
under training
at HMP Wormwood Scrubs.
And, of course, I'd read all
about this man in the newspapers.
There was a sense
in which I wondered,
"Have we got our own Hannibal Lecter
in Dennis Nilsen?"
And so I had this
incredible expectation
about meeting him
for the very first time
and I can tell you now...
I was completely underwhelmed.
Most serial killers that I've met
are really silent
and uncommunicative.
Nilsen was the opposite.
Nilsen spoke endlessly about
the murders that he had committed.
Dennis Nilsen
wanted to be in control
and dominant and domineering.
He wanted to control his legacy,
he wanted to tell everybody
who Dennis Nilsen was.
He was a true narcissist.
There was my power
and his passivity.
The more passive he could be,
the more powerful I was.
I still feel in a spiritual
communion with these people.
Nilsen was still co-operating
with the police,
but he was playing mind games.
Of the 12 victims
he initially confessed to killing
at Melrose Avenue,
he would offer only vague details
as to who some of them were.
He only ever gave the detectives
three full names.
Kenneth Ockenden, who went missing
in December, 1979,
Billy Sutherland,
who Nilsen strangled in 1980...
..and finally, Martyn Duffey.
The door went and you came
and you said, "It's the police."
And that's when they said
about Nilsen
and there was a possibility
that Martyn was one of the victims.
Nilsen had befriended
the 16-year-old
the day he arrived in London.
Detectives hoped the Duffeys could
identify items found at his flat.
It wasn't easy telling them
the truth about their son,
who'd been a victim of a man who,
at that time,
was headline news around the world.
Nilsen had taken
a left luggage ticket
from our Martin... Yeah.
..after he'd killed him.
And went back to Euston
to pick up the property.
Nilsen was using Martyn's briefcase
to take his sandwich
and his newspaper into the office.
That's right, yeah.
Nilsen also used Martyn's
treasured chef's knives.
They had been a gift
from his father.
Horrifically, he used the knives
as well to cut the victims up.
Of course, yeah.
Martyn's knives, that was a shock.
Nilsen's crimes shocked the world.
He'd confessed to killing
15 young men,
but what turned a Mr Ordinary
into a serial killer?
SEAGULLS CRY
Dennis Nilsen was born
just after the Second World War,
in the port town of Fraserburgh
in Scotland.
His parents, Betty and Olaf,
divorced in 1949,
and he became close
to his grandfather.
He told author Brian Masters
that the death of his grandfather
when he was just five years old
had a profound effect on him.
His mother said to him,
"Do you want to see your grandad?"
"Oh, yes."
And he went into the dining room
and on the table was a box.
And inside the box
was his grandfather.
Nobody told him anything,
nobody explained it to him.
But I was convinced,
and I put this to him,
that his idea of love and his
idea of death fused at that moment.
And thereafter, he always wanted
either to be dead himself,
and he would pretend to be dead,
or, eventually, he got round
to killing people instead.
The making myself look dead
was nothing to do with death itself,
it was making myself look
as different from me
as it was possible to imagine
so I could really be convincing
as being somebody else.
In 1985, Brian Masters published
his best-selling book,
Killing For Company,
the result of hours of conversations
with Nilsen himself.
He wanted company and he wanted...
erm, especially to have company
which didn't interrupt.
erm, especially to have company
So, eventually,
he fell back on this fantasy
of his grandfather and the dead.
And he would make somebody dead
in order to be able to talk to them.
This was the nearest
he ever got to friendship.
And I think it's tragic
from point of view of the people
he encountered, obviously,
but it's also pretty grim for him.
It's something I just
can't understand, this.
I've tried and I thought about it
and thought about it.
He just must be sick or something.
Because it's not the Dennis I knew
that's doing this, somehow or other.
By the age of 15, he was determined
to get away from his family.
In June 1961, he enlisted
in the British Army Catering Corps
and was posted to Aldershot.
Dennis Nilsen was in the same squad
as me, V Squad.
He was weird.
I say weird for the fact
he had a strange sense of humour,
he was very argumentative.
It was there,
as an apprentice army chef,
that Nilsen learned
how to butcher meat.
Kitchen work was to get you ready
for working in the main kitchens,
you learned how to cut up, erm...
sides of beef, carcasses of lamb,
sides of pork and so forth.
He was very meticulous, actually,
he was a good chef.
I just find it amazing
that somebody could actually
commit the crimes he did.
After 11 years in the army,
and only reaching the rank
of corporal,
Nilsen decided he'd had enough.
He moved to London
and eventually joined the Met
as a trainee police officer.
A revelation that initially
shocked detectives -
they were investigating
one of their own.
During the interviews it came out
that he had been a police officer.
When I found out that he hadn't made
his two-year probation,
I wasn't too concerned
and I thought that if Nilsen said
he'd resigned,
I would have thought it's more
likely
that he was gently ushered
out the door.
He'd lasted just 12 months,
leaving, he claimed,
because of homophobia.
He joined the Civil Service
as a junior officer at a job centre.
Then the murders began.
Nilsen was preying
on the vulnerable.
Young men he thought
would not be missed.
Sometimes runaways, sex workers.
But one of his victims
was different.
A mistake that could have ended his
killing spree three years earlier.
ARCHIVE: 'On 3rd December 1979,
'Kenneth Ockenden left his hotel
between nine and ten in the morning.
'It was the last time
he was positively seen alive.'
Kenneth Ockenden was a 23-year-old
tourist from Canada,
who'd been due to fly home
when he met Nilsen in a pub.
They went sightseeing
around the capital,
then Kenneth disappeared.
It became an international incident,
with the Canadian Prime Minister
calling Margaret Thatcher,
piling on political pressure
for the inquiry to be ramped up.
'Police said there was
a strong possibility
'that Kenneth Ockenden
had been murdered.
'But he did make
one last phone call.
'It was to his uncle in Surrey.
'The call came from
a public call box.
'There was music in the background.'
The police couldn't find him.
And the truth only came to light
when Nilsen was finally caught
three years later.
He'd taken Kenneth back to his flat
in Melrose Avenue,
then strangled him.
He'd kept his body
under the floorboards.
Bringing it out to wash
and dress it,
watching television with the corpse
as company.
Now the investigation team
needed proof.
And they had a lead,
discovered in Nilsen's home.
When they found an A-Z of London,
fingerprint people
took it back to Scotland Yard
and they blasted every page
of this book
and they found a fingerprint,
and that fingerprint identified
Kenneth Ockenden.
Nilsen was charged
with Kenneth Ockenden's murder.
And of another man
police had now identified.
Malcolm Barlow was suffering
from a fit
when Nilsen found him
and helped him get to hospital.
When the 24-year-old returned
to say thank you,
Nilsen invited him into his flat
and strangled him.
He kept Malcolm's body
under his kitchen sink
before burning it
in the back garden.
Five men had complained to police
in the past
that they'd been the victims
of violent attacks by Nilsen.
But their cases had never been
properly followed up.
Now the murder investigation team
needed to track them down.
This was when he was in one
of the hostels in London.
One of those survivors
was 21-year-old Carl Stottor.
JULIE: Carl was a lovely man.
I idolised him.
He had this infectious laugh.
He always used to open his mouth,
very much like Marilyn Monroe.
Chucked his head back and he would
mouth open and laugh.
Julie has never spoken publicly
about what happened to her brother.
He left home
after coming out as gay
and being disowned by his father.
It had a profound effect on him,
and I think the rest of his life,
all he looked out for
was love from another man.
In April, 1982, he met Nilsen
in the Black Cap pub in Camden Town.
Nilsen bought him a drink.
When the pub shot, erm,
Dennis Nilsen said,
"Do you want to come back to mine
for a drink?" And he said yes.
Nilsen paid for
the 15-minute taxi ride
back to his top floor flat
in Cranley Gardens.
Nilsen made him a drink,
put some music on.
I think he whispered,
"I'm falling in love with you."
He didn't feel very well at all,
and I think that's when
they went to bed early.
And I think Nilsen
had drugged his drink.
I sort of felt his hands,
and at first,
I thought he was sort of, like...
helping me out of it,
but he sort of shouted,
sort of whispered, sort of,
"Keep still."
And I sort of passed out.
Nilsen was trying to kill him.
The next thing Carl new,
he was in the bath.
The thought that went
through my mind was,
"You are drowning,
you are being murdered by this man
"and this is what it feels like,
and you're going to die."
And I thought I was dying.
For some reason, Nilsen stopped.
Instead, he began reviving him.
And I saw my face in the mirror,
and all my tongue was all swollen
and my face was bloated
and I had, like, red blotches
where the blood vessels had burst
in my face
and my neck was all sort of cut
round here.
Nilsen helped a confused
and disorientated Carl
to a nearby tube station.
After getting treatment
at a hospital,
he reported what had happened
to the police.
The police put it down
to a lover's tiff.
Carl, erm, could only remember Des'
first name
and that he lived in Muswell Hill.
So we didn't have enough information
to put a formal complaint in,
but at the same time,
the police didn't take it seriously
because it was in the 1980s
and there was a lot of homophobia
in the police force
and in the country.
Nilsen was question three times,
following different complaints,
but police took no further action.
Nilsen was able
to kill two more young men
after his attack on Carl.
London, 1983.
Murder detectives are trying
to identify the victims
of serial killer
Dennis Andrew Nilsen.
After months of investigations,
the police had only identified
five of 15 men
he confessed to killing.
Nilsen had given them another name -
John from High Wycombe.
After painstakingly
searching records,
detectives confirmed
victim number six as John Howlett.
Nilsen had strangled and drowned him
in March 1982.
The team at Melrose Avenue
had also uncovered more objects,
including three dental plates.
Exhibits officer Brian Lodge
thought that they could give them
more names.
I took them to some North London
dental laboratories
and asked if they could say
who they were made by,
or who they were for,
et cetera, et cetera, but...
from what I learned,
they were all made in Germany,
and I suggested to the inquiry
that perhaps enquiries
should be made in Germany.
But by then,
the investigation's overtime bill
was rumoured to be over £1 million.
Brian's request was denied.
That testing was never allowed
and never followed up,
which I thought was rather a shame
because perhaps there were many
families around the country now
who are wondering still
was their son,
was their brother, their uncle,
their dad a victim of this man?
Something we'll never know,
something they'll never know.
Nilsen's 14th victim, and the last
to be identified at Cranley Gardens,
was Graham Allen from Glasgow.
He was 28 and had a child.
Police had found a jawbone
and matched it
to Graham's dental records.
But because it happened
only days before Nilsen's trial,
the murder was never added
to the indictment.
'The Nilsen murder trial
at the Old Bailey
'has entered its closing stages.
Dennis Nilsen is charged
'with six murders
and two attempted murders.'
Nilsen entered a not guilty plea
on the grounds
of diminished responsibility.
The court heard evidence
from three psychologists
about his mental state,
and the prosecution argued
he was in his right mind
when he killed.
The jury agreed.
At the Old Bailey,
Dennis Nilsen has been found guilty
of six murders
and two attempted murders.
He's been jailed for life
with a recommendation
that he should serve
a minimum of 25 years.
Author Brian Masters
was at the court every day.
He believes the jury
came to the right verdict.
He was an intelligent man.
He knew perfectly well
that it was wrong to kill people,
but he didn't know
why it mattered so much.
The last victim,
er, he'd cut the head off
before he went to bed and put it
in a cooking pot
and put it on to simmer,
and then went to bed.
When he woke up in the morning
to take the dog out for a walk,
the pot was still simmering.
When he came back,
adjusted the flame
to see whether it needed to be
turned up or put down again.
Then he butted a slice of toast
and ate it.
I couldn't do that.
It is not possible
unless you are severely damaged
in your moral sense.
In the early 1990s,
Peter Paul Hartnett
began researching a book
and exchanging letters with him.
He also recorded
some of their conversations.
It's the first time
these have been heard.
Over the years,
I was getting many letters a week.
It might be three one week,
five the next,
and believe me, they were
a bore of a chore to wake up to,
cos it was page after page.
Nilsen asked him
to edit his autobiography.
What he had written was shocking.
He was saying in the manuscript
he had a regret about the murders,
and the regret was
that he hadn't kept body parts
in glasses of formaldehyde -
genitals, a pretty hand.
If Nilsen had had the money,
one of his fantasies
was to have a van
in which he could
pick up hitchhikers,
get them in the back of the van,
gas them, and bring them home.
Hartnett declined
to work on the book,
and by 2002,
they stopped corresponding.
There were too many triggers.
There were things that I had to say,
"I think we need to edit that out."
And the one person
you couldn't edit was Nilsen.
Control freak.
In those situations
where a knife is involved,
there's a lot of blood
flying around.
If I was to stab you right now,
or you were to stab me,
the heart is pumping away
and there would be blood
splattering all over the place.
In a dead body,
there's no blood spurts
or anything like that.
It congeals inside
and forms part of the flesh
and it becomes like anything
in a butcher's shop.
There's little or no blood.
During his time
as a prison governor,
David Wilson interviewed Nilsen
a number of times
and studied his motivations.
The reason why Dennis Nilsen killed
was because this was an extension
of his sexual fantasy.
He killed, therefore,
because it was through those murders
and then what he could do with
the victims after they had died.
Does fantasy shape the reality?
Or does fantasy shape the reality
until the first murder?
And then does fantasy propel the...
the sequence of murders
in an evermore dramatic way?
Because once you've engaged
in the reality the first time,
it's no longer fantastic.
The most exciting part
of the little conundrum
was when I lifted the body,
carried it.
It was an expression of my power
to lift and carry and have control.
And the dangling element of limbs
was an expression of his passivity.
Over the course of time,
not only is he killing his victims,
he is, erm,
then washing his victims,
he's, erm, propping his victims up
in chairs or on beds.
And although he would deny it,
and did deny it to me,
there is evidence to suggest
that he would engage in necrophilia.
He would have sex
with their dead bodies.
I think there is some indication
about cannibalism,
despite, again,
the fact that he would deny it.
He would trophy take.
He would cut up and keep
some of the victims' body parts
whilst disposing of other parts.
This is somebody who was a complete
and utter failure in his life,
and the only way that he could gain
some sense of who he wanted to be
was through killing
and after he had murdered.
And that's the ultimate form
of being a loser.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING
Carl died the day that he found out
Dennis Nilsen tried to kill him.
He had survivor's guilt.
He couldn't understand
why he was saved
and the others weren't.
And he just needed the pain
to go away,
which made him an alcoholic.
Carl Stottor passed away in 2013.
He died alone at the age of 52.
What happened in 1982 haunted him
until the end.
His life was horrendous for him.
He lived in his own hell
and his own prison.
But Nilsen's attempt
to kill her brother
also devastated her own family.
Three years ago, Julie's oldest son,
Jack, took his own life.
He suffered from depression
and said that he didn't want
to end up like his Uncle Carl.
His personality, the nice side
of him, was like my brother.
Jack would hit a depressed spot
and he'd remembered what Nanny
had gone through with Carl
and didn't want to put me
through the same thing.
Dennis Nilsen destroyed my family,
both my son and my brother.
Sorry.
Only eight of Nilsen's victims
were ever identified.
The rest remain unknown to this day.
Events like this
can blow families apart,
erm, but for us,
it definitely pulled us
closer together. Yeah.
There's yards and yards
of column inches
given over to Nilsen
and his motivations,
but very little
about the people that he killed.
And those people were far more
important than Nilsen will ever be.
The victims are all like
just an afterthought, I suppose.
And because of the way
Martyn certainly,
and most of the others,
were portrayed in the press,
it's very unjust.
Describing all of his victims
as gay, homeless drifters
was purely...
just a catch-all term to sort of
pigeonhole people into being...
..of less value.
Nothing could be
further from the truth. Mm-hm.
Martyn was part of our family.
He was loved.
Mm.
And we miss him.
Mm. Yeah.
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