Dennis Andrew Nilsen was born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire on November 23, 1945, and was profoundly affected by the death of his fisherman grandfather when he was six, whose body he was shown. He served eleven years in the Army as a cook, briefly joined the Metropolitan Police, and by 1978 was a civil servant in a Job Centre in Soho, a union officer, and a lonely man living with a dog called Bleep at 195 Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood.
He killed for company, which is the only explanation he ever gave that held together. He brought home young men from pubs in the West End, most of them homeless, drifting or looking for work, strangled them, usually with a tie, and then washed the bodies, dressed them, sat them in a chair, talked to them and slept beside them.
He kept them under the floorboards for months and brought them back up. At Melrose Avenue he burned the remains on bonfires in the garden, putting tyres on to mask the smell. The London press called him the Muswell Hill Murderer, and later the Kindly Killer.
In October 1981 he moved to an attic flat at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, which had no garden. He killed three more men there and disposed of them by boiling the heads on the stove and flushing what he could down the lavatory.
On February 8, 1983 a drainage engineer called to the blocked sewer outside the house found the pipe packed with flesh and small bones. Nilsen came home from work, was told what was in the drains, and after a few words in the hall said that the rest was in two plastic bags in the wardrobe.
He talked for the next thirty hours and filled fifty notebooks in prison afterwards.
He was convicted at the Old Bailey in November 1983 of six murders and two attempted murders, and given a minimum of twenty-five years, later a whole-life tariff. He died on May 12, 2018, aged seventy-two, of a pulmonary embolism following surgery, while serving his sentence at Full Sutton.
Six convictions stand against a total usually given as twelve to fifteen. The reason is not that the evidence was thin. Most of what was left of most of them had gone into a bonfire or a drain, and several were never identified at all. Men whose absence from a bedsit or a hostel nobody reported. He killed for five years in two flats in north London, and the thing that stopped him was a blocked pipe.