Dennis Nilsen was convicted of six murders, and the number that is actually known is eight, and the number he gave the police on the night of his arrest was fifteen or sixteen. He killed young men whom nobody was looking for, in two north London apartments, over four years, and he was never once a suspect until a drain cleaner from Dyno-Rod lifted a manhole cover outside 23 Cranley Gardens on the evening of February 8, 1983, and found the sewer packed with what he took at first for chicken skin. Nilsen, who had been complaining to the landlord about the plumbing, came home from work the next evening to find two detectives on the stairs. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay told him the blockage had been human remains. Nilsen asked where the rest of the body was, and Jay said that was what he wanted to know. In a plastic bag in the wardrobe, Nilsen said. On the drive to Hornsey police station Jay asked whether they were talking about one body or two. Nilsen said fifteen or sixteen.
Stephen Holmes was fourteen years old. He had been out on the evening of December 30, 1978, trying to buy beer in the Cricklewood Arms, and Nilsen, who was thirty-three, took him back to his ground-floor apartment at 195 Melrose Avenue on the promise of more to drink. Both fell asleep. In the morning Nilsen strangled him with a necktie until he was unconscious and drowned him in a bucket of water, then bathed him and put him under the floorboards, where he stayed for nearly eight months before being burned on a bonfire in the garden. Stephen, who was from Kilburn and had been on his way home from a rock concert, was reported missing by his parents, and his mother, Kathleen, campaigned for years to find out what had happened to him. Nilsen described him in his confession only as a boy whose name he never knew. In 2005 detectives showed Nilsen a photograph, and he confirmed that the boy in it was his first victim; the identification was announced on January 12, 2006, too late for Kathleen Holmes, who had died about four years earlier. That November Nilsen wrote to the Evening Standard from his cell that Stephen Dean Holmes "was the first of 12 homicide victims." The Crown Prosecution Service decided a prosecution would not be in the public interest, and the boy was never on an indictment.
Kenneth Ockenden was twenty-three, a Canadian who was touring England and visiting relatives, and had a flight home booked. On December 3, 1979, he met Nilsen in the Princess Louise on High Holborn, spent the afternoon with him sightseeing, and went back to Melrose Avenue for a meal. That night, while Ockenden sat listening to records through headphones, Nilsen strangled him with the headphone cord. Two months earlier, on October 11, 1979, Nilsen had tried to strangle Andrew Ho, a student from Hong Kong whom he met in the Salisbury pub on St. Martin's Lane; Ho got away and went to the police, but no charge was brought. Ockenden was not so lucky. Nilsen kept his body in the apartment for two weeks, sitting it in an armchair, before it went under the floor. Because Ockenden was a tourist with a family expecting him, his disappearance made the newspapers, and Nilsen watched the coverage on television.
Martyn Duffey was sixteen, from Birkenhead, and had run away to London with a catering course behind him and no place to sleep. Nilsen met him at Euston station on May 17, 1980, and offered a bed. He strangled Duffey in his sleep and finished by drowning him in the kitchen sink. Duffey's family searched for him for years. Billy Sutherland was twenty-six, a Scot from Edinburgh with a young child, who had come south looking for work and had visited the Denmark Street Jobcentre where Nilsen was an executive officer; Nilsen met him again in a Piccadilly pub in August 1980, took him home and strangled him. Through the rest of 1980 and the first half of 1981 Nilsen killed, by his own account, several more men at Melrose Avenue whose names he did not know or did not ask: an Irish laborer, a hippie type, a young skinhead with a tattoo around his neck that read, he said, cut here. He gave the police enough to try to trace them and the police could not. Malcolm Barlow was twenty-four, epileptic, homeless and in and out of care. On September 17, 1981, Nilsen found him slumped against a garden wall on Melrose Avenue, called an ambulance for him and saw him taken to hospital. Barlow came back the next day to say thank you. Nilsen fed him, and when he fell asleep after mixing alcohol with his medication, strangled him. He was the last of the Melrose Avenue dead, and in the weeks before Nilsen moved out he built a final bonfire at the bottom of the garden, threw old tires on it to cover the smell, and let the local children come and watch.
He had been born in Fraserburgh on the Aberdeenshire coast on November 23, 1945, to a Scottish mother and a Norwegian soldier who left before he could remember him. He was raised largely by his grandparents, and the death of his grandfather Andrew Whyte, a fisherman, when Dennis was six, and the sight of the body laid out in the front room, was the thing he returned to all his life as the point where love and death got joined. He enlisted at fifteen and spent eleven years in the Army Catering Corps, in Aden, Cyprus, Germany and the Shetlands, and learned to butcher a carcass. He joined the Metropolitan Police in December 1972 and lasted a year. From 1974 he worked for the Manpower Services Commission, interviewing the unemployed, and became a shop steward in the civil service union, a left-wing, argumentative one who wrote long letters. He lived with a younger man, David Gallichan, at Melrose Avenue from 1975 to 1977; when Gallichan left he was alone with a mongrel named Bleep, and the following year the killing began.
In October 1981 he moved to the attic apartment at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. It had no garden and no floorboards he could lift, and he told himself that he had left the killing behind with the house. John Howlett was twenty-three, a former guardsman from High Wycombe, whom Nilsen met in a Leicester Square pub in March 1982. Howlett fought. Nilsen strangled him three times before he stopped breathing, then held his head in the bath, and carried the bruises for a week. Graham Allen was twenty-seven, from Glasgow, with a partner and a small child, when Nilsen met him hailing a taxi on Shaftesbury Avenue in September 1982 and offered him a meal. Nilsen said afterward that he could not remember the moment he strangled him; Allen was found sitting with an omelette on his lap. His body lay in the bath for three days. Stephen Sinclair was twenty, from Perth, a heroin user who had been sleeping rough and was known in the West End, and Nilsen picked him up on Oxford Street on January 26, 1983, bought him a hamburger, and strangled him on the sofa with a tie and a length of rope while he slept. He bathed the body, powdered it, arranged three mirrors around the bed and lay down beside it. Twelve days later the drain blocked.
Without a garden he had turned to the plumbing. He dismembered the three Cranley Gardens victims on the kitchen floor, boiled the heads and some of the bones in a large pot on the stove to strip them, put what he could not flush into plastic bags and tea chests in the wardrobe and under the bath, and flushed the rest a piece at a time. The building's other tenants had complained for days about the toilets. After Michael Cattran, the Dyno-Rod engineer, found the blockage and went away for the night, somebody went down the manhole and cleared most of it; Cattran and his manager came back the next morning to find the sewer almost empty and four small bones and some flesh caught in a pipe leading from the top apartment. A pathologist confirmed the flesh was human that afternoon, and the detectives were waiting when Nilsen came home from Kentish Town Jobcentre at half past five.
He talked for thirty hours across the following days, with his solicitor present, in a flat, exact voice that the officers found harder to bear than the material in the wardrobe. He took them back to Melrose Avenue and showed them where to dig. He wrote afterward, in prison, more than fifty notebooks about what he had done and why, and the best answer he gave was that he had killed for company: that he could not keep a living man and so kept dead ones, bathed them, dressed them in his clothes, sat them in the armchair and talked to them, and took them out from under the floor to look at them. Brian Masters, who corresponded with him for his book Killing for Company, took the phrase from Nilsen's own writing.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey on October 24, 1983, before Mr. Justice Croom-Johnson. He was charged with six murders, those of Ockenden, Duffey, Sutherland, Barlow, Howlett and Sinclair, and two attempted murders: of Douglas Stewart, a barman who woke in 1980 with his ankles tied to a chair and Nilsen's tie around his neck and fought him off, and of Paul Nobbs, a university student who woke at Cranley Gardens in November 1981 with a bruised throat and burst blood vessels in his eyes and was sent to see a doctor. A third survivor, Carl Stottor, gave evidence though his case was not charged: in May 1982 Nilsen had strangled him in a sleeping bag, held him under the bath, and then, finding him alive, warmed him by the gas fire, let Bleep lick him awake, and walked him to the Tube. Allen and Holmes were not on the indictment because, at that point, one could not be identified beyond the confession and the other had not been identified at all. Nilsen pleaded not guilty and the defense, led by Ivan Lawrence QC, argued diminished responsibility on psychiatric evidence of a severe personality disorder. The prosecutor, Allan Green, put it to the jury that a man who chose his victims, planned their deaths, hid the bodies, and let the survivors go when it suited him knew exactly what he was doing. On November 4, 1983, after twelve days, the jury convicted him by a majority of ten to two on all six murders and one attempted murder, and unanimously on the other. Croom-Johnson passed life sentences with a recommendation that he serve at least twenty-five years. In December 1994 the Home Secretary made the tariff whole life.
He spent thirty-five years inside, at Wormwood Scrubs, Wakefield, Whitemoor and finally Full Sutton in Yorkshire, writing constantly and fighting the Prison Service through the courts over the right to publish his autobiography, which he lost in 2003. He never claimed innocence and never asked for release. He died on May 12, 2018, at York Hospital, aged seventy-two, of a pulmonary embolism and a hemorrhage following surgery for a ruptured abdominal aneurysm, two days after being found collapsed in his cell. The inquest found neglect had not contributed. The autobiography was published later that year under the title he had given it, History of a Drowning Boy.
Eight of the dead have names. The rest were men who came to London and were not missed loudly enough for anyone to file a report that would ever be matched against a description, and it is because of them that no figure attached to Dennis Nilsen has ever been final.