Dennis Nilsen was a 37-year-old civil servant, a former Army cook and police constable who worked interviewing job seekers in London, when he was arrested in February 1983. Tenants of the house in Muswell Hill, north London, where he rented the attic flat had complained that the drains were blocked. The engineer who came to clear them found human remains. Nilsen was arrested the next day and told police that the account went back to 1978 and that there had been 15 or 16 deaths.
At the Old Bailey in November 1983 he was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders. He had pleaded not guilty on the ground of diminished responsibility, and the jury rejected that defence. He was given life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve at least 25 years, and the term was later made a whole life tariff. He spent the rest of his life in prison and died in May 2018, aged 72. The number of young men he killed has never been settled. Several were never identified, and the first of them, a 14-year-old boy, was named only in 2005.
Nilsen was born on November 23, 1945, in Fraserburgh, a fishing town on the Aberdeenshire coast in the north-east of Scotland. His mother, Betty Whyte, was Scottish. His father, Olav Nilsen, was a Norwegian soldier who left the family; the Scotsman, in a 2009 profile, said he left when the boy was about four, and gave 1949 as the year the parents divorced. Betty Whyte and her three children then lived with her parents.
Her father, Andrew Whyte, became the most important adult in the boy's life. The Evening Express, an Aberdeen paper, recorded that Andrew Whyte died on October 31, 1951, a few weeks before Dennis turned six. By Nilsen's own later account, his mother took him to see the body without first explaining that his grandfather was dead. In Brian Masters' book on the case, he is quoted as saying that his troubles started there and that the experience damaged his personality for good. The Scotsman noted that Nilsen himself was the only source for this and other childhood episodes, and that the producer of a 2009 documentary about him doubted how much weight they could bear.
Another episode he described often was a near drowning. The Press and Journal dates it to 1954, when he was swept out to sea at Inverallochy beach near Fraserburgh. Nilsen later took the title of his prison autobiography, History of a Drowning Boy, from it. The family afterwards moved to the village of Strichen, inland from Fraserburgh. His mother remarried and became Betty Scott; in 1983 she was living in Strichen with her second husband, Adam Scott.
From prison Nilsen wrote letters to the Press and Journal about his childhood. He described the harbour at Fraserburgh, Kinnaird Head and summers on the beach, and he said he had never been ashamed of his Buchan accent or his working-class background. He also called questions about his childhood memories a dangerous invitation, and said he would leave out personal and emotional trauma.
In 1961, at about 15 or 16, Nilsen joined the Army, and he spent about 11 years in it as a cook. The Press and Journal says he began with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Inverness; the Scotsman's timeline lists service in the Catering Corps in South Yemen, Cyprus, Germany and the Shetland Islands, and the Evening Express adds postings at Fort George near Inverness and at Ballater. He left the Army in October 1972.
In December 1972 he joined the Metropolitan Police in London. According to Police Professional, after training he was posted to Willesden Green; he resigned after about eight months. He then joined the civil service, where he worked at a London jobcentre interviewing people looking for work. Police Professional describes his grade as acting executive officer. In November 1975 he moved into a ground-floor flat at 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, in north-west London. It had a back garden.
On December 30, 1978, Nilsen met Stephen Holmes, who was 14 and lived in Kilburn, in a pub. Stephen had been out that evening, and the Press and Journal says he was on his way home from a concert. He went back to Melrose Avenue and stayed the night after drinking heavily. The next morning Nilsen strangled him with a tie and drowned him. Nilsen later said he did it because he was afraid the boy would leave and he wanted company over New Year. He hid the body in the flat for months and then burned it in the garden.
Stephen's mother, Kathleen Holmes, reported him missing and spent years trying to find out what had happened to him. Nilsen was not charged with the boy's death in 1983 because he could not be identified. Detectives identified Stephen from a photograph in 2005, and Nilsen confirmed to them that he was the first. Kathleen Holmes had died a few years before. In November 2006 Nilsen wrote to the Evening Standard from his cell that Stephen Dean Holmes "was the first of 12 homicide victims." A Crown Prosecution Service spokeswoman told the paper that the letter could be considered if the case were formally reopened. No charge was ever brought for Stephen's death, and it is not one of the six murders of which Nilsen was convicted.
Nilsen's pattern over the next two and a half years was the same in almost every case. He met young men in pubs and bars in central London, or found them with nowhere to stay, and offered them a drink, a meal or a bed. Many of them were homeless or close to it, and some were gay. Once they were asleep or drunk, he strangled them. Because so many of the dead were people whose absence went unreported or unconnected, most of the killings at Melrose Avenue left no trace that the police could follow at the time.
Kenneth Ockenden, 23, was a Canadian on holiday in London in December 1979. He met Nilsen in a pub in the West End and went back with him to Melrose Avenue, where Nilsen strangled him on December 3, 1979, with the cord of a set of headphones. Because he was a tourist whose family expected him home, his disappearance was reported; but nothing tied it to Nilsen. Ockenden's murder was the first of the six on which Nilsen was later convicted.
Martyn Duffey was 16, from Merseyside. The Press and Journal describes a hard childhood that included time in care and on the streets, and says that when he met Nilsen in May 1980 he was trying to turn his life around. Nilsen found him at Euston station, where he had nowhere to sleep, and took him home on May 17, 1980. He strangled Martyn and drowned him. His murder was the second conviction count.
William Sutherland, known as Billy, was 26 and from Muirhouse in Edinburgh. He was divorced, had a girlfriend and a three-year-old son, and had worked before as a chef in London. In August 1980 he went south again to look for work. The Edinburgh Evening News reported that he called at the jobcentre where Nilsen worked, that Nilsen heard his Scottish accent and suggested a drink, and that when Billy said he had nowhere to go he went back to Melrose Avenue and was killed within hours. His family reported him missing in London in 1980 and did not learn that he was dead until Nilsen was arrested three years later. When police later searched the Melrose Avenue garden, they found a piece of skin with a tattoo that was linked to Billy, and his false teeth. His murder was the third conviction count.
The Press and Journal's timeline records three more killings in the three months after Martyn Duffey's death, one of them Billy Sutherland's; another, of a young Scot, in January 1981; and two more between February and April 1981. These men are among those whom Nilsen described to police but who were never identified, and none of their deaths was charged.
Malcolm Barlow was 24. He was born in Sheffield in 1957; his mother died when he was 11, and his sister, who looked after him, found him more than she could manage. He spent much of his youth in care, had epilepsy and mental health problems, and drifted to London. In September 1981 Nilsen found him unwell in the street near his home and called an ambulance, which took Malcolm to hospital. When he was discharged he came back to Melrose Avenue to thank Nilsen, who let him in, gave him a drink and strangled him after he fell asleep. Sources give the date of his death as September 18, 1981. Malcolm Barlow was the last man killed at Melrose Avenue, and his murder was the fourth conviction count. At Melrose Avenue Nilsen burned remains on bonfires in the garden.
Not every man Nilsen attacked died. In November 1980, by the Press and Journal's account, he tried to strangle a young Scottish barman, who got away and went to the police. Officers treated the complaint as a quarrel between two men who had both been drinking, and took it no further. In 1983 Nilsen was charged with two attempted murders as well as the six murders, and convicted on both; the reports do not name the two men in those counts. In 2021 the director of a Netflix documentary on the case said that the second half of his film looked at why Nilsen was able to avoid capture for so long.
In October 1981 Nilsen moved to an attic flat at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill. It had no garden. He killed again there.
John Howlett was the first. The Press and Journal says he had a record of trouble with the police, that he first met Nilsen in 1981, and that when they met again in March 1982 Nilsen took him back to Cranley Gardens and killed him. His murder was the fifth conviction count.
UPI reported at the opening of the trial that police had identified seven of the men Nilsen said he had killed, and that six of them were named in the murder counts. The seventh identified man's death was not charged.
Stephen Sinclair was 20 and from Perth. He had been fostered as a boy by a couple near Balbeggie, in Perthshire, and had moved to England a couple of years before his death; his foster father told the Press and Journal in 1983 that the family had lost touch with him. Nilsen met him on January 26, 1983, took him back to Cranley Gardens and strangled him. He was the last man Nilsen killed, and the sixth murder of which he was convicted.
At least one man survived an attack at Cranley Gardens. In May 1982 Nilsen strangled a young man in his sleep there and then revived him; the man did not go to the police because, the Press and Journal says, he believed he had dreamed what happened. His sister told reporters in 2021 that he fought for the rest of his life to stop Nilsen's memoirs from being published, and that he had died in 2013.
Without a garden, Nilsen tried to dispose of remains through the plumbing. In early February 1983 the other residents of the house complained that the drains were blocked and smelled. An engineer from Dyno-Rod, the drain clearance company, was called. When he lifted the manhole cover outside the house, he found that the drain was blocked with human flesh and small bones. UPI, reporting the prosecution's opening at the trial, gave the amount as 30 to 40 pieces.
Police arrested Nilsen the following day. The detective who led the case was Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay. On arrest Nilsen admitted what he had done and told officers there had been 16 bodies, and that it went back to 1978. In the flat police found the remains of two men in plastic bags, one in a wardrobe and one in a tea chest, and further remains in the bathroom. Nilsen then took officers to Melrose Avenue, where he showed them where he had hidden bodies under the floor and burned others in the garden. When police dug the Melrose Avenue garden, they recovered human remains and teeth. Scotland Yard described the inquiry as the biggest murder investigation in its history.
Peter Jay later recalled that throughout the interviews he looked at Nilsen in disbelief. Nilsen, for his part, later said that he could say what he had done but could not say why.
In February 1983 Nilsen was charged with the murder of Stephen Neil Sinclair and appeared in court in London. The Press and Journal, carrying the news in Scotland, noted that the accused was a 37-year-old civil servant from the north-east. His mother, then 63 and living in Strichen, told the paper that she had last seen her son ten years earlier and had last spoken to him about two weeks before.
While he awaited trial Nilsen wrote extensively about his life and the killings. The writer Brian Masters, who corresponded with him, drew on those prison notes for Killing for Company, published in 1985. The European Court of Human Rights later recorded that the book was based on notes Nilsen wrote on remand. It won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for non-fiction in 1985. Masters described Nilsen as "mad in his soul."
The trial opened at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, on October 24, 1983. Nilsen faced six counts of murder, for Kenneth Ockenden, Martyn Duffey, Billy Sutherland, Malcolm Barlow, John Howlett and Stephen Sinclair, and two counts of attempted murder, concerning two men who had survived. The National Archives holds the Central Criminal Court case file under the title "Dennis Andrew Nilsen: charged with murder and attempted murder," with plans of the premises; it is closed for 81 years.
Nilsen pleaded not guilty. The defence did not dispute that he had killed the men. It argued that he was suffering from such abnormality of mind that he was guilty only of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. Opening for the Crown, Allan Green told the jury that police had identified seven of the 15 or 16 people Nilsen said he had killed, that six were named in the indictment, and that there was no dispute that the defendant had killed each of the six men. Psychiatrists gave evidence for both sides.
Nilsen's counsel was Ivan Lawrence QC. In closing he argued that the nature of the killings showed his client must be out of his mind. In summing up, the judge told the jury that it had to decide between murder and manslaughter, and that they would almost certainly find his mind evil, but that a mind could be evil without being abnormal. The jury began its deliberations on November 3, 1983, after nine days of evidence.
On November 4, 1983, the jury convicted Nilsen of all six murders and of both attempted murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on each murder count, six life sentences in all, with a recommendation that he serve at least 25 years. Decades later Sir Ivan Lawrence told the Spectator that he believed the jury had made a mistake and that Nilsen had been plainly mad. He thought that a majority of the jurors, faced with conflicting psychiatric evidence, had been most concerned to make sure Nilsen was never released.
No appeal against the convictions was reported. In the judicial review proceedings he brought twenty years later, the High Court noted that he did not challenge his convictions or tariff.
The recommended 25-year minimum did not stand. The term was later raised to a whole life tariff, so that Nilsen would never be released. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman's report on his death attributes the increase to the Lord Chief Justice; the date of the change was not reported. By the time of the 2003 High Court ruling the court recorded simply that he was serving six life sentences subject to a whole life tariff. He was held as a Category A prisoner, the highest security category, for his whole sentence.
Nilsen served his sentence in high-security prisons. By 1996 he was at HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire, and on November 27, 2001 he was moved to HMP Full Sutton, near Pocklington in East Yorkshire, where he spent the last 16 years of his life.
In September 1992 Central Television interviewed him in prison for Murder in Mind, a programme in its Viewpoint 93 series on offender profiling. The Home Office tried to stop the broadcast, saying it had not given permission for the interview; Central said permission had been given in advance. On January 16, 1993, the decision was taken not to ban the interview, and it was shown in full that evening. In a 1993 interview Nilsen said that the bodies were all gone and that nothing was left.
He also kept writing. From about 1992 he worked on an autobiography, and by 1996 it ran to about 400 closely typed pages. That year, at Whitemoor, he gave the typescript to his solicitor, who took it out of the prison without the knowledge or consent of the prison authorities. Copies stayed outside. In 2001 a new solicitor sent a copy back to him, marked as privileged legal correspondence; the governor returned it, and in October 2002 the Prison Service refused to pass the manuscript to him, ruling that it was material intended for publication about his offences and that it did not fall within the exceptions for serious comment on crime or justice.
Nilsen challenged the decision in the courts, arguing that it breached his right to freedom of expression. On December 19, 2003, Mr Justice Maurice Kay refused his application for judicial review. The Court of Appeal, in a judgment given by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Master of the Rolls, dismissed his appeal on November 17, 2004, and refused permission to appeal to the House of Lords. The court did not accept that Masters' 1985 book made the restriction pointless; an account in Nilsen's own words, it said, would still cause public outrage. Nilsen then applied to the European Court of Human Rights. On March 9, 2010, the court unanimously declared his application inadmissible, finding the restriction lawful, aimed at legitimate ends and necessary in a democratic society.
Prison staff who gave evidence at his inquest described him as polite, independent and stubborn. One officer said he held outdated opinions, talked about himself a good deal, told stories about his time in the Army and made jokes to make staff laugh.
At Full Sutton Nilsen rarely engaged with prison healthcare. The Ombudsman's report records that he complained in 2011 about being called for a flu vaccination, refused in 2012 to go to hospital for an eye operation, declined flu vaccination every autumn from 2012, and declined NHS screening in 2014 and bowel cancer screening in 2017. On December 20, 2016, he declined screening for an abdominal aortic aneurysm, saying he did not want to engage with healthcare. The Ombudsman found that if he had accepted it, his aneurysm would probably have been found at an early stage.
On the morning of May 10, 2018, he rang his cell bell complaining of severe stomach pain. A mental health nurse saw him at 7:20 a.m., and a nurse reviewed him in the clinic at about 9:30 a.m.; his early warning score was normal. A prison GP suspected a urine infection or kidney stone and asked for a urine sample. At about 2:15 p.m. two officers found him slumped on the toilet, disoriented and barely responsive. Through the afternoon officers repeatedly contacted healthcare; the Ombudsman found that he was not reviewed for about two and a half hours and lay in his own waste, growing steadily worse. At about 4:50 p.m. the GP saw him and suspected a ruptured aneurysm. An ambulance was requested at 5:20 p.m. and reached the prison at 6:03 p.m.; it left with him at 6:52 p.m.
At York District Hospital he had emergency surgery to repair a ruptured abdominal aorta. The operation succeeded technically, but his condition worsened. He died in hospital at 9:20 a.m. on Saturday, May 12, 2018, aged 72. The Prison Service announced that he had died in custody. The post-mortem gave the cause as a pulmonary embolism and retroperitoneal haemorrhage, due to deep vein thrombosis and the repaired aneurysm rupture.
The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, Sue McAllister, found that the clinical care he received before May 10 and on the morning of that day was equivalent to what he could have expected outside prison. She was critical of what followed: poor communication between officers and healthcare staff, the failure to review him in the afternoon, and a delay of about half an hour between the GP's assessment and the request for an ambulance. Her report called the delay before paramedics reached him unacceptable and attributed it to a GP's ignorance of emergency procedures in a prison. The report could not say whether earlier action would have changed the outcome, but found that he could have been taken to hospital sooner. It made eight recommendations, among them that healthcare staff must review prisoners when officers raise serious concerns and that seriously ill prisoners must not be left without medical help.
The inquest was held at Hull Coroners' Court on October 23, 2019, before Professor Paul Marks, senior coroner for the East Riding of Yorkshire. It heard from officers, healthcare staff and the paramedic who reached him, who described him as ashen and extremely unwell. The coroner recorded a conclusion of natural causes, and said he would write to NHS England about the delays and about the level of life-support training for prison healthcare staff.
Nilsen's family had long since cut contact. His next of kin was Mark Austin, a graphic designer who began writing to him in 1991 and who, by his account to the Telegraph, exchanged more than 800 letters with him and visited him about 70 times. Nilsen left Austin his possessions, including his writings. Austin said in 2021 that he had refused to scatter Nilsen's ashes in the Melrose Avenue garden, and that he expected instead to scatter them at sea off Fraserburgh.
Austin edited the autobiography, and it was published in January 2021 under the title Nilsen had given it, History of a Drowning Boy. Reports at the time said that it described previously unknown attacks, including two further killings. Relatives of victims objected to publication. The sister of the man who survived at Cranley Gardens in 1982 called the book morally wrong. Austin said that any royalties would go to charity.
The families of the men Nilsen killed have spoken rarely, and mostly to object. In January 2020 a friend of Billy Sutherland's brother, Seaton, told the Edinburgh Evening News that the family would never come to terms with what had happened, and that a new television drama about the case was hurtful to the families of all the victims. Seaton Sutherland had earlier campaigned against the publication of Nilsen's memoirs.
The case has been retold many times. Brian Masters' Killing for Company was the basis of Des, a three-part ITV drama shown in September 2020, with David Tennant as Nilsen, Daniel Mays as Peter Jay and Jason Watkins as Masters. Netflix released Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes in August 2021, drawing on more than 250 hours of audio recordings Nilsen made in his cell and on 7,000 pages of his unedited autobiography; its director, Michael Harte, described Nilsen as an unreliable narrator whose account was often contradicted by other witnesses. A BBC Alba documentary, Dennis Nilsen: In Love With Death?, was shown in 2009.
How many men Nilsen killed is not known, and his own figures changed. On arrest he spoke of 15 or 16. At the trial the prosecution said police had identified seven of them. In his 2006 letter to the Evening Standard he wrote that there had been 12. The autobiography published in 2021 was reported to describe two killings not previously known. Of the men he admitted killing, six murders were proved in court; the death of Stephen Holmes was confirmed by identification in 2005 but never charged; one more man was identified before trial but not charged; and the rest remain unnamed.
The total. Nilsen's own figures range from 12 to 16, and reports on his autobiography suggest further deaths. None of these was tested in court, and the unnamed men remain unidentified. Only the six murders and two attempted murders are convictions.
The childhood. The accounts of his grandfather's death and his near drowning, and the weight he gave them, come from Nilsen himself. The Scotsman noted in 2009 that some who studied him believed he embellished them.
His state of mind. The jury rejected diminished responsibility, but his own counsel maintained decades later that he was mentally ill, and psychologists remain divided, according to the Scotsman.
The source of the whole life tariff. The Ombudsman's report says the Lord Chief Justice made the increase; no other report gives the date or confirms the decision maker.
The Ombudsman's findings on cause. The report could not say whether earlier hospital treatment would have saved his life.
November 23, 1945: Born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire.
October 31, 1951: Death of his grandfather, Andrew Whyte.
1961: Joins the Army; serves about 11 years as a cook, leaving in October 1972.
December 1972: Joins the Metropolitan Police; resigns after about eight months, then joins the civil service.
November 1975: Moves to 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood.
December 30, 1978: Kills Stephen Holmes, 14 (confessed; identified 2005; never charged).
December 3, 1979: Murder of Kenneth Ockenden, 23.
May 17, 1980: Murder of Martyn Duffey, 16.
August 1980: Murder of Billy Sutherland, 26.
November 1980: Attacks a barman, who reports it to police; no action is taken at the time.
September 18, 1981: Murder of Malcolm Barlow, 24.
October 1981: Moves to 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill.
March 1982: Murder of John Howlett.
May 1982: Attacks a young man who survives (not charged).
January 26, 1983: Murder of Stephen Sinclair, 20.
February 1983: Remains found in the blocked drain; Nilsen arrested the next day and charged with Stephen Sinclair's murder.
October 24, 1983: Trial opens at the Old Bailey.
November 4, 1983: Convicted of six murders and two attempted murders; life imprisonment, recommended minimum 25 years.
1985: Brian Masters publishes Killing for Company.
January 16, 1993: Central Television's prison interview is cleared and broadcast.
1996: At HMP Whitemoor, gives his autobiography typescript to his solicitor.
November 27, 2001: Moved to HMP Full Sutton.
October 23, 2002: Prison Service refuses to pass him the manuscript.
December 19, 2003: High Court refuses judicial review.
November 17, 2004: Court of Appeal dismisses his appeal.
2005: Stephen Holmes identified from a photograph.
November 2006: Letter to the Evening Standard naming Stephen Holmes as the first of 12.
March 9, 2010: European Court of Human Rights declares his application inadmissible.
December 20, 2016: Declines aneurysm screening.
May 10, 2018: Taken ill at Full Sutton; surgery at York District Hospital.
May 12, 2018: Dies in hospital, aged 72.
October 23, 2019: Inquest at Hull records natural causes; Ombudsman report published.
September 2020: ITV broadcasts Des.
January 2021: History of a Drowning Boy published.
August 2021: Netflix releases Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes.