Dennis Nilsen, the "Kindly Killer": A Documentary with Clips from His Home Videos

A British documentary on Dennis Nilsen, with the detective who arrested him, a surviving victim and a friend, and short clips of Nilsen's own voice from his home videos.

Subject

Dennis Andrew Nilsen

Runtime

45:39

Content warning: Describes the murders of young men (the first a 14-year-old boy), necrophilia, dismemberment and the disposal of remains, and attempted strangulation.

The Interview

This recording is not an interview. It is a British television documentary about Dennis Nilsen, uploaded to YouTube under the misleading title "Dennis Nilsen's Chilling Confession - Real Interview". Nilsen is not interviewed and does not confess on camera. His own voice is heard only in short clips from his home videos, which the programme introduces as "the home movies of a murderer". In them he directs whoever is holding the camera, complains of being a "harassed commuter, harassed London tenant", shows a ceiling that has fallen in at his flat, and talks to his dog, Bleep. Together these clips amount to about a minute and a half. The rest of the programme is narration and interviews with the detective who arrested him, commentators, a former army colleague, a friend, and Carl Stottor, a man Nilsen tried to kill.

Historical Context

Nilsen was born in Fraserburgh, Scotland, in 1945. He served in the Army Catering Corps from 1961 to 1972, spent a year in the Metropolitan Police, and from 1974 worked as a civil servant at London job centres. Between December 1978 and early 1983 he killed at least twelve young men and boys, first at 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, and from October 1981 at a top-floor flat at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill. He met most of his victims in pubs, took them home, strangled them, and kept their bodies for days, weeks or, in some cases, months before dismembering or burning them. At Melrose Avenue he burned remains in the garden; at Cranley Gardens he flushed them into the drains.

Circumstances

On February 9, 1983, after drains at Cranley Gardens were found blocked with human remains, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay waited for Nilsen to come home from work. In the programme Jay describes the arrest, and recalls Nilsen telling officers in the police car that there were not one or two bodies but, as he put it, "16". Nilsen was convicted at the Old Bailey on November 4, 1983, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The home videos predate the murders' discovery. The programme presents them as Nilsen's own recordings; this has not been independently confirmed.

What the Interview Covers

The documentary follows Nilsen's life in order: the death of his grandfather when he was a child, which commentators link to his later association of love and death; his army years and his photographs of colleagues posing as corpses; his time in the police; his life on the London gay scene; his relationship with David Gallichan at Melrose Avenue; the first murder, which the narration places on New Year's Day 1979 (court and police accounts give December 30, 1978); and the killings that followed. Carl Stottor describes being strangled and then revived by Nilsen in 1982. A friend recalls waking to find Nilsen straddling him with a knife beside a fallen gas heater, and Nilsen's agitation on the friend's last visit to his flat. The programme ends by asking whether Nilsen was "born to kill"; its commentators disagree.

What Makes the Recording Significant

The home-video clips let viewers hear Nilsen in ordinary, everyday moments at home. The programme shows them alongside its account of Melrose Avenue, where most of the killings took place, but does not date them. They are not about his crimes. Alongside them, the programme records first-hand accounts by the arresting detective and by a man who survived an attack.

Archival Importance

Recordings of Nilsen's own voice are uncommon. The best-known, his prison audio tapes, were used in Netflix's "Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes" (2021) and do not appear here.

Important Caveats

The uploader's title is misleading: there is no interview and no confession. The passage at the end of the programme beginning "It amazes me that I have no tears for these victims" is a reading of Nilsen's written words, not a recording of Nilsen speaking; the reader is not identified. Words of Nilsen's quoted by DCI Jay are Jay's recollection. That the home-video voice is Nilsen's rests on the programme's presentation. The narration calls Nilsen "the most prolific serial killer in British history"; that was a 1980s perception and is not correct (Harold Shipman killed far more). The narration also says Nilsen took the lives of 15 young men; he was convicted of six murders, and estimates of his victims range from 12 to 15. The narration dates his meeting with David Gallichan to 1976; other accounts give November 1975. The programme's producer, broadcaster and date are not identified.

Dennis Nilsen: I can't understand you. I asked you to start filming from the feet, slowly up to the head, and you [unclear: "were set for set plan" / "go sit pan"]. Bloody hell, don't you ever watch movies? You've seen thousands of movies. You must know what it's like. They're training chimpanzees [unclear: "is a kid" / "a kick canal"] to operate a camera. Anybody can do it.

Narrator: These are the home movies of a murderer.

Dennis Nilsen: Can you go back a bit? I mean, you're far too near.

Narrator: A man who in the 1980s would be uncovered as the most prolific serial killer in British history.

Dennis Nilsen: And you ain't seen nothing yet.

Narrator: A civil servant whose extraordinary behaviour would see him named, with cruel irony, the Kindly Killer.

Dennis Nilsen: Batteries have run out. That's why the camera went up the creek. Okay, fair enough. If you think you know how to use [unclear: "that" / "it"], all you do is point it down and then you press the button.

Narrator: But was this murderer of young men driven by nature or nurture? Was the Kindly Killer born to kill?

Dennis Nilsen: Cut. [00:58 to 01:27: music; no speech]

Dci Peter Jay: In the early winter of 1983, we had a problem arise in the Muswell Hill area of London. It was initiated by us receiving a call for a blocked toilet.

Narrator: Number 23, Cranley Gardens, had been split into flats and bedsits. The residents had experienced problems with the plumbing for days.

Dci Peter Jay: An engineer at the time went to attend the blocked toilet, cleared the toilet, but did remark to us afterwards that he'd never smelt such a bad smell in an apartment before in his life.

Narrator: Still, lavatories at the property continued to block.

Dci Peter Jay: A plumber was sent around very urgently on Saturday morning, and he looked down in the drains beneath the house, and he saw what he knew was not what should be there.

Narrator: He observed what he said looked like some butcher's prepared meat and a few bones. He discovered that what was blocking the toilets was actually human flesh.

Dci Peter Jay: On the 9th of February 1983, sitting in my office, minding my own business, and suddenly got a phone call from Peter Slade, who was the early-turn uniform inspector, and he asked me if I'd go up to Cranley Gardens. He had a bit of a problem up there, and I just got into the CID car and drove up there. I always remember it was bitterly cold, it had been snowing, and we stood outside this awful house and looked down the pit where the drains were, and he showed me four little pieces of flesh, each about three inches by half an inch, maybe an inch, and also three bones with a knuckle at each end. And my first thought when I saw them was that they were from a human hand.

Dci Peter Jay: The drains were blocked over halfway up the building, so we knew that the blockage was originating from the very top.

Narrator: The top flat was [unclear: "a" / "of"] 37-year-old executive officer at a nearby job centre, Dennis Andrew Nilsen. He was due to return from work at 5.30.

Dci Peter Jay: When my two colleagues and I walked up to the front door of the place in order to wait for him inside, we had no idea what we were going to find. We knew we had a killer, but we didn't know what he'd done. Nilsen walked in bang on cue at [unclear: "Huppers 5" / "Hus 5"], and leading up to that, I had been thinking for two or three hours about what I was going to face. I knew that for someone to have flushed a dead body down the loo in small pieces, it was going to be somebody a little bit different. When Nilsen came in through that front door, I'd already made a decision to be very light-hearted with him. And I remember saying to him, Mr Nilsen, and he said, yes, that's me, and I said, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Jay, I've come about your drains. And a little smile came across his face and he said, well, since when have police been interested in blocked drains? And I said to him, well, you take me up in your flat and I'll tell you all about it.

Dci Peter Jay: The first thing that caught me was the smell of decomposing flesh. I said to him, I'm here because your drains were blocked with human remains. And he said, oh, my God, how awful. And I just got a little bit closer to him, face to face, looked him straight in the eyes and said, don't mess me about. Where's the rest of the body? And he just paused momentarily and he said, in plastic bags in the other room.

Narrator: Nilsen was immediately arrested and taken to the station for questioning.

Dci Peter Jay: My deputy, Detective Inspector Steve McCusker, sat in the back of the police car and I drove. And I don't know what prompted Steve to do this, but he suddenly said to Nilsen, are we talking about one body here, or maybe two? And Nilsen said, neither. He said, I think it's 16. Well, I can remember the steering wheel in the car sort of shaking in my hands.

Commentator: The police [unclear: "hardly believed there he is" / "hardly could believe there is"], because this was all said in a very matter-of-fact voice. Very dispassionate. Why dispassionate? Because this is a man without passion. His only passion came when he was in a murderous impulse, when he was overtaken by the other self.

Narrator: In Nilsen's wardrobes were two black plastic bags and several air fresheners. The bags contained dismembered body parts and two severed heads. In a tea chest was found another torso, bones and a skull. Under a drawer in the bathroom were legs and a pelvis. It constituted the remains of three men. In the garden of an address in Cricklewood, investigators would identify the fragmented remains of at least eight more.

Dci Peter Jay: He told me off the record that if it hadn't have been 15, it would have been 150 if we hadn't caught him when we did, because there was no stopping. The whole thing was just totally bizarre.

Narrator: Dennis Nilsen was born in 1945 in Fraserburgh, a remote fishing community in north-east Scotland. His mother's family had lived there for generations. His father was a visiting Norwegian soldier.

Commentator: He was one of three children, the middle child. He had an older brother, a younger sister. He never really knew his father.

Commentator: Nilsen, as a child, was a bit of a loner. He didn't really have friends because everybody thought he was a bit odd. His mother said she could never cuddle him. He didn't have tactile relationships with anyone except his grandfather.

Commentator: Nilsen's father is absent from the household, and so he had formed a bond with his grandfather. They would walk together, fish together, and so forth.

Narrator: The boy's grandfather would often be away for weeks at a time, trawling the fishing grounds of the North Sea.

Commentator: One day, he came home from school, and his mother said to him, oh, do you want to see your granddad? He said, oh, he didn't know he was there even, so he was very pleased about that. And he went into the kitchen, and there on the kitchen table was a long box. And in it was his grandfather. Nobody had prepared him for the fact that he was dead.

Narrator: Nilsen's grandfather had died at sea, and his corpse had been brought home for burial.

Commentator: He had this picture in his mind imprinted of seeing his grandfather white as a sheet. And I think that affected him deeply.

Commentator: Nilsen would later say that when he saw his grandfather laid out in the front sitting room after his grandfather's death, that this was when Nilsen first began to associate love with death, an inert body.

Commentator: From that moment, I'm convinced, I can't prove it, but I'm convinced that his idea of love and his idea of death fused and became linked, inextricably linked. When his mother said to him, your granddad's gone to a better place, he, the little boy aged six, thought, well, if he's gone to a better place, why didn't he take me with him? Would sometimes even go out into the sea and simulate drowning as a means of being with him.

Narrator: Aged 15, Nilsen would leave his home behind.

Commentator: Nilsen would join the army. Specifically, he joined the Catering Corps, which is, of course, where he'd learned his butchering skills, skills that were going to be put to use in a different context when he's back in civilian life.

Narrator: In 1983, the discovery of human flesh blocking the drains of 23 Cranley Gardens had led to the arrest of civil servant Dennis Nilsen. He claimed to have taken the lives of at least 15 young men. Investigators learned that he'd had a lonely childhood, punctuated by the death of a beloved grandfather. At 15 years old, he joined the Army Catering Corps. Early on, the young Nilsen would stand out from his fellow new recruits.

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Former Army Colleague: He was quite argumentative, in as much as not picking an argument in a nasty sort of way, but if you said that photograph is black and white, [unclear: "you didn't know he was saying" / "even though he was saying"] it was white and black, and so forth. He was quite [unclear: "contrary" / "contrarious"] as a person, really. We used to sit listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones. We'd read the Parade magazines, which are like girly magazines of the day, and he'd probably be reading broadsheets, and he'd also listen to classical music. I remember there was once a scrap in the [unclear: "barrack room" / "bar room"], and I think he scratched and slapped. He didn't thump like the rest of us. I remember somebody saying, oh, you're Nilsen, you're weird.

Narrator: The teenage Nilsen harboured a secret.

Commentator: What's interesting about the army experience is that it would have been impossible for Nilsen to have shared the fact that he was gay with any of his colleagues.

Former Army Colleague: Basically, they just didn't accept homosexuals at all. So if somebody was gay, they'd keep very, very quiet about it.

Narrator: During his time in the army, Nilsen began a lifelong interest in photography.

Commentator: He maintained it was his hobby, photography, but it was much more important than a hobby. It was self-realisation. He used to get his colleagues in the army to pretend that they were corpses, as if they'd been slain in battle, and he would take photographs of that. They thought this was a bit odd, but they went along with it.

Narrator: Nilsen would spend 11 years in the armed forces Catering Corps, rising to the rank of corporal.

Former Army Colleague: I think he was a bit of a bully underneath, with his rank, you know, once he was in charge of a room sort of thing. I think he tended to bully a bit.

Narrator: But just before his 27th birthday, Nilsen would reject the familiarity and order of army life and strike out on his own. In 1970s London, he found a thriving gay scene.

Commentator: He's living in a large urban metropolitan area where clearly there are gay pubs that he would be able to visit for the first time.

Friend Of Nilsen: People were more friendly back then. People were very chatty, and life in London was exciting at that time. He wasn't a bad-looking man, and he seemed quite educated, quite good to talk to.

Commentator: He chooses his words well, fluently, but after a few minutes you realise that he's not talking to you or with you, but he's talking to himself, because he doesn't pay attention to anything except what he himself is saying.

Dennis Nilsen: What are you doing switching the bloody thing on and off for? You'll never make a cameraman, you know.

Dennis Nilsen: No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to do anything pornographic.

Narrator: Nilsen joined the Metropolitan Police.

Commentator: This is not unusual for these individuals to seek out a profession of authority, whether it's a police officer or some other civil-servant-type job, where they could have control over someone else. This is what is so stimulating to them.

Commentator: He's living a double life. He's living a life of the police constable, but at the same time, he's also living a double life, talking about being able to express his sexuality. And of course, that inevitably would lead to conflict.

Narrator: After 11 months, Nilsen tired of the police and quit. He was also becoming disillusioned with the transient nature of the gay scene and began to seek more permanent companionship.

Commentator: What he was looking for was a relationship, somebody to share his life with.

Friend Of Nilsen: He didn't go out to find companionship in the club. You just went out to pick up. That's what generally people did. They weren't there for an affair or a relationship. They just wanted a one-night stand.

Narrator: He got a job with Manpower Services in the heart of the West End, but the opinionated young Scot struggled to bond with anyone.

Commentator: He's not somebody who's going to make friends very easily. He's not somebody who's going to be the life and soul of the party. He's far too self-centred. He's far too self-obsessed.

Dennis Nilsen: Harassed commuter, harassed London tenant, being screwed by the Department of Employment, London Transport, big chain stores, supermarkets. [pause] [unclear: "Can you, all right, come now, let me think."]

Commentator: So he's got this quite isolated existence, in which he finds it difficult to make friends, in which it's very difficult for him to socialise in any normal way, and that isolation would mean that he would return to his home and lose himself in alcohol.

Friend Of Nilsen: He was a drunk, frankly. I'm not sure he was alcoholic, but he did like to get drunk.

Dennis Nilsen: Beer I cannot stand. I got it [unclear: "for free at the bottle party" / "from create the bottle party"].

Home Video, Second Voice: No.

Narrator: And he would listen intently to music.

Commentator: Nilsen was more at ease with machines and objects than he was with people. So music was a way of controlling what was being heard. You can't control a person. You can't control what he's going to say and how he's going to react and how he's going to respond. But you can control the record player.

Narrator: In 1976, Nilsen meets a young drifter called David Gallichan.

Commentator: Gallichan is unemployed and living in a hostel. And although they're seemingly unsuited, Nilsen seeks out a flat for them both to set up home together.

Home Video Voices: Please. / Yeah. Okay. Come on in a minute. I've got to sign on. / I am going to sign on today. What's going on again? / Where's that bloody dog? He's been chewing my slippers again. / Here it is. [unclear: "Chew your slippers. I give it." / "Join us for the first time, give it."] I'll wring his bloody neck if I catch it again.

Friend Of Nilsen: Melrose Avenue was a very old kind of building. It had lots of furniture in it that [unclear: "let's have" / "if had"] been bought during the war, really. It was quite old. The carpets weren't very nice, and it was quite a run-down building.

Dennis Nilsen: Ten past one last night. [unclear: "Sun asleep" / "Some asleep"]. [unclear: "TR"] over there. Me here. What happens? Crash. Bang. What? Have a look. Move the camera up there. Have a look at that. Right. Look at the state of that. Whole bloody ceiling falls down. [unclear: "Pours down on me"] for a start. Rips straight across. Hits the dog. Poor old [unclear: "push" / "pooch"]. [unclear: "Bludgy"] goes up. Big row. And it wakes you up as well. Great chunks. Bloody great chunks of masonry. I mean, they could kill somebody. Listen to that.

Friend Of Nilsen: They had French windows which led into a garden. Nobody from upstairs could get into the garden. Only he had the entrance, through the French windows.

Home Video Voices: You're a big [unclear: "Neelkampu" / "noo"]. Over here. / Over here. / Over here. Stand up. / How long do you think it'll take me to dig the garden? Don't stand there with your hand on your head [unclear: "feeling" / "looking"] a big p---. / I can't give you [unclear].

Narrator: But Nilsen's overpowering and controlling nature would drive a wedge between the companions.

Dennis Nilsen: Oh, come on. Where's [unclear: "every"] bloody tea? [unclear: "Then tears."]

Friend Of Nilsen: David Gallichan walked out on him after about 18 months. And that really hurt Nilsen, I'm sure it did.

Commentator: By virtue of the fact that he bored everyone, and they all left him.

Commentator: So the thing he's searching for is companionship, a relationship, and it's the one thing that psychologically, sociologically, he's not set up to be able to do.

Dennis Nilsen: You're a [unclear: "big" / "great"] pillock, Twinkle. [laughter]

Friend Of Nilsen: And then he used to invite more and more people back, hoping that someone would stay. He did ask me to move in, but I said, I don't think I can put up with you and the bottle. The bottle comes between us. It's too much of it. You've got to stop that. If you stopped it, you'd be a lovely, decent guy to live with. But he couldn't stop that. He couldn't stop that. He seemed to be very into himself. It was all him, him, him. He never hardly asked anything about me.

Dennis Nilsen: [unclear: "I don't mind" / "Mind"], anything good you find in this kitchen is probably attributed to my having [unclear: "practice there" / "puck this day"] in the first place. Bloody light doesn't even go on. Can you go back a bit? I mean, you're far too near. Let's...

Narrator: The lonely Nilsen increasingly took refuge in his morbid private fantasies.

Commentator: He used to lie on the floor in front of a mirror and put blue on his lips and make his eyes look bloodshot. And he got satisfaction out of regarding himself in the mirror in that way. Not, I don't think, an emotional satisfaction, but a deep requirement of his nature, which was obviously perverted.

Friend Of Nilsen: He would make out he passed out and would fall to the floor. And then you'd go rushing up to him, and he'd just be laying there. But I actually know that he wasn't asleep. He wasn't out. He wasn't passed out. He was awake. And he would stay there, he would stay there, and you'd sit down, you could, you could cook a meal, you could watch [unclear: "Dolly Widgeon" / "del"], [unclear] still be there. But I know that he wasn't asleep. You just know. And it would be in this position of a kind of arms-outstretched position. I believe he was pretending to be dead.

Narrator: All the while, Nilsen continued to play the role of the unremarkable civil servant.

Commentator: He gets up in the morning, he's a civil servant, he goes to work, he comes home at night, he tends his garden, he cooks for himself, he has a dog which he calls Bleep.

Dennis Nilsen: Bleep. Come on. Come on, Bleep. Say something.

Commentator: So there's a sense in which these are the banality, the ordinariness, of suburban life.

Dennis Nilsen: [unclear: "Bloody finger"], you great pillock.

Commentator: But of course, Nilsen doesn't really have a sense of how an ordinary life is actually what most people experience, because Nilsen wants to be extraordinary.

Narrator: On New Year's Day 1979, 33-year-old Dennis Nilsen woke up next to a teenager he'd met in a pub the night before. The lonely Manpower Services employee later claimed he couldn't face the thought of the sleeping boy leaving.

Commentator: There came a moment when the murderer's impulse to keep this man, not to let him go, overtook him.

Narrator: Nilsen took a tie, wrapped it around the boy's neck and pulled.

Commentator: He was astonished at his strength. At the moment of the murder, he was amazed at how strong he was, because he was not normally a very strong man. Once the murder had occurred and Nilsen had before him a corpse, he then, in a very peculiar fashion, looked after the corpse.

Narrator: Now, for the first time, Dennis Nilsen had the means to live out his darkest and most secret fantasies.

Commentator: He would run a bath, he would bathe it, clean it, he would then make it comfortable, he would dry it, put it into the bed, put it into an armchair.

Narrator: Nilsen lived with the corpse for a week. He then placed the naked body under the floorboards, where it remained for almost eight months.

Commentator: If you have this body, you have to find some way to get rid of it, and you certainly don't want it to be identified as quickly as you possibly can.

Commentator: Nilsen was efficient. He couldn't relate to a person emotionally, but he could relate to a corpse as something that had to be disposed of. It was a problem that had to be solved. That's much easier than dealing with people and their emotions.

Narrator: Nilsen's garden would provide the solution. He burned his body in the garden of Melrose Avenue, obliterating him and spreading his ashes to the four winds. It was not until 2005 that the victim would be identified as 14-year-old Stephen Holmes. His murder would prove to be merely the beginning.

Commentator: I think the first murder that any serial killer commits is always the revealing murder. He enjoyed doing it, and I think it's that enjoyment that he got from that first murder that propelled him to kill again and again and again.

Commentator: Well, this is Soho, and the heart of Soho, Old Compton Street, and this is the area that Nilsen used to favour. He'd come out in his spare time to this kind of area, and to gay pubs in particular, in order to make contact with people. So he had contact with a lot of youngsters who were coming to London thinking the streets were paved with gold, and who were probably of no fixed abode, may have run away from home, dropouts, that kind of person. The people that Nilsen went to meet were people he [unclear: "instinctively" / "stick with"], with an uncanny knack, recognised as people who were lonely and would be most likely to accept an invitation to go home.

Commentator: Often there is no record of these people being reported as missing. And therefore, he's tackling a particularly vulnerable group that many other serial killers target.

Narrator: While living at Melrose Avenue, Dennis Nilsen would pick up and strangle to death a further 11 young men.

Commentator: If you strangle someone, you feel it, you can touch it. You just grab whatever is at hand and pull.

Commentator: I have always suspected that Nilsen would strangle the people that he really didn't want to go at midnight or one o'clock in the morning, the ones that he wanted to stay. The ones he didn't particularly want to be with, they'd just go at the end of the night.

Commentator: That may be true to some extent, but I would look at it in a very different way. I would say that he wanted the bodies to be there because it assured him how in control he was of other people. This is what is arousing to an individual like Nilsen, to be in complete control and domination of others.

Narrator: Nilsen used the bodies of his victims sexually and in other ways.

Commentator: Nilsen wanted to stay close to these bodies, almost as if they were a form of trophy. He wants to express his power, his complete and utter domination of these young men, even after they're dead.

Commentator: After he killed them, he would sometimes bring them out and put them in a chair and have conversations with them as if they were still alive.

Commentator: They can watch television with him. He can talk to them. He even would go so far as to come home from work and find the corpse sitting in the same armchair that he'd left him in that morning, and saying to him, guess what happened to me today?

Commentator: So this was a substitute for real human company. Nilsen is so self-obsessed, so desperate for his opinion to be the only opinion that counts and matters, he finds it easier to relate, to have a conversation with a dead young man who isn't capable of answering back.

Commentator: He would then keep the corpse for quite a few days, until they became unbearable. He would eviscerate them. He would put into the garden the spleen and stuff, which might be, proved impossible to live with, and then put what was left of the corpse under the floorboards.

Commentator: An obsessive-compulsive personality, where somebody is attuned to details and orderliness and so on, is very common in prolific serial killers, because that personality trait will help them elude law enforcement. They're aware of forensic evidence, they'll clean things up meticulously, and so on.

Narrator: Ultimately, the bodies that were serving as Nilsen's companions would become an annoyance to him.

Commentator: They were in the way. He needed to get rid of them for a variety of reasons. Firstly, they'd smell. Also, they were an annoyance to him because he keeps wanting to bring more live young men back to his flat.

Friend Of Nilsen: I would actually stay there for the night, or maybe for the weekend, or whatever. All I can say is that the smell, the smell from Melrose Avenue, which you put down to dry rot or whatever, [unclear: "rising down" / "rising d"], I don't know, animal smells. It smelt awful. It really smelt nasty. [unclear: "But nothing other than this really stood out" / "Nothing other than this weirdest headache"]. Nothing at all.

Narrator: With no further room under the floorboards, the decomposing corpses were removed, cut into manageable pieces and taken into the garden.

Commentator: In the middle of the night, he would have a huge bonfire in his garden, burning the remains, disguising the smell with rubber tyres. And the local children came and danced around the bonfire because they thought it was all rather fun, having not the faintest idea what was going on, really.

Narrator: Dennis Nilsen had murdered and disposed of 12 young men without arousing suspicion. In 1981, he moved to a new address, where his behaviour would become increasingly more bizarre.

Narrator: Between 1979 and 1981, civil servant Dennis Nilsen had murdered and disposed of 12 young men at his flat in Cricklewood. In October of '81, he moved to a rented top-floor flat at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, where his disturbed fantasies would take a new twist. 21-year-old Carl Stottor met the seemingly kind and friendly Nilsen at the Black Cap in Camden.

Carl Stottor: He, um, took me back to his place. He was a nice guy. He didn't have murderer tattooed across his face or anything like that. He was nice. And I slept with him.

Commentator: What he did was first of all attack him from behind with a tie and throttle him.

Carl Stottor: He killed me. He strangled me.

Carl Stottor: He thought he was dead, but he wasn't. And then he drowned me in a bath and walked out,

Commentator: got himself a rum and Coke and lit another cigarette and said to himself, oh my God, here we go again. As if this had been done by somebody else.

Commentator: He described it as being almost in a trance, that he was doing this act without even realising that he was doing it. And that's fairly typical. Serial murderers will talk about almost waking up and realising that, oh my gosh, what are they doing?

Commentator: When he realised the man was alive, he then got extra blankets out. He rubbed his legs to get the blood circulating properly. He put on an extra fire.

Carl Stottor: Heart massage, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He brought me back to life, and I was there for three days.

Commentator: You've got a classic example of Nilsen initially killing, trying to kill, believing he's killed the victim, but then realising that the young man is actually still alive, and then Nilsen going into Good Samaritan mode, trying to help the young man get better. Nilsen is able to kind of inhabit a kind of parallel universe in which he no longer sees himself as being someone who's doing wrong, but actually can interpret his actions as somebody who's doing good.

Carl Stottor: He told me that, um, what happened was I got caught up in the sleeping bag [unclear: "zip" / "set"], and that was it. And I believed him, because you don't think that somebody's going to try and kill you. Anyway, he did.

Narrator: Carl Stottor would not be the only recipient of Nilsen's Good Samaritan act. At least three more young men would be strangled and then allowed to live. The attacks would remain uninvestigated by the police.

Commentator: Most of the police would say, well, you were in a bondage game, and it's your fault, you participated. And the absolute humiliation of saying, oh, gosh, I don't want to be known for this kind of behaviour, really protects the serial murderer.

Narrator: It appears Nilsen's odd behaviour was not only reserved for strangers.

Friend Of Nilsen: I fell asleep on the floor. I wouldn't get into the bed. I woke up, and he was straddled over me. He had what I call an apple knife. But behind him, there was smoke, and there was a gas heater that used to be on the wall had apparently fallen off. Now, I couldn't possibly have knocked that off with my feet. And it was quite bad. The room was full of smoke. And I said, what's the knife for? He said he was trying to cut it, trying to get it right off the wall in case there was an explosion. And I'm positive that when I went to sleep, that gas fire wouldn't have been on, because he was already asleep, and because it was quite a very mild night. That's all I remember thinking. But then again, thought no more of it. I have to believe that he was going to do something. He was trying to asphyxiate me.

Narrator: But not everyone would escape with their lives.

Commentator: With every serial murderer, although they start out slowly, they then become more frenetic, and they will start killing a lot more people, a lot more close in time. The addiction becomes so overwhelming that the corpses pile upon one another.

Narrator: At Cranley Gardens, three men would suffer the same fate as the 12 at Melrose Avenue. But unlike his previous residence, Nilsen's top-floor flat had no space under the floorboards.

Commentator: He would boil their skulls to get all the flesh off. And then he would chop them up into little bits. To him, the people were just about the same and equivalent to the meat he was chopping up in the army. Had absolutely no reason or meaning emotionally to him. It was just something he did.

Narrator: [unclear: "Part" / "Half"] of one was under the bath. Pieces of another were in the wardrobe in black bags.

Friend Of Nilsen: On the day that I went back there, on the very last day, and he wouldn't let me into the flat, he was in the strangest mood I've ever seen him in. He was completely flustered. And I couldn't, I couldn't understand what was happening. And the dog ran down the stairs, and he said, hold the door, but don't go in. And I thought, charming. I thought, I've known you all this time, you won't let me into your flat. I said, he doesn't trust me, obviously. So he brought the dog back up, and he said to me, [unclear: "you didn't go in" / "he didn't go in"]. I said, no, I'm just standing here, aren't I? And I couldn't work that out.

Narrator: Nilsen's desperate efforts at disposal would be his undoing. On the 9th of February, blocked drains would lead to his discovery and arrest.

Newsreader: Scotland Yard launched its biggest murder investigation today after a pathologist confirmed that human remains found in a sewer outlet were parts of three bodies.

Friend Of Nilsen: For some strange reason, the minute they said Muswell Hill, they gave no address, they gave nothing, I seemed to know that this is him, it's him. I don't know why I would think that. And then an hour later, I was listening more intently, and then they said, in Cranley Gardens, and it was the house. [unclear: "I've"] ... Could you stop it a second? Yeah.

Narrator: In custody, Nilsen would describe the murder of 15 young men in minute detail.

Commentator: He saw no reason to get worked up about it. All right, if you've arrested me, you've arrested me, so let's get on with it.

Dci Peter Jay: Nilsen gave us every bit of information that he could think of. I mean, we interviewed him 16 times over the next few months. Throughout the interviews, Nilsen was totally matter-of-fact, quite cold. There was no remorse. There was no indication of any remorse at all.

Narrator: In November, Dennis Nilsen was sentenced to life imprisonment. Over a four-year period, he had taken the lives of 15 young men. But was the so-called Kindly Killer born to kill?

Commentator: Dennis Nilsen was clearly born with a gene which was flawed and which was bound to cause problems in one way or another, just as some people are born with a gene which makes them prone to anger or to jealousy. Nobody is born with an inevitability about his future. The future is shaped by the experience. It may shape the gene which is flawed, but that is not the same thing as saying that there is evil inherent. So Nilsen could have turned out to be a completely different person, not a stable person, because of the inherited gene. He would still be flawed, but he need not have become a murderer. The idea that he was born evil is nonsense.

Commentator: He was brought up in relatively banal, ordinary circumstances. There were certain elements of his life which were odd or which were difficult for him to overcome. But the circumstances of his childhood, and the trials and tribulations of his childhood, were not something that were unique to Dennis Nilsen, but were common to many hundreds of thousands of young people. And if Dennis Nilsen was born to kill, so would those hundreds of thousands of young people who had similar circumstances that they had to deal with when they were growing up. So, no, I don't believe that Dennis Nilsen was born to kill.

Commentator: You can be born with the flaw, which you've got to keep under control. If you don't keep it under control, it's your fault.

Friend Of Nilsen: I don't think he was born to kill, but certain circumstances made him that way. Des was an [unclear: "Equaphyliac" / "equiliac"]. He was a control freak. I think if he couldn't get what he wanted from a person, like some nights he couldn't with me, then he would, if he wanted it, and he was drunk, and he was in the mood for it, and I mean sex, then he would do something to get it, go out of his way to get it. He would, whatever it took.

Commentator: I think all of these people are to a large degree born to kill. It's a biopsychosocial problem, but biology, in my judgement, has a very large component. We don't know exactly what the specific biology or neurobiological problem is, whether it's genetic or hormonal, chemical, electrical, brain damage, a combination of factors. But there has to be a number of things to go wrong in order for a serial sexual murderer to be created.

Narrator: Nilsen himself claimed to have wrestled to find a reason for his crimes.

Reading Of Nilsen'S Written Words: It amazes me that I have no tears for these victims. I have no tears for myself [unclear: "of" / "or"] those bereaved by my actions. Am I a weak person, constantly under pressure, who just couldn't cope with it, and escapes to wreak revenge against society through the haze of a bottle of spirits? Or maybe it's because I was just born an evil man.

Commentator: Self-serving crap. For me, this is just specious nonsense, self-serving nonsense, to try and justify his behaviour. ---