Through to the death
Wilfred De'Ath
Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen "Brian Masters (Cape £10.95) Reading this masterly account of the mass murderer Dennis Nilsen, I real- ised with a sense of shock and horror that, but for the grace of God who made me hetero rather than homosexual, I might have ended up under the floorboards of 195 Melrose Avenue myself. After all, Nilsen and I drank in the same pubs — the Coleherne in Earl's Court, the Salisbury in St Martin's Lane, the William IV Ming Billy') in Hampstead — in London in the late 1970s. We even frequented the same pet shop, the Palace in Wonderland, in Willesden High Road, where I often took my children on a Saturday morning. (It was here that Nilsen bought for £10 the kidney- shaped plastic fishpond he sank into the garden, which later contained the remains of 12 of his 15 victims).
But for an aversion to the company of `lonely homosexuals' as well as to Bacardi and Coke, Nilsen's favourite tipple, and to the music of Mike Oldfield, another bait with which he lured his hapless, homeless prey, I might have found a nocturnal invitation to Melrose Avenue, NW2, or (later) to 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, too tempting to resist.
It is only part of the triumph of Mr Masters's book that he paints such an overwhelmingly accurate picture of the sad, rootless world of the homoseitual that one begins to wonder whether an equiva- lent heterosexual mass murderer could ever have got off the ground in contempor- ary London. Of Nilsen's 15 victims, only two were ever reported to the police as `missing persons', and one of those was a Canadian tourist. But for an unpleasant smell emanating from the drains at Cranley Gardens, it is not fanciful to suppose that he might have gone on for ever.
Brian Masters has come to know his grisly subject extremely well while resear- ching this book, which, of course, has all the advantages, as well as the drawbacks, one might have anticipated. The supreme advantage is that he is able to sketch Nilsen's lonely childhood and puritanical Aberdonian background in riveting, if occa- sionally revolting detail (though as so many people have this kind of background, one wonders our prisons are not stuffed with mass murderers). The drawback is that he has allowed himself to get too close to his subject, swallowed Nilsen's ghastly pseudo-intellectualism hook, line and sink- er (the murderer's dreadful poems and pathetic drawings are, in their fashion, crimes as horrendous as any he perpetrated on human beings) and generally let Nilsen `off the hook' on far too many vital points. To take one very simple example:
Talking of the death of his first victim, Nilsen says that he examined the body with his hands, and was particularly fascinated to see that part of it which is normally never seen, between the scrotum and the anus. Lovers who are relaxed and are used to exploring each other's body would find this statement odd, and may deduce that Nilsen could only have had limited sexual experience if he was a stranger to the perineum.
Pure nonsense. Speaking as one who has certainly had extensive, if not unlimited, sexual experience — with women, who presumably possess this part of the ana- tomy as well — I am most definitely a stranger to the perineum; in fact, I had to look the word up in the dictionary. Any attempt to prove that Nilsen's sexual ex- perience was somehow `limited' will simply not wash. He was, for many years, an outrageously promiscuous homosexual who actually managed to kill only a tiny percentage of his 'lovers'.
I am also inclined to agree with Dr Anthony Storr who, in an interesting post- script to the main account, suggests that Masters possibly 'underestimates the part which alcohol played in the murders. Masters writes, in fact, that `Nilsen over- estimates the power of alcohol in the commission of his crimes, but underesti- mates its symbolic significance'. I would have thought it was exactly the other waY round. It is most improbable that Nilsen would have embarked on the first murder unless he had been drunk at the time, alcohol being a notorious reinforcer of the schizoid state of mind. Once the inhibitions against murder had been overcome by these means, the other murders could be performed more easily. When the long period of remand was over, when he had finished filling 50 prison exercise books with his appalling moralis- ing and self-pity and self-justificatio when he had finally been tried and life- sentenced and was securely (we hope) locked up in Wormwood Scrubs, Nilsen was at last able to write something fairly truthful about himself: The loner has to achieve fulfilment alone within himself., All he has are his owe extreme acts. People are merely sol). plementary to the achievement of these acts. He is abnormal and he knows it.
I had always wished to kill but the oppor- tunity never really presented itself in safe conditions . . . therefore substituted by fan- tasies which had me killed in the mirrored images. I had been killing this way for years' killing my own image. The kill was only part of the whole. TO whole experience which thrilled me intensely was the drink, the chase, the social seduc- tion, the getting the 'friend' back, the deer sion to kill, the body and its disposal. The pressure needed release. I took re-
lease through spirits and music. On that high I had a loss of morality and danger feeling
. . . If the conditions were right, I would
completely follow through to the death.
That self-deception seems to me as near to the truth about Dennis Andrew Nilsen as we are going to get. He killed for company, as the book's title says, and for pleasure pure and simple. Endless psychiatric speculation, such as occurred at his trial, will not alter that fact. The trial made three perfectly competent, respect- able psychiatrists emerge as complete fools. It was the lawyers who won the day. This horrific but extremely well-written book has had the unexpected side-effect of helping me to understand, for the first, time, the case for capital punishment. Al' the 'research' that might have been done on Nilsen and his crimes has now been done by Mr Masters (the Home Office, for once, offered full co-operation) but with- out drawing any really helpful conclusions or providing any real answers. Nilsen remains the supreme enigma among murderers. He will also remain a charge on the tax payer for the next 20 or 30 years. No-one wants him to live (least of all his fellow inmates who have already made a number of determined and violent attacks on him), not even Nilsen himself. So whY not quietly and painlessly put him to sleep?
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