The Subject of Murder by Lisa Downing

Author:Lisa Downing [Downing, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, General, Murder, History, Literary Criticism, Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9780226003689
Google: E9YUf7Kga0QC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-05-01T04:09:27+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

“Monochrome Man”

Dennis Nilsen

And I said: Ok. Who is this really? And the voice said:

This is the hand, the hand that takes.

This is the hand, the hand that takes.

This is the hand, the hand that takes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

’Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice.

And when justice is gone, there’s always force.

—(Laurie Anderson, “O Superman [For Massenet],” 1981)1

Dennis Nilsen (1945–), a civil servant who strangled to death at least 15 young men between 1978 and 1983 in North London, and kept their bodies around his flat for long periods of time,2 is one of the most represented faces of serial killing in a contemporary British culture fascinated by the figure of the murderer. As well as spawning the usual tabloid-esque true-crime volumes, Nilsen’s case and persona have been the basis for an avant-garde physical theatre piece, an award-winning feature-length “docudrama,” an oil painting, and a postmodern Gothic novel.3 He is therefore notable among twentieth-century murderers for being associated with alternative and high art. Added to this, Nilsen is unusual, though by no means unique, among convicted murderers in terms of the amount of self-representation and creative production, in the form of both confessional and fiction writing, classical music, and images, which he himself has produced.4 In April 1983, while on remand in Brixton Prison, Nilsen was approached by Brian Masters, a scholar of French literature turned student of murder, who offered to write Nilsen’s biography with the murderer’s help. Nilsen produced hundreds of pages of detailed confession about his childhood, sexual life, political inclinations, and crimes for Masters, as well as a collection of visual recollections of the death and disposal scenes entitled “Sad Sketches.” These textual and visual memoirs are discussed and cited at length in Masters’s study Killing for Company and have been commented on by numerous scholars.5

Since then, while serving a life sentence in prison, Nilsen has written a multivolume autobiography entitled The History of a Drowning Boy in an attempt to explicate as fully as possible the circumstances that led to his crimes. While acknowledging that Masters’s account does its best to understand his situation, the killer writes that, in the sections of the book focusing on psychology and motive, “I vanish into a muddled array of psychobabble. The human is never explained or answered.”6 Nilsen has, however, been legally prevented from publishing his work, a decision which he has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to have overturned.7 In what follows, I will investigate some potential cultural meanings of Dennis Nilsen’s inexhaustible desire to represent himself and his crimes, and I will attempt to account for the wealth of critical and artistic production that has been inspired by the persona of this particular murderer. Additionally, in a second section, I explore the discourses of homophobia that accrue to reportage of Nilsen’s case and

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