Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer by Coffey Russ

Author:Coffey, Russ [Russ Coffey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781782197195
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2013-09-03T14:00:00+00:00

At the end of 1973, at the age of 27, Nilsen decided to go no further with the police. A rumour exists that he was informally asked not to continue after a colleague reported him for masturbating in the morgue, but there isn’t much evidence to support the claim. Nilsen says he just felt he was in the wrong business. He wanted to have fun, but had found the police force to have been full of bigots. He now just wanted to be a normal citizen.

During the winter of 1973-74, the UK was in the midst of a depression. The pop group Slade might have been celebrating their huge hit, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, but elsewhere an oil crisis had just ended and the three-day week was about to start.

Nilsen, however, was feeling optimistic. Just before Christmas, he moved into 9 Manstone Road, a sub-let bedsit in a Victorian house just off Cricklewood Broadway (another mixed suburb with a large Irish immigrant community). Despite Nilsen’s initial sense of hopefulness, the festive period soon became lonely. His only company came from occasional trysts in bars. He wrote to his mother as he did periodically throughout the year, but had no other contact with his family. There were no friends to give him support, or to give him an injection of normality or common sense.

In the first week of January, the Labour Exchange found Nilsen a job as a security guard for the Department of the Environment. Compared to the police, it was straightforward. Mainly, it just involved patrolling various government buildings in different parts of town. In one office in the Shell building, next to Waterloo, he found a book on toxicology. Two photographs brought home to Nilsen his increasing sexual interest in dead bodies. One was an image of a boy who had died of drowning; the other was a colour photo of a boy with rigor mortis. By a trick of the light, his flesh tones suggested that he was still alive. That photograph made Nilsen realise that he could be ‘frantically aroused’ by the idea of someone being at the ‘dividing line between life and death’. He contemplated stealing the book. As he writes about this, his prose becomes even more direct and confessional.

Another story from this period also rings true, even though it is utterly bizarre. It finds Nilsen trying to act out his ‘old man fantasy’ with a dead gorilla. It was in the warehouse of the Natural History Museum, and the gorilla was stuffed. Nilsen was again working as a security guard. He was patrolling one night when he came across the animal, which, with its false eyes, looked alive to him. More importantly to Nilsen, the dead primate looked ‘powerful’.

Nilsen had recently dyed his hair blonde, and thought he looked young, Aryan and pretty. The contrast between himself and the gorilla provided just the frisson he enjoyed. Looking at the gorilla, Nilsen says his heart beat harder and harder until he could no longer resist the urge to strip off.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.