Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

I think this recording machine

might be under some kind of strain.

Speech oscillates from one speaker to the next.

Anyway, let's begin the recording proper.

My name is Dennis Nilsen .

My companions, as you can hear,

are a couple of mating budgies, Hamish and Tweetles.

He's a good boy, Hamish.

I sit here,

smoking a Scaferlati roll-up cigarette.

Oh dear.

Yeah, we are ruining our healths-ssss .

Well, we've all gotta die of something, haven't we?

This morning, a friendly screw kindly lent me his News of the World,

an amusement sheet posing as a newspaper...

and he brought to my attention page 21.

" Dennis Nilsen makes a sick joke of his crimes

by having pinned up in his cell

a poster of The Silence of the Lambs star Hannibal Lecter. "

"And he believes that one day,

his grisly exploits will be immortalized in a film."

End of story.

What a load of rubbish!

Good evening. Scotland Yard launched its biggest murder investigation today...

...after the discovery of bodies in London.

In the next few hours,

the scale of this crime will begin to unfold.

Well, what is this article's accuracy?

Oh yes, I was definitely convicted for murder.

Eh, but apart from that, most of the stuff is just pure fiction.

The prosecution alleged a pattern of murder.

The public gallery of No. 1 Court has been full every day.

Those who'd expected to hear horrors were not disappointed.

Great. "Des Nilsen, the monster."

"Oh, Nilsen." As soon as you mention the name,

people have made their mind up about it.

Dennis Nilsen, the man who once called himself

"the murderer of the century"...

They are still trying to plug this image

of the dangerous creature so beloved of fiction,

the movie monsters.

Now Nilsen wants to publish his autobiography

from behind prison bars.

It's a tale beyond comprehension.

Right, let's go!

London, 1983.

Good afternoon to you.

Well, it's decidedly parky to say the least.

And, in fact, it's not gonna get any warmer, really, in the next few days

because we're going to keep these north to northeasterly...

I certainly remember the day because it was cold and miserable outside,

and I was sitting in my office

when a colleague of mine told me

that he had been called to Cranley Gardens,

where suspected human remains were pulled out of a manhole there.

When we got there, the tenants were standing around the manhole.

The toilets had been blocked,

and an engineer had been called to clear the drains,

and he discovered huge amounts of flesh and bone.

I have a limited knowledge,

but very heavily suspected

that it wasn't, um, animal, shall we say.

Did anyone express any particular interest in what you found?

Yes. The guy, I believe, was living in the top-floor flat.

Then the tenants told me that the previous evening,

around about midnight,

they had heard a scraping noise outside.

When they went to the front door and opened it,

they saw the man from the upstairs flat.

He was dressed in just a simple vest.

And bearing in mind, this was February, freezing cold.

And they asked him if he was all right.

And he said, "I am. I've just been outside for a pee."

I made further inquiries at Cranley Gardens

and found out he was at the local Jobcentre where he worked.

And he normally returned from his work

at half past five every evening.

We then found out that the pieces of bones from the drains

were indeed from a human body.

And the pathologist said that the piece of flesh

appeared to have strangulation marks on it.

And lo and behold,

we saw a man walking up the road.

He was very calm indeed.

When I arrived to Cranley Gardens,

the police were unsure of their ground.

They were fishing tentatively in the hope of gaining information

concerning the samples of human flesh found down the house...

...drains.

Nilsen then said, "Very strange that police officers should come

and talk to me about my drains."

But he let us into the house...

...and we went up to the attic flat.

And as soon as he opened the door,

the smell just came at you.

I knew that awful smell.

So we said to him ...

" Stop messing about. Where's the rest of the body?"

And he looked at me,

and he pointed

to the wardrobe.

And when I opened it,

there were two huge, black bin sacks, sagging.

So I got him by the cuff,

and he was told that he was being arrested on suspicion of murder.

On the way back to the police station,

I sat beside him,

but something was bothering me.

Those two bin sacks were huge.

In the car, on the journey to the police station, I was asked...

" Are we talking about one body or two here?"

I immediately replied with...

"15 or 16."

It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

And I could see the detective chief inspector

looking into the mirror at me.

And I had to tell him to concentrate on the driving

'cause he started to veer across the road.

And it hit me.

"We have a serial killer here."

I glide down a long corridor with my escort,

and I'm lodged in the first cell at the end of the line.

I am deposited there, in this antiquated room,

with a small bench

and rough, upright, small stool of a table.

I sit there, light up a cigarette, and pause.

We didn't know for sure

if what Nilsen was telling us was actually truthful.

You think, "15 or 16 people?"

But we've only had the authority to keep him in custody for 48 hours,

and that's it.

You've gotta get everything out of this guy that you can.

But you don't wanna put that much pressure on him

that he doesn't wanna talk to you.

Wary of the expected long train of questioning,

I surprised the CID trio

by interjecting that I would tell them everything.

Nilsen wouldn't stop talking.

He started telling us exactly what had happened.

He would go into a pub

and speak to someone,

take them back to his flat.

They would be drinking. They'd be listening to music.

The following morning, Nilsen would wake up,

and there would be a dead body beside him.

And when he was pressed on this, he just said

he couldn't remember what had happened.

Normally, in a murder case,

you'll have a victim,

and then you will go looking for the murderer.

In this case, we had a murderer,

but he didn't know who the victims were.

So we had to go backwards, if you like,

and trace all the victims.

There was no questions I refused to answer.

Going into minute detail.

If anything...

no other British murderer

has ever been so forthright...

in confronting his offending behavior than I have been.

He was giving very limited information, but they were mainly young men.

But I thought,

if what Nilsen was telling us was truthful,

how on earth, in a place like London,

could 15 people have been murdered without anyone noticing?

T he police had all the ingredients

to lay a charge against me.

This would have placed the whole matter under the protection of sub judice

and out of reach of the sensation-hungry media.

This was to be the biggest case in all of their careers ,

and in order to enhance their own place in the professional public spotlight,

they made sure that the entire nation knew about it

when they sat down to their breakfast tables.

I was up at the office,

and the news desk called me over and gave me this sheet of paper

that said that a plumber working for Dyno-Rod

had found pieces of human flesh down a drain.

I phoned Scotland Yard, but they knew nothing about it.

So I carried on and wrote the story.

But there was resistance to the story being used,

because in those days,

you never really wanted to upset people over the breakfast table.

And there's no doubt

that the reality of Cattran's discoveries

would make people dry heave over their cornflakes.

So I had no idea if the story was gonna be used.

Well, I was told there had been a... a murder inquiry

at Cranley Gardens,

and could I get up there as quickly as possible?

Well, I wasn't too excited about it.

I thought, "This is a... a fairly mundane story."

"If I'm lucky, I might get a lead that'll get me a piece on the Six O'Clock News,

and it'll be forgotten."

Well, normally, when you get to a scene like that,

the road's already been cordoned off. Never mind the house, the road.

No sign of that here. We were right up on the doorstep.

But we did interview one or two people who had noted him, you know.

They had seen him. They thought he was a bit strange, a bit quiet.

Is he a man whom you'd seen in this area before?