The Real Des: The Dennis Nilsen Story

Making myself look dead,

it's nothing to do with death itself.

It's making myself look as different from me

as it was possible to imagine, so, I could really be convincing

as being somebody else.

Dennis Andrew Nilsen

seemed to be an ordinary man with an ordinary life.

Bloody finger! You great pillock.

But behind the facade, he was the stuff of nightmares.

It could kill somebody!

Because Nilsen was a killer

with the blood of at least 12 young men on his hands.

Dennis Nilsen wanted to be in control

and dominant and domineering.

A seemingly boring civil servant who hid in the shadows.

Nilsen was known as dodgy.

He had a terrible temper. He was violent.

A control freak.

Now, the story of the making of a mass murderer can be revealed

in never-before-aired material.

NILSEN ON TAPE

Exclusive testament from the detectives

who brought him to justice.

There was a pair of legs sticking out the end

of a big black bin liner.

I said to him, "How many bodies are we talking about here?"

And his reply, "I've killed 15 or 16."

It was one hell of a shock.

How many people were buried in that garden?

The prison interview the Home Office tried to ban.

It was my power and his passivity.

The more passive he could be, the more powerful I was.

And the families of Nilsen's victims speaking for the first time.

My dad was relentless in the way he searched for our Martyn.

He said, "Where are you, son?"

Dennis Nilsen destroyed my family.

VOICE BREAKS Sorry.

You pull the body out from under the floorboards,

put it on a sheet and then cut it up.

This shocking interview was filmed in 1992.

A cold-blooded killer calmly describing

how he got rid of his victims.

Come the summer, it got hot,

and I knew there would be a smell problem.

I thought, well, I'm going to have to deal with the smell problem.

And I thought what would cause the smell more than anything else?

And I came to the conclusion it was the innards.

This footage hasn't been seen on British television

for over 20 years.

On a weekend, I would sort of pull up the floorboards,

and I found it totally unpleasant and I get blinding drunk,

so, I could face it and start dissection on the kitchen floor.

I'd go out and be sick outside in the garden.

But how did we get here?

12 years earlier, Dennis Nilsen was in the middle of murder spree.

Opportunities for a serial killer seemed horrifyingly easy.

Britain was undergoing huge social change.

But not everywhere.

I joined the Metropolitan Police in April 1979.

I came into the station

and there were two guys there who were on my team.

I went up to them and said,

"Hello, I'm WPC 8141, I'm starting today."

And they looked at me and said, "Oh, for fuck's sake,

"we've already got one on the team, we don't need another one."

That was my first introduction to being a female police officer.

In the early '80s, London was a magnet

for thousands of young people

heading to the city to follow their dreams.

'It's a familiar story,

'every night, trains from Scotland and the North

'carry those hoping to escape a dull and dreary existence

'and looking for the extra excitement

'they believe life in the capital will bring.'

But for many, the reality was very different.

And huge numbers were going missing.

'At any one time, 8,000 people are listed as missing in London alone,

'a clear illustration of how easy it is for someone

'to simply disappear without trace.'

We would give it 24 hours.

If they didn't come back,

then we would obviously do the surrounding police stations.

Have they been arrested for anything?

Hospital checks, but that's really all we did.

In 1983, I was the detective inspector

at Hornsey Police Station, in north London.

In those days, a missing person bureau

was a small office at Scotland Yard.

They didn't have a national database,

it just wasn't very professional at all.

'They've often, deliberately

'cut all links with the past

'and this makes them an easy target for exploitation

'by criminals or conmen.'

Because they were young, they were inexperienced

and when they got there, you could say they were led astray.

It meant they could be easy prey for someone like Dennis Nilsen.

Martyn Duffy was one of them.

Our Martyn had a lovely smile. Yeah.

He'd do anything for anyone. He had a heart of gold.

Hazel and Graham are talking for the first time about their brother

and the last Christmas they spent together in 1979.

You look at those photographs and you can see he was happy.

Yeah, yeah.

It was one of the best times, I suppose. Yeah.

As a family, we were all happy, we were all together. Yeah.

In May 1980,

the 16-year-old ran away to London in the hope of finding work.

Something he'd done before.

But this time, no-one heard from Martyn after he'd arrived.

He didn't go to any of the contacts we knew he had there,

he just disappeared off the face of the earth.

Martyn's disappearance was reported to the police.

His name was simply added

to the list of thousands who were missing in London.

My dad was relentless in the way he searched for our Martyn.

There was a photograph of Martyn by his bed

and he just looked at it and he said, "Where are you, son?"

It was obvious that something bad had happened. Mm.

And something terrible had taken place.

Three years later, the truth was about to be revealed.

Hornsey Police Station, North London.

Detective Inspector Steve McCusker was about to get a report

that would haunt him for the rest of his career.

A uniformed colleague of mine came to my office.

He told me he'd been called to an incident

at a house in Cranley Gardens.

Plumbers had found something suspicious down the drain

they were unblocking.

McCusker headed to the house with his boss,

Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay.

When we got up there,

we saw a number of people standing around an open manhole cover.

'What did you find?' A mass of flesh.

Very heavily suspected that it wasn't animal.

'One of the people in the house was quite interested?'

That's correct.

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

'The man living in the flat was a job centre supervisor

'called Dennis Andrew Nilsen.'

It was snowing, sleet, real miserable, wet, dark evening.

His boss told him, "Look, put the manhole cover back on

"and we will come to investigate it in the morning in the light of day."

With the manhole left unguarded,

the neighbours heard Nilsen going up and down the drain

at around midnight.

When Cattron returned the next day, the remains had gone.

If a manhole can be sparkling, it was sparkling!

But he did put his hand up

and he was able to extract from the smaller drains in a manhole,

erm, what looked like the fingers and knuckles

and skin and bone of human hand.

We got a phone call from the mortuary,

telling us that, indeed, the bones were actually from human being.

Our main suspect was a guy called Dennis Nilsen.

Sometimes, he goes by the name of Des.

Des was due home from work at around half past five.

Detectives Peter Jay Steve McCusker and Jeff Butler

were waiting for him.

He arrived, he was dressed in a trench coat, wearing glasses,

carrying a briefcase.

We did say we were police officers from Hornsey police station.

Nilsen expressed some surprise at this.

He said, since when did police officers get interested

in looking at people's drains?

We said, let's go up to your flat and we'll tell you all about it.

He opened his door with a key.

It was a grubby flat.

There was a grubbiness to it and, of course, the smell,

the smell was absolutely awful.

It was the smell of death.

Peter said to him, "Stop messing us about, where is the body?"

He looked shocked.

It suddenly dawned on him that the game was up.

And he simply said, "It's in there." He pointed to a wardrobe to my left.

So, I opened the wardrobe and I saw two black bin liner sacks,

full to the brim with the remains of human bodies.

Peter Jay then told Nilsen that he was arresting him

on suspicion of murder and cautioned him.

The detectives put Nilsen in the back of the car to take him

to the police station.

What he told Steve McCusker next

would be a defining moment in the case.

And so I said to him, "How many bodies are we talking about here?

"One or two?"

And his reply, shocked us.

"I've killed 15 or 16.

"There are three back here,

"and the rest I killed at a flat I used to live in."

'Scotland Yard

'launched its biggest murder investigation today

'after a pathologist confirmed that human remains,

'found in a sewer outfit, were parts of three bodies.'

We knew we had not just a killer

but he said he was willing to talk, tell us all about it.

We thought, well, we're going to have a murder investigation.

We'll just get on with it.

Dennis Andrew Nilsen was under arrest on suspicion of murder.

Detective Chief Superintendent Geoff Chambers

and DCI Peter Jay would question Nilsen.