Nilsen the copper became Nilsen the civil servant, securing a place as a clerk at Kentish Town Job Centre. Colleagues viewed him as diligent, almost workaholic. They also respected his commitment to the Trade Union Movement. By this time, he was about to begin another career: as a killer. On 30 December 1978, he was drinking alone in a pub called the Cricklewood Arms, popular with the area’s large Irish community. There, he met a young, anonymous Irishman, who looked about 18. The lad accepted his older friend’s invitation back to the flat at Melrose Avenue for more alcohol. Afterwards, the pair went to bed, but fell asleep without having sex. During the night Nilsen woke with a desire to kill – he took a cord from the end of the bed, wrapped it round the young Irishman’s neck and pulled. There was a struggle, but within a minute the victim was still.
To make doubly sure he had actually killed, Nilsen fetched a bucket of water and held the youth’s head in it. In what was to become a repeated trademark, he then carefully washed him and put the body to bed. The next day, he placed it under the floorboards, only to retrieve it a day later for another hot bath. Following this, the body remained under the floorboards until August 1979, when the killer burned it on a bonfire of fence posts at the bottom of the garden.
The next attack, in October 1979, did not prove fatal. Andrew Ho, a young student from Hong Kong, was lured back to Melrose Avenue. But the killer’s attempts at strangulation were half-hearted and his victim escaped. Police were alerted and quizzed Nilsen, but the investigation was dropped as Ho, 19, did not want to go through with a prosecution and admit in front of a public court that he had intended to sleep with a strange man twice his age.
Nilsen’s second murder came on 3 December 1979. He took a day off work to go Christmas shopping. At the time no one perceived it as odd that such a loner would need time to buy gifts for anyone, but the clerk had other items on his shopping list and as he sat drinking in the Princess Louise pub in Holborn he came across Canadian Kenneth Ockendon. Kenneth, 19, had just completed a technical course and was holidaying before flying home for Christmas. His final destination was Melrose Avenue, where he accepted an offer of a heavy boozing session with Nilsen.
As Kenneth drank whisky and listened to music through headphones, Nilsen strangled him with the flex from his stereo. Once more, the victim was given a hot bath before being taken to bed. The next day, the corpse was hidden under the floorboards, only to be disinterred several times over the next fortnight to ‘watch’ TV on an armchair next to the whisky-swigging murderer. Kenneth was one of the few victims to be reported missing. His frantic parents in Canada contacted police in London, who found his unused airline ticket home in his hotel room. But there was little more they could do. Kenneth Ockendon was placed on Scotland Yard’s Missing Person’s Register.
There followed the killing of victim number three, Martyn Duffey, whose murder is described earlier. The fourth victim was Billy Sutherland, a 27-year-old from Edinburgh, who was working as a male prostitute in London’s West End. Nilsen insists he had no intention of taking Billy home, but the rent boy followed him on the Underground. His insistent manner sealed his fate. Strangled with Nilsen’s bare hands at Melrose Avenue, his body went under the floorboards along with the others. But here Nilsen’s own recollections – the only details available of his crimes with few witnesses – become vague. During this time, he was drinking more and more, traipsing around the gay bars of early 1980s London in search of liquor, sex and victims.
Victim five was an Asian prostitute, ‘probably Thai or Filipino’; six was an ‘Irish labourer’, while seven a ‘hippy type’ found in a doorway at Charing Cross. Of victim eight, the killer had no recollection apart from that he’d cut him into three pieces before hiding him under the floorboards. Nine and ten were later described to police as merely young Scots picked up in Soho’s gay Dean Street area.
But Nilsen did manage to recall his eleventh victim. Little wonder, as he was a skinhead with a tattoo ironically reading ‘Cut Here’ around his neck. The lad boasted how he liked fighting and how tough he was. Not so tough after a dozen cans of beer and several large whiskies, though. Nilsen strangled him and hanged his corpse from a bunk bed to admire it for an entire day.
On 10 November 1980, Scottish barman Douglas Stewart met Nilsen at The Golden Lion in Dean Street. He was to have a lucky escape. As usual, large amounts of alcohol had been consumed and the younger man fell into a slumber. He woke up in the nick of time to find his host strangling him. Nilsen was also carrying a large knife. Stewart literally fought for his life and managed to fend off his attacker. Almost immediately after the attack he called the police, but no action was taken because the officers, it is reported, considered the incident to be a ‘domestic’.
Murder victim twelve – prostitute and pickpocket Malcolm Barlow – was discovered slumped in a doorway by Nilsen. Suffering from epilepsy, he had collapsed from the effects of the drugs he was taking for his condition. The killer called an ambulance and Malcolm was taken to hospital. After treatment, he returned to Melrose Avenue and waited on the doorstep of his ‘rescuer’s’ home. He was invited inside, plied with drink… and throttled. His corpse was hidden under the kitchen sink until the killer had time to put him under the floorboards.
The disposal of bodies at Melrose Avenue was a task Nilsen – using butchery skills acquired in the Army Catering Corps – approached with apparent relish. As the space beneath the floorboards filled up, he removed the corpses. Stinking rotten, they would be dissected by him, wearing only his underpants. Heads were cut off, main organs removed and torsos cut into three. Then the parts were packed into suitcases and hidden in a shed at the rear of the property, covered in rubble. Other body parts were dumped in a narrow space between a fence and wall, where London’s dogs, cats and foxes acted as undertaker. Yet more body parts ended up on the bonfire, tyres covering up the smell of burning flesh.
In his journals, Nilsen describes in revolting detail the process of chopping up one of his victims:
I had to have a couple of drinks before I could start. I removed the vest and undershorts from the body. With a knife I cut the head from the body. There was very little blood. I put the head in the kitchen sink, washed it, and put it in a carrier bag. I then cut off the hands, and then the feet. I washed them in the sink and dried them. I made a cut from the body’s naval to the breast bone; I removed all the intestines, stomach, kidneys and liver. I would break through the diaphragm and remove the heart and lungs. I put all these organs into a plastic carrier bag. I then separated the top half of the body from the bottom half. I removed the arms and legs below the knee. I put the parts in large black carrier bags. I put the chest and rib cage in a large bag and the thigh/buttock/private parts (in one piece) in another. I stored the packages back under the floorboards.
In October 1981 Nilsen moved to Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill. There, he had a problem: there was no garden in which to dump or burn the remains of bodies and the floorboards could not be pulled up. He would have to take another route.
Nilsen’s first known guest at his new address was student Paul Nobbs. He awoke after a drinking session with Nilsen, suffering bruises to his throat. Paul, 25, consulted a doctor, who told him that he had probably been strangled. The man, who met Nilsen in Soho’s Golden Lion, refused to go to police – he was afraid his homosexuality would be discovered. Another hair’s breath escape was by drag queen Carl Stottor – who went by the name of Khara le Fox. After meeting Nilsen in the Black Cap pub in Camden, he awoke submerged in Nilsen’s bath. His attacker explained to Carl that he had passed out and it was only a revival attempt.
In December 1982, John Howlett became the first to be murdered at Cranley Gardens. There was a tremendous struggle, during which John even tried to strangle Nilsen back. Eventually he was drowned after having his head held underwater for five minutes. He was to become the first victim of a ghastly end – being flushed away in pieces down the toilet into London’s Victorian sewerage system.
Nilsen’s next victim was drunken drifter Graham Allen. Taken home from his haunt on Shaftesbury Avenue, Graham was given a meal. As he tucked into an omelette, the homeless man was strangled