Nilsen’s unwitting nemesis was drug addict Stephen Sinclair. The youngster dropped into a booze and drugs-fuelled stupor at the killer’s home, where he was stripped and strangled. His body was cut up and flushed down the drains.
The slow-burning massacre that stalked London’s gay and homeless young men since 1978 was brought to light by a cleaning company responding to a blocked drain – blocked, it turned out, by pieces of Stephen Sinclair’s body. The company found the drain was packed with a flesh-like substance, resembling chicken.
Suspicious, the drain inspector summoned his supervisor and they called police. Upon closer inspection, some small bones and what looked like human flesh were found in a pipe leading off from the drain. DCI Peter Jay was called to the scene with two colleagues and waited outside until Nilsen returned home from work. As they entered the building, Jay introduced himself with the now-famous words: ‘Mr Nilsen, we’ve come to talk to you about the drains.’
As they entered the flat DCI Jay immediately smelt rotting flesh. Nilsen asked why the police would be interested in his drains and the officer told him they were filled with human remains. ‘How awful!’ Nilsen exclaimed. ‘Don’t mess about, where’s the rest of the body?’ snapped Jay.
Dennis Nilsen came to trial at Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey on 24 October 1983. He was charged with the murder of six of the seven men that police had been able to identify: Kenneth Ockendon, Martyn Duffey, Billy Sutherland, Malcolm Barlow, John Howlett and Steve Sinclair. The defendant was also charged with the attempted murder of Douglas Stewart. To each count, he pleaded not guilty.
He told the court: ‘By nature I am not a violent person. You can look at my school reports, Army and Police Service, and nine years in the Civil Service and you’ll find not one record of violence against me.’ Questioned by the prosecution as to why he murdered, he replied: ‘Yes, it is a great enigma. These things were out of character. I killed people over a period of five years and it got worse.’ He denied that during his time on remand he had taunted fellow prisoners about his crimes, saying: ‘I’ve never gloried in their publicity, never given interviews to the press, not received any money for anything.’ He added: ‘Since I have been in prison I have felt no irresistible urge to kill someone else.’
Defence counsel Ivan Lawrence, QC, argued Nilsen was not guilty on account of being mentally ill. He told the jury: ‘One would have to say that anyone committing such crimes must be out of his mind.’ But the prosecution, led by Alan Green, QC, had already told the jury that Nilsen killed simply because he enjoyed it. After 24 hours, the jury returned a ten to two majority verdict. Nilsen was guilty on all counts and he was sentenced to life, with a recommendation that he serve at least 25 years. Home Secretary Leon Brittan later imposed a full-life tariff.
In his summing-up, judge Mr Justice Croom-Johnson said: ‘There are evil people who do evil things. Committing murder is one of them. A mind can be evil without being abnormal.’
‘He was so evil that no restriction such as a curfew or tagging would have stopped him. You would literally need a policeman at his side at all times to stop him.’
Detective Inspector Tim Grattan-Kane
Name: John McGrady
Crime: Serial rape and murder
Date of Conviction: 16 May 2006
Age at Conviction: 48
The mum of murdered schoolgirl Rochelle Holness will never forget 25 September 2005 – the last day she saw her daughter. ‘It was a Sunday,’ Jennifer Bennett recalled. ‘I’d been to my sister’s and when I got back I was shocked because all the dishes in the kitchen had been washed up. I went up to Roch’s room to thank her and she just said “OK” like a typical teenager.’
Rochelle stayed upstairs, sorting through her clothes and texting her boyfriend. About 20 minutes later, she came down when the credit ran out on her phone. Jennifer said: ‘She came to me and asked for money for the payphone. I didn’t have any money, but a friend gave her 30p and off she went. Rochelle left the house at 7.30pm. It was still light outside and I didn’t think anything of it. She was 15 and she was always going to the phone box – it was only a three-minute walk away.’
At around the same time that Rochelle left her home in Lewisham, South London, alcoholic serial rapist John McGrady was at his council flat on the nearby Milford Towers estate, attempting drunken sex with his girlfriend, Margaret Arif. Since waking up hungover at lunchtime, the former butcher had been downing cans of strong cider and now, unable to perform in bed, he became frustrated. Margaret knew what was coming so she dressed before her lover’s mood worsened. As she left the shabby seventh-floor flat, McGrady asked: ‘What am I going to do? That means I will have to go out to look for someone.’ Margaret thought he was joking and laughed as she walked past the empty cider cans strewn across the floor. She had no idea what was to come.
The phone box Rochelle Holness used that night was on the outskirts of McGrady’s estate and just a few minutes’ walk from her home. CCTV footage shows her walking away from there at 8.03pm, at which point she was alone. As she made her way home, Rochelle crossed paths with McGrady, a psychotic sex offender, who had already served two life sentences for attacks on young women.
In a drunken, sexually frustrated rage, McGrady abducted the young girl from the street and marched her up to his flat with the intention of raping her. No one but McGrady knows for sure, but police believe he threatened the teenager with a knife. His previous sex assaults involved knives and unless her life was in immediate danger, Rochelle would never have gone off with a scruffy stranger who stank of stale booze. Furthermore, she and her friends knew to stay away from Milford Towers, a run-down, crime-ridden 1960s estate despised by residents, a place that the local deputy mayor conceded was ‘ghastly’.
That night, Rochelle’s mum went to bed expecting her daughter to return at any time. When she checked her room at 11 the next morning and saw she wasn’t there, she simply assumed she had gone off to school. But that evening she didn’t come back and Jennifer started to worry. She tried ringing Rochelle’s mobile, but it just rang and rang.
In an interview with the Mirror, Jennifer said: ‘At 10pm her boyfriend Seb called to check Rochelle was alright. He said she was supposed to see him, but she never turned up. I thought that was weird, so I immediately started ringing around her friends to see if she was with them, but of course she wasn’t. I couldn’t sleep that night.’
The next morning she called the police and reported Rochelle missing. When she still hadn’t returned the following day, Jennifer went to a photocopying shop and made hundreds of flyers, each bearing Rochelle’s picture.
That afternoon – Wednesday, 28 September – Jennifer was handing out the flyers close to where Rochelle disappeared when her son Michael, 22, rang her mobile. Jennifer recalled: ‘Michael said, “Mum, there are loads of police outside the flats across the road.” I rushed home and when I got there, my other son Richard said he’d heard someone had been murdered.’
Together with her ex-husband, Denroy – Rochelle’s dad – Jennifer ran over to Milford Towers to see what was going on. Denroy, 45, said: ‘When I got there they were carrying a stretcher out with a body bag on it. As they walked past me I tried to open the bag. I wanted to see if it was Rochelle inside, but the police stopped me. I thank God now that I didn’t see what was in it, because if I had, I think I would have died there and then.’
Inside was the couple’s treasured daughter. ‘I grabbed a police officer and gave him a flyer with Rochelle’s photo,’ Jennifer said. ‘I asked, “Can you tell me if that’s my daughter in there?” He took it and said he would go and check. He came back down half