RedHanded - Episode 204 - Dennis Nilsen: The North London Necrophile

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

In 1983, in an unassuming suburb of North London, some plumbers were called out to fix an un-flushable toilet. This already unpleasant job was made much worse by the distinctly hand-shaped bones mixed in with lumps of human flesh blocking the drains. This discovery would lead to the arrest of Britain's most notorious necrophile, Dennis Nilsen. The body Nilsen had chopped up, diligently flushed down the toilet and blocked with was his last victim, but it was nowhere near his first...Follow us on social media:InstagramTwitterFacebookVisit our website:WebsiteContact us:ContactSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This week, because we have spent some time on some lesser-known cases recently, this week we have a real big-time true crime, often referred to as the British Jeffrey Dahmer. In this episode, we are introducing you to Dennis, if they're dead, they can't reject you, Nilsson. A lot of people say Nilsson. My best friend is Swedish and she says Nilsson, but it's spelt differently. She's got a double S.

And I actually believe that his name was just like a made up. His dad was Norwegian, had a much more complicated Norwegian name. So he was given Nilsson as like a halfway Norway name. I see. But I'm going to say Nilsson because that's what most people tend to say. But if Scandinavians are upset. Yeah, when I say Dennis, I want to say Nilsson. Yes, exactly. So that's what we're going with. And Dennis Nilsson is famous for keeping his victims in his bed, wheeling them out for an occasional bath and dressing up game before stuffing them under the floorboards when they got a bit too stinky. Dennis Nilsson has sidled back into the zeitgeist recently

because of David Tennant's chilling portrayal of him in the recent TV drama, Des. Which I did not watch all the way through. But a huge fan of David Tennant, the only thing I would say about his portrayal a little bit too Scottish so if you watch interviews with Dennis Nilsen much softer accent I thought yes yes yes but full credit to ITV for finding a Scottish man who looks almost entirely like Dennis Nilsen who happens to be a very good actor and an absolute crowd pleaser of an actor it was definitely the right casting choice but i would pay enormous amounts of money to watch peter capaldi do it oh yes oh yes yes yes it would also work but like honestly when they put up the like just the shots from the set of david tennant dressed up like dennis nelson and then people

put like dennisilsen's mugshot next to it. You were like, they are the same person. And David Tennant is also very good at playing very sinister characters. He excels at that. But I thought it was very funny because I did actually watch all of Des. I think it's because I'm at home with my parents and they're not like as, they're like, mum's super into crime, but she's not as aware of most of it as we are, just because like not everyone is and so she'll like happily watch any crime drama so we did watch all of Des even though you're right when you know the story it's maybe not as compelling but the thing I loved the most

about having watched Des is that the next day after it finished the next day after the first episode came out was the number of Ofcom complaints and the number of complaints that ITV got when they aired that show. People were fucking furious at how horrible it is. If you aren't aware of the story of Dennis Nilsson, get ready because it's fucking grim. I mean, he's called Britain's Jeffrey Dahmer for a reason, right? And I don't know if these people who were just like settling in for a nice little 9pm crime drama on ITV were expecting like a bit of a Broadchurch situation or maybe like Deepwater Fell or whatever the fuck that show was called. It was shit. Horrified. Horrified by Des they were. I mean, it's not called My Little Pony, is it? Like what? What did they think it was going to be?

I mean, I guess it's just called Des. And they're like, oh, it's David Tennant in Des, whatever the hell that means. Sure. But post Doctor Who, he's already he's done some pretty gritty roles, you know, like, I don't know. Oh, my God. They lost it. They lost it. The general viewing public in this country lost it. And I thought it was hysterical. Well, exactly. I don't even know how to describe it. It's not hysterical. It's absolutely fucking horrible. And no eating, I think. I think this is actually the most convinced I've ever been by a no eating warning because it is going to get pretty grim. Especially no eating KFCs, I'm going to say.

Oh, man, I was going to leave that bit out, but I'm glad that you pulled that in. Okay, so Des, to everyone who ever knew him, was a deeply political man, a union man, a monochrome and boringly dressed man, whose years of rape and murder were revealed by a toilet that wouldn't flush at 23 Cranley Gardens in London's Muswell Hill. I've listened to a lot of interviews of people who knew him personally and I think a union man is the best way to describe him. Like his friends are like he doesn't need you to talk he's talking at you like he has no interest in communicating with you or any sort of to and fro or any sort of discourse. He doesn't even really need you to listen. Just needs to talk.

He's a primetime podcaster, is Des. Oh God, can you imagine? Can you imagine? Des the union man. The brand new hit podcast. Better nasty tweet never made him cry. Sponsored by KFC. For those of you who are listening and may not be London literate, Muswell Hill these days is full of yummy mummies, coffee shops and yoga studios. But it had a little bit more edge to it in Des's day. It was never rough, really, but not quite as fancy as it is now. Because

nothing was in the 70s, let's face it. Dennis's troublesome toilet was so blocked that not even acid from an ironmonger's could get the water flowing again. And that is some serious stuff. 23 Cranley Gardens was an old house converted into flats occupied by loads of different people. If the flats shared a landing, they also shared a toilet, which was much more normal than it sounds. And it also meant that when the toilet stopped flushing,

it was everybody's problem. About a that when the toilet stopped flushing, it was everybody's problem. About a week before the toilet stopped flushing, Nilsen had killed his 12th victim. Well, we think it was his 12th, but we don't have any real way of knowing exactly how many men Dennis Nilsen actually killed. Nilsen is known to have killed 12 men and for attempting to kill seven more, but the actual number is anyone's guess. Like a lot of high body count serial killers, Nilsen managed to kill so many people for so long without being discovered because no one went looking for his victims. The men he chose to kill were often living transient lives.

Most of them weren't missed. They were never even put on any sort of missing persons registers. The only record we have is Nilsen's own detailed confession. But for obvious reasons, his number should of course be taken with a pinch of salt. Nilsen initially claimed that he had killed up to 16 people, but even he wasn't sure if that was the actual final number or not. He literally says like, he says 15 or 16, I think. I mean, the idea of like, you've killed that many people that you've literally lost count. It's something else. And also like a lot of other killers, you know, they obsessively

note take about their victims or they have them memorized in their heads the way they looked, their age, their name, everything, because it's like a part of that control. And it's really interesting that Dennis Nilsen, as a serial killer, can barely even remember how many people he killed, which, yes, he's got a high body count. But, you know, he's not like Gary Ridgway numbers. He's like in a manageable number of people that you could remember. He just chooses not to or he doesn't care to. And I think that's quite interesting. So yeah, like we said, he doesn't know exactly how many people he killed. So how could we possibly know?

But the final victim, where we start our story, had been kept by Nilsen for several days, hidden in his wardrobe. This isn't cupboard week, is it? If only. If only. If only we'd foreseen that. Fuck. Ah, God, that's a shame i mean not as much of a

shame as like somebody keeping a dead body in their cupboard wait let me check let me check though let me check oh my bloody nora it is oh my giddy ass i love it when a plan comes together there you go if you are listening to this on the Wednesday or the Thursday this Friday the 9th of July is if you all remember cupboard day and if you don't know what the fuck we're talking about welcome newbie spooky bitch we will be making some fun videos actually about cupboard day and we're posting those on our new YouTube channel which you should come and follow and subscribe and we'll talk about it there let's get back to dennis nielsen so yes he had kept his final victim in his cupboard sorry wardrobe for several days after he was dead

just in case that wasn't clear nielsen was used to decomposition that even for him the smell got too much after a while so he decided that the only way to get rid of the body of victim number 12 was to chop him up. So Nilsen cut off the head and put it in a big cooking pot on his stove. Once the head was simmering away on the hob, Nilsen put the rest of the body in the bathroom. Then he took his dog out for a walk. Nilsson had a small black and white dog called Bleep. And the thing you need to know about this dog is that Nilsson really, really bloody loved this dog a lot. Like really a lot. Like really, really a lot. It's because unconditional love by someone who can't talk back is all he ever wanted. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. Bleep the dog is,

it's a very cute dog too. It's also a very cute name. It's also a very cute name. Do you think? Kind of like an expletive, isn't it? And it's like bleep. Be very on brand for us, but it would be very weird if one of us got a dog and called it bleep after fucking Dennis Nielsen, the serial killer's dog. No, we've already discussed my Chinese meat dog is going to be called Marvin. Here for it. You can call yours bleleep if you want.

I don't think I could do that. Should I call mine Marvin Bleep McGuire? So it sounds like it's middle name. It'll be a secret middle name. Whilst Dennis was out on his dog walk, Nilsen picked up some cigarettes and a bottle of rum from the shop. And then he made his way back home. I believe, I don't know, I might be making this up. I think the Sainsbury's in

Moswell Hill is where my nanny used to work. She either worked in the Moswell Hill Sainsbury's or she worked in the Cricklewood one. She lived in Cricklewood. Oh mate. But then they grew up in Finchley. It's entirely possible. Maybe she once served Dennis Nielsen. Maybe she once served. It's possible. It's possible. Actually, it's not. I don't think she even lived in London then. Who knows? Never mind. So after he bought this rum and these cigarettes, possibly from my grandmother, he made his way back home. When he was at home, Nilsen drank three quarters of this bottle of rum while sat in front of the television, the severed head still bubbling away in a pot on the stove.

Amazingly, after nearly a whole bottle of neat rum, Nilsen managed to remember to turn the stove off before going to bed, which I think is pretty impressive. That is impressive, but also, again, very reminiscent of Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer, big old lover of the alcohol. And seeing it again here, which I don't know if it's like that consistent across serial killers. Not that I can remember off the top of my head. I do think it's, I mean, it's a control thing, isn't it? It's like not wanting to feel out of control. And I don't think that that's ever something that particularly bothered

Des. Like I think he enjoyed being three or four steps ahead of the game and that's why he got away with it for so long. But I don't think he was even an alcoholic. I think he just liked to be drunk. Like I think that was the vibe. Yeah. And I think his issues were more like abandonment. Yeah. And a weird sense of, I don't even want to say the word curiosity, but like when you watch the TV show Des, that's kind of what comes across a bit, but I'll save that for later. But definitely abandonment. The next day, plumbers were called out to 23 Cranley Gardens to solve the unflushable toilet problem. People sniffing around the pipes was the last thing Nilsen needed he had a dead body to dispose of down the drain. The plumbers couldn't figure out what the problem was, so they left. This brief intermission allowed Nelson to do away with the rest of the body,

cutting the torso into pieces, stuffing the legs into a bathroom drawer and stowing the head into the wardrobe in a carrier bag. Monday came and so again did the plumbers. This time they were better equipped, though nothing could prepare them for what they would find in the sewers under number 23. The plumbers lifted the manhole cover outside of the house and the stench that emitted from the pipes was so putrid and unusual it prompted a bright young plumber to turn to his boss and say, I may not have been on the game for long

but I know that isn't shit. A closer inspection of the sewer blockage proved the protégé plumber right. The pipes weren't blocked with shit. They were blocked with lumps of flesh, and the lumps were accompanied by a questionable white ooze. And what really finished it off is, like, finger joint bones that were quite obviously from a human hand, is the description that was given. Yeah, yeah.

Because when they first find it, is it Nilsson who says that it's just KFC bones? Yeah. That's why we were referencing KFC earlier, just in case you're completely lost about why the fuck I was talking about that. Yeah, when he gets sort of asked about it, he's like, oh, it's definitely just finger licking good Kentucky fried chicken in finger shape. Oh no. When actually they're just fingers that I've probably licked and then topped off a human person and then thrown into my toilet.

Oh, God. Yeah, we told you guys, this is just the fucking tip of the iceberg. Prepare yourselves. All of these hunks of human were a bit above the plumber's pay grade, so once again, they left. Nilsen watched them leave from his window. And once the coast was clear, he stole away out of the house and under the manhole cover.

He picked up all the bits of meat that he could find. Oh, God. And threw them over the hedge into his neighbour's garden. This is not the best body disposal plan that we have seen on this show. Slinging it over the fence. Don't worry. Maybe you can do that with possibly cat shit, but that's it. Just rifling around in the sewers, picking up the remains of men you've murdered

and throwing them into your next-door neighbour's garden. Not the best plan, I would say, but, you know, there you go. And after he had done all of this, Dennis Nilsen woke up the next day with, well, zero hope that his plan would work. You know, I guess he's not that stupid. He's just doing it, but he doesn't actually think it's going to be successful. No, he's pretty up against it now.

He left the chopped up body in the wardrobe and bathroom, suspecting very much, as we've said, that the jig was up. Nils the chopped up body in the wardrobe and bathroom, suspecting very much, as we've said, that the jig was up. Nilsen saw little point in moving it. And he was entirely correct. I mean, yes, why put yourself through all that manual labour if you're already going to get caught? Pointless. Nilsen took himself off to work that day at the job centre on Denmark Street and had a reasonably normal day. You know, all things considering. In terms of killing or even flushing bodies down toilets, this is nowhere near his first rodeo. But Nilsen had never come this close to being discovered before. But he knew what the plumbers had seen and he knew that

the police wouldn't be too far behind. Again, he was entirely correct. When Nilsen got home from work that evening, DCI Peter Jay was waiting for him, just as Nilsen had suspected. DCI Jay had been alerted when the plumber started to pull undeniably human remains out of the pipes beneath Nilsen's abode. When DCI Jay asked Nilsen, don't mess about, where's the rest of the body and nelson told him very calmly that it was inside his flat in plastic bags inside the wardrobe so this is the thing he gives it up very quickly he doesn't even try to like hide it no there's like a little bit of like snark where dcij is like oh i've come to talk to you about your pipes and nelson's like, since when have the police been interested in clogged pipes? And then it's the don't mess about bit. And then Nelson is like, okay, fair cop.

Like he doesn't even try. And another really interesting, there's a lot of interviews out there with DCIJ and also with the plumbers as well, which is very funny. But he said, I never didn't believe him. He's like, as a detective, like you're sort of trained to never really believe 100% what people say. But there was just something about the way he was that I was like, oh, this is true. This is all true. So officers present at the scene asked Nilsen if there might be more bodies lurking in the flat, to which he replied, it's a long story. It goes back a long time. I'll tell

you everything. I want to get it off my chest, not here at the police station. As Nilsen opened the door to his home, DCIJ could smell that he was not making it up. Nilsen was arrested immediately and when he got down to the station, he confessed to killing 15 or 16 people in the last five years, between 1978 and the day he was arrested in 1983. Bleep the Dog was put down a few days after Nilsen was taken into custody. Three of these murders took place at Cranley Gardens. The rest had been killed at the monochrome man's previous address, 195 Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood.

Why did he kill these men? Because Nilsen was sexually and emotionally attracted to corpses. He was a necrophile and a narcissist. The seeds of these disorders were sown in his childhood that began in an Aberdeenshire fishing village. His absentee father was Norwegian, hence the unignorably Scandinavian-sounding surname. His mum remarried and Little Des ended up as one of nine children. Later, his mother admitted that Dennis was the only one of her children that she never cuddled. Maybe Mother Nilsen found it difficult to bond with him because he was different from his siblings.

Or perhaps this lack of affection at a young age drove Nilsen to find tactile comfort elsewhere. If you want to learn more about that chicken and egg situation, surprise, surprise, buy the book. Without his dad around, Wee Des got very close to his grandfather, who on Halloween 1951, after saying he felt a bit funny, went to bed and never woke up. The fact that his grandfather had died was never actually explained to the five-year-old Dennis.

He was just asked if he wanted to see his grandfather, which he obviously agreed to, thinking it would be an alive person, and then he was presented with the lifeless corpse of his most beloved person. Stop doing open caskets. That's just, uh, just stop doing it. Nothing good happens. No, and especially not in this situation,

where they don't even explain to Dennis, little child Dennis, what death is, or that his grandad is actually dead. Let's do that. Maybe a bit more people from the 50s, pastors from the 50s. But anyway, they don't. So Nilsson spent the rest of his life trying to emulate the relationship he had with his grandfather. He never managed it, but the image of his patriarch's dead body never left him. So emotionally, little Nilsson is not doing so well. And his sexual development was about to get a lot more lifeless body focused too. And once again, if you'd like to know a bit more about how sexual development works in Serial Killers, buy the book.

And there's no nice way of telling you this bit, so let's just get through it. As a preteen, Dennis Nilsen played with his brother's penis as they shared a bed. Both boys were completely awake, although Nilsen's brother was motionless and feigning sleep. Very still bodies that looked like they were asleep would eventually become Dennis Nilsen's only sexual target. This incident was never spoken of by either brother ever again, but it did plant the seed for Nilsen's sexual attraction to bodies that did not interact with him.

Bodies that couldn't leave him, like his grandad did. This was Nilsen's only sexual experience until his early 20s. Nilsen left school at 15 and ended up in the army, stationed at Aldershot. Then he spent what he would describe as the best days of his life, stationed anywhere from the Persian Gulf to Cyprus, from Berlin to the Alps. When he was in the Alps, I think he worked for like the skiing corps. That's a thing, apparently, in the British Army. Oh. So he's stationed in the Alps. I don't think he was actually like a speed skier or whatever, but he was a chef,

which is where he learned how to butcher things. Excellent. Yep. During his time in Bavaria, Nelson paid a female sex worker for sex, which he described as thoroughly depressing. And this experience left him with even less desire to pursue women than he had in the first place. That's just so, like, depressing on so many levels. Oh, God. I mean, considering his mum never hugged him, he probably wasn't that bothered about women in the first place. Yeah, it is depressing. And it continues to be depressing. After his time in the army, Nilsen briefly enrolled in a police training academy in Hendon and it was here that he had his first adult sexual experience with another man and he wasn't particularly thrilled with that either. But the same year Nilsen had penetrative anal sex for the

first time and after that there was no stopping him. He started to have innumerable one-night stands with men. In his own words, this was both promiscuing and, his favourite, depressing. Yes, he's quite the nihilistic edgelord, is Dennis Nilsen. Oh, God, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. He listens to records with headphones and everything. He actually fully does. Because although Nilsen was having no trouble having sex,

it wasn't the sex he wanted. Not with other people, at least. Hauntingly, Nilsen often fantasised that he was actually dead and violating his own corpse. That is quite imaginative. It's so imaginative that people have like written articles about how he has his own specific paraphilia that literally nobody else has ever had. It's Des specific. Wow. A paraphilia about the idea of being sexually aroused by the thought

of gratifying one's own corpse. That is very specific. Yes, extremely specific. And it's kind of the necrophiliac narcissist's dream to be so fucked that only you are as paraphernalia as you are. Absolutely. It is also quite like a typical trait of narcissists, that idea of the ideal love, that narcissists often fantasize about the ideal love like they'll disregard partners because they don't fit into this category that they've built in their head of like what the ideal relationship looks like i feel like dennis nielsen's disregard of like every person he has a sexual encounter with apart from when he's violating his own corpse or fucking a corpse that can't speak back is his form of idealized

love. It speaks somewhat to his extreme narcissism, possibly. Yeah, I'm not surprised he didn't have heaps of friends. Hold on to your fucking sex hats, guys, because you can leave that hat on for quite some time. Nilsson never let another man penetrate him because the thought of anyone else entering his body made him jealous of himself. Think about that for a bit. It took me a while. Oh my God, what the fuck? In conclusion, the only living person Nilsen wanted to have sex with was himself, but only if he was dead. See? See? That's what I'm talking about. Ideal love gone too far.

Jesus. So, everybody with us good this impossible fantasy would take a back seat for a while however in 1975 nelson met a young man named david galician or as nelson would call him twinkle twinkle was a 20 yearyear-old easy target. He was vulnerable, unemployed, and living in a hostel. One night, Nilsen took him home after a night out on the piss, and by the very next day, they were in a live-in relationship. It was with Twinkle that Nilsen would move to 195 Melrose Avenue, and it is also here, with Twinkle, of course, that Nilsen had his first proper crack at an adult romantic sexual relationship. But this relationship, if we can call it that, didn't last.

Twinkle moved out. Another rejection for Nilsen meant he began to trust living people even less and less. And there's, like, home videos of David Gershon and Nilsson. They do look like a couple. Like they're making jokes and like they're talking like to each other,

but only one of them is in the shot. And like they do seem like very familiar with each other. And like, I'm not going to say they look like Love's Young Dream because they don't. And I think Nilsson was quite like aggressive and manipulative and like gaslighting, which is why David left. But it was sort of some semblance of a normal-ish relationship, I would say. Yeah, and I think this is the thing you see with Nilsson, that he does make attempts at points in his life to try and conform to normality.

Like when he hires that sex worker, a female sex worker, to try and again and again quote unquote be normal and just sleep with a woman this is like back in i don't know it would have been like the mid 60s or late 60s that he was doing that so it would have been him trying to conform in some way again here i feel like he's trying to be in an adult relationship with twinkle but he can't make it work and in the des tv show and i believe that this is true because I think it was in the books, that when they arrested him and they asked him why he did it, he says, I was kind of hoping you'd tell me that. Exactly. And I think that that is that element of curiosity that I think that Dennis Nilsen, and I'm making no excuses for him as if he didn't want to be

doing this. Of course he wanted to be doing it, otherwise he wouldn't have. But I think he tries to conform and I think he's not really sure what's motivating him or driving him. He is one of the most fascinating killers that we've come across, I think. Oh, I totally agree. I do think he genuinely wanted to be in love. But he couldn't make it work with people. No, he couldn't. That's why he loved his dog so much. Yeah, because I think he couldn't stand people because they were never going to live up to what he wanted. There was always that fear they were going to leave. And he was just never going to be able to do that. But I think he desperately wanted to be quote unquote normal. So anyway, after Twinkle, a few other boyfriends came and went. But Nilsen's fantasies about having sex with his own dead self didn't stop.

He started to line his bed with mirrors so he could indulge in the most theatrical of wanks possible, surrounded by his own reflection. I told you to leave that sex hat on. This is rough, guys. This is really fucking rough, this next bit. So, hold on. You need like a fucking sex apron for this.

Like a sex lead-lined apron that you could just take off and throw in a decontamination shower after. Jesus. Nilsen's favourite storyline, because yes, when we say that he was imaginative, he had storylines for his wanking. In this particular storyline, an imaginary scruffy woodsman happened upon his body, washed him off, then buried Nilsen in the woods. Then the woodsman digs Dez up again, gives him a handjob, and Nilsen's penis is the only bit of his body that magically reanimates and ejaculates. You are welcome.

Well, we've all had that. Yeah. We've all had that. Yeah, sure. The scruffy woodsman. The scruffy woodsman. The magic penis that just comes back to life. Oh, my God.

I mean, it's very imaginative. I will give him that. It is truly quite special. Absolutely. And if he'd have just kept it to this, fair's fair. You're into what you're into, but he doesn't. That would be a confusing true crime episode if this is as far as he went. If he had just turned it into a novella, he could be Stephen King, but he didn't.

So when Nilsen was feeling especially fancy, he would even put charcoal under his eyes and whiten his skin with talc so that he looked extra dead. That's showbiz, kid. Yep, it is indeed. Really committing. Absolutely. It's when he's really like, you know what, no one's going to be home for hours. I've got nothing to do. Let me have the most elaborate wank ever where I even get into costume. There's something else. Necrophilia is rare enough, but sexualising your own corpse is almost entirely unique and

shows just how deep Nilsen's particular brand of paraphilia ran. The first night Nilsen got his hands on someone else's dead body began in an Irish pub. This particular one was in Cricklewood, northwest London, where to this day you can't swing a cat without hitting an Irish pub. This particular one was in Cricklewood, northwest London, where to this day you can't swing a cat without hitting an Irish person. Fight me, it's true. Nilsen had stationed himself in this Irish pub and he met a young man, well actually a boy, a 14-year-old boy called Stephen Holmes. And Stephen wasn't actually identified until the 2000s. So the book about this case, it's called Killing for Company by Brian Masters. The first edition of that book doesn't actually even have his name in it, but he has now been identified and that is his name. So Nilsen took Stephen Holmes back to his house on Melrose Avenue,

where they drank themselves half to death, got naked, and got into bed far too pissed to do anything about it. In the morning, Nilsen woke up first and was overcome with fear that Stephen, just like Twinkle and all the others before and after him, would leave as soon as he woke up. And Nilsen just couldn't let that happen. So he did what any deranged person would do and took his tie, wrapped it around Stephen's neck and partially strangled the 14-year-old boy. Stephen was limp, but Nilsen wanted to make sure he was really dead and he really couldn't leave, so he dragged the boy over to an inexplicable bucket of water that he had just lying around and dunked steven's head into the water and held him there steven struggled and once he stopped moving and

nelson was sure he was dead nelson took the body straight back to bed and pulled the covers up to the dead teen's chin then nelson dressed his new flatmate in socks and underwear and then got into bed himself. Conveniently, Nelson had an erection, so he decided that he might as well try to penetrate the boy, but didn't like the feeling of the cold body, so Nelson just went back to sleep, which is quite a feat, even for the supremely hungover.

I don't think I've been that hungover in my life that I could lie next to a dead body and just go to sleep. So maybe I'm not that maladjusted after all. I think if anybody's worried about their levels of adjustment, just listen to the rest of this episode. Well, quite. But yeah, it is just so fucking chilling. The mundanity.

Mundanity? Is that a word? I feel like maybe that's not a word. It doesn't sound right. Anyway, you know what I mean word it doesn't sound right anyway you know what i mean you know what i mean the mundaneness i don't know that also sounds wrong whatever of this whole situation and i can't help but just picture in my head some like horribly crass like love montage between nelson and this other character it keeps cutting back to where there's like love music playing in the background and they're laughing like Nilsson's laughing maniacally and like they're flipping pancakes and you know feeding each other pasta and the other person's just dead because that's what he wants he wants somebody who's never going to leave him but he's so

terrified that they will and he's so incapable of dealing with another living person that he has to do this it is mortifying and just the idea the idea of him pretending to wake up on the Sunday and just roll over and have a cheeky little shag with his partner and then go back to sleep. And I'm like, it's a dead body. Oh, my God. The next day, Nilsen washed the body in the bath and then used the same bath water to wash himself. And afterwards, he masturbated onto the

dead boy's stomach. Nilsen was so in love with this corpse that he decided he couldn't possibly dismember and dispose of it. He needed to keep it. So he shoved it under the floorboards, where it stayed for seven and a half months. Once the smell became too overpowering, Nilsen burned the corpse in his garden, adding rubber to the flames to conceal the smell became too overpowering, Nilsen burned the corpse in his garden, adding rubber to the flames to conceal the smell of burning human flesh. And this would be the first of quite a few funeral pyres. As we often see with serial killers, they take time between their first and second kills.

Killing another person for the first time takes some processing, even for the depraved, and it wasn't until the next year that Nilsen actually tried again. On the 11th of October 1979, Nilsen met Andrew Ho, a student from Hong Kong. He lured him back to Melrose Avenue with the promise of alcohol and sex. Nilsen then attempted to strangle Andrew with a tie, but Andrew escaped and ran from the house. He called the police half an hour later, but nothing happened after that initial call. And then, of course, Andrew was reluctant to proceed and Nilsen claimed that he had never attempted to strangle Andrew at all.

He'd only put the tie around his neck to scare him. What the fuck? Yeah, I mean, it's a classic, like, it's, again, very similar to a Jeffrey Dahmer situation where the police are just, oh, well, sex game gone wrong, that's all that is. Oh, God. So later, Nilsson would say that it was a shame

that he had not been caught when this initial report had been made. But he wasn't caught, and he would go on to do plenty more strangling. The next one, happening just weeks later. He was called Kenneth Ogden. He was a Canadian on holiday in London. He'd come specifically to take photographs of the capital. Nilsen likes a photograph, by the way. When he was in the army, he used to make all of his friends lie on the floor

and pretend to be dead and take pictures of them. So yeah, photography is something that he was quite keen on and why he had video cameras and stuff, because in the 70s they're extremely expensive. And, you know, he's a civil servant. He's not got hella dosh, but he specifically spent money on cameras. Or photographers, deviants. I also read that, I don't know if this is true, but I'm going to get slated for it anyway, so it doesn't matter. I read that photography degrees have the lowest employment rate of any degree ever. I did see on Twitter the other day, and I forgot to talk to you about it on Under the Duvet, was somebody started a Twitter thread of the degree course that turns you off a romantic partner the fastest,

a possible romantic partner the fastest and I read through it 90% of it was economics I was like fucking hell yeah you are boring fuckers though to be honest I was like at least they were boring but people were like those fucking capitalist fat cats and I was like what that's hilarious and then somebody was like, what? That's hilarious. And then somebody was like, oh, well, maybe the most off-putting thing is judging people based on their degree course. And shut the fuck up. It's ridiculous. Someone's got a home economics degree. Someone's probably got an economics degree.

Anyway, back to Dennis. So Kenneth Octon had the misfortune of running into Dennis Nielsen in the Golden Line pub in Soho, a well-known pickup spot for gay men. It's still there today. Although technically consensual sex between people of the same gender was decriminalized in 1967 with amendments to the Sexual Offenses Act. Being out and proud in Britain was still no easy thing. Discrimination and hate crimes against the LGBTQ community were rife. In Thatcher's

Britain, 75% of the population believed the homosexuality was inherently wrong. That's mad! 75%. 75! That's crazy. So the age of consent for homosexual people was introduced as 21 years old in 1967. And it was not lowered to 16, which is the heterosexual age of consent in this country, until 2000, which I did not know. Yeah, we're going to be dropping all sorts of legislation facts later on. But let's get back to 1979 for now, when Nilsen and Kenneth left the Golden Lion together and went back to Melrose Avenue,

where Stephen Holmes had laid under the floorboards for months. Once Nilsen and his Canadian conquest made it back to Melrose Avenue, Kenneth sat listening to records with headphones on, Nilsen's second favourite pastime. Psychopaths, only psychopaths do that. Music is for sharing. And Nilsen, as he watched Kenneth listen to his records,

was consumed by the idea that Kenneth would be going back to Canada eventually, so he put a stop to it. Nilsen strangled Kenneth from behind with the headphone cable, and once Kenneth was dead, he stripped him naked, cleaned him up in the bath, and put him him to bed and then fell asleep next to him. The next day, Nilsen left the dead Kenneth in his bed as he went off to work. When he got home from a day of crushing dreams and

signing people on at the job centre, Nilsen lay in bed with dead Kenneth and frequently had frictional sex with the corpse. Kenneth too would find his resting place beneath the floorboards at Melrose Avenue. When Nilsen brought him out, he was treated like a sex doll. He was dressed and undressed, washed and violated. Nilsen spoke to him at length and would always bid his dead doll a good night. Nilsen didn't like blood or mess. He liked clean, well-dressed, dead people who couldn't hurt him. And he would go on to collect more and more

unargumentative flatmates his next victim was 16 year old martin duffy who although was two years older than stephen holmes was the youngest looking person nelson had ever seen it's almost like some perverse extreme of i'm gonna hurt you before you hurt me i know you're gonna hurt me so i'm gonna fucking kill you before you do and then use your corpse as a fucking sex doll forever. Yeah, I suppose. I think, I don't know if he wants to hurt them, though. I genuinely don't think that's it. Because I think if he wanted to hurt them, it would be a more violent death.

But he does it in the least messy way possible. He's like Dahmer in that he's not a sadist. He's not a process killer. He's very, very much, I mean, Dennis Nilsson is the poster child for a product killer. Just the idea of a process killer being the type of killer that enjoys a process of the actual kill. That's what gets them off. The dead body is a byproduct. It's not what they're after. And then you have somebody like Nilsson or Dharma, who the act of the killing is the one that gets them off. It's the dead body that they get to

play about with that makes them the product killer because that's what they want and you're right I don't think he's doing it to hurt them because I'm like how long do you get out of a dead body I know he keeps them under the floorboards for months and months and months but like soon they're going to be skeletons or putrefying so like you could just have short-term relationships but no he's like I'm going to be the one in control and decide when you're no longer usable. You don't get to walk out on me. I get to throw you down the toilet. Yes, exactly.

But I do think, though, that if he could have, again, like Dharma, if he could have managed this preservation, that would have been his ideal, I think. Yes, yes. It's the fact that he can't figure out how to keep them fresh. So if you haven't already figured out, Nilsen had a thing for young, slender-looking men and boys. Martin had a tricky start.

He had run away from his native Birkenhead to London at just 15 years old. And after he was returned home by the Soho Project, he was put into care and emerged hardened with an addiction to Valium. But things did look up for him briefly, as he started a catering course and got a girlfriend. But it didn't last, and 16-year-old Martin ran away to London once again, where he slept rough in stations, and was found by Dennis Nilsen in May 1980.

Nilsen took the stray Martin back to his house, and Martin only had time to drink two cans of beer before he was taken to bed, where Nilsen sat on top of him and strangled him until he was unconscious. Then he carried Martin to the kitchen, where he filled the kitchen sink with water and held Martin's head down until he drowned. He then lay the teenager on the floor, stripped him, and took him to the bathroom, where Nilsen took a bath with the corpse laying on top of him. Martin's body was kept in Nilsen's bed for a couple of bathroom, where Nilsen took a bath with the corpse laying on top of him.

Martin's body was kept in Nilsen's bed for a couple of days, where Nilsen masturbated over him. As soon as Martin's body started to show the slightest sign of corruption, and when the body started to bloat, he went straight under the floorboards with the others. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.

This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry.

But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new

journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on

Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And we're back. Everyone take a deep breath because we're not even close to being done. After Martin's murder, Nilsen started to pick up the pace, which is usually how things go. But 1980 would be a bumper year for Nilsen by any serial killer's standards. It's estimated that he killed six men in 1980 alone. And we say estimated because of the reasons we list at the top of the show. We don't know how many there really were, and we actually only know two of their names. As for the other four, we only have Nilsen's questionable memory and possibly narcissistic confession to go on. So the other name we have, other than Martin, is Billy Sutherland.

He was a father of one from Edinburgh and he was 27, heavily tattooed, including the words love and hate on his knuckles. Hardly Nilsen's usual type. But still, Nilsen got talking to him in a pub near Piccadilly Circus and then they hopped from pub to pub until they ended up on Charing Cross Road. Nilsen said that he wanted to go home, and Billy, having nowhere to stay, went with him. Nilsen claimed to not have a clear recollection of killing Billy. He only remembered that he had strangled him from the front rather than the back.

And then he didn't remember anything. He just woke up to a dead body in the morning. Over the four remaining months of 1980, Nilsen killed four more men. He knew none of their names, only their heights, sometimes their eye colour, and that one was Irish, one was Filipino or Mexican, and the other two were English. 1981 brought with it three more unidentified victims, an 18-year-old Scottish boy with blue eyes,

a 5ft9 man from Belfast, and a 20-year-old muscular skinhead who had the words cut here tattooed around his neck. Nilsen would later claim in his confessions that he had made up some of these victims, but no one knows for sure. And this takes us to the 17th of September 1981, when Nilsen met 23 year old Malcolm Barlow. Malcolm had been in and out of care homes for disabled children. He was epileptic, a compulsive liar, an orphan, and without a friend in the world. Nilsen discovered Malcolm leaning against a garden wall on Melrose Avenue, just a couple of doors down from 195. A monochrome

Nilsen, with his helpful civil servant hat on, asked Malcolm if he was alright. Malcolm told Nilsen that he had collapsed after taking some medication prescribed for his epilepsy. Nilsen called him an ambulance and Malcolm was whisked away. After he was discharged from hospital the next day, Malcolm made his way back to 195 Melrose Avenue and waited for Nilsen to return. Nilsen invited Malcolm in and cooked him dinner as he watched TV. Malcolm ate, had two Bacardi and Cokes, and fell asleep on the sofa. Nilsen tried to wake him up, but he didn't stir, so Nilsen decided that he was going to have to kill him.

He could have called him another ambulance, but that was, of course, quite a lot of faff. Nilsen's calm deliberation would cause him quite a lot of problems later on. And it's difficult to argue that he wasn't a calculated killer. He's hardly someone out of his mind in a legal sense. Nilsen had no sexual interest in Malcolm's corpse, which is interesting because he's got this corpse here of a young man and he's like, nah. Yeah, well, I think he does get quite specific in his types, especially as he goes on. He just wasn't that bothered.

However, there's a lot of argument, especially in the book, about whether he was actually always a sexually motivated killer. And they use Malcolm's example because he's like, oh, well, he doesn't defile Malcolm's corpse. Like, right, but he still strips him naked. He still cleans him. There's still this ritual. So I still think it is a sexual kill.

Like, for sure. I think it's sexually motivated and I don't think that's sort of stopped or scuppered in any way by the fact that he didn't actually like because he doesn't penetrate any of them and also we only have Nilsen's word for the fact that he wasn't sexual with Malcolm I know you might be thinking like why would he lie but also nelson he admits that he makes things up as well so we don't know that he didn't have sex with malcolm so after he had killed him malcolm that is nelson just went to bed the next day he couldn't be bothered to prise up the floorboards yet again so he stuffed malcolm's body in the cupboard under the sink and just took himself off to work malcolm barlow was the last to die at the hands of Nilsen at 195 Melrose Avenue. Shortly after this murder, Nilsen was asked to leave his flat because the landlord wanted to renovate it.

And this left Nilsen with quite a large multiple decomposing corpse type problem. Desperate to stay on and to not have to dispose of his dead boyfriend slash silent floorboard flatmate, he offered the landlord a thousand pounds to let him stay on, which in the 80s, early 80s, is a lot of fucking money. But his bribe fell on deaf ears and he was told that he needed to clear out. The day before he left Melrose Avenue, Nilsen burned the human remains he had been hoarding in his home in the garden. Again, he flung a tyre on top of the flames to disguise the smell of burning human flesh. And apparently the local kids came and danced around the fire, because obviously they didn't know what was going

on. Oh God. But this body burning turned out to be an effective tactic. Nilsen was allowed to leave Melrose Avenue without anyone saying a word. He moved into the attic flat of 23 Cranley Gardens, where he would block the toilet and finally get his comeuppance. Despite its name, Nilsen's new flat didn't have a garden like Melrose Avenue did, so his body disposal system was going to need a rethink. Also, given that it was an attic flat, the floorboard storage solution was no longer going to hold up either. So for the first few months, Nilsen suppressed his murderous impulses. Yeah, you have to wonder if he managed to just get himself another ground floor flat, how many more people he would have killed. Oh, many, many, many, I think. So yeah, Nilsen is busy trying to suppress his murderous urges.

But he came close on the 23rd of November 1981, when a 19-year-old student, Paul Nobbs, ended up at Cranley Gardens after a night on the town. But we'll leave Paul for a minute, and we'll come back to him later on. So remember that name. Nilsen's reformed self, if that is what it was, didn't last forever. By March 1982, he was back to his old self, and this is when he met 23-year-old John Howlett from High Wycombe. The pair met in a central pub

and headed back to Muswell Hill. Once John fell asleep, Nilsen strangled him with an upholstery strap, then drowned him in the bath. Nilsen left him in the bathroom, put a clean blanket over the bed, called in his dog Bleep, and then went to sleep. Later, Nilsen cut up John Howlett's body and flushed it piece by piece down the toilet, putting the bones that were too big out for the bins, just like Bob Bardella. Nilsen referred to his next victim as the Omelette Death. This man's name was Graham Allen, and he was 27 years old, and he bumped into Nilsen on Shaftesbury Avenue as he was trying to hail a cab. Nilsen later claimed to have no memory of Graham Allen's strangulation. He only remembered that Graham had insisted that he was starving, so Nilsen had made him an omelette. One minute he was eating the

omelette, the next minute he was dead. Nilsen wondered for a moment if he had choked on his food, pondering, If you believe Nilsen's recollection of the omelette death that he recounted to the police, then it is evidence that he disassociated from his crimes as time went on. A possible argument for diminished responsibility, or maybe even not guilty by reason of insanity. Nilsen's psychological state remains a mystery to this day, but it was made more mysterious by Nilsen's final kill. The man who ended up with his head boiling away on the stove at 23 Cranley Gardens. His name was Stephen Sinclair, and Dennis Nilsen claimed to have literally no memory of this murder at all.

Stephen was just 20 in 1983. He was homeless, harbouring a severe heroin problem and a dramatically impulsive history of self-harm when Dennis Nilsen offered to buy him a McDonald's on Oxford Street. Then they took the tube to Highgate and walked the short distance to Cranley Gardens. Stephen stopped at Centrepoint on the way to check in with his friends, which is maybe the only reason we know exactly when he went missing. All Nilsen can remember of what happened when they got back to Cran New Gardens is Stephen sloping off to the bathroom.

Nilsson just assumed that he was off to inject himself with drugs and carried on listening to the Who's rock opera Tommy, which, by the way, is dark as fuck. It's about this, like, there was recent, not recently, probably about five years ago now, there was a revival of it at Stratford East. It's about a boy, his dad was a World War II veteran, I think. And then he loses his sense of sight and hearing and he can't speak, I think. And it's about his experience of that through music by The Who. And that's what that is. Wow, I did not know that. So he is sitting there listening

to Tommy. And then before he knew it, it was the next day and Stephen Sinclair was dead in the armchair, a string with a tie attached to it lying next to him on the floor. Not knowing where this dead body had come from didn't stop Nilsen carrying out his ritual cleansing and he took Stephen Sinclair's dead body to the bathroom and then he lay both of them on his bed, naked, surrounded by his favourite mirrors. Every kill was a sexual kill because Nilsen was attracted to dead bodies, especially when he imagined them to be himself. In his confessions, Nilsen admitted that by killing these men, he had, in fact, been killing himself,

which, just, what a dickhead. Oh, absolutely. He's psychoanalysing himself to the extreme. He is very much. But the thing that is interesting is that, you know, we were saying that maybe Nilsson didn't seem to really know or understand why he was doing these things. But he does seem to quite accurately be profiling himself

in that these people that he's killing, these men he's killing, are surrogates for himself because that's who he really wants to be dead and fuck about with. But obviously he can't do that. Maybe that's even why he disregarded some of the bodies like Malcolm. Maybe they didn't look enough like him or they weren't like a good enough surrogate for him or something. I don't know, but interestingly he says that.

That's a very good point because Nilsson wasn't a particularly hairy guy and if his victims were too hairy he would shave them. So I think it is, you know, in one's own image. And the fact of the matter is these men died because of a sexual fantasy of a man who wanted to have sex with his own corpse and also to never be alone. According to Nilsson, he, quote, never sensed the feeling of killing as such,

only a feeling of stopping something terrible from happening, a compulsion to squeeze the person by the throat to relieve and absolve him and me from something terrible. As you can see, Nilsen, he had to kill these men. He had to do it so that they couldn't leave him. If they were dead, they couldn't choose not to hug him like his mother had. The rest of Stephen's body that would not fit in the pot was stowed in a tea chest in a wardrobe and under the bath. The dissection and dismemberments of the bodies was not something that Nilsen enjoyed. Like we said, he's very much a product killer. He doesn't

want to be fucking chopping them up. He hated the mess. It was a necessary evil of body disposal. He often vomited as he cut his victims' bodies apart. Decomposition was not his bag. And actually one of the biggest theories, well not biggest theories, a theory around Jeffrey Dahmer is the reason he was drunk all the time was because he hated, you know, dissecting the bodies. That's not really what he wanted. He just wanted all the bits. He didn't want to do it.

So now, with that, we're right back to the beginning after Dennis Nilsen has been arrested. After Nilsen was taken to Hornsey Police Station, police removed one plastic bag containing two human torsos and another bag filled with assorted internal organs. How big is this fucking plastic bag that it's got two human torsos in it?

Well, you didn't have to pay 10p for them back in the day. They were fucking huge. I see. So yet another bag was found filled with two human heads, one devoid of flesh and another torso, complete with arms but missing hands. Once interviewed, Nilsen confessed to the three men he had murdered at Cranley Gardens and the 12 to 13 others at Melrose Avenue and the attempted on seven other men who had escaped or whom he had revived. When asked what his motive was, like we said, Nilsson just replied with the

phrase, I was hoping you would tell me that. And he never gave that much more insight. He's very good at like floating above the situation and be like, oh, I suppose I was really killing myself. Like he's very good at that bit. He's no good at all at the like, I did it because of this. He never gives any more reason than that. He's like, I do not know why I did it. Like full stop. Like it's really unsatisfying. What he does say later is that idea of it's just like a compulsion for him. He can't stop. He has to do this. He has to do it to stop something terrible happening. Almost like, you know, like an OCD element of like, if I don't do this thing, something terrible is going to happen. If I don't kill this person, something terrible is going to happen if I don't kill this person something terrible is going to happen I have to do it but the terrible

thing that's going to happen is they're going to leave him that's it and like although he doesn't offer that many reasons though I guess like killing is already a very outlying thing and I guess him saying that he's doing it because it feels like a compulsion is maybe the most you could get out of anybody or hope to get out of any serial killer. But other than that, Nilsson just says that he wished he could have stopped. But saying again that he couldn't and that killing was the only thing that brought him a thrill or happiness of any sort. He wished that they hadn't found their way to him. Meaning, of course, his victims. He's just putting the blame on them like the one he says that about particularly is malcolm the one who goes to hospital and then comes back he's like

why did you do that because obviously i'm gonna kill you now like he has no control over the situation these men and boys just mysteriously find their way to him and then he can't be blamed for what happens next it's almost like talking about it almost very like as if it's fate. Like this thing happened, they found their way to me and then I had to do it. Yes, yes, exactly. Because he's a narcissist and narcissistic serial killers love a big fat confession. They have a captive audience and finally they can tell everyone how great they are. Ed Kemper was another one of the big confession gang. Nilsen, no, different. The reason the likes of Kemper and Nilsen are so famous is the sordid details they give in their confessions. I'm sure there are killers who have done way worse, but we don't know because they haven't told us about it. Nilsen loved talking about his crimes

so much he filled 50 notebooks full of his murderous manhunting the only reason we know that ed kemper fucked his dead mom's head is because he told us so similarly the only reason we know that nelson boiled heads on his stove is because he said so and also because of the fact that the two decapitated heads found in a bag in his flat had clearly been subjected to, technical term, moist heat. Ew, gross. Few survived Kemper, but at least seven escaped Nilsen. We've already met Andrew Ho, and now we're going to revisit student Paul Nobbs. Nineteen-year-old student Paul had run into Nilsen in the Golden Lion in November 1981,

and they'd headed back to Cranley Gardens. Nilsen had lived there for just a month. They got drunk and had sex. Paul then fell asleep inside a sleeping bag. The next morning he awoke with a shocking pain in his throat. Even drinking water was painful. His eyes were bloodshot and he had no memory of the night before. He left Cranley Gardens in a haze and took himself to a doctor after bruises appeared on his neck. The doctor told him that he'd been strangled and that he needed to report the incident to the police, but Paul didn't feel like he could do that. He would, however, when it came to October 1983 and Nilsen was safely behind bars, testify at his trial. And he wasn't the only one that Nilsen had decided to let live. Carl Stotter had just got talking to Nilsen in the black cap in Camden when he was just 21 in 1982.

Carl had just gone through a horrible breakup and his confidence was at an all-time low. Nilsen convinced him that he could make him feel better back at Cranley Gardens, in a pattern you'll all be familiar with by now. They drank, had sex, and then Carl fell asleep in the same sleeping bag. Paul Nobbs had escaped the year before. Nilsen had strangled Carl as he slept in the sleeping bag. Carl thought that Nilsen was trying to get him out of the sleeping bag. Then he heard running water, and then he passed out.

Nilsen had attempted to drown Carl after strangling him, and thought that he'd done the job, but Carl was still alive. Thinking it was all done, Nilsen took himself off to have his favourite rum and coke. He remembered thinking, here we go again, as if the murder had been carried out by another person, as if he wasn't actually the one in control. And this is another example of Nilsen's dissociative states,

convenient but typical in serial killers. They often report not being present for the actual act of the murder. It doesn't make them not responsible for the homicide, however. After Nilsen returned from his drink, upon discovering that Carl Stotter was not actually dead, instead of strangling him, Nilsen gave him CPR and revived the young man. Carl stayed at Cranley Gardens for three days until he was strong enough to leave. Nilsen cared for him that entire time. It's such a like night and day thing and it sort of feeds into this like dissociative state idea kind of but like I don't know. I think he wants to be perceived as this like nice caring

civil servant who cares about like people's rights. And then there's this murderer that he can't control. Sort of like two sides of a coin really. But like even with Paul Nobbs, like he walks him to the station. He wakes up and he's like, oh, like you look like shit. You should go to the doctor and walks him to the station. He's literally just tried to kill him. It's bizarre. He's fascinating. It is. It's almost like that weird narcissistic god complex of, like, he's going to decide who dies and who doesn't. And maybe it's also that narcissistic draw that those people have,

which is, like, a need to be liked. So if he decides that I'm not going to kill you, then I'm going to be really nice to you because I want you to really think I'm great, like a great fucking person. So at trial, the defence were never going to argue that Nilsen didn't kill all of these men. Instead, they argued that he had a diminished responsibility,

that he was incapable of forming the intention to commit murder, making manslaughter a more appropriate charge, which obviously comes with less time. For what it's worth, this theory was backed up by psychiatrist James McKeith, who testified that Nilsen had no capacity to express emotions other than anger as a result of being emotionally underdeveloped. Other humans were little more than characters in his fantasies. You know how people talk about like being the main character? You know, like I run at night in the middle of the road to make myself feel like the main character. Nilsen really is his main character. Other people are just like 2D to him, I think.

Coupling this with Nilsen's sexual obsession with penetrating his own dead body, McKeith concluded that Nilsen suffered from an unspecified personality disorder that could substantially diminish Nilsen's responsibility. Not particularly helpful. Not super compelling, I'm going to say. If I was in that courtroom. There's something wrong with him. I don't know what it is, but there's something going on.

The second psychiatrist on the stand was a bit more definitive. His name was Patrick Galway, and he diagnosed Nilsen with, quote, don't hold your breath because this is a long one, borderline false self as if pseudo-normal narcissistic personality disorder with occasional outbreaks of schizoid disturbances. Put that one on a postcard and send it to your mum. Basically, what I think that means is that Nilsen was capable of being what we would perceive as normal most of the time, but social isolation made him impulsive and

violent, which made it impossible for Nilsen to have premeditated his crimes or appreciate their criminal nature. Which, fine, but these diagnoses were basically pointless and totally useless when the jury were presented with the matter-of-fact delivery of Nilsen's own confessions in all of their excruciating detail. It's a hard sell, very much so. And so, of course, with that, Dennis Nilsen was found unanimously guilty

of six counts of murder and one count of attempted murder on the 3rd of November 1983 attempted murder on the 3rd of November 1983. And on the 3rd of November 1983, he was given life with a minimum of 25 years and transferred from Brixton to Wormwood Scrubs. I know that I should like be more stressed about Broadmoor than I am Wormwood Scrubs, but the words Wormwood Scrubs just send an actual shiver through my entire body. Who the fuck named it? What does it mean? You know the other one that's bad?

Strange Ways. Oh, yeah, yeah. The names of prisons in this country terrify me. So after this, Nilsson didn't appeal his conviction and seemed accepting of his fate. He did, however, make many attempts to challenge abuses of prison rules because he was a union man until the very end.

In 1983, he was attacked by another inmate with a razor blade and needed 89 stitches in his face. Because of this, he was sent to the Monster Mansion, a.k.a. Wakefield, until 1990. When his 25 years were up in 1994, he was handed a whole of life order. Again, he didn't seem to mind this, occupying his time translating books into braille and writing his autobiography, The History of a Drowning Boy. He's such a fucking emo wanker. I know. It's like he wrote a song about himself entitled Poor Little Dennis.

But I do think, again, it's this sort of like two sides of a coin thing. You know how like Ed Kemper recorded audiobooks for the blind? Like there's so many parallels. Like who taught Dennis Nilsson Braille for a start? And how is he so good at it he translates books? That's mental. What a skill. That is fucking crazy.

Yeah, I mean, and again, this is shown in the dramatization in Des. I don't know if it's real, but I can see it being real. The author who writes Killing for Company is like a main character in the TV show Des because he's writing the book throughout the process of the show. And when Des asks him, what are you going to call the book? And he says Killing for Company. He looks really disappointed. He's like, it's a bit fucking on the nose, isn't it? And so I can absolutely see him being like, well, I'm going to write my own and I'm going to call it The History of a Drowning Boy and live my fucking book writing dreams.

Oh, absolutely. So in May 2018, Nilsson started complaining of severe stomach pains, which turned out to be an aortic aneurysm. He had surgery, but it was futile, and he died on the 12th of May. But how did he get away with it for so long? How did he manage to kill 15, maybe even 16 men or boys without anybody having any idea? Before we move on to the answer to that question,

which you should already know if you are in any terms of the word spooky bitches, if anyone writes in to say that Harold Shipman is the most notorious serial killer in British history, I will personally meet you outside. Move on. Yeah, I just haven't got any energy for that man. We're never going to cover Harold Shipman. Ever. Ever, ever, ever,

ever. I will start killing people myself so that we can cover those on the show before I feel like we need to cover Harold Shipman. So anyway, how did Dennis Nilsen get away with it? The answer is, of course, the same as it always is, victim selection of the less dead. Nilsen killed transient people who no one would look for. Many were homeless, some were involved in sex work, and almost all of them were gay. Paul Nobbs testified in court that he had not gone to the police about his near-death encounter, because remember, the doctor told him, you've been strangled, you should go file a police incident report. And he said no, and this was because he was afraid that his sexuality would be discovered

and the consequences as a result for his career. Police in Britain were not that bothered about gay people. In fact, the government weren't that bothered about gay people and they proved that in 1988 when Thatcher's government enacted Section 28. Section 28 was a very loosely worded piece of legislation that forbade the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities. And local authorities means councils and, crucially, schools. This legislation was a reaction to LGBTQ protests about the inalienable right to be gay and also to the 1983 book called Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin,

which taught children about other types of families, not just heteronormative ones. This book was seen as unbearably offensive by Thatcher who said that quote children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All those children are being cheated of a sound start in life. The real world impact of section 28 was shattering. It prevented local authorities from funded much needed LGBTQ initiatives right in the middle of an AIDS epidemic.

Equally, it meant that children who were bullied in school for their sexuality were unprotected. Davina De Campo spoke about her experience of this exact situation on the first season of Drag Race UK. She said that teachers felt as if they were unable to step in when she was being violently bullied because they would be violating Section 28. And this may sound like ancient history, but it literally isn't. Section 28 stopped in Scotland in 2000,

and it didn't stop in every other part of the United Kingdom until 2003. I was reading about this this week, and I was thinking about all the sex ed like PSHG stuff I had at school I finished school in what 2009 I don't think I ever heard anything about LGBTQ rights at all or even that it was like anything other than heteronormative family units or relations I didn't hear anything about it but I didn't even question it really at the time I don't even know if it's in curriculums now I think it's just about being brought in in some primary schools in Scotland, but I think that's it. I have no idea, but you're right. I finished school in 2008. Do not remember. Do not remember at all. I'll ask my

mum and we'll talk about it on Under the Duvet because I haven't got a fucking clue. There's never been any real apology for Section 28. Only Baroness Knight, who was instrumental in the building of the bill, said that the intention was the well-being of children the distaste is completely learned and societal yeah yeah of course because what they're saying is if these kids grow up to be gay then they're going to have a really difficult time because the rest of us are super bigoted so instead of saying hey how about we'll be less bigoted so people can be whoever they want and not have a horrible time they're like no no we'll just make you conform to what we think is okay that's what they're saying the world's full of people like me i'm a horrible fucking bigot so you should just

not be gay that's it yeah exactly because what we need is more of me surprisingly institutional homophobia is still alive and well in the uk we We only need to look at the case of Stephen Port, where murdered young men were found in the same place by the same dog walker, weeks apart, and these murders were dismissed as young gay party boys overdosing, and Port kept on killing. So although Nilsen may feel like a distant memory in the public consciousness, the attitudes that allowed him to kill so many so quickly are still very much alive. And that is Dennis Nilsen for you. Wow, that was quite the journey. I hope

you guys survived it. Hope you put the fucking KFC down before you started listening to this like we advised you to. If not, you only have yourselves to blame so yes if you would like a little bit of a palate cleanse a palate cleanser head on over to under the duvet now on patreon.com slash red handed where we'll be talking about something else entirely that isn't to do with necrophilia most likely we love you and we'll be back next week with some more scary shit bye bye Scary shit. Bye. Bye. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame industry. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down.

Today, I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom. But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy. Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal.

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