EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (10 page)

Dennis Nilsen

In the police station, Dennis Nilsen calmly explained to the investigating officers, ‘The victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing up is an ordinary clinical task.’ He had performed that ‘ordinary clinical task’ no fewer than fifteen times, disposing of the bodies of the young men he had had brought home and from whom he could not bear to be parted.

It had all begun on 30 December 1978. He had befriended a young man at a local pub and taken him home with him to his flat at 195 Melrose Avenue in north London. Stephen Dean Holmes, it would later emerge, was only fourteen years old at the time and was on his way home from a concert when he met Nilsen. The two continued to drink at the flat and then climbed into bed together.

When Nilsen awoke towards dawn, he realised with an overwhelming sense of sadness that Holmes would be leaving when he woke up. Nilsen had spent Christmas entirely on his own and did not relish the thought of a solitary New Year. He picked up his tie from the piles of clothing they had thrown on the floor the night before and climbed on top of the boy, encircling his neck with the tie, pulling it tight. Holmes woke up immediately and they fell from the bed onto the floor as he struggled for his life. Nilsen pulled tighter and gradually, the life flowed out of Holmes and he went limp. He was only unconscious, however, and Nilsen went to the kitchen and filled a plastic bucket with water. He brought it back in and, placing Holmes on some chairs, dangled his head into the bucket, drowning him. Holmes did not struggle and within a few minutes, he was dead.

Nilsen was unnerved at having killed someone – especially someone whose name he could barely remember. He drank some coffee and thought about what to do. He carried the corpse into the bathroom where he washed its hair. He then returned it to the bedroom and put it to bed.

He later told how he thought that Holmes’s dead body was rather beautiful but, of course, he realised that he had to get rid of it somehow. He went out to buy an electric knife and a large cooking pot, but when he got back home, he could not bring himself to slice up his new friend. Instead, he dressed him in clean underwear and clothes, like a doll. He thought about having sex with the body, but was unable to. Then he laid it on the floor and went to bed for a while.

Later, when he got up again, he had some dinner and watched television, the body lying all the while on the floor. Suddenly, he had a brainwave. He prised loose some floorboards and tried to shove the body into the space beneath them. Unfortunately, rigor mortis had set in by this time and he could not manage it. He stood Holmes against the wall and decided to wait until the stiffness had worn off. Next day, he finally succeeded in squeezing him under the floorboards before nailing them back down.

A week passed and he wanted to have a look at the body again. He lifted the carpet and prised up the floorboards again. He was dismayed to see that the corpse was a bit dirty and so he took it out of the space and gave it a bath, before washing himself in the same water. All of this had aroused him and he masturbated over the body before inserting it in its grave under the floorboards again.

Remarkably, the body of Stephen Holmes would remain under those floorboards for more than seven months before Nilsen took it out into his garden and burned it, throwing pieces of rubber into the flames to disguise the stench of burning flesh.

A year later, a young Chinese student, Andrew Ho, escaped from Nilsen as they played bondage games in the flat. He actually went to the police and accused Nilsen of trying to strangle him, but the police decided not to charge him.

His second victim was Kenneth Ockendon, a Canadian whom Nilsen met at a pub, on 3 December 1979. Nilsen liked him a lot and was devastated to learn that his new friend was flying home to Canada the following day. As Ockendon listened to some music through headphones, Nilsen sneaked up on him and strangled him with their chord. He listened to some music with the body lying on the floor beside him and then dragged him into the bathroom to clean him up. He put him in his bed and climbed in beside him, remaining there for the night, stroking and caressing him. In the morning, he stuffed him into a cupboard and went to work.

The following day, he took the body out and photographed it in various positions before taking it to bed with him and having sex with it. Ockendon was then put under the floorboards but when Nilsen felt lonely, he would get the body out and sit beside it watching television. Nilsen would then clean the body again, dress it and put it back to bed under the floor, wishing him a gentle ‘goodnight’.

Five months later, in May 1980, he strangled Martyn Duffey, a sixteen-year-old homeless boy. Duffey had to be drowned before Nilsen took a bath with his body. He kissed him all over and then masturbated while seated on his stomach. It was then two weeks in the cupboard for him before he went under the floor.

Nilsen next killed a twenty-six-year-old Scottish male prostitute, Billy Sutherland, strangling him, it later emerged, with his bare hands. Nilsen did not remember killing Sutherland. He seemed to enter a trance of some kind when he was killing and his memories of many of his acts when he was in this state were wiped.

Many of his victims were itinerants or homeless and they were, consequently, never identified. The names of the next seven young men Nilsen killed have never been known. The first, his fifth murder, was again a male prostitute of oriental – possibly Thai – origin. His sixth was a young Irish labourer and the seventh was what he described as a ‘hippy type’ whom he encountered sleeping in a doorway in London’s Charing Cross area. Number eight remained under his floorboards for a year and numbers nine and ten were young Scottish men, picked up in the pubs of Soho. Number eleven was a young skinhead who had a tattoo around his neck – a dotted line saying ‘Cut Here’.

On 10 November, 1980, he picked up a Scottish barman who woke up back at the flat with Nilsen trying to strangle him. Douglas Stewart fought him off and ran out of the building. He went to the police but they refused to take action, putting it down to a homosexual domestic argument.

Martyn Barlow was next. Twenty-four-years-old with learning difficulties, he loitered outside Nilsen’s building and then complained of weakness from epilepsy. Nilsen called an ambulance and had him taken to hospital. On his release, on 18 September 1981, he returned to Nilsen to thank him and the two had a meal and drank together in the flat. When Barlow fell asleep, Nilsen strangled him. This time it was not because he did not want him to leave. He simply found him a bit of a nuisance. He squeezed his corpse into a cabinet under the sink in the kitchen.

Of course, the question of hygiene was becoming pressing and the neighbours began to complain about the smell in the building. Nilsen told them it was because the building was old. Meanwhile, he sprayed his flat twice a day to kill off the countless flies that were hatching in the putrefying flesh.

He got rid of the bodies by stripping to his underwear and cutting them up with a kitchen knife on the stone kitchen floor. He would often put the head in the large pot he had bought and boil the flesh off it. He knew how to butcher, having learned during a stint in the army as a chef. He would put pieces of bodies in the garden shed and disposed of internal organs in plastic bags between the double fencing in the garden. The rest he would burn in the garden.

He moved to a new flat at 23 Cranley Gardens in the Muswell Hill area of north London, having tidied up the old flat, remembering at the last moment that he had left Martyn Barlow’s hands and arms beside a bush in the garden. The new place had no garden and was an attic flat. He believed he would be able to bring an end to his murderous spree if he could not dispose of the bodies. He was wrong.

He met John Howlett in a pub and they went back to his flat to carry on drinking. For once Nilsen wanted him to leave, but ‘John the Guardsman’ climbed into Nilsen’s bed and refused to go. Nilsen took a length of upholstery strap and strangled Howlett with it. It was a tough one as Howlett was a fairly strong man. He hit him on the head, and the fight was over. Howlett would still not die, however, and he had to drown him before putting him out of sight in a closet.

He decided to dispose of the body by cutting it into small chunks and flushing it down the toilet. He then boiled some of the flesh and Howlett’s head, hands and feet, disposing of the bones in the rubbish.

Soon, he killed another man in the attic flat. He does not remember strangling Archibald Graham Allan. He just noticed him sitting there with a piece of the omelette he had been eating protruding from his mouth. He left him in the bath for three days before dissecting him.

Last of all, he killed twenty-year-old drug addict, Steven Sinclair, after meeting him in Leicester Square. He strangled him with some thick string and on removing some bandages from his victim’s arms afterwards, realised that he had recently tried to slit his wrists. He gave the dead man a bath and put him to bed. He then placed mirrors by the bed, undressed and lay down beside Sinclair’s body, becoming excited by looking at them in the mirror. He disposed of Sinclair in the same way that as the others at Cranley Gardens.

In February 1983 it all began to unravel when one of the five tenants of the house experienced difficulty in getting his toilet to flush. In fact, none of the toilets in the house were working properly and a plumber was called. He was unable to fix the problem, however, and a specialist was summoned. Nilsen began to worry that the toilets must be sticking because of what he had been flushing down his. He swiftly disposed of what he could from his flat. He stuffed what remained of Sinclair’s body into plastic bags and locked it in a cupboard.

Two days later, someone arrived to investigate the blockage. He clambered down a manhole at the side of the house and immediately noticed a strong smell. He was certain it was the smell of something dead. There was sludge in the sewer which he discovered was coming from numerous pieces of rotting flesh. Its source was a pipe from the house. He phoned in to his bosses and told the tenants, Nilsen amongst them, that he would have to notify the police. To their horror, he showed them the piles of flesh he had dragged out of the sewer.

Incredibly, that night Nilsen tried to get rid of the pile, dumping them over the fence, but he was spotted by a watchful neighbour. Next day, he is reported to have said to his colleagues at work, ‘If I’m not in tomorrow, I’ll either be dead or in jail.’

When he went home, three officers were waiting for him. A search of the flat very quickly uncovered Steven Sinclair’s body parts, amongst others. Nilsen accompanied them to the police station and began to talk, providing them with a full confession of what he had been up to for the previous four years.

Dennis Nilsen’s trial began on 24 October 1983 and on 3 November he was found guilty of six murders and two attempted murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-five years, but it is unlikely he will ever be released. Still, prison has its advantages – at least he will never be lonely again.

Peter Sutcliffe

The Yorkshire Ripper

For almost six years, he dealt death and terror to the women of the north of England, attacking twenty women, thirteen of whom he brutally murdered. The area was in the grip of hysteria and the biggest police force ever to be involved in a manhunt in the United Kingdom struggled to deal with the countless pieces of information.

They caught him on Saturday 3 January 1981, more by luck than judgement, as he sat in his car talking to a prostitute. She was lucky because in his pockets were the tools of his grisly trade – a ball-peen hammer and a knife – and the moment she stepped out of the car, he would have used the hammer to smash her skull and the knife to mutilate her body, as he had done with the others. As it was, however, two policemen who happened to be passing in a patrol car, stopped to investigate the brown Rover parked on the driveway of the British Iron and Steel Producers Association.

Peter Sutcliffe had seemed an unlikely Yorkshire Ripper suspect. He had always been quiet, and in his work as a lorry-driver had a reputation for being slightly different to the others. A quietly-spoken man, he never talked about women the way the other drivers did, never used bad language and seemed to be in an idyllic marriage to his wife Sonia.

He had been born in Bingley in 1946 to John and Kathleen Sutcliffe but instead of being the action man that his sports-mad father wanted, he turned out to be a loner, a bit of a ‘mummy’s boy’ who was bullied at school, until he became interested in body-building. Nonetheless, he was never any good at school and left aged fifteen, working in a number of jobs during the next couple of years.

When he was twenty, he finally – much to the relief of his father – found a girlfriend, Sonia Szurma, daughter of Czech immigrants. They married in 1974 and to her family and others he seemed to be a nice, hard-working young man who thought the world of his wife.

Under that loving and caring surface, however, there were less desirable traits. He was a habitué of prostitutes, as his brother-in-law would discover when they went out drinking together. A friend, Trevor Birdsall, who would later report his suspicions about Sutcliffe to the police, spent countless evenings cruising the red-light districts of Yorkshire with him.

Not long after his marriage, Sutcliffe gained an HGV licence. He and Sonia also learned that after many miscarriages, she would never be able to have children. They were both devastated.

Around this time, he attacked a woman, the first of two attacks he would make before he finally killed. She lived in Keighly but had fallen out with her boyfriend. As she banged angrily on the door of her boyfriend’s house, Sutcliffe leapt out from the shadows and dealt her a crushing blow to the head with a hammer. As she lay on the ground, he hit her twice more and lifted her skirt. Pulling down her underwear, he slashed her across the stomach with a knife. A neighbour, hearing the noise, came out to ask what the commotion was. Sutcliffe calmly told him it was nothing and that he should go back indoors. With that, he left the scene, his victim surviving the attack. But investigating officers were bemused. No money had been taken and the attack did not appear to be of a sexual nature.

A month later, on Friday 15 August, Sutcliffe was out carousing with Trevor Birdsall in the pubs of Halifax when he caught sight of forty-six-year-old Olive Smelt. She was out drinking with friends while her husband stayed at home looking after the kids. She and her friends were given a lift home by some men they knew and Olive was dropped close to her house.

Meanwhile, Sutcliffe had left Birdsall alone in his beloved white Ford Corsair, saying he would be back in a minute. As Olive walked down an alleyway, she heard a voice behind her saying, ‘Weather’s letting us down, isn’t it?’ before feeling a shattering blow on the back of her head. He struck her once more as she hit the ground and lashed out with the knife, slashing her in the lower back. A car suddenly approached, however, and he was unable to finish the task. He returned to Birdsall waiting in the Corsair as if nothing had happened.

Again the police were puzzled by the incident but they critically failed to link it to the earlier attack. It would be a full three years before they realised that the same man had been responsible for them.

Two months later, he killed for the first time.

The body of twenty-year-old mother-of-four Wilma McCann was found by a Leeds milkman in the early hours of 30 October, lying on her back on a dark recreation ground just a hundred yards from the front door of her council house. The previous night she had left her children to go drinking in Leeds and had drunk heavily before making her way home. Several people had seen her, including a lorry driver who stopped to offer her a lift, but she was incoherent and he thought better of it. She was then seen at 1.30 am being picked up and was never seen alive again.

She had been struck twice on the back of the head and then stabbed frenziedly fifteen times in the neck, chest and abdomen. There was semen on her trousers and on her underpants, but she had not been raped. Her purse was missing, however, and the police conveniently used this as the motive for her killing. A large force consisting of 150 officers was thrown at the task of interviewing 7,000 householders and checking every detail with which they were presented. It was to no avail, however. They were no closer to finding their man.

Emily Jackson was not a full-time prostitute. She lived with her husband and three children in a respectable Leeds suburb but money troubles had forced her on to the street. She left her husband in the lounge of the Gaiety Pub on 20 January 1976, stepping outside in search of business. When she failed to return to the pub at closing time, her husband went home, expecting her to follow later.

She never returned. Her body was found next morning a short distance from the Gaiety, on her back with her legs spread apart. Her tights and pants were still in place, but her bra had been lifted, exposing her breasts. She had been dealt two sickening blows to the head with the hammer and then stabbed 51 times with a Philips screwdriver that had been sharpened for the purpose. They had their first clue, however – the print of a size 7 Dunlop Warwick Wellington boot was imprinted on her thigh where he had stamped on her in his rage.

The same man that had killed Wilma McCann had killed Emily Jackson. Police now knew they had a serial killer on their hands.

Sutcliffe had been working as a delivery driver for a tyre company, but his lateness in the mornings resulted in him being sacked. He now spent several months looking for a job. In the meantime, his evenings were often busy.

Marcella Claxton, a twenty-year-old prostitute was attacked on 9 May. Sutcliffe picked her up and drove her to a large open space where he offered her £5 to have sex with him. She told him she had to urinate first and as she did so, he hit her twice from behind with the hammer. As she lay on the ground drifting in and out of consciousness, she opened her eyes to see him masturbating in front of her. He put a £5 note in her hand and warned her not to call the police before climbing back into his car.

She staggered and crawled to a nearby phone box and dialled 999, but as she waited, bleeding and crumpled on the floor of the kiosk, she saw him pass in his white car several times, as if he was looking for her in order to finish her off. She survived and was able to provide a description of her attacker.

The Yorkshire Ripper, as he was now being called by the newspapers, was the main topic of conversation amongst the prostitutes of the Chapeltown area of Leeds. The newspapers compared him to Jack the Ripper, the killer who had stalked the streets of London’s East End, killing prostitutes, almost ninety years previously. However, there was a prevailing feeling that no one really cared because his victims were prostitutes. The girls working the area were terrified, however, and many moved away to other cities.

Sutcliffe finally found work as a lorry driver in October 1976 and it seemed to stop him killing for a while. On 5 February 1977, however, his old urges re-surfaced. Irene Richardson’s skull was fractured by three blows to the head. She was also stabbed in the neck, throat and stomach, the knife wounds so savage that her intestines spilled out. This time, they found tyre tracks but were dismayed to learn that these could belong to any one of around 100,000 vehicles.

On 23 April, Patricia Atkinson went to the Carlisle pub for a drink with friends. The next day she was found dead on the bed in her flat from where she operated as a prostitute. She had received four hammer blows before being stabbed six times with a chisel in her abdomen and in her back. The print of the sole of a size 7 Dunlop Warwick Wellington boot was found on a bed-sheet.

Life changed for the Sutcliffes around this time. Sonia was training to be a teacher and would hopefully find a job in the autumn term. They also bought a house in Bradford for £15,000. The night after they had first gone to have a look at the house, Sutcliffe travelled to Chapeltown again.

Jayne MacDonald was sixteen years old and was walking home when she was attacked and dragged into a playground by Sutcliffe. When she was found, on the morning of Sunday 26 June, her breasts were exposed. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and once in the back, after being felled by three blows to the back of her head. She was not a prostitute and suddenly the public seemed to awaken to the danger in their midst. The investigating team was inundated with information and a huge number of interviews and house-to-house calls were carried out.

On the night of 9 July, Sutcliffe drove into Bradford. In the early hours of Sunday morning, he stopped at a taxi queue and offered a lift to Maureen Long who had been drinking and dancing in the bars and clubs of the city. He drove her to Bowling Back Lane where he killed her with the customary blow to the back of the head before stabbing her as she lay on the ground. He was disturbed in his savage work, however, and she survived although it would be many weeks before she left hospital.

Another 12,500 statements were taken and 10,000 cars were checked. Information that the car was a white Ford Corsair was exciting until they discovered that it was the vehicle of choice for thousands of taxi drivers in the area.

It became irrelevant, however, when Sutcliffe sold the white Corsair and replaced it with a red one. Sonia, meanwhile, had been given her first teaching post.

On 1 October, Jean Jordan climbed into his new car in Manchester’s rough Moss Side area. She had agreed to have sex with him in a quiet piece of parkland for £5. She slipped the £5 note into a hidden pocket in her handbag but once she had climbed out of the car, he hit her no fewer than thirteen times in a frenzy of rage. In his new house the next day, however, he began to worry about the £5 note he had left behind. It had been brand-new, he remembered and could, consequently, be easily traced back to him.

He had concealed her body well and eight days later it had still not been found. Therefore, when he had to drive some visitors home on the night of 9 October following a party, he decided to return to the scene of her murder to retrieve the note. Having dropped off his friends, he drove back across the Pennines and found her body where he had left it. He was unable to locate the handbag, however. He became furious and ripping her clothes from her body, began stabbing her viciously. In his fury, he attempted to decapitate her, but did not have the proper tools. Her hideously mutilated body was found the next day.

The handbag and the hidden £5 note were found five days later. Sutcliffe had been correct – the serial number of the note provided a massive clue and its provenance was soon found as part of a batch that had been distributed to firms that employed around 8,000 men in the Bradford and Shipley area. They were all interviewed, including Sutcliffe, but there were no new developments as a result.

Sutcliffe botched an attempt to kill a prostitute, Marilyn Moore, in mid-December and then killed Yvonne Pearson on 21 January 1978, although her body would not be discovered until March. Prostitute Helen Rytka was murdered on 31 January – this time he had sex with her as she lay on the ground bleeding from a blow to the head before stabbing her through the heart and lungs.

On 16 May 1978, Vera Millward had gone out to buy some cigarettes and pick up some painkillers when Sutcliffe jumped her on the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary. She was hit on the head three times before being viciously slashed and stabbed in the eye. Her screams were heard, but such noises were not unusual in that area at that time of night and no one reported them. Tyre tracks found nearby matched those found at other murder scenes.