The Big Read: Dennis Nilsen - The Scottish nobody who became the archetypal serial killer

Nilsen, a lonely, socially awkward outsider from Aberdeenshire, killed at least 12 young men between 1978 and 1983. He is, in many ways, the archetypal serial killer – his strange and terrifying psychology a guide to understanding what makes such men (and serial killers nearly always are men) tick.

His crimes still resonate so powerfully in British society that his life is to be dramatised from tomorrow night in a new ITV series, Des, starring David Tennant.

The gateway to understanding Nilsen, and other killers like him, comes in the form of a series of sketches, poems and prose passages which he composed called Monochrome Man: Sad Sketches. The drawings and writings detail his crimes and his feelings towards both himself and his murders. The sketches comprise a ghastly collection of drawings of his victims. One image shows an impassive Nilsen staring down at a dead body on a bed. Another shows a victim stuffed into a wardrobe while a third is titled “The body on the floor. Ritual stripping and washing”. Others depict mutilated and naked bodies.

If Nilsen’s drawings reveal the utter detachment and terrifying lack of empathy with which a psychopath views human suffering, then his writings show us the absolute emotional deadness which exists inside the serial killer. One of his poems reads:

The monochrome man is a dream

It is the black and it is the white of life.

There he stands near himself and distant

He is the cameo who activates now and then

Can’t cope with metropolitania

Taking him sometimes to this, numbing chant.

On the waste he laid before him

Peaceful, pale flesh on a bed

Real and beautiful – and dead.

There’s nothing inside Nilsen, the poem tells us. He’s emotionally dead, any sense of human feeling gone. Nilsen is confessing that he quite literally doesn’t function as other humans function – he’s like some alien creature pretending to be human. He’s a “cameo” – an unnoticed walk-on part in life. He cannot bear modern society – “metropolitania”, as he calls it. Nilsen clearly says that it’s his rejection of this world, which the rest of us live in, that led him to murder.

Nilsen is obviously trying to exempt himself from the sin of being simply evil – of killing for the mere pleasure of killing. However, while he self-pityingly blames his crimes on the modern world turning him into an emotionally blank “thing”, he also effectively confesses that he only feels alive during murder. The acclaimed writer Brian Masters called his study of Nilsen Killing For Company because the murderer kept the corpses of his victims in his home to assuage his intense loneliness and inability to connect to other, living, human beings.

There’s an horrific truth to Nilsen’s writings when it comes to the study of serial murder. Most repeat killers share the same emotional deadness, rejection of society, and inability to feel alive unless involved in an act of destruction. This loser Nilsen, this nobody from Fraserburgh, this forgettable dull friendless non-entity, is also the template of the modern serial killer. This makes studying Nilsen and his crimes both dreadful and necessary, because his murders say something very important and disturbing about the nature of modern crime and society.

Self-esteem killers

The philosopher and writer Colin Wilson was one of the greatest explorers of the mind of the serial killer. Wilson died in 2013 but his theories about what makes and motivates a serial killer will continue to influence criminology for generations.

In lengthy works such as A Criminal History Of Mankind and essays like The Age Of Murder, Wilson suggests that serial killers, a relatively modern phenomenon, are primarily motivated by the need for “self-actualisation” – the desire to fulfil some inner want which expresses an individual’s psyche.

Until the 20th century, most murders were motivated by an individual’s basic “needs” – they killed because they were cold, hungry or poor, as a shortcut to wealth and status, in vengeance because of insult, to protect themselves from danger, or to safeguard honour and reputation.

Sex crime was common, but sex crime involving murder and torture was relatively rare. However, in the 20th century, a different type of murderer emerged, motivated solely by the desire to kill and inflict suffering. This is the era of the sexual serial killer, of which Nilsen is the most marked stereotype.

Wilson linked this change in the pattern of murder to the psychological theory of the “hierarchy of needs” – the most basic needs are food, shelter and warmth; then comes security, followed by friendship, then prestige; and finally self-actualisation or achieving your full creative potential.

As history progressed into the 20th century, most of our human needs in the West were met. We had food, housing, security, jobs, education – but what was missing in many human lives was a sense of fulfilment, self-actualisation or even, as Wilson says, “self-esteem”. For a few twisted souls – who have usually suffered extreme abuse in childhood (Nilsen was sexually assaulted by a teenage boy as a youngster) – this thwarted desire for personal fulfilment deforms into something terrifying and dark.

Wilson saw significance in a comment by the multiple sex killer Melvin Rees, a gifted jazz musician, when he was arrested in America in 1960: “You say it’s wrong to kill – only individual standards make it right or wrong.” To Wilson, the murders of Rees – and other serial killers like Nilsen – were “to some extent crimes of intellectual rebellion, and therefore could not be classified simply as sex crimes. [Rees] was justifying his sex crimes with his intellect, and felt … that he had seen through the sham of morality. He saw himself as being above normal morality, and in that sense, could be classified as a self-esteem killer”.

Wilson hypothesises that the stresses of industrialised urban modern life on this small band of psychopaths is of such intensity that they become so alienated from society that killing becomes easy for them. Wilson often quoted an experiment in which rats, when put under the stress of overcrowding, turned violent and sexually aggressive.

The portrait of the archetypal serial killer which emerges from Wilson’s studies is that of a weak and pathetic man, damaged in childhood, unable to withstand the strain of modern life, and therefore incapable of experiencing any sense of self-worth.

This description fits Nilsen perfectly. In a curdled mix of revenge against a society which has rejected them and the desire to inflict control over the world, these men turn to violence as the sole remaining expression of their inner self.

Serial killer traits

In the film Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer – a grimly authentic account of the inner life of a repeat sexual murderer – the title character, based on the real-life offender Henry Lee Lucas, says of his crimes: “It’s always the same, and it’s always different.”

You could apply this comment to serial killers as a sub-group of humanity. They’re all different, but all horribly similar too. Nilsen bears shockingly close characteristics with the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance, who started murdering young men in 1978.

Both served in the army, Dahmer practised cannibalism and Nilsen is suspected of doing so. Bith were high-IQ low achievers, both rendered victims insensible with drugs or drink before strangling them, both cruised gay bars for vulnerable victims, both dismembered victims and kept bodies and body parts in their home, both were necrophiliacs, both were isolated loners, both abused alcohol, both even shared the same favourite drink – Rum and Coke.

From the outside, serial killers seem just like us. They mostly hold down jobs and even relationships, some are loners like Nilsen, some charming like Ted Bundy. But when they’re caught there’s one universal response from those who knew them: nobody expected they could be a killer.

They wear “the mask of sanity” – the guise a psychopath adopts to pass among functioning humans.

Mostly, they’re meticulous in planning their crimes – fantasising about the act at length – and there’s often a ritualistic aspect to their murders. Nearly all collect some sort of “trophy” from a victim, like a lock of hair. After killing, many experience a “cooling off” period where they don’t offend again until the pressure to murder once more becomes uncontainable.

Many serial killers hold their intelligence in high regard and some, in a ghastly way, see their crimes almost as an artistic expression or social comment – they certainly believe their offences are more than “mere murders”.

The American serial killer Edmund Kemper would lecture academics and detectives who came to study him as if they were semi-literate children.

Moors Murderer Ian Brady, another of Scotland’s most notorious serial killers, even wrote a book called The Gates Of Janus. It’s a twisted, bizarre work, like a critical study of serial murder. Brady writes about the crimes of other serial killers such as Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and appraises their offences the way one novelist might appraise another. It’s shocking and repellant but offers a glimpse of the way serial killers see their crimes – almost like some dreadful work of art.

Professor Elliott Leyton, who has made anthropological studies of serial killers, says we’re wrong to assume these criminals are insane. They “rarely display the cluster of readily indentifiable clinical symptoms … which psychiatrists agree make mental illness”.

Leyton, best known for his groundbreaking work Hunting Humans: The Rise Of The Modern Multiple Murderer, believes that these killers represent something very dark about modern society. “They are no freaks,” he says, “rather, they can only be fully understood as representing the logical extension of many of the central themes of their culture – of worldly ambition, of success and failure.”

Such killers should be perceived, Leyton says, as a dark and inverted “embodiment of their civilisation”.

“Therein lies the special horror,” he says, “for the killers are as ‘normal’ as you or me, yet they kill without mercy, and they kill to make a statement.”

In the mind of the serial offender, killing, says Leyton, is a “form of social art”, their crimes a “primitive rebellion against the social order”.

In perhaps the best summary of the mind of such killers, Leyton says that if the serial murderer is seen as having embarked upon a “personalised social protest” then “it must be emphasised that these killers are no radicals: they have enthusiastically embraced the established order only to discover that it offers them no place they can endure. Their rebellion is a protest against their perceived exclusion from society”.

In essence, they are men who have failed. This sense of inadequacy is tied intimately to their sexuality.

Nearly all serial killers target within their sexual group – straight men kill women, gay men kill men. As most serial killers are straight, white males, the preponderant targets of their hateful and damaged psyches are women and girls. The gap between their expectation of life and the reality of their own deficient personalities is so huge, says Leyton, that they feel compelled “to vent their rage upon the hated group”.

Most scholars of serial murder don’t see sex as the prime motivator. It’s power over others – the act of humiliating the victim – that compels them, as it briefly allows them to feel a sense of control they otherwise do not have. To Leyton, serial killers represent the ultimate in alienation.

Leyton sees their crimes as a “monologue with the social order”, sometimes quite literally – Nilsen would talk to the bodies of his victims for hours about the minutiae of British life. If we’re to understand serial killers, says Leyton, “their acts must be seen as a kind of deformed creativity, not a consequence of some drooling derangement”.

Serial killers like Nilsen, according to Leyton, need to be understood through the “fundamentally social nature of their creation, and the deep social meaning of their acts”.

The passing of the serial killer age

Fortunately for humanity, the serial killing phenomenon seems to have peaked.

Murderers such as Jack the Ripper in 1888 were outliers – an early herald of the coming of the serial killer phenomenon in the 20th century’s industrial age of social alienation. Serial murder began to accelerate after the First World War, became prevalent from 1945 onwards, peaking in the 1980s around the time of Nilsen’s arrest, and then began to tail off as the century ended.

Some scholars see the traumas of the 20th century – global war and genocide played out via a new mass media – as minor but contributory factors in the alienated psyche of the serial killer.

It’s not that the circumstances which led to the serial killing phenomenon have changed or disappeared – society still creates alienated, violent men.

What’s altered is law enforcement. Until the late 1980s, forensics was in its infancy. There was no DNA profiling, no CCTV camera on every street corner, police databases weren’t networked to pass relevant information from one force to another, there was no digital surveillance or satellite tracking.

Nowadays, it’s hard to get away with murder. It could be said that when Nilsen died in prison in 2018, his death marked the end of the serial killer era as we know it. It’s rare these days for a murderer like Nilsen to stay at large long enough to ensure such infamy or mass body count.

Some of the most notorious serial killers were caught by luck, chance or slip-up, not refined detective work. A parking ticket finally led to the arrest of David Berkowitz, New York’s Son of Sam killer, who murdered six people in the mid-1970s.

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was pulled over for driving with false number plates and would have got away with his crimes if he hadn’t tried to hide his murder weapons and been caught. Dennis Nilsen’s lengthy killing spree would have kept going if he hadn’t

been foolish enough to dispose of body parts down his toilet and blocked the drains.

That’s why we see so many proto-serial killers jailed today – men who a few decades ago would have got away with their crimes for much longer. William Beggs from Kilmarnock – the so-called Limbs in the Loch murderer – was a “serial killer in the making”, police believe. He was convicted of murdering an 18-year-old man and dismembering him. Modern policing brought Beggs’s criminal career to a halt and prevented the loss of more innocent lives.

Today, the ability to repeatedly kill over a lengthy period of time without falling under police attention is all but impossible. In the 21st century, the clearest criminal outlet for alienated, angry and damaged men, who wish to make some dark and dreadful statement about the world, is the spree attack – the mass shooting, the mass knifing.

These types of killers, one could argue, are just the latest incarnation of society’s most dangerous human beings, refashioned for a new age.