Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer Read Online Free PDF Page A

was ‘tired and prepared for what lay ahead,’ and also ‘sickened by the past, the present, and a doubtful future’. As he left the office, he put on his new, bright-blue-and-white scarf. Some colleagues commented on it. It, in fact, had belonged to Stephen Sinclair.

    A brief summary of the events preceding the arrest appears in
History of a Drowning Boy
. In the main, however, Nilsen seems satisfied with how the events of those five drama-filled days havealready been told. It’s hardly surprising, as much of the commonly-told story actually derives from his own confessions. Now, Nilsen doesn’t seem particularly interested in adding more to his thoughts and feelings. Significantly, he doesn’t complain, as he does so frequently, that he has been misrepresented.
    The reason soon becomes clear. Nilsen’s priority in writing his book seems not to re-write the well-known stories about him, but to ‘correct’ what he believes to be the misconceptions about the overview of his life. In letters he told me how he wanted to demonstrate the ‘human’ aspect of his past and to show how a potentially ‘viable human being’ developed a desire to kill.
    He says he needs to do so because he believes that, despite the quantity of material that has been written on the case, no one has actually understood his psychological make-up. Most of the analysis he has read in the press he dismisses as sensationalist nonsense. Of greater concern to him is his belief that the one ‘serious’ study on his case, Brian Masters’
Killing for Company
, published in 1995, missed ‘so many insightful clues’.
    If Masters had indeed missed certain ‘clues’ it was not for a lack of possible material. During the project, he had got to know his subject personally in the way that a documentary maker or anthropologist might have done. For a further eight years after publication Masters continued to visit Nilsen out of both a sense of obligation and professional interest. During this period, Nilsen gave him the impression he had welcomed his insights. But towards the end of this period, Nilsen began to feel Masters was exploiting his life story.
    In the early 1990s, Nilsen turned against both the authorand his book. ‘
Killing for Company
is so pretentious,’ he later wrote to me, ‘that it disappears into the contradictions of its own confused academic fog. With
History of a Drowning Boy
comes the rain.’
    Nilsen began to compose his first draft in Albany Prison in 1992. He had been prompted to write by a letter from an American psychiatrist. He had also found that under the influence of a (claimed) easy supply of marijuana, he found he could look back on his life with greater clarity.
    Initially, over a period of several weeks, Nilsen wrote late into the night while his budgie, Hamish, flapped around his cell. The first thing he wrote about was his earliest memories growing up in the far north-east of Scotland. What was particularly striking was the emphasis Nilsen placed on the poor relationship he had with perhaps the most influential person throughout his formative years – his mother.

2
GROWING UP
    ‘My mother suffocated me like a boa constrictor.’
    D ENNIS N ILSEN , IN A LETTER TO MATTHEW MALEKOS
    I n December 2010, Nilsen’s mother, Betty Scott, died. She was 89. Some months later, I asked Nilsen if he knew about her death. His reply was typical. He wrote, ‘I can tell you exactly when my mother died – it was 23 November 1945.’ Similarly, the feeling that she’d been dead to him from the moment he was born runs throughout the first 50 pages of his autobiography.
    To the outside world, however, Nilsen’s mother seemed a warm, caring lady. Many journalists who travelled up to the village of Strichen, near Fraserburgh, on Scotland’s far northeast tip to interview Scott, considered her a rather dear old sort; religious and quite unable to understand how the gentle boy she had raised could be associated with such awful