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

things. Although these reporters only saw her public face, those who knew her better, such as Nilsen’s biographer Brian Masters, agreed.
    In her public statements, Betty Scott maintained it was for others to judge her son and that she would stick by him. Nilsen, however, never believed a word. It was all lies, he would say, designed to hide the truth of what a rotten mother she had been. In 1985, he ended their relationship with a letter.
    Nilsen’s and his mother’s accounts of his childhood broadly agree on the facts. It was what was going on
behind
Dennis’s eyes that he feels his mother never understood. Nilsen says he felt different, unlovable, and needing to hide what he thought and felt.
    Betty Scott did notice her son was a little introverted but did not have the time to worry about it. There were five other children to look after. Besides, she thought Dennis would eventually find a niche to suit his artistic, sensitive temperament or maybe his love of animals. In the last 27 years of her life, however, Scott would spend her days trying to work out what had gone wrong. She drew nothing but blanks.
    Dennis Nilsen spent many hours pondering the same question. Now he feels he has answers. He is not inherently evil, he says, but rather ‘an ordinary man driven to extraordinary conclusions’. He is on a mission to make the world understand it was extreme psychological circumstances rather than the essential ‘him’ that had created a perfect storm in his head. Two out of the three psychiatrists at his trial also partly agreed. They argued he suffered from a variety of ‘personality disorders’; a term for abnormalities of mind that fall short of being full psychotic illnesses.
    Nilsen dismisses such psychiatric concepts as ‘psychobabble’. He believes his crimes will only be fullyunderstood by reading an account of his life story, told
his
way. This is what he claims
History of a Drowning Boy
to be: a serious enquiry, and not a ‘whitewash’ of his life.
    There is one man who seems to agree with many of Nilsen’s claims – Matthew Malekos, a 31-year-old psychologist living in Cyprus. They started corresponding in 2000, when Malekos was 18. Twelve years later, Malekos published a thesis on Nilsen called ‘The Birth of Psychopathy: the Psychology of a Serial Killer’ (2012). In the closing chapter, Malekos suggests that Nilsen’s ‘therapeutic’ writing may have helped him conquer the factors that once made him a psychopath.
    Nilsen doesn’t explicitly go that far, but he still claims his book is a thorough ‘investigation’ into the ‘recesses’ of his mind, and he starts with his infancy.
History of a Drowning Boy
opens with: ‘As the unique amalgam, in a new genetic configuration of contributions from a man and a woman, one is born into the world. Therefore at birth I was as different from other people in much the same way as my fingerprints were different from other people’s.’
    Although Nilsen accepts he was born ‘different’ from others, he will not concede his nature should have
necessarily
caused his later problems. ‘It was not these differences which spawned destructive behaviour later on in life,’ he wrote to me in 2003, ‘but an utter repudiation of them by my parents, peers and a conventional repressive society.’
    The first chapter of Nilsen’s manuscript elaborates on this sense of rejection. Olav Nilsen, his father, had been virtually absent since his birth. Yet, although Nilsen clearly resents his lack of a father figure, it is his feelings towards his mother which dominate his thoughts. On the first page of his book,he even complains bitterly about how she treated him when he was just a tiny baby.
    In 1946, life was hard for everyone in the small Scottish fishing town of Fraserburgh, which had been hit hard by the war. For the residents of the top flat in 47 Academy Road, things were particularly austere. The living space was terribly cramped. Nilsen’s grandparents