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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. I am your Norwegian host, Samus Viborg Thule. This is part three in my series on Dennis Andrew Nilsson, aka The Kindly Killer. If you haven't listened to part one and two, please do so now.
Last episode ended with Dennis Nilsen looking out at the sea beyond the northeastern Scottish coast as a young boy, wistfully and painfully missing his dead grandfather. Tonight, we move our tale a bit further along Dennis' life as a youngster and into early adulthood, and thus we start to see the emergence of something dark.
Something murderous. This is episode one hundred and two, and it is recorded on Halloween. Halloween is a favorite holiday of your humble host, perhaps not surprisingly. A few listeners on my Facebook group have petitioned me to record a version of the song Monster Mash.
So I thought, well, my listener's wish is my command. So, this time, for all patrons pledging one dollar or more, a new exclusive version of Monster Mash, recited by yours truly, is now available on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast.
I don't know if I can recommend it. I am no singer. But I did record it as requested. For my TSK producers pledging $5 or $10 or more, the other very varied content, including the fascinating topic of torture, is still available. And new content is coming soon.
Again, if you wish to listen to this exclusive bonus content, head on over to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast after you're finished with this episode. I really do think you'll enjoy it. Dennis Nilsen's sexual awakening, or corruption, depending on how you see it, began when he was very young.
At only about eight years old, Dennis was a boy very much prone to melancholy. Again, as so often it is with Dennis, he explains it in detail himself, much better than if I were to simply relay the facts to you. I quote, On one of my treks along the beach to Inveralochie, I was feeling pretty miserable.
I stopped and took off my shoes and socks and waded up to my knees in the sounding sea. I was hypnotized by its power and enormity. I disregarded that my short trousers were getting wet. I moved steadily forward up to my waist. I could see a much older boy sitting further up the shore, poking the sand with a stick. I must have stepped into a hollow, because I suddenly disappeared underwater.
The retreat of the wave carried me out further. I panicked, and waving my arms and shouting, I submerged. I could hear a loud buzzing in my head, and I kept gasping for air which wasn't there. I thought that Grandad was bound to arrive and pull me out. I felt at ease, drugged and dreamlike under the silent green weight of water. I felt myself suspended in a void.
I could hear a droning, slowed-down voice in the distance. A mixture of every voice I had ever known. Nothing truly recognizable. I felt a heavy weight upon me. I felt very cold at first, but this changed to a neutral feeling. Then I could feel the warmth of the sun. I was vomiting and gasping.
I became aware of blue and air and breeze in a sandy hollow in the dunes. My clothes were spread out on the long sand grass. My clothes, they were all spread out on the long sand grass, and the sky was bright blue with wisps of white cloud. I felt a pressure on me and sank into a deep sleep. Later I could feel the dry sand's comforting support beneath me.
I coughed a bit and felt my raw throat. I sat up and covered my nakedness with my hands, noticing a white sticky mess on my stomach and thighs. I remember thinking that I had been fouled on by a seagull. I wiped it off with sand. I peered from behind the grass high on the dunes, but there was no one about. My clothes were damp, but not all that wet.
It was quite hot, so I put them on and wandered over the dunes and took the golf-links road slowly home, hoping that my things would soon dry out. Although Dennis, at age eight, didn't understand what had happened to him at the time, that the teenager who had rescued him had probably sexually abused him,
The incident had a profound and lasting effect upon Dennis for the rest of his life. He didn't tell his mother anything about what had happened when he returned home. His mother, Mrs. Nilsen, who by 1948 had divorced the father of Dennis, Olav Nilsen, would end up much like her mother.
she chose to dedicate herself to the church and the evangelizing of the word of jesus christ to everyone who would listen especially her children denis and his siblings had to travel with their mother to faith meetings all over aberdeenshire
But Dennis was never persuaded to accept any other god than the silent, unnamed god he prayed to in private, the one who lingered in the abyss of the sea. So Dennis kept silent and withdrawn.
Finally, after too many years of living with three children in one room, Betty Nilsen eventually persuaded the authorities to give her a flat of her own and moved to 73 Mid Street, much closer to the center of Fraserburg, part of a corner block of all tenement flats in a depressingly gloomy area. The flat did not lift anyone's spirits.
But at least it was to give them an opportunity to live as a family unit for the first time in a proper apartment of their own. The apartment was at the top of the block, and there were steep stairs to climb. At the back there was a common area, shared with other tenement blocks, containing old concrete air-raid shelters, which served as a playground for the children.
dennis however rarely joined in still melancholic still drawn to the sea he formed no close friendships with the children of his new neighbors being a single woman with several children was no easy task and almost impossible back in those days
So no one was surprised when Betty Nilsen soon found a new husband, named Adam Scott. He was a reliable, solid man in the construction business, and with him she got four more children in four years. Dennis didn't like the added hubbub with an ever larger family, and he absolutely hated his new stepfather.
He had grown into, in the local word, a skokie child, unsmiling and resentful of questioning by adults, to whom he gave a clear impression of distrust and reserve. His mother recalls that something prevented her from cuddling him. She wanted to, but he appeared to repel demonstrations of affection, so she kept her distance.
She was an extremely good and caring mother, but, with Dennis at least, not tactile. In the media, Dennis Nilsen is almost always presented as a sort of clean-cut, almost kind figure, who never had any trouble with the law, and with a stable upbringing. It is thus interesting when, delving into more details into his past,
to note that he exhibits the very traits we know today to be typical markers for psychopathy. Dennis writes from his prison cell, and I quote, On occasion I was a difficult child to manage. While at 73 Mid Street, I had been brought to the attention of police in Fraserburg. I once took a one-dollar note from my mother's purse and went to see the film The Dam Busters.
I was taken from the cinema and got a good hiding from Adam Scott, my mother's new husband. Myself and a couple of schoolboy friends had been in the police station for breaking into an old iron steam drifter boat, which was moored in Fraserburg Harbour, and used solely for barking herring fishing nets. As kids we would stay out all day, missing lunch, and when we were hungry we would steal apples from the gardens.
His new stepfather did not tolerate such behavior, and, as was customary in those days, he frequently punished Dennis physically for any misbehavior. Dennis felt alone, and when the family moved once more, this time away from the sea, his mental state did not improve. He took to roaming the local forests instead of the beaches. His favorite spot was Wharton Hill,
and the high empty ruin of Hunter's Lodge. There he could tame his growing wrath against what he saw as the materialistic standards of his mother, her facade of polish and sparkle to impress the neighbors and divert attention from the shoddiness of the children's clothes.
At 14, Dennis Nilsen joined the Army Cadet Force and frankly reveled in the equality which the uniform provided. He also had his first beer and passed out. His love of alcohol was ignited and would never leave him. Dennis was no particularly bright young man. He was especially bad at math, but he did fairly well in English and very well in art.
In all his years at school, Dennis Nilsen had no sexual encounter, not even of a minimal kind. This in itself is unusual enough in a pubescent boy to warrant notice. However, there was an emotional experience which burned deeply, never to be released or confessed. In his sister Sylvia's class at school, there was one boy whom Dennis adored from afar.
Of the entire school, no other person held this power to make him feel nervous. He was, to Dennis, beautiful, enigmatic, different. Being the son of a local minister, he spoke with a different accent from the other boys and had about him an air of aloof confidence. Dennis felt inferior and ashamed.
He did not dare to approach him, but merely hovered in the playground, watching him, and trying to get near him, his legs quivering like jelly. He never once spoke to the boy, whose name was Adrian, and whenever he thought of Adrian, guilt invaded him. Vague, uneasy guilt, without a reason. His next attachment was even less open to declaration.
It was for a boy called Pierre Duval, an illustration in the book used for French lessons. Dennis found that his response to this illustration simmered with the same intensity as his earlier response to Adrian. The fact that it was an inanimate object did not remove its appeal. On the contrary, it enhanced it.
Throughout his early adolescence, Dennis shared a bed with his brother Olaf, two years older. There came a night when Dennis's sexual imagination could no longer be restrained, and, waiting until he thought his brother was safely asleep, he undid Olaf's pyjama cord, pulled down his pyjama pants, and began to explore.
moving his fingers over his brother's buttocks, stomach, and eventually his penis. The body beside him did not move, but remained still, lifeless. Olaf had in fact been awake, for when Dennis felt his brother's penis became erect, he stopped. Neither of them ever referred to the incident.
As he lay awake at night, he would sometimes hear the springs creaking in his parents' room. He felt outrage and repulsion when this happened, and it would take some time for this extreme reaction to fade. When Dennis Nilsen left school at the age of 15, he was sexually innocent, emotionally untried. He had had no best friend.
No exciting discoveries with other boys beside his brother. No desire to unravel the mysteries of girls. But his emotions had been aroused three times, in three ways where safety from rejection was ensured. With a distant idol, with an inanimate drawing, and with what he thought had been a sleeping body.
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He wanted first and foremost to escape Aberdeenshire, to simply get away. When he was only 15 years old, Dennis told his mother that he had decided to enlist in the army. It offered new opportunities, travel, a complete break with the past, and the occasion to train for a trade. He would be a chef. His mother said she thought he had wanted to do something artistic,
to which he replied that cooking was as artistic as anything else. At the army recruiting office in Market Street, Aberdeen, he passed the entrance tests and was given a date to start in September 1961, having signed on for a period of nine years. He was perky with optimism. Adam, his stepfather, went to see him off. When the train arrived in London,
Dennis made his way to Aldershot and took a taxi to St. Omer Barrack for the apprentice chef's wing in the Army Catering Corps. From the very first day, he was initiated into the iron discipline of army routine under a strict and smart instructor. The day started early, stripping beds in the barracks and making a neatly folded bedpack.
Then the scrubbing jobs, washing the floors, corridors, lavatories, until the linoleum shone like a mirror, with not a second to spare. They toiled the rest of the day in military, educational, and technical trade training, with kit inspections likely to be called at a moment's notice. The boys quickly grew accustomed to working as a team, the better for each individual.
and were transformed in a matter of days from a disparate group of confused, undisciplined children into an array of smart, alert, responsible young men. Dennis Nilsen's confidence blossomed under the strain, and he, like everyone else, did not object to speeding about all day.
To feel, quote-unquote, like everyone else was both novel and exhilarating for him. According to himself, his boyhood days in the army was the happiest of his life.
After three years, Nilsen passed his senior education test in five subjects. Maths, English, Catering, Science, Map Reading and Current Affairs, passing in addition the important B2 Catering exam, which confirmed the direction of his career. He completed full training on foot, arms and weapons drill and took his passing out parade in the summer of 1964.
At the age of eighteen, Nilsen was a young man with a career, a future, security. There was little that need trouble him. Even his pervasive sense of isolation had to a large extent been dissipated by the comradeship of army life. He could mix much more easily, and he had begun to find his tongue.
Nilsen's first posting as a private was to the 1st Battalion the Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment at Osnabruck in Germany. Their commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Taylor. It was, again, a happy time. An extension and continuation of the domestic camaraderie began at Aldershot, occasionally interrupted by military field exercises.
Osnabrück also marks Dennis Nilsen's proper introduction to serious drinking. Some of his fellows noticed Dennis was more frequently drunk than the rest of them. He returned to Aldershot briefly to pass the B1 catering exam and served with the brigade in Norway.
Now, I would love to have found some more details as to Dennis Nilsen's time in my home country of Norway. But, unfortunately, the only information available is that he was here for a brief period of time. The happiness of these years was compromised by one increasingly serious preoccupation.
While still at Aldershot, he had been aware of being attracted to various other boys, and of the obvious need to repress these sexual longings. The repression carried with it a constant feeling of guilt and shame. He thought of himself as bisexual rather than homosexual,
And as he was not in any way effeminate, it was relatively easy for him to hide his true desires. He avoided shared showers and preferred to bathe on his own. His only relief came from masturbating alone in the barracks toilet while the other boys slept. As a young man in Germany, the temptations were greater.
Coming home drunk in the evening, he might frequently have to be undressed and dumped into bed by one of the other soldiers, or perform the same service for one of them. No sexual encounter ever took place. If ever quote-unquote queers were discussed, it was invariably with derision and scorn in which Dennis Nilsen joined as heartily as the next man.
All the time he knew that he was deceiving his friends and that his real emotional identity was being smothered by pretense. The strain of maintaining the deception was gradually depositing a silt of unacknowledged pressure. A pressure which was slowly and surely building. In 1967...
Aged 21, Nilsen was posted to the then British colony of Aden, now belonging to the country of Yemen. There he was attached to the Military Provost Staff Corps in charge of terrorist detainees at the Al-Mansourah prison.
The British had on their hands a desperate defensive war against Arab terrorists. The prison, a walled fort with heavy gates and machine-gun watchtowers, was under frequent attack from rioters, and the sight of dead bodies littering the countryside was commonplace. Some soldiers, ambushed on their way back to their barracks, lost their lives and were horribly mutilated.
Others, unwise enough to be entertained by a local whore, might have their throats cut on the job. It was altogether a searing experience in an atmosphere torrid with heat and danger. It was in this very exotic environment that Dennis Nilsen experienced his first taste of deadly violence combined with a homosexual encounter.
He describes it best in his own words, and I quote, I was really drunk at the time. I hailed a black and yellow cab and instructed the driver to go forth. I remember passing Checkpoint Bravo and waving the taxi on. I must have dozed off in the back of the cab. I felt a sharp pain on the back of my head. On reflection, I guessed that the driver had hit me with a kosh or something.
To this day, I cannot understand why he didn't cut my throat. Maybe he was proud of his taxi and didn't want to make a mess of the back seat with my blood. I woke up naked in what I took to be the boot of the car. I was still a bit dazed. I felt around and my clothes were in the boot as well, or someone else's clothes. The engine started and I couldn't open the boot.
After what seemed like a short drive, the vehicle stopped. In a flash, I decided to play dead, as being the best way to sum up the situation and make a break for it. The boot opened slowly, and through a squinted eye I saw a well-built Arab. He had a kosh or something in his hand. He stretched his arm cautiously towards me, muttering something in Arabic.
He touched my ankle and moved his hand up to my knee, still muttering. He grasped my leg under the knee, braced it, and let it flop limply back in place. I tried to be as limp as possible. He stroked his hand across my buttocks. It was when he was manhandling me out of the boot that I felt the coldness of metal.
I grabbed the jack-handle and, sitting up, hit him a hard, full blow on the head. He dropped like a felled ox. I hit him two equally hard blows on the head. There was a lot of blood. He never made a sound. I was in a cluster of old buildings. I quickly put on my clothes, although I couldn't find my underpants. My money was still in my jeans.
I wiped the jack-handle with an oil cloth, put it in, and closed the boot. There was no one else around. Very quiet. A dog barked some way off. It was quite light under the strong moonlight. I stood thinking for a moment and decided that he would be less conspicuous actually in the boot himself."
Dennis put the dead Arab in the boot, scuffed the sand to conceal any traces of blood, and simply started walking. He was not far from a main road, and soon recognized it as the road which would eventually lead to the prison. It was two in the morning when he arrived at the gate, was picked out by searchlights, and brought in by foot patrol. He was reprimanded, but never talked about the incident.
He had just killed his first victim. And no one knew except himself. He was evolving into something different. Something darker. Something deadly.
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And so ends part three in the saga of Dennis Nielsen. Next week I will bring you episode 103 and part four in this ongoing expose of a true serial killer superstar. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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Good night and good luck.