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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 Thun. This is part four in my series on Dennis Andrew Nilsen, aka The Kindly Killer.
If you haven't listened to part 1, 2 and 3, please do so now. Last episode ended with Dennis Nilsen killing his first victim, an Arab taxi driver while he was in the British colonial army in modern-day Yemen.
Dennis Nilsen himself has written detailed about the experience, and tonight we continue on the path that took him down a route that would end with him becoming a serial killer superstar. This is episode 103.
Last week I did as promised, and recorded my own version of the song Monster Mash, in occasion it being Halloween, my favorite holiday. It is still available on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast for all of my patrons. 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've finished with this episode. I really do think you'll enjoy it. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, a land far, far away.
A land of adventure, allure, mystery, and above all, sand. Aden, where Dennis had killed his first victim, was behind him. And instead, Dennis Nilsen was posted in Oman, along with his army comrades, in charge of catering to the Trucial Omen Scouts' mess at Sharjah in the Persian Gulf.
There were less terrorism and rebellion in the then-called Trucial States, today the United Arab Emirates, and for the most part the posting was a peaceful one. Still, Dennis did witness death and horror. A pilot, for example, had crashed and was brought back to his mess hall in literally pieces, his innards displayed along with his torn limbs.
One of Nilsen's drinking companions, known as Smithy, fell off a Land Rover and broke his neck. He was unceremoniously buried in a simple desert grave. Dennis lamented his loss, as they all did, but he nursed a secret fascination with the idea that to die young was in an important way enviable.
That to be saved the uncertain future of old age was perhaps more a cause for celebration than regret. In his grey and gloomy prison cell, Nilsen writes how, and I quote, "...the sandstorm blowing over the disappearing grave of young Smithy terminated at the end of a happy day with his mates instantly."
At Sharjah, Dennis Nilsen was a non-commissioned officer, with the crucial advantage of a private room. This was to have a lasting influence upon the development of his sexual nature.
A young boy, no one knows how young he really was, but he was probably only a teenager at best, was offering sexual services. It was not particularly important that the Arab boy was willing to go to bed with him, as the boy was with most of the other officers, although this must have been the first time that Dennis had achieved tactile sexual contact with another person.
The boy declared undying affection, pleaded to be taken back to England, and offered his services more frequently than they could reasonably be required. Dennis was not moved in any way. He felt rather ashamed of having sex with the boy, who was not even sure of his own age. But his thoughts did not dwell upon it or deepen into guilt.
Far more important was his discovery of the mirror. Again, Dennis is not shy when recanting his deviant sexual exploits in writing. I quote, When I had the privacy of my own room as an NCO, sexual expression became more complex. The novelty of one's own body soon wore off, and I needed something positive to relate to.
My imagination hit on the idea of using a mirror. By placing a large, long mirror on its side strategically beside the bed, I would view my own reclining reflection. At first, always careful not to show my head, because the situation needed that I believe it was someone else. I would give the reflection some animation.
But that play could not be drawn out long enough. The fantasy could dwell much longer on a mirror image which was asleep. End quote. In this manner, Denny's sexual fetish for men and boys who at least seemed to be dead was properly lit.
What made Nilsen's fantasy truly unusual was the requirement that the body in the mirror be still and that the head not be visible. Dennis Nilsen was not just aroused by the image of himself, but of himself only as a dead man. Love and death were becoming dangerously mingled in his mind.
as the remembered image of his adored grandfather surged forward. Quietly, in his quarters with his mirror, Dennis was dead too. In January 1968, Nilsen returned to England to be posted with the 1st Battalion, Argyll, and Sutherland Highlanders at Seton Barracks, Plymouth, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel C.C. Mitchell.
With them, he was part of a spearhead battalion which went to Cyprus in 1969, to be placed thereafter in charge of catering for the officers' mess hall at Montgomery Barracks, Berlin, 50 yards from the communist border. In Berlin, a city which was rapidly regaining its pre-war reputation for vice-chancellery,
Nilsen frequently found himself waking up in a strange bed with a strange man, with little in the way of satisfaction to boast of. His love of binge-drinking was coupled with his sexual desires, and together they left him simply wanting more. At his fellow-soldiers' urging, he once bought the sexual services of a female prostitute,
According to Dennis himself, he found sex with a woman to be very easy. And aside from the brief release of ejaculation, he is quoted as calling the experience overrated and depressing. After his stay in Germany, which included a few months working at an army ski resort in Bodenmeis, he was in 1970 returned to Great Britain.
There he was sent to Fort George in Invernessshire, in Scotland. He was, after travelling half the world, back in his home country, not many miles away from where he desperately had wanted to escape. He did not spend long in the Scottish mainland, and in 1971 he was shipped to the Shetland Islands to join the 242 Signals at Aces High Station.
During this time, he had lost contact with many of his earlier army comrades, and he became more and more isolated. The nature of Shetland gave him solace, though, and he started his lifelong passion for photography and filmmaking. Another aspect of Shetland that lit something in Dennis was the island's pride in their Viking heritage. Dennis writes,
I had found great beauty, sadness, and poetry in the Shetlands, and a wild desolation nearly untouched by man and his civilization. I felt at one with heaven and its gods, and all the earth and its peoples. For one moment in my life I really had roots, and I had a warming identity with all things past, present, and future.
My feelings were such that I knelt and took some wet island soil in my hand, smeared it all over my face. Was this the earth from which I had sprung? It was cold, harsh, and soothing. I had a strange tingling feeling of being somehow home."
However, his life in the Shetlands would come to an end in 1972, when his army service ended. He was 26 years old, and he had served 11 years and 84 days in the army, almost half his life. He completed his military career with the rank of corporal and the General Service Medal, South Arabia. His conduct is recorded in the books as exemplary.
While he worked on finding out what to do next in life, he returned to his mother in Strichen between October and December of 1972. He did not find peace in his childhood home. He got in a serious fight with his brother Olaf over a film depicting a homosexual liaison, and he felt the same sense of isolation and existential angst as he had as a youth. He decided...
It would be natural for him to exchange one uniform for another, and in December 1972, he joined the Metropolitan Police Training School at Hendon, North London. He lasted a year as a policeman.
By now he was tired of being told what to do by authoritarian men in uniform, and he had developed left-leaning politics, which flew in the face of the very conservative men in uniform. Although police life wasn't for Dennis, he did have one experience while serving there that put him firmly on a destructive path for him and many innocent victims.
In April of 1973, he was taken to the local mortuary behind Brent Town Hall. I quote, We entered the shabby little room which displayed all the disarray of an army butcher's shop behind the scenes. A couple of metal trolleys were lying around with opened bodies upon them, mostly old men with a wooden block supporting the head with a variety of grotesque facial expressions.
each one cut from the neck to the navel, with the breasts and rib-bones sawn out, so that the examiner could get at the heart and lungs. The back of the head was open, to give access to the brain, and one of the trolleys containing an old man's uncut corpse was the contrasting body of a young girl, with a label attached to her left wrist. My colleague, Ian, felt a bit pale,
End quote.
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But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. Dennis didn't know anyone in London and began to feel the awkwardness of isolation in a crowd, a sensation which would deepen as the years progressed.
His solution was the common escape of many young men in London. He frequented the pubs and discovered the huge subterranean homosexual fraternity which eddies around certain public houses in the metropolitan area. The most famous of these pubs was the crowded Colhern in Earl's Court. It would serve as the crucible of his initiation into a homosexual subculture. In August 1973,
He met a man a few years younger than himself. They went back to Nilsen's room at the police section house, and anal sex took place for the first time in Nilsen's life. He felt, for the first time in a very long time, a romantic attachment, and was ready to commit himself totally, and thought he saw the chance of a permanent relationship.
But Derek Collins, the man he had brought home, showed no further interest in Dennis Nilsen. He was quite happy to sleep around with many different partners, and saw Nilsen as nothing more than a, and please excuse my language, fuck-buddy. This crushed Dennis emotionally. I quote,
I was left with an endless search through the soul-destroying pub scene and its resulting one-night stands. Passing faces and bodies, the unfulfilled tokens of an empty life. A house is not a home, and sex is not a relationship. We would only lend each other our bodies in a vain search for inner peace.
The Derek episode and consequent homosexual promiscuity, and here you must remember that in 1973 homosexuality was highly illegal in the UK, convinced Nilsen that he could not remain in the police force. He resigned in December of 1973. From January and through April of 1974, Nilsen was at a loose end and very poor.
He didn't have his own place, and took a room at 9 Manstone Road. He sold his general service medal for £8 to help pay for it. He managed to land a poorly paid job as a security guard, but it offered him nothing but further poverty and extreme boredom. So he quit in May that same year.
He, feeling very ashamed, thus applied for unemployment benefits at the Department of Employment office in Harleston High Road. There he was interviewed by an executive officer who submitted him for a job in the civil service. On the 20th of May, he went for an interview to determine whether he should be offered a post as clerical officer in the Department of Employment itself.
His interview was successful, and he would start his career at the job center in Denmark Street, in the heart of London's West End. This was finally a job Dennis loved, in his own words. I warmed to the creative and positive community service aspects of placing an unemployed person in a job vacancy.
The number of these placings each week gave a genuine feeling of achievement and job satisfaction. He would remain in this job all the way up until he was arrested, nine years later. Although he really enjoyed his new job, his social life was barren and superficial. He threw himself totally into hedonism and was with a new man almost every night.
Sometimes he went back to another man's home. Sometimes they went back to his place. All were anonymous, and Dennis doesn't remember much of any of them. His landlady didn't approve of these nightly visits and asked Dennis to leave. He thus took a slightly larger room at 80 Tainmouth Road, where the landlady was more accommodating. The years 1974 and 1975
were promiscuous and depressing. Going home with complete strangers almost every night was of course not danger-free, but Dennis didn't seem to much care. Nilsen was fast coming to believe that he would forever remain alone. Coworkers found him talkative and articulate, but occasionally boring, and he lacked the ability to recognize when he had said enough.
He would often continue talking as if the most profound interest had been shown, even though those he talked to had put up newspapers in front of their faces or simply left. During these years, he developed more and more narcissistic traits. I quote, In the lonely years, I became more and more into myself.
and expressed my fantasies of physical love on my own body. I would jealously not allow others to enter that body. Only I would enter that body. My most fulfilling sexual feasts were savored with the image of myself in the mirror. To detach this image for identifying it directly with me, it evolved from being an unconscious body
Just as his paraphilic tendencies were intensifying, he received crushing news from Norway.
His father, whom he had always known as Olaf Nilsen, was dead. Dennis inherited about 1,000 pounds, and he found out his father had married three times since he divorced his mother. Suddenly, Dennis realized he had half-brothers and sisters scattered who knew where, whom he would probably never see.
More important than this, however, was the shocking revelation that his father's name was not Olav Nilsen. It had been Olav Magnus Moksheim. Nilsen was only an alias he had used while stationed in Scotland. The surname Moksheim is very rare in Norway and comes from the small city of Haugesund on Norway's western coast.
Dennis lost one of his last pillars of certainty overnight. He was not Dennis Nilsen after all. His name should have been Dennis Mocksheim. But that was too late. One thing his father's death did give him was the ability to get a proper apartment. He also managed to convince a gay man to move in with him. His name was David Gallichan, and although he was far from in love with Dennis,
Anything was better than staying in the dingy hostel he had been so far. They found their place at 195 Melrose Avenue. The most attractive part of the apartment was that they had exclusive use of the building's backyard garden. The pair managed to liven up the very disheveled backyard into a beautiful garden with apple and plum trees in blossom. They even bought a cat and a dog together.
There is a film, taken of 195 Melrose Avenue at this time, which shows how pleasant it was, and how starkly it differed from the squalor of Cranley Gardens, where Nilsen was arrested years later. The contrast is not merely trivial, but a fundamental expression of psychological health.
In the Melrose Avenue film, we see a happy atmosphere of domestic bliss from a time before Nilsen's personality disintegrated. The shabby, neglected flat which police discovered at Cranley Gardens was the home of a man who had, in the meantime, become a habitual murderer. Dennis started calling Gallican Twinkle and presented him as his boyfriend publicly.
If anyone asked him directly if he was into men, he would simply confirm before continuing to talk about something else. But Gallican and Nilsen's relationship was never more than superficial. They had radically different personalities, and soon both started to bring home strange men.
Twinkle once brought home a 17-year-old boy, who robbed the apartment after both men had left him when they went to work the next day. Tensions reached a breaking point in the summer of 1977, when Nilsen demanded that Galligan leave, which he did happily. Nilsen's next homosexual partner was Stephen Martin, who came to live with him for four months in 1978. However...
Stephen was yet another man who saw Nilsen as nothing but a piece of fun and a place to crash before moving on to another man. Nilsen didn't give up, though, and another man named Barry Pett stayed a brief time before he, too, left Dennis all alone. More and more, Nilsen took refuge in the private fantasies of his mirror fetish, but it was beginning to develop increasingly.
into something even more sinister. I quote,
I soak the blood into the holes, and liquid stains my shirt and runs down my body. I lie staring-eyed on the bed in front of the mirror, and let my saliva foam and drip from my mouth. I stare in fascination at the shot body of me in the mirror. I step outside myself in detached imagination. There is another imaginary person in the room, who finds my body out in the woods.
"'I have been executed and left there by the SS. "'I am a French dissident student. "'The other person, an old hermit who lives in the woods, "'drags my dead body back to his old shack. "'He is wearing rags, "'and he decides that I have no further use for my clothes "'and begins to strip my limp body. "'He is speaking to me as though I were still alive.'
He pulls my now naked body off the bed onto the floor. He washes me. He ties my penis and puts some wadding in my anus. He sits me on a chair. Then he puts me over his shoulder and carries me back into the woods and buries me. Later, he returns and digs me up and takes me back to the shack. He masturbates me, and my penis comes to life, and I ejaculate.
It is over. I tidy up the room, replace the mirror and have a bath. I turn on the TV and call the dog over to me. She wags her tail, unsure of her reception. I reassure her and she jumps on the bed and makes herself comfortable. I watch TV. She goes to sleep. I must be in love with my own dead body. I am quite sober. It worries me. End quote.
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And so ends part four in the saga of Dennis Nielsen.
Next week I will bring you episode 104 and part 5 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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