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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, Thomas Weyborg Thun. This is part 5 in my series on Dennis Andrew Nilsen, aka The Kindly Killer. If you haven't listened to part 1 through 4, please do so now. Some listeners have asked me how many parts my expose on Dennis Nilsen will be.
Well, the answer is I don't know yet. I have to deliver weekly episodes. And in order to do that, I often have to start on a serial killer series before I have finished it. Also, some serial killers are more fascinating than others. And Mr. Nilsen is one of the most fascinating human beings on planet Earth.
The more I read about him, the more content becomes featured here on TSK. Last week ended with a lengthy quote from Mr. Nilsen himself, detailing his developing sexual deviancy into extreme narcissism and necrophilia. Tonight, we continue along the long road down into the depths of Dennis Nilsen's personal hellscape.
This is TSK episode 104. Do you wish to hear more from your humble host? If you donate as little as $1 on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast, you will get access to bonus content produced by me.
On Patreon, I branch out and cover other topics aside from serial killers, but always with an emphasis on the dark underbelly of human nature. Torture, murder, Satanism, the death penalty, and more are waiting for you. So, go to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast now to get access. ♪
I want your love. I want your love. I want your love. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, that you for a moment are a young homosexual man in the late 1970s in England.
You have just met a handsome, slender man with some rather odd qualities you also find attractive. He's assertive, knowledgeable, and intense. At the gay pub you met, you join with two other young men, Dennis Nilsen, as you leave the pub for his apartment. You're all quite drunk, and after some sloppy sex, you fall dead asleep.
You wake up to shouting, and a room filled with thick smoke. Dennis is shouting for you to get out. He's managed to get open all the windows, and he's ushering you and the other men out the door. He seems stressed, and one of the other men has a strange look of anger on his face. What had happened was not as the young man had originally thought. As the three young men had fallen asleep,
Dennis had gotten up, calm and collected. He had calmly placed a jacket over the oil stove and sprinkled water over it, after having closed all the doors and windows. Then he lit the stove. Smiling to himself, he took his dog out in the back garden for a walk, as the room was filling with deadly smoke. Luckily, one of the men had woken up before it was too late.
Dennis was quick on his feet and immediately tried to put on the role as a gallant rescuer, rushing in to open the windows and doors and getting the men out of his apartment. This near-murder-by-smoke happened more than once. The last person to stay at 195 Melrose Avenue before Dennis's world of dark murderous fantasy was forged into reality was Paul Dermody.
He spent two weeks with Nilsen in November of 1978. By this time, Dennis' behavior had developed into something manic, something neurotic and dangerous. Paul noticed this and later remarked that during their time together, Dennis didn't talk with him, but at him, and he soon left Dennis for good. This did not improve Dennis Nilsen's mental health.
In his own words, I quote, "'Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain. I felt that I have achieved nothing of importance or of any help to anyone in my entire life. I would think that if I drank myself to death, my body would not be discovered until at least a week after or longer. There was no one I felt I could call upon for real help.'
I was in daily contact with so many people, but quite alone in myself. I was becoming depressed and conditioned to a belief that I was impossible to live with. This feeling of despair reached its peak when I spent Christmas of 1978 alone with the mutt. I would find comfort in music and the bottle. I was in a fit of drunken desolation by the time New Year approached.
And so it is that we have come full circle from episode one in this series, which dealt with Dennis Nielsen's murders at his nice place in 195 Melrose Avenue. After having walked with Dennis from birth to adulthood, we now stand with him as he says, and I quote, I took his young body back to bed with me.
and it was the beginning of the end of my life. I had started down the avenue of death and possession of a new kind of flatmate." By the time Dennis Nilsen moved out of 195 Melrose Avenue into Cranley Gardens, he had killed a total of twelve young men. Even today, only about half of those are identified.
The last person to die at 195 Melrose Avenue was Malcolm Barlow, whom Dennis strangled, dismantled and burned, as detailed in episode 1. On the 5th of October, 1981, the year Your Humble Host was born, Dennis Nilsen drove away from his old apartment for the last time before his arrest.
His new place was at 23 Cranley Gardens, where three more murders took place. By this time, Denny's mental state was deteriorating rapidly, and he was having problems at work too, constantly getting into fights with management and his colleagues. His new apartment was nothing like the prim and proper place he had before. It was filling with debris,
Furniture was haphazardly placed, and there was always a large pile of dishes, gathering mold and flies. It was much smaller and was located in the attic of the building, so he had no direct access to a garden, where he might more easily have disposed of corpses. There were no floorboards in his new place. Two months after he moved in, there was an incident which greatly encouraged him.
In the west end of London, one evening he found a young man, paralysed with drink, lying in the gutter. He hailed a cab and took the young man back to his place at 23 Cranley Gardens. He did not molest the man, and the next morning served him a decent breakfast, and went with him to the underground station to see him safely on his way. The young man was named Kevin Sylvester,
and he has later corroborated the events of that night and morning, expressing gratitude towards Dennis for helping him out. But this surge of benevolence and empathy towards his fellow man would not last. Between March and September of 1982, and in January of 1983, three men would be strangled to death at 23 Cranley Gardens by Dennis Nilsen.
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i know first-hand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care 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. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. The first to die in his new apartment was John Howlett. He was no innocent schoolboy, but a criminal who had been in constant trouble with the police.
At age 13, he had been evicted from home by his parents and had been living rough ever since. His homes had been an institution for what was back then called retarded children. He had spent some time in prison for theft, and he was a chronic liar. When he met Nilsen, he had bragged about being an ex-grenadier guardsman.
He met Dennis twice. On the first occasion, they had a long conversation in a West End pub in December 1981. There, they drank for a few hours before parting company. In March 1982, Nilsen was drinking in the Salisbury pub in St. Martin's Lane, London, when John walked in. He immediately joined Dennis and suggested they go together somewhere else.
They walked off to an off-license liquor store and stocked up. Then they took the London Tube from Sharing Cross Underground Station to Highgate Station. From there, Dennis brought John to 23 Cranley Gardens. Nilsen cooked a meal for both of them, and they settled down to watch television and drink. Around midnight, John said he wanted to sleep.
and Dennis pointed him towards the bed in the front room of the loft apartment. About one a.m., Dennis put the light out and went to the other room where he found John asleep in bed. He roused him awake and told him he would call for a taxi to take him home. John, in a fatal mistake, told Nielsen that he didn't feel like getting up at all. At this, Dennis noticed that John had taken most of his clothes off, and he liked what he saw.
In his own words, and I quote, I went to the armchair, and under the cushion there was a length of loose upholstery strap. I approached to where he was lying in bed under the blankets. I wound this material round his neck. I think I said, It's about time you went. I was astride him, and I tightened my grip on the material. He fought back furiously, and partially raised himself up.
I thought I'd be overpowered. Summoning up all my strength, I forced him back down, and his head struck the rim of the headrest on the bed. He still struggled fiercely, so that now he was half off the bed. In about a minute he had gone limp. There was blood on the bedding.
I assumed it was from his head. I checked, and he was still breathing deep, rasping breaths. I tightened my grip on him again, around his neck for another minute or so. I let go my grip again, and he appeared to be dead. I stood up. The dog was barking in the next room. I went through to pacify it. I was shaking all over with the stress of the struggle. I really thought he was going to get the better of me.
I returned and was shocked to see that he had started breathing again. I looped the material round his neck again, pulled it as tight as I could and held on for what must have been two or three minutes. When I released my grip, he had stopped breathing, but I noticed, as he lay there on his back, and I checked afterwards, his heart was still beating quite strongly. I couldn't believe it.
I dragged him through to the bathroom. I pulled him over the rim of the bath, so his head was hanging over the bath. Put the plug in, still holding him, and ran the cold water full on. His head was right at the bottom of the bath. In a minute or so, the water reached his nose. The rasping breath came on again. The water rose higher, and I held him under. He was struggling against it.
The bath continued to fill up. There were bubbles coming from his mouth or nose, and he stopped struggling. I held him in that position for four or five minutes. The water had become bloody, and a substance as well as particles of food was coming from his mouth. I left him there all night. I washed my hands and went through to the bedroom and pulled off the sheets and soiled parts of the bedding.
I placed a clean blanket on top of the under-blanket and went to bed. I was smoking and shaking. I called the dog, and it came through looking a bit sheepish. I tapped the bed, saying, "'Come up here,' and it curled up by my feet and put its head down, trying to keep as quiet as possible. I must have gone to sleep quickly, induced by the alcohol. I was completely exhausted."
For a week afterwards, I had his finger marks on my neck. End quote. Graham Archibald Allen was born on the 31st of October 1954 in Motherwell, Scotland. He was a healthy, athletic child, raised in a stable home by two strict Protestant parents. The youngest of two, he grew with attention problems and failed miserably at school.
The only thing he excelled at was football. At the age of fourteen, making Motherwell's youth team. But in the town of Motherwell, not even the promise of professional football could contain Graham. By the age of fifteen, he had discovered the new mean city of Glasgow, alcohol and cheap prescription drugs. By seventeen, he was out of school, out of pocket, and out of home.
having been laid off by the steelworks in Motherwell, and with nothing else for it, he made his way down south to London. It was there that Graham Allen would one night meet another fellow Scot, by the name of Dennis Andrew Nilsen. Graham arrived in London penniless in the late autumn months of 1971.
He intended on finding labouring work with one of the many small building contractors who hired workers for cash in hand with no questions asked. Like many a young Scot before him, Graham Allen hit the city only to find that the tales of easy employment had been greatly exaggerated, and that there were no jobs you could just step into straight off the train.
To find employment would still take some effort, and what's more, it would also take a few quid. Graham didn't have a few quid. He couldn't even buy the early papers which advertised the latest jobs, and didn't have the fear to travel to well-known pick-up spots.
"'Instead, he walked his way into central London, to the bright lights and the sex shops, a place notorious for runaways, and a place where one could make a quick illegal buck, and then move on to pastures new. Whatever happened, it didn't happen how Graham had imagined it would.'
From the quiet industrial town of Motherwell, we are the shit and pish of Glasgow. He was suddenly slumming it rough in London. Homelessness, however, wouldn't last long. After making a few contacts, he was soon taking advantage of the lenient squatting laws of the time, living in abandoned buildings and stealing electricity from the main supply, with a roof over his head, warmth, and a few quid in his pocket.
Graham suddenly had time to kill, and it wasn't long before he was sucked into the sleazier side of city life. Cheap, strong booze and whatever pills were doing the rounds. It didn't take long for Graham to pick up the habit of injecting heroin into his veins. Less than a year later, at eighteen years of age, Graham Allen was one of the city's many officially registered heroin addicts.
He funded his habits through a mixture of government unemployment money, begging, stealing, and robbing tourists around London's West End. One of Graham's regular drinking haunts, and one of the few places he was welcome, was the King's Head pub in Leicester Square. It was there where he met Leslie Mead, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed barmaid employed by her father, who owned the place.
Within weeks of meeting, the two had fallen in love. But it wasn't simple. Leslie was already in a relationship, and had a child with a well-known local criminal. And so Graham became a badly kept and barely tolerated secret. But some secrets could not be kept hidden, not even badly. And in early 1975, Leslie fell pregnant.
and in nine months, the pair would have a child together. The child would be brought up by Leslie's other partner, but Graham continued to see her from time to time, but their relationship deteriorated and became violent as Graham became more and more lost to the grip of heroin. Eventually, he was evicted by his girlfriend.
"'Graham somehow got money. "'Scores of heroin around Piccadilly. "'Had a few too many drinks and decided to head home. "'As he wandered down Shaftesbury Avenue in Soho, "'he was accosted by Dennis Nilsen. "'Nilsen, seeing Graham's drowsy state, "'decided to try his luck.'
He offered him the promise of more alcohol, a warm taxi ride, a bed for the night, and something to eat. Graham, probably with sinister intentions of his own, accepted. They arrived at Nilsen's flat on Muswell Hill at around one o'clock in the morning. Here's what Nilsen described as taking place. I quote, "'The thing he wanted more than anything was something to eat,'
I had very little supply in, but I had a whole tray of eggs. So I whipped up a large omelette and cooked it in a large frying pan, put it on a plate and gave it to him. He started to eat the omelette. He must have eaten three quarters of the omelette. I noticed he was sitting there and suddenly he appeared to be asleep or unconscious with a large piece of omelette hanging out of his mouth.
"'I thought he must have been choking on it, but I didn't hear him choking. He was indeed deeply unconscious. I sat down and had a drink. I approached him. I can't remember what I had in my hands at the time. I don't remember whether he was breathing or not, but the omelette was still protruding from his mouth. The plate was still on his lap. I removed that.'
I bent forward, and I think I strangled him. I can't remember at this moment what I used. I remember going forward, and I remember he was dead. If the omelette killed him, I don't know. But anyway, in going forward, I intended to kill him. An omelette doesn't leave red marks on a neck. I suppose it must have been me."
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And with that ends part five in the saga of Dennis Nielsen.
Next week I will bring you episode 105 and part 6 in this ongoing expose of a true serial killer superstar. In it, I will cover Nilsen's last murder in detail and delve even further into his methods of corpse disposal. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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You really helped produce this show and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
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