Alone on Hallowe’en with one of Britain’s worst murderers!

(from Unsplash media)

It looks like a headline in one of those cheap magazines you find lying about in the hairdresser’s, doesn’t it? It's true in my case, although it wasn’t anything like as horrendous as it sounds. It makes a good dinner party conversation piece, though. The murderer in this instance was Denis (known as Des) Nilsen. The killer of at least twelve young men (maybe fifteen - even he wasn’t sure how many), he was arrested in 1983 and died in prison in 2018, aged 72. He was the subject of a recent docudrama, Des, with David Tennant playing the role, and there is a documentary around too, with the same David Tennant doing the narration. Nilsen was Scottish from Aberdeenshire, so Tennant is a good match. He has a slight resemblance to Nilsen; with the help of the make-up department added to own acting skills, he was uncannily reminiscent of the serial killer.

My own encounter with Nilsen began in the Spring of 1985. I was a first year mature student at Leeds University reading Theology & Religious Studies. The fact that I was the oldest student in my year must have brought me to the attention of Ed Kessler, a third year student about to graduate (after graduating, Ed moved to Harvard for a Master’s in Theology and returned to Britain for a PhD at Cambridge, where, in 1998, he founded the Woolf Institute for Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations).

Ed had been part of a Leeds University team visiting Wakefield Prison. It consisted of a professor, a lecturer, and a student. They ran weekly seminars in term time for inmates who were studying at higher education level (or others whom the warders felt would be able to benefit). Ed had to give up this work to leave for America and he needed to find a replacement. The person he asked was me (I have no idea whether I was his first choice). It was voluntary work, a project in which university people served the wider community.

I wasn’t sure, living in York at the time, but what swung it for me and enabled me to say ‘yes’ was that, by one of those mysterious coincidences, I had just been looking at that chapter in Matthew’s Gospel which includes the words, ‘when I was in prison you visited me’. That seemed to me to be a sign if anything is. So Ed passed my name on and I received a phone call from Maurice Beresford, Professor of Economic History. It was one of the worst first impressions you can imagine. Maurice died in 2005 aged 85 (I won’t speak ill of the dead, as fortunately I came to like him). He was like something from a 1940s British movie; Robert Morley could have played him. He was eccentric and almost comically blunt. He conducted that first phone conversation like he did most others, by chatting as little as possible and ending it with a sudden ‘goodbye’, putting the phone straight down without knowing or caring whether the person at the other end of the line had finished or not.

I arranged to meet him and the lecturer in the team, Dr David Bell of the Politics Department, a Scot, only a few years older than me. David was a socialist, a witty character who liked calling people, tongue in cheek, ‘comrade’. He was also, like Maurice, a staunch atheist. They thought it useful to have a person of faith in the team (Ed is Jewish and I am a Catholic Christian) given the range of interests among the prisoners, but they were both quite clear to me that they regarded religion as false and illusory. We had a good few arguments about that, but the disagreements were always respectful. I think the fact that I was in my early thirties did help me to stand my ground with them!

The sight that greets the Wakefield visitor (from https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news)

On my first visit to Wakefield, I had done no prior research (we didn’t have Google in 1985 and I was too dull-witted to ask the others much about it). I didn’t know it was a maximum security prison and that several of the members of our inmate group were convicted murderers. I soon found out. We never had any problem but, just in case, there was a panic button by the door near where the tutors sat. The warders left us to it. It was a bit of a shock when I saw Denis/Des Nilsen in the seminar room, as by then his face was well known. His arrest and conviction had occurred only two years before, and the case was notorious, made especially so by the fact that he stuffed body parts down the drains.

As the new member of the team, I was asked to introduce myself. I said that I had been an employment advisor in a Job Centre before going to university. At this point, Des interrupted to say that had been his job too at the time of his arrest, and that we had something in common there. He looked straight into my eyes. My polite response hid the fact that I was privately hoping it was all we had in common.

The way the team worked was that the three tutors (Maurice, David, and I) went each week, but only one of us presented something that the whole group including the tutors could then discuss. Sometimes we invited a visiting speaker. The other two were happy to leave me to tackle anything that included religion when it was my turn. Sometimes, one of the tutors not presenting would have another engagement, sent their apologies, and only two tutors went. And that brings me back – Ronnie Corbett-esque – to the subject of my headline.

On one occasion, both the other two tutors said that they couldn’t do the normal day and asked whether I could run the visit on my own. It was rare that only one tutor went, but I agreed to it. It was Hallowe’en that day – I can't recall which year; I did the visiting over five years, so somewhere between 1986 and 1990.

David Tennant as Des Nilsen (at https://www.independent.co.uk)

Up to then, each week the prisoners were waiting in the seminar room when we arrived. For some reason, this didn’t happen on this particular occasion; they had been delayed. As I walked through the corridor towards the room, the inmates were sent down the same corridor some way behind me. Des had seen me, however, and jogged up to speak to me about something. The others were left behind out of sight in the winding corridors. For a couple of minutes, we walked and talked completely alone and with no panic button in reach. I wasn’t unduly disturbed, as I knew that Des’ victims had all been unconscious on drink and drugs before being strangled! He was himself the target of attacks while in prison. He was about my height, but didn’t look especially strong.

The jury in Des’ trial were clear that he had committed the killings, which he confessed to, but nevertheless there was only a majority verdict for murder, not a unanimous one, as a couple of jurors were unclear about his mental state. The majority decided that, while he killed people so that he could molest the dead bodies, he did so as a rational and sane person. Therefore, he went to prison rather than a criminal mental health faculty.

I am no expert, but my own observations over the five years were that he did not present any symptoms of insanity. His view of the world, which he articulated on one occasion, was that we were all violent, killers even, but very nearly all of us neurotically suppressed it. Therefore, he rationalised his own actions; he had just done what the rest of us secretly wanted to do and would do if we were not so inhibited! This was a view of humanity somewhere between Freud and Hitler, quite abhorrent but not necessarily of an unsound mind. Des was actually quite a dull and arrogant person, and one could see that he would not have been particularly attractive in his pre-prison life. He did have some adult homosexual relationships, but generally struggled to relate to people. He had also fantasised about corpses since his childhood. Altogether, this was the psychological background to serial killing.

Des was a train wreck of a human being, but his murders made him a celebrity. A film was made about him in his lifetime (well before the David Tennant one), and journalists visited him. He also got the usual murderer’s fan mail. What really concerns me is how murder can become a route to ‘immortality’ when one’s life is fairly dull and nondescript. I suspect you had already heard of Dennis Nilsen before you read this. Have you come across these names: Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, Fred and Rosemary West, Harold Shipman? Ever heard of these Americans: Al Capone, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson? Yes, of course you have. Now how many Nobel peace prize winners can you list? Gangsters and murderers are far more fascinating than philanthropists.

You may not agree with that statement, but then you’d be out of tune with the media. Programmes on murders, horrendous crimes, or the atrocities of the Nazis are on our TV every single night. If you want to be in the public mind fifty or a hundred years from now, then get the axe out or, if you live in the USA, the machine gun. Otherwise, you’ll need to be a film or music star or a major world leader for anyone to remember your name.

To see Des back on the screen again was interesting for me personally, but generally it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why can’t the media leave these people in obscurity, where they deserve to be? Let’s avoid making them household names, instead just try to learn the lessons of how human life can go so badly wrong: for the criminology or psychology student, perhaps, not something to fascinate and entertain people on daily TV. One of the lessons we learn should be that widespread coverage begets more murderers. Can we ever hope for responsible media?

Des lapped it up. He knew he had committed evil crimes and expected nothing less than life imprisonment, but he enjoyed being a celebrity. And, three years after his death, here we are still remembering him. By writing this, I’m just as bad as everyone else. Guess who I met?! Well, I haven’t met the Queen or, for that matter, many other famous people, so he’ll have to do.