Dennis “Des” Nilsen murdered 15 men between 1978 and 1983, and was eventually arrested when the drains in his London flat were found to be clogged with human remains - he had been butchering his victims in the bathtub and flushing pieces down his toilet! Because of the recent hit TV show, Des, starring David Tennant as Nilsen, Brian Masters’ 1985 true crime book, Killing For Company, where he interviewed the serial killer in person, has been reissued - and it’s a pretty decent read for the most part.
It’s morbidly fascinating to read about Nilsen’s crimes: how he’d mostly pick up gay men in bars (he was a repressed gay man himself), take them home, get drunk with them and, when they were passed out, strangle them with a necktie and sometimes drown them in his tub. He’d wash the bodies and hang onto them for weeks, sometimes months, storing the corpses under the floorboards!
Nilsen’s behaviour when the police stepped in was interesting. When he was caught, he almost seemed relieved to unburden himself and was glad that he had finally been stopped - he said he would’ve kept going and who knows how many would’ve died as a result! He confessed to everything, being 100% co-operative with the police and gave them all the evidence they wanted. But he was too effective at body disposal so, while he confessed to killing 15 men, in the end they only had enough evidence to prove 6 murders and 2 attempted murders.
There were also numerous men who came back to his flat, drank with him, stayed the night, and left the next day without being murdered - so why did he kill the ones that he did? It’s unclear. In fact, quite a lot of Nilsen’s pathology remains murky. Motive is extensively explored by Masters in what becomes a tediously overlong psychological review in the final third of the book, that ends, essentially, with a shrug - we dunno why Nilsen was the way he was. He seems to have been a real Jekyll/Hyde character with Mr Hyde only emerging after heavy drinking and a trigger of some kind.
It’s a bit of an unsatisfying conclusion given how much time is spent contemplating possible reasons: his love of his granddad and the trauma of seeing him dead when he was a child which possibly fatally fused love and death in his head. That said, numerous people see their grandparents die and don’t become serial killers! Ditto the explanation that he was lonely and depressed - they’re very tenuous, and therefore unconvincing, connections to make for such extreme behaviour.
The court case was also a bit dull as it rehashed what we already knew of Nilsen’s crimes and boils down to an uninteresting, dry discussion on the lexiconical differences between legalese and psychological terminology.
Still, this is a sometimes compelling portrait of an articulate, intelligent man who bizarrely ended up a serial killer for no real reason, and the search to understand why kept me reading. Nilsen’s drawings at the end of the book, showing the bodies and what he did with them, are also chilling in their child-like simplicity of horrific deeds.
Dennis Nilsen died in prison in 2018 so he will remain a mystery, in terms of how he became who he did. Though the court case and psychological study that make up most of the second half of the book were a bit dull to get through and didn’t really add all that much in the end, it’s compelling to read about the murders and for anyone looking for an overview of Nilsen’s case, Brian Masters has done a thorough job here.
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