Care to give me an overview of his story?
I can do that.
Dennis Nilsen was born in Scotland on November 23 1945 to a Nowegian soldier and a Scottish woman. His father was a heavy drinker left when Nilsen was still very young. His main father figure became his grandfather. In 1951 Nilsen was taken to see his grandfather's body without any one telling him that his he had passed away. Nilsen said later that this early trauma was a foundation for what was to happen later in life.
In 1953 his mother remarried and had a few more kids, so he was cast aside. He was a loner at school and when he was 16 he joined the army.
There he worked as butcher among other things. He developed feelings for a man who did not reciprocate them, and left the service not long after. He tried being a policeman but found it didn't suit him. He moved to Soho and started working for a job centre where he interviewed people looking for work.
He became immersed in the gay bar scene, but the casual one night stands left him feeling even more alone.
For two years he lived with a flat mate, David Gallichan, but eventually Nilsen asked Gallichan to move out because their temperamental differences were too great.
He became incredibly lonely again.
In 1978 he picked up a young man in a pub and took him home. As he watched the man sleeping he realised he would leave in the morning and couldn't stand it any longer. Nilsen strangled the young man with a neck tie and then drowned him in a bucket of water.
Once the man was dead Nilsen washed his corpses hair and put him back in the bed. He later referred to this as 'a new kind of flatmate'.
Eventually he tried to discard of the body but couldn't bring himself to cut it up, so he hid it under the floorboards for eight months before burning it in a bonfire in his backyard.
His next victim managed to escape him and went to the police, but the police regarded it as a gay lovers quarrel and did not press charges.
A few days later Nilsen lured another man to his home. After strangling him with an electric cord he cut up the body and hid part under the floorboard and flushed parts of it down the toilet.
By 1981 he had killed 10 more times.
That year he moved in the hopes that living in a house which didn't enable such easy disposal of the bodies would effectively stop him from killing again. But he still managed to kill three more men. However the drains in his new building became blocked and another tenant called a plumber. Upon discovery of the body parts Nilsen had been flushing down the toilet they called the police. Nilsen was arrested and immediately confessed in great detail.
He was sentenced to life in prison and is currently held in HMP Full Sutton maximum security prison in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where he is awaiting an appeal on the judicial decision not to allow him to publish his autobiography.
He was an incredibly lonely man. He didn't kill for money like Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, or sexual gratification like John Wayne Gacy, or some psychotic vendetta like Aileen Wuornos or David Berkowitz. He just wanted some company.
