Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer by Russ Coffey Page B

the trial, Masters visited twice a week. Throughout this period, Nilsen wrote his thoughts and biographical reminiscences daily in prison exercise books (he would also carry on writing after the trial). Under the agreement Masters had with the prison and Home Office, he was allowed to use anything Nilsen had written but nothing from the face-to-face meetings. He even had to sign a formal undertaking to that effect.
    Soon, Brian Masters started to experience what appeared to be Nilsen’s fierce loyalty. At first, it seemed like one of his impulsive friendships. Eventually, however, he decided it was mainly an obsession with principles. During the summer, some prisoners suggested to Nilsen that Masters was a ‘plant’ for one of the tabloid newspapers. It made him extremely angry. He felt Masters was now his friend and an attack on the author was an attack on him. As the rumours grew, he responded by sulking and refusing to talk to his solicitor. This protest seemed childish.
    Nilsen seemed confused by his own emotions. In one notebook, he described them as ‘the most toxic substancesknown to man’. His words match, remarkably, a profile of ‘covert schizoid personality’ described by the psychiatrist Dr Salman Akhtar. Such people are characterised as being, amongst other things: cynical, grandiose, sensitive, creative, voyeuristic, amoral, autistic, hungry for love and envious of others’ spontaneity. Nilsen wrote it must be a ‘wonderful gift’ to ‘throw your arms around someone and just weep’. At that moment, he seemed to accept that, for much of his life, normal emotions had been beyond him.
    More usually Nilsen presented the impression that he was convinced he had now returned to ‘normal’. Of course, it was odd that he felt so little sadness for his victims, but he didn’t feel there was essentially anything wrong with him. Yet whenever he put pen to paper, the results inevitably showed him to be disconnected from his crimes. Most strikingly, there were a series of drawings of his last victim, Sinclair. These ‘Sad Sketches’ were accurately drawn renditions of how his remains appeared after they had been dismembered. They were accompanied by notes recounting how he had cut up the corpse. Masters described them as being drawn with ‘energy and pride’, and ‘an odd kind of perverse affection’.

    As 24 October 1983 – the date set for the trial – drew closer, Nilsen’s mood swings seemed more extreme than ever. One moment he could be cheery and, minutes later, he seemed tortured. ‘I go through a personal hell each day,’ he says in
Killing for Company.
    The divisions within him in the run up to the trial were, however, still consistent with a personality that was under pressure but basically working. That impulsive infatuationwith Martin, the sudden friendships in the exercise yard, the erratic defence strategy and the compulsive writing may simply have been him coming to terms with being a murderer. His behaviour even reminded Masters occasionally of Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s motiveless killer whose reflections are the subject of the classic novel,
Crime and Punishment
.
    Nilsen even said that he hoped if he accepted all blame, maybe he could look the parents of victim Ken Ockendon in the eye. Of all his victims, Ockendon was the most inexplicable. Nilsen had met the 23-year-old Canadian tourist in a pub one lunchtime. The young man had a loving family and probably wasn’t homosexual. The two of them had enjoyed an entire day together. Nilsen had seemed genuinely confused as to why he had killed him. In order to atone for what he had done, he told Masters he wanted to accept any punishment the law prescribed and some more besides.
    Eventually, however, he seems to have changed his mind. Nilsen pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility. On 3 November, the 12 men and women of the jury were initially unable to agree whether there might be something sufficiently wrong