10 Harrowing Details Surrounding Dennis Nilsen, The “British Jeffrey Dahmer”

6 /10 Moving To Muswell Hill

In October 1981, he moved into an apartment at 23D Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, North London, where he stored dissected parts of his victims’ corpses in wardrobes, suitcases, and plastic bags.

His first victim in his attic flat was 23-year-old John Howlett, who struggled ferociously with Nilsen but was later strangled into unconsciousness. He later drowned him after further unsuccessful attempts at killing him. 

The next murder attempt was on 21-year-old Carl Stokker(in march 1982), which proved unsuccessful as he kept regaining consciousness.

Some months later, he murdered Andrew Graham and dissected his body after keeping him in his bathtub for three days.

5 /10 Time's Up For Des

Nilsen killed a total of three persons at his Muswell Hill residence. He dissected their bodies on his kitchen floor and flushed the parts down his toilet, causing a drainage blockage that required the necessary authorities to come to check it out. This was the beginning of the end of Nilsen’s necrophilic acts. 

An employee of the plumbing company called to check out the drainage issue noticed that the drain was filled with what looked like human remains, and alerted the proper authorities.

Further, inspection confirmed them to be human flesh and bones. Upon confronting and questioning Nilsen, he willingly confessed to the murders, directing the police to find the remains.

4 /10 Life And Death... In Prison

Nilsen was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders and sentenced to life in prison in 1983 with a minimum term set at 25 years which was later changed to a whole life tariff (he gets to stay in jail with no hope of ever being released).

In 1993 he was given the go-ahead to give a televised interview from prison and in 2006 was denied any request for parole. 

Nilsen was deemed a trouble maker in prison, bringing a couple of judicial reviews against the prison authorities’ decision not to allow him access to gay pornography or publish his autobiography – the history of a drowning boy. 

After spending, he died in 2018 at age 72 from surgery complications at HMP Full Sutton. His body was cremated, but no family member of his was present at the cremation service.

3 /10 Crisis With This Sexual Identity

For the longest time since attaining puberty, Nilsen struggled with picking between whether he was bisexual or gay.

To find out, he fondled his sister and his brother in their sleep but unfortunately for him, his brother woke up and caught him in the act. Since then, he nicknamed Nilsen “hen,” which is the Scottish slang for “girl.” 

He recorded that he later had sex with a female prostitute to be sure about his sexual orientation and described the experience as depressing, which confirmed that he was indeed gay.

A later argument on homosexuality with his brother sealed the end of their relationship for him.

2 /10 Life In Service

At age 14, Nilsen enlisted for the army and spent the first three years undergoing training at the Depot, Aldershot Barracks in Hampshire.

He was deployed to West Germany and then to Arden, Norway, to serve as a cook, which he described to be a very dangerous posting.

Following his unfulfillment in the army after 11 years of service and corporal rank, he left in October 1972.

He joined the metropolitan police in London in December of the same year. A year later, he resigned and found a job as a civil servant in 1974, where he stayed until his arrest in 1983.

1 /10 The Desire Started A While Ago

On one occasion at his station in Germany, Nilsen drank so much that he passed out only to find himself awake on the apartment floor.

From then onwards, he developed fantasies of sexual intercourse with an immobile partner and even wished for sex advances to be made at him anytime he pretended to be passed out.

He was also greatly influenced by the painting, The Raft of the Medusa. 

While serving in the Middle East, Nilsen would fantasize about being a corpse, covering himself with talc and bluing his lips, and masturbating to his image in the mirror.

The irony was that he never ended up a corpse(not until later) but instead made others real-life corpses by killing them. 

On the face of it, Nilsen could be mistaken for a shy, reserved young man who loved animals (he had a dog named Bleep) and just went about his business in 1970 London – he indeed was. But that wasn’t all there was to him.

On the flip side, he was twisted, dark, disturbed, and evil.  The next time your drain gets blocked, never rule out the possibility of a psycho around the corner.