Original subtitles

Making myself look dead,

it's nothing to do with death itself.

It's making myself look as different from me

as it was possible to imagine, so, I could really be convincing

as being somebody else.

Dennis Andrew Nilsen

seemed to be an ordinary man with an ordinary life.

Bloody finger! You great pillock.

But behind the facade, he was the stuff of nightmares.

It could kill somebody!

Because Nilsen was a killer

with the blood of at least 12 young men on his hands.

Dennis Nilsen wanted to be in control

and dominant and domineering.

A seemingly boring civil servant who hid in the shadows.

Nilsen was known as dodgy.

He had a terrible temper. He was violent.

A control freak.

Now, the story of the making of a mass murderer can be revealed

in never-before-aired material.

NILSEN ON TAPE

Exclusive testament from the detectives

who brought him to justice.

There was a pair of legs sticking out the end

of a big black bin liner.

I said to him, "How many bodies are we talking about here?"

And his reply, "I've killed 15 or 16."

It was one hell of a shock.

How many people were buried in that garden?

The prison interview the Home Office tried to ban.

It was my power and his passivity.

The more passive he could be, the more powerful I was.

And the families of Nilsen's victims speaking for the first time.

My dad was relentless in the way he searched for our Martyn.

He said, "Where are you, son?"

Dennis Nilsen destroyed my family.

VOICE BREAKS Sorry.

You pull the body out from under the floorboards,

put it on a sheet and then cut it up.

This shocking interview was filmed in 1992.

A cold-blooded killer calmly describing

how he got rid of his victims.

Come the summer, it got hot,

and I knew there would be a smell problem.

I thought, well, I'm going to have to deal with the smell problem.

And I thought what would cause the smell more than anything else?

And I came to the conclusion it was the innards.

This footage hasn't been seen on British television

for over 20 years.

On a weekend, I would sort of pull up the floorboards,

and I found it totally unpleasant and I get blinding drunk,

so, I could face it and start dissection on the kitchen floor.

I'd go out and be sick outside in the garden.

But how did we get here?

12 years earlier, Dennis Nilsen was in the middle of murder spree.

Opportunities for a serial killer seemed horrifyingly easy.

Britain was undergoing huge social change.

But not everywhere.

I joined the Metropolitan Police in April 1979.

I came into the station

and there were two guys there who were on my team.

I went up to them and said,

"Hello, I'm WPC 8141, I'm starting today."

And they looked at me and said, "Oh, for fuck's sake,

"we've already got one on the team, we don't need another one."

That was my first introduction to being a female police officer.

In the early '80s, London was a magnet

for thousands of young people

heading to the city to follow their dreams.

REPORTER: 'It's a familiar story,

'every night, trains from Scotland and the North

'carry those hoping to escape a dull and dreary existence

'and looking for the extra excitement

'they believe life in the capital will bring.'

But for many, the reality was very different.

And huge numbers were going missing.

'At any one time, 8,000 people are listed as missing in London alone,

'a clear illustration of how easy it is for someone

'to simply disappear without trace.'

We would give it 24 hours.

If they didn't come back,

then we would obviously do the surrounding police stations.

Have they been arrested for anything?

Hospital checks, but that's really all we did.

In 1983, I was the detective inspector

at Hornsey Police Station, in north London.

In those days, a missing person bureau

was a small office at Scotland Yard.

They didn't have a national database,

it just wasn't very professional at all.

ARCHIVE REPORT: 'They've often, deliberately

'cut all links with the past

'and this makes them an easy target for exploitation

'by criminals or conmen.'

Because they were young, they were inexperienced

and when they got there, you could say they were led astray.

It meant they could be easy prey for someone like Dennis Nilsen.

Martyn Duffy was one of them.

Our Martyn had a lovely smile. Yeah.

He'd do anything for anyone. He had a heart of gold.

Hazyl and Graham are talking for the first time about their brother

and the last Christmas they spent together in 1979.

You look at those photographs and you can see he was happy.

Yeah, yeah.

It was one of the best times, I suppose. Yeah.

As a family, we were all happy, we were all together. Yeah.

In May 1980,

the 16-year-old ran away to London in the hope of finding work.

Something he'd done before.

But this time, no-one heard from Martyn after he'd arrived.

He didn't go to any of the contacts we knew he had there,

he just disappeared off the face of the earth.

Martyn's disappearance was reported to the police.

His name was simply added

to the list of thousands who were missing in London.

My dad was relentless in the way he searched for our Martyn.

There was a photograph of Martyn by his bed

and he just looked at it and he said, "Where are you, son?"

It was obvious that something bad had happened. Mm.

And something terrible had taken place.

Three years later, the truth was about to be revealed.

Hornsey Police Station, North London.

Detective Inspector Steve McCusker was about to get a report

that would haunt him for the rest of his career.

A uniformed colleague of mine came to my office.

He told me he'd been called to an incident

at a house in Cranley Gardens.

Plumbers had found something suspicious down the drain

they were unblocking.

McCusker headed to the house with his boss,

Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay.

When we got up there,

we saw a number of people standing around an open manhole cover.

REPORTER: 'What did you find?' A mass of flesh.

Very heavily suspected that it wasn't animal.

'One of the people in the house was quite interested?'

That's correct.

Yes, the guy, I believe was living in the top floor flat. Yeah.

'The man living in the flat was a job centre supervisor

'called Dennis Andrew Nilsen.'

It was snowing, sleet, real miserable, wet, dark evening.

His boss told him, "Look, put the manhole cover back on

"and we will come to investigate it in the morning in the light of day."

With the manhole left unguarded,

the neighbours heard Nilsen going up and down the drain

at around midnight.

When Cattron returned the next day, the remains had gone.

If a manhole can be sparkling, it was sparkling!

But he did put his hand up

and he was able to extract from the smaller drains in a manhole,

erm, what looked like the fingers and knuckles

and skin and bone of human hand.

We got a phone call from the mortuary,

telling us that, indeed, the bones were actually from human being.

Our main suspect was a guy called Dennis Nilsen.

Sometimes, he goes by the name of Des.

Des was due home from work at around half past five.

Detectives Peter Jay Steve McCusker and Jeff Butler

were waiting for him.

He arrived, he was dressed in a trench coat, wearing glasses,

carrying a briefcase.

We did say we were police officers from Hornsey police station.

Nilsen expressed some surprise at this.

He said, since when did police officers get interested

in looking at people's drains?

We said, let's go up to your flat and we'll tell you all about it.

He opened his door with a key.

It was a grubby flat.

There was a grubbiness to it and, of course, the smell,

the smell was absolutely awful.

It was the smell of death.

Peter said to him, "Stop messing us about, where is the body?"

He looked shocked.

It suddenly dawned on him that the game was up.

And he simply said, "It's in there." He pointed to a wardrobe to my left.

So, I opened the wardrobe and I saw two black bin liner sacks,

full to the brim with the remains of human bodies.

Peter Jay then told Nilsen that he was arresting him

on suspicion of murder and cautioned him.

The detectives put Nilsen in the back of the car to take him

to the police station.

What he told Steve McCusker next

would be a defining moment in the case.

And so I said to him, "How many bodies are we talking about here?

"One or two?"

And his reply, shocked us.

"I've killed 15 or 16.

"There are three back here,

"and the rest I killed at a flat I used to live in."

ARCHIVE REPORT: 'Scotland Yard

'launched its biggest murder investigation today

'after a pathologist confirmed that human remains,

'found in a sewer outfit, were parts of three bodies.'

We knew we had not just a killer

but he said he was willing to talk, tell us all about it.

We thought, well, we're going to have a murder investigation.

We'll just get on with it.

Dennis Andrew Nilsen was under arrest on suspicion of murder.

Detective Chief Superintendent Geoff Chambers

and DCI Peter Jay would question Nilsen.

While DI Steve McCusker ran the day-to-day investigation.

'It was in this quiet residential street

'in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill,

'that the extraordinary series of events

'began to unfold.'

The eyes of the world were now on Nilsen's flat

as the murder investigation intensified.

When we arrived at the property,

we went upstairs to the second floor flat.

Walked into the flat

and straight away on the left-hand side there was an open kitchen.

I noticed there was a head in a cooking pot.

It had been boiled,

I think there was still a bit of hair on the scalp.

Half the flesh was taken off it and peeled back.

He'd severed right across the back of the neck.

This is the first time these officers have talked publicly

about the horrors that confronted them.

It was one hell of a shock,

probably the biggest shock that I'd ever received...

at a crime scene.

At Hornsey Police Station, Nilsen was talking to detectives,

calmly and lucidly. Telling them what he'd done.

He was answering all the questions, he wasn't nervous.

The only thing that seemed to concern him

a lot was that he told me he had a dog.

Oh! Ah! Bloody finger, you great pillock.

I thought to myself at the time, well, he is concerned about the dog

and there's the remains of three bodies lying in his flat

of men he'd killed.

During his interviews, Nilsen gave detectives details

of some of the men he'd murdered over a four-year period.

But he could only remember two of the three men

he had killed in Cranley Gardens.

His final victim, who was called Sinclair,

and a man called John from High Wycombe.

He was also telling investigators

where they should look for more remains.

In the bathroom,

there was an upturned drawer which had been used as shelf.

We turned that over.

We almost held each other's hands as we did it.

Underneath, there was a pair of legs sticking out of the end

of a big black liner.

Bin bags containing body parts were removed from the wardrobe.

So was a wooden box holding limbs and torso.

Investigators also found four carrier bags

filled with internal organs.

It was unbelievable what we were seeing.

This was the work of a man, clearly deranged and not in his right mind.

The detectives' main challenge was to find out who he'd killed.

Using fingerprints found on the flat,

the first person to have their identity confirmed

was Stephen Sinclair.

The 20-year-old from Perth had been strangled in his sleep.

Stephen Sinclair's identification within 48 hours was crucial.

It meant that Nilsen could now be formally charged with murder.

'Nilsen had been brought here to Highgate Magistrate's Court

'from Hornsey police station early this morning.

'Dennis Andrew Nilsen looked straight at the magistrate

'as the charge was read to him.

'That he did on or about the 1st of February, 1983,

'murder Stephen Neil Sinclair.'

SHOUTING CAMERA SHUTTERS

A picture of who Dennis Nilsen really was began to emerge.

In the early 1980s, London's gay scene was thriving.

But there were also predators looking to exploit the vulnerable.

And Nilsen was one of them.

What are you doing switching the bloody thing on and off for?

You'll never make a cameraman, you know.

He was recognisable as, you know, a guy on the gay scene.

He was recognisable as gay.

And kind of old school.

I can't understand you.

I ask you to fucking start filming from the feet,

slowly up to the head. And you go zip, zip, pan.

Bloody hell, don't you ever watch movies?

You've seen thousands of movies, you must know what it's like.

Nilsen was known to be violent towards young male sex workers,

and he was always on the hunt for new victims,

people who didn't know his reputation.

Nilsen was known as TTM.

The Taxi Man.

He was known to... chat up people.

The suggestion of money, suggestion of a taxi,

"Do you want to come home, stay the night with me?"

It was that kind of thing.

Word was out that he was a... He was dodgy.

That he had a terrible temper, that he was violent.

He once said to me, "Lead and they follow so easily."

Tragically, many did.

After Stephen Sinclair was identified,

the investigation's attention moved to Nilsen's previous home

in Melrose Avenue, five miles from Cranley Gardens.

It was a ground-floor flat with a back garden.

'Search teams, equipped with spades, sieves and rakes

'arrived to turn over the garden of Nilsen's first home

'in Melrose Avenue.'

Nilsen told the police he kept up to three bodies at a time

under the floorboards at Melrose Avenue.

He'd dissect them on the kitchen floor,

then burn the dismembered body parts in his back garden.

He drew a map to show where he lit the fires.

When we got there,

we went straight down to the garden and it was freezing.

And I thought, "This is not gonna be easy,

"digging here anyway, in February."

We were looking for bones.

I found two or three the first half an hour,

and then it went on to dozens.

We probably had 1,000 bones in the ground there.

So, how many people are there?

The work is going slowly.

For it appears that the bones are scattered

over the whole area of the garden.

I found a latchkey.

I found a torn, charred piece of a postcard

with an Australian stamp on it.

Has he picked up a backpacker?

'How many people do you know of?'

Maybe five or six.

'Can you say anything about them?' Nothing at all.

'Were they male or female?' Male.

'And what age?'

We believe between 20 and 40.

Nilsen had moved into the ground floor flat with his then boyfriend,

20-year-old David Gallichan, in November, 1975.

Come on, mate, let's have a little smile, then.

Come on. Smile?

A little smile, come on. Like that?

Come on, ducky, little smile.

Nilsen filmed this remarkable home footage of David in the garden.

When we came here, this back garden was like a bloody rubbish heap,

with tons of old cookers and tyres and debris

and plaster and wood and God knows what else.

This was the garden where Nilsen would later burn the remains

of some of the men he admitted killing.

In May, 1977, Nilsen's relationship with David came to a bitter end.

You've been biting my cardigan again.

It was the moment everything seemed to change.

A year later, he killed for the first time.

Professor David Wilson is an expert on serial killers,

and has met many of them, including Nilsen.

I first met Dennis Nilsen because I was the new assistant governor

under training at HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

And, of course, I'd read all about this man in the newspapers.

There was a sense in which I wondered,

"Have we got our own Hannibal Lecter in Dennis Nilsen?"

And so I had this incredible expectation

about meeting him for the very first time

and I can tell you now...

I was completely underwhelmed.

Most serial killers that I've met

are really silent and uncommunicative.

Nilsen was the opposite.

Nilsen spoke endlessly about the murders that he had committed.

Dennis Nilsen wanted to be in control

and dominant and domineering.

He wanted to control his legacy,

he wanted to tell everybody who Dennis Nilsen was.

He was a true narcissist.

There was my power and his passivity.

The more passive he could be, the more powerful I was.

I still feel in a spiritual communion with these people.

Nilsen was still co-operating with the police,

but he was playing mind games.

Of the 12 victims he initially confessed to killing

at Melrose Avenue,

he would offer only vague details as to who some of them were.

He only ever gave the detectives three full names.

Kenneth Ockenden, who went missing in December, 1979,

Billy Sutherland, who Nilsen strangled in 1980...

..and finally, Martyn Duffey.

The door went and you came and you said, "It's the police."

And that's when they said about Nilsen

and there was a possibility that Martyn was one of the victims.

Nilsen had befriended the 16-year-old

the day he arrived in London.

Detectives hoped the Duffeys could identify items found at his flat.

It wasn't easy telling them the truth about their son,

who'd been a victim of a man who, at that time,

was headline news around the world.

Nilsen had taken a left luggage ticket

from our Martyn... Yeah. ..after he'd killed him.

And went back to Euston to pick up the property.

Nilsen was using Martyn's briefcase

to take his sandwich and his newspaper into the office.

That's right, yeah.

Nilsen also used Martyn's treasured chef's knives.

They had been a gift from his father.

Horrifically, he used the knives as well to cut the victims up.

Of course, yeah.

Martyn's knives, that was a shock.

Nilsen's crimes shocked the world.

He'd confessed to killing 15 young men,

but what turned a Mr Ordinary into a serial killer?

SEAGULLS CRY

Dennis Nilsen was born just after the Second World War,

in the port town of Fraserburgh in Scotland.

His parents, Betty and Olaf, divorced in 1949,

and he became close to his grandfather.

He told author Brian Masters

that the death of his grandfather when he was just five years old

had a profound effect on him.

His mother said to him, "Do you want to see your grandad?"

"Oh, yes."

And he went into the dining room and on the table was a box.

And inside the box was his grandfather.

Nobody told him anything, nobody explained it to him.

But I was convinced, and I put this to him,

that his idea of love and his idea of death fused at that moment.

And thereafter, he always wanted either to be dead himself,

and he would pretend to be dead,

or, eventually, he got round to killing people instead.

The making myself look dead was nothing to do with death itself,

it was making myself look as different from me

as it was possible to imagine

so I could really be convincing as being somebody else.

In 1985, Brian Masters published his best-selling book,

Killing For Company,

the result of hours of conversations with Nilsen himself.

He wanted company and he wanted...

erm, especially to have company which didn't interrupt.

So, eventually,

he fell back on this fantasy of his grandfather and the dead.

And he would make somebody dead in order to be able to talk to them.

This was the nearest he ever got to friendship.

And I think it's tragic

from point of view of the people he encountered, obviously,

but it's also pretty grim for him.

It's something I just can't understand, this.

I've tried and I thought about it and thought about it.

He just must be sick or something.

Because it's not the Dennis I knew that's doing this, somehow or other.

By the age of 15, he was determined to get away from his family.

In June 1961, he enlisted in the British Army Catering Corps

and was posted to Aldershot.

Dennis Nilsen was in the same squad as me, V Squad.

He was weird.

I say weird for the fact he had a strange sense of humour,

he was very argumentative.

It was there, as an apprentice army chef,

that Nilsen learned how to butcher meat.

Kitchen work was to get you ready for working in the main kitchens,

you learned how to cut up, erm...

sides of beef, carcasses of lamb, sides of pork and so forth.

He was very meticulous, actually, he was a good chef.

I just find it amazing

that somebody could actually commit the crimes he did.

After 11 years in the army,

and only reaching the rank of corporal,

Nilsen decided he'd had enough.

He moved to London

and eventually joined the Met as a trainee police officer.

A revelation that initially shocked detectives -

they were investigating one of their own.

During the interviews it came out that he had been a police officer.

When I found out that he hadn't made his two-year probation,

I wasn't too concerned

and I thought that if Nilsen said he'd resigned,

I would have thought it's more likely

that he was gently ushered out the door.

He'd lasted just 12 months,

leaving, he claimed, because of homophobia.

He joined the Civil Service as a junior officer at a job centre.

Then the murders began.

Nilsen was preying on the vulnerable.

Young men he thought would not be missed.

Sometimes runaways, sex workers.

But one of his victims was different.

A mistake that could have ended his killing spree three years earlier.

ARCHIVE: 'On 3rd December 1979,

'Kenneth Ockenden left his hotel between nine and ten in the morning.

'It was the last time he was positively seen alive.'

Kenneth Ockenden was a 23-year-old tourist from Canada,

who'd been due to fly home when he met Nilsen in a pub.

They went sightseeing around the capital,

then Kenneth disappeared.

It became an international incident,

with the Canadian Prime Minister calling Margaret Thatcher,

piling on political pressure for the inquiry to be ramped up.

'Police said there was a strong possibility

'that Kenneth Ockenden had been murdered.

'But he did make one last phone call.

'It was to his uncle in Surrey.

'The call came from a public call box.

'There was music in the background.'

The police couldn't find him.

And the truth only came to light

when Nilsen was finally caught three years later.

He'd taken Kenneth back to his flat in Melrose Avenue,

then strangled him.

He'd kept his body under the floorboards.

Bringing it out to wash and dress it,

watching television with the corpse as company.

Now the investigation team needed proof.

And they had a lead, discovered in Nilsen's home.

When they found an A-Z of London,

fingerprint people took it back to Scotland Yard

and they blasted every page of this book

and they found a fingerprint,

and that fingerprint identified Kenneth Ockenden.

Nilsen was charged with Kenneth Ockenden's murder.

And of another man police had now identified.

Malcolm Barlow was suffering from a fit

when Nilsen found him and helped him get to hospital.

When the 24-year-old returned to say thank you,

Nilsen invited him into his flat and strangled him.

He kept Malcolm's body under his kitchen sink

before burning it in the back garden.

Five men had complained to police in the past

that they'd been the victims of violent attacks by Nilsen.

But their cases had never been properly followed up.

Now the murder investigation team needed to track them down.

This was when he was in one of the hostels in London.

One of those survivors was 21-year-old Carl Stottor.

JULIE: Carl was a lovely man.

I idolised him.

He had this infectious laugh.

He always used to open his mouth, very much like Marilyn Monroe.

Chucked his head back and he would mouth open and laugh.

Julie has never spoken publicly about what happened to her brother.

He left home after coming out as gay

and being disowned by his father.

It had a profound effect on him, and I think the rest of his life,

all he looked out for was love from another man.

In April, 1982, he met Nilsen in the Black Cap pub in Camden Town.

Nilsen bought him a drink.

When the pub shot, erm, Dennis Nilsen said,

"Do you want to come back to mine for a drink?" And he said yes.

Nilsen paid for the 15-minute taxi ride

back to his top floor flat in Cranley Gardens.

Nilsen made him a drink, put some music on.

I think he whispered, "I'm falling in love with you."

He didn't feel very well at all,

and I think that's when they went to bed early.

And I think Nilsen had drugged his drink.

I sort of felt his hands, and at first,

I thought he was sort of, like... helping me out of it,

but he sort of shouted,

sort of whispered, sort of, "Keep still."

And I sort of passed out.

Nilsen was trying to kill him.

The next thing Carl new, he was in the bath.

The thought that went through my mind was,

"You are drowning, you are being murdered by this man

"and this is what it feels like, and you're going to die."

And I thought I was dying.

For some reason, Nilsen stopped.

Instead, he began reviving him.

And I saw my face in the mirror,

and all my tongue was all swollen and my face was bloated

and I had, like, red blotches

where the blood vessels had burst in my face

and my neck was all sort of cut round here.

Nilsen helped a confused and disorientated Carl

to a nearby tube station.

After getting treatment at a hospital,

he reported what had happened to the police.

The police put it down to a lover's tiff.

Carl, erm, could only remember Des' first name

and that he lived in Muswell Hill.

So we didn't have enough information to put a formal complaint in,

but at the same time, the police didn't take it seriously

because it was in the 1980s and there was a lot of homophobia

in the police force and in the country.

Nilsen was question three times, following different complaints,

but police took no further action.

Nilsen was able to kill two more young men

after his attack on Carl.

London, 1983.

Murder detectives are trying to identify the victims

of serial killer Dennis Andrew Nilsen.

After months of investigations, the police had only identified

five of 15 men he confessed to killing.

Nilsen had given them another name - John from High Wycombe.

After painstakingly searching records,

detectives confirmed victim number six as John Howlett.

Nilsen had strangled and drowned him in March 1982.

The team at Melrose Avenue had also uncovered more objects,

including three dental plates.

Exhibits officer Brian Lodge

thought that they could give them more names.

I took them to some North London dental laboratories

and asked if they could say who they were made by,

or who they were for, et cetera, et cetera, but...

from what I learned, they were all made in Germany,

and I suggested to the inquiry

that perhaps enquiries should be made in Germany.

But by then, the investigation's overtime bill

was rumoured to be over £1 million.

Brian's request was denied.

That testing was never allowed and never followed up,

which I thought was rather a shame

because perhaps there were many families around the country now

who are wondering still was their son,

was their brother, their uncle, their dad a victim of this man?

Something we'll never know, something they'll never know.

Nilsen's 14th victim, and the last to be identified at Cranley Gardens,

was Graham Allen from Glasgow.

He was 28 and had a child.

Police had found a jawbone

and matched it to Graham's dental records.

But because it happened only days before Nilsen's trial,

the murder was never added to the indictment.

'The Nilsen murder trial at the Old Bailey

'has entered its closing stages. Dennis Nilsen is charged

'with six murders and two attempted murders.'

Nilsen entered a not guilty plea

on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

The court heard evidence from three psychologists

about his mental state, and the prosecution argued

he was in his right mind when he killed.

The jury agreed.

At the Old Bailey, Dennis Nilsen has been found guilty

of six murders and two attempted murders.

He's been jailed for life with a recommendation

that he should serve a minimum of 25 years.

Author Brian Masters was at the court every day.

He believes the jury came to the right verdict.

He was an intelligent man. He knew perfectly well

that it was wrong to kill people,

but he didn't know why it mattered so much.

The last victim,

er, he'd cut the head off

before he went to bed and put it in a cooking pot

and put it on to simmer, and then went to bed.

When he woke up in the morning to take the dog out for a walk,

the pot was still simmering.

When he came back, adjusted the flame

to see whether it needed to be turned up or put down again.

Then he butted a slice of toast and ate it.

I couldn't do that.

It is not possible

unless you are severely damaged

in your moral sense.

In the early 1990s,

Peter Paul Hartnett began researching a book

and exchanging letters with him.

He also recorded some of their conversations.

It's the first time these have been heard.

Over the years, I was getting many letters a week.

It might be three one week, five the next,

and believe me, they were a bore of a chore to wake up to,

cos it was page after page.

Nilsen asked him to edit his autobiography.

What he had written was shocking.

He was saying in the manuscript

he had a regret about the murders, and the regret was

that he hadn't kept body parts in glasses of formaldehyde -

genitals, a pretty hand.

If Nilsen had had the money,

one of his fantasies was to have a van

in which he could pick up hitchhikers,

get them in the back of the van,

gas them, and bring them home.

Hartnett declined to work on the book,

and by 2002, they stopped corresponding.

There were too many triggers.

There were things that I had to say, "I think we need to edit that out."

And the one person you couldn't edit was Nilsen.

Control freak.

In those situations where a knife is involved,

there's a lot of blood flying around.

If I was to stab you right now, or you were to stab me,

the heart is pumping away

and there would be blood splattering all over the place.

In a dead body, there's no blood spurts

or anything like that. It congeals inside

and forms part of the flesh

and it becomes like anything in a butcher's shop.

There's little or no blood.

During his time as a prison governor,

David Wilson interviewed Nilsen a number of times

and studied his motivations.

The reason why Dennis Nilsen killed

was because this was an extension of his sexual fantasy.

He killed, therefore,

because it was through those murders

and then what he could do with the victims after they had died.

Does fantasy shape the reality?

Or does fantasy shape the reality until the first murder?

And then does fantasy propel the... the sequence of murders

in an evermore dramatic way?

Because once you've engaged in the reality the first time,

it's no longer fantastic.

The most exciting part of the little conundrum

was when I lifted the body, carried it.

It was an expression of my power to lift and carry and have control.

And the dangling element of limbs was an expression of his passivity.

Over the course of time, not only is he killing his victims,

he is, erm, then washing his victims,

he's, erm, propping his victims up in chairs or on beds.

And although he would deny it, and did deny it to me,

there is evidence to suggest that he would engage in necrophilia.

He would have sex with their dead bodies.

I think there is some indication about cannibalism,

despite, again, the fact that he would deny it.

He would trophy take.

He would cut up and keep some of the victims' body parts

whilst disposing of other parts.

This is somebody who was a complete and utter failure in his life,

and the only way that he could gain some sense of who he wanted to be

was through killing and after he had murdered.

And that's the ultimate form of being a loser.

CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING

Carl died the day that he found out Dennis Nilsen tried to kill him.

He had survivor's guilt. He couldn't understand

why he was saved and the others weren't.

And he just needed the pain to go away,

which made him an alcoholic.

Carl Stottor passed away in 2013.

He died alone at the age of 52.

What happened in 1982 haunted him until the end.

His life was horrendous for him.

He lived in his own hell and his own prison.

But Nilsen's attempt to kill her brother

also devastated her own family.

Three years ago, Julie's oldest son, Jack, took his own life.

He suffered from depression

and said that he didn't want to end up like his Uncle Carl.

His personality, the nice side of him, was like my brother.

Jack would hit a depressed spot

and he'd remembered what Nanny had gone through with Carl

and didn't want to put me through the same thing.

Dennis Nilsen destroyed my family,

both my son and my brother.

Sorry.

Only eight of Nilsen's victims were ever identified.

The rest remain unknown to this day.

Events like this can blow families apart,

erm, but for us,

it definitely pulled us closer together. Yeah.

There's yards and yards of column inches

given over to Nilsen and his motivations,

but very little about the people that he killed.

And those people were far more important than Nilsen will ever be.

The victims are all like just an afterthought, I suppose.

And because of the way

Martyn certainly, and most of the others,

were portrayed in the press,

it's very unjust.

Describing all of his victims as gay, homeless drifters

was purely...

just a catch-all term to sort of

pigeonhole people into being...

..of less value.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Mm-hm.

Martyn was part of our family.

He was loved. Mm.

And we miss him.

Mm. Yeah.

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