Dennis Andrew Nilsen Biography

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World of Criminal Justice on Dennis Andrew Nilsen

Dennis Andrew Nilsen was a thirty-seven-year-old government worker whom London police arrested after the discovery that the sewer below his home was blocked by human body parts. Nilsen readily admitted to strangling fifteen young men over the previous four years, then dismembering and disposing of the bodies in various ways.

Born in 1945 in a Scottish fishing village on the North Sea, Nilsen grew up in an impoverished home with two siblings and four half-siblings from his mother's second marriage. In 1961, at the age of fifteen, he enlisted in the British Army and spent the next eleven years as a cook. Moving to London in 1973, Nilsen eventually found a job as a civil servant at a government employment office but remained alienated and friendless. His only companion was a mongrel named Bleep, to whom he seemed devoted, as neighbors later reported.

Nilsen had a series of unsuccessful relationships with "rent boys," rootless young men who would exchange sex for shelter. Even more privately, Nilsen recalled that he would feel troubled and shameful about his lifestyle and elaborately make himself up to look like a corpse. By 1978, he had begun to drink heavily. Around the Christmas holidays that year, he was dejected and went to a local pub, where he met an Irish youth who accompanied him back to his flat on Melrose Avenue. Nilsen, sad when he realized the youth would leave in the morning and not stay with him over New Year's, strangled him, then buried the body beneath the floorboards of his apartment. He later removed it and burned it in his garden seven months later. The identity of that teenager was never learned, and over the next four years Nilsen killed eleven other men before he moved out. Only four were later identified; many of the young men that Nilsen lured and killed were never even reported missing.

At his new flat in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill, Nilsen killed another three men. Neighbors there were perplexed in February 1983 when their toilets began to back up, and plumbers investigating the blockage looked into the sewer beneath the building and found a mass of rotting flesh. They even took Nilsen and another tenant to see it, and later that night Nilsen went down into the sewer himself and took the remains away. But neighbors witnessed some of this odd midnight activity, and Nilsen was arrested the next day when he returned home from work. He readily admitted he was guilty and showed police the remains of his fifteenth victim. Detectives found bags of body parts in his apartment, some disguised with air fresheners and mothballs. His lawyers claimed insanity, but psychiatrists who examined Nilsen disagreed, and a jury found him guilty on six counts of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of twenty-five years. A manuscript of Nilsen's autobiography was smuggled out of prison in 1998, but authorities monitoring his mail discovered the book contract and ended the deal.