Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer by Russ Coffey Page B
Authors: Russ Coffey
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‘special’ effeminate boys at school. Apparently, they made him feel like a girl who would faint if they spoke to him. Nilsen says he would watch others and imagine things he would like to do. He was aroused when he saw another boy masturbate for the first time behind some sheds near the park.
Although the knowledge that he was attracted to boys made Nilsen feel ashamed, he was proud of the creativity he thinks is tied up with his sexuality. One evening in particular sticks in Nilsen’s memory. It exemplified the gap between his burgeoning identity as a ‘creative homosexual’ and the lack of imagination around him. He describes the family sitting down to watch television. Around him, he saw ‘kitschness’ in the decorations, low aspirations in the literature and repression in the religion. On the small black-and-white TV a modern ballet was being shown. When he saw the male dancers in their tights, Nilsen said he was excited. The feeling was cultural as well as sexual. His mother just shouted, ‘Getthis filth off!’ Hostility welled up in him. Why couldn’t she understand his world?
Nilsen cites the low cultural ambitions of 16 Baird Road as another example of how he felt his differences were rejected. He thinks it was damaging for him not to have had any of his talents and sensibilities nurtured. Later, he and Matthew Malekos discussed whether such low cultural aspirations in the house may have denied him ‘the building blocks of human need’. In his thesis, Malekos conjectures whether Nilsen’s claims of emotional impoverishment match existing theories of how psychopaths are created. He finds some evidence to suggest that they are.
Whether or not the atmosphere in 16 Baird Road really damaged Nilsen psychologically, he certainly resented it. It encouraged him to retreat further into his private world of the imagination. He says that he liked to feed this with movies, and this seems to have made him try to format his fantasies to make them more like films he had seen. Strichen was much too small to have a movie theatre, however every so often a projector would be set up in the town hall. Nilsen would go as often as he could.
Retreating to the world of make-believe, he found he could replace the world-as-it-was with the world-he- wanted-it -to-be. Up on the silver screen, he saw father figures in actors like James Stewart and Gary Cooper. With James Stewart, Nilsen felt a sexual as well as parental attraction. ‘Life looked better through the oblong frame of the movie screen,’ he writes. When on his own, he imagined he was in a movie, which he considered a great improvement on ‘the drab dullness of real life’. Only one person in his familyseemed to understand the power of the imagination like he did, and that was his Uncle Robert.
Aunt Lily’s husband, Robert Ritchie, was a design engineer by trade, but also a man of ideas and culture. His pride and joy was an expensive hi-fi system on which he would play Dennis the great symphonies. While the music was playing, he would regale the boy with tales of the left-wing struggle. These stories may have opened up the welcome possibility that Uncle Robert and his kind could be right and most of the world wrong. They may have been the primary reason that socialism later became so attractive to him.
Then, at the age of 14, despite the influence of Uncle Robert, Dennis did something that took everyone by surprise: he joined the Army Cadet Force. We hear that, despite being physically weak and disliking authority, he found firing guns and, more particularly, the other boys, thrilling. That last point is made at great length. Nilsen spends paragraph after paragraph detailing how thrilling he found seeing them in their PT kit.
But although much of what he says is merely sexual, Nilsen also seems to want readers of his book to join in his youthful enthusiasm for the Army. Nilsen knew that, as much as he would have liked to have been able to develop his artistic
Although the knowledge that he was attracted to boys made Nilsen feel ashamed, he was proud of the creativity he thinks is tied up with his sexuality. One evening in particular sticks in Nilsen’s memory. It exemplified the gap between his burgeoning identity as a ‘creative homosexual’ and the lack of imagination around him. He describes the family sitting down to watch television. Around him, he saw ‘kitschness’ in the decorations, low aspirations in the literature and repression in the religion. On the small black-and-white TV a modern ballet was being shown. When he saw the male dancers in their tights, Nilsen said he was excited. The feeling was cultural as well as sexual. His mother just shouted, ‘Getthis filth off!’ Hostility welled up in him. Why couldn’t she understand his world?
Nilsen cites the low cultural ambitions of 16 Baird Road as another example of how he felt his differences were rejected. He thinks it was damaging for him not to have had any of his talents and sensibilities nurtured. Later, he and Matthew Malekos discussed whether such low cultural aspirations in the house may have denied him ‘the building blocks of human need’. In his thesis, Malekos conjectures whether Nilsen’s claims of emotional impoverishment match existing theories of how psychopaths are created. He finds some evidence to suggest that they are.
Whether or not the atmosphere in 16 Baird Road really damaged Nilsen psychologically, he certainly resented it. It encouraged him to retreat further into his private world of the imagination. He says that he liked to feed this with movies, and this seems to have made him try to format his fantasies to make them more like films he had seen. Strichen was much too small to have a movie theatre, however every so often a projector would be set up in the town hall. Nilsen would go as often as he could.
Retreating to the world of make-believe, he found he could replace the world-as-it-was with the world-he- wanted-it -to-be. Up on the silver screen, he saw father figures in actors like James Stewart and Gary Cooper. With James Stewart, Nilsen felt a sexual as well as parental attraction. ‘Life looked better through the oblong frame of the movie screen,’ he writes. When on his own, he imagined he was in a movie, which he considered a great improvement on ‘the drab dullness of real life’. Only one person in his familyseemed to understand the power of the imagination like he did, and that was his Uncle Robert.
Aunt Lily’s husband, Robert Ritchie, was a design engineer by trade, but also a man of ideas and culture. His pride and joy was an expensive hi-fi system on which he would play Dennis the great symphonies. While the music was playing, he would regale the boy with tales of the left-wing struggle. These stories may have opened up the welcome possibility that Uncle Robert and his kind could be right and most of the world wrong. They may have been the primary reason that socialism later became so attractive to him.
Then, at the age of 14, despite the influence of Uncle Robert, Dennis did something that took everyone by surprise: he joined the Army Cadet Force. We hear that, despite being physically weak and disliking authority, he found firing guns and, more particularly, the other boys, thrilling. That last point is made at great length. Nilsen spends paragraph after paragraph detailing how thrilling he found seeing them in their PT kit.
But although much of what he says is merely sexual, Nilsen also seems to want readers of his book to join in his youthful enthusiasm for the Army. Nilsen knew that, as much as he would have liked to have been able to develop his artistic
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