CROWN V COLONY — The Man Who Killed for Company: How Dennis Nilsen Murdered Lonely Men Until the Drains Gave Him Up

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, It's Wednesday, July first, and this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is day three of Crown Versus Colony, our Independence Day week, putting the United Kingdom's worst on the stand. Yesterday we were in a house of horrors with two killers and a buried graveyard. Today there's only one man, and at first glance, he is the least frightening person you could imagine. A quiet, tidy, soft spoken civil servant who went to work in an office, paid his taxes, fed his dog, and spoke up for workers' rights at his union meetings. And in his spare time in a small flat in North London, he murdered young men, one after another for years and nobody came. That's the part of this one that has always chilled me, not the blood, the silence. In early Febus of nineteen eighty three, the tenants of a house at twenty three Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, North London, had a very ordinary complaint. The drains were blocked, the toilets wouldn't flush properly, and there was a smell. So the landlord did what anyone would do.

1:16 He called a drain company, Dino Rod, and on the evening of February the eighth, an engineer named Michael Catrin came out and lifted a manhole cover at the side of the house. What he found down there was a gray, fleshy sludge packed with small bones. He didn't have the science to be certain, but he had a gut feeling, and his gut said that material was human. He was right. The next morning the police came and up in the attic flat at the top of that house lived a thirty seven year old civil servant named Dennis Nielsen, who, when the officers confronted him, calmly told them there was more in a wardrobe and that he'd explain everything at the station. In the police car on the way there, a detective asked him whether the remains belonged to one person or two. Nielsen looked out the window and answered fifteen or sixteen. He said, since nineteen seventy eight, this is his story, but more than that, it's the story of the men He counted off like that in a car window as a number. The Quietest Monster. Dennis Nilsen was Scottish born in a fishing town up in the northeast of Scotland. He served in the Army for over a decade, cooked in the catering corps, learned, among other things, how to butcher meat. After the Army, he had a brief stint as a police officer, and then he settled into the most ordinary job imaginable. He became a civil servant in a London job center, the office where unemployed people go to look for work. He was, by every account,

2:48 good at it. He cared about the underdog. He was an active trade unionist who would stand up in meetings and argue for the rights of the lowest paid workers. And I want you to sit with that contradiction, because it's the whole horror of this case. By day, he was the man at the desk, helping societies overlooked find a foothold. By night, those same overlooked people, the unemployed, the homeless, the drifting young men with nobody checking on them were exactly who he hunted. He saw who the world wasn't watching better than almost anyone, because watching them was literally his job, and he turned that knowledge into a weapon. He lived alone. He was profoundly, achingly lonely, the kind of lonely that most people just survive. Nielsen did not just survive it. He let it curdle into something monstrous. And that brings us to the question everyone asked about him. Why why kill men? He had no grudge against men, He'd often only just met in a pub an hour before company. His own answer, as much as he ever gave one, was almost too sad and too sick to repeat. He killed them, he said, so they wouldn't. He would meet a young man, often someone with nowhere to sleep, and offer him food, warmth, a bed, a bit of human kindness, and then, at some point in the night, gripped by the terror of being alone again in the morning, he would strangle him. He wanted the company, he wanted someone who would stay, so he made them stay in the most final way a person can.

4:22 When detectives later asked him his motive, he told them he was hoping they would tell him because he didn't fully understand it himself. He insisted he never decided to kill until the moment was already on him. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't put a lot of stock in a serial killer's poetry about his own loneliness. And I'm not going to sit here and treat the murder of more than a dozen people as some tragic love of solitude gone wrong. A lonely man doesn't kill anybody. Millions of people are desperately lonely tonight, and not one of them is a danger to a soul. The loneliness explains nothing. Strangling a guest who trusted you. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. He made it again and again and again at his first flat on Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood. He kept the bodies for months, hidden under the floorboards of the place he ate and slept, and then disposed of them on bonfires in the back garden.

5:17 Neighbors saw the fires, neighbors smelled them. Nobody said a word. He burned the evidence of multiple murders in open air in a London suburb, and the world simply looked the other way. Their names. He confessed to killing fifteen, maybe sixteen young men. He was only ever convicted of six. And here's a fact that tells you everything. Several of his victims have never been identified, not then, not now. More than forty years later, men were murdered and the world could not even produce a name to bury. So let me give you the ones we do have, because they are owed at least that much. Stephen Holmes, just fourteen years old, a schoolboy. He was Nilsen's very first victim at the end of nineteen seventy eight. And here's the gut punch. He wasn't even one of the six murders Nilsen was convicted of because at the time of the trial nobody knew who he was, a fourteen year old boy, and it took decades just to put a name to him. Kenneth Aukenden twenty three years old, a Canadian student on a trip of a lifetime who made the mistake of accepting a friendly locals invitation back for a drink. Martin Duffy sixteen years old. Billy Sutherland twenty seven years old, a young father who'd come to London looking for work. Malcolm Barlow twenty three years old, homeless, a man Nilsen had actually once helped by calling him an ambulance and who came back the next day to say thank you, and was murdered for it. John Howett twenty three years old, Graham Allen twenty seven years old,

6:49 and Steven Sinclair twenty years old, a troubled young Scott, the last one, the one whose remains were in that wardrobe. And then there are the men with no names at all. Nielsen could only describe some of them, a young Scott, an English skinhead, a boy from Belfast. Human beings, somebody's sons who walked into that flat and never walked out, and who are to this day just a sentence in a killer's confession. Somewhere out there are families who never got an answer, who maybe still wonder forty years on whatever happened to him. That's the cruelty underneath the cruelty nobody was looking. So how does a man burn bodies in his garden and stuff a wardrobe with remains and get away with it for five entire years in a major city with a steady office job. The answer is the ugliest thing about this whole case, and it is the reason I wanted it in this week. He chose his victims precisely, homeless men, drifters, runaways, sex workers, and gay men in an era when being gay in Britain was still treated by much of society, and frankly by the police as something shameful and suspect. Those men went missing.

8:01 Often no report was filed because there was no one to file it, and when there was a report, it went into a drawer because a missing drifter with no fixed address was nobody's priority. The killer understood that the men he picked were men the system had already decided not to look for. Nobody was looking for them. He banked on it. But here is the part that should keep you up at night, because it's worse than nobody looking. Some people did fight back, and they were not believed. Nielsen attacked more men than he killed, and some of them got out alive. A man named Douglas Stewart woke to find Nielsen strangling him, fought him off, and escaped. He went to the police, nothing happened. A young student named Paul Nobe survived a night that left strangulation marks on his throat. A young man named Karl Stautor was throttled and held under the water in Nilsen's bath, left for dead, and somehow lived. These men survived a serial killer and lived to tell it, and the home of phobia of the time meant their warnings went nowhere. Some were too afraid to even come forward because they expected contempt instead of help. So the killer kept his job, kept his flat, and kept killing. The alarm was raised, nobody answered it when we come back. The move to a flat with no garden and no floorboards forced this killer into the one mistake that finally caught him, and the men he'd left for dead got to walk into a courtroom and look him in the eye. Stay with me,

9:38 Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. In nineteen eighty one, Nilsen had to move out of the house on Melrose Avenue and he took that attic flat at Cranleigh Gardens, and that move is what undid him. The new place had no garden for bonfires and no easy floorboards to hide a body under. So to dispose of the three men he killed there, he resorted to the the method that became this case's grim signature. He dismembered them and tried to flush the remains away. The drains of an old London house were never built for that. They clogged. The smell rose. A tenant called a plumber, and the whole thing came up out of the ground. Nielsen confessed almost eagerly over more than thirty hours of interviews. He went on trial at the Old Bailey in October nineteen eighty three. His defense didn't dispute that he'd killed. It argued diminished responsibility, that he was so mentally abnormal he was guilty only of manslaughter, not murder. And the most powerful answer to that argument came from the witness box, from the survivors Douglas Stewart, Paul Nobs, Karl Stodter, the men the system hadn't believed finally stood up in a courtroom and were believed by a jury, to devastating effect.

10:53 On the fourth of November nineteen eighty three, Dennis Nilsen was convicted of six counts of murder and two of attempted murder. He was sentenced to life, and it was later made a whole life order. He would never come out. He died in prison in twenty eighteen at the age of seventy two, of natural causes. He never gave a satisfying reason. He never could, and accountability, as I always tell you, doesn't have a legal department. The fullest justice in this case didn't come from his confession or his death. It came from three men he tried to kill, sitting in a witness box alive, being listened to it last. The men who were never supposed to be heard were the ones who helped put him away for good. So tonight say the ones we can Stephen Holmes fourteen years old, Kenneth Aukinden, Martin Duffy, Billy Sutherland, Malcolm Barlowe, John Howllett, Graham, Allen, Steven Sinclair, and the ones we can't name, the young Scott, the Skinhead, the boy from Belfast, and the others who are still just a number in a killer's mouth. They were lonely too. The difference is they never heard anybody for it. If somebody has to say they were here, a few honest notes. Dennis Nielsen confessed to killing roughly fifteen or sixteen young men, but he was convicted by a jury of six murders and two attempted murders. The larger figure comes mainly from his own statements and the

12:24 physical remains, and the precise total has never been definitively established. Several of his victims were never identified and remained nameless to this day, and some dates and exact ages vary across sources. At trial, Nielsen pleaded not guilty to murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The jury rejected that defense and convicted him of murder, and that conviction is what we report as fact. The survivors named here gave evidence at his trial. Nielsen died in prison in twenty eighteen. We've named what we're confident of and flagged we're not. That's Crown versus Colony day three. Tomorrow, the story changes shape completely. We moved from a man who killed and was caught to a boy who killed nobody at all and was hanged for it. Anyway, A nineteen year old who never pulled the trigger, executed for a murder his friend committed on the strength of five words he may never have said, Derek Bentley and one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in British history. Tomorrow on Daily Crime and Justice. If this one stayed with you, do me a favor and share it. Tell someone we're doing the UK's worst all week and send them this episode. Word of mouth is honestly how this show grows and it costs you nothing. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment down below. Tonight tell me this Do you think anyone should have caught Dennis Nilsen sooner? And who I read them? Wherever else you're listening on YouTube or

13:55 anywhere else, A rating helps a lot. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been Daily Crime and Justice. A quiet man, a quiet flat, and a room full of young men nobody went looking for. We said the names. We could do better.