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Serial murder is rare, awful and, for those who would write or make films about it, lucrative. This is understandable. The idea of unnatural death — the imagining of it — reminds people that they are fortunate, because they are not eviscerated by Jack’s knives or buried under Dennis Nilsen’s floorboards. It is a protective charm that allows people to lessen their fears by placing themselves within them. It’s not a pretty thing, but it is human: a visit to the funfair, to be terrorised and soothed.
This week ITV is airing Des, a three-part dramatised account of the capture of Dennis Nilsen after he killed at least 12 men in north London in the 1970s and 80s, first at Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood, and then in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. (The exact number of his victims is unknown, and only eight have been identified.) It stars David Tennant as a solitary and contemptuous Nilsen and it is based on Brian Masters’ singular book, Killing for Company, which was published in 1985 after Nilsen was convicted of murder. He lured men to his home, strangled them, and then kept them as trophies until they rotted, caressing them even then. He would then burn them (in Cricklewood), or dismember and flush them down the toilet (in Muswell Hill, and this led to his capture. He blocked the drains.) He said he did not want to be alone and he feared their leaving: hence the title Killing for Company.
True Crime is usually a murderer’s tale, with corpses in supporting roles. If we fear we enjoy true crime — and we do — it is essential to look not from the victim’s perspective, for that is shaming, but from that of the murderer. He is more interesting — anyone can be a victim — and we can feel superior to him.
This tendency was redressed last year in Hallie Rubenhold’s superb The Five, a social history and study of the five “canonical” — a grotesque phrase, implying it is not murder but myth — victims of Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold wrote a hinterland for Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane. The faceless prostitutes — in fact, only two were, and they were of course more besides — bloom into life The Five, and so Rubenhold could write of Annie Chapman: “What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what the drink had left behind.”
Brian Masters, for all his excellent intentions and his scholarship, could not be so humane. He was a biographer who wrote on Rabelais and Camus, but he wanted to write about Nilsen because Nilsen, like Masters, was gay: “It might require a homosexual sensitivity to unravel the sources of such derangement,” he wrote, rather primly, at the time. I sense more than social responsibility in Killing for Company, even if the tabloid coverage was homophobic, as Masters feared it would be. His subject was irresistible.
Nilsen, who died in 2018, was unusual even for a serial killer. He was a committed trade unionist; he was gay; he was a former policeman, who claims he left the Met because he would not arrest gay men for indecency; he was a gifted writer who was, according to Masters, “the first murderer to present an exhaustive archive measuring his own introspection”.
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SubscribeThere will always be interest in the extremes of human behaviour. And usually, the serial killer gains a lasting notoriety, while his victims are quickly forgotten. The performances in Des, by the way, are superb. David Tennant, Jason Watkins and especially Daniel Mays.