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ACAST.com Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Vyborg Thur. This is part six in my series on Dennis Andrew Nilsson, a.k.a.
The Kindly Killer. If you haven't listened to part one through five, please do so now. The saga of Dennis Nilsson is a long, dark, twisted road through a foggy forest with crooked and hooked trees scaring the way. I am nearing the end of the road, though, and I can glimpse something lighter in the distance.
Last episode ended with Dennis telling us how he killed a man eating an omelette in his apartment. Tonight, we'll go through his very last murder, as well as more details as to what Dennis did with the corpses piling up. This is episode 105. Do you wish to hear more from your humble host?
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It was a frigid London evening in January of the 26th, and the year was 1983. Your humble host was a toddler of barely two years, and was tumbling around on the floor in the family living room in Norway, many, many kilometers away. At the same time, a young man, just twenty years old, was hustling for drug money in the dingy alleyways of London's upscale West End. His name was Stephen Sinclair, and he was the last person to die at the hands of the kindly killer.
Everyone knew Stephen as a punk. He was a very disturbed young man who was in the habit of self-harm, usually by slashing his arms with sharp objects and knives. When he wasn't hurting himself that way, he was hurting himself by injecting any drug he could get his hands on. His favorite was amphetamine, colloquially known as speed.
But he also took cocaine, heroin, various sorts of pills, and of course, marijuana. He was last seen by his so-called mates on the streets of West End. Going off with a strange man, we know to be Dennis Nilsen. They didn't think much of it at the time, as they were sure he was simply selling sex to feed his drug habit.
As Dennis was walking with Stephen, he told him that he could follow him to the underground station. He also offered to buy Stephen McDonald's hamburger and a pair stopped along the way to buy hard liquor and beer. By then they had agreed to go back to Nilsen's place to drink, and perhaps something more. So they walked side by side onto the tube, which they took to Highgate Station.
From there they walked the last brief mile Stephen would ever walk in his life to Crandley Gardens, and arrived at Dennis Nilsen's flat around 9 p.m. During the evening they drank a lot of alcohol and listened to music. At one point, Stephen disappeared into the bathroom, and Dennis assumed it was to inject drugs. What follows is a detailed account of how Dennis Nilsen murdered Stephen.
He, as always, says it best himself. I quote. I'm sitting cross-legged on the carpet, drinking and listening to music. It finished with the theme from Harry's Game.
I drain my glass and take the phones off. Behind me sits Stephen Sinclair on the lazy chair. He was crashed out with drinking drugs. I sit and look at him.
I stand up and approach him. My heart is pounding. I kneel down in front of him. I touch his leg and say, Are you awake?
There is no response. Oh, Stephen, I think. Here I go again. I get up and go slowly and casually through the kitchen.
I take some thick string from the drawer and put it on the stainless steel draining board. Not long enough, I think. I go to the cupboard in the front room and search inside. On the floor therein, I find an old tie.
I cut off a bit and throw the rest away. I go back into the kitchen and make up the ligature. I look into the back room and Stephen has not stirred. Bleep comes in and I speak to her and scratch her head.
Leave me just now, Bleep. Get your head down. Everything's all right. She wags her tail and slinks into the front room.
Her favorite place is on one of the armchairs in there, where she curves up. Looking back, I think she knew what was going to happen. Even she became assigned to it. If there was a violent struggle, she would always become excited and start barking.
I was relaxed. I never contemplated morality. This was something which I had to do. I knotted the string because I had heard somewhere that this was what the third guy did in India for a quicker kill.
I walked back into the room. I draped the ligature over one of his knees and poured myself another drink. My heart was pounding very fast. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Stephen.
I thought to myself, All that potential, all that beauty, and all that pain that is his life. I have to stop him. It will soon be over. He was wearing his white running shoes, very tight rain pie black jeans, a thick jersey, leather jacket, and blue and white football scarf.
I did not feel bad. I did not feel evil. I walked over to him. I removed the scarf, picked up one of his wrists, and let go.
His limp arm flopped back onto his lap. I opened one of his eyes, and there was no reflex. He was deeply unconscious. I took the ligature and put it around his neck.
I knelt by the side of the chair and faced the wall. I took each loose end of the ligature and pulled it tight. He stopped breathing. His hands slowly reached for his neck as I held my grip.
His legs stretched out in front of him. There was a very feeble struggle. Then his arms fell limp down in front of him. I held him there for a couple of minutes.
He was limp and stayed that way. I released my hold and removed the string and tie. He had stopped breathing. I spoke to him.
Stephen, that didn't hurt at all. Nothing can touch you now. I ran my fingers through his bleach-ballon hair. His face looked peaceful.
He was dead. The front of his jeans was wet with urine. I wondered if he had defecated as well. I got up and had a drink and a cigarette.
He had made no noise. I had to wash his soiled body. I ran a bath. I kept the water in its hand warm and poured in some lemon washing up liquid.
I returned and began to undress him. I took off his leather jacket, jersey, and t-shirt. Lenny's running shoes and socks. I had difficulty with his tight wet jeans.
He still sat there now, naked, in the armchair. He had only urinated. He obviously had not had a square meal in a couple of days. I had not really known that his hair had been bleached until I'd stripped him.
I discovered that he had ginger pubic hair. Otherwise his body was pale and hairless. He had crepe bandages on both forearms. I removed these to reveal deep, still open, recent razor cuts.
He had very recently tried to commit suicide. His heart was stopped. He was very dead. I picked up his limp body into my arms and carried it into the bathroom.
I put it into the half-filled bath. I washed the body. Putting my hands under his arms, I turned him over and washed the back of his body. I pulled him out.
He was very slippery with all that soap. I sat him on the loo and toweled the body and his hair as best as I could. I threw him over my shoulder and took him into the back room. I sat him on the white and blue dining chair.
I sat down, took a cigarette and the drink and looked at him. His head hung back, with his mouth slightly open. His eyes were not quite closed. Stephen, I thought.
You're another problem for me. What am I going to do with you? I've run out of room. I dismissed the future problem from my mind.
I would cross that hurdle when I came to it. I laid him on top of the double bed. It must have been well into the next morning of 27 January. I lay beside him and placed a large mirror at the end of the bed.
I slipped my own tie-shirt and gray cords off and lay there, staring at both our naked bodies in the mirror. He looked paler than I did. Being ginger-haired, he would anyway. I put talcum powder on myself and lay down again.
We looked similar now. I spoke to him, as if he were still alive. I was telling him how lucky he was to be out of it all. I thought how beautiful he looked and how beautiful I looked.
He looked sexy, but I had no erection. He just looked fabulous. I just stared at us both in the mirror. Soon I felt tired.
I got in between the sheets, as I was starting to become cold. He still lay there beside me, on top of the bedclothes. I knew he would become cold very soon, and I did not want to feel his coldness actually in bed with me. The coldness, of course, has nothing in bearing in it.
Believe came into the room and jumped up on the bed beside me. Come on, old girl, get your head down. Stephen is all right now. He's okay.
She settled down at the end of the bed, stopping only to Smith once near Stephen's leg. She knew that a warm, friendly Stephen was no more, and ignored his body completely. I turned his head towards me and kissed him on the forehead. Good night, Stephen, I said, switched off the bedside lights and went to sleep.
I was up a few hours later. It was an ordinary day of work for me. I had, Stephen was cold. I carried him into the front room and laid him on the floor under a blanket.
I straightened him, as I knew that rigor mortis would set in soon. End quote. In previous episodes, I have briefly mentioned how Dennis would cut up his victims in his old flat and burn their remains in his back garden. In his old flat, he also had space under his floorboards where he stored several corpses before disposing of them in his backyard bonfire.
However, I did not give much detail as to how Dennis went about disposing of the corpses. I will do so in this episode. Having corpses in his flat never bothered Dennis. It actually gave him a sense of company, and he rather enjoyed it.
He only disposed of the corpses when they became so putrid that neighbors might notice. The apartment might be permanently damaged from the rotting flesh and fluids, and or he simply ran out of room. It took seven and a half a month before he removed his first victim at 195 Melrose Avenue and dragged it out in his backyard. There he burned the body whole, without first cutting it up.
His next two victims he laid out on his kitchen floor and dissected them into several parts using a meat knife. Then he placed the value's body parts into value's bags and stuffed two suitcases with those bags. Then he put the suitcases in his garden shed, which had originally been constructed for his dog, Leap. By the end of 1980, Nielsen had six corpses on his hands, some in pieces in the garden shed and some under the floor.
These he chose to dissect and burn. Again, he describes the process best himself. I quote I prized up the floorboards. I uncovered the body and took it by the ankles.
I pulled it through the gap in the floor and along the floor into the kitchen onto a piece of plastic sheeting. There were other bodies and parts of bodies under the floor. I get ready a small bowl of water, a kitchen knife, some paper tissues, and plastic bags. I had had to have a couple of drinks before I could start.
I removed the vest and undershorts from the body. With the knife, I cut the head from the body. There was very little blood. I put a head in the kitchen sink, washed it, and put it in a carrier bag.
Then I cut off the hands, then the feet. I washed them in the sink and dried them. I wrapped each one in paper toweling and put them in plastic carrier bags. I made a cut from the body's navel to the breast bone.
I removed all the intestines, stomach, kidneys, and liver. I would break through the diaphragm and remove the heart and lungs. I put all these organs into a plastic carrier bag. I then separated the top half of the body from the bottom half.
I removed the arms and then the legs below the knee. I put the parts in large black carrier bags. I put the chest and ribcage in a large bag and thigh slash buttock slash private parts, the latter of which was in one piece, in another. I stored the packages back under the floorboards.
I would leave the bag with the enterhills slash organs out. I uncovered the next body which had been there longer. I pulled it out by the ankles on the kitchen floor. There were maggots on the surface of the body.
I poured salt on these and brushed them off. The body was a bit discolored. I was violently sick. I drank a few more glasses of spirits and finished the job as with the other.
Got a bit drunk that afternoon. The French windows were open and I had to go out every so often. I was naked to save soiling my clothes. After I replaced the packages under the floor, I had a bath.
To carry out these dissections, I only used a kitchen knife, no saws, or power cutting tools. Afterwards, I would listen to music on the headphones and get really drunk, and perhaps take the dog out to Gladstone Park. The messiest part of the dissection, I do not have a direct quote from Nielsen on, but it concerned the removal of the internal organs. This job involved liquids, and a smell worse than anything anyone could imagine.
It was the smell of rotting flesh, feces, and maggots. It was the smell of death. The disposal of this was easy at his first apartment at 195 Melrose. Here he could simply put the innards in the gap between the double fencing at the side of his garden.
Within a day or two, they would be completely gone, having been devoured by insects. and small animals. However, in his new place at Cranley Gardens, he did not have a garden, nor a garden shed, nor a handy double fence, or space under his floorboards. There was no place he could build a bonfire.
As such, the methods used to dispose of bodies there was even more repugnant than at 195 Melrose. The first victim, at Cranley Gardens, he placed in a wardrobe for a few days while he pondered what to do. He decided the safest course would be to dissect a body into very small pieces and flush it down the lavatory. He carried the body into the bathroom and carried out the dissection in the bath itself.
First he opened the stomach area and concentrated on the organs, chopping them on a cutting board into small two-inch pieces and putting them down the lavatory in loads of about half a pound in weight each time. At this rate it threatened to be a long and laborious business, so he began cutting off large pieces, which he boiled on the kitchen stove to make them disintegrate. The boiling could continue while he dealt with further dissection. The head was boiled in the large cooking pot, followed by hands and feet, and the ribs, cut from the body one by one.
Once boiled free of flesh, the bones were separated into smaller fragments and simply thrown in a dustbin, to be removed in the normal way by council's refuse collectors. Meanwhile, flesh, hair and organs were sent down into the sewage. Nielsen was then left with some large bones which still had some flesh attached. The shoulder blades he hurled over the common back garden fence into a waste ground.
While the skull, arm bones, leg bones and pelvis he placed in several bags, sprinkled with a large amount of salt, in the tea chest in the corner of the room. He packed the tea chest with material and covered it with the red curtain he had salvaged from Melrose Avenue. There it remained until police removed the tea chest and its contents eleven months later. The two other victims at Cranley Gardens were butchered in a very similar fashion.
Stephen Sinclair was in the process of being cut up and dissected when Nielsen was arrested on the 9th of February, 1983. Dismemberment had not proceeded very far and police were able to assemble the parts so that he could get a proper burial. And so ends part six in the saga of Dennis Nielsen. Next week I will bring you episode 106 and part seven in this ongoing expose of a true serial killer superstar.
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