North London
When residents of a block of flats in North London complained that their toilets would not flush properly, they couldn’t have known that their complaints would lead to the capture of a major serial killer.
When a Dyno-Rod engineer came to check the flats, he found the sewer pipe was blocked by a white and red sludge, that included lumps of rotting flesh with hair attached.
The police were called and came the next day, and although most of the lumps of flesh had disappeared, there were still fragments of flesh, bone and hair. The officers canvassed the residents of the flats, including 37-year-old Dennis Nilsen. As they spoke to him and asked him if you knew anything about meat being dumped in the sewer, one officer became suspicious and so asked Nilsen, “Don’t mess around, where’s the rest of the body?”
Nilsen confessed straight away – the rest of the body was in two plastic bags in his flat.
Nilsen was arrested immediately. On his way to the police station, he admitted he had actually killed 15 or 16 men at his flat and his previous one. Nilsen was gay, and had picked men up at various places in Soho, offering them food for sex. He then killed and dismembered the men.
Police searching his Cranley Gardens flat and his previous flat in Cricklewood found remains from various bodies at both addresses.
At trial, Nilsen’s lawyer did not put forward an insanity please, but argued that his mind was so disturbed that he killed instinctively, not deliberately. In the end, the jury agreed by 10 to 2 that he was sane and so guilty of the 6 murders he was charged with. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Nilsen co-operated with author Brian Masters on the famous biography, Killing for Company, and died in 2018 in custody.