Transcript of Dennis Nilsen: The Kindly Killer (Part 3)

Hey, weirdos.

I'm Ash. And I'm Elaina.

And this is Morbid.

This is morbid. This is Morbid.

This is Morbid, and we're coming off the Super Bowl. We are, which we lost- Bummer that our team lost. Legendarily. I was so worried because for so much of that game, here's the thing, I really thought I was out of it because my husband doesn't care about sports. This man looks at me. I didn't even get to tell Debbie that she's sitting on the couch looking at me. This man tells me, let's just watch for the commercials.

Oh, no, that's the beginning. I said, okay. Oh, no.

Welcome. And then he said, there's really nothing else on. I was like, I could think of so many things. There's so many things on. All right. I was like, okay. But I was so worried. We were at zero points for so much of it that I was like, are we going to lose this Super Bowl with zero points? We almost did. And that has never happened in history. So I was like, that would be horrible. And we had gone to the Celtics game earlier, which was also Love Our Sees, Love Our Sees, real bad game. Yeah, they didn't do great. I was like, it's not a banner day for Boston sports.

No, I said that to John, and he didn't think it was as funny as I did because I was like, whoa, Boston sports really shit the band today. He was like, Yeah.

I was like, Sorry. They did.

But he said that halfway through it, he said, This has to be the worst outing for a team in Super Bowl history. Yeah.

Yeah.

And he wasn't pleased.

The score was just crazy. You know what? We won't harp on it because- Yeah.

I mean- Sports. Because sports. But what we will talk about is how fucking awesome that Super Bowl halftime show was.

The halftime show was incredible. I just found out that the Bush were people.

Yeah. And when she first said that, she said that out loud to me, and I paused. I had to- I saw it.

I looked coagulating all over your brain.

I was that meme with the lady with all the equations over her I'm looking out because I thought she meant the Bush family. The Bush family. The Bush family. And she was like, The Bushes are people. And I was like, Was that a question? Did I miss a whole chapter in this nonsense that is what is the world right now? Were they not people?

They very much are people.

I was very confused. And then you said the Bushes and the Half-Time show.

The Bushes in the Half-Time show were people. And then I saw them leaving, and I was like, That's incredible.

That's really cool.

A couple got married.

It was beautiful. It was gorgeous. The whole thing was beautiful. Bad Bunny is beautiful.

Bad Bunny is beautiful. Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga, forever. My entire TikTok now is Bad Bunny. I saw a family who was watching the Super Bowl, and they were fans of Big Bunny, and I literally cried at this family because they were just so excited, and they were actually finally represented on a main stage. I started crying. Oh, I love that.

It was beautiful. I think it was the most watched Super Bowl halftime show. Was it? I believe it's up there, at least. At the very least. It was big. I should make sure. But I know it's got a distinction.

It squashed that other one. It did.

It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. But yeah, it was really cool to see. I thought that was a really cool halftime show. It was incredible. The End. The message was beautiful.

I loved The End.

The only thing stronger than hate is love because we should all believe that. Yes.

And togetherness. And together we are America.

It was unity. Together we're America. It was unity. It was all positivity. If you happen to find something offensive about it, I I can't really help you there because it was all pretty fucking positive.

Also, Bad Bunny.

He's a handsome man. Benito. Benito. He is very handsome. But yeah, it was great. It was awesome. And I really liked it. And did you see that creature, Megan Kelly, being such a racist bitch about it?

Unfortunately, I did.

It made me spin out.

When she went into being like, Let Latinos. I was like, You're disgusting.

It was just gross. It came across my feed and I was like, I think she mentioned that the halftime show is supposed to be all-American, which- Meatloaf, she said. Read a goddamn book. I fucking beg of you. And two, she wanted meatloaf there? I don't know where that went. She said- Not the singer. The food.

Yeah, that person's dead. She said meatloaf, fried chicken- And apple pie. And an apple pie. I said none of those things were on my table, ma'am.

It's also never What halftime show has had meatloof apple pie and fried chicken as part of it?

I don't know. But we do not condone Megyn Kelly at all. No. We think she's- In any way. Vile, racist, disgusting. Our opinions do not align with hers at all.

No, they don't.

We just wanted to say that.

But you know what? Have the day you deserve, I guess.

Bad Bunny forever.

Bad Bunny forever.

Bad Bunny goes hard. I'm going to learn Spanish just so I can jam to those songs.

I should know Spanish. I took it in high school, but I did not do well, so maybe I should relearn it.

I I know a tiny, tiny bit of Spanish, like when he says bailar.

Oh, you had a good... Prononciation. I almost said personification.

My Spanish teacher used to tell me that I had a really good prononciation But I don't. I just I never got verbs and tenses in that whole thing. It's hard.

You know, but you know what? Let's learn it.

Babble.

Babble.

Babble. Come on the show. Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone. We'll learn it. And then we'll know exactly what Bad Bunny is saying. And we can jam even Hell, yeah. What's the one? He's saying, I should have gave you more kisses and hugs when I still had you. And it makes me cry and dance at the same time.

Also, when Ash did that, she danced while she did it.

I salsed in place. She did.

She salsed in her couch.

Listen. I love it. Listen. There's white people, and then there's white people.

It's speaking of wildness. America's Next Top Model.

Get ready for our bonus episode. This one we're both wicked excited for. We are going to be covering, if you guys haven't seen it on Netflix, there's going to be a new documentary about America's Next Top Model. Like the Rise and Fall.

I have been waiting for this my entire life.

I was actually so upset. I went to watch something on Netflix the other day and it was huge. I was like, oh my God, it's already on. I went to watch it. No, I believe it's February 16th. We'll be covering it in our bonus episode.

It's on Netflix. We're going to talk about it.

That'll be out February 27th. The bonus episode, yeah. Might I suggest, too, because I am actually wanting to read this. Mr. J wrote a book. Oh, really? All about it. Yeah. Oh, shit. The Wig, the Bitch, and the Meld down. And then the little tagline is the Devil also wears fake shoes.

That's amazing. Or cheap shoes. I want to watch that.

Yeah, I would order that book for sure because I want to read that.

Yeah, I'm going to read the book. I'm going to watch the documentary. We'll be talking all about it. Because I've been actually watching old episodes of America's Next Stop Model, and that shit will change you watching that. So many misunderstood gals, I feel like, throughout there. Jade.

The Undiscovered Supermodel. The Undiscovered Supermodel.

I always thought she was misunderstood, though. Her and Camille.

I don't remember Camille.

She's from an earlier season. If you look, there were times when she had moments, but I thought they were really hard on her confidence. She was just a confident That's a bad bitch.

Well, the part of that show was that they always bothered me. They didn't want you to be confident.

No. Everyone always thought she was mean, and I was like, no, I think she's just like...

It's funny, too, because I think you and I were watching one recently where it was... Is it Melrose and Kerry D? Yeah. The final two. I thought Melrose was pretty misunderstood, too. I thought she was, too. I remember watching it when I was little and being like, Melrose is such a bitch. And then I watched as an adult and I was like, Melrose is just funny, and I think they don't get it.

I think when you get older, you just watch it and you're like, Wow, everybody's so fucking up in there. You have their panties in a wad over the smallest things. It's like, I don't know.

It's funny. They were so mean to those girls. Do you remember Molly? Who's, famously, they gave her that crazy... Oh, yeah. Basically, they gave her a weave, but it pulled her hair out because her hair wasn't strong enough for it. She's on Southern Charm now.

Oh, I did hear that.

She is so fucking funny.

I love that. She's hilarious. So here we go. We'll start talking about all that stuff.

Oh, she found her. She found the weave. She still has it. She found the weave. She smelled it on live camera. Eew. Yeah.

Let's save that for the bonus episode. Yeah, let's talk about it. That stuff. Yeah. But yeah, so stay tuned for that. We'll be talking about all the craziness behind that.

Yeah, I think that's all we have.

And yeah, I think that's all the business. Go buy the Butcher Legacy. I was going to say. Butcherlegacy. Com. You can get it anywhere you want.

More signed additions.

I added more signed additions at Barnes & Noble. You can order online. You can get them, order them in the store, whatever you want to do. Barnes & Noble, signed additions. Been signing them. There's a box in front of me that I am currently signing. Oh, also, Mikey added in Tokara and Eva, who are also misunderstood, and I fully agree.

I love them. Oh, fuck. Yes. Eva was famously on the Real House Vibes of Atlanta. Yeah.

But again, we'll talk about it then. Yeah. Other girls who are misunderstood. But yeah. So go get the book, go pre-order it, sign copies if you want. Yeah. All kinds of copies. Go do it. So, yeah, we got to get back into into Dennis here, unfortunately.

But you know what? We're finishing today.

Yeah, exactly. We're going to finish today. He's going to get what's coming to him. Good. But man, he's going to get... He's going to keep going down this weird path.

You said he killed more people.

Yeah, he wasn't done. So when we last talked to you in part two, he was starting to flush pieces of people down the toilet.

Yeah.

Which Which is weird in every way. It could be weird. And it's also very like, what were you thinking?

I think at this point, he was not thinking anymore.

Yeah, I don't think he's thinking very straight here.

I think he's just losing it.

He's just trying to get out of it. In May 1982, his trend of very erratic behavior and increasing the risks he was taking, he didn't seem to be thinking things through very well. It continued. He met one year old Carl Stotter at a local pub and invited him back to his apartment. Like so many of his previous victims, Carl was very vulnerable at the time. He had just been dumped and was experiencing a lot of depression as a result. Back at the apartment, the two of them started drinking. And this this seems to happen a lot at his apartment. He passed out. He passed out.

Because he was definitely drugging people.

He had to have been because all of them are passing out. And he passed out on an open sleeping bag on the floor.

Yeah.

Yeah. And he later, he survived. Oh. Because he later told the court, I woke up feeling something around my neck. My head was hurting and I couldn't breathe properly. And I wondered what it was. Oh, God. So he could hear Dennis' voice. And this is so scary. When he woke up, he was out of it. Sure. Could have breathed, was panicking a little. And he said he could just hear Dennis's voice almost in a whisper saying, Stay still, stay still Over and over. As he fumbled with the zipper on the sleeping bag, and it occurred to him, he might have gotten tangled in the cord on the sleeping bag. And maybe Dennis is trying to help him out of it. Because he wasn't saying it like... He was saying it very like, Like nice calm. You know what I mean? So he passed out again a few moments later. When he came to, he was cold and could hear the sound of water.

He woke up in the bathtub.

He said, I knew I was in the water, and he was trying to drown me. He kept pushing me under the water. The third time I came up and I said, no more, please, no more. And he pushed me under again. So he's like begging him to stop.

And that just makes you wonder what everybody else said, too.

And then he didn't listen to any of them. Right. So Some amount of time passed. He's not sure how much when Carl woke up again. Holy shit. And he said, when he woke up, he was laying on Dennis's couch. And Dennis's dog Bleep, remember Bleep?

He's had Bleep there the whole time.

He's had Bleep there the whole time. And Bleep is licking Carl's face.

Poor Bleep is probably so stressed out. Yeah.

And Carl was very weak but was able to stand. And when he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw that he had a deep red mark around his neck and several blood vessels in his eyes had burst. Oh, God. Yeah. According to Dennis, Carl had become tangled in the sleeping bag and the cord wrapped around his neck, causing him to choke.

Yeah, for sure.

I was like, what was he doing thrashing around in there like a toddler? Yeah, no. And he had brought him in the bath, he said, as an effort to resuscitate him. And since then, Dennis said he'd been trying to keep him warm with blankets and with heat from his own body. Eew. No, thank you. Yeah. It was only later during the trial that Carl learned that Dennis had, in fact, thought he'd killed him in the bathtub, and he'd taken him out to the living room and positioned him on the couch to dry his body just as he done the other victims. Oh, my God. So he thought he was posing a dead body there. Yeah.

Which also tells you how fucking faint his pulse must have been.

Yeah, exactly. Wow. It was while he was drying him that he realized Carl was still alive. So he started rubbing his limbs and wrapping him in blankets to keep him warm. It's very unclear why Dennis chose not to kill Carl in that moment. Yeah. And I don't know if it's because he didn't think he could finish it. He was worried he was going to be able to say he tried to kill me. Right. This would be the end of him.

So it's like, oh, no, I'm just trying to save you. Yeah.

He's got to use this story to be like, well, I was trying to help you. Right. But it's like, no, as you him out of the water, he said, Please stop no more. And you pushed him back down. Obviously, you didn't think he was dead. Two months later, in June, Dennis met 27-year-old Graham Allen while Graham was hailing a cab on the street. Some of the other murders, the details of this one are a little hazy, and Dennis is a bullshitter. Yeah, of course. He claims not to remember a lot of the specifics of this. He did say, and this really breaks my heart. He says, The thing that Graham wanted more than anything else was something to eat. So he said he made him a big omelet. But after that, all of a sudden, he can't really remember exactly how this happened.

He just remembers the one nice thing he did.

It becomes a mix of reality and fantasy here because he says, I noticed he was sitting there and suddenly he appeared to be asleep or unconscious. Oh, that's crazy. I thought he must have been choking on it, but I didn't hear him choking. He was indeed deeply unconscious.

That's nuts how he just got unconscious.

Dennis claims he doesn't quite remember what happened next, only that he must have strangled Graham Allen. He said, I bent forward and I think I strangled him. I can't remember at this moment what I used. I remember going forward and I remember he was dead. If the omelet killed him, I don't know. But anyway, in going forward, I intended to kill him. An omelet doesn't leave red marks on a neck. I suppose it must have been me. Wow. That's how flippant he is about this.

And to try to make it funny.

Like an omelet doesn't leave red marks on this. So I guess it was Go fuck yourself.

Yeah, get a fucking group, dude. You piece of shit. Also, he probably drugged the omelet.

Yeah, that's what I think. Now, Dennis kept Graham Allen's body in the bathtub for three days before Decomposition made it impossible. He dismembered Graham Allen's remains and disposed of them as he had John Howell's body, hiding the larger body parts in various spaces around his apartment and flushing the smaller bones, organs, and flesh down the toilet. More than six months would pass before he would commit his next and final murder. Okay. Now, on the night of January 26, 1983, Dennis met 20-year-old Stephen Sinclair, and he invited him back to his apartment. Sinclair had spent a lot of his time on the streets. He was a bit of a rogue, Most of his life had a lot going on. Given that he had spent a lot of his young life on the streets and didn't have a fixed address, didn't have a job, it's easy to see how someone like Dennis could have lured him back to his apartment just with the promise of food, money, Yeah. Anything else. A place to stay. That night, Steven's friends recalled seeing him walking towards the train station with, a strange man who they later identified as Dennis Nilsson.

But they had assumed at the time that he was tricking for money. Sure. That's a quote. And didn't want to disturb him. Yeah, understandable. Months later, Dennis confessed that he had gone with Sinclair to McDonald's nearby where he bought him a hamburger. Then they went back by train to Muswell Hill and walked to Dennis's apartment. Once there, they had a few drinks, and they listened to the Who's Tommy on stereo until a little past 9: 00 PM. At one point, Sinclair excused himself and went to the bathroom, and Dennis said that he assumed he was injecting drugs, which I was like, I think you're just covering for your own thing. Yeah, exactly. And when he came back, he sat down in a chair and passed out almost instantly. Everyone's passing out in Dennis's apartment.

Yeah, it's just so nuts that that happens to everyone who goes there.

Now, he gave a very brutal account of Sinclair's murder at the court hearing and at the time of his arrest. But he was unusually cagey about the crime at first. He didn't want to talk much about it. He said, I remember nothing else until I woke up the next morning. Steven He was still in the armchair and he was dead. On the floor was a piece of string with a tie attached to it. Crazy. He completely removes himself from actively hurting these men. Now, Dennis claimed that he had no intention of harming the young man and had only, quote, concern and affection for his future and the pain and plight of his life.

I bet.

Dennis sat in the living room with the body for several hours before finally carrying Sinclair to the bathroom and placing his body in the tub to begin in his ritual cleaning. Now, once he was finished, he brought him to the bedroom and laid him in the bed. And there, he just caressed him for some time before falling asleep next to him.

Okay.

He said, I never looked at him. No sex, just a feeling of oneness.

It wouldn't be sex anyway. That would be rape.

That would be rape. The next morning, Dennis dressed his body in his own clothing and placed him in the chair in the living room where he stayed for several days. Wow. He just put him in a chair in his living room. He this so several times. Yeah. Put men in a chair in his living room dead and just left them there for days at a time. Just walked in and went to work.

Yeah.

And then came home.

And didn't think about it at all while he was at work.

No. Later, he would talk about how when he decided to kill Steven, he had knelt in front of him as they listened to Tommy, and he said, Oh, Steven, here I go again.

Oh.

That's what he said to this.

Like, what? Which also makes you wonder the just eerie things he said to everybody else that he killed.

Yeah, he just said weird shit. And then he strangled him with a string and a necktie. Now, after that, what had happened, this is when he got into more detail during the court hearing. After he had killed Steven, he put him in bed, and then he arranged mirrors around the bed and just laid with him in the bed, looking at them at all different angles.

He is on another level. This is psychosis. It's like the nth degree.

It's deeply, deeply ill.

This is shit you see in horror movies that you're like, wow, they went too far. Yeah.

You're like, that's wild. Why would you do that? Now, later, after his arrest, Dennis would become strangely almost philosophical about this murder. Speaking of it, in these weird, bizarre and in his romantic terms, almost, in his romantic terms. He said, I believe he is me or part of me. How can you feel remorse for taking pains into yourself? I loved him much more than anyone else he had ever met in his 20 years. I don't know that. The image of the sleeping Steven is and will be with me for all of my life.

Oh, that's so dark. And to say that, knowing that he has family out there, that's just another Another level of predator.

Yeah.

And stealing that from- Yeah.

Saying, I love... You knew him for how many hours? And then killed him. And you're saying that you loved him more than anyone in his life?

And then saying, I'll always have that image. Yeah.

That's so- Because that's also saying to his family, that's something you can't have back. It's like that is so deeply evil.

It is evil.

Now, Dennis's perspective on this particular murder is Definitely unusual. He describes none of his other murders quite like this one. In fact, he went from having no recollection of the murder at all to being that philosophical about it and that like, weirdly cruel about it. Very strange. He described it almost like a transcendent experience. Yeah. Transcendent, excuse me.

Yeah, like with the mirrors and everything, too. Yeah. He treated it like a project.

Yeah. It's very strange. Now, at this point, when he was talking about it like that, he was already arrested and he had confessed. Okay. So it is possible that he was setting himself up further for an insanity defense. Yeah. But it's also positive that there was something about Steven that was just different than his other victims. Something that reminded Dennis of himself, maybe. Who knows? There was something there that was different.

To say that he felt like he was a part of him?

Yeah, because it feels like he was really taking him as his own personality, in his own being. Because, again, he'd only known him for a few hours, and he couldn't possibly have known anything about his life or the people in it. It's very strange. Now, about a week later, Dennis dismembered Steven Sinclair's remains and disposed of them in the same way that he had before. But this time, when he tried to flush pieces of his body down the toilet, it didn't go as smoothly as the previous disposal. In the weeks after this, Dennis's neighbors started complaining about the drains in the apartment, saying they were all backed up and didn't seem to be draining properly. Oh. Yeah. In fact, it was Dennis himself, who in early February, wrote a letter to his landlord on behalf of himself and the other tenants of the building, demanding that something be done about it as soon as possible. He did it.

Because he wanted the problem to go away.

Yeah. Now, on the afternoon of February fifth, after hearing nothing from their landlord, one of the residents in Dennis's building, Jim Alcock, finally grew tired of waiting for a response, and he decided to call a plumber himself. He was like, We'll fucking do it. It took a few days, but on the evening of February eighth, a plumber from Dino Rod arrived at 23 Cranley Gardens to come help the problem. The plumber, Michael Katran, was He was relatively new to this job and didn't have a lot of experience, especially with complex drainage problems. But after taking a little bit of a look at the problem in the building-I don't really know if anybody was equipped to deal with this issue. This particular problem, no. So he took a look the problem inside the building, and he knew enough to know the source of the problem was likely outside the house under the ground. Although it had already grown dark, he agreed to take a look. So with Jim Alcock holding a flashlight for him, he went to the side of the house and removed the manhole cover, providing access to the sewer, and he descended the ladder into the manhole.

Oh, my.

As soon as they were down in the sewer, both of them were hit with a terrible order. Now, a sewer does have a terrible order, so that's not strange.

But it's usually like a waste. Poop. Yeah.

But Michael Ketran said, I may not have been in the game for long, but I know this isn't shit.

What a quote.

That's what he said. That's a quote. There was also a pool of sludge on the floor about 8 inches thick. Oh, fuck. Containing about 30 or 40 pieces of flesh, grayish white in color and of various sizes.

Oh, my.

Using the flashlight, Michael followed the pipes back to the ones connected to the house, which was leaking the same sludgy substance that was covering the floor.

Can you imagine finding this out? No. That your neighbor was flushing murdered victims down the toilet.

And that your backed up drains were containing pieces of people.

That and just knowing that this was all happening while you, I think I mentioned it in part one or two, we just go about our day and people are doing this. I can't imagine finding out I was in the same home.

Sharing a wall.

Sharing walls, potentially. Or like I had like- Walking by him. Maybe he was your upstairs neighbor and you had to do the broom trick.

Or you just held the door open for him. Held the door for him. Yeah.

Got his mail once. Yeah.

Probably saw the victims and didn't realize it. Now, having found the source of the problem, Michael called his supervisor to report the discovery, saying that he thought it might have been a dead body. By then, most of the residents had crowded around, and as he was on the phone and overheard this conversation. Oh, shit. So after hanging up, Michael turned to Dennis Nilsson, who was there listening to the conversation, and asked whether he had a dog. And Dennis said, Yeah, he did. And the plumber asked whether he tried to flush dog meat down the drain, like food. Yeah. Dennis said, No, I haven't. So he didn't even try to lie about it. Yeah. It's unclear why if he was the source of the problem, he would have reported the drain blockage to the landlord and insisted something be done about it because he had to know they He was going to figure out it was human remains.

Maybe he was just so far into this fantasy that he didn't, that didn't occur to him, that they would figure it out.

Well, and it's possible he was hoping that by joining in on the outrage, that suspicion wouldn't fall back on him. He might not have known how specifically that pipes would go directly to his, like that they could trace it back.

I think probably he wanted the problem to be cleared up so that he could continue this because he can't, he can't do anything anymore. He can't do anything right now. Do any more killing because he doesn't have a way of disposing of people.

Yeah, he already ran out of space in his apartment and realized he couldn't do that.

Now the drain is not working.

He was resorting to this. Now, around midnight that night, Dennis concocted a plan that he was hoping would take the heat off him. Carrying a flashlight in a garbage bag, he went down into the sewer at midnight and collected the large pieces of flesh.

This can't even be fucking real.

No. Which he then brought to the surface and dumped over the garden wall into the hedge on the other side. That's What's his big plan? Oh, there's more. He said, I had planned to go to the supermarket or Kentucky fried chicken and purchase a few pounds weight of chicken pieces. These I would soak, cut up into smaller chunks as that removed, and then he would place them in the sewer.

And just make everybody think that it's KFC?

He figured that by replacing human flesh with raw chicken, he hoped the men from Dino-Rod would quickly notice their mistake and not wanting to appear foolish wouldn't call the police.

Like, babe, when somebody smells a dead body, they know what they've smelled, and it doesn't smell like raw chicken.

Now, Dennis's plan was to wake up early in the morning and place the chicken in the sewer. But after removing the human remains, he went to his apartment and started drinking heavily. The next morning, he slept in. Uh-oh. Oops. So Michael returned to the property, the plumber, and he came with his supervisor, Gary Wheeler. And together, the two men went down into the sewer, and Michael noticed the manhole cover was in a different position than he'd left it the night before. When they got to the bottom of the ladder, they found that the remains were gone. Convinced that someone had removed them, Wheeler called the police.

Because you're also thinking all of these people were gathered around and heard me say it's a dead body. It's got to be one of them.

In the meantime, Michael continued investigating the pipes and found that impacted into one of the pipes was more flesh and several pieces of small bones.

Well, that was my other assumption, too, is it's like that whatever Whatever Dennis collected had drained. Yeah. Like, he didn't think of what was in the pipes. He clearly had no understanding.

Something was blocking the pipes.

I said the other day that I don't really understand pipes. I understand this.

You understand this pipe? I do. Now, while the Dino-rod men were in the sewer, Dennis slipped out of the building and went to work, just as he did any other day. Wow. Just went to work. Yeah. Sitting at his desk, he arranged and re-arranged the objects on the surface, and then he composed a letter that he tucked into a brown envelope and placed in in the desk drawer. He said, I was sure that I would be arrested when I came home or sometime that evening. Among other things, the letter said that he should be arrested, and if he was found dead, it would not be from suicide.

Oh.

Which is interesting. As Dennis sat at his desk writing, investigators were at the house on Cranley Gardens investigating the scene. The remains found in the drain had been removed and sent to be examined at the University of London, where they were confirmed to be human. The flesh appeared to be from, The region of the neck, and the bones were from the hand, and both were almost certainly male. Okay. Now, Dennis returned home a little after 05: 30 PM, and as he expected, there was a detective waiting for him at the door. The man at the door introduced himself as DCI Peter Jay and told Dennis he was there about the drains. Dennis acted surprised that a simple drain problem would warrant a call to the police.

He said, Miles. All I can think is, you remember that feeling when you were younger and you were in trouble and you knew you fucked up. So you were like, oh, shit. I got to just deal with this. That must be on a galactic level when you are a serial killer.

And they have found all your victims. Yeah. What? Now, upstairs in his apartment, Jay told Dennis that the remains discovered in the sewer and in the drain pipe were human. And this prompted another feigned surprise reaction from Dennis. He said, oh, my goodness.

Who, meanwhile, has human remains hidden around his home at this point in time.

Yeah, don't worry about that. We'll figure that out. It was immediately clear to Dennis that they suspected him. In fact, they had already traced the drainage's problem directly to his apartment. So when they asked where the rest of the body was because they just flat out said it, Dennis didn't bother continuing the charade and just simply told them in plastic bags in the bedroom wardrobe.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Just drops the act so immediately.

You got me. Where's the rest of the body? Imagine asking that and him just being like, in plastic bags in the bedroom wardrobe. You're just like, what?

This is so wild. It sounds like fiction.

Yeah, it does. Dcij and his partner went with Dennis into the bedroom but declined to open the wardrobe, saying the smell was confirmation enough. Instead, Jay turned to Dennis and asked if there was anything else he wanted to show them or anything he wanted to say. And Dennis said, It's a long story. It goes back a long time. I'll tell you everything. I want to get it off my chest. Not here, but at the police station. What the fuck? So at the station, Jay sat down with Dennis in an interview room and began the interrogation. And it was obvious he was dealing with a murder, but he had no idea what was to come. So Jay just asked, Are we talking about one body or two? Oh.

And what Dennis say?

He said at first he was expecting maybe this was a crime of passion or something of that nature. One body or two. And he was absolutely stunned when Dennis looked at him and said, 15 or 16 since 1978.

Holy shit. Yeah.

Like, that would be the shock of the century.

Like a slap across your face. Truly.

Now, in the wake of his arrest, the shock and horror among the police press and people in London could be felt everywhere. There were so many unbelievable aspects of the case, like we've been saying, that as soon as one had managed to process one thing, some new hideous detail would come out. Not only had Dennis Nelson killed 15 people in five years, he had done so while being completely undetected. No one ever seemed to notice that his victims had even gone missing. Which is so heartbreaking. That's what's even sadder. Then, of course, there was the specifics about the murders themselves. Brutal strangulations, drownings, the ages of the victims, the necrophilia, the awful dismemberments.

I mean, it's grotesque. It is. It's a lot.

Although he gave a full confession to 15 murders, the prosecutor's office faced a significant challenge in charging him for the full extent of his crimes because they couldn't identify all the victims.

That happens so often. It does. It's so sad.

In fact, even Dennis didn't know the names of everyone he'd killed.

Well, even his answer, 15 or 16.

He didn't even know. He would refer to some of them by nicknames that he'd given them before or after their death. In the end, only eight of his victims were identified. So half. We're still missing half, essentially. By the following week, investigators had gathered enough info to charge him with the murder of Stephen Holmes. But the news of the charges was quickly followed by the public comment from DCIJ, who assured the public, Our inquiries are by no means complete. So they're like, We're not just charging him with one. When the charges were read aloud in court, Dennis simply looked up at the judge and said, Thank you.

Wow.

The next day, February 13th, more charges were brought against Dennis, this time for the murders of Kenneth Ockenden, excuse me, Martin Duffy, William Sutherland, and Malcolm Barlow. He was also charged with the attempted murder of Paul Nobs and Douglas Stuart, who he had attempted to strangle in 1981 and 1980. Following the additional charges, Dennis was removed from the local jail where he was being held, and he was brought to Brixton Prison, which we know well.

Now, we've talked about that many times.

While investigators diligently worked to build their case against Dennis Nilsson, Dennis sat in the cell writing and pondering his own crimes. Throughout most of his life, he'd compartmentalized everything, living in one very disappointing real world while simultaneously building a big grandiose fantasy world in his head. And his time in jail, that was no different. Now, having given up and confessed, he was beginning to play a new role in his mind. And this role was that of a tragic monster. From a very early the age he had hoped to be to one day discover that he was special and remarkable. Unfortunately, that turned out to be true, just not in the way he had originally hoped.

Yeah, he's certainly remarkable. I can think of lots of remarks. Yeah.

Among the things he found most surprising after his arrest was the extent to which the public was interested in his crimes and the case. He later wrote, I'm always surprised and truly amazed that anyone can be attracted by the macabre. The public fascination with types, rare types like myself, plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. No one wants to believe ever that I am just an ordinary man, come to an extraordinary an overwhelming conclusion.

And here we all are listening to Morbid. Exactly.

He's saying that. I'm like, yeah, that's true. We all want to know why the fuck you are that way.

Well, and you're not just an ordinary man.

No, you're not.

You can't be like, I'm just an ordinary guy.

I'm just like you.

I've met a lot of ordinary men. They saw nothing like you.

Exactly. Now, if Dennis had managed to hide any abnormality or symptoms of mental illness throughout his life, it's likely because no one ever really paid him much attention. That was the problem. Now that he was locked up in Brixton and was a source of a lot of curiosity, certain aspects of his personality suddenly became noteworthy. In his early days at Brixton, Dennis was uncharacteristically defiant. He would refuse to wear his prison uniform and would become argumentative with the staff and his lawyers who were provided to him through the legal aid program. At one point in July, when his chamber pot was overflowing, Dennis threw the contents through the bars, some of which splashed onto several guards Oh. What followed was a violent exchange between Dennis and the guards, during which his glasses were broken, a tooth was knocked out, and he received a black eye.

Maybe don't throw your shit on people.

You throw your shit at me. That's happening.

Yeah, shit gets gnarly When you throw shit.

I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm above if you throw shit at me punching you in the face. Yeah. In the weeks that followed, Dennis became increasingly destructive. He tore up court documents that were sent to his cell. He destroyed his personal items. He said this was in order to have something to do.

Read a fucking book.

Yeah. At the same time, he was also becoming increasingly paranoid. He would accuse the governor of stealing his postage and being suspicious of other inmates. He was also developing this intense bitterness that in the wake of his arrest, all the good work he'd done in his life through the military and civil service had become completely overshadowed by murder.

Doll, once you get to the point where you are defiling corpses by raping them. You're a necrophiliac. You're a necrophiliac. You're literally bathing people, chopping them up, either keeping parts of them in your home or all of them for days, and then flushing them down your toilet. I don't give a fuck what you did for the military.

But wait a minute. Pristine military record, though. Don't care, doll. Pristine.

That just has to tell you that his brain works differently because how the fuck do you rationalize that? Exactly. I was such a good in the military.

That feels very narcissistic. It does. It absolutely does. I'm not diagnosing him as narcissistic. I'm just saying it has a vibe of narcissist to me. Yeah, absolutely. Because he's like, Well, look at all these amazing things I've done. And you're just like...

I do think, and I'm going out on a swim here, but I I think most serial killers have at least narcissistic tendencies. Yeah, I would think so. Because even to believe that you will get away with it is narcissistic in and of itself.

And to think you have the right to take another person's life. You have a weird God complex. Yes, precisely. You think you think who should be able to task out who lives and who dies, and when they live and when they die. I just love that he's like, it's like, you commit necrophilia. I'm sorry, doll.

Any good thing that you've done.

That's going to become You're a defining characteristic. You're not going to get away from that.

You could cure world hunger, and people will still be stuck on the fact that you're a necrophilia.

Exactly. No matter what good you do in your life, you're a necrophil. It's like a pedophile. You're a pedophile. No matter what rank office you tend to get to or what success that you get to, you're always a pedophile. You're always a fucking monster. And that's the way it is. Ten toes down. Ten toes down. You're a pedophile, necrophiliac murderer. That's your defining characteristic. Now, he wrote letters to journalists like Brian Masters, urging them to not just focus on the murders when you write about this case. He said, display the clean linen as well as the dirty.

No. You don't get to decide either at this point.

Yeah, you made the choices, babe. Now, through all the post-arrest chaos of those early months in prison, Dennis had also come to develop several theories as to the reasons for his crimes. Initially, he seemed as bewildered as anyone for how he could have done such terrible things. Then he placed the blame on society in general for marginalizing his victims and placing them in his path.

Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, I wish I was. He said this was just a universal He said, Well, fuck.

You put these marginalized people in my path. What was I supposed to do? Not murder them? That is literally his argument. No, you're- You put this person who didn't have a home or food and was desperate in front of me. What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do? Help them? Not murder them? What do you expect of me?

Hello?

That's some barbaric shit. Is to sit there and be like, What did you expect?

The fact that they called him- I expected anything else than what you did, Dennis. The fact that he's still referred to as a kindly killer after he was like, Eeu, a marginalized people on my path?

Gross. What am I going to do with them? You murder them. That's what you do. He's bonkers. Bonkers. Truly bonkers. But finally, and almost certainly after speaking with a psychiatrist. He settled on the explanation he would stick with pretty much for the rest of his life. He said, I believe my offenses are motivated by emotional disturbance under unique conditions of extreme mental pressure, which release areas in the subconscious when I have lost control.

No.

I guarantee you he came up with that completely by himself and that a psychiatrist did not tell him that.

Take the mental fucking pressure out of it. You didn't kill because you were pressured mentally. And you killed because you are disturbed mentally.

Well, and in one breath. So before he sees a psychiatrist, he's like, I don't know, you put a marginalized person in my path. What am I supposed to do? And then he sees a psychiatrist and he's like, I believe my offenses were motivated by emotional disturbances under unique conditions of extreme mental pressure, which, at least in the subconscious, I have lost control.

Yeah, I know.

You're just parroting what they said at you.

You had me unemotionally disturbed. You lost me your mental pressure. Because that's taking it off of himself.

But then, this is what's interesting. It's interesting that you landed on that because He said, mine is a disease peculiar to me, which I should have sought to cure or control. Yes. There is no excuse for taking the lives of 15 innocent people and trying to kill eight others. The buck stops here. Yes. So it's like, what? Which one is it, though? Which one is it? Now, although he had confessed to the murders, there was still the question of sanity in sentencing. I got that. I totally got that. Dennis Nilsson's trial began at the Old Bailey, which again, we're very familiar with.

Why do I love the Old Bailey? Never been there in my life. Love it.

Love the Old Bailey.

Love it.

It began in late October with Alan Green arguing on behalf of the Crown and Ivan Lawrence acting as the defense. Now, given that Dennis had already confessed, Green spent a lot of the opening statement detailing the murders in Dennis' own words, including all the details of the crimes and the disposal of the bodies. Green noted that Dennis had confessed to feeling as though he was, a quasi-god who could do anything I wanted.

Interesting. In that fantasy world, it does seem that way.

Oh, he felt like a God.

Also, the washing of people feels like it weirdly aligns with that.

And the fact that he would... Because that's what was so interesting with him saying, Oh, you're just going to place these people in front of me who are marginalized and desperate. He acted like he didn't care, but he would bring them in to feed them. Right.

And in one case, he even called an ambulance for somebody and didn't kill them. He killed them the next day.

And that's the thing. He didn't kill everyone he came in contact with. So he did act like a quasi God because he was determining who lived and who died. Very That's weird. Also important to Green's argument was the fact that Dennis had a pattern and strategy for meeting, luring, and murdering men, which he argued was evidence of sound mind when the crimes were committed. That's fair. Which I think so.

I mean, the disposal in and of itself. Yeah. You know it's wrong. You're disposing of the evidence.

You're trying to get rid of it. It's like you are luring them in, and you clearly have. You've said before, I intended to murder this man. Right. So you've said it. Right. Now, he said, The defense says he is guilty of manslaughter because they the defense of diminished responsibility. The Crown says that even if there was mental abnormality, that did not diminish substantially his mental responsibility for these killings. Absolutely.

To call that manslaughter is a fucking- Travis. Yeah, it really is.

Now, in the early days of the trial, several key investigators were called to testify for the Crown, including Peter Jay, who read aloud several of the letters and notes sent to him by Dennis Nilsson following Dennis's arrest. In one, Dennis attempted to explain his actions, writing, At the subconscious root lies a sense of total social isolation, which he did have his whole life, and a desperate search for sexual identity. I felt repelled by myself, and as stated, I have no experience of sexual penetration for some years. In simple terms, his defense was that his sexual confusion and loneliness were triggers for committing murder.

Okay.

No. Yeah. No. The defense's position was that Nielsen was only guilty of manslaughter because on some psychological level, he was unaware of what he was doing, or at least unaware of the consequences of his actions. Then why did he hide the bodies? Exactly. In a way, they had a head start on the prosecution in that whatever his motive, most people include including those on the jury, couldn't imagine a sane, rational person doing anything that he did. They really did have a head start because they're already going in there being like, this guy sounds wild. Who would do this?

Well, the tough thing with an insanity plea is a A lot of people don't understand what it constitutes. Like the minutiae of it all.

Because you can sit there and colloquially, we can sit there and go, wow, that's insane.

That's insane, right.

It's legally not insane. It's just insane to think about.

There's so much more to the legality of that.

Exactly. Now, in fact, even one of his victims who'd managed to escape testified that murder seemed entirely out of character for the man he'd met. Wow. It was like a switch.

But so many killers have that switch. Like Ted Bundy, We always go back to that example of women who did survive him say his eyes would just switch.

And we have evidence of that.

In the courtroom when he was representing himself.

There's one clip of him losing it when he was defending himself. And he becomes a monster. You can see that face change. You see those eyes go dark. It's like, you know that's what they saw.

It's a trigger. It's a trigger in their brain somewhere.

Now, while most people had spent at least a little time trying to understand his violent behavior, most were eager to hear from the psychiatrist psychiatrists who'd evaluated him on various occasions. In his testimony for the Crown, Dr. James McKeece, a consultant for Broadmore, told the jury that Dennis is, an extreme egocentric, grandiose in the way he talks about himself with a craving for attention. In his descriptions of his conversation with Dennis, McKeith presented a very different person that had previously been described in court. According to the psychiatrist, Dennis hadn't killed out of loneliness, but out of rage. It was only when the men showed a lack interest or a plan to leave, essentially defying Dennis' wishes that he became violent. And that is the truth. Dennis told McKeece, I was giving them a chance to live. That's what he said. You have got to listen But potential relationships broke down. That's what he said. Okay. So he said, I was giving them a chance to live, but they wanted to leave. He really does have a God complex.

Yeah, that's their right, dude. Why don't you understand that?

So Dr. Mckeeath diagnosed Dennis with, a severe personality disorder of an unspecified type.

Interesting.

He couldn't even pinpoint it.

I mean, there are so many. I think that we just don't have names for yet.

I think it's just an amalgamation of a lot of them, too. Agreed. Totally. So he's like, I can't even pinpoint it. The defense had their own psychiatrist, of course, Dr. Patrick Galway, who more or less agreed with McKeeat's diagnosis, telling the jury that Dennis was constantly under immense pressure that would periodically erupt into, outbursts of irrational violence, often with bizarre or quasi-sexual features, always apparently motiveless.

I'm just so interested to know what pressure they were talking about. Is this internal pressure?

I think it's internal pressure because he was unsure of how to act in public. He was socially in But then- I just feel like that's such a write-off.

You know what I mean? Yeah, it's a cop-out.

Where they differed was over whether Dennis was abnormal to the extent that he couldn't be held fully accountable for his crimes. Galway indicated that he believed Dennis, quote, suffered from mental abnormality and thus couldn't be held accountable. Disagree. But McKees felt that Dennis was not legally insane when he killed. He said, I think he hoodwinked himself, referring to his ability to justify his murders. Agreed. Both psychiatrists had reviewed the evidence and spoken with Dennis at length, and naturally, they both came to the same conclusion. While the facts spoke to the extent of his personality disorder and the accuracy of the diagnosis, it really didn't do a lot to settle the question of responsibility. In fact, if anything, it caused more confusion. In an effort to provide clarity, the defense asked and were granted the opportunity to call a third expert witness, Dr. Paul Bowen. Like McKeith and Galway, Dr. Bowen had spent several hours interviewing Dennis, but he rejected the final diagnosis and had considerably more clarity around the question of responsibility. According to Bowen, Dennis didn't kill because of a mental disorder. He killed because, he enjoyed feeling the power over his victims.

Yeah, that's what I think.

On an afternoon soon in November, Justice Krum Johnson dismissed the jury to their chambers for deliberation, and their directive was very clear. They were not to determine guilt or innocence, only whether he was legally sane when he committed the murders. He said, What is contested is whether In the killing of the 15, he was guilty of murder or the lesser offense of manslaughter. Twelve hours later, the jury came out to announce they had rejected Dennis's plea of guilty to six counts of manslaughter and instead found him guilty of five counts of six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. Okay. So they gave him murder instead of manslaughter. Good. In considering his sentence, Justice Krum Johnson put a lot of weight on the input from the three expert psychiatrists, all of whom had acknowledged that, The severe personality disorder they had diagnosed in Nielson was unlikely to be alleviated by treatment. Because of that, the justice recommended a sentence of life in prison with a minimum of 25 years because they had said, I don't think he can be treated. No, I don't.

Because you don't even know what he has. No. How do you treat what you don't know?

When the verdict was given and the sentence announced, Dennis made no comment and barely seemed to register any emotion. At his mother's house in Scotland, on the other hand, Elizabeth Scott told the reporters, It is the worst possible verdict. I did think they would give him the benefit of the doubt. I still think he is innocent of murder. I dread thinking what he is thinking now. I mean, that's his mom. At the time, the sentence was one of the most severe ever imposed in the United Kingdom.

Wow. What was it? 25 years to life? Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah. A minimum of 25 years. Now, after his conviction, Dennis was sent to serve his sentence at HMP Wormwood Scrubs, which is- Not Wormwood. Wormwood Scrubs. A medium security prison in West London. Although he had the right to appeal the conviction, he chose not to. Oh, interesting. Accepting the jury's determination and the sentence from the Crown.

I mean, I think with all the details and I mean, all the gory details of his case, he maybe was smart enough to know that he wasn't going to want to appeal. I guess, but most of them aren't. I know. It's true.

Several years later, after the identification of two more victims, the sentence was upgraded to a whole life tariff, meaning he was required to serve out the entire sentence, which in this case was life. No more 25 years. Wow. Just one month after his sentence, Nilson was attacked by another inmate who cut his face in chest with a razor, resulting in several dozen stitches. The first of several conflicts with other inmates that would occur in the years that followed. According to one inmate, When an inmate like Nilsson comes into a prison, it frightens everybody. With him having so long to serve, he has nothing to lose if he kills anyone in prison.

Yeah, it's like this hierarchy thing where they just got to get rid of it.

When they have nothing to lose, they're widely. Throughout the course of his incarceration, he struck up several friendships and correspondences with people outside of prison, always, including a relationship with Mark Austin, who helped Dennis collect and publish his memoir, History of a Drounding Boy. Austin said, A lot of what's written is just through and through completely him. When you get to the murders, I just cannot connect it with the real person. But it is with the real person, so you I could connect that. The book was immediately banned in the UK until 2021 after Nilson's death, when it was eventually released with the agreement that any profits would go to charity. On May 10, 2018, Dennis complained of severe stomach pains to prison staff. And soon after, he was removed and taken to York Hospital, where it was discovered he had an aortic aneurysm that had ruptured.

What is an aortic aneurysm?

That is a gnarly aneurysm, and you're not surviving that, usually. Really? It's your aorta.

Oh, fuck. Why did I not put that together? Why? Gosh, I feel so dumb asking that.

Surgeons at York were able to repair the rupture. Wow. But complications arose, and he died a short time later. An autopsy was performed, and it was determined that Nilson's cause of was a pulmonary embolism. His body was cremated, and the ashes were given to a family member.

Wow.

Which, okay. But that's the story of Dennis Nilson.

That was by far one of the gnarliest stories we've ever shared on the pod.

And so grotesque. That's what I'm saying. So mind bending, just confusing.

And just his cavalier attitude toward the whole thing.

Yeah. He's an anomaly of nature, I tell you.

His patterns are fascinating. That was a very fascinating story. Heartbreaking. But his mind is strange. He's not a lot like anybody we've really talked about before. No.

Because he goes back and forth. He'll talk about the details of one murder and then claim he doesn't remember the next one. He's an odd duck. He's a very odd duck. All right. So my fun fact, because we certainly need it right now. Yes. Deep sea male anglerfish are way smaller, tiny, tiny, tiny, way smaller than the females. Obsessed. To mate, the male anglerfish bites onto the much larger female and then just dissolves into her body eventually. What? Leaving behind a living sack of sperm that she can use whenever the fuck she decides to lay eggs.

Are you kidding?

And I say, Good for her.

They have really figured out sperm donation much better than we have.

She just absorbs that little fucker. Wow. And then she says, When I'm financially, emotionally, and psychologically ready, and when I've done my dancing, like Mikey said, around my purse at the club, enough that I feel like I am ready and responsible to give myself to my child, then I will become pregnant.

I wonder. Good for her. Is it a one time only on the sperm release there?

I mean, that's a great question. You mean do you get to time release That's exactly what I mean.

I don't know. Does she get many pregnancies over the years or does she just get that one shot of sperm?

Here's the thing. If I ever run into one, I will ask.

That's the first question I'm going to ask. All right. I'm going to be like, Girl, shout out.

Tell me. Thank you.

I appreciate that. Now I'm curious. I'm about to research anglifish. That's a super fun fact. Yeah.

Thanks to Dub Dub for that fact. Dub Dub.

All right, guys. Well, we hope that you keep listening.

And we hope you... Keep it weird.

Keep it as weird as an Anglerfish, baby. They've figured it out.

Keep it that weird. Yeah.

Dance around the person, your club. At your deep sea club. Yeah. I want to go to a... Actually, I don't want to go to a deep sea club. No, you don't. I've probably been to one, and I just didn't even know. Woke up the next morning like, That was weird. That's where your lore started. Yeah, honestly. My lore started at the deep sea club.