A friendly civil servant, 37 years of age, who killed over a period of five years fifteen young poor devils in London. All victims were mail students or tramps that he picked up in bars en took home with the pretence he would shelter them. Once Nilsen said he killed for sociability, because he kept the bodies of his victims with him for a while, sometimes even sitting upright in a chair in front of the TV-set.

Nilsen's activities were by accident discovered in February 1983, when a company that cleaned sewers was called to Cranley Gardens in North-London to push through the choked up street sewerage. There seemed to be pieces of rotting meat in the sewer pipe that came out of the house on number 23. At first, they thought that the stinking stuff was dog meat, or the thrown-away contents of a freezer, but further investigation revealed it was human-origin meat. When the police knocked on the door of 23 Cranley Gardens, Dennis Nilsen seemed almost happy to be able to tell his dreadful story, which he did in a very formal way.

He admitted to have killed and dissected fifteen people, however he apologized himself for not recollecting the exact number. 'I didn't note down the number of bodies', he said. In a wardrobe, three heads were found which were put in plastic bags. Other body parts were found in a box. Nilsen pointed out that, besides the three bodies in his house, there were thirteen others buried in the backyard of a house in Cricklewood, where he had lived in the past.

He's the son of a Norwegian military man who was addicted to alcohol, and who had neglected his family. His parent's marriage broke down when Nilsen was still very young. Nilsen had been in Germany, Aden and Cyprus as an army cook, and when he got out of his time of service, he'd worked a while with the police. Later on, he got a job with a security company, and in 1974, he became a civil servant with a labor exchange in London. He did everything to try and hide his homosexuality. Because of his job, he got in touch with the less successful part of the community and his till then lonely existence was broke through by the dropouts he took home. He spent a large part of his time in clubs and bars, where he easily got acquainted with other lonely souls, which he felt more and more pity with during his drinking-bouts.

In December 1978, after his roommate left him, he obeyed to those destructive tendencies that had slumbered beneath the surface for a long time. He took his victims home, often in such a drunk condition he often didn't remember who he had took with him, and he strangled them, after which he cut their bodies to pieces. He was obviously obsessed with death. He used to masturbate in front of a mirror after having covered himself with a white powder, in order to look like a corpse. Later on, he liked watching his victim's bodies, put on their underwear and masturbated over them. He was faced with a big problem when he had to get rid of them. Now and then, there were four or five bags with remains under the floor of his apartment in Cricklewood, while cases full of human organs were in his shed. Sometimes, he burned them to get rid of them, but when he tried to flush the results of his massacres down the toilet, the waste pipes got blocked and Nilsen got caught.

In October 1983, Nilsen was put on trial as 'the killer of the century' in the Old Bailey. His cool, dissocial and merciless way of acting was considered by psychiatrists during the trial. When his lawyer asked him: 'Why?', Nilsen answered: 'I was hoping you could tell me that'. This man, who once called himself a creative psychopath, was being defended on the ground of diminished sanity. The jury concluded that he was responsible for his deeds and judged him guilty. He was convicted to a life sentence. Nilsen himself didn't show any remorse: 'I don't sleep a minute less because of what I've done, nor do I have any nightmares'.

In 1985, Brian Masters published a book about Nilsen, called 'Killing for company', based on personal interviews with the captured killer. The author created an image of an unwanted child that grew up to be an isolated adult who was obsessed by the sexuality of death. On of the motives for this study was to show how an ordinary individual could go down so deeply. Masters added that Nilsen's victims were nothing more than stage-properties in his phantasy world, and no longer human beings. Nilsen himself wrote a report in prison in which he tried to analyze himself. His presence wasn't really appreciated by the other prisoners, and when he was in Wormwood Scrubs, a fellow-prisoner cut open his face with a razorblade.