Free Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer by Russ Coffey

murder had been committed under the influence of drugs and he had no memory of it. Nilsen says he thought that David needed immediate treatment for his drug problems.
    After telling the reader how awful this situation was, he gives a flavour of how he would interact with David. He remembers one afternoon in particular. It was just after the prison library trolley had done its rounds. Nilsen asked David if he could swap his book of poems for David’s copy of the
Complete Works of Shakespeare
. They started to discuss David’s case. Soon, the conversation turned to the unfairnessof wearing prison uniform. How can they make you dress as a prisoner, they agreed, when you haven’t yet been convicted of anything?
    From the injustices of prison life, Nilsen moves on to the plight of some of the more wretched prisoners he saw. For the most part, he says inmates were just ‘ordinary human beings’ in adverse circumstances. Nilsen says that ‘in crimes of emotional/sexual psychology, it is a case of “there but by the grace of God goes anyone”’. But what to do with such prisoners? Nilsen says he thought prisons were there to help rehabilitate, not to further brutalise those to whom life had already been cruel. He concluded the prison authorities didn’t really want to manage their inmates back into society, but ‘warehouse’ them like ‘animals in a zoo’.
    If he doubted for a moment that prison warders were thugs, then meeting another inmate – we’ll call him Carlton – settled the issue. Here was another very tragic situation. Carlton was standing accused of throwing a child out of a window during a burglary. The child had died as a result. Nilsen and Carlton spoke to each other during cell-to-cell conversations and exercise periods. It soon struck Nilsen that Carlton had mental problems. In fact, he thought he had no place being there at all. On top of that, he seemed to be the victim of racial abuse. Carlton was a heavily-built black man, who, Nilsen claims, was repeatedly beaten by the prison guards.
    On one occasion, it was apparently just because he was listening to Bob Marley. Nilsen vividly describes the guards’ language: ‘Don’t you play that fucking jungle music in here, you black cunt.’ When the prison doctor came to do hisrounds on the medical wing, he allegedly ignored Carlton’s injuries. Carlton was eventually committed to Broadmoor. Before he left, he thanked Nilsen for not blanking him. It was written on a Mother’s Day card and Nilsen included it in the papers he gave Masters.
    Nilsen enjoyed acting protectively – and, probably, domineeringly – towards weaker inmates like Carlton. Some were very grateful for his support and assistance. Peter Jay told me that, when he and Geoff Chambers travelled over to complete their final interviews, they were surprised to see other prisoners come up behind Nilsen and slap him on the back. It appears that, in particular, Nilsen helped others write letters to their girlfriends or lawyers.
    Mostly, however, Nilsen was a nuisance to all around him. The governor, A J Pearson, told him one day that after all he had done, he had a cheek going on about prisoners’ rights. But Nilsen could only see the hypocrisy on the other side. To him, the authorities were punishing people by breaking the law themselves. His chapter on his spell on remand is replete with accusations of beatings, the forced administration of drugs such as chloropromazine (an anti-psychotic), and placing prisoners naked in what he referred to as ‘strip cells’ in the ‘punishment block’.
    As a prisoner on remand, Nilsen was given an allowance of 88p a week. He was allowed to supplement this with his own money, but since he had resigned from the Civil Service (to spare them any embarrassment, apparently), he had no salary. Nilsen’s main outgoing was tobacco. As a lifelong chain-smoker , he’d been so concerned about running out in prison; the day he arrived he’d switched to