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

roll-ups. Cigarettes andwriting materials were Nilsen’s necessities. When he could access money, it would be spent on newspapers and batteries for his small radio.
    Dennis Nilsen may have had some friends among weaker prisoners, but a significant number objected to his very presence there; some because of what he had allegedly done, but others just disliked his aloof personality. One of Nilsen’s lowest moments in the pre-trial period came when the prison governor banned him from attending chapel. Despite his atheist beliefs, Nilsen had been a regular visitor to break up the interminable hours spent locked up in his prison hospital cell.
    The governor was worried that Nilsen’s presence might cause a disturbance and present a threat to ‘good order and discipline’. That wasn’t how Dennis Nilsen saw it. In
History of a Drowning Boy
, he describes this incident as his ‘expulsion’ from ‘religious activity’. He felt the chaplains should have stood up to the governor and describes them as ‘Christian hypocrites’, and ‘worse than cockroaches’. They were forever ‘crossing to the other side of the road’, like in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The reader is left feeling that what really got to Nilsen was that the Church was meant to be there for all humanity. If it rejected him, what, then, was he?
    If the world saw him as a monster, Nilsen’s ‘inner film’ was still working out ways to be the hero of his story. He found it, temporarily, when he fell in love. In between writing his self-admonishing essays, Nilsen had become infatuated with a young psychopath, who was also on remand, called David Martin. They met for short periods in the exercise yard. He was small, effeminate and bisexual. It is possible theirrelationship may have developed if circumstances had been different. But, as it stood, it was largely one-sided. While Martin seemed initially to enjoy Nilsen’s attention, he was also smitten with an ex-model called Sue Stephens. Eventually, Martin sent a note to Nilsen to stop pestering him. Still, the ‘couple’ was gossiped about in the prison. One warder described them as the ‘copper who liked killing queers with the queer who liked killing coppers’, referring to Nilsen having been a policeman and Martin having shot one of them.
    It was easy to see why Nilsen might have been attracted to David Martin. His story read like the plot of a gangster movie. He was a career criminal who had been in and out of prison all his life. Martin had resumed offending in 1981 after an eight-year sentence for fraud. His spree started with a series of burglaries on video stores to get equipment to start an adult movie business. A month later, he raided a gun store in Covent Garden. Finally, in August 1982, he broke into a film-processing laboratory, shooting a policeman in the leg before escaping.
    Martin then fled to Spain. While he was away, detectives located his flat. Just as he returned, the flat was being put under surveillance. The only person they saw going in and out, however, was a slim, blonde girl. Then information reached them that Martin himself enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes – they had been watching him all along.
    On 15 September, Special Branch waited outside the flat for the ‘blonde with the Adam’s apple’ to return. As armed officers approached him, Martin pulled a gun out of the top of his stockings and pointed it at them. They responded by shooting him in his neck.
    Some months later, after he had recovered, Martin escaped from Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, using clips and pins hidden in his long hair to pick the lock. With his fur-coat collar up and a stack of papers in his arms, he then walked out of the building. News of the escape spread over the front pages, and a manhunt was launched.
    When Nilsen chatted to Martin in the exercise yard, he discovered just how close he’d been to Martin’s subsequent, dramatic arrest. That their stories might be connected