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

appealed to Nilsen’s sense of romance. In a ten-page sequence, his manuscript describes the last week of January in 1983.
    Nilsen had killed Stephen Sinclair on Wednesday, 26 January 1983. The next morning, he says he woke with a hangover, but still felt ok to do a normal day’s work. When he got back, he spent some time admiring Sinclair’s naked body and then he decided to go for an evening’s drinking at the fashionable, gay-friendly, King William IV pub in Hampstead.
    Half an hour before Nilsen had arrived at the ‘King Willy’, Martin had been arrested in Hampstead Tube station. One of the regulars at the bar was talking about how the police had shut the Tube station down. But Nilsen says at the time he was more interested in where he might find some action. He decided to move to the Sir Richard Steele pub near Belsize Park Tube just down the road. The police were there, too. Nilsen asked what was going on; the constable replied they had arrested a dangerous criminal.
    Later, Nilsen got a cab back. He describes getting home and letting the dog out into the garden downstairs. Then he went up to his room, lifted Sinclair’s dead body up and placed him in the chair in the next room. Filling his glass, andturning on the tape player, he turned to the dead man. Without any apparent shame or embarrassment, Nilsen recalls saying to him, ‘You’re a lot better off than the poor bastard they’ve got down the Tube station.’

    Although Dennis Nilsen and David Martin served remand time together in the summer of 1983, they became separated that autumn when Martin was moved from Brixton to Parkhurst. Suddenly, Nilsen felt isolated. Impulsively, he wrote to Martin’s solicitor, Ralph Haeems, to see if he might represent them both. Any contact, he decided, was better than none.
    Retaining Haeems as solicitor was not simply a romantic gesture by Nilsen – it was also a shrewd choice. Haeems had no qualms about representing notorious clients, frequently with favourable results. He was himself a colourful, unconventional character. Although brought up in Bombay, Haeems later relocated to London’s East End, and he was Jewish. During his career he acted for the Krays, defended clients in the Brink’s-Mat robbery and helped acquit a convicted paedophile, Russell Bishop, of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ killings. If ever there was a man to find a way to mitigate what Nilsen had already admitted to, it was surely Ralph Haeems.
    By the time he appointed his new legal adviser, Nilsen had dismissed and re-appointed the previous solicitor, Ronald Moss, three times. In between these periods of appointment, he even tried to represent himself. Nilsen’s dismissals of Moss always sprang from the same complaint – he felt that his lawyer simply wouldn’t help him stand up to a prison regime,which he felt repressed and bullied him. He wanted Moss to give him legal help to put an end to what he saw as the intolerable conditions of the hospital wing, and the ‘solitary confinement’ that inevitably resulted from his own efforts to square up to the strictures of life inside.
    Above all, Nilsen objected to the ‘monster’ tag that everybody seemed to apply to him. Did no one appreciate the psychological complexities of a case like his, he would ask himself. One afternoon, he became so frustrated, he started tearing up his case papers. The act of tearing up the papers landed Nilsen another spell in an isolation unit for behaving ‘irrationally’ or, as the doctors on the unit might have considered, to safeguard his own safety.
    After appointing Haeems, things initially went well. Nilsen eventually, however, became disenchanted. By the end of their relationship, he would describe Haeems as the sort of man who had a ‘tax-deductible heart’. Some months earlier, he became convinced Haeems briefed friends in Fleet Street about current cases. This was doubly intolerable. Nilsen felt that if his solicitor kept such company, the least he