Call me macabre, but I've long held an odd fascination with serial killers. I went through an adolescent horror film phase which naturally grew intertwined; murderers being a real-life encapsulation of everything Hollywood might try and frighten us with. I understand the psychological theory that this interest is borne out of a rational yet deep-seated fear of ourselves being murdered and through this rumination do we attempt to neuter its potency.
Similarly, I believe that our collective obsession (whether acknowledged or not by people) stems from our subconscious understanding that the act of murder is within our own personal reach at any given time. Murder is an abhorrent crime precisely because it represents a complete rejection of society's ingrained codes and ethics. It is the perpetrator rejecting all civilised conventions in favour of attaining the highest possible oasis of personal freedom for which of course the penalty must be the total prohibition thereafter; i.e. the famous Aleister Crowley quote, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'.
Whenever I hear someone say that they themselves would not be capable of committing a murderous act, I cannot help but condemn them as delusional; clinging to some notion of absolute control of their own impulses and psychological faculties. This is not to say that I think everyone to be a simmering psychopath capable of grave depravity at any given time; just that I think evil is as innate a feature of ourselves as good, that evil is sublimated deep within the recesses of most sane and rational people's minds by virtue of societal conventions, self-awareness and experience, and could, if the correct algorithm of causation be achieved, spill over into realised action. I believe everyone has this deep-rooted schizophrenic capacity for good and evil engrained within them through millennia's-worth of human awareness. I baulk at sensationalist tabloid buzz-words like 'inhuman' or 'monster' that are catapulted around at such perpetrators; it is not that they are inhuman but precisely because they are human that enables such murderous acts to be carried out.
These views were lent further credence by my recent reading of Brian Masters' book 'Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen'. For those who don't know, Nilsen was a deeply complex and disturbed man who, whilst outwardly exuding an unremarkable, taciturn demeanour, behind the closed doors of his North London residences murdered 15 men, dismembering and disposing of their bodies over a period of 5 years from 1978 to 1983. He was finally caught when neighbours complained of blocked drains which, when investigated, was found to be due to Nilsen having resorted to flushing human remains down his toilet.
Having completed the book I decided to set out and walk to his first residence, 195 Melrose Avenue in Kilburn, and then thread my way horizontally across North London's suburban districts and through Hampstead Heath, to link up with the house in which he was discovered, 23 Cranley Gardens. There was no grand plan in so far as what I hoped to achieve other than satisfying my own curiosity, and being able to visualise the drab city edges that, despite their surface orthodoxy could, when peeled back and glimpsed within, reveal such a disturbing heart of darkness.
I admit that I was also enthused by my strong conviction that since this was a walking route perhaps only previously undertaken by a curious minority, I was in some way carving out a unique tourist trail between two disparate sites of intrigue. Indeed, together with my sympathetic girlfriend, I was fairly certain to be the only pursuer of this path on a bright but chilly Saturday in March. They may be macabre sites, I pondered as we slogged up the steady incline of Maida Vale and the Kilburn High Road, but was it any more so than the groups of tourists mooching round Whitechapel trying to sense the ‘evil vibes’ of Jack the Ripper? It cannot be said to be Des Nilsen's fault that his crimes have failed to consolidate the same lucrative appeal for London's tourists!
Turning off the Kilburn High Road and onto Walm Lane, I followed the road along until at an intersection it morphed into Melrose Avenue. By this point I had the geographical sensation that I had left the familiarities of inner-city London behind to become immersed in the suburbs. The featureless semi-detached houses, some prim and tidy, others having lapsed into shabby disrepair, many apparently up for sale, lined the road entrenching my view whilst reading the book that Nilsen's crimes were made all the more shocking by how strikingly they contrasted with the quiet, routine-led environs in which they gestated. The very idea that anything so uniquely heinous could occur amidst such mundane uniformity!
I felt a definite sense of, perhaps willed, foreboding as the road gently bent round before arriving at 195, the ground floor flat in which Nilsen killed 12 men and stored their bodies in wardrobes and under floorboards before burning them on bonfires in the garden, all without attracting the attention of any of his neighbours.
The street was mostly quiet, although a few residents were going to and fro getting on with their day. This set me thinking about whether or not they were aware of the house's grisly history. If they were, what influence did it have on their feelings towards life on the street generally, and what would be the impact on their impressions if they weren't? I wonder whether such proximity might dwell on their minds at all, might heighten their sense of neighbourly distrust or suspicion, or even act as a subconscious buffer or pinion point for their own latent psychopathologies.
I ruminated on this point whilst pausing at the top of Gladstone Park's gentle hill-rise. There were a few children playing in a small play area, a handful of others playing football, various dog-walkers; the standard non-descript park in perfect keeping with the residential area. Sitting at the top offered a pleasant view of the immediate North London area, with the Shard and the scythe-like arch of Wembley Stadium bookending the extreme left and right angles. Two landmarks incidentally that would have been absent from Nilsen's view on his daily walks round the park with his beloved dog Bleep.
Walking back down Melrose Avenue and following Cricklewood Lane on through West Heath Road I thought about the difficulties such properties must pose for estate agents and landlords trying to maintain its economic viability. I had read online that in some cases tenants had bought the flat only to later discover its past infamy and subsequently struggle to sell it on. Whether or not this is due to a commonly-held belief in any evil metaphysical residues having been etched into the very structure of the house like some kind of terminal moraine; the social stigma perhaps entailed with residing in a 'house of horrors'; or simply a belief in those tangible 'bad vibes' that, thanks to films such as 'The Shining' or 'Paranormal Activity', could manifest themselves in the inhabitants' psyche, whether genuine or (as is more likely) not.
The dilemma is an intriguing one, in a society that is still not in any way reconciled, or any less obsessed by, the notion of death. A short distance south from Nilsen's former homes, is the site of 10 Rillington Place, where John Christie raped and murdered 8 women between 1943 and 1953. Such was the notoriety of his crimes that the decision was taken to first rename the street and then to demolish it completely, thereby in some way exorcising his evil doings and avoiding the tarnishing of the area for the years to come. Similarly, the decision was taken in 1996 to demolish the Gloucester home of Fred & Rosemary West, and more recently that of the Soham murderer Ian Huntley. I'm not so sure I concur with these destructive remedies for wiping clean the past, but I can recognise the logic for so doing.
It is not simply due to something malicious having taken place in the house (if this were the case, there would likely have to be mass housing cull up and down the country), or even that it was the former home of a murderer. Instead in cases like these, the house has been made complicit in the crimes, it is imbued with a vicarious attachment of guilt. In the case of Nilsen, by storing the bodies within its fabric, as well as the attempts at disposal, the murderer has forced the house to assume the role of a sort of structural accomplice in both providing the setting for and concealing his crimes, for which in the eyes of the world it will forever be tainted.
Meanwhile on our walk the houses grew fatter, the driveways longer and the gardens greener as we crossed the threshold into Hampstead. The bucolic lung of the Heath was as revitalising as ever; the narrow and enclosed residential streets yielding generously around this wide open space. Exiting on the east side via Merton Lane, it was a relatively short walk from there up Muswell Hill Road to Nilsen's second and last London home, 23 Cranley Gardens. A long, sloping road of houses that, with the cityscape view fanning out below, appeared to thread right the way into the heart of the city itself.
It was in the top floor flat of this unassuming abode that Nilsen killed his final three victims and, without the convenience of a garden in which to build a bonfire, struggled with a means of disposal, living with the bodies for months on end before the desperate measures that eventually led to his capture.
The truly chilling aspect of the Nilsen case is the fact that until his arrest and subsequent confession, the police were completely oblivious to the fact that 15 men had gone missing in the last 4 years, such was the transient nature of the wanderers he befriended. The fact that Nilsen, though a loner, was a prominent and respected employee at the DHSS branch in Kentish Town, had aroused no prior suspicion as to his murderous Hyde-like alter-ego also added to the paranoid unease many felt towards the case. This, in the end, is why killers arouse such fear and loathing; the fact that such depravity and wanton disregard for human life could linger just below the surface of a man who in many ways was the ordinary and incongruous reflection of the suburban neighbourhoods in which he lived.
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