Dennis Nilsen
© Brian Masters 1995

Dennis Nilsen is a serial killer currently serving a life sentence in the UK. He operated in London between 1978 and 1983, until his arrest. He was convicted on two counts of attempted murder and six counts of murder, although he confessed to killing more than double that number.

This text is an extract from one of the 50-odd notebooks of his memories he compiled to aid the prosecution. He is reported as saying, "the victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing up is an ordinary clinical task ". Nilsen also drew a series of diagrammatic ‘Sad Sketches’, indicating what he had done to some of his victims.

• Dismembering a Body
Dennis Nilsen

I prised up the floorboards. I uncovered the body and took it by the ankles. I pulled it up through the gap in the floor and along the floor into the kitchen on to a piece of plastic sheeting. There were other bodies and parts of bodies under the floor. I got ready a small bowl of water, a kitchen knife, some paper tissues and plastic bags. I had to have a couple of drinks before I could start. I removed the vest and undershorts from the body. With the knife I cut the head from the body. There was very little blood. I put the head in the kitchen sink, washed it and put it in a carrier bag. I then cut off the hands and then the feet. I washed them in the sink and dried them. I wrapped each one in paper towelling and put them in plastic carrier bags. I made a cut from the bodies [sic] navel to the breastbone. I removed all the intestines, stomach, kidneys + liver. I would break through the diaphragm and remove the heart and lungs. I put all these organs into a plastic carrier bag. I then separated the top half of the body from the bottom half. I removed the arms and then the legs below the knee. I put the parts in large black carrier bags. I put the chest and/ribcage in a large bag and the thigh/buttock/private parts (in one piece) in another. I stored the packages back under the floorboards. I would leave the bag with the entrails/organs out. I uncovered the next body which had been there longer. I pulled it out by the ankles on to the kitchen floor. There were maggots on the surface of the body. I poured salt on these and brushed them off. The body was a bit discoloured. I was violently sick. I drank a few more glasses of spirits and finished the task as with the other. I got a bit drunk that afternoon. The french windows were open and I had to go out every so often. I was naked to save soiling my clothes. After I replaced the packages under the floor I had a bath.

To carry out these dissections I only used a kitchen knife – no saws or power cutting tools. Afterwards I would listen to music on the headphones and get really drunk and perhaps take the ‘weed’ out to Gladstone Park. (He was (Bleep*) always a bit apprehensive and stayed in the garden while I carried out these tasks).

While at Melrose Avenue where there were 12 dead bodies involved the only method of disposal I employed there was dismemberment well after death and burning (2 fires in the back garden and one just behind the garden fence in the waste ground). While drunk I may have taken the carrier bag full of organs up with me to Gladstone Park (with the dog) and left the bag somewhere. I can’t recall now. There were fires involved in the attempts to fully dispose of the 3 bodies at Cranley Gardens. No part of the last body was disposed of at all – it has been dismembered partially and the parts recovered by police. Parts of the other two included large bones and the heads.
* Bleep was Dennis Nilsen’s dog.
© Brian Masters 1995

Video Loop (s)

Loop 1
The Oprah Winfrey Show
Featuring Aimee Mullins
Gait Analysis
Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Northwestern University Medical School, USA
Toe to Hand Transplantation
By J Fleming and L Chait
Departments of Orthopaedic, Plastic and Microsurgery Surgery
With thanks to the Department of Surgery, Wits Medical School

Loop 2
Footage from The Visible Human Project
University of Colorado and the National Library of Medicine, USA

This is one aspect of a much larger project which allows a body to be dissected and reconstructed digitally. The images were produced using a variety of digital and medical imaging processes, obtained from successive scanning and photographing of an actual body. The man in question was a prisoner on death row, who was executed by lethal injection. He had donated his body to medical science.
Because a near-perfect specimen was required, no visible signs of trauma or pathology could be present. The process of lethal injection facilitates this, but the body does begin to decay faster than usual. The body was immediately packed in ice and then frozen in blue gel. After the body was sectioned into four, millimetre-thin sections were then planed from each, with an image taken at each stage, resulting in a total of 1 878 photographs. Blue gel was also injected into anatomical cavities to make these areas visible in the images. MRI scans were carried out before sectioning began. The full project is available on CD-ROM. Selected images can be viewed at: www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html

Loop 3
The Demonstration of the Autopsy
University of Sheffield Medical School Dept. of Pathology
The Medico-Legal Autopsy
University of Glasgow
With thanks to the Department of Surgery, Wits Medical School