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

that Nilsen now thinks there may have been more to his grandfather’s apparent kindness than he realised as a little boy. After careful reflection, he believes his grandad may actually have been a ‘hesitant’ sexual abuser. This is reflected in the new accounts he gives in
History of a Drowning Boy
. For instance, he says, ‘He would take me out on long walks over the sand dunes and golf links … On the dunes at the far end of the bay, near the stream flowing into the sea … he would take me out into the dark, slit-windowed pill box and take down my short pants and hold my penis and told me to urinate … Tired by the long journey, I would, invariably, fall asleep and be carried home … My conscious memory is of his strengthand a feeling of comfort and security. These were my only real, one-to-one, personable physical contacts with someone who took a beneficial interest in me. He may have been a tepid paedophile, but I do not remember him as threatening or oppressive.’
    In a later chapter, Nilsen elaborates on his grandfather’s ‘special’ interest in him. He wonders if, during the long walks he remembers so well, his grandfather may have drugged his tea, and possibly inserted his finger in his anus. He feels this might explain why, as a young boy, he was fixated with defecation. More recently, Nilsen has discussed his new memories in letters exchanged with psychologist Matthew Malekos. The conclusions have been that, as a young boy, and irrespective of any actual sexual abuse, Dennis had conflicting feelings of love and fear towards Grandad. Sometimes the old man could be fond but, on other occasions, he was tyrannical.
    As such, young Dennis’s feelings towards him may have been a mixture of love and hate. If so, Grandad’s death would have prompted both grief and guilt. Malekos suggests that unresolved childhood feelings of ‘control and domination’ may even have been present in Nilsen’s mind when he murdered. It’s an intriguing idea, but without any corroboration as to another side to Andrew Whyte’s character, it is pure speculation.
    Once Grandad had died, it was Dennis’s mum and granny who were left to bring up the three children. Nilsen’s feelings towards his grandmother at this time are almost as ambivalent as those towards Grandad. In 1983, he wrote in
Killing for Company
:

    …the wireless played ‘Workers’ Playtime’, ‘Have a Go’ and ‘Music While You Work’, and while Mother went about her seemingly endless washing and housework she sang along with all the popular tunes. The open coal fire burned in the grate with a folding metal guard over it, with always something drying on it … It was a crowded but happy room. Mum being on her own was a dab hand at interior decorating. She had become self-reliant in her daily struggles to make ends meet. There was always lots of washing hanging
…
[after church] we would return to Academy Road for Sunday dinner. Granny would prepare all the food the day before as she was loath to do anything on the ‘Lord’s Day’. I still have not known anyone to make a Scotch broth as good as Granny
.
    In
History of a Drowning Boy
, this wistfulness has all but gone. Granny now takes her place alongside his mother as one of the ‘shrill’, ‘domineering’ women who helped make the small flat in Academy Road such a cold and uninviting place.
    Lily Whyte – Granny – died in 1990. At this time, Nilsen had been in the habit of writing autobiographical notes in a diary. In
History of a Drowning Boy
, he expands some of these thoughts to explore his confused feelings towards his grandmother. He talks about ‘the drab, grey life of dear departed Granny’. Then he wonders what kept her going until she was 96. His visual image is of a hard-bitten fish-wife who never stopped to think, in case thinking made her realise the tragedy of her life. He concludes that for all her good intentions, she suffered from emotional paralysis that knocked any