Paperback: I have now a guilt and punishment complex. I am convinced that I deserve everything that a court can throw at me. - D A Nilsen, 13 April 1983
On February 9th 1983 Dennis Nilsen was arrested at his Muswell Hill home, after human remains had been identified as the cause of blocked drains.
Within days he had confessed to fifteen gruesome murders over a period of four years. His victims, all young homosexual men, had never been reported missing.
Brian Masters, with Nilsen's full cooperation, has produced a unique study of a serial killer's mind, revealing the disturbing psychology of a mass murderer in Killing for Company (1995).
"This has been in many ways a disturbing book to write, and some will no doubt find it an unpleasant one to read. Dennis Andrew Nilsen, having started life unremarkably enough in a fishing community in Scotland, at the age of thirty-seven admitted to the wilful murder of fifteen men over a period of four years, thus becoming the biggest multiple killer in British criminal history. This book attempts to show how such a calamity could occur.
The courts have already dealt with Nilsen by imprisoning him for life. In this there can be but scant comfort for the families of his victims, who must forever wonder why their sons were cut down before they had time to grapple with life's problems in their own way, in order to satisfy the obsessive needs of a stranger who has been adjudged sane. With this in mind, there can be no ambiguity about the moral response to his crimes.
By examining in detail Nilsen's life and attitudes, his emotions and reflexes, it might be possible to reach an understanding, albeit a scrappy one, of one dark and mysterious aspect of the human condition. That, at least, is my purpose." - Brian Masters, London, 1984
About the author: Brian Masters' work is eclectic, to say the least. Brian Masters (born 1939) is a British writer best known for his biographies of mass murderers. He has also written about the British aristocracy and worked as a translator. He was a contributor to the Spectator, the Standard and Book & Bookmen.
Masters grew up in a prefab on the Old Kent Road, Southwark to a hunchback mother with a weak chest and an illegitimate no hoper father. During his adolescence, after he asked to interview television personality Gilbert Harding for the school magazine he had launched, Harding became close to him, and functioned as a mentor. Masters was apparently quite unfazed when Harding asked to watch him bathe.
The family having moved to Wales in a vain hope of improving his mother's health, Masters read French Literature and Philosophy at University of Wales, Cardiff where he gained a first in 1961. Briefly a teacher in France (as part of his degree), he worked for a time as a travel guide organising educational tours for American students and then wrote books on French writers such as Molière (1970) and Camus, among others, without any pretence at them having any real originality. The publisher Anthony Blond interested him in a book on the public's dreams about the Royal Family, which was the first of several books by Masters on the British aristocracy.
Masters is best known for his books about serial killers, written with the co-operation of the subjects or their families. Masters corresponded with Dennis Nilsen from shortly after his arrest in February 1983, and met him in prison without having felt the slightest unease during their time together. His book contains writings by Nilsen, and Masters considers various theories which attempt to explain Nilsen's actions. Masters reaches no final conclusion on the essential unknowability of the human mind. Masters was accused of being overly sympathetic to Nilsen at the time his book first appeared, a view he rejects in his memoir.
Following the book on Nilsen, Masters wrote The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer and She Must Have Known: The Trial of Rosemary West. (Source: Wikipedia)
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