Killing for Company
Once in a while a killer appears who captures the public imagination. Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen, John Christie, The Yorkshire Ripper-Peter, Sutcliffe, Iam Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rosemary West. Names which hold a morbid fascination for us all and strike terror in our hearts. What makes them tick? What psychological flaws can produce such monsters - as the tabloids like to call these dangerous misfits.
Killing for Company, based on the international best selling biography by world renowned criminologist Brian Masters, explores the background and probes the hidden recesses in the warped mind of notorious killer Dennis Nilsen. Over a period of five years he strangled to death over fifteen young men he met in London pubs and invited to his home.
No one seemed to have missed any of his victims, or suspected anything was wrong with "Des" as he liked to be called.
Nilsen, an ex-policeman, later described himself as the most unlikely murderer I know.
A bit of an odd ball perhaps, sometimes prickly and rather intense. His colleagues at work, in a Job Centre, had no inkling about his secret life. No one had any idea how he managed to work conscientiously during the day, ignoring rotting dead bodies piling up under the floor boards in his flat.
Nilsen wrote from prison 'If I had been arrested at sixy-five years of age, there night have been thousands of bodies behind me'.