Killing For Company

This is a superb and beautifully written book about one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers – Dennis Nilsen. 

Brian Masters bases his text on documents, letters, and other materials that Nilsen sent, or shared with him and whilst the two would later fall out – Nilsen was a notoriously touchy and narcissistic man, this remains a detailed and forensic account of him and the crimes that he committed. In my own work I got to know Nilsen well and would often check out some of the things that he claimed to me by returning to Killing For Company.  

Denis Nilsen was arrested in 1983 because of the body parts found in his flat and then, in the car on the way to the police station, he confessed to more than a dozen murders. He had worked as a police officer himself and set about telling his story as clearly as he could manage it, dismissing his lawyer when Nilsen thought he was interfering. Nilsen, like the more popular Ted Bundy, liked talking, and one of the people he liked talking to was Brian Masters, whom he picked to write his biography. Masters negotiates Nilsen’s troubled life with his… show more.

The strength of Masters’s book about the London serial killer Dennis Nilsen, convicted in 1983, is access. Nilsen spoke to Masters at length, and apparently truthfully, about his life and crimes. As we follow Nilsen from birth to conviction, we begin to understand how he came to think and act as he did.