Gay Serial Killer Dennis Nilsen’s Autobiography Confesses To New Murders

Gay Serial Killer Dennis Nilsen’s Autobiography Confesses To New Murders
Image: Dennis Nilsen after arrest in 1983.

In his forthcoming posthumous autobiography, serial killer Dennis Nilsen has confessed to a series of new crimes.

Nilsen’s book, penned from behind bars, details a previously unknown sexual assault on a drunken soldier and two murders by strangulation.

At the time of his trial, Nilsen was known to have murdered at least 12 mostly homosexual men and boys during his six-year spree from 1978 to 1983. However, only seven victims were ever identified, leaving the true number a mystery.

The Scottish serial killer was only charged with six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 1983.

His unpublished memoir, History Of A Drowning Boy, is based on some 6,000 pages of notes he left to his prison pen pal.

Nilsen’s attempt to have the book published in the 1990s was blocked by the government. However, publishers were granted permission after the killer’s death in 2018 at age 72.

 Family and friends of Nilsen’s victims are outraged at the prospect of his words being granted such credence.

One relative described the book’s publication as Nilsen “still laughing at us from beyond the grave.”

Julie Bentley, whose brother survived one of Nilsen’s attempted murders, called the memoir “morally wrong.”

Her brother, Carl Stottor, who narrowly escaped death at the hands of Nilsen in 1982, eventually took his own life in 2013.

“Nilsen may not have killed his body that night, but he killed the Carl I knew and idolised as a child. He ended up in a worse hell than Nilsen, and a prison of his own.”

“Carl fought all his life to have those memoirs stopped,” said Bentley. “When that evil man died, I thought it was over. Why should he have his say when the victims can’t have their word?”

Nilsen’s story was also told in a television mini-series last year. Des, starring David Tennant as the eponymous, drew similar criticisms at the time of its release.

The brother of one victim described the series as “trying to glorify a murderer.”

In an interview, Tennant addressed such concerns, stating Des was made “in no way to celebrate the macabre, but to memorialise the victims as much as anything.”

History Of A Drowning Boy is set to be released next week.

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