The voice takes you by surprise. Arch, urbane, a little fey: it could be TS Eliot reading The Wasteland.
Instead, it’s that of Dennis Nilsen, one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Between 1978 and 1983, Nilsen murdered at least 12 young men. Most were poor, drifters and gay. Nilsen would pick them up in bars, lure them home and strangle or drown them. He would keep the bodies for weeks, and sometimes months, using them for sexual games before disposing of them by flushing them down the toilet or burning them in his back garden. He died in 2018, after serving 35 years in prison.
Now, though, he is back on Netflix in Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes. Told largely in Nilsen’s words – using the vast archive of audio tapes he recorded in prison, and his memoirs (published controversially in January this year) – it gives us the well-trodden story of his arrest, trial and conviction.
The result is grubbily gripping. But it is also tawdry and almost entirely morally compromised. Nilsen was a gleeful self-mythologist, who orchestrated his crimes with sick showmanship. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he would be thrilled to have his own special on the world’s biggest streaming service. After finishing it, I felt like I had been standing thigh-deep in cold silage.
At this point, readers may well cry that I should pack away my pearls. True crime, after all, is big business and Netflix have proved themselves dogged in pursuit of the rubber-necking dollar. But context is crucial. And while Memories of a Murderer flirts with the idea of soberly discussing how Nilsen could kill so many, in the end it decides his victims’ suffering is best treated as sensationalist entertainment.
We began in 1983, with a blocked drain in north London. An engineer was called to 23 Melrose Avenue, and found “what would make people dry heave over their cornflakes,” recalled a reporter who covered the story. The police identified the wodge of flesh and bone as human, and arrested Nilsen as he sauntered back home. We then heard from the officer in charge who said that Nilsen immediately confessed to multiple murders and told the police where to search for further remains.