![]() Nilsen doesn’t really discuss the particulars of his gruesome pastime his thoughts on that subject are conveyed by director Harte via transcribed commentary, and police and court records presented as typewriter text. This information, as well as the fact that Nilsen was gay and often preyed upon homosexual men, became prime fodder for the media, and BBC correspondent Bill Hamilton is one of multiple interviewees to state, in Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes, that he got a sensationalistic thrill out of learning about Nilsen’s horrific crimes. At Cranley Gardens, the drain pipe was a central means of body disposal, whereas at his prior residence at 195 Melrose Avenue he’d stashed corpses beneath the floorboards-and burned their bodies in bonfires in a rear garden-until he ran out of space and had to move. Nilsen’s modus operandi involved picking up male drifters and “rent boys” and bringing them back to his home, where he’d kill them. The details that soon emerged were grisly. Neighbors claimed that they’d seen Nilsen near that drain around midnight the previous evening, and when he returned home from his job at the local Job Centre, he led investigators into his flat, where the stench was fetid thanks to two giant garbage bags that, he confessed, contained the remains of numerous victims. Nonetheless, he was as cold-blooded as they come, a raging sociopath who admitted to killing 15 men during a five-year span from 1978-1983, and who was only caught when an engineer was called to fix a clogged drain at his Cranley Gardens apartment complex in North London, and discovered that the cause of the back-up was an enormous amount of human flesh and bone. Like Ted Bundy before him and Jeffrey Dahmer after, Nilsen didn’t fit the typical homicidal-maniac profile (he had even served, for a time, as a police officer). There’s no denying that Nilsen’s nondescript exterior-lanky frame, glasses, schoolboy haircut-was part of what made him such a macabre spectacle. Intended to form the foundation of his autobiography (itself an attention-courting vanity project), these recordings find the murderer expounding on his life and circumstances with an eloquence that reeks of affected smugness-a quality that’s also true of his everyman schtick, as if anyone would buy for a second that, because of his ordinary appearance and demeanor, he wasn’t a dangerous predator. ![]() Nilsen’s protests, however, don’t jibe with the many audio tapes he made while in prison. ![]() ![]() ![]() 18, on Netflix) begins with Nilsen slamming the notion that he deliberately sought immortality, as was claimed by a newspaper article that surmised he had a hunger for the spotlight from the Hannibal Lecter poster hanging in his jail cell. Helmed by first-time director Michael Harte, who’s previously edited Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer as well as Three Identical Strangers, Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes (Aug. To that list one can now add Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes, a non-fiction film whose primary draw is a raft of personal recordings made by Dennis Nilsen, the Scottish madman who terrorized London during the 1980s, and whose killing spree, and attempt to avoid incarceration, was recently immortalized by a Sundance Now dramatic series starring David Tennant. Killers don’t like to get caught, but once in custody, they sure do like to talk, as evidenced by a raft of true-crime efforts- Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Confronting a Serial Killer, The Confession Killer, The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness and Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime, among others-centered around taped conversations with notorious fiends. ![]()
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