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"I stood there amazed. I found it all hard to believe, that I, Des Nilsen, had actually done all that."

Dennis Andrew Nilsen, a.k.a. "The Kindly Killer" and "The Muswell Hill Murderer", is a Scottish necrophilic serial killer who was active in London. He is sometimes called "the British Jeffrey Dahmer" because of similarities in their victimology, motives and modus operandi.

Background
Nilsen's father, Olav Magnus Nilsen (né Moksheim), was a Norwegian soldier evacuated to Scotland after the Nazi conquest in World War II; his mother, a local fisherman's daughter named Elizabeth Duthie Whyte, married him in May 1942 against the opinion of her parents. Olav Nilsen was never interested in forming a family and the marriage fell apart soon after the war ended. They divorced in 1948. As a result, the father role of their three children (Olav Jr., Dennis and Sylvia, all conceived during Nilsen's leaves from the army) was fulfilled by their maternal grandfather, Andrew Whyte. The young Nilsen was very close to his grandfather and would eagerly wait for him while he was at sea. On October 31, 1951, just a month before Nilsen's sixth birthday, Whyte died of a heart attack while he was fishing in the North Sea. His body was brought to the family home for burial and Nilsen's mother let him see it, telling him that his grandfather was sleeping. This event had a profound effect in Nilsen's personality. He became quiet and reserved, and would shun attempts to offer him affection by adult relatives. His favorite activity was to travel to the harbor, alone, and watch the fishing boats coming and going. During one of these excursions in either 1954 or 1955, Nilsen became submerged in the water and was almost dragged out to sea. He panicked at first, but once he run out of oxygen he had a near-death experience during which he calmed down and believed that his grandfather was coming for him. He was then pulled out of the water by another youngster. Shortly after this incident, Nilsen's mother remarried and the family moved to the inland village of Strichen.

With the onset of puberty, Nilsen realized that he wasn't heterosexual, but he was unsure if he was gay or bisexual, because all the boys he was attracted to looked like his sister. To test his attractions, Nilsen decided to fondle his sister and brother as they slept, but his brother woke up. Subsequently, Nilsen was bullied and called a "hen" (Scottish slang for a girl) by his brother. Resolving to leave life in Strichen, Nilsen joined the Army Cadet Force at fourteen and the British Army after finishing High School, being employed as cook. His first destination was Osnabrück, West Germany. There, Nilsen drank high quantities of alcohol to combat his shyness and help himself socialize. One time, he passed out and woke up on the floor of an appartment owned by a German friend. Though no sexual activity took place, this incident became a source for Nilsen's fantasy about having sex while one of the parties was mostly immobile, and he would pretend to be passed out during later drinking sessions, hoping that one of his partners made sexual advances on him. In 1967, Nilsen redeployed to Aden, South Yemen, and was assigned cooking duties in Al-Mansoura Prison. This was a dangerous destination. The colony was torn apart by violence from pro-independence groups (independence would be granted in November of that year) and many of Nilsen's companions were abducted or killed in ambushes. Nilsen himself was nearly abducted by a Yemeni taxi driver once. The man knocked him unconscious and placed him in the trunk of his car. However, Nilsen awoke before their destination, and when the abductor opened the trunk with the intention of dragging him out, Nilsen knocked him to the floor with a jack-handle, beat him until he was unconscious, and left him locked in his own trunk. Now granted his own room, Nilsen began to use a free-standing mirror to simulate sex with a masculine partner, and his fantasies became decidedly necrophilic after he discovered the painting The Raft of the Medusa, which depicts the survivors of a shipwreck engaging in cannibalism. Following brief stays in Britain and Cyprus, he was destined again to Germany, where he had his first sexual relation with a woman in 1969. Already twenty-four, Nilsen found the experience "overrated" and "depressing", and concluded that he was indeed homosexual.

Nilsen retired from the Army in 1972 and returned to Strichen, where his mother repeatedly voiced her concern about Nilsen's lack of interest in female companionship. A few months later, Nilsen and his brother attended a group watching of a documentary about male homosexuality. Everyone present spoke of the subject derisively, with the exception of Nilsen who made an ardent defense of gay rights. A fight between Nilsen and his brother ensued, and after its conclusion, Nilsen's brother told their mother that Nilsen was homosexual. Nilsen never talked again to his brother, and in December, he left Strichen for London to join the Metropolitan Police. After graduating from the academy, he began to visit gay pubs and have brief relationships, and resigned after a year. He later worked as a security guard for a short while, until he settled for a civil servant post at a job center.

Murders, Arrest and Incarceration
Nilsen's first fatal victim was fourteen-year-old Stephen Holmes, whom he encountered at the Cricklewood Arms pub on December 30, 1978, after Holmes attempted unsuccessfully to buy alcohol there. Nilsen had been drinking heavily and believed that Holmes was around seventeen. He invited Holmes to his home and they drank together until they fell asleep. The following morning, Nilsen awoke and found Holmes still asleep on his bed. Believing himself unable to have a prolongued relationship and fearing that Holmes would leave him to spend New Year's Eve alone, Nilsen strangled Holmes with a necktie until he was unconscious and then drowned the boy in a bucket of water at the kitchen. Nilsen masturbated twice over Holmes body and then stowed him under the floorboards. Eight months later, he built a pyre behind his home and burned the body. In October, he met Hong Kong student Andrew Ho in another pub and lured him to his appartment with the promise of sex, but Ho escaped when Nilsen tried to strangle him and reported Nilsen to the police. Nilsen was questioned about the incident but Ho declined to press charges.

Modus Operandi
Nilsen's victims were young homosexual men that he met in bars or transients that he run across randomly. He would lure them to his home by offering them food, alcohol or shelter and strangle them with a ligature after they passed out or fell asleep. If the victim was unconscious but not dead yet, he would drown them in his sink, bathtub or in a bucket of water. Afterward, he would bathe the corpses, clothe them and prop them, cohabiting with them as if they were still alive. Sometimes he would masturbate and perform sexual acts on the bodies, but never penetrate them. While living in Melrose Avenue, he eviscerated the bodies and abandoned the organs in a fence behind his property or near Gladstone Park, and later dismembered the bodies and burned them in a bonfire, adding car tyres to the fire in order to mask the smell of burning flesh. When he was in Muswell Hill, he flushed the flesh and smaller bones down the toilet and kept the rest in his residence.

Known Victims
Note: Besides the twelve known fatal victims, Nilsen also claimed to have killed three unnamed ones (an Irish laborer in September 1980, an English hippy in November or December 1980, and an English skinhead in April 1981). He later said that he had fabricated these victims in order to match the fifteen he said he had killed when he was first arrested, rather than admitting that he had misremembered.
 * 1967, Aden, Yemen: Unnamed taxi driver
 * 1978-1981, 195 Melrose Avenue, Lonson:
 * December 30, 1978: Stephen Dean Holmes, 14
 * 1979:
 * October 11: Andrew Ho
 * December 3: Kenneth Ockenden, 23
 * 1980:
 * May 17: Martyn Duffey, 16
 * August 11: Douglas Stewart
 * August 20: William "Billy" Sutherland, 26
 * October: An unidentified foreigner, 20-30
 * November: An unidentified Englishman, 20-30
 * 1981:
 * January 4: An unidentified 18-year-old Scotsman
 * February: An unidentified Belfast man, early 20s
 * September 18: Malcolm Barlow, 23
 * 1981-1983, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, London:
 * 1981:
 * November 23: Paul Nobbs
 * December 31: Toshimitsu Ozawa
 * 1982:
 * March: John Howlett, 23
 * Carl Stotter, 21
 * September: Archibald Graham Allen, 27
 * January 26, 1983: Stephen Sinclair, 20

On Criminal Minds
In sharp contrast to Dahmer, who is one of the most commonly referenced criminals in the show, Nilsen has only been named once. He was brought up in Drive when the BAU theorized that an unsub who decapitated his victims might be a partialist who used dismemberment as a way to obtain sexual gratification.