London: Gay serial killer Dennis Nilsen spoke about his first victim a boy of 14 whose body he kept under the floorboards of his flat for eight months.
In a letter sent to the Standard from his prison cell which prosecutors said could be used as new evidence against him Nilsen told how he picked up Stephen Holmes in December 1978 in a pub.
He lured the boy to his flat in Cricklewood where he strangled him with a tie until he was semi-conscious and then drowned him by holding his head in a bucket of water. It was the beginning of a series of gruesome murders of young men that went on until his arrest in 1983.
Nilsen was only stopped after human remains were found in a blocked drain at the flat he had moved to in Muswell Hill. In the letter, Nilsen, 60, confessed: "Stephen Dean Holmes was the first of 12 homicide victims." In fact it is known he killed at least 15 men, among them rent boys, students and the homeless. He sexually interfered with their corpses which he then dismembered. At least seven men remain unidentified.
Nilsen, an interviewer at a job centre who had previously worked in the Army and police, was not charged with murdering Stephen at the time of his trial because the boy could not be identified. Last week a spokes-woman for the Crown Prosecution Service said Nilsen's letter could be considered if the case was formally re-opened.
Stephen, from Kilburn, was identified when Nilsen was shown a photograph of him last year by police. The killer confirmed to detectives that the boy in the picture was his first victim. It came too late for Stephen's mother Kathleen who campaigned to find out what had happened to her son. She died four years ago.
Nilsen said Stephen had spent the night with him after drinking heavily and he decided to strangle him the next morning because he was fearful the boy would leave. He said he wanted company for New Year. He stuffed the boy's body under the floorboards where he left it decaying until August the following year when he burned it on a bonfire in his back garden.
He used the same method to dispose of several victims, raking their ashes into the ground.
Nilsen was caught out after moving to a flat in Cranley Gardens where he lived in the attic and had no access to a garden. He chopped up victims and stuffed their bodies down the drain. After complaints about the smell, a plumber found 30 to 40 pieces of flesh beneath the manhole cover, leading to Nilsen's arrest and conviction on six counts of murder.
