Grievous bodily harm with intent - potentially life imprisonment. I didn’t say very much to other than ‘You have no idea, Dennis, how lucky you are,’ because he would have gone to prison. “His father just said, ‘He’s not going to court.’ And I remember saying to his father, ‘Do you realize what is going to happen if you do not bring a prosecution? He’s gonna do this to somebody else,'” Brenton says in the documentary. He says the boy jumped out the window through broken glass to get away from Nilsen, but that the boy’s family refused to press charges. Brenton says he met Nilsen again later, before he had committed any murders, when he was brought into the police station after an underaged boy had been injured jumping out of Nilsen’s window.īrenton says the boy described meeting Nilsen at a bar, going home with him, being given alcohol, and then waking up sometime later, naked, with Nilsen approaching him.

He was a former police officer - and he was almost caught before he committed any murdersĭetective Sergeant Bob Brenton recalls working with Nilsen when he was a police officer, describing Nilsen as “a real loner” who did not seem to enjoy his job and that he resigned a short time later. In his tapes, Nilsen said he knew he was gay since he was a child, but lived most of his life in the closet because he had been taught to feel ashamed of his sexuality.Ī cassette tape shown in Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes on Netflix. “I wanted to see if he could remember anything extra about the pubs where he picked some of the victims up,” McCusker says in the documentary, “and he told us a lot of them were gay bars.” The victims that police identified, the doc says, are Malcolm Barlow, 23, Martyn Duffey, 16 Stephen Holmes, 14, John Howlett, 23, Kenneth Ockenden, 23, Stephen Sinclair, 20, Graham Allen, 27, and William Sutherland, 26. However, it’s worth noting that not all of his victims were gay, and only eight out of the 15 that Nilsen says he murdered have been identified, according to the documentary.

When he began his murder spree in 1978, he preyed mostly on gay men and boys who were involved in sex work in London, assuming that their disappearances would likely go unnoticed. If anything, no other British murderer has ever been so forthright in confronting his offending behavior than I have been,” Nilsen says in the documentary. “There was no question I refused to answer, going into minute detail.

Memories of a murderer rt