A Moors Murderer, the Yorkshire Ripper and a necrophiliac slayer of young men. Between them, responsible for the deaths of more than 30 innocents, Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe and Dennis Nilsen were described by one journalist as the ‘unholy trinity of the most evil men in modern Britain’, they were also the subjects of the most chilling play I have ever directed, Killers, by Glenn Chandler.
Adapted from their actual prison correspondence, Killers offered a revealing insight into the criminal mind while giving a fascinating glimpse into the mentality of the people who, for many different and often disturbing reasons, choose to enter into long-distance written relationships with society’s most evil.
Set in three prison cells, the play finds the three serial killers locked away for life, their only communication with the outside world, scrawled letters to their ‘fans’. Sociable, sympathetic and sinister, these letters challenged audiences to dare look into the soul of a killer, accompanied by the warning: ‘Think you know Brady, Sutcliffe and Nilsen? Meet them… and think again!’
Written and produced by award-winning playwright Chandler, best known for creating the world’s longest-running police drama, Taggart, Killers starred Arron Usher as Dennis Nilsen, Edward Cory as lan Brady and Gareth Morrison as Peter Sutcliffe. It premiered in the atmospheric depths of Brighton’s Old Police Cells Museum in 2013, part of that year’s Brighton Fringe. It would later be remounted at that year’s Edinburgh Fringe, playing the Assembly Rooms.
The piece itself explored the nature of evil, posing the question whether Brady, Nilsen and Sutcliffe were born monsters or creations of society while also exploring what drives the need for some to communicate with such people.
As Chandler told the BBC at the time, the letters adapted for the play were sent to schoolchildren, supermarket shelf-stackers and lonely women by Brady, who killed five children in north-west England in the 1960s, Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 women in the 1970s and 80s, and Nilsen, who killed 15 men in his London flat, disposing of their remains by boiling body parts in his kitchen.
The revelations in the letters, ranging from the disturbing to the surreal to the mundane, find Brady confiding in a schoolboy that his favourite film is Bambi, Nilsen giving relationship advice to a confused Waitrose worker looking for a gay affair, and Sutcliffe assuring an infatuated woman he is no longer dangerous as he now ignores the voices in his head.
“Believe me, lots of women write to the Yorkshire Ripper and fall in love with him,” revealed Chandler. “The strangest people become fans of serial killers. The exciting thing about the letters are the little mundane things about them, such as Brady talking about his favourite film and the avuncular advice that these serial killers give their fans on the outside; Brady is advises his schoolboy correspondent to stick with school, and not follow a life of crime like he did, and become a mechanic or a chef and he picks him up on his handwriting.
“Nilsen likewise. One gets the impression the boy is writing to him saying, ‘I’m very lonely, I don’t have any friends.’ Nilsen is writing saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to go out and make friends.’ He tells Nilsen that he wants to go out and have a gay relationship. Nilsen says, ‘Remember, a gay relationship is a two-way thing. You must give and take.’ Yet here’s a guy who killed 15 men and chopped up the bodies. Some of the ironies in the letters are absolutely fascinating.”
The letters give a valuable insight into the psyches of each killer, Chandler believes. “In the letters, Brady refuses to answer questions about his crimes and shows no remorse, asking the boy, ‘Why are you interested in me? Why aren’t you interested in an American Air Force pilot who drops bombs on a village in Iraq? Is it because he kills with official permission and I don’t kill with official permission? Is that what makes me so interesting?’ He goes on about that but he won’t talk about his crimes.”
Chandler continued, “The Yorkshire Ripper, on the other hand, he does. He says to his lady correspondent, ‘I’m cured now. I still hear the voices telling me to do these bad things, but I know that they’re bad and I don’t listen to them any more. If I got out now I’d be all right, I’d be perfectly safe, I wouldn’t hurt you. I know all the things I did were bad and I wish I could put the clock back and not do them.’ You get the feeling there’s not a lot of sincerity there, ‘the things I did were bad,’ is a bit of an understatement.
“All three three are linked by a sense of self-importance that comes from the knowledge that they have a reputation as criminal celebrities – if you’re Sutcliffe and you get 50 letters a month from different women… he never had that when he was a lorry driver.”
If that all sounds chilling, the insidious nature of Nilsen quickly became evident when he contacted Chandler after reading about the production in a newspaper. Nilsen got a message to the writer through a third party, at first threatening, when that failed, he later attempted to manipulate Chandler into allowing him become a part of the process by offering personal information about his correspondent. His approaches were naturally ignored.
As Usher, who portrayed Nilsen, admitted in an interview with the Johnstone Gazette, his blood ran cold when he heard Nilsen had contacted the show’s producer. He said, “When I first heard Nilsen had been in touch, it was quite unnerving. A shiver ran down my spine and I was quite shocked he’d have the arrogance to get in touch.”
Chandler elaborated, “He wanted me to know he was now ‘just a 68-year-old geezer’ who accepted people would always want to write about him – which was his way of tacitly giving his approval to Killers. It was not direct. It was passed through another party. He knew so much about the play. It was almost as if he was sitting there watching it. It was actually beginning to spook me a bit.”
Just as unnerving were the fans of the killers who turned up to see the show, including one of Sutcliffe’s ‘girlfriends’ who carried her collection of his letters to her in a carrier bag that she took wherever she went, and a young man Nilsen had stopped writing too and who confided to Chandler and myself in the bar after one performance that attending the show was his way of being close to Nilsen once more. Consequently, Killers is the only production I’ve worked on where the cast were instructed not to interact with audience members after the show. Indeed, for the Edinburgh Fringe run, arrangements were made to ensure the three actors could leave and be on the way home before the last of the audience had even left the venue.
Another interesting memory I have of Killers is that ahead of the Edinburgh Fringe performances, the company were invited to ‘meet’ a fourth serial killer, William Burke, when they posed for some unexpected publicity shots with a chilling artefact provided for the occasion by Robin Mitchell of Cadies Tours, a calling-card case crafted from the skin of William Burke, one half of Burke & Hare.
The grisly case, made from skin taken from Burke’s left hand, was sold at auction for £1,050 in 1988 by the family of Piercy Hughes, a descendent of a surgeon involved in the dissection of Burke. The calling-card case can still be viewed at the William Burke Museum, the smallest museum in the world, which houses that sole exhibit, at Cadies Tours on Edinburgh’s West Bow.
For myself, however, the most chilling moment working on Killers was the first time I was handed one of Brady’s hand-written letters, his signature scrawled across the bottom. Holding that piece of paper that he had once held, sent a distinct shiver down my spine – it was as if I could sense his darkness.
Brady, Nilsen and Sutcliffe have since all died in prison; Brady in 2017, Nilsen in 2018 and Sutcliffe in 2020. The world is undoubtedly a better place without them.
An excellent and particularly atmospheric and chilling article written by one who had and still has a major part of it. Makes one want to seethe production.