Serial killer Dennis Nilsen has died in prison, the Ministry of Justice has said.

The 72-year-old is understood to have died of natural causes at HMP Full Sutton maximum security prison in Yorkshire.

Nilsen is believed to have killed at least 15 young men, most of them homeless homosexuals, during a murderous spree between 1978 and 1983.

He was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders at the Old Bailey in 1983.

The former civil servant killed and dismembered many of his victims at two addresses in Muswell Hill, north London.

His victims would be lured to these addresses through guile and all were murdered by strangulation, sometimes accompanied by drowning.



His crimes were only detected by chance – when a drain outside his home in Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, became blocked by the human remains he had tried to flush away.



A spokesman for the prison service said: “Dennis Andrew Nilsen, date of birth 23 November 1945, died in custody at HMP Full Sutton on Saturday, 12 May 2018.

“As with all deaths in custody, there will be an independent investigation by the prisons and probation ombudsman.”

In 1993, the bespectacled Scottish murderer told an interviewer how he enjoyed caring for the bodies, dressing them and undressing them and recounted in horrific detail how they were then cut up.

While some remains were inexpertly flushed away by Nilsen, others were stored under his floorboards and in cupboards for many months, meaning detectives were greeted with the foetid stench of decay when they first searched his flat.

Nilsen said: “The bodies are all gone. There is nothing left. But I still feel a spiritual communion with these people.”

The sentence given to him in 1983 was later upgraded to a whole-life tariff.