Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
The softly approach made sure he talked
DS Chris Healey
DETECTIVE sergeant Chris Healey says that just as the drama shows Nilsen was given the softly, softly approach by the police.
It rankled with some on the team but it worked.
Chris, played by Jay Simpson, explains: “There was a saying, you’ve got to kill him with kindness. It would have been, ‘Do you want another packet of cigarettes?’ The more you could get out of him the better, obviously. His solicitor was saying, ‘You’re sure you want to say all this? And he was, ‘Yes, yes, I want to get it off my chest’.” Healey thinks if he’d been interrogated in the proper fashion, Nilsen would wo have withdrawn co-operation: co “As soon as you started sta to treat him with animosity, an he would have said, ‘I’m just jus not assisting any more’.”
He remembers how helpful
Nil Nilsen was, after the drains at his fla flat in Cranley Gardens became blo blocked with body parts, leading to his arrest: “I took him back the there the day after and he was co completely compliant.”
“He was just showing us ‘under these floorboards, that’s where I put the bodies. Lift this and you might find traces of this and that’.”
He said they had never
encountered a killer anything like Nilsen before. “Obviously, it is strange, but he seemed almost like, ‘Well, that’s it, I’ve been caught, and it doesn’t worry me if I’ve got to go to prison.’
“He’d been institutionalised all his life. In the Army, in the police and then back to the employment agency. It’s all institutionalised jobs where you’re told what to do. I think he quite gloried in it, that he was going to be infamous.”
In the drama, Carl Stottor is shown to be crucial to the case, as he had survived a murder attempt by Nilsen. Healey says he played his part in getting Stottor, throttled but brought round by Nilsen’s dog Bleep, to the court.
“He was a bit of a troubled soul, Carl Stotter. He made a statement, but didn’t want to come to court to give evidence… Because there was no CPS, you were responsible for getting your witness to court. He phoned up and said, ‘I can’t get to court, I haven’t got any money’.
“In the end, I said, ‘Get a taxi, I’ll meet you and I’ll pay for it,’ and he turned up at The Old Bailey.”