Life & Mortality Quote by Dennis Nilsen

The syntax does what Dennis Nilsen’s crimes required: it drains agency out of the speaker and pours it into the air of the room. Everything is bluntly observable - “lying dead,” “fully clothed,” “He was dead” - as if repeating the fact can turn a murder into a discovery. The childlike insistence on description doubles as a legal alibi-in-progress: he’s narrating the scene, not the act.

Then come the escape hatches. “I got the impression he wanted to go” smuggles in consent where none is possible, a classic predator’s move to launder violence as accommodation. “I must have killed him” pretends uncertainty while landing exactly where he needs to: yes, a death occurred; no, he can’t supply the incriminating mechanics. That “must” is doing heavy work, offering responsibility in the abstract while withholding it in the concrete.

The most chilling line is the one that performs amnesia as self-defense: “I can’t remember strangling him.” Not “I didn’t,” but “I can’t remember” - a rhetorical shrug that keeps moral panic at bay and invites the listener to negotiate with doubt. The finale, “I just sat there shocked,” tries on a normal human reaction like a costume, the same way “fully clothed” signals staged decorum. Context matters: Nilsen was a serial killer who cultivated intimacy with vulnerable men, then rewrote the aftermath as confusion, accident, even mercy. The quote isn’t confession so much as a script for dissociation - a way to sound haunted without sounding culpable.