'I visited Britain's worst serial killer in jail - just one thing made me cry'

One of the UK's most famous and feared serial killers, Dennis Nilsen, formed an unusual friendship in the last years of his life. After reading a true crime book that had been recommended to her by a friend, Andrea Kubinova became intrigued by the life and crimes of Nilsen - and what had motivated them.

The serial killer is suspected to have killed as many as 15 people, but was convicted on six charges of murder and two of attempted murder in 1983. He was initially sentenced to 25 years, but this was upped to a whole life order nine years later - meaning he would never again be a free man.

Nilsen's crimes were horrific: he would strangle or drown his victims, before ritually bathing and shaving their corpses, sometimes photographing their bodies around his home, where he would position them in various poses and talk to them. He would then store the corpses under his floorboards.

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His method of disposing of the bodies would eventually lead to his downfall; dissecting and boiling their remains before flushing them down the toilet.

Plumbers called to his North London home to deal with a blocked drain saw what appeared to them to be parts of a human hand, and called the police. After testing revealed the drain's contents were of human origin, the police went to Nilsen's home to interview him, and were immediately met with the stench of rotting flesh inside.

Nilsen confessed to killing "15 or 16" young men "since 1978", once he was taken to the police station under caution in February 1983, but was unable to provide an answer when questioned about his motive, instead saying to the police, "I'm hoping you will tell me that".

Wanting to understand Nilsen's motives for his crimes became a preoccupation for Andrea Kubinova, who decided on the spur of the moment to write Nilsen a letter in prison back in 2013.

She had only recently moved to the UK, she previously told the Mirror, and did not actually expect Nilsen to respond to her correspondence.

"I was sickened by his crimes – it’s impossible not to feel that way. But I also found Dennis Nilsen’s story intriguing," she said.

"I was interested in his motives, and one of the most common theories about his motive was loneliness. I thought, how lonely does one have to feel to kill somebody and leave the corpse on the chair just so someone’s waiting for them when they get back home?

"I wrote to him, not expecting to hear back. Because I had nothing interesting to say, I drew a picture of his dog Bleep to try to get his attention."

She managed to get his attention with the picture and, within days, had received a reply from the sick serial killer who was in the maximum security prison, HMP Full Sutton, close to York.

"He complimented my drawing, said he was gay, an atheist, had no extreme political leaning and shared my love of animals. I had just moved to the UK from Prague and didn’t know many people.

"So I wrote back. I opened up about my daily life, job, and any problems or funny little things. His were much the same and he often gave me advice.

"All his letters were signed, ‘Des’."

For two years, the pair became avid pen pals, sending two letters a week, before Andrea - whose mum and some of her pals were dead against the correspondence - decided to take the plunge and visit him in person.

One of her friends stopped speaking to her entirely over the relationship she built with the serial killer, she told Crime Monthly, especially the fact that she "felt sympathy for him" and the loneliness that had apparently motivated him to commit these horrific crimes.

Andrea, who worked as a hotel housekeeping supervisor, never discussed the crimes explicitly with Nilsen, with the murderer instead regailing her with stories of his life in the army, and his career, and she would tell him all about her dating exploits until eventually he became a "parental figure" to her.

When they met in person in 2015, she said "I’d been nervous so I stopped off at a bar and downed a couple of shots to calm down before going to the prison.

"I was an hour late, and hadn’t realised Des had been sitting in the visiting hall, with a guard at his side and unable to move, all that time. I could see he was annoyed. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Well, you’re late’."

Andrea revealed that he sported a long scar across his face from where a fellow prisoner had once attacked him, and spoke with a thick Scottish accent.

"When I stared straight into his eyes I felt something odd. I can’t put my finger on exactly why it felt so strange. When he stood up to shake my hand at the end of our meeting, I did think, ‘What have those hands done?'"

Andrea said that he put her at ease as the visit went on, during which she bought him a coffee and they chatted about current events, "He was just so friendly," she told Crime Monthly, "it was easy to forget the crimes he had committed."

"I don’t know what I wanted to gain from Des, I just wanted to meet him. He had hardly any visitors and said his family had all disowned him. I had a unique opportunity to sit opposite him and didn’t want to miss it," Andrea explained to the Mirror about her desire to take a seven-hour bus journey to York to meet the serial killer.

Despite the fact that she never asked him about his horrifying crime spree, he once divulged to her that he knew all too well he deserved to be exactly where he was and that he was sorry for the impact he had on his victims' families.

Over the course of the years, the pair exchanged over 300 letters, but only one thing brought Andrea to tears about the serial killer: his eventual death.

Nilsen suffered a pulmonary embolism in May 2018, aged 72, after undergoing surgery. A friend of the murderer's rang Andrea to tell her before the news hit the press, and she said she was "devastated" and "started to cry" when she learned her "close friend" had died.

She mourned the loss for a long period, she revealed, and was inspired by their relationship to become a probation officer.

"I don’t judge people on the worst things they have done in their lives and one day hope the letters will help me understand criminals and try to stop them hurting people.

"And I’m shocked myself to say it, but Des became a big part of my life."