Professor David Wilson is also a former prison governor (Image: Express)
How does a boy raised on a dairy farm outside Carluke, South Lanarkshire, end up as arguably Britain's top criminologist? “Simple,” says Professor David Wilson. “Rugby.” None the wiser? Let him explain.
“Playing rugby at Cambridge changed the entire trajectory of my life. I was a winger; I was fast; I had a good side-step off both feet.
“But I got fouled pretty badly in one match and, when I got up off the ground, I punched the person who'd done it and broke his nose. We both got sent off – and, two hours later, we were best friends, drinking at a bar.”
That very week, the Cambridge Evening News covered a story about a young man, an unemployed laborer the same age as Wilson, who'd punched and broke the nose of the doorman outside the pub where he'd been drinking. He was arrested and subsequently sent to Borstal for two years.
“I wanted to know how his more-or-less identical violence led to two years in detention while mine had resulted in a couple of pints at the college bar,” explains Wilson, a former prison governor who has worked alongside some of Britain's most prolific murderers and on several police investigations.
Dennis Nilsen was a serial killer and necrophile (Image: Express)
“As a direct result, I finished my degree in history and philosophy, applied to study the civil service exams before being appointed an assistant prison governor (under training) at Wormwood Scrubs, the youngest in the country,” he recalls.
“The reason, of course, for the different ways in which the laborer and I were treated was down to privilege and class. I thought it was wrong then and I think it's wrong now.
“But the result was that I found myself working in a therapeutic way with men who had committed violent crimes.”
One of the first prisoners he met at the Scrubs was Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer who, between 1978 and 1983, despatched at least a dozen young men by burning their body parts or flushing them down the lavatory of his north London flat.
“Whenever we were together, I was conscious of him talking at me rather than with me. He didn't want my opinion; He simply wanted to talk about himself. He was the very definition of the philosopher Hannah Arendt's concept, in describing Adolf Eichmann: 'the banality of evil'.”
Theodore John Kaczynsk AKA the Unabomber (Image: Express)
Nilsen was in sharp contrast to Charles Bronson (now Salvador), widely regarded as Britain's most dangerous man.
“He was clearly a very troubled person, someone you had to be very careful around. There was a volatility about him, the feeling that he might erupt at any moment. But that was 30 years ago; he might have mellowed in the meantime.”
Subsequently, and after a short time with the Prison Reform Trust, Wilson joined Birmingham City University where he still teaches, was given a professorship in 2000 and was made Emeritus Professor in 2017. With Silent Witness star Emilia Fox, he also co-presents the Channel 4 series, In the Footsteps of Killers, the third helping of which will be shown in 2025.
A couple of years ago, novelist and broadcaster Marcel Theroux came into his life for advice on a TV documentary he was putting together. “We got talking and one day I happened to mention how interesting I found it that there were a number of novels which have led, directly or indirectly, to murder,” says Wilson, 67.
It turned out to be something of a lightbulb moment which has now spawned an upcoming UK tour, Killer Books, taking in 12 venues and kicking off in New Brighton, Merseyside, on September 10.
“I'd done a one-man tour last year and had rather been bitten by the bug. So, the idea of talking about books – think how many clubs there are throughout the country – combined with true crime, seemed like a no-brainer,” says Wilson.
So, which works of fiction are likely to come under scrutiny?
The Turner Diaries, a novel written in 1978 by American neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, under the name Alexander Macdonald, was a call to other white supremacists to rise up and overthrow the government. That book has inspired a number of murderers, from Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, to Anders Behring Breivik who killed 77 people in Norway, to the Brixton nail bomber, David Copeland, who quoted the novel as a call to action upon his arrest. .
Then there's Holden Caulfield.
“The disaffected teenager at the center of the novel The Catcher In The Rye, appealed to what I would describe as those of a fictive personality, people so uncertain of who they are that they latch on to a character who gives their life meaning,” Wilson says. “Mark Chapman, John Lennon's killer, so identified with him he believed he had become him.
“For what it's worth, that strikes me as incomprehensible now I've re-read the book as an adult.
“I find Holden insufferable and his actions frankly implausible. Which 16-year-old that you know would book himself into an Upper West Side hotel? Or hire the services of a sex worker?”
Wilson is reluctant to name particular books that sparked copycat killings – “I think that would be irresponsible” – but he notes that Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent was on the bedside table of Ted Kaczynski. Between 1978 and 1995, the so-called Unabomber murdered three and injured 23 in a nationwide nail bombing campaign across America against those he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment.
As he prepares to hit the road again, has Wilson ever encountered anyone in an audience who has made him wonder if that person was capable of murder?
An involuntary chuckle.
“Oh, constantly. And I have 400 new criminology students every year, at least a couple of whom will give me the heebie-jeebies.”
All of which leads to the blindingly obvious observation: there surely is a book in all of this.
● Professor David Wilson and Marcel Theroux's Killer Books Tour runs September 10 to October 22, tickets available via
professordavidwilson.co.uk