From Dennis Nilsen to hitmen and violent killers, criminologist's fascinating insight into his life with murderers

“One particular [player] behaved abysmally towards me. We both got up from the pitch and I punched him in the face and broke his nose. We both got sent off and then we made friends and we had a beer in the bar. He apologised for fouling me, I apologised for breaking his nose and nobody thought any more about that incident.”

Except that it just so happened that in the same week the local newspaper covered the story of a young man from Cambridge, the same age as Prof Wilson, who had got into a fight at the end of a night out and had punched his victim. He got sent to prison for two years.

“I wanted to know why my violence as a university student in the context of a rugby pitch was any different to his violence,” he says. “That was a key thing that changed my thinking. I wanted to know about crime and punishment and about criminology.”

Prof Wilson’s first job was as an assistant governor at Wormwood Scrubs men’s prison in London, a far-cry from the rural idyll in which he had grown up. He was raised on a dairy farm in Scotland, brought up by his three older sisters after the death of his parents when he was a young child. “It was very difficult,” he reflects of that first prison role. “I was 23 years old. I was Dr Wilson, I was wet behind the ears. I was out of my depth and I relied on prison officers helping me get through the strange world of having to manage inside a prison.”

Still, Prof Wilson spent more than a decade in HM Prison Service, from 1983 to 1997. At Woodhill prison in Milton Keynes, he helped to design – and then ran – two units for the 12 most violent prisoners in the country. He also spent time as a governor at Grendon in Buckinghamshire, which operates as a therapeutic community for prisoners. “Every day they had to talk about their offending and try to learn different ways of living within the institution. That taught me a great deal about violence and murderers because those men had to talk.”

Prof Wilson regularly came into contact with violent men and high-profile killers. Long before he became a criminologist, they taught him about violence. He would listen intently as they talked about the circumstances in which they would commit murder. One of first people he encountered in his career was Dennis Nilsen, a serial killer and necrophile who murdered a number of young men in London in the late 70s and early 80s. Prof Wilson remained in contact with Nilsen by letter until his death in York in 2018.

"We’re never quite sure about the number of people he might have killed because he would exaggerate and then deny and so forth. Sometimes I don’t think he even remembered…

“He publicly acknowledged that I had worked with him. I tend not to name the others [I have worked with] because they’re very narcissistic and I don’t like to give their name because it puts them as the centre of the story. I tend not to put the murderer as the centre of things I write or talk about or present on television because I think we should be putting the victim at the heart of the story.”

After a stint as a senior policy adviser to the Prison Reform Trust, Prof Wilson moved into academia. He is an Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University and the founding director of the university’s Centre for Criminal Justice and Research.

Among his work, he has studied which jobs are most likely to attract serial killers. “Driving occupations allow a murderer or serial killer to be in different places away from home so often they can scout out suitable victims, a suitable place to attack and so forth,” he says. “A lot of our most prolific serial killers – people like Peter Sutcliffe, Robert Black – often have got driving occupations.”

Prof Wilson’s other research interests range from British serial murder to family annihilation, hitmen and lethal violence, as well as prison history and penal reform. He has also advised on live police investigations and has provided training to new senior investigating officers as they take charge of murder inquiries."[In this line of work], you're going to encounter people who have done appalling and despicable things,” he adds. “You have to be psychologically robust enough to be able to cope with the demands of talking about, and meeting with, this kind of offender or with families of victims of this kind of offender.”

As well as his academic work, Prof Wilson is a television presenter, who has fronted Channel 4’s In the Footsteps of Killers and David Wilson’s Crime Files for BBC Scotland. He’s also the author of a number of books including his professional memoir My Life With Murderers. His tour of the same name draws on his unparalleled knowledge of murder, delving into both infamous and lesser-known true crime cases.

He hopes to share “the reality of murder”, unpicking some of the popular beliefs and television dramatisations. “I also want to persuade the audience that an interest in true crime is not just normal but necessary,” he says. “And, above all, to offer hope about how we can reduce the incidence of murder and serial murder in our culture.”

Professor David Wilson is at Sheffield City Hall on April 11. Visit MyLifewithMurderers.com for tickets.