Serial killer Dennis Nilsen butchered my uncle – his tattoo helped nail monster but the pain ripped my family apart
Mary-Jane Pettit escaped the 'dark shadow' of the gut-wrenching tragedy to build a remarkable, inspirational business empire
CLEANING boss Mary-Jane Pettit is worth £15 million, lives in a five-bedroom mansion and holidays in some of the world’s most exotic destinations.
She went from a council house to a life of luxury after starting work as a cleaner when she was just 14.
Bond actor Daniel Craig is one of her neighbours in an upmarket area of Berkshire, she drives an £80,000 Lotus and is now launching a new – but her climb to the top was far from easy.
Her life is haunted by a “dark shadow” that almost destroyed her family.
Her uncle William Sutherland, 26, was one of serial killer Dennis Nilsen’s victims.
The depraved Scot murdered at least 15 men and boys between 1978 and 1983, strangling them – often with neckties – before keeping them under his floorboards.
Nilsen even had sex with rotting corpses before chopping them up and burning them in his garden.
Mary-Jane says her mum Mary turned to booze after her brother’s death and her step-dad also hit the bottle, haunted by a last-minute decision not to leave Edinburgh for London with William to look for work.
She says she was neglected by her parents and twice taken into foster care, left alone on Christmas Day and fled the tough Edinburgh fringe estate of Wester Hailes to London aged 16.
Now 46, she tells The Sun: “Uncle Billy’s death left a dark cloud over the whole family and there’s been so much generational hurt and trauma.
“My grandma Frances ended up in a mental institution for a while, as did her daughter Joyce, my mum had a break down and started drinking to numb the pain of losing her brother.
“She’s had a row with him before he went to London because she didn’t want him to go so the last time she saw him they had cross words, which she felt awful about.
“There was no mental health agencies around to help families back then so I don’t blame any of them for being unable to cope, but it had a huge impact on everyone around them.
“Every Christmas, birthday or special event centred around the fact uncle Billy was no longer there. It’s hard to imagine how any parent could cope with the unimaginable way he was killed.”
Killer closes in
Billy, a chef, left his home in Muirhouse, Edinburgh to look for work in London in August 1980 but vanished within days of arriving in the capital.
He went to the job centre where Nilsen, who grew up in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, worked and, on hearing his Scottish accent, the killer suggested they went for a drink together.
It would be three years before Billy’s body was found during a police dig at Nilsen’s garden in Muswell Hill, north London.
Cops were alerted after a plumber was called out to fix a blocked drain at the property, after neighbours reported a terrible smell. Workman Michael Cattran later described how he pulled “lumps of flesh the size of his fist” from the drain.
Billy’s family were watching news of the police search when detectives knocked on the door to deliver the grim news that Billy was among the victims.
His only remains were a piece of skin with a tattoo and his false teeth, which forensic scientists used to identify him. The evidence helped nail Nilsen who initially confessed to killing “around 15” people.
Nilsen made himself notorious – it sickens me
Mary-Jane Pettit
Mary-Jane still remembers the day her family had a memorial service for Billy when, put into a pretty dress by her mum, the seven-year-old first thought she was going to a wedding.
She said: “I remember the black cars and everyone crying.
“I had a nice new peach dress and my aunt had bathed me and washed my hair and couldn’t understand why everyone was so upset because I initially thought it was a wedding we were going to.
“I can clearly remember people saying ‘this isn’t right, we don’t have a body’.”
Mary-Jane says her mum’s mental health started to deteriorate after her brother’s death while her step-dad struggled with the decision not to travel to London for work with Billy as first planned.
She said: “They both started drinking heavily and I was twice taken into foster care with my brother, who was seven years older than me. One time I was with another family for a year and another about seven months.
“I recall getting up one morning and my foster parents were sitting down to breakfast, making toast with jam and thinking ‘what’s going on here’. I was watching this family live an ordinary life, yet my normality was very different.
“My mum and her siblings were always fighting and arguing. I had a relative who was in and out of jail and one doing drugs. There was always a drama going on.
“Mum would think nothing of disappearing for a weekend and leaving me on my own. One Christmas Day when I was a young teenager, I actually told them to go to the pub because they obviously wanted to be there and not at home.”
Against all odds
When she was 14, Mary-Jane, now a mum of three boys, started spending time with an older sister who lived in London and travelled to and from her home in Edinburgh.
She got a job as a cleaner at the offices of a car hire firm and was paid in cash.
After finishing school she moved to Bracknell in Greater London where she started getting more cleaning jobs before setting up her business, Pioneer FM, a year before the pandemic hit.
It specialised in sanitisation and, now with 20 staff, Mary-Jane was approached by the Government to take on a £6million contract cleaning offices and lorry parks.
It was the lucky break that showed her hard work had paid off and she took on more than 1,000 new employees.
Despite her fractured upbringing, Mary Jane holds no grudge against her family who, she says, were “dealing with life under the worst circumstances”.
She said: “I made my peace with mum years before she died aged 72 in 2020 and my boys loved their nan.
“I look back now as an adult and I can look at mum and see her trauma and understand why she was the way she was.
“If anything my upbringing has made me into the determined, self sufficient person I am now. I’ve got my cleaning business and recently set up clothing company, Pioneer Clothing, and a recruitment firm.”
Mary-Jane says her family are still furious about the fact Billy was labelled a male prostitute when he was a divorcee with a girlfriend and a three-year-old son.
She said: “One of uncle Billy’s brothers is gay and nobody batted an eyelid in the family about his sexuality, nobody would have cared.
“But, in the early days Billy was called a male prostitute, and that hurt the family a lot because it wasn’t true.
Dark ripples
Mary-Jane and husband Stuart, 47, might enjoy a high-end lifestyle with holidays in distant places like the Maldives and the Caribbean, but she has never strayed far from her roots.
She said: “I said I’d never move from Bracknell where my first council property was but when I bought a big house I moved to a nice area because it was less than a couple of miles away.”
She said she can never forget – or forgive – the way her uncle was murdered.
“It caused untold trauma that still ripples through the family today.
“It sickens me how Nilsen gained notoriety for his crimes. He has immortalised himself.
Killer's victims
DENNIS Nilsen, one of the UK's worst ever serial killers, was caged for life in 1983 after murdering up to 15 men he mainly picked up from the streets.
Nilsen, from Fraserburgh in Scotland, strangled or drowned his victims before dissecting them, between 1978 and 1983.
Nilsen confessed to police of committing 15 murders in February 1983 after they visited his home at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, north London.
He could reportedly only name 12, however, and he was only charged over six murders.
He was jailed for life in 1983 and died in 2018.
His first victim was Stephen Dean Holmes in December 1978. He was just 14 and met Nilsen in a pub.
The killer kept his body in his flat for several months and even slept beside it.
The following year, Nilsen strangled Canadian tourist Kenneth Ockendon, 23, who ended up at his flat after a day of sightseeing.
Kenneth was strangled with the lead of a set of headphones as Nilsen listened to a record.
In May 1980 the monster strangled and drowned 16-year-old homeless lad Martin Duffey. He later bathed his body before placing it under floorboards.
William Sutherland was his next victim three months later and Nilsen said he could not recall exactly how he murdered him, other than that he had used strangulation at one point.
Nilsen murdered seven more between August 1980 and April 1981 but claimed he didn’t know their names. Among them were an Irish labourer he described as having “rough hands”, a Filipino or Mexican prostitute aged between 20 and 30, an English homeless man, a “long-haired hippy”, an 18-year-old “blue-eyed Scot” and a man from Belfast in his 20s.
The sick killer claimed his next prey was an English skinhead aged around 20 who slaughtered before hanging his torso in his bedroom for 24 hours. He later claimed to have fabricated this victim.
In September 1981, he came to the aid of epileptic Malcolm Barlow, 23, who was having a seizure.
Malcolm, who spent much of his life in care, was the final person to be killed at Nilsen’s Melrose Avenue address in Cricklewood, north west London.
Nilsen said Malcolm went to his home to thank him for his assistance but was murdered. His body was stowed in a kitchen cupboard as there was no further room beneath his floorboards. His body was later dissected.
John Howlett was the first of Nilsen’s victims killed at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, in March 1982.
The 23-year-old slept at the murderer’s flat and woke up to find himself being strangled before being drowned. His body was cut up, his organs flushed down the toilet and large bones “put out with the rubbish.”
Six months later lost tourist Graham Allen, 27 asked Nilsen for directions and ended up dead, strangled with a ligature as he ate an omelette the killer had cooked for him. Nilsen was never charged over the killing but Graham was identified from dental records.
Stephen Sinclair was Nilsen’s last kill in January 1983 before a plumber was called to the property to unblock drains and alerted the police.
Stephen, 20, was a heroin addict who Nilsen bought a burger in Oxford Street and invited home.
“His lack of remorse and cavalier attitude to his victims scares me and he left behind a trial of disaster and sorrow.”
Nilsen, a former Army chef who, incredibly, spent six months as a junior Metropolitan police officer, died in May 2018 aged 72 after suffering a blood clot.
He spent his at HMP Sutton prison, in East Yorks, in “excruciating agony” lying in his own faeces before being taken to hospital in York where he died following an emergency operation.
The twisted monster sued the Home Office to publish his memoirs but lost. His gruesome autobiography, History of a Drowning Boy, was released posthumously in 2021 and spawned a Netflix docuseries.
Actor David Tennant played Nilsen in a chilling ITV drama called Des in 2020.
