Elena

He had no friends or family in the city, so he spent four days sleeping in train stations, surviving on whatever food he could scrounge from the trash.

In many ways, he was kind of an ideal victim at this point for someone like Dennis Nilsen.

Yeah.

He came from a troubled home.

He had struggled with his parents since reaching his teen years.

Yeah.

He's not familiar with this area.

He had been picked up by the police for shoplifting on several occasions.

And a lot of times he would stay out all night at the bars around the Liverpool area.

So this wasn't like immediately setting off alarm bells.

Yeah.

At one point, Martin's parents had become so frustrated with him that they had him committed to a residential facility for troubled adolescents.

Oh, wow.

And he received psychiatric treatment there.

After his discharge from the facility, Martin genuinely seemed to want to turn his life around, even managing to stay off drugs and maintaining a job.

That's great.

By all accounts, things were going well for him until April 1980 when he was picked up by police for fare evasion.

He was let go with a warning, but for whatever reason, that incident caused him to backslide into his old habits.

And on May 13th, he packed a small suitcase and left his parents' house for the last time.

When he ran into Dennis Nilsen on the night of May 17th, he was bordering on desperate death.