Nilsen didn't drive, so without the possibility of removing their bodies from his home, he dismembered the corpses, then buried the remains beneath the floorboards or flushed them away.

As he hammers out his garrulous letter on an antiquated typewriter, Hamish and Tweetles the budgerigars flap freely around his cell, which contains a desk, a toilet and a bed. He won't be allowed a television for another year, but copies of The Guardian and Private Eye lying on the floor are evidence of his interest in the outside world; a world that, by and large, would prefer never to hear from him again.

Nilsen's letter discusses an autobiography he has written that, he says, tries to show why he became a killer capable of such depravity. The 400-page manuscript is in four separate parts. It includes an analysis of his stunted emotional and sexual development; a description of life as a prisoner that he has mainly spent in a vulnerable prisoners' unit (he calls it a "ghetto for nonces"); and an explanation of why he feels it is important that those who have never met him should see beyond the label of "monster". Though far from complete, it is unique. Nilsen is the only serial killer to have attempted this kind of self-analysis.

"I serve my time as an extreme example of human contradiction in the wide continuum of human nature and its actions," his letter says. He continues: "I am not contained, mute and immobile in a glass jar as some kind of eternal official specimen of popular 'evil'. As I am alive I must live as a man."

To be human, he believes, is to be allowed the freedom to explore the reasons why he became a killer. In another letter sent to me in May 2003, he says: "I seek only to reach out to engage with the human dimension which is anathema to rigid officials of the retribution machine who are content with the official view of men like me as eternally and evilly sub-human and monstrous."

His letters and essays make it clear he believes in his own humanity, despite his past actions. And though he is not campaigning for release (in 1994 his sentence was changed from a minimum of 25 years to a whole life tariff) he wants to exercise what he sees as his right to be heard. He writes: "I know the Home Office will keep me in for natural life one way or the other. Punishment does not come so much from a prison sentence, but from the knowledge of what one has done, a fact in itself never to be adequately redressed."

There are three known copies of the full first draft of his autobiography, The History of a Drowning Boy: the original with his friend Mark (who has asked not to be identified), a second
with the cult gay writer P-P Hartnett, and a third that his solicitor holds pending a decision at a judicial review in the High Court on October 20 on whether he should be allowed to continue working on it. In March 2002, this copy was intercepted by the Home Office when Nilsen's solicitor, Nick Wells of Tuckers, sent it in for his client to edit. They did so on the grounds that it contravened the regulations that say inmates cannot have material sent in and out of prison if it concerns a book about their crimes.

Since then, Nilsen has said in a letter that his work "is not about the events of 1978-83 alone, but concerning how a man developed over the 58 years of his existence. There are laws governing publications in this country...The Obscene Publications Act... the laws of Libel which anything I write is subject to like anything else".

"[My work] is written from an overtly moral perspective full in the knowledge of my own faults and failings and criminal culpability, for which I accept full responsibility ... No man lives in a vacuum but in tandem with his society... to explain how he develops over the years... for better and for worse."

At the High Court hearing, counsel for the Home Office will meet Nilsen's barristers, Flo Krause and Alison Foster QC. The court judgment will not consider future publication or debate whether an analysis of the extremes of human evil is legitimate. It will simply decide whether the Home Office's interception of the work under the prison rules is legally valid, and if the freedoms of expression and correspondence granted by the Human Rights Act take precedence and the document should be returned to Nilsen.

His plea is that he has the right to tell his own life story, for he writes: "There is nothing in Prison Rules, Standing Orders, or Laws of England which prohibits me (or anyone) writing a book for publication." But the question remains: have his crimes forfeited this right?

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