CARL Stottor was scarcely more than a teenager when he met Dennis Nilsen in a gay bar in 1982. They talked for some time and then the older man, a civil servant, invited him back for coffee. There, in the North London flat that would become so notorious, Nilsen strangled Stottor and dumped his body in a bath full of water.

Stottor survived this horrendous experienced because Nilsen had a change of heart and suddenly decided to revive his victim. He then took Stottor to hospital, which is precisely the kind of anomaly that journalists love to fix upon when writing those bestsellers generically subtitled ''Inside the Mind of a Killer''. For 16 years, Stottor has tried to endure the memory of his ordeal, suffering long bouts of unemployment and depression. He has not, he says, minded the many books about Nilsen published during that time, even though they replay the dreadful events of his early life. But he is now protesting about a book which has yet to appear: the autobiography of Dennis Nilsen.

Very few serial killers have written their memoirs and even fewer of their victims have survived to object. Who would not sympathise with Stottor, whose days and nights are ruined by recollections which his tormentor has now recorded for posterity? The book is to be titled History of a Drowning Boy - surely doubly injurious to Stottor in its reference to drowning and its mawkish bid for pathos. How understandable it would be if he threw a press conference begging British publishers not to buy the manuscript purely on grounds of taste.

Naturally, such a gambit would never work these days and we can confidently expect a full schedule of profiles and features when Nilsen's book is published, perhaps even serialisation in some Sunday newspaper. Stottor's only recourse is to comply with the mores of our age and appeal on grounds of profit instead. This he has done, writing to Jack Straw to request that Nilsen should not be allowed to make money from his crimes. Since legislation already exists to prevent this, Straw's boys will presumably reply to this effect before returning to their real preoccupation, which is how that manuscript got out of jail in the first place.

When the book is accepted by a publisher, and when it finally appears, the Mary Bell row will blow up all over again. It will be claimed that Nilsen is secretly stashing the filthy lucre in preparation for some future release from prison undoubtedly never likely to happen. The equation will be made - perfectly properly - between the loss of life and the profit of evil, between the massacre of innocents and the murderer's prosperity. But it will all be completely off the point because Nilsen cannot receive payments. Financial gain may be our concern, but it is certainly not his.

Last week, the fact that Lucille McLauchlan and Deborah Parry sold their stories to the tabloids vastly overshadowed everything they said in those articles. It's hard to establish exactly the point at which popular belief in their innocence made the sudden queasy switch to suspicion of guilt, but it seems to have occurred in the smallest of intervals, the few hours between the announcement of their release and the news that the Mirror and the Express had bought their stories.

Was there new evidence? There was not. Was there anything in those articles to incriminate them? There was not. Apart from the news of their mutual dislike, and Parry's suggestion that she has a hunch about the real murderer or murderers, there was nothing new to alter the consensus that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. Yet that consensus has definitely wavered and the other tabloids have been filled with dark rhetoric about former convicts selling their stories.

Down under, the bereaved Frank Gilford discovered proof of guilt in this fact. ''If I was innocent, I would not be selling my story,'' he nonsensically asserted. But the fact that McLauchlan and Parry did so is indicative of nothing whatsoever except the desire for publicity, money or both. It may even be self-protection at a time when silence itself is regarded as suspect. It is absolutely not evidence of guilt, indeed it

doesn't fall into the category of evidence at all.

These women have no salaries and, thanks to George Galloway's mysteriously-motivated intervention, they will have to undergo full-scale investigation from their professional body if they are to work as nurses in Britain again. Presumably they both need money. Yet the sale of their statements has somehow undermined their credibility, as if the statements were made for money alone, not according to the demands of truth.

It is unfair to assume that a financial motive must be inconsistent with truth and integrity. It is also somewhat hypocritical to think less of the nurses for selling their stories while readily buying those stories by the million. Far too much emphasis is currently placed on these autobiographical statements as a means to financial gain. By this token, we would suddenly have to admire Dennis Nilsen for offering the profits from his memoirs to a victim support charity which has, incidentally and understandably, refused. People who buy Nilsen's book will be giving him something that money cannot buy. They will be satisfying the intimate cravings of an ego ravenous for publicity.