Ian Brady Moors Murderer
May 11, 2007
Ian Brady the moors murderer has been locked up now for 40 years. He is currently in Ashworth High Security Hospital and it seems he will die there. He is a man that I have come to admire over the years. They say that he is a monster and the most evil man in Britain. But who are they?
Brady was born in the Glasgow in may 1938. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966 for the murder of three children. He committed two more murders which he has admitted but not yet been charged with. He spent 19 years in various prisons before being sent to Ashworth Mental Hospital in 1985. In 2001 he published a book ,”The Gates of Janus” which is about serial killers. He has expressed a wish to be let die and has been on hunger strike now for several years. He will never be released. He holds a special place in the mythology of evil , is universally hated and is probably the most famous murderer of all time. The word ‘monster’ is commonly attached to his name in the tabloid press.
But Brady like all of us is human. By definition he is part of humanity. He is just like us whether we wish to believe it or not. And yet in those 40 years I have never hear him being refered to in this regard. He is, if we are to believe the press a one dimensional man. A man of pure evil. Albert Speer who was complicit in the murder of six million jews was released from Spandau Prison on the ground of compassion but Brady is beyond our compassion. As Brady himself remarked , if he had come form a different background and gone into politics and killed thousands he might have been honoured and awarded a pension. As Dennis Nielson once said , “The only house of Horrors I know of is 10 Downing Street.”It’s the old story. Few rich men go to prison and none stay there very long.
There are many myths surrounding him but they are just that. One of these being that his crimes are inexplicable. But they can in fact be explained. If Brady had been born twenty years later these crimes would never have happened. He is very much a product of his time. He was born into a time of great social and cultural change. He was a self educated young working class man with a history of petty crime who read the wrong books and crossed the line from fantasy into reality. It could quite literally have happened to any of us. The intellectual climate of the time was that anything goes and morality was relative. The books he read reinforced this concept of morality. Many rebelled in a harmless way imitating their heroes of the big screen while his were more potent heroes. But we must not forget that many of the former walked out of the cinema and killed in imitation of there heroes. The ‘flick’ knife was common as was it’s use.
Another myth is that he has never apologised. But he has apologised and unlike others has neither asked for nor expected anything in return. He has however never apologised to the press who as he remarked are always ready to make money out of murder and the bloodier the better. Nor has he apologised to his better’s who keep him behind bars and make political capital out of his crimes , the same people who pleaded for years the case of Speer. Brady is not a stupid man and refuses to be judged by such people and is right.
None of this is intended to excuse his crimes. I am not a liberal much less a bleeding liberal. When Brady was sentenced to life in prison justice was done and he himself has acknowledged this but much of what has happened to him since has nothing to do with any kind of justice. We say that a society may best be judged by how it treat’s it’s prisoners. When we deny Brady his humanity we deny our own humanity. There is no profit to society in any of this.
He has been interviewed relatively few times and is selective in who he speaks to. Be it the quality press or BBC playwrights ( he’s had a couple of plays written about him and Hindley) they all go to him looking for something. They report him as being a highly manipulative man , the implication being of course that they are not taken in but that perhaps less educated people ( working class people like Brady himself) might be. There is a class prejudice at work here that reminds us of the trial of the Kray Brothers.
He is certified as insane but there seems no reason to believe that he is actually mad. He is the loneliest man in Britain and might have eased his situation by compromise. Perhaps there’s madness in that. Many books have been and will continue to be written about him. Authors and publishers have made money out of this tragedy and no doubt there is even more profit to yet be made. There are countless websites devoted to the exploitation of him and his crimes while his victims are largely forgotten. They of course deserve our humanity and compassion too. Their names are as follow’s
Pauline Reed age 16
John Kilbride age 12
Keith Bennett age 12
Leslie Ann Downey age 10
Edward Evans age 17
There may be others but not children. Myra Hindley claimed that they murdered a hitchhiker but her word is not to be relied on while Brady himself claimed to have killed a member of the Glasgow underworld but this may not be true. The mother of Keith Bennett still to this day visits Saddleworth Moor in the hope of finding his body. She also deserves our compassion. Brady has offered to go back to Saddleworth Moor ( he was brought there once before but could not find the site of Keith Bennett’s burial). He claims that he could now point to within twenty yards of where the body is but his offer has been refused. There is no reason to believe he is lying or just seeking publicity. He has never sought parole and has said he never will.
Another post on Ian Brady may be found here.
May 18, 2007 at 7:27 pm
I read it and it made sense except Ian Brady does not know where he is. Why? The map is fake as he knows it is a two headed coin and so he cannot find Keith on the flip side of the coin, he is face up as were the others and Myra as she says in Lost Boy stalked him, that is until he got to drunk to care. The hitch hiker yes, she is missing in old newspapes just as Linda Calvey discribed, as were 6 listed in the 1965 paper. The error Ian makes is that of making fact a fiction when empirically it can be proved and is proved otherwise. Some murders he simply was not there if we take the accounts of Myra and Paul Reade. The bank robber that never was, so what exactly is and was he?
May 21, 2007 at 7:40 pm
[...] are not familiar with the story of the moors murder then you may wish to read my previous post on Ian Brady Moors Murders. Posted by sillyoldtwit Filed in Myra Hindley, Duncan Staff, Ian Brady, moors murders, Current [...]
June 1, 2007 at 7:06 am
‘Brady has offered to go back to Saddleworth Moor ( he was brought there once before but could not find the site of Keith Bennett’s burial). He claims that he could now point to within twenty yards of where the body is but his offer has been refused. There is no reason to believe he is lying or just seeking publicity’
Wrong, He was taken to Shiney Brook, note spelling. He expected to go to Hollin Brown Knoll and drove past the former site of both girls graves and John Kilbride. Locals in Greenfield saw him pass from a pub window by the station, even by one of Myra’s unknown men friends from when he was ‘going out’ with her.
He is on the other side waiting for him.
Chris Lambrianou who knew him in prison gave him a hiding for smirking and making remarks his new wife told me last year. Chris a man in his own time and fraternity abhorred child molesters and killers. Brady simply wanted to be a Kray, but did not have the bottle.
Yes as said above a different time he would be different. I assert if he never left Scotland he would still be in the bookies, drinking wine and telling tall stories perhaps with his head in a book by the banks of the River Clyde as kids safely passed him.
He claimed in a letter to Anne West that he could find Keith to twenty paces and wanted 50 policemen zigzagging up and down that gulley.. Not three gulleys as there are on the mile quagmire one mile past Hollin Brown Knoll, but one.
This was in 1987 he wrote that. He has responded to me last year and earlier with cryptic clues as I expected he would. Of our time there were many like him, but they did not do what he is supposed to have done. What exactly we only know from Myra Hindley, who made a tale that unravelled as time went on. She made new ones.
Ian cannot find Keith Bennett although we can put him on the rocks 40 foot above Hollin Brown Knoll looking to Greenfield Brook and to the grave of John. We can put Myra there to, but who is the third person? The one dressed for the digging, the one who takes the picture.
I have been asked by a well known solicitor who says it is his job to get him out one more time to see if he can find Keith IF he really does know where Keith is.
My answer as a educated former working class slum kid, now landowner, and highly reactive researcher that Ian DOES NOT KNOW WHERE HE IS.
If all the diatribe on his case of killing others is as false I wonder if he were there at all. Keith was taken from the road outside his mothers house in Longsight. Now that is a buffer zone, so he was either very angry when Myra told him that or very fearful.
Taking Pauline from the street where both she and Myra lived was a personal murder in my view, one that gave her and Maureen a reward in many ways. She hated so badly and then comes the exile, the one that walks in and solves all the problems. The affairs with those in society she can now cover with this dupe.
There is every reason to believe he is lying – and publicity, he can make a storm by writing to the press of any matter he wants. Like goldfish they will fight for it, every crumb.
He is lying in his book as a serial killer for there is no substance to it, yes he was an accomplice to a woman who killed and made tapes of torture which captured Myra, for if not she would be home and free. Same as the Prayer Book, he would not touch her things, he was a visitor, not even a lodger.
If Ian Brady wants his day out on the Moors, he will have to say WHERE he knows Keith Bennett is. And that might be a problem. The hitchhiker who is mentioned, one is missing still, and Myra puts herself there in a grand statement to the police investigator at the time. I found a person matching this description in the old archives, and of other missing kids at the time of his arrest.
The problem with Ian Brady is he should have hanged, he wanted to. It was denied him. If Ian got out there is more danger to police officers as he just might have the balls to actually kill someone himself. He just might be hiding some weapon on the Moors and know it. He just might show them in a gulley where Keith is if they let him choose, and that means going back to the place the others were all buried as he expected to.
He did not because fate took a hand. That very morning Pauline was found. He was taken away from the scene he thought he was going to go. That is why he has a dilemma. He has not yet replied to my letter, the latest one, and will if he gets it. He will do so in his usual cryptic or method of media outbursts. I am on the Moor digging in an area he knows so very well.
The cold mothers milk wine from the moorland stream. The curlews overhead and damp moss, with Myra’s silly dog yapping at his heels and the sound of dogs from the farm blanket the Moor, yet she heard nothing. She said this was the spot. She said he threw the dead sheep as the dog by the stream had noticed something. But of Ian and his reasons I have this to say for why.
He has shown in books to be wanting to be like the St Albans poisoner, and all the other icons of infamy, just as he wanted to be a bank robber instead of a voyeur in peoples houses. If he had won money, stole money, what would he do with it? He sought and needed a one roomed supported sheltered housing unit all his life and that is exactly what he has got. He has got revenge on the journalist who he thought or knew was his father has he not?
June 1, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Paul(a)? Thank you for taking the trouble to comment on Ian Brady.I agree with you that Brady wanted to be like the Krays but I also belive him when he said the killings were an existential exercise. I have no idea if he is a good or a bad person , his crimes were terrible but that was a lifetime ago. What interests me in the man is how he has never given in to those who keep him locked up. I agree with most everything he say’s about the society that judges him.I will be writing more posts about him and will do my best to cover the points you have raised. And again , thank you for your comment.
June 2, 2007 at 9:23 am
Thank you, I believe Borstal made him the man who became the deranged man. In studying behaviour it is clear Ian heard the ranting rage of the troops in Hitler’s war and could not understand the words. He never went to Germany, whereas I did, he never saw Bergen Belson or heard of young German lads being shot who could not ‘hear the music’. Strange as it is, Ian who was weak, and had some form of autism in childhood and mental injury would have been in Mengele’s operating theatre for dispatch.
That is the stupidity of it all. Irme Gresse who Myra dresses as in the costume would have made his flesh into lampshades. Yet he still does not get it in using a German word and not the language. He never did, and never will.
Same as existential, it is a glossary word and any academic uses the term to define something as defining the term, he does no such thing. A kid would do that to impress and look an arse.
It is like saying it is empirically so, or because it was a positivism we did this. In studying medicine and psychology and criminology,etc. there is no need to use a word when the description will do.
He has said there were others to police and now it was an exercise. Sorry, Myra did not think so, He could not stop her deluded behaviour in being a kidnapper, torturer and seducer of young lads, girls and men.
Her campaign of caught victims included Lords, Lady’s and top chief’s of police, vice madam, prison warder/nun, governor of the prison, prison advocates, priests and even the victim’s family members. The list goes on.These were caught by her zeal for conquest in making them dance to her tune as he did. Not least the myth that Ian was her virginity taker is the biggest myth.
In Scotland they said he was homosexual, not a crime today, but it was then. How and to what degree perhaps confuses him still. It is in belonging and he never belonged to any girl or woman sexually. Borstal acts as described by Myra in institutions are no different than other male incarceration institutions of the upper classes. Abuse and pleasure are synchronistic in the mind of the receiver and giver. There, Ian will like that word.
So the time period of killing that he thinks he controlled is now dissolved as Myra has said she was having sex with a police officer in a clandestine triangle, and that she stalked him. That and the fact that the book says granny Maybury formerly Pri…… of Barton upon Humber was not a one night holder of laying out the dead as funeral home, but a home embalmer so I am told. It is common practice to do the two, not all the dead would be intact as fights and industrial accidents happened in Gorton, check the papers of that time and see who lay on grannies table where she had also a laundry. So very convenient in shroud making?
There is another autobiography and someone has been swooshing it under my nose. Duncan Staff will not get it, and Ian will not. It is hidden and not with the person who sold this lot to Duncan.
There will be many copies in what Ian thinks an existential exercise. But the truth is none were of his trait or choosing. He said he would not kill one of his own – a Scot. Searching through the archives some victims have Scottish ancestry. He could not chose children as he could not choose a bank.
I know of the gangsters lives and how they in the East End had a code of their own. Ian could never come from telling kids of bank jobs to this level. That is why he cannot ever reveal he is not the serial killer that he is made out to be. Did he kill- yes. Could be do it alone – no.
It was not an ‘existential exercise’ same as empirically as in his book he could state the nature of tying bonds on a victim knowing he or she was going to die. A hollow ring to it, do you not think. It sounds a boast and not a follow through of feel, felt, found in sensory cognitive autobiographical memory akin to Bundy et al.
Therefore his book is a sham, as he should have correlated his experiences and method to the others. He will not get out of prison to find Keith as when an academic proves it cannot be so, no solicitor is going to go and get his day out when risks as I assert on line are out there. I value all those persons, it is right they ask someone who has not an axe to grind, no pun intended. Ian Brady is not Peter Tobin who will not become infamous. Ian Brady is Ian Duncan Stewart Brady, as on birth certificate it is Stewart.
No he will never give in as to the way mental health and insanity is still in the view of society a miasma. See the Welcome History site for the history of asylums in our time. He unlike Myra did not get the same adoration due to his manner of outbursts and of being an outsider – a Scot in working class slum housing. No free football tickets for him.
June 2, 2007 at 10:38 am
Thank you again Paul for your comments. I agree with much of what you say but disagree on one point. I will make that point the subject of the next piece I do on Brady which will probably be within the next week.
June 10, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Ian Brady is not a criminal profiler and is not a clinical psychologist, neither is the gang he adores. They are theorists. He has never been to US and never ever stepped further, yet others have that write back to him. The letter seems to evoke a oneness with the young male as to his identity. It is not false memories but again a way of making himself seem important, knowledgeable and travelled. In reality he is still a bastard child that is ashamed of it. If so why? There is nothing shameful of a woman who worked in up market tea rooms in top hotels that fell in love with an educated man, nothing at all. Yet he wanted more. Myra the scum, the slut, the predator would never sit in a tea room, or anything quite so grand. The odd grope in her unwashed regions by a male or female in uniform was more to her delectible taste. A bit of rough she always was. The bigger fool is the tail of the King with no cloths. For Ian Stewart is just that – a fake.
June 12, 2007 at 1:16 pm
You claim to know so much Paula, but yet really know very little.
June 12, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Thank you for your comment Mark but don’t be shy and feel free to let us know what you think in relation to Ian Brady. As someone who is very interested in the man I look foward to hearing from anyone who has an opinion about him. Regards Sillyoldtwit.
June 21, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Tell me as my team dig on the Moors what I do not know for a fork is a very good implement and a sane mind. My friends are hard as rock. I research and found what others did not find. That the film I say again of ‘The Hill’ that Topping swallowed is a fiction. So challenge it by going to the archives as it did not exist. So where do we start to believe? Go on tell me how this was overlooked and why?
July 2, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Today it has been confirmed that new photographs that have been shown to Brady by his solicitor have been confirmed as the buriel site of Keith Bennett.Well done to the team that have collected information and got it right with research.
August 10, 2007 at 9:21 pm
My thanks to Aiden O Rourke who supplied the images of the terrain which went to him. But we have not stopped digging, just gone digging in Portugal instead. If Ian cannot remember the view to John’s grave he is as mad as the parrot that wants to contact him, that shuns him. He knows who. The burial site of Keith Bennet is within spitting distance of John as he has shown it to be.
January 21, 2008 at 11:10 am
Amazing. I wondered how it was that humans turn a blind eye when victims of circumstance get imprisoned and I see at least part of it is due to their lack of regard because of fools who try and empathise with deliberate cold hearted killers like Brady and Hinley.
There is nothing special about these two. They are very ordinary people who chose to commit acts which made them feel better but had disastrous consequences for the children they acted out on.
No one is to blame other than Brady and Hinley. Sure others, ‘society’ if you will, may have hurt or degraded these selfish nasty but very ordinary people, but they chose to take that out on children.
We (meaning a community of humans) can’t murder murderers because that lowers us to their level so we must keep them locked up in as close to misery as we can make it for as long as we can keep them alive.
Those they killed had their one crack at life stolen from them and therefore our only way of ensuring that others realise what a terrible thing it is to take a life, by keeping murderers alive for as long as possible in total misery.
Who cares what Brady says about bodies or other deaths, listening to it gives power to a power hungry prick. Don’t listen.
Yes it is sad that rich crims rarely get punished but it is also sad that most victims of crims, whatever the wealth of the perpetrator may be, are poor so we must punish anyone who hurts others the way Brady did.
Letting him off because he’s poor makes the injustice against poor victims worse not better.
March 30, 2008 at 3:39 pm
i would like to know if people are still digging to try to find koeth and if so could i help. i have been fascinated by the moors murder story for years and wanted to write a book about it. i then wanted to give the proceeds to bennetts family to help find him.
please let me know if you still dig on the moors and how i can get in touch / meet up to help.
April 15, 2008 at 12:24 am
If Ian Brady’s book was written by a criminologist/psychologist or police inspectator, it would be regarded as a fine piece of writing. His writing is enhanced by superb grammar and logical argument.
Keep an open mind when reading a book…..not all “experts” of the “criminal mind” exert their opinions lucidly or are in such a position to really understand what they are talking about.
I compliment Mr.Brady for a marvellously written book. His philosophical and ideological thinking may not be to everyone’s taste, but at least he does not cower under the pretence of an “expert”….his views should be respected in a “democratic and civilized” country !
June 29, 2008 at 8:02 pm
His writing was edited by experts and ghost written, He has some issues of grammar same as I do, the difference is he has not an Masters in Science or no criminal record. My second MSc and my continued tutorship under an expert in the field remains as a factual act of writing.
The book is not in fact a fine piece of writing as it is dictatorial and does not relay what is promises. It does not provide a framework of what killers think and do, it uses threatenening psychopathic tendancies that no person that is versed in psychological profiling could detect. I have many enemies that sell products to make them seem scientific yet they do not post here with such qualifications as like Ian they have legally obtained none. They are charlatons as Ian is.
Ian had the chance to tell in his book the method of his burials, the motive and how they differed from the men he wrote of as an ‘expert’. The title even is a ploy as his solicitor suggested
July 15, 2010 at 11:31 am
why does he not just tell keith,s mum and police where he is buried out of respect for keith and his mum and family