THE LOST BOY by Duncan Staff Bantham Press.
There have been many books written about the moors murders and this one is no different from the rest. Apart that is from the fact that there is some new material from Myra Hindley’s diaries , letters and brief extracts from her unpublished autobiography. Mr Staff would , like so many journalists before him wish to have us believe that he wrote this book for some suitably grand motive. In his case to help in some way to find the body of Keith Bennet , the only victim of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley who’s remains has not been recovered from Saddleworth Moor. But this of course is a lie. This like all the others was written for money and Duncan Staff stands to make a lot of money out of this book. The fact that he feels the need to justify himself in this way tells us a lot about him and those like him.
Quite early on in the book on page 3 and referring to Hindley he say’s ” I would have to get very close to her to extract the story. Not only would this be distressing but…..” This is another way of depersonalising Hindley in much the same way as most writers refer to her and Brady as monsters and evil. He has hardly started the book but want’s us to know that these people are not like you or me. The problem is that Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are just like you and I and indeed that is why they have the hold over us that they have. And while Staff spends the rest of the book trying to understand Hindley he is doomed to fail from the very start.
Much of the book is a retelling of Hindley’s life story as told by her and at various points he insists on quoting for us the opinion of Professor Malcolm MacCulloch Bradys psychiatrist. This is done no doubt in part to impress us but it soon becomes quite clear that Staff actually rates this man highly. The professor is trotted out at what are obviously felt to be pivotal points of Hindley’s narative but if the purpose is to give weight to certain events then it soon has the opposite affect. I doubt if any psychiatrist has ever been so wrong about so many things as MacCulloch. Indeed he’s so far off the mark and generally inept at explaining human behaviour that at times the whole thing has an air of Vaudaville about it. We can almost see the professor in our minds eye but we come to see him as something out of a Carry On film. To give just one example of how wrong this man can be…..
In the course of telling her life story Myra mentions death quite a lot. The professor considers this ’significant’ and ‘unusual’. He makes a point of stating how ‘unusual’ it is for anyone to have so many memories of death in their childhood. But we have already learnt from Myra that her grandmother with whom she lived would from time to time prepare the corpse of a deceased neighbour for burial and on a least one occasion kept one in the house overnight. In the fifties this was not unusual. Life was hard and extended families meant that old and young lived side by side in the same house and often the same room. Death was a normal part of day to day life. People , including children died from diseases and illnesses that are virtually unknown today. A child growing up at that time would see more death by the age of twelve than most people today would experience in a life time. If we further consider that Myra wrote this account of her life as a direct result of the death(murder) of several young children and that her normal life ceased when she was in her twenties then it would be very strange indeed if death was missing from her story. And yet the professor feels that this is all a bit odd. This is as I have said just one example of the professors insight and we have a great deal more of it inflicted on us throughout the rest of the book.
Another problem we find when reading this book is that most of the information comes from Myra Hindley herself. And while much of it has a ring of truth about it she does not attempt at any point to explain in any credible way why she helped Brady to murder and murder again. And of course she had been lying for years about her part in the murders to anyone who would listen. There is of course nothing in the book about Brady’s life story or no extracts from his letters as he does not make these available particularly to journalists. This is the one real problem that all authors who choose to write on the moors murders have in common.
The book is fairly readable overall and you will probably get through it at one sitting. But it cannot be regarded as a particularly good book and is full of the usual prejudices about Brady and Hindley. I will be writing more about the moors murders soon and will have no doubt more to say in relation to Staff’s book but for review purposes there is not a lot more to say of it here. A readable but ultimatly disappointing book.
If you are not familiar with the story of the moors murder then you may wish to read my previous post on Ian Brady Moors Murders.
See also this post.
Video Footage: For video report on new evidence presented by Duncan Staff go to this page and click on video link at top right of page.
If you wish to read some abridged extracts from Duncan Staff’s book go to this page.
May 21, 2007 at 11:13 pm
[...] Another post on Ian Brady may be found here. Posted by sillyoldtwit Filed in Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, Duncan Staff, discrimination, crime, [...]
May 22, 2007 at 12:06 am
Excellent review of this book!
May 31, 2007 at 8:53 am
I have been on those Moors and was a slum kid like Myra, and saw her many times as she grew into the fag smoking tall bully she always was. Her presence at the Elizabethan Ballroom with her sister was of a different time, and a different tune. BBC at the time reported her as 15 when meeting and being controlled to kill by Ian Brady. Wrong. Myra was born in 1942. Sister 1946. Ian 1938.
In 1963 of first ‘known’ murder found out in 1986 by his confession she was in fact 21. She started work in Millwards at the age of 19.
Not a little schoolgirl but a villain of entrenched vines in Gorton whereas Ian was a good target for those entrenched. He had only been in England and this slum district of Longsight near to Gorton since being evicted due to summary justice in Scotland. If his mother had not married she would not have been given this lad as a juvenile delinquent. Brady had two years out of the Manchester circle, and only spent a couple of years in Longsight before the murders.
Myra in contrast as locals said, and was confirmed, went at 15 upwards to Judo classes and would have to have the ‘uniform’. She would also have to have a weight category for her class. Her weight would have to lift someone in a stranglehold and headlock in the order of 10 -11 stone. She was a big ‘girl’ with big feet, big hands and talked dirty too. Toilet talk in those days showed who was common, and not like the ones seeking at 16 a mate for life, love and domestic bliss.
Myra and Maureen said David Smith a lad of some prowess at a very early age in the below trousers department was selected by alpha female Maureen. Gloria writes to me of fleeing her in terror at 14. Maureen would be 16 going on 17 and lived in the same area as Pauline Reade as two streets away.
Myra as a martial arts devotee used sadistic holds in submission that are told of in JD Potter and remembered by those old invisible locals now. Of how she used to pinch, thump and pressure point and that no one wanted to be her opponent. That was at age 15, in 1957. That is the age the BBC said on documentary she was seduced by Ian Brady who was in Borstal at the time.
Myra Hindley was a consumate actress that had her granny and family up in arms with her goings on. No one asks why Myra was on the corner of Bannock Street at 9.15 pm on the evening of Pauline Reade’s disappearance and just hours to the anniversary of Ruth Ellis’s hanging.
Ruth Ellis like Myra had alternative lovers.
The one that is hidden was a former Manchester police officer named in this book who bought the murder van soon after Pauline’s death.
Contamination is evident in her motives and in taking the courses and coaching by a police officer serving who was married.’Lost Boy’.
Where does one think Myra had sex with this officer in 1963 and earlier?
If we imagine where Myra indulged in such practices with Patricia Cairns in uniform we come to a picture of what Myra fancied she got. Did she dress up in these uniforms someone said, no not said -told.
Paul Reade says that he came down the road on this fatal night and saw Myra on the corner, David and Maureen in a fight on the Wiles Street junction at 9.15 pm. July 12th 1963.
Myra says Ian and she picked up at random Pauline Reide offering records and to look for a lost glove of hers. Time 8.15 pm. Time to Moors one hour, time back one hour. Walk and burial ‘up top’ one hour. Time back 11 p.m.
NO WAY COULD SHE AND IAN GET TO THE MOORS IN ONE HOUR, BACK AND DO WHAT SHE SAID ====HE=== DID.
Pauline had a glove, it was in her mothers draw, she showed it to people, and one must have been Myra or the lot of them as Myra knew the family very well. The record, oh, yes.
Myra says to the police chief who was avid to get Myra to reveal the graves now of two more victims Ian had told the reporter Fred Harrison of. He wrote in his -autobiography’ an exclusive, just as Duncan Staff has done, but Duncan did not call it something it was not. No one wanted to read of the police chief’s life story, what they wanted was the guts on Myra.
He wrote that Myra said each time she was to abduct a child he gave her a record the day before. STOP.
Myra said this was ‘The Hill’ a record on the film tune of that name after seeing the film of this name by Sean Connery and that of ‘The Triffids’. A hundred thousand probably read that book including the police and this senior officer. Not one, not one bothered to edit this in the book, nor did Ian Brady comment.
ALL BRADY SAID WAS MYRA DID NOT MAKE MISTAKES.
I emphasise that to show she made deliberate mistakes for a reason, nor errors, but sadistic acts like the lost glove she used to taunt Mrs Reade in 1986. Why is obvious. The glove in her draw she had held.
I checked this record and found it was not released till the end of 1965, so wrote to Ian this week as to his time travelling abilities.
The film Myra did see she could never tell the investigation team looking into the burial spots of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade was ‘The Scapegoat’ where there are two body doubles. Myra and Maureen were body doubles in many ways, they shared a single bed as two grown women when there was a choice not to.
No record to give Pauline, no record for Ian to give her. and no film they went to. So how credible is the rest of her testimony? No record, no Ian.
John is buried by a hill a child cannot climb.
Pauline was taken from Froxmer Street where another murder happened and all the local men were questioned at the time.
Ben Marsden of Dalkeith Street, West Gorton, aged 50 was stabbed as Pauline was said to have been in the eaves of the Beyer Peacock railway carriage company in Graveney Street. A local puts his point across on Rochdale on line of this fact and where. It was reported in the Manchester Evening News of the 8th of October with heading ‘ eleven murders…were they the perfect crimes? Date of murder. October 18th, 1959. Less than four years later Pauline would be fataly stabbed and her last sighting was this spot as she disappeared minutes later.
Maureen married the lad when he was 16 and she 18 some months later. She was 18 and Myra 20. Maureen started to work at Millwards with Myra.
Going back Myra used the first murder van of Ben Boyce, a local travelling grocer to the estates. She had no licence, someone taught her to drive over two years or more. It was not Ian, he never could.
Myra used people and mentioning the other murder in the same location is how I bring in the next one.
Veronica Bondi. Ian said he killed her, police proved he did not they confirmed, nor did he kill William Cullen which Myra talks of on waste ground.
Whoever killed all these 11 people was a local who had severe rage problems and was in the same social mix as those that frequented the fight pubs under the viaduct of arches where bent stuff was sold. Oxford Road and Ashton Old Road connect to Gorton. None were buried.
Susan Thomas from Brailsford Road, Fallowfield found at Platt Fields in 1963 on the date of Ian Brady’s birthday, January 2nd. Strangled and left by this circular route of murders near to Veronica Bondi.
The obvious fact is Myra would be intimately interested in being coached by her married serving police officer as a now capable entrant at the age of 19. She worked as barmaid in the Belle Vue tavern where his mother was manageress it says in Staff’s book. It was he who bought the murder van from Myra, though her name was never on the log book.
Ben Boyce if Pauline would be found at any time then would be hanged for murder. Her boss and her man with no alibi thanks to her. She says she drove to Ben’s house after the murder and woke him up, she had a key then? Where was his wife and children?
She says she did him a favour and at the time of midnight she and he at Abbey Hey near her grannies family in Dukinfield went on the Old Road to recover the Dormobile. She steered this and crashed it into the murder van she had Ben drive along this road. Ben was now sat in the same van that a short time before had carried Pauline to the Moors. But had she? Was it later, during the moonlit night in the early morning?
Myra did this trip with Ben and no one saw the bright red bike of Ian’s, she does not explain this to Topping. Question. If Paul Reade sees Myra at 9.15 pm then how can any police officer believe a fragment of what she says in the events of that time?
The record, well, that is egg on the face, now I a simple graduate have found archival evidence in the OLDHAM CHRONICLE. The case unravels.
Myra clearly meant for Ben to die if Pauline was found. Her police tutilage under her lover, or over, was to get into the police. How magic then if she had became a police officer and ‘found’ all the victims and set up the ‘culprits’ by Chinese whispers to the police at the time and to the locals. She could have gained fame as the best detective. Ian having axed the last male victim would be a drunken Scot who she had befriended as her journal shows of HER split personality.
Myra in ‘Lost Boy’ STALKS Ian Brady by parking outside his house in the van, so she has one before Pauline is murdered then and in 1961. She has no licence, so this is a borrowed car then, a car Keith knows well. She says he passes when she is ‘watching’ Ian’s mothers house.
Myra needs to get Maureen a job. What better than to get Maureen and he together, they will be a double act for sure. Maureen marries David and is in the net, cannot move out of her spider legs, not ever.#
John Kilbride is taken on a market day when she would drive to the market which is drop off for Dukinfield and Granny. At 8 p.m she would be on the Moors in a saloon with low wheelbase as the white Ford Anglia, a saloon. She is used to throwing people and digging for peat for the fire is explained in books and by locals.
John is not an energetic burial, nor is the walk arduous. A dumping place that would fit the father if he were found same as Ben in his trade and ability is my observation of motive of the place of burials.
Keith, well there you go. Another long thesis as she used to do in typing and in her classical studies in literature. A map that has as many spelling mistakes as there is to make. A map that goes know where. A map that she draws in 1986 from the ordinance survey map, yet she gets the spelling and names wrong, and the undulations which fit only one grid square. She gets the ‘idea’ of another place and fits it to that square.
What she does not want you to do, is use logic. She draws the map as a competant short hand typist in the manner of a child, and the manner of add on ‘noise’.
Ian says Myra never makes mistakes.
So they are AGAIN deliberate mistakes.
I tried to walk the route she says Keith took and now have exposure as onset of hypothermia and wore same jacket style. Myra’s walk is displayed in her shoes.
I am on steroids and asthma medication, the walk even in a a hundred yards with the wrong cloths on brings on severe exposure.
When burying John she could be seen from the knoll where Ian stood and her boots were to stop the nettles biting her legs and to surmount the clough at the time.
Each photo a time capsule of events, colour and noise.
Myra Hindley was taking the reader and listener on a voyage and she held them spell bound. They wanted fame and fortune and she gave it them. Same as she did in her essays on literature she gave false accounts with the real facts as mistakes.
The mistakes I have noted and only some as Duncan will not respond for me to see the other deliberate mistakes. Shiney Brook does not exist, Shiny Brook does. You cannot see either on going to the place or which grain, it is a quagmire and a flooded plain.
Myra died laughing at her audience that fed from her.
When Lesley Anne Downey was taken and buried she was put near Pauline as sisters would be in spacial difference to her street and Myra’s street. Close and very connected.
If Lesley had been found, then Alan West who was a removal van driver who had a cab he slept in and did the Moors run would be hanged. Enough chinese whispers in the area led to him being interrogated as her mother recountes in ‘For the love of Lesley’. Her location like all the others found so far points to the ability of the male suspect in the case framed at the time.
Who better to know all the answers and ongoing information than Myra.
Her lover at the time was a police officer and she was ‘in training’ to be one.
Of course she would have information of the search and as a local give information that was contaminating on local gossip massaged to make this look like family murders. The motive is what everyone has missed, even Duncan, even the chief at the time who wrote the book without checking the facts.
Fact one.
She never did get ‘The Hill’, so where does that leave the millions of pounds enquiry into the landscape where she said Ian went.
It leaves it back at the door of the original murders. Back to what they knew and found.
Myra meant also for Keith’s stepfather to die for some sadistic reason as he too was interrogated by police at the time. He had the time she knew, drove and had the opportunity.
He would be so close to these competances she had to make her police training done clandestically fit. In time she would recover them as her ‘catch’ of criminals.
If you believe this then you might just see contamination at the beginning means this case should have been handed over to another force.
June 8, 2007 at 8:00 pm
[...] June 8th, 2007 Moors Murderer Ian Brady who has been on hunger strike since 1999 is to sue author Duncan Staff for using private photographs of him in his book , “The Lost Boy”. He is also suing his former psychiatrist Professor Malcolm McCulloch for breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. Brady’s claims that the photographs of which there are five are private property as they were not part of any evidence in his court case. Brady want to put an injunction on Professor McCulloch , Duncan Staff and Ashworth Hospital and is seeking legal aid. It will be interesting to see how all this works out. I think Brady has quite a good case but that’s not to say he will get justice this time around. You can read the full story such as it is on the Daily Express Site. Read my review of The Lost Boy. [...]
February 4, 2008 at 11:57 am
Great revue.
Now I have studied under Klein and Winnicott in psychoanalytical concepts under the Klein and post-Kleinian measures of clinical observation, treatment and difference than Freud in ‘trauma’ theory I see that your review is the argument of the judgement of how ‘we’ differ.
I found ‘Lost Boy’ a disappointing book too, as it failed to give the one thing it said –
Where Keith Bennett?
This is due to the serialised autobiography content.
The whole thing is on selected bits of her writing and to academics seeing her changing writing style would have been more valuable.
We see she trained as a shorthand typist, yet sometimes she indents and in her map she goes on a paranoid journey of add-in comments.
One writes and adds above it as ‘footnotes’ and corrections, she does so in the hand of child who is vulnerable, exposed, exploited, painfully anguished at ‘remembering ‘ the death scene and the sublimation.
One sees deception in this character from what we know of her very masculine, authoritarian and subversive acts on her audience of the decision makers who she found ‘useful’ as a motive for this child-like set of maps.
It was quite clearly dissociative, and deformed by the character as was her writing in her Journal and letters and manuscripts in carrier bags. An authenticity of the split personality and narcissist as ‘not me’ and not ‘good enough mother’ as a clause to explain her descent from ‘decent girl (20) to slut, sadist, murderer and manipulator under the control of the ‘outsider’ alpha male patriarchal mesmerising process.
Yes, the book has been out now for over a year, and no new search for Keith on the Moors. It has a presence at the ‘crime scene’ Myra indicated in words as named streams which are not written in paint on the Moor, nor observable day or night from the way in she indicated.
It is a massive fiction made as Tony Ainsworth says on his site for some ulterior reason or purpose – a deflection from the real thoughts and location perhaps?. What that might be I do not know. It is feasible enough with accepted Heaulme-like confabulation. See Abgrall ‘Inside the mind of a serial killer’.
Any philosopher will add their own detail to a ‘painting’ of a visit that never happened as an oratory ‘truth’. It is social constructionism.
I would have liked the book I kept mine back for to be in the first person as a judgement by the author and the strengths and weaknesses of the content put to the reader.
Maps too would have been greater testimony to the project and photos. Beesley Street formerly Bannock Street in conjunction with distance from West Gorton, and Westmorland Street would have shown clarity of ‘performability’ – (can it be done) in the available maps of the time I analysed from my collection.
An autobiographical chart of what is most advantageous, most easily accessed, and least effort to achieve is glaring obvious when reconstructing the events: That they have two different environments of urban predation- murder and rural geology and co-habitation as disposal buried sight as private cemetary on private land; that is hostile to a ‘townie’ with no physical knowledge of such rocky terrain. It is after all the abode the countryman and farming community they invaded.
It simply could not be done were my findings in the manner stated.
All in all the ‘grey stones’ mentioned which are at the Wessenden Head location could be viewed as cognitive to the gray stones of Standing Stones or other stones as shale banks appear twice in the mirror image reversing the map she drew.(Far Rough Clough from entry backwards coming up from Greenfield Reservoir – the path to the right is stated as landmarks by Ian, so he went to check I surmise, and got lost to the Yorkshire side up past the now ruined cottage where the exit is where Myra was in her car then as he said round the bend- THAT IS HOLLIN BROWN KNOLL opposite seen from below).
Drawing in such lines of uncertainty made certain in the tale is a fragment of psyche in psychic reality; defined by the stages of Kleinian narcissism in Paranoid pscyzoid and depressive stage in internalized and externalised projecting of the bad and good as splitting.Thus this concept of ’splitting’ is of concern in the written copies received by Duncan Staff.
I do not think they were ‘perfect murders’ as a motive and method that is put about so empirically. It says that heading in the Manchester Evening News a day or so before Edward Evans was killed in October 1965 as ‘Eleven perfect murders’ in central Manchester and the corridor of Hyde/Oxford/Stockport Road at the time.
It is more likely that future psychoanalysts in the later decades will use this pattern to find how the mind works like ‘all of us’ as individual approaches in clinical practice, a point Klein makes in sociological and not pathological perspectives of Lacanian views versus the British School view.
However, most obvious is that the routes taken by Myra are straight long roads of known visual feminine landmarks with family connections along each route.
Ian and Myra were just two affected individuals where the latter was madder than the man in the cell with mars bars, and crisps in the latest tabloid Sunday edition of his ‘treats’.
Are we that blinkered not to see that humans have individual unconscious desires from childhood without academically studying the Klein and other childhood development analysts?
No I don’t think Ian Brady is keeping things back.
I am told he does not lie.
Who in later life inside a ‘total institution’ of incarceration knows or remembers a process that was not his own in being ‘decultured’.
Burial seems the least of his objectives as unexplained behaviourisms. Ranting and ideological projecting of a behaviour that is seen as bizarre and immoral historically is not the same as finding the kid or girl ‘next door’ as to location as it is an act that is very risky, and very personal.
It is not discussed as to how Paul Reade fits into this in Fred Harrison’s book of where Myra and Maureen was with the missing Ian Brady and his geriatric method of riding his bike.
A man who loves his bike that much choosing red and flashes similar to the police checkered emblem is hardly likely to stow it in the back of a beat up old van to go and ride along dirty, dark and pot-holed roads onto the subsiding A635 at peak traffic time of the overnight haulage lorries. Nor to encounter them sleeping in the cab in the lay-by at that location as has been affirmed by a company, plus the request stop bus.
All of this I would have liked to challenge have explained in the book, plus the notion of what the moon was like as my research found scientifically accurate to the victims day of abduction even to the hour. It was not elaborated on as to what moonlit phase.
It was the phase preceding a Full Moon in the boys specifically in both murders. In the girls it was the phase preceding a New Moon. All this I gleaned from the astronomical data of the Ephemeris Charts at Cambridge University and which I hold to consult on the phases to the present day for reconstructing the illumination and shadows as markers to the road and safety.
The left side falls to the reservoir and is a deadly descent to the rocks below as hidden streams and bogs are treacherous on this fell side. To the right up the bank is less deadly due to the fall to the road only and not to the tumble of stones. Moonlight in the First and Last Quarter are half the moon glow with days to the no moon or full moon being the observed checking phase of self preservation.
Moonlight and illumination figured in Myra as a driver who drove late at night after work;and in some clandestine occupation of ‘income protection’ as the more ‘fitter’ species of human in the ’sink’ of industrialised confines of leadership. She was the longest living family occupant of the region of slum housing in Bannock Street is recorded. She had ’status’ among the children who came later. A root with a tendril of fear.
Yet in the book such detail and her mindset is omitted. It is that omission and her use of Catholicism in contrast to Ian Brady that the author needs to add to the second edition after seeing the book did not become a film or a best seller.
It did not invite the reader in. It told a dialogue of what the researcher wanted to include.
In doing so it did not produce Myra’s own stamp of identity as she changed chameleon-like, and did not use graphologists or a range of psychoanalytical practioners to investigate what she wrote displaying examples of her ramblings.
No visual evidence was produced.
No peer-review on the cover or in the book itself on the accounts and motives suggested in clipped parts of her explanation of fictional events and factual possibilities akin to ‘Wire in the Blood’ serialisation of a play. Maniacal prose interlaced as ‘Moorland Night’ by suicidal minds in macabre poetry she includes in her dialogue to her literary audience.
She uses and abuses Charlotte Mewe for this poem and others including the dysfunctional/suicidal, self harmer/feminine emancipated victim element added.
If the writing on this had been produced it would have stood the test of self assessment of validity in the way it was written.
That is the greatest downfall as in ‘For the Love of Leslie’ by Anne West we have the comparison and mental anguish of Ian in his writing phases.
Therefore, I await an amended version by someone who holds the papers of Myra, the person who wrote freehand and typed a range of ’scrolls’ for the human mind to use with a bias as the ’same old tale’ of two monsters as Silly Old Twit says.
For more insight into the conditions of ’splitting’ and the rethinking of Freud in the two schools of psychoanalysis go to the Klein, Winnicott and Freud websites where the books can be bought.
One knows Ian has read them due to his use of language/terminology and definitions including Carlson’s Physiology of Behaviour and Parkin’s ‘Explorations in Cognitive Neuropsychology’. All these I have studied in the Masters strands of both Psychology and Behavioural Sciences. He is intelligent, but not awarded with any credit for his learning it seems?
Perhaps he is deceived in his own classification as others have done to him. Perhaps as I suggest and expound the burial process was of little importance in removal of the stimuli of his rage and envy stages as sublimation to Myra. A closet killer who came out when a brighter psyche lit the flame.
Fantasist, visionary, damaged human being, or fake?
Which is part of each individual in ‘misrecognition’ from childhood ‘damage’ to the psyche and ego development due to environment- Winnicott – or paternal mistruths – Lacan, or Klein in Primary narcissism phases revisited and inner and outer world conflicts with a hostile audience.
That is why I have issue with Ian Brady and the cognitive first person phase used by Myra in this book of where ‘he’ put Keith, and where ‘he’ planned the ‘operation’ as a surveillance exercise in criminal activity from Borstal thuggery days.
He simply does not know.
Suggestion is imprinted so much that he cannot now back down and say he does not know where exactly this lad he named as Keith Bennett is.
My challenge to him remains the same. Name the rock formation seen in the moonlight or be shamed into being a fakir, a fake, or one that was misled with geology due to the changes with dementia setting in?
Because publicity has made him a liar in the tabloids in the last few months, he now looses face. X does not mark the spot, if there ever was an x at all. A generalisation and over simplification of landscape to the amateur.
What of the man who is suicidal? The account of 200 tablets in the Sunday tabloid is but a story elaborated to suit the media. If only ten tablets or less in a reduced fluid dietary intake are enough to kill, and there are differences in tolerance due to other drugs and medication then why stockpile 200?
To harm whom?
Or to cause alarm?
The answer is ‘Chinese whispers’, the amount found in a ‘sock’ was meant to be found.
It was a publicity scare and one to make comment on the ‘Frankenstein’ in the cage to a circus audience.
Because confectionary as sugar intake and carbohydrate content are regularly eaten by a person who is foremost mentally ill, and perhaps mentally injured too then it is a human dietary intake of choice. That every feral cat, dog and wild animal has in what it seeks to find as the diet to sooth and calm.
Sated with chocolate and crisp where Harold Shipman would never be sated. Yet even in death he is not credited with great evil even when killing hundreds of patients he selected and dispatched without occupational ethics of conscience. That comparison with the two might psychoanalytically be more thought provoking in ghoulish licence as ‘suturing’ into being akin to characters in a play.
Finally, as an academic reply to the content, not the author but the material and its message in my own view I take the ‘suturing in’ of the police officer who was used and abused by Myra before she met Ian Brady.
I say that as she worked behind the bar in her late teens in Belle Vue it is said with the manageress – mother of the serving uniformed officer son she ‘caught’, so she would have seen this man and his wife and kids. It did not stop her ‘romantic Barbara Cartland type novel in her Journal of Ian Brady’ did it? BUT.
She would have been then unable to drive efficiently; furhter, getting a job on a delivery round van to the rural and urban streets selling fags and medications on ‘tick’ and to the poor would be a step-up for her.
Driving we know she did for extra income on the vast rounds of Hyde and other locations such as Abbey Hey and Belle Vue. The officer then is named where he is not in the book ‘Topping’. He is described as a smoker, one who begs fags and so a story is told or he is seen for fags in a residential home in Blackpool regions of the Fylde Coast.
I wondered why this man had not been more illuminating? If as said he had nocturnal and daily sexual adventures outside the police house or home he had where he took the murder van he bought in August 1963 then where before this did he carry on his ‘other life’.
The answer is ‘did Myra drive to the Moors with this man for a drink or did he’?
If so the Moors would be her sensory garden of delight of her own secret life with another ‘lover’ Ian invited in with Maureen and David, plus drink soaked children from her estate who were plied with cocktails with supreme acting skills.
That in closing is the part I think that is missing in this book as to the social constructionism of the participants that is used in ‘Monsters of the Moors’(1966) to describe the patrons of the estates in negative terms of low intellect accepting domestic violence and ugliness.
It is a play, is it not over nearly fifty years in what is moral and immoral?
What do others think?
March 23, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Well, I havent read all of your comments but I have read the book, I do feel Duncan could only scrape the surface and didnt get anywhere near the full facts. Im writing this down here as I don’t know who else to tell, and, indeed – if theres any relevance. I was born in 1956 and lived in Birmingham, there is an island at the bottom of our road with 4 roads streaming from it. When I was 8 or 9 years old I was playing on the pavement on the edge of the roundabout when a black austin pulled up besides me. A slim woman with a blond beehive and very smartly dressed opened her door and asked me if I’d like to go for a ride with them. She was holding a out a bag of sweeties that could only have come from the sweetie shop on the other side of the island – I was puzzled as they had driven towards the island and not around it so how cvould she have bought the sweeties – I noticed they were very fresh! I looked at the driver – he was rather small to medium and had on a black leather coat, he also had glasses on and a trilby pulled low on his face, he was just sitting very still and staring straight ahead. All the time the woman was trying to entice me into the car I was fascinated by him, he did not move, turn his head or appear to be listening. Every so often she turned to look at him but I did not see any response to her unspoken question, at last I saw her looking at him and he shook his head very very slightly. They drive off in a very unhurried manner. The whole thing spooked me so I ran off home and promptly forgot about it. I have no doubts in my mind that it was Brady and Hindly but what were they doing in Great Barr Birmingham? I had deduced it could not be a sunday yet they were wearing what I would have described as sunday best. Im sure this was 1964, the weather wasnt cold as I had on my favourite frock without my cardigan. I would be interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts on this – I do not know if there were any other reports of abductions gone wrong at the time and also it doesn’t say in the book if they ever had a black car, it definately wasnt white but could have been dark green.
Curious
March 23, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Myra (!!),
You should write to Staff and tell him as there are many unpublished account of the kind you write of and he would be familiar with them and might be able to help you. But either way I’m sure he would be happy to hear from you….
March 23, 2008 at 5:07 pm
SillyoldTwit
thanks for your reply babes, not sure how to track him down but I could always send a letter via his publishers I suppose.
from
Myra (!!)
!!
March 23, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Hi M ,
Do that , write to him at his publisher’s. His book wil probably be revised with every print run and he relies on people like you for most of his background information. Most author are delighted to have feedback and as I say there may be others who have had the same experience as you ….
March 23, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Hi SOT, I just wanted to say I would have got in that car but for how wierd he looked and behaved – I didn’t get any bad vibes from her and she was also offering pineapple chunks which was the creme de la creme of sweeties back then!
kind regards
M
April 16, 2008 at 6:39 am
I have read the book and can only say what I felt all along: Myra manipulated so many people in order to get paroled. At least Ian Brady does not seek freedom and never felt the need to cower behind religious conversion (unlike his hypocritical partner in crime).
She, to my way of thinking, was more evil than he was because she used cunning to gain sympathy. Glad she is dead (pity she was not butchered during her time in prison).
At least IB can write and express himself much better than that bitch ever did.
July 4, 2008 at 5:49 pm
reading the lost boy iwas wondering, all the codes they spoke in the letters does anybody think that poor kieth might be buried in scotland?
August 7, 2009 at 11:47 am
I have just finished reading ‘The Lost Boy’ by Duncan Staff. I liked the way it was written. I read the book because I have also just read Joe Powell’s book ‘Dead People’ in which he mentions Keith Bennett. I was a teenager in the early sixties and remember the case unfolding vividly. The tape recording of Lesley Ann was particularly distressing and everybody I knew was affected by it. I felt deeply for her mother and can only imagine the pain suffered by the families of these children. This case touched so many people. Myra Hindley was hated even more than Ian Brady for reasons which are well known – she was female she should have had an inbuilt desire to protect and yet she lured the chosen victim to him knowing exactly what he was going to do to them. Why do the ‘professionals’ try to establish a reason or explain their behaviour? Why can’t we just accept these two were evil? As for Ian Brady being intelligent – he certainly had delusions of grandeur and wanted to be something he wasn’t and never could be. Plagiarism – that’s what he was about. He wasn’t so clever.