Ian Brady: Moors Murders and False Memories
June 7, 2007
Yesterday or the day before I posted a short piece about Ian Brady and the people who write to him in which I gave a link to someone who had had a letter from him. In the letter Brady speaks of his time in America and how he had met ‘contacts’ there. I am aware of Brady having made statements like this before but in view of the fact that he has never been to the USA it reminded me of how we all have ‘false memories’. And such things as false memories are very real and quite common. Some would of course say that Brady is mad and that that explains his false memories however given his situation , ie locked up and isolated for 40 years , such memories might become very real indeed and might just keep him from really going mad.
We are all familiar with the case of therapists helping abuse victims to recover painful memories and their sometimes terrible consequences for perfectly innocent people when it all goes wrong. I have just now been reading of a woman in the USA who was led to believe she had been raped when she was in fact a virgin. It’s possible of course that I am suffering from such a false memory in relation to Brady and that he has perhaps been as he claims to the USA. If anyone out there in the ‘real world’ can shed light on the subject why not drop a message here.
PS. Depending from where you acessed this page from the links contained in this post may or may not work. This is due to a change in my URL (address). The problem will be sorted out within the next week so if they did not work for you call back later.
Ian Brady and Ashworth Hospital
May 25, 2007
Ian Brady was first admitted to Ashworth Hospital in 1985. When first sent there he had expressed ‘deep remorse’ for his crimes but this was to change. After a knife had been discovered taped under a sink in a washroom Brady was forcibly moved to a cell on Lawrence Ward of the hospital. Prior to this he had been refused the right to donate one of his kidneys. According to Colin Wilson “”it was because of this attempt to express remorse was thrown back in his face that he began to contemplate suicide”. In Oct. 1999 he went on hunger strike and is still being tube fed to this day.
“On 30 September 1999, Ian Brady was transferred to another ward. He took objection both to the transfer and to the manner in which it was effected. In addition to making complaints to the police and through the National Health Service complaints procedure he went on hunger strike. At the same time he began a media campaign, writing repeatedly to the BBC and others and issuing information through his solicitor complaining about the way that he had been treated, giving details of his hunger strike and the manner in which he was affected.
Because of the substantial media interest which Ian Brady generated, the director of communications of Ashworth found it necessary to make 12 press releases between 30 September 1999 and 11 January 2000 answering inquiries for information. The release of the 2 October 1999 began by stating: “Ian Brady, a patient at Ashworth Hospital, has exercised his right to refuse permission for the hospital to disclose any clinical details about him”. On 29 October, it was announced that he had refused food for a total of 30 days and that a program of “refeeding” had been introduced, which involved force feeding by means of a nasogastric tube.
On 2 February 2000, Ian Brady obtained permission to apply for judicial review, in order to challenge the continuing decision to force feed him. The hearing was held in private but, due to the public interest in the case, Maurice Kay J delivered his judgment in open court: see R (Brady) v Ashworth Hospital Authority[2000] Lloyd’s Med R 355; (2001) 58 BMLR 173. Maurice Kay J ruled that force feeding was lawful since it was reasonably administered as part of the medical treatment given for the mental disorder from which Ian Brady was suffering. By virtue of section 63 of the 1983 Act consent was not needed for such treatment. The judgment set out in detail particulars of Ian Brady’s clinical history which related to his decision.” ( taken from the website of the House of Lords).
In Sept. 1999 a telephone call from Dirty Harry’s bar in Amsterdam triggered an inquiry into the running of Ashworth Hospital. The call had come from Stephen Daggett a convicted paedophile who had absconded from Ashworth while on day release. He claimed that pornography was freely available as were drugs. As a result The Fallon Inquiry was set up and in it’s final report the hospital was roundly condemned.
While there is little reason to believe that Brady is mad his mental health has diminished since going on hunger strike. He recently (2006) wrote to Winnie Johnson the mother of Keith Bennett a rambling letter complaining of his treatment at the hospital.
A review of the latest book on the moors murders may be found here.
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.
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.
