by Ian Brady
Jean Ritchie has one highly significant story to tell: how, at the age of nine, he was taken on a picnic to the shores of Loch Lomond.
‘For Ian it was a day of discovery. He discovered in himself a deep affinity with the wild, rugged and empty scenery around the lake. He was moved by the grandeur of the hills, awed by the vastness of the sky. When it was time to go home, the family found him halfway up one of the hills, standing still absorbing something — who knows what? — from the strange, open, inspiring scenery around him. It was an unusual Ian who came down the hill, one who babbled happily about his day out to his foster sisters . . .’
This story, which epitomises the Ian Brady I have come to know, sounds as if it was told to Jean Ritchie by the Sloan family, and it is supported by other comments from those who knew him: for example, Lord Longford, who visited him in prison. The latter is also on record as saying that Brady knew his Tolstoy and Dostoevsky better than anyone he had met.
What most writers on the case seem agreed upon is that Brady was — as Jean Ritchie puts it — ‘a loner, an outsider.’ He was also a highly dominant child at school, a born leader, who seems to have embarked on burglary at an early age (nine has been quoted) — not, as in the case of Panzram, out of envy of contemporaries from wealthier backgrounds, but simply out of devilment. He tells me that on his first burglary — the house of a naval man — he did not take anything, but simply looked around.
When he was ten, the family were moved from the Gorbals to a new council estate at Pollock, with ‘indoor bathroom and lavatory, a garden and nearby fields.’ At the age of eleven he started attending Shawlands Academy, a school for above-average pupils, but seems to have taken a certain pleasure in misbehaving, perhaps in reaction against richer schoolmates. But he received high marks for his English essays, and was a natural leader.
At the age of thirteen he came before a juvenile court for burglary but was bound over; nine months later, he was again bound over for the same thing. He left school at sixteen, and worked as a butcher’s boy, and then as a tea boy in a Glasgow shipyard. He tells me that it was the feeling of frustration, of being in a dead-end job, that made him feel that he needed to start accumulating ‘working capital.’
In that same year he appeared again before a Glasgow court with nine charges against him. This time he was put on probation on condition that he join his mother in Manchester. Margaret Stewart had moved there when her son was twelve, and had married a meat porter named Patrick Brady, whose name Ian was to take.
His stepfather found him a job in the fruit market. He was still a loner, spending hours in his room reading — including Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Possessed. But in November 1955, he was again in court, this time on a charge of aiding and abetting. A driver asked him to load some stolen lead onto his lorry. On being caught, the scrap dealer gave the driver away to the police, and he in turn implicated Brady. In court, Brady pleaded guilty, expecting a fine for such a trivial offense — after all, everybody in the market was ‘on the fiddle.’ But because he was on probation, the judge decided that severity was called for. To his bewilderment — and rage — Brady was remanded to Strangeways jail to await his sentence. Here, I suspect, was the beginning of that resentment that led to the Moors Murders.
In jail he spent three months among professional criminals, and deliberately cultivated fences, cracksmen, even killers. He had made up his mind that society was going to get what it deserved. This reaction is typical of the high-dominance male faced with what he considers outrageous injustice. The two-year Borstal sentence that followed only confirmed the decision — particularly when, in an open Borstal at Hatfield, he found himself in further trouble. He had been selling home-distilled liquor and running a book on horses and dogs. One day, after getting drunk and having a fight with a warder, he was transferred to an altogether tougher Borstal housed in Hull prison. This, says Jean Ritchie, ‘was where he prepared himself to become a big-time criminal.’ The aim was to become wealthy as quickly as possible, so he could enjoy the freedom he dreamed about. This was why he studied bookkeeping in prison — to learn to handle money.
Three months in Strangeways and two years in Borstal had turned a youth with a minor criminal record and a tendency to bookishness into an antisocial rebel. Even taking into account the fact that he had been on probation, the ineptitude of the law seems incredible.
He was released at the end of two years, but remained on probation for another three. When he was released, he returned home to Manchester, under the terms of the probation. Fred Harrison, the journalist who interviewed Brady in prison, and who wrote a book on the case (Brady and Hindley, The Genesis of the Moors Murders, 1986) has an interesting passage that makes it clear that Brady soon became actively involved in crime. He speaks of a Borstal friend named Deare, who delivered a stolen Jaguar to Manchester — not to Brady but to another man. The car was to be used in a ‘job.’ The other man, says Harrison, made the mistake of not getting rid of the Jaguar after the ‘job,’ and was arrested. He gave Deare’s name to the police. Deare subsequently vanished, and Harrison suggests that Brady might have killed him. But Brady pointed out to me that Gilbert Deare was still around at the time of Brady’s arrest for the Moors Murders, and died some time later in a drowning accident. On this matter, Harrison is inaccurate. But he is correct in saying that Brady was involved in crimes that required a getaway car soon after he returned to Manchester, and that he had at least two accomplices. What is also clear is that Brady spent a great deal of time ‘casing’ banks and building societies, watching the transportation of money.
Apart from one brush with the law for being drunk and disorderly, Brady managed to stay out of trouble. His probation officer obliged him to take a labouring job in a brewery, which he understandably detested. In 1959, at the age of twenty-one, he succeeded in changing this for something less disagreeable; the bookkeeping training led to a job as a stock clerk with Millwards Ltd, a small chemical firm. He was a careful and neat worker, although inclined to be unpunctual, and to slip out of the office to place bets with a local bookmaker.
But he remained a loner, spending the lunch hour alone in the office, reading books, including Mein Kampf and other volumes on Nazism. By the time Myra Hindley came to work at Millwards, Brady was a fervent admirer of Hitler and Nazism.
There was another element in Brady that Fred Harrison was the first to point out: a curious black romanticism associated with death. Harrison describes how Brady became an atheist at the age of twelve, when he prayed that his pet dog would not die, and his prayers remained unanswered. Two years later, cycling to a job interview, he felt giddy and halted in the doorway of a newsagent’s shop. There he saw ‘a green, warm radiation, not unattractive to the young man who tried to steady himself. The features were unformed but still recognisable. Ian knew that he was looking at The Face of Death . . . he instantly knew that his salvation was irrevocably bound to its demands. “I’ll do it a favour, and . . . it will do me favours.” The bond with death was fused by the green radiation.’
On the day Myra Hindley came to work at Millwards as a shorthand typist — Monday, January 16, 1961 — Ian Brady dictated her first letter. She was four and a half years his junior, a completely normal working-class girl, not bad-looking, with a blonde hairdo and bright lipstick, interested in boys and dancing. She had been born (January 23, 1942) a Catholic, brought up a Protestant, and returned to Catholicism when she was sixteen. When she was four, the birth of a sister made the home too cramped, and she went to live with her grandmother nearby. This was not particularly traumatic since she could spend as much time as she liked at her home around the corner. In fact, since her father was a heavy drinker and inclined to violence when drunk, she preferred her grandmother’s house.
At school she received good marks and wrote poetry and excellent English essays. She played the mouth organ and was known as a high-spirited tomboy.
Myra had been engaged but had broken it off, find
ing the boy ‘immature.’ This was one of the problems for working-class girls at that time, whose notions of male attractiveness were formed by cinema and television — hard-bitten heroes with strong jaws, or charismatic rebels like James Dean and Elvis Presley. By contrast, the youths they met at dance halls seemed commonplace and boring.
Ian Brady was certainly not that. He had slightly sulky good looks reminiscent of Elvis Presley, and a dry and forceful manner. His self-possession was intriguing. So was his total lack of interest in her. Myra’s infatuation blossomed, and she confided it to her red diary. ‘Ian looked at me today.’ ‘Wonder if Ian is courting. Still feel the same.’ ‘Haven’t spoken to him yet.’ Then: ‘Spoken to him. He smiles as though embarrassed.’ On August 1: ‘Ian’s taking sly looks at me at work.’ But by November: ‘I’ve given up with Ian. He goes out of his way to annoy me . . .’
Just before Christmas 1961, there was an office party; he got drunk and danced with her, then walked her home and kissed her goodnight, saying ‘I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.’ Myra felt she was in heaven. On December 22, she told her diary: ‘Out with Ian!’ They went to see the film King of Kings, the life story of Jesus. Just over a week later, on the divan bed in her gran’s front room, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley became lovers. ‘I hope Ian and I love each other all our lives and get married and are happy ever after.’
Many books on the Moors Murder case imply that Brady’s attitude towards her was cold and manipulative. In fact, it seems to have been exceptionally close. Myra was over-awed and fascinated by her lover. She declared later: ‘Within months he had convinced me there was no God at all: he could have told me the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese and the sun rose in the West, I would have believed him.’ Ian told me that the relationship was so close that they were virtually telepathic.
They spent every Saturday night together, went on visits to the moors on Ian’s second-hand motor bike, taking bottles of German wine, read the same books, and went to see films like Compulsion, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case.
Within a fairly short time, Myra had been indoctrinated. She had become an atheist, and accepted what he called ‘moral relativism,’ the notion that right and wrong are creations of the human mind. She was soon as enthusiastic as he was about the Nazis. From then on, it was only a short step to accepting the ideas of the Marquis de Sade, whose basic notion is that physical pleasure is the only real value, and that all the rest of our moral values have been concocted by the ruling classes to keep the poor in their place.
According to de Sade, nature knows nothing about morality or good and evil; it inflicts pain or pleasure, happiness or misery, ecstasy or death, with utter indifference. Therefore there is no reason why the individual should not follow its example, and do whatever brings pleasure without regard to its effect on other people. In Sade’s novels, pity and compassion are regarded as a form of feeble-mindedness.
It follows logically that there is no such thing as crime. Since we owe nothing to other people — in this world it is every man for himself — there is no moral reason why, if crime pays better than honesty, we should not live by crime. Which is why Brady had soon persuaded Myra Hindley that it would be sensible to make a large sum of money from crime, and then retire to somewhere with a better climate than rain-sodden Manchester.
Brady’s influence on Myra’s personality and outlook was immense. Her sister Maureen would later describe in court how Myra had changed completely, from being a normal girl and a regular churchgoer who loved children and animals, to someone who claimed she hated human beings, including babies and children. Maureen noted that her sister also became hostile and suspicious, keeping all her belongings — books, tape recordings and clothes — under lock and key.
There may have been another reason for this: Myra did not want anyone prying into evidence that would reveal just how much she had changed. For example, she and Brady had taken up photography, and bought a time-lapse camera so they could take ‘pornographic pictures’ to sell. Jean Ritchie points out that eighteen months earlier, Myra had been so prudish that she would not even allow her sister to see her undressed. Now she posed for the camera wearing black crotchless panties, and engaged in sexual intercourse. Other photographs show her tied up with whip lashes on her flesh. So her secretiveness is understandable.
What had happened to her is obvious. She had not merely fallen in love; she had experienced something like religious conversion. Brady became her whole life. She must have felt that she had been asleep before she met him, and was now finally awake. She was seeing everything with new eyes.
Given this neo-Sadeian outlook (which Brady claims he held long before reading Sade), it is easy to see that it is only one small step from planning bank robberies to murder. If what is called crime is justifiable, because the individual has the right to do whatever suits him best, without taking other people into account, then the same certainly applies to sex.
Philosophically speaking, this step is the most dangerous of all. It is natural for dominant individuals to enjoy sex, and both Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were dominant. But because nature has designed them as childbearers, even dominant women tend to look for ‘Mr Right.’ Every dominant male, on the other hand, wishes he had a slave of the lamp who would use magic to enable him to have sex with every pretty girl he passed in the street. This is why the dominant male finds it difficult to engage in binding relationships.
I suspect that, even so, Brady found Myra’s devotion and subservience intoxicating, and that he suddenly felt like a starving man who has been invited to a ten-course banquet. There is nothing like an adoring and uncritical girl to fill you with self-confidence. It seemed that life had ceased to treat him as an outcast, and was inviting him to help himself.
Most males, under these circumstances, would decide on sex as a priority. And since his relationship with Myra was one of total dominance, he would certainly not meet any resistance there.
The first ‘Moors Murder,’ that of Pauline Reade, happened on July 12, 1963, a month after Brady had moved in with Myra at her grandmother’s house in Bannock Street, Gorton. The only account we have of the murder is from the confession Myra Hindley made to Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping in January 1987, when she finally decided to admit her guilt. According to Myra, she picked up Pauline Reade — who was sixteen, and a friend of her sister Maureen — in a newly purchased minivan. Pauline was on her way to a dance, but agreed to go and look for an expensive glove which Myra claimed she had lost at a picnic on Saddleworth Moor — Myra offered her a pile of gramophone records in exchange. When they had been on the moor about an hour, Brady arrived on his motorbike, and was introduced as Myra’s boyfriend. Brady and Pauline then went off to look for the glove, while, Myra claims, she waited in the car. Later, Brady returned to the car, and took her to Pauline’s body. Her throat had been cut and her clothes were in disarray, indicating rape. They then buried the body with the spade that Myra had brought in the back of the van.
In an open letter to the newspapers in 1990, Brady claimed that Myra had been involved in the actual killing, and had also made some kind of sexual assault on Pauline Reade. He says that Myra took the necklace off Pauline, saying: ‘Where you’re going, you won’t need this.’ On the whole, his version sounds the more plausible. Myra’s accounts of the murders invariably have her elsewhere at the time, and Topping indicates that Myra told the truth only insofar as it suited her.
Although I initially accepted Myra’s account when I first read Topping’s book, I have since come to feel that it is simply implausible. It seems to me far more likely that Myra had absorbed the Brady/de Sade philosophy to the point where she actively participated in the murders and sexual assaults.
But I can accept one comment that Myra made for the benefit of a television documentary: that Brady complained that Pauline Reade had been too hard to subdue, and that in the future he would prefer children.
In October 1963
, three months after the murder of Pauline Reade, Ian Brady made the acquaintance of sixteen-year-old David Smith, the husband of Myra’s sister Maureen (who was now also working at Millwards). Smith was a big youth who had been a member of a street gang and had been in trouble with the law. Soon David and Maureen took a trip to Lake District with Ian and Myra, where they sailed on Windermere. While not homosexual, Smith experienced an emotional attraction to males; soon he was almost as completely under Brady’s spell as Myra.
On Saturday, November 23, 1963, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley drove to the small market town of Ashton-under-Lyne. A twelve-year-old boy named John Kilbride had spent Saturday afternoon at the cinema, then went to earn a few pence doing odd jobs for stallholders at the market. It began to get dark and a fog came down from the Pennines. At that moment, a friendly lady approached him and asked if he wanted a lift. It seemed safe enough, so he climbed in. It was the last time he was seen alive. Later, Brady was to take a photograph of Myra kneeling on his grave on the moor.
On June 16, 1964, twelve-year-old Keith Bennett set out to spend the night at his grandmother’s house in the Longsight district. When his mother called to collect him the following morning, she learned that he had failed to arrive. Like John Kilbride, Keith Bennett had accepted a lift from a kind lady. His body has never been found.
Meanwhile, David Smith’s admiration for his mentor was steadily increasing. Brady took him up to Saddleworth Moor and they engaged in pistol practice — Myra had obtained a gun license by the expedient of joining the Cheadle Rifle Club. Myra was not entirely happy about this intimacy; her attitude to Smith had an undertone of hostility; in fact, both of them were getting sick of the Smiths. She was glad when her gran was rehoused in Wardle Brook Avenue, in the suburb of Hattersley, in September 1964, when she and Ian were able to move into the little house at the end of a terrace. Nevertheless, Ian continued to consolidate his influence over David. If he was going to rob banks, a partner would be needed. Soon David Smith was recording in a notebook sentences like the ones quoted at the trial: ‘Rape is not a crime, it is a state of mind. God is a disease which eats away a man’s instincts, murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure.’ Soon he and Brady were ‘casing’ banks and drawing up elaborate plans.
