by Ian Brady
One day Brady asked him: ‘Is there anyone you hate and want out of the way?’
Smith mentioned several names, including an old rival named Tony Latham. After some discussion, they settled on Tony Latham as the murder victim. But first, Brady explained, he would need a photograph. This was no problem. Smith had a Polaroid camera, and he knew the pub where Latham drank. The next evening, Ian and Myra drove him to the pub, then drove away. Unfortunately, Smith had forgotten to insert the film, and when he went into the toilet to develop the photograph, found the camera empty.
When he went out to Wardle Brook Avenue to confess his failure, Brady seemed to take it casually enough. In reality he did not believe Smith was telling the truth, and was alarmed. Now, suddenly, David Smith was a potential risk. If he had participated in the murder of Tony Latham, he would have been bound to Ian and Myra. Now Brady began to think seriously about removing him. Oddly enough, it was Myra who dissuaded him. ‘It would hurt Mo’ (Maureen).
On December 26, 1964, there was another murder. Like the others, this was planned in advance. Myra had arranged for her grandmother to stay the night with an uncle at Dukinfield. At about six o’clock that evening, she picked up ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey at a fair in Hulme Hall Lane. In Myra’s version of what happened to Topping, they took Lesley back to the house in Wardle Brook Avenue, and switched on a tape recorder. Myra claims that she was in the kitchen when she heard the child screaming. Brady was squeezing her neck and ordering her to take off her coat. Lesley was then made to undress, and to assume various ‘pornographic’ poses, while Brady photographed her. On the tape, Myra can be heard ordering her to ‘put it in, put it in tighter,’ presumably referring to the gag that appears in the photographs. Lesley screams and asks to be allowed to go home. At this point, Myra claims she was ordered to go and run a bath; she stayed in the bathroom until the water became cold. When she returned, Lesley had been strangled, and there was blood on her thighs. The following day they took the body to the moors and buried it.
In his open letter to the press, Brady declares that Myra ‘insisted upon killing Lesley Ann Downey with her own hands, using a two-foot length of silk cord, which she later used to enjoy toying with in public, in the secret knowledge of what it had been used for.’
Brady had killed approximately once every six months since July 1963: Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey. For some reason, July 1965 went by without a further murder. The reason may be found in something Brady said to Fred Harrison, in a prison interview: ‘I felt old at twenty-six. Everything was ashes. I felt there was nothing of interest — nothing to hook myself onto. I had experienced everything.’
Harrison tells how Brady suggested to David Smith one evening that they should play Russian roulette. He removed all the bullets from the revolver, then replaced one, and spun the chambers. Then he fired at Smith. There was just a click. Brady laughed. ‘There would have been an awful mess behind you if the bullet had hit you.’
But if the bullet hit Smith, Brady would have been arrested on a manslaughter charge. The fact that he took such a risk reveals his self-control was being eroded.
Then, in September 1965, Brady decided to kill out of sequence. The aim seems to have been to cement David Smith’s membership with the ‘gang.’ According to Smith, during a drinking session on September 25, Brady asked him: ‘Have you ever killed anybody? I have — three or four. The bodies are buried up on the moors.’
Two weeks later, on October 6, Smith turned up at Wardle Brook Avenue hoping to borrow some money, but they were all broke. Brady had already suggested that they should rob an Electricity Board showroom, and the robbery had been planned for two days later. Smith’s urgent need for money to pay the rent suggested that now was the time to ‘cement’ him beyond all possibility of withdrawal.
Towards midnight, Myra called at her sister’s flat with a message for their mother, then asked David Smith to walk her home. As he stood waiting in the kitchen — expecting to be offered a drink — there was a scream from the sitting room, and Myra called, ‘Dave, help him!’ As Smith ran in, Ian Brady was hacking at the head of a youth who was lying on the floor. In spite of blow after blow, the youth continued to twist and scream. Finally, when he lay still, Brady pressed a cushion over his face and tied a cord around the throat to stop the gurgling noises. Brady handed Smith the hatchet. ‘Feel the weight of that.’ Smith’s fingers left bloodstained prints on the handle.
Gran called down to ask what the noise was about, and Myra shouted that she had dropped a tape recorder on her foot.
When the room had been cleaned up, the body was carried upstairs between them. Brady commented: ‘Eddie’s a dead weight,’ and he and Myra laughed. The victim was seventeen-year-old Edward Evans, a homosexual who had been picked up in a pub that evening.
They all drank tea while Myra reminisced about a policeman who had stopped to talk to her while Brady was burying a body. Smith agreed to return with an old pram the next day, and help in the disposal of Edward Evans.
When he arrived home Smith was violently sick. And when he told Maureen what happened, it was she who decided to go to the police.
At eight o’clock the next morning, a man dressed as a baker’s roundsman knocked on the door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. Myra answered the door, still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. The man identified himself as a police officer, and said he had reason to believe there was a body in the house. Brady was on the divan bed in the living room in his undervest, writing a note to explain why he was not going to work that day. Upstairs, the police demanded to see into a locked room. When Myra said the key was at work, a policeman offered to go and fetch it. At this, Brady said: ‘You’d better tell him. There was a row here last night. It’s in there.’ Under the window in the bedroom there was a plastic-wrapped bundle.
In a letter to me, Ian described how, when the police came in, and told him to dress, he had cautiously felt under the settee, where he kept the loaded gun — he had made up his mind to shoot the policemen, then himself. But it was not there. Then he remembered: the previous evening, as they had been carrying the body upstairs, the revolver in its shoulder holster had been banging against his ribs, and he had taken it out and left it upstairs.
Myra was not arrested at the same time as Brady. The police probably accepted that Evans had been killed in the course of a quarrel, and Brady’s bad limp — due to a kick on the shin from Evans — seemed to support this. So for the next five days, Myra remained free, going to see Brady every day.
But David Smith told the police that Brady had stored two suitcases in the left luggage at Manchester Central Station, and these were recovered. (The cloakroom ticket was later found where Brady had described it — in the spine of a prayer book.) These proved to contain pornographic photographs — including nine of Lesley Ann Downey — photographs of Ian and Myra on the moors, the tape of Lesley Ann pleading to be allowed to leave, various books on sex and torture, and wigs, coshes and notes on robbing banks. The police decided to dig on the moors, using the photographs as a guide, and the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride were recovered.
On May 6, 1966, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were both sentenced to life imprisonment. (Only the abolition of the death penalty a month after their arrest saved them from the hangman.) There had been no confession — at the trial, Brady maintained that Lesley had been brought to the house by two men, who had taken her away after taking the photographs.
Myra was sent to Holloway, Brady to Durham, where he opted for solitary confinement, and studied German. He and Myra wrote constantly, and he began a campaign to try to secure her visiting rights, insisting that they were, in effect, man and wife. When this came to nothing he went on hunger strike. But although Myra had his photograph on her cell wall, she was embarking on a lesbian affair with a teenager called Rita; it was the first of many. She was gradually drawing apart from Ian, who was irritated to learn that she was in the process of returning to
Catholicism — here the Catholic peer Lord Longford seems to have been instrumental.
Fred Harrison has an interesting anecdote. In 1967, a child killer named Raymond Morris was sent to Durham; he had murdered and raped three little girls, aged five, six and seven. Brady loathed him; on one occasion he threw boiling tea in his face — for which he received twenty-eight days confined to his cell — and subsequently punched him in the face as he was walking upstairs, knocking him down again. Brady told Harrison: ‘Years later . . . I realised that, in a way, I was attacking myself. I could see myself in the Cannock Chase killer.’ He was, in other words, beginning to feel remorse about killing children. And when Mrs Ann West, the mother of Lesley Ann Downey, tried to get permission to see him in prison in 1986, but was refused because of his ‘mental condition,’ Brady told a correspondent: ‘Re: letters from Mrs West and the mother of Keith Bennett.* Although I have been given them I have not been able to bring myself to read them. I have been afraid to read them. Understand? I have to keep mental blocks tightly shut and keep control. The authorities have refused Mrs West’s requests to visit me … I can’t say how it would have worked out if the meeting had taken place. Remorse for my part in this and other matters is axiomatic, painfully deep.’
Brady knew from the beginning that he would never be released from jail. Myra, on the other hand, felt there was a good chance of parole, and in the 1970s, newspapers began carrying reports that she now claimed that Brady was totally responsible for the murders and she was innocent. It was that point that Brady began to hate her.
In 1973, a singer named Janie Jones was sentenced to seven years for controlling prostitutes and sent to Holloway. She heard that the Moors Murderess admired her, but refused to be introduced, because she was revolted by the case. But when they finally met, she felt sorry for Myra, who looked like a bag of bones. Far from being hard-faced and brutal, as she looked in the trial photographs, she struck Janie Jones as shy and rather pathetic. Myra told her about the murders, and insisted that she had never been involved. She had helped pick up the children, but had no idea that Brady had killed them.
Janie Jones was completely taken in, and sympathy for Myra turned to pity when she saw her being attacked by a fellow prisoner. Myra stayed passive as a boot smashed her nose, and blood spurted on the floor. Janie finally intervened to prevent Myra from being thrown over the top floor balcony railing to certain death.
Janie Jones soon became convinced that Myra was suffering a great injustice, and when she was released in 1977, she joined Lord Longford in campaigning for her release.
In 1979, Myra wrote a 20,000-word document for the Home Secretary, begging for release. This completed the alienation between the former lovers, for Myra insisted that Brady alone was guilty of the murders, and that she was merely his dupe. And Ian, who had made every effort at the trial to establish Myra’s innocence, now took every opportunity to state that she was as guilty as he was.
In November 1986, a policeman who had been born in her area, Gorton, went to see her in Cookham Wood prison, where Myra had been transferred in 1983. Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping wanted her help in finding the two unrecovered bodies: Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade. Myra, undoubtedly seeing this as a step towards parole, promised to help. Besides, Brady was showing signs of mental stress, and his weight had dropped to a hundred pounds. That was why, in 1985, he was moved to the Park Lane Hospital, a mental institution (later Ashworth Hospital) in Liverpool. In that state, he might well confess to the murders, and implicate Myra. She considered that her best defense against this was to make the first move. She agreed to help in the search for missing bodies.
The search began on December 16, 1986, a freezing day, and snow was falling by lunchtime. Predictably, the search failed to find anything, although it went on — without Myra — all week. David Smith came to the moor one day, but the snow was now too deep to see anything but the vague contours of the moor; he was only able to indicate the spot where he and Myra and Brady sometimes parked the car and drank German wine. Myra was not present on that occasion, which was just as well, since both she and Brady continued to regard Smith with hatred. (Paradoxically, Smith had been forced to move from Manchester because of the detestation with which he was regarded. Maureen had died of a brain hemorrhage in 1977.)
Myra was still maintaining that she was not involved in the actual murders, but in late January 1987 she dropped this pretense, and began to confess to Topping. As she talked, she chain-smoked, and on two occasions became so tense that she had to be given tranquilisers.
Myra’s version was that Brady blackmailed her into helping with the murders. One night, she claimed, he had given her wine with a gritty deposit and she lost consciousness; later he admitted that he had drugged her with sleeping tablets. When he began to talk to her about his desire to commit the perfect murder, and she was appalled, he showed her pornographic pictures he had taken of her while she was drugged, and told her he would show them to her family if she refused to help. Topping disbelieved this story — as he disbelieved much of her ‘confession’ — feeling that she was simply trying to excuse herself.
Myra continued to claim that she had never been present when the victims were killed — Brady sent her away. And when she returned, the victim (John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey) was already dead. After the first murder of Pauline Reade, Myra claimed of being so sickened that she decided to take the van and go to the police, but she was deterred because Brady had the key. From then on, she insisted, she was terrified that he would kill her too if she resisted. She even claimed that he had threatened to kill her grandmother by pushing her downstairs.
Describing the final killing, of Edward Evans, Myra told Topping that Brady and David Smith had planned it together. Clearly, she was still determined to involve Smith.
Although Myra had gone to so much trouble to emphasise that she was in the last analysis blameless, former supporters like Janie Jones and Lord Longford were upset to learn how far she had deceived them.
In March 1987, Topping went to the Park Lane Hospital to interview Brady. He had been told that he would not understand what Brady was saying, and would be incapable of answering; this proved to be untrue. In fact, Topping felt that Brady was perfectly lucid, and obsessed by a need to feel ‘in control’ of situations.
Brady agreed to confess if he could be given the means of killing himself. Topping explained that this was impossible. ‘Talking to him was like playing chess,’ said Topping, ‘He was always thinking three moves ahead.’ When — at a later meeting — Topping had finally made it clear that he had no power to offer ‘a deal,’ Brady offered to locate bodies on the moor if he could be granted what he called his ‘human week’ — a week of normal life, eating the food he chose, drinking Drambuie and watching old films. He felt deprived of these things after twenty years, and felt it was not much to ask; again, Topping had to refuse.
Topping was with Brady on July 1, 1987 when Pauline Reade’s body was finally located. It was lying on its side, fully clothed, and the throat had been cut. The clothes had obviously been pushed up, then carelessly pulled down. The following day, Brady agreed to go onto the moor and try and find the body of Keith Bennett. On July 3, Brady was allowed back onto the moor, the first time in twenty-two years. But by mid-afternoon, he had lost his bearings; the moor had changed a great deal since the 1960s. By that time, so many reporters and news cameramen were following that Topping decided to call it a day. And although Brady offered to go back to the moor to try again, the Home Office refused to allow it.
During many visits to Park Lane, Topping and Brady talked a great deal about the topography of the moor, but Brady would not discuss the murders themselves — except to say that Myra’s accounts were thoroughly untrustworthy.
During one of these conversations, Brady talked about other murders (as he had, in fact, with Fred Harrison). He claimed that, in Glasgow, he had seen a man mistreating an old woman, and had followed hi
m and stabbed him with a sheath knife. Near Manchester station he had quarrelled with a man on a piece of waste ground and ‘bricked him,’ leaving him on the ground. Again, in Manchester, after getting into an argument with a woman, he picked her up and threw her over the parapet wall into the canal. He told Topping that the body of a youth he had killed was buried near one of the markers on the A635, but declined to elaborate.
I have no idea whether these ‘murders’ actually happened — although something Ian said in one of his letters to me inclines me to think not.
After Topping’s book came out in 1989, Ian was indignant that he had, while still a serving officer, been allowed to publish his account of his Moors investigation, when the police, like the armed forces and the Civil Service, have to sign a confidentiality agreement. Brady’s protests led to the book being withdrawn.
During our early exchanges of letters, Ian would put two parallel red lines across every page, with the words: ‘Personal and confidential. Not for publication.’ Finally, as he came to trust me, he stopped bothering to do it.
His letters often contained personal anecdotes that threw an interesting light on his personality, like the following (dated December 12, 1992):
Another absurd insight. I always liked the best seats in the cinema. But, when there was a full house and we had to queue, and the doorman would come walking along the queue declaring that two of the best seats (also the most expensive) were available, I hated having to walk past the queue in order to accept them; I felt that I was deliberately snubbing or insulting them by my action: ‘I can afford the most expensive; you can’t.’ Not very flattering to my ‘demon’ image. But I can laugh at such paradoxes.
