The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  Now, to even the account, I’ll give you the other side of the coin. In Inside the Mind of a Murderer, M [Myra] refers to a true crime incident. We had come out of a cinema and gone for a late night drink in a town-centre bar in Manchester. As we were drinking, a group of five or six men came in together and sat at right angles to us. The one nearest kept staring at M with a stupid grin on his face. I gave him a few warning glances, but he continued. I fumed silently for some minutes, and then suddenly I took a decision, and the ‘black light’ began to operate. Casually I slipped my hand into my overcoat pocket and, with thumb and forefinger, opened the lock-back knife I always carried, made entirely of stainless steel, devoid of ornament and with the functional purity of scalpel. I glanced at the bottles on the table in front of me, selecting which ones to choose as additional weapons. I felt marvellous, delighted, and ready to hack the halfwits. I turned towards them. ‘Who the fuck are you staring at? You looking for trouble?’ Words to that effect. I waited for the first move, and intended to deal with the starer first. His grin had disappeared and his mouth hung slack in a white face. His mouth gave me the idea of sticking the knife into it and expanding the sliced grin up to his ear. During all this I hadn’t said a word to M, and my hand was still in my overcoat pocket. I just sat patiently. Suddenly, apologies were coming from the men, including the starer. I felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. Afterwards I castigated myself for making such a stupid move — stupid, not from a moral viewpoint, but because of the certainty of being caught. I referred to it as ‘the danger of audience potential,’ of being pushed into a situation I would have avoided had I been alone. After that I never took M into the Gorbals at night; I wandered the area alone, loving the atmosphere of cobbled alleys and gaslit streets I’d known so well as a child.

  Letters like this made me aware of Ian as a human being, and I could understand why he hated journalism — and books — that stereotyped the two of them as ‘The Moors Murderers’ or ‘The Monsters of the Moors.’

  Anecdotes like this also made me aware that Ian is what zoologists call a ‘king rat.’ It has been known for more than a century that five percent of any animal group is ‘dominant’ — that is, possesses drive and enterprise. Shaw once asked the explorer Stanley: ‘If you were injured and unable to lead the party, how many people in the group could take over from you?’ and Stanley replied without hesitation: ‘Five percent — one in twenty.’ This applies to all animals, birds and fishes.

  But there is in any large group a very small proportion of ‘king rats,’ individuals of such high dominance that they dominate even the dominant. These are the Napoleons and Hitlers. Beethoven and Wagner were ‘king rats.’ But they were fortunate because they were king rats who had found a way of expressing their dominance in a socially acceptable manner.

  And this, of course, is the major problem for such men — in fact, for all members of the dominant five percent. For before the dominant individual has found a way of expressing this dominance, he is bound to feel irritable and frustrated — a misfit or ‘outsider.’ Shaw’s Undershaft — the ‘armament king’ in Major Barbara — says: ‘I moralised and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs; that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. . . . I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person.’

  The reason that I soon came to feel a great deal of sympathy for Ian was that I felt that he was a frustrated king rat. In one letter he expresses his basic aim:

  To shed the boring, accepted realities that suffocate the majority, and embrace or confront what lies beyond. I always had the sense of seeing far and deep, and had contempt for those who couldn’t. Sometimes I felt weary, as though being dragged down into a mire by others, but I always threw them off successfully, as if an inner generator was simply biding its time to save me, expanding the spirit in tune with a vast gestalt. Confronting a sea, a moor, or standing on a mountain, you can almost hear the unknown, invisible presences; you know they are there, almost within touch, speaking an arcane language, and you feel the power rise up within as you become a receiver. No religious twaddle involved, just a pantheistic and atavistic surge of ultimate energy and power, and it makes you laugh with pure delight or cry with gratitude.

  What struck me about this passage — also from a letter of December 1992 — is that what he is saying would normally be called mysticism. In fact, in my reply I quoted the famous passage from Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude,’ in which he describes finding a boat moored by Windermere in the moonlight, and climbing in and rowing into the middle of the lake, until a huge black peak towers above him like a living creature. He writes that for days afterwards:

  My brain

  Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

  Of unknown modes of being . . .

  I have also noted again and again how much Ian enjoys travel. We all do, of course (although I, as a typical Cancer, easily become bored with it). But for some people, it undoubtedly means more than for others — Ernest Hemingway, for example. And the reason, I think, is that Hemingway’s childhood in Michigan was rather claustrophobic, so that travelling — first to Chicago, then to Paris, produced an almost dizzying sense of freedom, of ‘escape from personality.’ Ian’s letters make it clear that it was the same for him. Even his latest letter, which arrived today (May 31, 2001) has a typical passage:

  Under Brooklyn Bridge, on the Brooklyn side, there’s a little place called Grimaldi’s among the warehouses; it still had coal-fired ovens like the shops in the Gorbals . . . and did pizzas and pies hot from the oven; so New York likes to hold on to old traditions more than this country. I prefer the old to the new.

  And he goes on to reminisce:

  The few times I used long-distance buses, I used to like the half-hour stopovers in little slumbering places in the middle of the night, with only a diner remaining open for the bus passengers and I’d go for a stroll along the sleeping streets and dark shops, enjoying the experience of being awake and alert, living while the world slept, having confidential conversations with nocturnal cats and dogs . . .

  His point is underlined by another passage in the same letter:

  We are never more truly ourselves than when we are briefly someone else — as on travels, for instance, free of the conditioning of our normal surroundings. . . . The theory that we only use a fraction of the power the brain commands, but have not the knowledge to access it — I’ve experienced times of increased conscious awareness . . . a sensation of cerebral, as opposed to physical dizziness, as though from the vibrations of an awakened dynamo slowly gathering speed . . . Switching the dynamo on seemed to be preceded by an unusually long period of sustained mental exertion and concentration, rather like the degree required to get through the initial inertia of the sleep barrier in order to remain awake for days with little subsequent effort.

  All this, I believe, has to be taken into account in order to fully understand the Moors Murders. Here, at least, I am in a position to sympathise, since I hated the claustrophobia of my hometown Leicester — a Midlands manufacturing city, devoted (in my childhood) to hosiery and shoe factories. I hated it and dreamed of escape, which is why I taught myself to type, then poured out thousands of words a week — plays, stories, essays — with that same dream of freedom that drove Ian. My frustration became so intense that at one point I seriously contemplated suicide. And this was not out of self-pity as much as a desire to ‘spite God,’ who seemed to have condemned me to a life of futility. And I can easily believe that if I had felt that the only chance of escape was crime, I would have taken to crime with enthusiasm.

  But would I have committed murder? I doubt it. But that is simply a matter of the degree of frustration. I was born into a normal family situation, the firstborn among siblings and cousins, and since I was an attractive and intelligent child, also received a great deal of admiration and affection. Now I look at my own grandchi
ldren, I can see how important it is to have the feeling of being loved and admired unconditionally. I have no doubt that Ian’s mother did her best to give him the kind of affection that a child needs; but without a husband, this must have been difficult.

  What I do remember clearly is how, in my mid-teens, I had the feeling that I had to dispense with love and understanding; there seemed no chance that my mother and father could provide it: they already regarded me as a cuckoo in the nest. I had the feeling that I had to face up to the reality, and that reality was that I had to get used to living without love. At that stage, working in factories (because my parents felt it was time I earned some money) I first read A Farewell to Arms, and the pessimism of Hemingway spoke to me. ‘. . . they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.’

  I was lucky; a period of National Service in the RAF gave me a chance to recover my old optimism. Ian spent the same period of his life in prison. So by the time he came out, the hardness born of innate pessimism was endemic; he had learned to live ‘without appeal.’ And in that psychological state, crime must have seemed the logical solution to the problem of making a living.

  Yet here — and again I am recalling my own situation — there still remains a nostalgia for the old innocence and trust. As a child I believed in God; as a teenager I had come to accept that God is irrelevant. But I would have been relieved if some powerful emotional experience had restored me to my old belief.

  This struck me when I read Myra’s account of how Ian, after one of the murders, had shaken his fist at the sky and shouted: ‘Take that, you bastard.’ The sentiment is illogical for someone who professes to believe that God is a delusion; yet it also reveals a sense of betrayal.

  The same thing struck me when I listened to a tape he sent me of extracts from his favourite films, which included A Christmas Carol (he still read the book every year at Christmas) and Carousel. Both seemed to offer a key to his personality. I also used to love A Christmas Carol, and must have read it a dozen times. But listening to the end of the film soundtrack, with Scrooge looking out of the window and learning that it is Christmas Day, and suddenly being filled with love and generosity towards his fellow men, was unexpectedly moving. The fact that Ian loved it so much indicated a longing for lost innocence, a desire to put back the clock, as Scrooge did, and wake up to find that it had all been a dream.

  I found Carousel just as unexpectedly moving. It is based on a play, Liliom, by Ferenc Molnár, and is probably Rodgers and Hammerstein’s best musical. The hero, Billy Bigelow, is an easygoing ne’er-do-well, who falls in love with a mill-girl, Julie Jordan, and marries her. True to his nature, he is a poor provider, but when Julie becomes pregnant, he decides he has to make money somehow, and takes part in a robbery — then commits suicide to avoid arrest.

  After death, Billy is sentenced to fifteen years in Purgatory. Then he is given a day back on Earth to try and redeem himself. He is curious about his child, and finds her unhappy and rebellious, about to go through the graduation ceremony at school. He manages to infuse her with hope and courage, and as he watches her graduate, knows that he has not only saved her, but himself too.

  As I listened to ‘What’s the Use of Wond’rin’,’ I felt that it was offering me an insight into Ian Brady’s state of mind:

  What’s the use of wond’rin’

  If he’s good or if he’s bad?

  He’s your fella and that’s all there is to say . . .

  Common sense may tell you

  That the ending may be sad

  And now’s the time to break and run away

  What’s the use of wond’rin’

  If the ending will be sad?

  He’s your fella and you love him

  And that’s all there is to say.

  He cannot have avoided seeing the parallel with Myra, who was spending a lifetime in jail because he had dragged her into murder. Carousel is about redemption, and the reason it is one of Brady’s favourites is obviously because, like A Christmas Carol, it is about putting back the clock, about the possibility of forgiveness and blotting out the past.

  But then, Billy Bigelow has merely committed a robbery; by comparison, killing children is unforgivable. Yet this dream of forgiveness and reconciliation obviously haunts him. I have to admit that after listening to the tape of Carousel I had a lump in my throat.

  The problem is compounded by the fact that the dream is not of reconciliation with society, since — as the reader of this book will soon find out — he regards our society as totally corrupt, a community in which dishonest and unprincipled authority pose as the representative of goodness and decency. So he is caught again in the double-bind situation that turned him into a criminal rebel in the first place. It would be hard to feel genuine remorse about Myra’s wasted life when he strongly feels that he did the right thing in opening her eyes to the nonsensical claims of Christianity and the corruption of the Catholic Church. I have to admit that I see his point.

  But I also suspect that, in this double-bind situation, he has performed a kind of mental conjuring trick which enables him to turn his back on the possibility of reconciliation with society. In concluding that society is utterly corrupt, he can lose sight of what he actually did and why he is in his present situation.

  How did he come to be in this situation? In other words, what made him a killer? There is an abyss of difference between feeling that government is corrupt and our society is rotten — a sentiment which most social rebels would applaud — and committing murder.

  The answer, I believe, lies in his relationship with Myra, and in that strange psychological riddle known as ‘folie à deux.’ And here it is essential to speak once again of that matter of dominance. Abraham Maslow, of whom I have already spoken, spent some time studying dominance in women. (He found they were easier to work with because they were more honest than men.) He questioned a large number of women, and soon learned that they fell into three ‘dominance groups’ — high, medium and low. The high-dominance women were, as you might expect, precisely five percent of the total. Sexually, they were inclined to promiscuity and experimentation — many had had lesbian experiences or tried sadomasochism. They liked males of even higher dominance, and regarded the male sexual organ as beautiful.

  Medium-dominance women, the largest group, were basically romantics. They liked the kind of man who would take them to restaurants with candlelight and give them flowers. They were looking for Mr Right. They were capable of a certain amount of promiscuity, but it was essentially a second-best — what they really wanted was a husband who was a good father and provider. They also wanted him to be slightly more dominant than they were, but not too dominant. Very high-dominance males scared them. This group didn’t have any strong feelings about the male organ.

  Low-dominance women didn’t much like sex. They liked the kind of man who would admire them from a distance for years without daring to say so. They were terrified of high-dominance males, and thought the male organ downright ugly.

  But all three groups needed a male who was more dominant than themselves. One very high-dominance woman searched for years for such a male, and when she found him, was finally happy. But he wasn’t quite dominant enough, and so she used to provoke quarrels that would end with him slapping her about, hurling her on a bed, and raping her. These sexual experiences she found most satisfactory of all.

  I would classify Myra as being at the upper end of the medium-dominance type. And since we all tend to be interested in sexual partners in our own dominance group, she would have been ideally happy with a Mr Right who belonged to the same group.

  Ian, of course, needed someone of higher dominance than Myra — that is why he ignored her for a year. Then, I suspect, he decided that, since she was on offer, he may as well accept what she was so anxious to give. But merely being her lover and dominating her with his personality was not enough, and he was not satisfied until he had converted her from being a Catholic to
an atheist. Myra, anxious to keep this god-like male, tried her best to please, and made no objection to posing for pornographic pictures with the occasional cut of a whip.

  With the new self-image produced by Myra’s adoration, I think Ian decided: ‘Why not?’ One of the books on the Moors case quotes him as talking about murdering a baby in its cradle. I suspect that he was actually quoting Blake: ‘Rather murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unsatisfied desire.’ And since Myra was willing to help by picking up children, he could see nothing to stop him putting his plan into operation.

  The murders, I believe, were intended as a first step towards putting into practise what de Sade had only theorised about, and becoming a master criminal, the first great exponent of moral relativism.

  This, I would suggest, was the real genesis of the Moors Murders.

  A few words on how this book came to be written. During the early years of our correspondence, I found myself brooding a great deal on how Ian might find a way out of his ‘double bind’ — that is, the problem of being trapped in a situation that could offer no hope of improvement. In the late ’60s or the ’70s, I would have said, like most people: ‘Let him rot. That’s what he deserves.’ But to actually be in the situation of exchanging letters with a man with no future made me realise that, murderer or not, Ian Brady was a human being like myself, and that he deserved something more than being allowed to rot.

  Part of his problem was that it would be pointless for him to look for help from the prison psychiatrist or chaplain; he would feel, quite rightly, that he could psychoanalyse himself as well as any psychiatrist, and that since he had no intention of swallowing the consolations of religion, the chaplain would have nothing to offer either. This is the problem of most strong-minded people when they find themselves under stress — that there is no one they respect enough to ask for help.