by Ian Brady
He also gave money regularly to animal charities, however I also read that once the charities knew where the money came from, that they immediately sent it back. I am not sure if this is true or not.
He has mentioned that ‘actions speak louder than words’ and that he refuses to say that he is sorry for what he did as he believes that this will not make a difference and that people should focus on his actions whilst incarcerated. If the above is his attempt to gain some sort of public feeling of acceptance for what happened, then I don’t think that this makes any difference whatsoever to the suffering that he has caused not only to his poor victims, but their families, police officers, past friends, friends of the families involved, past employers etc…
Brady knows that the only way that he will gain even an ounce of respect is by helping the Bennett family with their final wish of locating Keith. No amount of charity work, translation of books or anything else that he may have done whilst incarcerated will change that.23
Alan Bennett offering the quote that begins this afterword and then:
It is not possible to gain access to Brady’s writings without his permission and his solicitors are only concerned with his rights. Just as there is a legal problem with others connected to Brady and what they have received from him. It is a long and complicated issue but it all boils down to them being protected and their rights not being infringed upon.
I have asked why their doors are not kicked in if necessary but I have been told they have not committed any offence. The exception is (Jackie) Powell because of what she said about a letter and its contents, this is an ongoing police matter. The solicitors, legal and medical, do not seem to care for anyone but their clients.
It is an agonising frustration for all the right-minded people concerned and a blessing for all the people who have contact with Brady and see him as either a friend, a client or a source of future income.24
How would I know what it’s like when the words anyone can write like mine are just too easy to say without thinking them straight. Straighter. “Right-minded people.” After all, he’s been there to tell me and the rest of the uneducated wrong-minded public, as well as the kindly vocal supporters on his causal website, his “partner” who became such after writing two books on the Moors murders case, and the ridiculous fanboys who praise Brady as something, anything, other than a monster or a monster as something, anything, other than typical. The interest in the Moors murders must come from a serious discussion of what happened as long as a side between good and evil is flat pity; it must have a purpose to accomplish something more healthy than an elastic truth that wouldn’t allow the sympathetic and sorrowful to abut prurient and vicarious. And while it might seem unfair to focus on Alan Bennett’s dedication as getting rather than giving, or moral rather than pragmatic, or personal rather than sensible; typifying any other serious discussion as inconvenient if not wrong stays Alan decidedly unhealthy.
The previous decade had been marked with Ann West and her demands that Myra Hindley never be released from jail as Myra worked hard on probation and release laws. And it must be made clear that while the Alan Bennett exemplar can get boring for those of us who don’t care or don’t believe in Christian fucking burials anyways, a large part of the history of Brady and Hindley’s crimes had to do with locating the bodies well after the pair had been sentenced to lifelong jail drips. The police decision against searching for the second two bodies after the first two gave them enough to charge and sentence Brady and Hindley to life in 1966, and the moors proving as difficult as the pair to plumb, created indissolubly the search for confession, details, bodies and empathy.
Fred Harrison famously pinned out new confessions from Brady in the early eighties and the police were forced to rethink the original cavalier approach to less pressing evidence. When the Peter Topping book on the reopening of the case expressly to find the bodies of Keith and Pauline, published in 1989 and following a huge media circus that resulted in helicopters and photographers ruining much of the efforts when Brady and Hindley were brought back to the moors, the public worth was all but concrete. Only Pauline was found then. And every book since has followed the search for Keith as paramount. Replacing Lesley as the focus of what actually occurred in the crimes that sent Brady and Hindley to jail, the proof of evil was now psychological rather than sexual: only vaguely pornographic.
Family members have always been available to provide color. Long winding drama and doleful pain. With the exception of Edward Evans’ family. Who were seen to suffer silently, often suggested to be more than dignity, appearing to resemble the shame that the age had against homosexuals. Possible homosexuals even. My own problem, Lesley and Edward-centric, now positioned conveniently and thinly as if an interest in why was more important than how. Carol’s popular books did much to alter the routine misunderstandings as well as the implacable perceptions of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and David Smith. Among these extended portraits of the villains, or in Smith’s case, potential villain, she recast Ann West and Edward Evans. Extra sensitive to Evans’ public caricature:
Under these unenlightened circumstances, Edward’s family were dealt a cruel blow by rumours surrounding their dead son’s sexuality. The fact remains that Ian Brady was the only person to claim Edward was homosexual—and he did so merely as a means of deflecting police interest.25
And while sensitive to Ann West’s decline, hard-nosed about her reliability, summing it up appropriately but tentatively in a post to the Keith Bennett forum in the section on her book with David Smith:
Hello everyone
I agree that Ann West’s book is very moving indeed and I remember finding it very difficult to read when I first bought it in my teens because it was just so terrible to contemplate what had happened to Lesley and her family.
I hope no one minds if I just pick up on one point, however: I spoke to Dave about the passage in the book where Ann West discusses his apparent visit to her home; she contends that he remarked upon the resemblance between Lesley and her brother and also passed on Brady’s favourite joke about harming babies. I asked Dave about this and he said, ‘As God is my witness, that never happened. Think about it, for just one minute: I had people catching buses out to Hattersley to find where I lived in order to attack me and my family. Why in God’s name would I then go to the mother of Lesley Ann Downey in order to pick a fight and provoke even more hatred against me? It never happened. She came to my flat as I told you, but that was the only time I ever met her.’
I am sorry if it upsets some people by pointing this out, but I feel that it’s important to do so—I did also mention it in ‘Witness.’
Cherrydrop, the tape was played in court at Brady and Hindley’s trial in 1966, but has never been broadcast. Shortly before her death, as part of her campaign to keep Hindley behind bars, Ann West asked reporter/producer Clive Entwistle to include both the tape and the photographs Brady had taken of Lesley in his documentary about the case, but after a meeting with executives, it was decided to include only one photograph and not the tape—that was deemed too harrowing to broadcast and in light of the way in which that photograph has since been distributed, particularly on the internet, I feel that the decision was the right one.
best wishes to everyone,
Carol.26
Carol Ann Lee’s first book on Ian Brady was a biography of Myra Hindley. At the outset, she explains that one of her primary reasons for writing on the case is to do something no one else has done yet, to have the “facts properly told.” The second edition of the book, the new revised and updated edition, explained how she had gone on to do yet another book on the case after David Smith’s young wife encouraged both Carol and David to finally complete his biography. Although Alan Bennett and David Smith had previously declined her interview requests for the Myra book, both responded favorably to her portrayal of their sides of the case after the publication of One of Your Own (The Life and Death of Myra Hindley) in 2010.
Alan wrote the
foreword to Smith’s book (Witness, published as written by David Smith with Carol Ann Lee in 2011):
My hope now is that this book and the truths within it will enable the public to understand that Brady and Hindley’s lies brought intense pain and distress not only to the victims and their families, but also to many others. Years into her imprisonment, Hindley admitted that she had lied about David Smith and that she was sorry for it. She repeated the same thing to me personally when I visited her in Durham and then Highpoint prison to talk about the search for Keith and what she might do to help. Brady, however, will never admit the truth. Indeed, he invents new lies to replace old ones when they lose their “exclusive” media status.27
Carol ended her preface to the 2011 edition of One of Your Own with:
I corresponded, briefly, with Ian Brady, and would like to echo Danny Kilbride’s words: ‘Tell us where Keith is. Stop being a coward. There’s a little boy out there on the moor who should be brought home to his family. It can’t end like this.’
Finally, there is one other person I would like to acknowledge, whom I did not meet whilst working on this book, but who contacted me after publication. That person is now my partner, Keith’s brother Alan Bennett. His support, courage and love mean everything to me and I want to thank him for it all from my heart, with love.28
Before the appendix in the original publication, Carol had also ended her book, proper, with Danny Kilbride’s thoughts. It was a perfect way to sum up, I think, Carol’s take on the book she had worked so very hard on. Once again, looking backwards, she had Danny connecting the search for Keith, this time in Danny’s own words but assuming Carol’s choice as an elegant summation of her own, mixing mission—gesture—with the greater impossibility of understanding facts. The facts that she wanted to tell, properly, that should override the sentimentality and viciousness of the people involved on both sides of the acts.
Danny Kilbride confirms: ‘No one has any idea of what our family—and the other victims’ families—have undergone. People say they understand, but they don’t. There is no excuse for what she and Brady did, and no amount of talking about causes and resolutions can help us come to terms with it. Unless you’ve gone through something like this, you haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. Where’s the resolution for Keith Bennett’s family? There’s none for any of us. One of my sisters says now, “I can’t remember our John and I feel awful.” But, God, she was only four years old when it happened. I’ve still got very strong memories of John. I can see him. I remember him. But it shouldn’t be about memories. He should be here.’29
A device police interviewers are taught about rape cases. The victim needs to be interviewed as quickly after the attack as possible. This, to the sympathetic public, may often seem cruel and insensitive. Thinking that some familial comfort or professional soothing, some trauma discussion with past references and forward suggestions might be more appropriate. However, the police understand that the details—the facts that they can apply distinct charges from evidence to—will most likely come before the victim has a sense of the emotionalism of their new standing in public and private. The language they’ll adopt to convey what happened, their violation and their health and protection providers’ inability to empathize adequately, will necessarily reflect the struggle between facts and color. The language itself has changed. Both sides searching for techniques to come to an agreement of sorts. The sex crime interviewer looks instead for what he needs: a certain state of so-called denial to gather attributable facts away from horrific opinions. And mistakes. Even guilt. Among victims. The accent of the campaign, the unjustly served innocent.
The initial response to being sexually assaulted is a denial of the emotional impact of the assault on the victim. Because of this, a lot of victims will show a very flat or negative affect when you initially approach them. The victim may be upset and crying when you first arrive, but once she realizes that she is safe with you, don’t be alarmed if she shuts off all expressions of emotion and becomes very easy to interview.30
Brady and Hindley were not charged with Keith Bennett’s murder. They’ve confessed but no body has been found. No evidence beyond what was said. They were not charged with Pauline Reade’s murder either, however. They confessed and the body was found some two decades after they had been sentenced to life. A new trial would be costly and change little in criminal penalties.31
The searches for the later bodies were entirely to bring a sense of closure, certainly not justice, to the families of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. It may be possible, in a mawkish stretch, to view the families of the victims as rape victims themselves. One would need a definition of rape that suggests an empathetic violence above a physical act. One that includes loss. And memory. Law shifts to child pornography—federal, state as well as civil—have come to echo much of this extended grasp. Rape becoming a catch-all for violence and then violence needing the same reworking to include mental affliction rather than second-party corporal proof. And so extended, it might be tacky, though just as mawkish, to see Brady’s reluctance to talk about what happened or what he did as an old man looking back at extremity, faced with the emotionally delicate caterwauling from the media but more directly owned by the victims’ family members who are immutably intent on asking for more and more information. For whom? As if it was possible. As if they wanted to hear it. As if they didn’t. Be brave, you. And as if Brady could say the body is over there, is that really all you want?
Not now.
Because the script becomes demographics.
Brady is a construct of the media, the only one readers like me have. A couch painting version created by the lowest forms of circulation-mad media. The emotional version. The tabloids that feature him most frequently are dependent on actual sales at the kiosks. Primarily train riders, in fact. This according to Guardian journalist Nick Davies who goes on to explain that more in-depth and less sensationalist (it follows) articles need to come from outlets that are primarily dependent on advertising. The splash headline version is what Brady argues with, simultaneously becoming exactly what they offer him. The low version less entertained by Brady’s vague to intellectual excuses, preferring the insults over the drama that he washes under. Virtually constantly. He has never been left alone. No one believes him. Few want to. Which is where Brady sits seemingly unaware and angry. Yet mimicking their responses and trails.
The sensationalists shrewdly appreciate that when it comes to serial killers or killings, the general public has the infinite attention span of lower primates assiduously searching for fleas. As a rule of thumb, conservative politicians, tabloid reporters, pimps and other strangers to ethics, who regularly and loudly pontificate on law and order or matters of public morality, bear closer investigation. They invariably fulminate in the not so ingenuous hope that hot air will waft attention from their own unprepossessing activities, and that their bluster will be mistaken for personal virtue and probity. They protest too much. The more they profit from crime, or the darker their hue of chosen vice, the louder they rave for ever-harsher penalties for the working-class criminal.32
Just months before the tribunal, just days before the airing of a new documentary on Ian’s “last days” and while Winnie Johnson was struggling to stay alive against cancer. The Telegraph, 8/17/12:
Mrs. Powell, who is 49, acts as the Moors Murderer’s “independent mental health advocate.”
Many people who play such roles, expressing the views of the mentally ill and defending their rights in hospitals, are lawyers, nurses or social workers.
Mrs. Powell is not a lawyer but her professional background remains unclear.
Unlike most advocates she is not employed by a local authority and is not on the books of Action for Advocacy (A4A), an umbrella organisation for the service.
She has never been employed by Ashworth, the high-security hospital in Merseyside where Brady is detained, nor by the Mersey Care NHS Trust that runs it, and is not part of its lo
cal advocacy service.
As far as the hospital is concerned, she is classed as merely a “visitor” and was not vetted.
She was originally paid legal aid for the role which she began in 1999 but this ended recently and she is now representing Brady for free.
Her position is further clouded by the fact that she also claims to be a co-executor of his will, a job usually undertaken by a friend or relative.
It was in this role that she says she was given an envelope to deliver to the mother of his victim Keith Bennett after Brady’s death, which may contain details of the whereabouts of the body.
Martin Coyle, deputy chief executive of A4A, said it was puzzling that Mrs. Powell had both roles as there could be conflicts of interest.
Ordinarily as a mental health advocate, Mrs. Powell would owe Brady a duty of confidentiality but this does not apply if there is serious risk to someone else or a risk of breaking the law.
As a co-executor of his will, however, she would have an “obligation” to report any wrongdoing.
She is not a solicitor so would not be bound by client confidentiality.33
From The Mirror, 2/11/13:
John Dilworth, Head of the CPS North West Complex Case Unit, said: “We have completed our review of the evidence concerning an alleged failure by Jackie Powell to disclose information about the location of Keith Bennett’s remains.
“This allegation centered on a letter, supposedly written by Ian Brady, which may have led police to where Keith Bennett was buried.
“The only offence that might have been committed by Ms. Powell was preventing a lawful and decent burial.
“It is possible to prosecute a person for preventing a lawful burial through a failure to act, but there must be sufficient evidence to prove that the suspect either prevented the burial or intended to do so when they chose not to act.
“After careful consideration, we have decided that Ms. Powell should not be charged, as it cannot be established that she knew the contents of the letter referred to, that the letter in question existed or what information it might have contained.
