by Ian Brady
There’s idiots still looking. Tacky of me. And not as hard to think as it is to say which, actually, argues that I just as easily don’t have to say it. Further back then, shouldn’t even think it. This whole private idiot behind the bigger spouting loudmouth self-impressed prick and, just, angry and fractured, and not smart enough in the end to keep his fucking wanting mouth shut. One more. Level. The cloying village united looking for the grave of Keith Bennett so that he somehow spiritual and they somehow spiritually now busy could get some Christian told. And relief. And stop thinking about it, the looking, at least. And the cunt that says they’re a bit silly and desperate and so fucking deeply sad and squashed by the way they were brought up, coddled as much as they were robbed, choose a side, fucker, that cunt, cunt, that cunt doesn’t go through the same things they do. With their pain. Every fucking day. Should get some fucking sympathy, learn a lot. So I’m supposed to keep looking. And not do this. And, I’ll tell you the truth, I say, pointing my drunk-faced finger at some cunt, I figure it’s got to be pretty bad. Because you have to keep fucking going on about it. And as a drunk friend, tell you that I think it would be better if you gave up, better for you and those of us who have to listen to you, those of us who really care about you and your pain, as difficult as that is, as hideous as it is, and then remind you that all the books and, really, the forests of newspaper and hours of Internet scrolls, all do the same fucking thing. They’re looking for answers about those two. And they’re looking because the answers aren’t there and closure doesn’t exist, you twice-divorced rag, and, here’s where I fuck up, again. The looking is getting in the way of what really happened. The intentions. Fuck the intentions. Fuck your level asking me for the intentions. And then the mistakes and the possibility of your good giving grace. Two more things, slurred and rambling: I was writing about the photo of Lesley. She’s taken second place now. Keith fucking Bennett’s fucking empty church-laid coffin has taken pride of place and I fucking miss her and that language riddled with sex rather than forgiveness. I know we miss things. Yeah? The second thing. He’s been telling you. It’s all there and you’re too fucking self-impressed with spotting his own ego that you won’t fucking read it right. All of you cunts. It is all intensely about plans. And what you do with plans when they don’t work is ask for help. Plans and help. Fucking been talking to Ashworth every fucking sentence. And there’s been a crowd of hysterical child porn cocksuckers listening in like palsies. Myra, when she was lying, still thought this is what you wanted to hear. And you did:
“All I’d ever hoped from a relationship with him was a marriage and children. It wouldn’t have been dull and boring; we were on a similar intellectual level and shared many good tastes in music and literature. We could have gone to theatres and other art venues; we both had good solid jobs, a car in which we would and indeed did set off on driving and camping holidays.
“One thing which we both shared was a dissatisfaction with belonging to the working class and being trapped in it. We could have risen above that; at Millwards he had the prospects of promotion. I could have studied and gained the qualifications for a career climb. But it wasn’t to be.”93
Fuck. I hope it hasn’t really been like this. If he just seeped so much sympathy and jealousy and resentment and all of it perfectly justified and perfectly desperate and so sad for us to have to watch him thrash against the weight of his bleak present past and present future. I’d like him to have enjoyed himself. Such is the selfless extent of my sympathy for him. I’d prefer he wasn’t trying to do something perfect and resentful and stamping his feet at the floor, screaming pathetically but romantically at the stars. I mean, fuck, he had to enjoy it, right?
It’s not in the definitive black-and-white photograph. I see trepidation. I read a genre, the artist brought nothing more than commercial concerns, I’d guess.
Unless. He started to enjoy it. Learned more as it went along and saw that he was really turning the act in on itself, less now about the stars and God and the dead end with any girl or full-figured boy anywhere and the non-exploded cosmos. It wasn’t the murder. It was the child. You know how I found out. Fucking looked at the photo. The photo was different than the act. The experience was secondary. Tertiary. After the God stuff that, obviously, doesn’t exist.
I am convinced that variations of such lines of thought—or a strong sense of personal destiny—are shared by most serial killers, but are seldom voiced.
Serial killers are, in that particular respect, very much like writers, pursuing the quest for a measure of immortality in similar solitary fashion, using a knife rather than a pen, skin rather than paper. In metaphysical terms, they would regard anything less a medium than human material as too insubstantial, lacking in existential satisfaction and durability, no substitute for the actual experience of writing on living and breathing pages.
In which case, retroactive metaphysical pondering of the long-term consequences of the act would be paramount to the act itself. Especially as experience soon teaches that nothing is quite what one expected or imagined and that, paradoxically, as previously evidenced, perpetration of the act itself invariably distracts and detracts, lessening immediate existential appreciation. The novelty dulled by concomitant confusion of the senses. This is resented.
It seems to them that nothing less than challenging God or the indifferent universe will satisfy. A form of reversed hope, as it were: ‘Show me your power, your existence, by stopping me.’
Naturally no response is elicited. So their acts, their crimes, become increasingly outrageous and nihilistic to prove to themselves that they themselves exist! That their acts have some meaning. By their rationale, if they do nothing, they might as well be dead. They demand acknowledgement, at any price.
To be ignored is to be deprived of human dignity and meaning.94
The existential experience had a wall it wasn’t supposed to reach. The part where he learns that he made mistakes that forced the universe, if not his jailers, to act back at him and teach him where the plan wasn’t just that, wasn’t in his head. We can take what little you like and what more you think is rotten and unfair—how dare you ask someone to be fair—away from you, you powerless poor little confused thrashing mite. And a cheap script writer, far worse than me, would see the redemption after the smoke cleared in Winnie Johnson dying and never in fact finding her child. The realization that Brady didn’t find his body godless just as the absolute worthlessness of her search would have proved brutally empty and demeaning had he given it up. It was fate. As well as. It wasn’t meant to happen, was it. A Christian burial for something as mutilated as silly need as much as human suffering and want and abnegating drive.
The truth, as if there is ever one, so the details, will never be clear. I don’t know how detailed and specific Brady will be in his second-rate biography after Gates of Janus. His introspection, warped so badly from the years of deflective hatred, will almost guarantee more lies and more assholes declaiming such. The reliable truth is exactly what is in the photograph of all the different girls who all share the same photograph. Now, again, thank fuck, thank you, it is cropped of graphic offense. Full stop. His crime is there. It can be detailed unlike the other points veering from hearsay to psychology. You can’t do that with this. No one but disease wants to see those photos. And Brady’s life story as a timid child pornographer, much more worthy of retelling than his murders, seeing as they were occurring with other people. Are the facts that too many followers know they don’t want to see.
His fantasies came before he found an excuse in writing. If he was ever searching for truth, it was someone to agree with him, feeling just enough like everyone else to have sympathy for them. It wasn’t a revelation. As murder wasn’t a catharsis. What happens is the lock, all the hatred for sex that he clearly was more interested in than disgusted by. Makes perfect sense. The rapes that followed the philosophy in his writing, of course, came first. All that shit about not wanting to “kill his own kind” wher
ein he was splitting Scots from the English scum he lived with. His history is a history of housing moves by the councils like any other poor family after the war or not. He thought he was taken advantage of, where he was actually seeing that and wanting it more. In the States, we don’t call them council homes or flats or slums. We call them niggers and ghettos.
How nice, for example, it would be to have written a book that could have been published under a different name, solely on the strength of his literacy and inspiring insight. How much nicer to imagine that he could have completed the book without having to say it was written by someone who knows what he’s talking about. The book could have shown that, perhaps? Anonymously. And much better, all those details and endless screed letters wouldn’t have been worth trading on. All the details you hold back as if the ones you’re writing to don’t get it otherwise. Your audience might be shit. Then. Stop talking to them. Start talking to your betters, Ian. The way you lost, keep losing, is so glaringly important to you, constantly. No one else cares. Bennett says you don’t care. You need to show care. The hospital employed to care for him. Forcing care. The armies of journalists that can’t write without pronouncing care in every sentence. What a terrible existence to not be believed when all you’ve been doing is showing how deeply you care.
The documentary ends with Winnie breaking down in tears, filmed at a very polite distance from a film crew that must have known that she deserved some space. Whether or not that this space was a conspicuous ruse or even a bad job the boss forced on the filmers that found themselves finally unable to do close-up is of no clear matter. Because you know what will be said. And you know that anyone else will sound cheap and as fake as moralists do when it comes from benefit.
Four months after publication of Janus, I’ve now received a copy. How? By a stranger sending me a copy to be autographed.
First, the Introduction by Wilson caused me legal work, to oppose Ashworth injunctions (to conceal the truth) and Hart’s legal threats to do likewise for her, only to have Wilson and Parfrey spinelessly surrender to both bluffs.
Next, American and UK friends informed me of press attacks on an “Afterword” by Peter Sotos inserted into Janus without my being consulted or informed by Parfrey or anyone else. I now see why Sotos was attacked as “apalling” [sic], etc. I wrote Janus deliberately avoiding the voyeuristic or sensational throughout and assumed Parfrey had published in similar good taste. When I read Sotos’ “Afterword” it was like opening a toilet door of wall scribbles. So Janus has again been used as a vehicle, this time by an illiterate pornographic hack. What legal actions can be taken to have that Afterword removed from Janus?
Now in the 28th month of this force-fed hunger strike the last thing I needed was injunctions and obscene ramblings of whatever parasite chose to use Janus for their own personal agenda. I’m sorry I agreed to its publication, or use of my name.
Tell Parfrey not to write to me direct on any matter whatsoever but to communicate only with my solicitors. Has he even sent Mr. Birnberg the second half of the so-called “advance” on….
Ian Brady sent this letter to one of his solicitors who then forwarded it on to Adam as requested. Among the legal work Brady had to ask his lawyers to do was answering pre-publication threats of lawsuits brought by Christine Hart, over what Wilson or Brady may or may not have said. Wilson starts his introduction with her. I don’t know the details that bothered any of the three involved before Adam had to answer to it. Hart has gone on to write a few more books after her first, The Devil’s Daughter, which may or may not have detailed what happened after the British tabloids made her meetings with Brady public. She retooled the book on her relationship with Brady and the tabloids (The Devil’s Daughter became Searching For Daddy) and intensified the narrative to her orphanage history as she launched her personal campaign to further understanding of the plights of those looking for a greater love from anyone worthy of trust. Recent version fit more snugly into the then-growing market of child abuse memoirs in the UK. The cover pronounced the shift of focus by mimicking the white foggy style of those books then taking the wider thought-line of Weight Watchers changing the pink on their products to white. Romance novels, Weight Watchers, same audience:
When I was four, I began to wish I could die.
I had dreamed of finding a family to love me. But the truth was that I was trapped in a loveless world. No matter what my fantasies, there was no escape, and though I couldn’t imagine life being any harder, over the next couple of years I was to discover that things could—and would—get worse.95
You can track Hart’s story shifts and confessions by following the line of her publications down to now. It’s a bit obvious. There’s one on her relationship with Kenneth Bianchi as well as Ian Brady and another one on her place within: The Phone Hacking Affair.
Ashworth could well have as much of an axe to grind with Brady as he has for them. Can’t be an easy job or an easy day for either party. Brady’s great public is always reminded of the conditions at Ashworth. His post-Fallon Inquiry work can be seen entirely through a prism of direct attacks on the hospital.
Brady’s “spineless” hurl at Wilson and Parfrey missed his target. Brady at infant stage, sat living as the only one gathering attention. If he had known what was happening and, to be fair, he didn’t. To be fair, I don’t think it was any of Brady’s concern. To be fair, Brady didn’t or couldn’t figure out what was going on.96 To be fair, I don’t think he really understood why the book was being published at all. To be fair, he might have been confused on how a spotlight actually worked. Being fair here suggests that he might not have wanted to think—or act—otherwise. Fair enough. Looking for his situation to rob him of his accomplishments is desperate. Fair becomes paltry, frightened, gullible and jealous. Inclusive.
“Ashworth” wasn’t the only reason for the book’s release or distribution troubles. And while Adam had to change cover art for Wilson worrying over Ian and Ian’s mother, he was also required to respond to business and legal worries just as irritating, tragic or comical:
ASHWORTH’S LIST
1) p31 The computer being taken away… Doesn’t seem to be of any real significance though suggested that we find out why the computers were taken away - I’ll ask Colin.
2) p31 The 8 year old girl… It is suggested we find out what the Fallon report actually has to say about this and what is the primary source for Colin’s remarks. Again not something the lawyer views to be of major significance.
3) p31 The broken wrist…This may be a little more tricky and we need to establish when it actually happened. ie was it during the move on 30.9.99. Nicola thinks there may be some minor point here as they seem to categorically state they were ‘not broken during the move to Jade Ward’ whilst I don’t think Jade Ward is even mentioned in the book. Again we need to get the primary source from Colin - he mentioned court transcripts to me so I’ll follow that up.
4) p31 Knife under sink… This is what Brady claims he was told and doesn’t seem to merit any concern.
5) p31 Psychotic Ward/Personality Disorder Ward. Colin needs to ask why this is defamatory. I will suggest he does. Not quite clear at present whether this is an issue or not as to the lay reader at least it doesn’t seem such an unreasonable ‘mistake’. That said, I did discuss with a mental health social worker who has told me - in no uncertain terms - that there is no such thing as a ‘Psychotic Ward’ and mental health workers might be appalled by such a description. Might be something that would need correction via erratum slip.
6) p31 Guards talking in loud voices… This might be marginally defamatory but again something that could probably be covered by erratum.
7) p31 Books
No concern here.
8) p31 Stamps. No concern here. More generally there are some other issues that arise connected with who actually runs Ashworth and whether or not they are actually allowed to sue - there is some issue in the UK as to whether certain bodies - as opposed to individuals
- can actually sue for defamation. This is being investigated further but the likelihood is that they can.
