Ian Brady
Ian Brady (born Ian Duncan Stewart on January 2, 1938 in Gorbals, Glasgow, Scotland) is a notorious Scottish serial killer.
Brady is known primarily for his role in a series of murders that took place in Greater Manchester between 1963 and 1965. These were dubbed the Moors murders, as several victims were buried along the Saddleworth Moor near Oldham in Lancashire.
Biography
Early life
Ian Brady began life at the Rotten Row Maternity Hospital in the tough slum neighbourhood of the Gorbals in Glasgow to Margaret ("Peggy") Stewart. Peggy Stewart, a tea-room waitress, found it difficult raising a child on her own and hoped to spare her son the social stigma of his illegitimacy. So she gave up young Ian to the nearby Sloane family who adopted him into their own family and raised him as one of their own. Ian's father has never been identified; Peggy Stewart claimed that he was a journalist who died a few months before their son was born.
However, early on Ian showed troubling signs of dysfunctional behavior and moodiness. When he could not have his way he would throw violent tantrums, which sometimes ended with him banging his head against the wall. Peggy occasionally came to visit her son and indulged him with gifts, as absent or inadequate parents often wont to do. Ian soon figured out for himself who Peggy Stewart really was and likewise deduced that the Sloanes were not his real family. Others in the neighbourhood also caught on to the boy's socially unacceptable origins and this, coupled with his sullen, unsociable personality and his lack of skill at football, made him unpopular with the local children. Ian Sloane (as he was then called) came to resent his illegitimacy and began to see himself as a solitary, rebellious outsider not bound by the same rules as others.
At school he was a bright student and a handsome, well-dressed boy, but not well-liked. He developed a deep fascination with Nazi Germany, and with Nazi pageantry and symbolism. He often asked other boys for any souvenirs that their fathers brought back from the war, and when playing rough-house war games he would always insist on being "the German". It was at this time that Ian also became known for his perverse and sadistic tendencies, particularly for bullying smaller children and torturing little animals in a variety of grotesque ways.
By the time he was a teenager, he had been brought before the juvenile courts for various incidents of burglary and house-breaking. The first two times he was given probation, but on the third occasion he was deemed incorrigible and the court ordered him to leave Glasgow and live with his mother, who had since moved to Manchester where she had married an Irish labourer named Patrick Brady. At the age of 16, Ian left the Sloane household for good and traveled to join his mother and her new husband. Although he did not get along with Mr. Brady, Ian took his stepfather's name as his own for posterity.
As a Scot exiled in an English city, Ian Brady's compounded feelings of isolation and hostility began to manifest themselves in other ways. He would often spend hours in his room, reading and listening to music. He developed a keen interest in the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, focusing particular attention on Nietzsche's theories of Übermensch and the Will to Power. He became increasingly enamoured with a philosophy that championed cruelty and torture, and the idea that superior creatures had the right to control (and destroy, if necessary) weaker ones. (This was not what Nietzsche himself advocated though it is sometimes interpreted this way.)
Brady avidly collected books about torture and sadomasochism and other paraphilias relating to domination and servitude. About this time, he had worked as a butcher's assistant, and some experts believe that the experience of regularly cutting meat away from bones may have nurtured Brady's growing interest in the physical act of mutilation and murder. He also began drinking heavily and frequenting the cinema, and often found himself in need of extra spending money to support these new habits. The young man soon resorted to thieving again and after being convicted several more times (plus being arrested and fined for an incident of public drunkeness), he was sentenced to two years training at a Borstal school as well as a spell at Strangeways Prison.
While incarcerated, Brady learned various techniques for becoming more proficient at acquiring money, as he entertained grandiose fantasies of becoming a big-time criminal pulling off lucrative bank heists. He also wished to avoid menial labour and appear respectable, and so he studied bookmaking in order to make himself suitable for office work. His release led to prolonged stretches of unemployment, before he eventually found a job as a stock clerk at Millwards Merchandising in 1959. Almost two years later, in January 1961, he met Myra Hindley, who had just been hired at Millwards as a shorthand typist, and who was to become the other half of the internationally notorious Moors Murderers.
Myra Hindley
The relationship between Brady and Hindley developed in concert with Brady's increasingly rabid identification with Nazi-era atrocities and his growing sadomasochistic sexual appetite. Hindley was Brady's eager student.
Soon after they became a couple, Brady and Hindley began to plan a series of bank robberies, which they never carried out. When Brady became fascinated with the idea of rape and murder for sexual gratification, Hindley actively participated in procuring child victims, as well as sexually abusing, torturing and murdering them. Brady and Hindley photographed themselves in sadomasochistic acts, as well as at the burial sites of several of their victims.
Moors Killings
Brady was responsible for the murders of five children during the 1960s. In 1987 he claimed to police that he had carried out another five killings and even said where he had buried the bodies, but the police were never able to prove whether these claims were true.
The five murders that Brady admitted carrying out were committed with Hindley as his accomplice. These were the infamous Moors Murders, which are still some of the most reviled crimes in Britain some four decades after they happened.
On July 12 1963, the couple claimed their first victim. 16-year-old Pauline Reade was enticed into Hindley's minivan while Brady followed behind on his motorcycle. They drove up to Saddleworth Moor where Hindley asked Pauline to help her look for a lost glove. They were busy "searching the moors" when Brady pounced upon Pauline and raped her. He then smashed her skull in with a shovel and slashed her throat so violently that she was almost decapitated. Brady then buried Pauline's body in a grave, where it remained for over 20 years.
On November 23, Hindley lured 12-year-old John Kilbride into her car from a market place in Ashton-under-Lyne, and drove him to Saddleworth Moor. Brady was waiting there and ordered Hindley to wait for him in a nearby village in their hired Ford Anglia. While Hindley waited in her car, Brady attempted to stab the boy with a knife, but the weapon was too blunt. Brady lost his temper and strangled him to death with a string before burying his body in a shallow grave.
On June 16 1964 their third victim was another 12-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, whom they enticed from a street in Chorlton and drove to Saddleworth Moor. Hindley stood and watched from the top of an embankment while Brady sexually assaulted Keith in a ravine before strangling him to death with a piece of string and burying his body. It has never been found.
The fourth victim, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, was lured from a fairground in Ancoats. Brady took nine obscene photographs of her (which were later found in a suitcase in a left luggage locker) while Hindley recorded the scene on audio tape. The tape clearly records the voices of Brady, Hindley and the child, who is heard to protest and asks to be allowed to go home. It is believed she was probably killed by Brady. The following morning, Brady and Hindley drove Lesley's body to Saddleworth Moor where it was buried in a shallow grave.
On October 6 1965, the couple claimed their fifth and final victim, 17-year-old Edward Evans. They enticed him from Manchester Central Railway Station to their house in Hattersley, where Hindley's 17-year-old brother-in-law David Smith was visiting. Brady then crept up on Edward in the kitchen and smashed his head in with an axe. He ordered Smith to help him carry the corpse to an upstairs bedroom and tie it up ready for disposal, but Smith then ran home and contacted the police. Smith explained later that, while apparently giving assistance to cleaning up, his sole concern was to escape the house alive.
Sentencing
The death penalty was abolished just one month after Brady and Hindley were arrested. By the time they went on trial the following April, the punishment for murder was life imprisonment. This meant that a murderer was liable to be detained for the whole of his or her natural life, but could be released on life licence when no longer judged to be a risk.
On 6 May, 1966, Brady was found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment. Hindley was found guilty of murdering Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and given two life sentences; she also received a concurrent seven-year sentence for harbouring Brady in connection with the murder of John Kilbride.
The key evidence against the couple included the tape recordings of Downey's made while they photographed her naked; the name of John Kilbride in a notebook; and a photograph of Hindley standing on top of the shallow grave where Kilbride was buried. Brady admitted the murder of Edward Evans, but insisted that Hindley had no part in it.
Imprisonment
Brady spent 19 years in a mainstream prison (at one point befriending serial poisoner and fellow Nazi aficionado Graham Frederick Young) before he was declared mentally disordered in 1985 and sent to a mental hospital.
He confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennent in 1987 and has since made it clear that he never wants to be released from prison. The trial judge spoke of his doubt that Brady could ever reform, describing him as "wicked beyond belief" - and effectively giving him little hope of eventual release. Successive Home Secretaries have agreed with that decision, while Lord Lane (the former Lord Chief Justice), set a 40-year-minimum term in 1982.
Brady could have applied for paorle in October 2005, but he still insists that he never wants to be freed and has had to be force-fed since going on hunger strike in 1999. In early 2006, various newspapers reported that Brady was hospitalised and doesn't have much longer to live. He is, however, still alive at present, and currently being held at Ashworth Hospital in Liverpool.
In 2001 Brady published a book called The Gates of Janus, which was published by the underground American publishing firm Feral House. The book, Brady's analysis of serial murder and specific serial killers, sparked outrage when announced in Britain.[1]
Despite his incarceration, Brady (and his murders) still provide headlines for the UK tabloid press. Fellow prisoner Linda Calvey recently told the The Daily Mirror that, before her death in November 2002, Hindley confessed their killing of a young female hitch-hiker.
It has been reported that Brady devised a secret code to stop the police from finding out where the body of Keith Bennett is buried, and that he is furious that a drama documentary based on the murder was shown on ITV1 in 2006. He has bragged to various newspapers that he has stopped four previous films from being made.
In early 2006, it was reported that a woman tried to smuggle 50 paracetamol tablets to Brady at the prison hospital. The amount would have been sufficient for a successful suicide attempt. Hospital employees foiled the attempt using X-ray screening, which revealed the pills in two sweets tubes inside a hollowed out crime novel.(see [2]).
Winnie Johnson, the mother of Brady's one undiscovered victim, received a letter from Brady in 2006 claiming that he could take police to within 20 yards of her son's body, but the authorities would not allow it.
See also
Notes
References and further reading
- The Moors Murders: The Trial of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, Jonathan Goodman, David & Charles 1986. ISBN 0-7153-9064-3
- Brady and Hindley: The Genesis of the Moors Murders, Fred Harrison 1986 Grafton. ISBN 0-906798-70-1
- Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess, Jean Ritchie, Paladin 1991, paperback. ISBN 0-586-21563-8
- On Iniquity, Pamela Hansford Johnson 1967, Macmillan.
- The Monsters Of The Moors, John Deane Potter, Ballantine Books 1967.
- Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection, Emlyn Williams, Pan 1992. ISBN 0-330-02088-9
- Serial Killers and Mass Murderers: 100 Tales of Infamy, Barbarism and Horrible Crime, Joyce Robins. ISBN 1-85152-363-4.
- The World's Most Infamous Murders. ISBN 0-425-10887-2.
- "Behind the Painted Smile", Gary Cartwright 2004. ISBN 1-4120-2647-4.