Deranged letters give a rare glimpse inside the twisted mind of Moors murderer Ian Brady
IAN BRADY constantly said he was on the verge of death in the letters he sent me throughout the last four years of his life.
So, late last year, when he mentioned he was terminally ill, I assumed it was yet another attempt to get attention.
For once, the Moors Murderer was being truthful. A fleeting flash of honesty from one of the most depraved and sadistic killers this country has ever seen.
Moments of truth were rare in the 25 letters — some 10,000 words — he sent me since 2013.
The last one came just two months ago, before an unnatural bout of silence.
Always scrawled on A4 lined paper, he shared so much, yet so little.
As well as his warped take on global affairs, there was the mundanity of everyday life at Ashworth high-security psych-iatric hospital — a bizarre tirade of anger and ailments.
Brady was less inclined to reference the only thing he will for ever be remembered for — the sheer barbarism he unleashed on his five victims.
And not once did he mention Myra Hindley by name.
I never met Brady, but I will never forget seeing and hearing him on video link in a Manchester court room just four years ago.
He had applied to be transferred from Ashworth to an ordinary prison. Death was his motivation even back then.
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At 75 years old, he had been on hunger strike for more than a decade and was being force-fed through a tube.
By being moved to an ordinary prison he would effectively be allowed to starve to death, without intervention.
On the courtroom screens Brady looked strikingly pale but surprisingly healthy. By this point he had lived more than seven times longer than the youngest child he slayed. It was not his appearance but his voice that was so impactful.
His soft Glaswegian tones were hard to hear at times. It was not how one imagined a serial killer to speak.
I decided to write to Brady following the hearing to gauge his views on the failed appeal.
His response on July 4, 2013, was a twisted mess of accusation.
It read: “Re £250,000 wasted by Ashworth medical mediocrities, manipulating a politically-motivated Tribunal into demonising pens, breadcrumbs and broomsticks, in a mantra of discredited psychiatric fabrications and abuse, designed to distract public attention from the lack of reasoned argument and pertinent evidence.”
His language showed immense control and precision. His handwriting was impeccable.
Yet Brady would use any opportunity to condemn the health professionals diligently caring for him.
“Excuse my hand-writing, caused by 14 years’ medical neglect of my cataracts by Ashworth,” he whinged in one note.
Having established communication with a killer, I kept the conversation going for the next four years.
Is it possible he would confide in me to reveal his cruellest and most sinister secret — the whereabouts of Keith Bennett’s body?
Clues would be at a premium, as Brady had no time for his victims. The only victim was Ian Brady. It was all about him.
While I would write him brief notes designed to provoke information about his crimes, Brady would simply reply with tiresome tributes to himself.
How else would a psychopath act?
On March 9, 2014, he praised himself, writing: “The fact that I’ve served half a century of hostile captivity which I shall die in, testifies to the voracity of my predictions and the absence of any regrets.”
His hatred of the media was another repetitive theme. On July 25, 2014, he proudly told me: “For 12 years I haven’t read newspapers, and only watch Teletext and uncensored Al Jazeera for news.”
Over time, his health deteriorated further. It was January 2015 when he first suggested he was about to die.
Following a fall at Ashworth, he was recovering after breaking his hip and arm. He informed me he was “still bedridden and worsening”.
His body may have been fragile, but his temper was as robust as ever.
He seethed: “This cell block is described as a ‘discharge ward’. I’ve been sitting here 30 years . . . and there’s no turn-around of inmates unless in a coffin. So it’s more accurately a blocked sewer-pipe!”
In an intensely retrospective mood, he pondered: “Had I divined the future of spending half a century in prison and the final fifteen years being force-fed by nasal tube in an unmonitored zoological cesspit of regression, I would’ve exited decades ago.”
He would dodge my questions about his crimes of the 1960s and focus on the politics of the 2010s.
Despite losing the right to vote when he was locked up in the mid-1960s, Brady remained a political animal.
On November 8, 2015, he expressed this view on Labour’s new leader: “Corbyn? A good choice, but it rightfully won’t sway Scottish voters back to the corpse of Old Labour, created originally by Blair and perpetuated since by the middle class armchair socialists and expense fraudsters.”
It was only in what turned out to be his final six months that cracks started to appear. I can see now he was attempting to vaguely open up.
But there were few glimpses of humanity from this most inhumane of beasts.
Earlier this year, he suggested he hid a secret arsenal of guns during his killing spree. It followed the discovery of an antique weapon, wrapped in a polythene sheet, beneath rocks on Saddleworth Moor.
He wrote: “Shotgun? I had two shotguns, two revolvers, two rifles and an automatic, strategically placed.” Then he boasted: “The police only got the revolvers and one rifle.”
His declaration on November 25 last year that he was dying can now be viewed as uncharacteristically truthful.
He wrote: “I’m still bedridden and have been for over two years. The lung and chest condition is terminal.”
Two years on from telling me he was at death’s door, I was sceptical.
Brady’s reflections from January 14 this year now read like someone writing his own eulogy. He wrote: “What my life may have been had I abided by the law? Doubtless as hopeless, repressed and depressed as the majority under Thatcher and Blair, while criminal bankers and elitists mightily thrived from subcontinental corporate slave policy, undermining the indigenous organised, so costly won by the generations of two world wars.
“Reminds me of how a criminal opportunity rescued me from continuing as an apprentice at Harland & Wolff shipyard, Glasgow, when I was fifteen — less than a decade later, the Clyde shipyards were closed!”
As his health seriously waned, his sense of evil never diminished.
And his cryptic and downright bizarre comments were present in his final letter to me in March: “I’m permanently bedridden. Always thought I’d die healthy!”
As the country’s longest-serving prisoner, much changed while Brady was shut away in prisons and hospitals.
But the hatred felt towards him from the British public never dimmed.
His deranged, self-deluded scribblings could never hope to alter that.