by Ian Brady
It seemed to me that there was one possible solution: to rise above the problem by shifting his mind into the creative mode. Therefore I advised him to do the thing I would have done: to think about writing a book. Since he obviously knew about serial murder ‘from the inside,’ this suggested itself as the obvious subject. I even approached a publisher who is also a friend — Nick Robinson, of Robinson Publishing — and asked him if he would be interested in publishing a book on serial killers by Ian Brady. He was cautiously interested, but pointed out a problem I had foreseen myself: that since the Moors Murderers are still probably the most hated killers in British jails, it would obviously be impossible to publish it as a book by Ian Brady. But the solution might be to publish it as a book ‘by a Serial Killer’ with an Introduction by me guaranteeing that the author was indeed a notorious serial killer. And the mystification ought to guarantee enough sales to cover its costs.
Nick agreed, and I gave Ian the go-ahead. But six months or so later, Nick wrote to me to say that he had read the typescript, and decided that he did not want to publish it. I asked Nick to send me the book, and when he did, saw immediately what was wrong. It was like a book by any competent journalist, but did not live up to the words ‘by a Serial Killer’ would seem to promise. It seemed to me that Ian had simply failed to stamp his own personality and insight on it. But it also seemed to me that if I worked with him as an editor, the problem might be overcome. So I wrote and suggested this.
The result was a violent explosion. He replied that he had not given Nick permission to show me the book, and would be grateful if I would keep my nose out of things that were not my business. He asked me to return the typescript immediately.
The tone — of an exasperated headmaster giving orders to a stupid sixth former — incensed me, even though I knew from experience that he was prone to blow off the handle. A few years earlier, he had forgotten that I told him I was going abroad for a month. The day I returned, I sent him a postcard saying I was just back and would be writing soon. This crossed with a furious letter from Ian, demanding forthwith the return of all his letters. I was glad I had already written, since it made explanations and excuses unnecessary. A few days later, I received a slightly sheepish letter, saying ‘Well, no harm done,’ and passing on to other things as if nothing had happened.
So now I wrote back a rather irritable letter, telling him that my patience was not inexhaustible, and that if he wrote to me in that tone again, it really would be the end of our correspondence.
In due course the quarrel blew over, and I assumed that was the end of the idea of a serial killer book and of further writing. (I knew he had already written an autobiography, but have never been allowed to see this.) So I was surprised to hear, sometime in year 2000, that he had written another book, and was willing to let me read it. It was sent to me by his solicitor, Benedict Birnberg, a man I have always found helpful and charming.
Within half a page, I could see that we were back to the kind of thing he and I have been arguing about for the past ten years: whether criminality is excusable on the grounds that society commits all kinds of crimes under the cloak of legality. So as I went on reading, it was with an increasing sense of déjà vu.
But when I came to the second part, on individual serial killers, I received a pleasant surprise. The chapters on Lucas, Gacy, Sutcliffe et al. struck me as excellent. The chapters on Dean Corll and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run had the kind of insight that I had missed in the first volume.
I decided that Adam Parfrey of Feral House, a publisher for whom I had written Introductions to other volumes on crime, was the likeliest publisher of my acquaintance to view it sympathetically, so I sent it off to him. I was delighted when, after a few weeks, he said he would like to publish it.
I was doubly pleased because by this time, Ian’s circumstances had deteriorated badly. There had been a time when he was by no means uncomfortable — when I first wrote to him, he was typing books for the blind in Braille, and was allowed books, videotapes, and his own television. Later he was even allowed a computer.
Computer was taken away from all patients without explanation. Brady was convinced that this was due to the fact that he was ‘making trouble’ writing to the press about the corrupt regime at Ashworth, and even appealing to the European Court of Justice.
It all led to an enquiry costing £7.5 million, whose 1999 report by Judge Peter Fallon declared unequivocally that Ashworth should be closed completely. It spoke of ‘years of abuse, corruption and failure,’ and said that although the inmates were forbidden to have money, there was about £10,000 in banknotes circulating around, which was used to purchase drugs, alcohol and child pornography. Three earlier reports had also been highly critical of Ashworth, and in one case, only nine pages out of 385 were made public.
The Fallon Report was ignored or overruled by the government; nothing more has been heard of it.
On September 30, 1999, several warders rushed into Brady’s cell, pinned his arms, and strip-searched him. The reason, he was told, was that a bucket handle had been found taped under a sink elsewhere on the ward.
Now in fact, he would have had nothing to gain from owning a bucket handle, and had never attacked a warder or prison officer.
There was a time when, if I had something private I wanted to say to him — for example, about his projected book — I could make sure the letter was not read by the prison authorities by putting it in a book parcel, which was handed to him unopened. After the ‘bucket handle’ incident, everything was opened and read. In any case, there would have been no point in sending him books, since he was not allowed more than six. Just before Christmas 2000, I sent him a parcel full of envelopes, with first-class stamps. They simply never reached him. I had to send another lot by recorded delivery.
As I write, Brady has begun a hunger strike. Brady’s own temperament guarantees that he is in a no-win situation. Because the basic characteristic of the ‘king rat’ is that he refuses to give way an inch, he will continue to charge brick walls until he collapses with exhaustion or dies of a heart attack.
Now this has been true of Ian at the time of his arrest. Since then, his self-esteem has been severely battered. His life in prison has been as miserable as even the parents of his victims could wish. At the time of writing it has reached the lowest point yet, where — as he says — ‘I’d be satisfied to be a beggar.’ And although I feel that there has always been an element of absurdity in his tirades against society, I also suspect that there is a mite of justification in his present protests. It looks to me as if his situation today is not due to taping a bucket handle underneath a sink, but because his refusal to be silenced has made him a nuisance to the authorities.
In an article I wrote for the Daily Mail in October 1999, I suggested that Brady should be allowed his wish to starve himself to death. Now I am inclined to reconsider that suggestion. His death would be too convenient for too many people.
Ian Brady cannot possibly live long anyway. In a letter of a few days ago, he wrote to me bitterly: ‘My life is over, so I can afford honesty of expression; those with a future cannot. If I had my time over again, I’d get a government job and live off the state . . . a pillar of society. As it is, I am eager to die. I chose the wrong path and am finished.’
As this book shows, that, at all events, is untrue.
* Whose body has never been found. His mother wrote to Brady asking for help recovering Keith’s remains.
THE GATES OF JANUS
by Ian Brady
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
JANUS: the Roman god of doorways, passages and bridges.
In art he is depicted with two heads facing opposite ways.
Collins English Dictionary
‘Let us to it pell-mell; if not to Heaven, then hand in hand to Hell!’
Richard the Third, Shakespeare
If we are to have a serious discourse on murder and some of its practitioners, we should first
broadly define our terms.
Murder is the premeditated killing of one human being by another, outside the law and without official sanction. It therefore follows that the premeditated killing of one person by another, inside the law and with official permission, is not considered murder. Whether or not this nice distinction has actual moral validity the reader must judge in the chapters to follow, where I shall, perhaps characteristically, don the mantle of Devil’s Advocate, a role so frequently attributed to me by the established order and mass media.
The question as to legal validity is of little consequence — Auschwitz, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atomic holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the deluge of napalm rained upon Vietnam and all other examples of wholesale global slaughter throughout the ages were, and still are, performed under the tattered umbrella of legality.
Self-evidently, too little law and order leads to freedom only for the few, the fittest; too much law and order has largely the same result. The powerful, wealthy and influential stay on top like oil slicks, by hereditament and oligarchy, rather than merit. Greed and lust are bipartisan.
According to official statistics in most Western countries, the corporate activities of this elite minority, aided by the best attorneys and tax evasion/avoidance experts, annually deprive the economy of more wealth than the total aggregate of all blue-collar crime. Yet few of that elite group will ever see the inside of a prison, and politicians of either party have yet to be heard demanding harsher penalties for these white-collar criminals. One contemptuously greedy exception, whose main error was public arrogance, nicely summed up the philosophy of the whole class: ‘Only little people pay taxes.’
One obvious reason why we so enjoy the fall of such public paragons and private criminals is that it happens so seldom. We may envy them their great wealth and power, but we never quite admire them as we do the relatively more honest, disadvantaged, blue-collar criminal who runs the risk of severe penalty.
However, as a brief preamble to discourse proper, let me first state what I believe to be universally acceptable, orthodox parameters.
Morality and legality are decided chiefly by the prevailing ruling class in whatever geographical variant, not least because a collective morality is too unwieldy and difficult to maintain. I prefer individual systems of principles rather than a collective set of precepts largely impossible to quantify or enforce.
Compulsory state education is, in effect, a form of mind control. Particularly enforced religious instruction.
The majority of people, rightly or wrongly, regardless of geographical location, believe that we all know instinctively what is the right thing to do in all matters simply by standing back and applying our own decisions to ourselves — ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ But Bernard Shaw spotted the flaw in that idealistic argument:
‘Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You might not share the same tastes.’
And, unfortunately, most people are not positioned to do what they would like to see done to the high and mighty who invariably escape the rigours of the law as though by divine right.
Notwithstanding, we continue to believe we know what is cruel or kind, selfish or selfless, fair or unfair, etc. Yet we endlessly struggle to explain — to ourselves and to others — why we are in conflict with such behavioural norms.
There are differing accents within the moral boundaries of one’s own unavoidably subjective system, whose familiarity makes what we do personally acceptable, particularly if our actions are consciously part of a larger, though expediently veiled, socially dictated pragmatism.
Self-interest and self-absorption has people blindly adhere to legality and morality, and not because of some innate saintly or metaphysical quality. By and large, the most common aspect of morality is compulsion, fear of crossing boundaries and doing the generally unacceptable.
I believe it is axiomatic that the majority are too lazy, intellectually and constitutionally, to oppose the accepted order of things. Conformity is passive. Dissension demands energy and dangerous commitment.
The central reason why many prefer to have the good opinion of others is: (a) the natural wish to be liked and popular, (b) the social and material advantages which follow from that, (c) the personal pleasure derived from being needed.
By seeking the comfort and advantage that follows from being accepted as a normal member of society, the individual is merely striving, at primal level, to have his self-opinion reinforced by others.
Ironically, the attempt to attain a consensus of good opinion simultaneously generates the envy, and therefore, the resentful vindictiveness, of others competing for the same good graces. Man socially advances himself invariably at the expense of others, for the pleasure of feeling superior to others.
And those who exalt themselves through the good opinion of their superiors, do so chiefly by deferring to the judgment of same rather than relying upon their own. Good reputation — or public virtue — can reasonably be perceived as being rooted in applied flattery, personal vanity and self-interest.
Man’s primal instinct is to obtain as much pleasure from life as possible, whether by self-sacrifice or the sacrifice of others. Whether termed good or bad by external moral and legal criteria, every action a person commits is determined by the amount of personal pleasure it gives.
Random acts of kindness or cruelty, which seem to surface from the individual of their own volition, often result from a clash between our personal system of beliefs and the artificiality of subconscious social conditioning.
Unfortunately, many people sleepwalk through life without conscious awareness of their own system, if they have one at all, and are therefore susceptible to external notions of right and wrong imposed by others, particularly members of the often eminently unqualified upper class and their support system, mass media.
Laws and morals based on honour are superior to those rooted in social expediency.
Thankfully there are some individuals who consciously resent and resist anything that conflicts with their own system of morals and ethics. Especially if the conflicting notions emanate from people who do not believe the pious platitudes they are trying to force or persuade others to accept.
The more dictatorial the state, the less capacity for individual discernment, and the greater the prevalence of erroneous self-sacrifice to a purely political imperative.
In my opinion, professional criminals are more prone than most to think for themselves in a morally eclectic manner. Society prefers to foster the contra-idea that, by definition, criminals are oblivious to moral and ethical values.
The fact is, many criminals know more about morality and ethics, via the process of opposition, than the conforming masses do from acceptance. I would even predicate that it is the criminal’s astute understanding that the morality and ethics of the powerful is purely cosmetic, that persuades him to emulate their amoral plasticity.
In effect, the criminal seriously studies the largely unscrupulous moral standards practised by ostensible ‘pillars of society,’ and modifies his values accordingly. He thereby becomes a player. Albeit, by force of circumstance and lack of privileged upbringing, having to adopt less sophisticated but no less ruthless methods than his social superiors.
Conformists who observe, deduce and vaguely bemoan the immorality of their superiors are largely too afraid of penalty, or are too lazy to run the risk of acting upon their conclusions.
People are not so remorseful or ashamed of their criminal thoughts; they are more afraid of criminal thoughts being ascribed to them by others. To compensate, they rationalise their timidity or indolence as an indication of moral character, and their vociferous clamour for harsher punishment of criminals is mob retribution against a will to power they covertly envy. This envy is exacerbated by the media’s colourful, exciting stories about criminals riotously enjoying every forbidden pleasure the ‘decent citizens’ can only dream about.
Good and evil mig
ht therefore be presented simply as a matter of what we think we can get away with without sacrificing reputation. To all intents and purposes, the majority regard themselves as law-abiding, decent, God-fearing people — right up to the moment they are caught.
Capture makes the criminal. A person may blithely break the law whenever it suits them, but still do not reject a personal sense of morality. The strictly law-abiding may still be subject to covert criminal tendencies. We all desire what we cannot have or are forbidden to have.
Naturally the polarised values of good and evil constitute a paradoxical, interdependent unity, an indivisible entity of internally opposing tensions which constitute the vital essence of life: contrast and variety.
Every act, good or evil, is a reflection of our most natural characteristics and genuine psyche.
A relativist viewpoint — rather than surrendering to statute — enhances a more profound understanding of this schismatic variegation, in which legality and illegality are unceasingly examined, and not only morally, but metaphysically (preferably devoid of obfuscating religious connotations).
It is independently documented that I instinctively began this relativistic thought process at the age of five. The law-and-order brigade would probably regard such teachings as heresy. Bovine conformism is indirectly responsible for unjust and alien legislation, laws made to be broken, laws denying or unsuccessfully trying to suppress the intrinsic dynamic nature of the individual.
Every dictator knows to strongly emphasise the advantages, over the disadvantages, of obeying law. But the only laws that matter are those based on universal usefulness rather than immediate expediency. The only lawgivers worthy of respect are those who own the necessary degree of honour to exclude their personal desires from principles and act as a collective conscience.