The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  Little ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey is seen in the photograph, lying naked on top of a bed, on her stomach. Her head in a pillow with her gentle face turned toward her photographer. Her dark eyes open. A scarf is wrapped around her mouth and tied behind her tousled black lovely hair. There is no genitalia or graphic nudity in this carefully broadcast and cropped picture. Her naked shoulder. She does seem small.

  It is the only photograph shown. However, in a talking head interview, retired detective sergeant Roy Jarvis was allowed to describe another from the small collection before he trailed off into police techniques and procedure:

  When we found the photographs of Lesley Ann Downey standing on a bed, naked, legs apart, hands outstretched, clothed in nothing but a pair of socks and wearing a gag, with a terrified look in her eyes, we realized that if we could link the bedhead . . .

  There is a much more precise level than this.

  Devil’s Disciples was the first of two books on the case written by Robert Wilson. Published in 1986 by Express Newspapers and based on the author’s contemporaneous coverage of the trial for “an evening newspaper,” Robert Wilson seemed to agree — slightly — with the defense’s argument when it came to the legally required deconstruction of the pornographic evidence:

  Yes, the tape recording was a “harrowing experience,” but on the photographs taken of Lesley Ann, she appeared to be “calm and reasonably” composed.

  Over ten years earlier and just six years after the crime itself, The Trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had recorded the argument for the defense without comment:

  It was one thing to say that the accused were so ruthless that they were prepared to photograph the little girl; it was quite another to say they killed her to dispose of her as a deadly witness against them. When one looked at the photographs, what perhaps was a little astonishing was how calm the little girl looked. The child appeared to be reasonably composed, and that might give the jury some idea of what went on at the time of the tape recording.

  And there are higher levels of honesty.

  Little ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey’s mother published her personal account of seeing only two of the seven pornographic photographs of her naked daughter in For the Love of Lesley in 1989. Published in hardback in 1989 by W.H. Allen and in an updated and revised paperback edition by Warner Books four years later:

  Lesley . . . naked, bound and gagged with a scarf that had been viciously forced into her mouth and tied tight at the back of her neck with a savage jerk. Lesley . . . pale and naked on a candlewick bedspread with her hands together in desperate prayer. Lesley . . . her hands tied together by sick people who revelled in her humiliation.

  The second image swam behind my tight shut eyes and superimposed itself over the first horror. Lesley . . . bent double over a chair. Lesley still naked, bound and gagged. I screamed louder and louder, trying to make the images go away. But the expression of terror in Lesley’s bulging eyes remained in sharp focus, imprinted on my mind. Lesley . . . who had never experienced a hand raised in anger at any time in her short life.

  A check through the index in the back of Topping — the autobiography of Peter Topping (“the police chief in the Moors murders case”), published by Angus and Robertson, UK, in 1989 — details a good many pages devoted to “Downey, Lesley Ann — tape recording.” Among them page 72:

  (Myra) moved on to talk about the tape recording made of Lesley Ann Downey. Contrary to popular belief, she said, the tapes had not been made while photographs were being taken — not during the torture session. She denied that Lesley Ann had been subjected to any physical torture. Having assessed the evidence at the trial and having heard the tapes, I accepted that they had been made while photographs were being taken; but I told Hindley that to deprive a child of her mother, then strip and bind and gag her, was in my book a form of torture — even if it was not the kind that had grown up in the public imagination.

  And on page 148:

  I have also carefully studied the photographs of Lesley Ann, in which she is bound and gagged. I have looked at the expression on her face. As a father myself, I believe that the full horrors of what happened to that child have not been misunderstood. Although, as Hindley points out, no fingers were cut off, and what was being forced into the child’s mouth was a gag — not, as some people have construed, Brady’s penis — torture certainly took place. When you think of the effects of what they did to the defenceless child then you can only conclude that she was dreadfully tortured. My heart goes out to Mrs Ann West. Who will never and perhaps should never forgive them for their actions.

  If ordering the child to strip, binding and gagging her, photographing her and then subjecting her to sexual abuse is not torture, what is? I viewed Myra Hindley’s attempts to put herself in a favorable light with great suspicion throughout: in the case of Lesley Ann Downey I do not believe that anything she could say would ameliorate her position. Her voice, clearly to be heard on the tape, is harsh and brutal: she blames her own fear for that. She never stopped to consider the fear on the face and in the voice of the young child she had in her power.”

  There are better things to do. First off, you don’t ask a child molester to write a book on serial killing. A child rapist. A child pornographer. A child murderer.

  Colin Wilson, from his introduction:

  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.

  You don’t ask him to do the obvious. You especially don’t ask him to do what you would do.

  Because the child rapist and murderer and pornographer will obviously lie. And, because he wants to believe you need to hear more and see more than you’ll ever actually do, he’ll even start to enjoy telling you he’s lying. Because it’s the easiest thing to do. It is the obvious choice. He can adopt the dime-a-dozen serial killer front of puffed-up superiority, all from his tiny cell, and serve the typical cold dish of chest-beating mental clarity over personal introspection. A wide view of painful dark humanity instead of tastes and salacious dives. Roots over themes. Brave actions rather than fearful words.

  Ian Brady:

  Some authors invariably rationalize their prurient intrusion in the name of science and the furtherance of human illumination. I believe most serious students can discern when that line has been crossed and morbid sensationalism begins.

  And

  The common individual craves prohibited sensation minus responsibility and risk. And perhaps the most psychologically intolerable aspect of all, such people resent inner knowledge that they will spend all of their life as timid spectators, never players.

  And

  As previously stated, it is invariably the case that actions bright and exciting in the imagination are, unfortunately, often disappointing or farcical in practice, more so when it has not been thought through thoroughly. Deep thinking gives people a headache.

  They think they are thinking when in fact they are merely daydreaming. For instance, if you were to ask them what they thought of ‘adventure,’ they would express a vague, undefined pro-adventure attitude, as practically everyone does, albeit from the comfort of an easy chair. They equate, or confuse, their liking for the idea of adventure with an ability to possibly participate in the real thing. Whereas, in practice, they might immediately discover that real adventure — of the neck-on-the-line variety — is unsettling, like entering a fourth dimension where the comfortable laws and rules they take for granted in normal life no longer apply; adrenaline speeds the pumping blood and distorts the faculties; immersion in the immediacy of action obviates wider appreciation. Riding the whirlwind is an acquired taste. The psyche aspires to accommodate the new perspective of both inner and external vision. The more times you act as supreme architect, the more you become one.

  The reader, the student — if you will, the voyeur — if you must, is left with exactly what he came in w
ith. The only option is to pick apart the text and combine it with what few details have been sifted and mined through the press and court transcripts and paint the ugly picture again and again as ugly as anyone wants it to be.

  So the painting has to be made special. The truth will lie. Excellent. The only worthwhile honesty has to be found in probing the desperate nervous system through the veils and the obvious and the hideous other’s need to impress.

  Ian Brady knew enough about transference to get a young girl — close enough in age to little ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey — to read a news clipping on Lesley’s disappearance into his tape recorder. But, here, he doesn’t come close to admitting it:

  The audience is the value and quality of the act. During the process of artistic creation, in the killer’s psychic dimension beyond good and evil, the audience is merely a possible off-stage threat. If his “play” is a success, at home he will read the critical reviews with interest, not least as a technician in search of dangerous, structural flaws.

  But, here, without discussing how fantasy bleeds inside an overactive yearning mind, he nonetheless might be edging closer to the point:

  Being in the position of having tasted both fantasy and deed, I can candidly testify that fantasy is invariably more hedonistically superior, its creator having the advantage of omnipotence. The safer one feels from interruption or capture, the more intense and rounded the act.

  There are more boys than girls on Ian Brady’s known victim list. Keith Bennett, John Kilbride and Edward Evans. The oldest victim was Evans at seventeen. And poor Edward’s death has never seemed to capture the public imagination as intensely as little ten-year-old Lesley’s has. Brady was questioned in court over his homosexual tendencies and over what it was — exactly — he was putting into little ten-year-old Lesley’s mouth as heard on the tape recording. But it is usually the little girl’s mouth that keeps the tongues wagging. Stupid questions all around. The children found with their pants down in both sexes. And the availability of young Edward having as much to do with rolling a queer as in fucking one. But when one searches for crumbs, one has to crawl up to assholes:

  From Topping again:

  It is part of the paradox of Brady that he cares a lot what people think of him, and he is ashamed about certain aspects of his life. I questioned him once about the trips he made into Manchester without Myra Hindley, and asked him if he was picking up men. He did not reply, so I asked him straight out if he was bisexual. He nodded, but kept his head down and his eyes averted as though he was deeply ashamed to admit it.

  From The Trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley:

  I think you told the court that you had met Evans before. I am interested in the club which you claimed on Friday was frequented by homosexuals. You were a visitor there?

  Brady: I have been there about three times.

  What were you doing in that hive of homosexuals?

  Brady: Watching the antics of them.

  And Brady, forever connected to his partner in crime Myra Hindley, has never seemed particularly forthcoming over the subject. He pores over the information on John Gacy:

  Gradually Gacy discovered that this form of sadistic sex was far more satisfying, making normal heterosexual sex tame and boring by comparison. So, when he abruptly informed his second wife that he would no longer be sleeping with her, Gacy was not abandoning her because he had become a homosexual, but rather that he had evolved into the enthusiastic, sadistic scourge of homosexuals.

  Peter Topping explains what he was told by Myra about the death of little ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey for the BBC documentary:

  She sees that the child was bleeding. And . . . there’s ligature around the child’s neck. And um . . . that . . . Brady carries the child and puts it in the bathroom, washes the blood off the child. And — and then they . . . wrap the body in a sheet, with the clothing, because the child is naked. And then they put the body in the back of the mini-traveller with a view to going up to Saddleworth moor to bury it.

  She didn’t go like a lamb to the slaughter. As Hindley said the others did. She fought very violently until eventually, she was quite horribly murdered.

  And Brady delves into the mind of a Mad Butcher whose victims were cleaned:

  If any victim, male or female, politely declined the offer of a bath, what would the killer do then? Cut their throat and flood his house with blood? Or knock them unconscious (which, in practice, can be a protracted, bloody business in itself), then carry them into the bathroom, undress them and put them into the bath to kill them?

  Brady smashed Evans’ head in with an axe before finally strangling him to death. Lesley’s head was caved in. How do you deconstruct Brady’s choice of characters? How did he come across his books and how carefully did he sift through the incredible trash heap of serial killer lore? How much is expansion — an honest desire to see himself in the mistakes and traumas and struggles of others like him — and how much is lonely rutting and rummaging:

  The plain and, perhaps, regrettable fact is that it is part of the eternal human psyche and cycle for the normal individual to derive cathartic satisfaction and enjoyment from savouring the crimes of others, and from luxuriously dreaming of personally committing them.

  And who can you trust when you play both ends against the middle? How desperate are you for perfect context?

  It is worth mentioning that The Gates of Janus was written under the telling pseudonym François Villon. And that explains Brady’s brief mentions of himself in the third person, altered to first person. It may also be worth mentioning that, contrary to Colin Wilson’s claim that it was he who sought out a publisher for this book, it was actually Adam Parfrey of Feral House who first contacted Wilson about the book after being alerted to its existence by a notorious child pornographer in the U.S. This child pornographer shares a chapter with Brady in Tim Tate’s exploitative exposé Child Pornography — An Investigation (Methuen, 1990, UK).

  It is a much uglier level than this.

  This gross monster, this fucking gross pig takes his newspaper clippings of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley — the boxes of them he’s saved and searched for for years — and picks out all his little favorite ones. Especially the ones that have photos. Especially of the little victims, the little children who weren’t quite young enough but perfect nonetheless. And he, this prick, this greasy fucking slime, takes these clippings and puts them in between the pages of this book called Show Me. And there’s nothing graphic in these pictures cut out so precisely from the British newspapers from nearly thirty-five years ago and still counting. Some of the headlines proclaim the garish horror that is the media’s selling point on the case, but there is no nudity. No autopsy shots. No blood or skeletons uncovered from the peat and ground and wrapped in the clothes the children were raped in. Just snaps the children’s parents and maybe their teachers handed out to the press. To, fuck knows, maybe help in the search or to help the idiot public remember the real point in such horrible affairs or however these pictures usually make it into the hands of paid journalists and greedy or well-intentioned friends and family and acquaintances. And this cocksucker takes these highly suspect black-and-white and mostly yellowing paper-thin shots of these smiling little rats and places them in between these pages of this book that was taken off the bookshelves years ago, back in the ’70s, because after obscenity cases and major shifts in public taste, St. Martin’s Press looked like they were publishing kiddie porn. From Child Pornography — An Investigation:

  The book Show Me for example, purports to be a sex education text for children and depicts children in various sex acts, including masturbation, oral copulation and vaginal intercourse.

  And

  Not surprisingly, Show Me is found with regularity during searches of exploiters’ homes and victims often report that exposure to this book preceded the initial act of molestation.

  And

  If manuals like Show Me pose a dilemma — how to sex-educate our children and at
the same time not validate or encourage paedophilia — they also highlight the essential and consuming power of this aberrant sexuality.

  You see, this will drag this book down into the gutter now. The people involved in its creation will not appreciate this. They have better things to do than be dirtied in the disgusting snail’s trail of this fat beast pervert fuck trying to ruin their best efforts. Their chances to help. Their chances to do the obvious. And what they would do. To get something better out of such a terrible situation. With all the hurt and pain on one side. And all that tragic humanity and confused existentialism on the other. And all of it surrounded by the braying angry masses in the coliseum hoarding their own desperate fears soaked in lust and safety and outraged inequity.

  Show Me! A Picture Book Of Sex For Children and Parents. Photography, captions and design by Will McBride, Explanatory text by Dr. Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt. St. Martin’s Press, 1975, New York:

  We are of the opinion that only an explicit and realistic presentation of sex can spare children fear and guilt feelings related to sexuality. For this reason we chose photography as a medium. With much care and under great difficulty we succeeded in photographing the children in such a way that their natural behavior came through.

  This prick-yanking lonely degenerate isn’t doing his pathetic little masturbating tricks to make a point. It doesn’t even want anyone to know. It isn’t here to help you understand the insides of frightened child-peering insects like its lonely sweating self. Itself. It just needs the connection. The children — naked — in the pages of the book. And the children — smiling, mother and father coveted family snaps, clothed, face shots mostly — stuck up against them. Washed in fucked murder. Bathed of blood in strangers’ bathtubs and dumped headfirst into holes in the freshly dug Moors.